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Jonathan Anomaly (1975–) is an American far-right eugenicist and pro-natalist, who promotes embryo selection and what he calls "genetic enhancement" or "liberal eugenics." Anomaly is associated with the "human-biodiversity" online network and blogsphere. He has published articles for far-right magazines including Aporia, Quillette and the antisemitic website The Unz Review that are mostly nonsense, with the exception of a stopped clock article that opposes factory farming.

Anomaly defends discredited theories on racialism and race and intelligence. Similar to Nathan Cofnas who he co-authored an article with, Anomaly tries to present himself as a political centrist and libertarian between both alt-right and hard left-wing extremes, when his own views concerning issues such as race and eugenics have much in common with the alt-right. Anomaly's race and eugenics papers are often cited by holocaust deniers, alt-right and white nationalists. In 2022, Anomaly was a speaker on holocaust denier Lipton Matthews podcast. In 2023-2024, Anomaly was a speaker at conferences attended by white nationalists and neo-Nazis including the Natal Conference, Vitalia and Manifest.

In August 2024, Anomaly appeared on the far-right podcast Lotus Eaters with ex-UKIP candidate Carl Benjamin.

Background

Anomaly's birth name was Jonathan Beres. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1975. He has a PhD in political economy from Tulane University. From 2010-2017 he was a senior lecturer at Duke University. He was an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego. Anomaly is currently the director of the Center for Philosophy, Politics and Economics in Quito, Ecuador.

He lost in the Round of 64 in the 2019 Name of the Year competition.

Pseudoscience and controversial views

Anomaly speaking at the Longevity Biotech Conference in 2024

Eugenics

Anomaly published a provocative article "Defending eugenics" in a peer-reviewed bioethics journal. It has been harshly criticised, with nearly 200 academics signing a letter of complaint to Monash Bioethics Review for publishing the article.

Anomaly has most controversially argued that 20^th century court decisions upholding the right of the state to forcefully sterilize undesirable people are morally defensible but as a libertarian favours the state only discouraging the reproduction of those with certain traits deemed "unfit" such as heritable diseases, low cognitive ability, and lack of impulse control. He has been criticised for espousing eugenics but claims he only supports "liberal eugenics" opposed to coercive eugenics or state-enforced "negative eugenics" policies (critics, however, such as Dr. David Gibbs, a history professor at UA, argue this distinction is ambiguous):

During the panel discussion, Gibbs also brought up Anomaly’s “Defending Eugenics” research paper, implying that the scholar approves of Nazi-style eugenics against certain populations.

Gibbs went on to quote from the paper, underscoring Anomaly’s observation that “Nazi policies had dysgenic effects” and that “Hitler’s attempt to exterminate Ashkenazi Jews—arguably among the most intelligent and productive people of the twentieth century—was not only morally outrageous, but contrary to what any reasonable eugenics program would hope to achieve.”

[...]

Anomaly, who was present at the event, challenged Gibbs’ interpretation of his work, stressing that his paper was taken out of context.

The paper on eugenics is defending liberal eugenics, which means that when we have the technology to select embryos we ought to allow parents to do that as individuals. I'm Jewish, and the idea that you would smear me as somehow defending Nazism is so disgusting and is so taken out of context.

His eugenics views and far-right connections have been criticised in a blog post on altrightorigins.com.

Racialism and hereditarianism

Anomaly co-authored an article "We shouldn't obsess about race and IQ, but we should openly discuss it" that defends racialism and hereditarianism. In regard to the latter, he cites with approval the dubious research of HBD pseudoscientist Gregory Cochran. He's also published a peer-reviewed article defending this sort of race-based junk science. In 2019, he co-authored a paper with Bo Winegard arguing that diversity between groups is compatible with political liberalism. He also co-authored a paper defending the hereditarian hypothesis with Bo Winegard and Ben Winegard.

In 2022, Anomaly appeared as a speaker on the far-right Aporia Magazine podcast to discuss HBD.

Noah Carl

Anomaly was a signatory to a petition organised by Quillette supporting the disgraced academic Noah Carl who was sacked from University of Cambridge for his links to white nationalists like Emil Kirkegaard and publishing Islamophobic papers in the OpenPsych pseudojournals.

Pro-natalism

Aside from speaking at the Natal Conference, Anomaly co-authored an article in 2018 titled "If you’re reading this essay, you should probably have (more) children".

Similar to far-right activists such as Steve Sailer and white nationalists in general, there is an underlying racial basis to Anomaly's pro-natalism viewpoint:

By the end of the current century, the population of sub-Saharan Africa alone is expected to triple. The problems this creates may eventually be mitigated by important efforts to supply contraception to poor women. But telling people in developed countries who are well-placed to have children to refrain from doing so is misguided. If anything, they should reproduce more, not less.

Anomaly therefore is only encouraging people from so-called developed countries to reproduce.

Speaking at right-wing to far-right conferences

International Society for Intelligence Research

Anomaly was a speaker at the International Society for Intelligence Research 2019 annual conference. White supremacist Emil Kirkegaard was also a speaker.

Natal conference

Jonathan Anomaly being interviewed by Richard Hanania

Anomaly was a speaker at the far-right Natal Conference in 2023 with far-right extremists including Kevin Dolan and Raw Egg Nationalist.

Some at the conference are interested in the genetics of the children they believe everyone should be having. Evolutionary biologist Diana Fleischman and writer Jonathan Anomaly argue that genetics are destiny. (“I shouldn’t say Good quality children,” Fleischman says after speaking at length about how people with mental illness are statistically likely to marry other mentally ill people and pass those genes along to their children, suggesting some children are indeed biologically better than others.)

Vitalia

Anomaly spoke at Vitalia in January-February 2024 alongside the white nationalist Anatoly Karlin to promote eugenics.

Manifest 2024

Anomaly attended the right-wing Manifest conference in June 2024 alongside the white supremacist Richard Hanania:

Billed speakers from the broader tech world included the Substack co-founder Chris Best and Ben Mann, co-founder of AI startup Anthropic.

Alongside these guests, however, were advertised a range of more extreme figures.

One, Jonathan Anomaly, published a paper in 2018 entitled Defending Eugenics, which called for a “non-coercive” or “liberal eugenics” to “increase the prevalence of traits that promote individual and social welfare”. The publication triggered an open letter of protest by Australian academics to the journal that published the paper, and protests at the University of Pennsylvania when he commenced working there in 2019. (Anomaly now works at a private institution in Quito, Ecuador, and claims on his website that US universities have been “ideologically captured”.

[...]

Several controversial guests were also present at Manifest 2023, also held at Lighthaven, including rightwing writer Hanania, whose pseudonymous white-nationalist commentary from the early 2010s was catalogued last August in HuffPost, and Malcolm and Simone Collins, whose EA-inspired pro-natalism – the belief that having as many babies as possible will save the world – was detailed in the Guardian last month.

The Collinses were, along with Razib Khan and Jonathan Anomaly, featured speakers at the eugenicist Natal Conference in Austin last December, as previously reported in the Guardian.

Creating Future People

In 2020, Anomaly authored Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement with a second edition published in 2024. In the book, Anomaly defends eugenics and argues for "enhancing traits that might benefit future people" (p. viii) including "cognitive enhancement" by gene editing and embryo selection. The book has been promoted by white nationalists and far-right eugenicists including Emil Kirkegaard, Anatoly Karlin and Ives Parr for Aporia Magazine.

Views on factory farming

In 2015, Anomaly published a peer-reviewed article in Public Health Ethics criticising factory farming. Anomaly does not suggest people should give up eating meat completely for plant-based diets but argues "governments should require factory farmers to change the way they raise animals" by improving animal welfare such as shifting to "free range" farming by "increase roaming space and access to fresh air". These arguments are rejected by vegans and animal rights activists such as PETA who point out animals on “free-range” farms still endure pain and suffering.

Anomaly has also published a paper discussing the issues "factory farming raises for human health".

In 2018, Anomaly suggested in a Quillette article replacing factory farming with "lab-grown" meat (in vitro meat). By the 2020s, Anomaly and co-author Diana Fleischman were supporting in vitro meat.

Misleadingly, Anomaly and Fleishman in their article(s) do not mention the use of fetal bovine serum (FBS) in the production of in vitro meat. The production of in vitro meat requires a growth agent to support cell growth which is usually foetal bovine serum obtained from the fetus of slaughtered pregnant cows.

External links

• Jonathan Anomaly's published papers