Gender War Update

A little house-cleaning on the last week’s WAM/Twitter thread:

I’m @srhbutts, the person you quoted the tweet of. You make a claim (out of nowhere, apparently) that I said @nero should be banned for being homophobic. I never said any such thing. I’m curious why you said this, and would appreciate it either being sourced or retracted.

Here’s the tweet to which I was referring:

If srhbutts’ issue with @nero were simply harassment, I don’t really understand why he was subject to that kind of criticism, as if his views had anything to do with his right to tweet freely. Another emailer close to the issue:

I am the Twitter user and YouTube video-maker mentioned in the second part of your post “The SJWs Now Get To Police Speech On Twitter“. I have no doubt you’re a busy guy, as am I, what with my campaigns of harassment and general shit-lord behavior, so let me make this as brief as I can manage, which is not at all. The description of me as a “critic of feminism in the atheist and skeptical community” is more or less accurate. The usual caveats apply: I’m not against women. I’m not a misogynist, except in the stupid Fashion Victim Feminist expansive definition of “someone who disagrees with them”. Although that’s not even strictly true.

By most measures my positions could be considered well within the scope of Second Wave Feminism that sought to redress social and legal inequality faced by women and most definitely solidly First Wave Feminist where, straight out of Mary Wollstonecraft, I believe in the social and moral equality of men and women.

What I do not support is the dishonest and manipulative “Fashion Victim Feminism” and invasive species of online Social Justice Warriors that barge into communities they had no part in creating and attempt to co-opt those communities with an agenda.

I am especially active where this concerns the online Atheist and Skeptic community. I have been a member of the Skeptical community from way back, am a member of the National Capital Area Skeptics and it’s only through the Social Justice Invasion that they attracted my attention at all.

For the past few years, beginning about the time of “ElevatorGate” in 2011, I’ve been having it out with these clowns. I’ve been incompetently doxed, laughably harassed and had people such as Greg Laden of Freethought Blogs and Melody Hensley of The Center for Inquiry make half-assed attempts at interfering with my employment. I have responded by punching them in the nose with a series of YouTube videos such as “Creepy Clowns: Freethought Bullies and the Threat Narrative Clown Horn” and “The Block Bot and the Dumbification of the Beeb”, which are far too long for me to recommend. After which I was often referred to as “He Who They Dare Not Name”, after proving direct intimidation wasn’t a course of action that would work against me.

But now, it seems, Women in Media have given the harassers another tool of harassment on the pretext of preventing harassment. Just to show how generally uninterested I am in the politics of these thing, I wasn’t even aware of WAM until someone directed me to your posts. I am now fairly convinced that my Twitter account was suspended as the result of a fraudulent mass flagging effort. Here is the only information as to why I was suspended I have received from Twitter:

Hello,

Your account was suspended because it was found to be violating the Twitter Rules (https://twitter.com/rules), specifically our rules around participating in targeted abuse.
If you would like to request your account to be restored, please confirm that you’ve read and understood the Twitter Rules.

Please note that future Twitter Rules violations may result in permanent account suspension. We appreciate your cooperation going forward.

Thanks,
Twitter

As Twitter seems intent on playing tag with me on this issue, and will not tell me what exactly the “targeted abuse” I engaged in was, my best guess before I read your article can be found in this relatively short (less than 15 minutes) video. Because Twitter’s protocol seems to be “We won’t tell you what you did, so just admit to it”, I may have been unconvincing in my prostrations and it seems that my Twitter suspension is a permanent state of affairs. Which means in one fell swoop and without anything like due process, I have lost my entire Twitter presence, complete with tweets, followers and those I follow going right down the memory hole.

I suspect my YouTube channel will be hit with bogus claims of inappropriate content and false DCMA claims. These people, soulless bastards that they are, are ruthless. Your post was one of the few that clearly detailed what is going on with WAM and these mass flaggings and as unresponsive as Twitter is, and they seem to be of the mind that a massacre of their users is a small price to pay for pandering to the right people. It’s only through efforts such as yours that these silencing tactics can be derailed.

Another story:

One of my viewers informed me of your recent call for anyone who suspects that they might have been suspended from Twitter as a result of WAM’s recent actions.  I was recently suspended from Twitter despite not having harassed, threatened, or otherwise violated the Twitter ToS, but my work gives me a unique reason to suspect that I was suspended due to WAM’s influence.

I’ve been a YouTube blogger since 2007 and started making it a semi-professional endeavor in recent years.  In addition to using it as a venue for my artistic endeavors, I also frequently comment on matters of gender politics, sexual freedom, and philosophy from a libertarian, free-market perspective.  Since 2012 I have devoted a large part of my video presence to commentary on the Social Justice Warrior influence on video game culture, which I consider myself a part of.

In August of 2014 my colleague Davis Aurini and I announced that we would be crowd-funding our new documentary, “The Sarkeesian Effect,” which will be a feature-length film aimed at a theatrical release.  It covers the last two years of video game culture that began in the summer of 2012 with the launch of media critic Anita Sarkeesian’s video series “Tropes Vs. Women in Games.”

The day we launched the project, the crowd funding website we were using, Patreon, was deluged with emails demanding that our project be pulled from the site.  This was spearheaded largely by Samantha Allen, a prominent SJW voice.  Patreon has received hundreds of emails on this matter, and on October 1st of this year we spoke with Patreon COO Jack Conte to discuss the matter with him directly. Funding has continued through the website, but they continue to receive demands that it be pulled.
Additionally, our project has been the subject of hit pieces and misinformation from news sites sympathetic to the SJW agenda and we have received intimidating tweets from various journalists, such as persons from BadAss Digest and the Guardian among others.

So, bringing this around to WAM and Twitter, I recently came home from the second leg of filming for the doc and woke up the next day to find that my Twitter had been suspended.  At first I figured it was the result of the usual false-flagging trolls, but then I noticed that it had come alongside another public push to have Patreon defund our project.  My followers on Twitter and viewers on YouTube noticed that WAM had recently partnered with Twitter, and my suspension came about two days after the announcement.

Well, I don’t have any hard evidence as yet, but I’m highly suspicious that this was done by WAM since Sarkeesian is a VERY close chum of theirs.  I outlined it in this video on my YouTube channel.
As someone who, because of the film, is becoming an increasingly recognized part of the #GamerGate movement, it’s more than a little curious.  Thank you for taking the time to read this, and feel free to discuss my concerns on your site and contact me if you have more questions.