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Thunderf00t rebuts charges he commands a hate mob by unleashing a hate mob on a woman who made this charge

Thunderf00t: Pleased with himself
Thunderf00t: Quite pleased with himself

Phil Mason, better known online as Thunderf00t, is a scientific researcher and YouTube bloviater who’s turned his hate-crush on video game critic Anita Sarkeesian into a surprisingly lucrative part-time job; his seemingly unending stream of YouTube videos attacking Sarkeesian, many of which have drawn hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, have without a doubt contributed mightily to the harassment directed against her by the online mob known as #Gamergate.

Now Mason is trying to defend himself against charges that he has become the de facto leader of a vast hate mob that harasses Sarkeesian and other women … by encouraging his followers to harass a woman who charged him with exactly this.

And a good number of Mason’s 400,000 YouTube followers have taken him up on this challenge, flooding the Yelp page of the business the woman runs with her husband with fraudulent one-star reviews and besieging her and her family business with angry and harassing phone calls (at least one of which the perpetrator has put online).

The story of this particular debacle began this past January when the YouTuber who calls herself Laughing Witch sent a letter to Mason’s employer, accusing the YouTuber of harassing Sarkeesian and other women and repeatedly suggesting that he and his followers were a bunch of Nazis. Her email was part of a letter-writing campaign by a number of feminist Youtubers who hoped their letters would get Mason fired from his research job.

Mason, who apparently faced no repercussions from the letter-writing campaign, decided last week to retaliate against Laughing Witch — real name Jennifer Keller. He posted a video about Keller’s letter, following up with a second video posting her name as well as screenshots from the web page of Porcelain Tub Restoration, the company she runs with her husband.

While Tunderf00t didn’t explicitly command his army to harass Keller and her husband, he suggested to his supporters that they post their thoughts about her on the business’s Yelp page — and they did, cratering the company’s rating with literally hundreds of fake one-star reviews.

Yelp has been removing the most obviously fake ones, as well as those referencing her letter about Thunderf00t, but many remain up as “not recommended” (in other words, questionable) reviews, including a number of clearly trollish ones accusing Keller of being a Nazi.

1.0 star rating 10/22/2015 When they came to remodel, i noticed their dismay i had a menorah, i ignored it and told them where my bathroom was. At first i thought it was my paranoia, but then...they starting putting the tiles in such a manner that swastikas were drawn in between the tiles. Then they dropped a very expensive soap and it broke, when i reacted, a short haired woman said: 'What? Is that you granma?' When they finished the work in the bathroom i was less than pleased, i wanted them to leave my house. They proceded to where my menorah was (I should mention i'm not jewish, it seemed practical for a quake or something) and the short haired elderly woman broke it and groped me, saying 'I haven't eaten kosher for a while'. At this point i told them to leave, and the woman exposed herself to me while yelling verses of mein kampf, saying Hitler had a point, but he should have killed all men as well, she refered to Hitler as the feminist who never was, a lonely tear drop running down her face. They left, well, she defecated on my garden and then they left. It would have been fine but the tiles were a bit bent, so 1 star.
Click for larger version.

These negative reviews, as ludicrous as many of them are, have apparently hit the business hard. Keller and her husband have set up a FundAnything page in an attempt, they say, to make payroll in the wake of the attacks on their and their company’s reputation online. On the FundAnything page Keller’s husband, Paul Burns, writes:

We are getting slanderous lies about our services and people posting deplorable images on review sites, as well desecrating our star ratings and customers calling. No one clicks to a service company with 1 star rating. 

According to Burns, the 26-year-old “family based service business with 14 employees” may be forced to close “because of a brutal mob attack on our social review sites.”

Mason’s response to this campaign being waged in his name? Another video, in which he declares that “Karma [is] ONLY A BITCH, if you are one!”

Except that this isn’t “karma,” a supernatural force that Mason, a self-avowed “skeptic,’ presumably doesn’t believe in anyway.

This is an organized harassment campaign, instigated and encouraged by Mason himself.

While I’ve enjoyed Laughing Witch’s videos in the past, I think the letter writing campaign was wrong. Writing employers is a low blow. And despite Mason’s many flaws as a thinker and a human being, he’s no Nazi.

But the wave of harassment he’s brought down on Keller — and which he has not made even the slightest attempt to rein in  — is indefensible.

And it’s getting worse by the day: 8chan’s Baphomet forum, a haven for malicious doxers and harassers, has now jumped aboard this harassment train, targeting not only Keller but her supporters as well. They’ve doxed one other YouTuber already, and are working on doxing others.

In a Baphomet thread, one anon happily reports that the attacks on Keller are causing her great distress:

Anonymous 10/21/15 (Wed) 20:11:27 No.98799>>99454 File (hide): 1445476287252.png (84.73 KB, 623x808, 623:808, 1.png) HOLY SHIT ATTENTION ATTENTION FELLOW BAPHIES!!! POSSIBLE SUICIDE MIGHT HAPPEN REPEAT SUICIDE MIGHT RESULT! Pic related but read this twitter thread for more context https://twitter.com/kflogan/status/656987823195693056 Apparently being triggered to near deadly levels, Kevin the cuck is apparently begging for Thundiecuck to delete his videos exposing laughing bitch. Thundercuck has finally been promoted to ThunderpossiblynotmuchofabitchthanIthought after saying he won't do it unless she does it first. She's having a nervous breakdown and her company may actually go down!

While Mason at first suggested that he would call off the attack if Keller apologized to him, he has since refused to accept her apology, and seems positively gleeful about the pain he’s caused her and her allies.

The internet has officially hit another new low.

I’ll post more on this as it develops.

NOTE: Thanks to Daily Kos blogger idlediletante (Margaret Pless), who provided me with a number of tips on this story. She’s written three posts on the subject so far:

Family Business Brigaded on Yelp by MRA YouTube Stars

Phil Mason is Working With Baphomet to Ruin DC Business

How it Feels to Be Targeted By An Internet Hate Mob: One Man’s Story

 

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loquora
loquora
9 years ago

Nothing says “I’m not making shit up!” like flouncing when someone asks for evidence. /s

Falconer
9 years ago

Welp, ninja’d like twice over.

I’m not going to post any more comments anyway, dont worry.

You are not freethinkers btw

Oh no a shocking and insightful glimpse into the parts of my psyche that i have been suppressing how will i ever recover goodbye mammoth i must now depart for my penitent cave in the wilderness

Quinn
Quinn
9 years ago

“You are not freethinkers btw”

Oh nooooooo! Right in the feels 🙁

Falconer
9 years ago

Oh good, he knows things because he saw them on a Twitter account which has now been deleted.

Falconer
9 years ago

Oh, and he didn’t stick the flounce. That’s -2 points.

milkshake fan
milkshake fan
9 years ago

“While you’re here, may I ask how you know that she asked David to write this article?”

i saw it on twitter. she had another twitter account @jenny_lyne1234 which she has also deleted now.

ianrennie
ianrennie
9 years ago

No, really, I saw it in a duplicate Twitter account that has now been deleted! I wasn’t the only one who saw it either, my girlfriend who lives in Canada and my uncle who works for Nintendo saw it too!

freemage
9 years ago

Okay, I’ve done all the investigating I can without actually watching the videos (not an option at this point in time). Judging by the description of the contents, I haven’t seen any evidence that The Foot is an actual Nazi or Holocaust denier; instead, he’s a shit-poor debater who got out-maneuvered verbally by… Ray Comfort, or as most atheists know him, Banana Man. This is not exactly a high-point in Thunderfool’s resume, but it’s not really evidence of Nazi sympathies.

Which means that yes, the letter campaign, both to his employer and the cops, was way out of line. However, any sympathy this might have garnered has subsequently been destroyed by his own reaction, which was clearly an effort at not only retaliation but escalation. And yes, unlike the letter campaign, the Patreon complaints ARE valid, because his conduct very clearly violates their ToS. I hope that particular spigot gets shut off.

(Note: If someone can point to a transcript of him either saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, or that the Nazis were good guys, I’ll happily retract this conclusion. From what I’ve been able to find, he just stumbled into accepting the idea that the Holocaust happened because of science, but that science is still a net good for humanity, which is profoundly stupid and inept, and shows that he’s not a great thinker outside his field. Dunning-Kruger may as well be called the Dunderdolt Effect.)

Falconer
9 years ago

Was the Twitter account, perhaps, deleted just before she could expose Vatican II as a devious Illuminati plot to ignite Jupiter?

throwaway
throwaway
9 years ago

Sorry, milkshake fan, that is not “evidence.” That’s “hearsay.”

Falconer
9 years ago

@freemage: I didn’t watch his debate with Comfort when it was new (I was still watching his creationist videos at the time) because I didn’t want to give Comfort the oxygen. I knew it kind of flailed along until it ended rather damply but I didn’t know Tfoot was so poor a debater as to accept Comfort’s frame.

Wow.

milkshake fan
milkshake fan
9 years ago

ask david about the twitter, i bet he will admit to it.

loquora
loquora
9 years ago

And if he does, milkshake, what does that prove? That someone being attacked by an online hate mob would like to have their side of the story heard? Why do you hate free speech, milkshake fan?

milkshake fan
milkshake fan
9 years ago

it proves that she was lying about wanting to apologise to him because at the same time she was trying to get a hit piece written about him.

milkshake fan
milkshake fan
9 years ago

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/freethinker

do any of you consider yourselves to be freethinkers?

Falconer
9 years ago

Oh no, the dictionary! Our arguments cannot repel firepower of that magnitude!

Quinn
Quinn
9 years ago
Reply to  milkshake fan

I freely think that you’re an idiot.

loquora
loquora
9 years ago

I’m pretty sure you have your timeline messed up, considering the apology that Thunderf00t refused is linked above. And asking someone to write an article about a situation isn’t the same thing as asking them to write a hit piece about someone. But since you consider this post about something he’s actually doing to be a ‘hit piece’, then you must agree that what he’s doing is wrong.

Falconer
9 years ago

Being a freethinker doesn’t mean “I have to accept any claim that Milkshake Fan makes and at face value!” It means we can evaluate claims and come to our own conclusions about their validity.

I don’t think you’re much of a freethinker, either, Mr. Toe-the-Thunderf00t-line.

milkshake fan
milkshake fan
9 years ago

LOL i just noticed linked to those bloody bogus articles by margaret pless

the first one says that thunderf00t is an MRA! it also connects this to sargon of akkad who NOTHING to do with this, and also calls him an MRA!

the second article states as a fact that thunderf00t is “working with baphomet” LIBELLOUS!

isidore13
isidore13
9 years ago

Milkshake fan, nearly everyone considers themselves freethinkers and nearly everyone is guilty of confirmation bias at some point in their lives. That is a pointless discussion.

Falconer
9 years ago

it also connects this to sargon of akkad who NOTHING to do with this, and also calls him an MRA!

Well I would expect not, since he died in 2279 BCE!

loquora
loquora
9 years ago

I’m growing bored of this surprisingly quickly, but I would still like to see milkshake justify how any of the things they’ve said about Laughing Witch or even the other articles linked above warrant the attacks she and her husband are receiving.

This could have been a huge get for Thunderf00t if he had taken legal action like an adult, or even just taken the high road and spoken out against it as a general ill. Instead he retaliated in a way that makes him and his ilk look far far worse.

delphi_ote
delphi_ote
9 years ago

“Someone who has 400,000 Youtube subscribers and gets a substantial secondary income (Perhaps even greater than his salary?) by putting their face in front of a camera to complain about feminists *is* in the public eye.”

But that is not the job Laughing Witch was writing letters to now, was it?

“That’s very noble of you, but I guess you forgot to relay this info to Dr. Mason himself. He’s the one going for “revenge” in this instance, doing unto others what was done to him and then some.”

And he’s wrong. His doing it does not make it RIGHT for someone else to do. It is still wrong. Look up “tu quoque”. People make this mistake so often, we gave it a name.

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