Nassim Haramein, the quack and fake physicist who censored RationalWiki

[ApooftGnegiol]

Nassim Haramein is a well-known New Age pseudoscientist. Psiram has old articles on Haramein in French and in German. These touch on his pseudoscience, but do not go into his quackery and later antics. The quackery includes crystal woo-woo "medicine".

More in-depth critical looks at Haramein's work and claims are however scarce on the web, because Haramein has his lawyers routinely threaten blogs, forums, and more recently RationalWiki, and scrub the web. (YouTuber 'Meromorphic', who referenced the RationalWiki article before it was deleted, and who's immune to SLAPP lawsuits, has two nice video essays: Debunking the Pseudoscience of Nassim Haramein, and Haramein Video Follow-up where he talks about censorship attempts and more.)

Well, RationalWiki had only gone moderately into any depth, in a somewhat short and rough article. Nevertheless, it did some things which Haramein really hated. Among these was to call him a pseudoscientist, make some simple points related to that, and be highly visible on Google. Apparently, that cost Haramein a lot of money. Thus in 2024 Haramein sued, and ultimately RationalWiki settled and censored itself. The old Foundation legally behind RationalWiki was based in New Mexico, which has no legal protection against private interests filing SLAPP lawsuits. Thus, it was prohibitively expensive to hire a lawyer to even make a routine dismissal happen ($10K), with no chance of recovering the cost on success. It would be at least several times more expensive than that to go to trial.

So RationalWiki caved. I'm no longer part of their Foundation, which dissolved and reincorporated in a better US state (Oregon), which has laws that protect against such developments. But that legal future-proofing didn't come before a bunch of racists gathered together, coordinated, and got a mass-censorship of articles about themselves, by filing lots of lawsuits together, in 2025. (The details on the latter are all censored on RationalWiki itself as of now, but this blog covers it in detail.)

I have some more material if of interest later, including finding some archived debunking of Haramein's physics which Haramein's lawyers had scrubbed both from a physicist's blog, and from the Internet Archive. Thankfully, there's more than one archive service.