Andrea “JudgyBitch” Hardie, banned from Twitter for abuse, insists: I meant to do that!

Last week, semi-professional internet instigator Andrea Hardie treated the world to a rather spectacular Twitter flameout, in which she hurled racist abuse against Beyonce’s allegedly “feral” and “animalistic” fans, and threatened to murder several of them, telling one that “I would love to bolt your ugly face to the roof of my car.”

I wrote about the incident, but amazingly things got even worse after I put up my post, with Hardie stepping up her racist rhetoric, calling blacks “monkeys” and “Jemimas” and, in one case, a “mud faced-f***ot,” as Hail to the Gynocracy reported; she warned one woman that if she did not “kiss my racist ass, bitch … I’ll have you lynched.”

As a result of these and many other blatant violations of Twitter’s rules against harassment and abuse, Hardie — aka Janet Bloomfield, aka JudgyBitch — found herself banned from Twitter.

In a blog post today, she took a page from Pee-wee of Pee-wee’s big adventure and told the world that she meant to do that.

Her explanation? Hey, she was just responding to the terrible Twitterers who decided to attack her en masse one fine day. Declaring that “[t]he only thing that surprise[d] me about [the Twitter suspension] is how long it took,” she explains that

feral Beyonce fans … showed up uninvited in my feed with all manner of death threats. I responded to those threats the same way I respond to every idiot who threatens me with violence: I don’t back down, I double down. I go medieval.

Apparently her notion of going medieval is this: when someone tells her they will “piss on u,” she responds with the most gruesomely and graphically violent threat she can come up with:

In her post today, Hardie complains that in my post about her Twitter tantrum I didn’t include the abusive tweets she was responding to. In fact, I discussed the abuse and quoted the worst threat I saw directed at her, a threat to “slice [Hardie] like a f**ing cheesecake,” which was sent from an account that seems to have vanished.

If she wants me to show other Tweets she was responding to, alas, I can’t, because most of the Tweets in question have been deleted (and in some cases Hardie didn’t even link to them herself).

I don’t know if the accounts themselves have been deleted or suspended or just the Tweets. Indeed, I don’t even know that the Tweets in question ever existed, but I will charitably assume that they did.

I was able to track down one Twitter exchange she responded to:

Hardie responded to the exchange with this graphic threat:

Is this wee darling lad threatening me? He can’t be serious. He’ll look cute flayed and spitted on my lawn.

I’ll assume that Hardie’s tweet is aimed at @whtepwr4life, as the only thing in the original exchange that could reasonably be construed as a threat is his promise to  “say hi, next time I’m in town.” But his Tweet is clearly directed at @KingpinPush, not Hardie.

So she responded to an implied threat that wasn’t even directed at her with a graphic threat that was so over-the-top it sounds like it might have come from a serial killer — or perhaps a 14-year-old obsessed with serial killers.

This rather belies Hardie’s continued insistence that she was “responding to abuse in exact measure.”

As for Hardie’s bungled attempt at blackface — because yeah, she did that too — she says that she definitely meant to do a terrible job at it. “Unfortunately,” she writes,

the darkest shade I could find was more Trump than Sambo …

I did an absolutely wretched job applying it, too. I did a very splotchy layer and let it dry and then added another layer on top and did the world’s worst eyeliner and blush and contouring job, and I didn’t blend or use primer so my crow’s feet and all the fine lines on my face were highly visible. I dragged black mascara through my eyebrows, creating a clumpy, horrid mess I didn’t try to shape or frame at all.

Apparently she thinks the best way to look black is to … do your makeup very badly?

I posed to minimize my lips as much as possible and at the same time, try to look ratchet. I tied a do-rag around my hair. I then set the filter to deepen contrast, just to make everything look even worse, and voila! My blackface. 

I’ll spare you the visual, which you can find in my previous post in any case. Given her skill at applying orange makeup in an “absolutely wretched” manner, perhaps she could get a job in Donald Trump’s wardrobe and makeup department.

Amazingly, despite all of her racist provocations and abuse, and all her talk of flaying and mangling and bolting people’s heads to the roof of her car, Hardie still insists that she doesn’t “actually have any idea why” she was suspended.

I’m guessing it will be because I responded to 100K people showering my account with abuse with some abuse of my own. The 100K people, who are on the right side of Twitter politics, will not be held accountable. Tweeting me threats of violence and death and just casual abuse will be tolerated because they are attacking the right person, who asked for it, after, by tweeting a picture of herself wearing dark makeup.

Perhaps Twitter takes a remark about “pissing on u” a little bit less seriously than repeated threats to flay people.

Perhaps some of those who sent her threats did have their accounts suspended; it’s hard to tell with all those missing Tweets.

But I will assume, at least for the purpose of argument, that some people sent her threats, that some of these threats were reported, and that some of the reported accounts weren’t suspended even though they genuinely deserved to be suspended.

That sucks. But “not responding to reports of threats and abuse” is pretty typical of Twitter.

Despite the hard work of countless anti-abuse activists, Twitter remains terrible at dealing with abuse and abusers. Hardie is well aware of this fact. Indeed, she took advantage of Twitter’s unwillingnss to rein in abuse for many months with impunity, not only returning to Twitter on a second account after her previous main account was permabanned for abuse, but also engaging in the same sort of abuse that had gotten her banned in the first place.

With more references to “flaying” this time around.

She’s no free speech martyr. She’s a bully whose Twitter account should have been shut down months ago.