Emily Willoughby



Emily A. Willoughby (online pseudonyms: Ferahgo the Assassin, Linda A. Ashtear, and Ixerin ) is an American right-wing  psychologist, and proponent of race and intelligence pseudoscience. Willoughby lives somewhat of a double life, as her Wikipedia edits as "Ferahgo the Assassin" reveal that she supports eugenics and hereditarianism, but on her social media using her real name, she misleadingly denies supporting these controversial and offensive things and presents a more moderate image of herself.

On August 11, 2022 a Twitter thread accusing Willoughby of racism and eugenics went viral in the paleoart community. After people began to look into her digital footprint — she spent years making controversial edits on Wikipedia's article and has defended far-right individuals including Michael Coombs and Emil Kirkegaard whom she collaborated with on Wikipedia. For disruption on the race and intelligence page, Willoughby was topic banned on Wikipedia in October 2010, banned from the wiki in May 2012, but unbanned with editing restrictions in March 2014. Her ex-boyfriend, Jonathan Kane, is permanently banned from Wikipedia for on the same race and intelligence article. On October 22, 2020, Kane and Willoughby published an article titled "The left-wing bias of Wikipedia" in The Critic, both using pseudonyms.

Willoughby identifies politically as a conservative and wrote a single article for the rag Quillette in 2017 that was against creationism.

The revelation that Willoughby is a proponent of race and IQ pseudoscience and has links to white nationalists led numerous academics to distance themselves from her, notably including palaeontologists Darren Naish, and Lisa Buckley. On the other hand, the biologist Jerry Coyne has defended her in a blog post.

History illustrator Midiaou Diallo has criticized Willoughby's controversial views on race and intelligence as "ultimately a major component of White Supremacy at a basic level".

Background
Willoughby's academic qualifications include a bachelor's degree in biology from Thomas Edison University, a master's degree and PhD in psychology from the University of Minnesota. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the behavior genetics lab at the University of Minnesota. Willoughby has published on behavioural genetics and IQ in peer-reviewed journals such as Nature Genetics, Intelligence, and Journal of Personality. She is an International Society for Intelligence Research Board Member and was involved in creating the program for ISIR's annual conference in 2021 (held online because of the coronavirus pandemic).

Willoughby is a furry and used to own an account under the pseudonym Ixerin on FurAffinity. She has an article about her on WikiFur.

In 2017, she co-authored with Jonathan Kane and T. Michael Keesey the anti-creationism book ''God's Word or Human Reason? An Inside Perspective on Creationism''. The book has been praised for its "painstakingly detailed rebuttals to papers by creationists." In March 2018, Naish wrote a positive review on his Tetrapod Zoology blog at Scientific American.

Willoughby is an accomplished paleoartist and in addition to her postdoctoral job works part time as a professional scientific illustrator. Her artwork can be found on her old and current DeviantArt pages. She has done illustrations of dinosaurs for scientific papers, including Nature. In October 2021, she published Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs: Using Art and Science to Bring the Past to Life which has received favourable book reviews. She has been interviewed by Mark P. Witton on his palaeontological blog.

Race and intelligence
Willoughby had made a lot of edits pushing race and intelligence pseudoscience on Wikipedia. In 2010, Willoughby opposed banning her boyfriend Jonathan Kane (alias Captain Occam) and the neo-Nazi editor Michael Coombs (alias User:Mikemikev) from the race and intelligence article, writing "they aren’t the ones causing a problem here" despite evidence to the contrary. Kane and Mikemikev were both topic banned in June 2010 after arbitration found them to have edit-warred and caused disruption.

Edits on her account reveal Willoughby is sympathetic to the controversial race and intelligence views of the white supremacist Richard Lynn:

Willoughby also complained about an article highlighting Lynn's connections to the eugenics Pioneer Fund and took issue with critical sources being added to his biographical page.

In October 2010, Willoughby was topic banned from editing race and IQ related articles. The following month she was back to her old tricks removing critical sources about a eugenicist. Willoughby and Kane were both "site-banned from Wikipedia for a period of no less than one year" on May 14, 2012. The reason was for sharing an IP address. Shortly before being site banned in a rant titled "Good riddance to Wikipedia", Willoughby admitted to being a proponent of hereditarianism and defended Mikemikev again.

Willoughby was unbanned on Wikipedia on March 28 2014. For the next five years, she avoided editing about race and IQ, but in January 2019 she appealed her topic ban which was still in place.

Magnus Pharao (alias Maunus), an anthropologist who debated Willoughby and Kane on Wikipedia in the 2010s, noted on his Twitter account on August 12, 2022:

Kane and Willoughby have defended Emil Kirkegaard and they all edited race and IQ related articles with overlapping edits as a sort of 'tag-team' with the same point of view.

Kane was permanently banned on January 9, 2020. On October 22, 2020 Kane and Willoughby published an article, "The left-wing bias of Wikipedia", in The Critic, complaining about a lack of "viewpoint diversity", including on the race and intelligence article. Deceptively, neither used their real names; Willoughby used the pseudonym Linda A. Ashtear, and Kane, Shuichi Tezuka. Despite claiming Wikipedia has a left-wing bias, neither mentioned their own right-wing bias and problematic edits.

Willoughby has authored a book review "bashing Gould and for the work they've done in dispelling racist pseudoscience."

Nazi dinosaur art
In August 2022, she was criticised on social media for having commissioned artwork of dinosaurs dressed in Nazi uniforms (the art is copyrighted by Willoughby as Ixerin). On August 12 2022, Willoughby wrote a statement on her Twitter account about her Nazi dinosaur artwork: