Large blocks of text related to Jesse Singal, Katie Herzog and Twitter drama.
The following is just a few giant blocks of text related to the ongoing saga in which Jesse Singal is called a transphobe and how this has somehow become a donation drive involving Brianna Wu who is famous from GamerGate. I’m not sure why anyone would read this, when they could read the backstory by a professional journalist (https://quillette.com/2021/03/18/the-campaign-of-lies-against-journalist-jesse-singal-and-why-it-matters/ ) instead of a random internet shitposter. This first block comes from https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/m5sma1/after_weeks_of_substack_drama_were_now_at_the/ where I try to explain some Substack/Twitter drama that had been building up for a few weeks, in order to explain why the cohosts of the Blocked and Reported Podcast (Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog) were taunting Brianna Wu on Twitter. At that point they had gotten promises for $5000 to a charity of Wu’s choice for the release of receipts related to Jesse Singal’s harassment of trans women. In other words, both of them were begging for Wu to cancel them and end their careers, and Wu simply responded that she would not do it and that neither of them could pressure her into doing so. The pool has apparently grown to closer to $50,000 https://twitter.com/kittypurrzog/status/1372583800480301065 (here’s where they hit the $30,000 mark https://twitter.com/kittypurrzog/status/1372434482788134913)
There’s a lot that lead up to this point. The short version is that people found out about “Substack Pro” deals where “tr***phobes” were getting paid to start a Substack newsletter (https://blog.substack.com/p/why-we-pay-writers). This culminated in this piece by Jude Ellison Sady Doyle https://doyles.substack.com/p/in-queers-we-trust-all-others-pay where a number of these people were named specifically with various allegations, but the most important background here is
>They host Jesse Singal, a high-profile supporter of anti-tr*** conversion therapy (https://jezebel.com/whats-jesse-singals-fucking-deal-1826930495) who is also widely known to fixate on and stalk tr*** women in and around the media industry. I would list Jesse’s targets, but at this point, I don’t know a tr*** woman in media who doesn’t have a story.
Jesse Singal hosts a podcast with Katie Herzog called “Blocked and Reported”, and got fuming mad about this accusation and some associated tweets, writing a debunking on his Substack: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/check-out-how-much-effort-it-takes and about a zillion tweets in the last few days. As an amusing aside, the linked Jezebel article by Harron Walker is literally a journalist bragging about publicly harassing Jesse for writing a story and encouraging others to do the same. It’s very on-brand for Gawker, but truly hilarious to see it being done so blatantly and being frequently cited as a good takedown of Jesse’s work.
In response, yet another pile of WORDS WORDS WORDS went up at Doyle’s substack https://doyles.substack.com/p/necessary-losses basically saying he’s not going to work with Substack because of the money they give to TERFs.
So, where does Brianna Wu from GamerGate come in? https://twitter.com/BriannaWu/status/1371452139856392196
>I have my own Jesse Singal stories I’ve never shared publicly. One day I will. And I have receipts.
>I don’t know how many sources have to talk about wildly unethical behavior before credible journalists decide not to be associated with someone.
https://twitter.com/BriannaWu/status/1371477325733371905
>Ultimately, what is going to sink Jesse Singal’s career isn’t his tr***phobia. Sadly, tr***phobia is not a dealbreaker to a journalism career.
>It’s the unethical shortcuts he takes with reporting.
>The truth will eventually come out.
https://twitter.com/BriannaWu/status/1371502668481503236
>1/ The last I’m going to say on this today.
>Many women have come forward with their stories about Singal. @JuliaSerano in particular was credible.
>It’s my belief that real consequences for Singal’s ethics will happen through his peers. Not on Twitter.
It’s about ethics in gender journalism.
Both Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog immediately taunt her with a “do it. u won’t”. https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1371467464333221889
>Brianna should share these stories immediately. I think it’s really important to get to the bottom of this.
>2/ My main experience with her is receiving vaguely threatening notes while she was running for Congress about how if I didn’t write differently about tr*** issues, I’d be punished for it. Didn’t like that — I don’t think potential MoCs should do this. That’s what aides are for! (screenshot of email)
>3/ (‘Notes’ because there was also a Twitter DM.) More recently, someone added me her to her PAC mailing list and when I asked to be taken off because of these prior notes, Wu herself jumped on to yell at me, claim I was saying she’d *physically* threatened me (no!), etc. (screenshot of email)
https://twitter.com/kittypurrzog/status/1371492671114506241
>All Brianna Wu would have to do to end Jesse’s career (and mine, by association) would be to share her stories and provide her receipts. She won’t, because she can’t.
>She just keeps going. Unbelievable that anyone falls for this shit. https://twitter.com/kittypurrzog/status/1371493957444673536
Brianna replies immediately https://twitter.com/BriannaWu/status/1371494008288075781
>I’ve never had any interaction with you that would affect your professional reputation as a journalist. And even if I had, I wouldn’t share it unless there were an immensely compelling reason to.
>I can provide receipts. And I will. But when I want to, not when you want me to. Red heart
Colin Moriarty, a longtime GamerGater begins the “post reciepts” donation fund https://twitter.com/notaxation/status/1371495816649703425 :
>I’ll give $1,000 to a charity of your choice if you provide the proof to Katie privately. This isn’t political at all for me; this is about how people are treated, and how they’re destroyed by innuendo and rumor everyday.
>A thousand bucks for you to give the “receipts” to Katie.
He immediately gets flamed by BWu for his lack of ethics in games journalism: https://twitter.com/BriannaWu/status/1371525025023602688
>Wow, $1000 whole dollars? Face with rolling eyes
>As I said, if a reputable journalist (not someone who reviews Sony PlayStation products while appearing in Sony ads, for example) wants to do a wider story about Singal I will happily chat with them.
Someone else matches $1000 to her directly: https://twitter.com/EsotericCD/status/1371512435669143557 and then a bunch of randos also start a “match me” chain: https://twitter.com/AnthonyMarchek/status/1371496108900368384
Browsing around will find plenty of other minor spats of drama. One is a partial release of Herzog’s DMs with BWu: https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1371489022384672768 and https://twitter.com/kittypurrzog/status/1371484911773700098
Editor at Reason https://twitter.com/MattWelch/status/1371502748773023747 responds to claims that everyone whiteknighting/simping for the tr***phobic ecelebs is an anime avatar or sockpuppet by saying that he is neither. I’m not buying it.
For more background on the months of other Substack Drama see https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-start-demanding-substack which references https://www.garbageday.email/p/starting-to-think-we-are-acting-like which references https://www.cjr.org/special_report/substackerati.php and https://blog.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderation Beyond that, you’re on your own.
The second block originally appeared as a post called “Internet armory for the “Jesse is a transphobe” debates” on the Blocked and Reported Subreddit, but the rules of that sub include “no twitter drama”, of which this certainly counts.
One of the Slate Star Codex posts that have stuck in my mind is https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/ which details some old time internet history where people really thought that people on “the other side” were simply misguided, and with a few facts and a bit of logic, they would stop being so wrong and “do better” (as the kids these days say). They specifically thought this about religion vs atheism, the good-old-days of which lead to these vast internet arsenals of links and debunkings and counter-debunkings, and pages and pages of lengthy posts, all provided either free of charge or at personal cost of running a server and moderating forums.
>This exercise is gradually bringing back memories of just how intellectual the Internet was around the turn of the millennium. You would go to bulletin boards, have long and acrimonious debates over whether or not the Gospels were based on pagan myths. Then someone would check Vast Apologetics Library tektonics.org and repost every one of their twenty-eight different articles about all the pagan myths the Gospels weren’t based on, from Adonis (“yet another unprofitable proposition for the copycat theorist”) to Zalmoxis (“there is no comparison, other than by illicit collapsing of terminology and by unsubstantiated speculation”). Both sides had these vast pre-built armories full of facts and arguments to go to.
>At some point, in a way unrelated to the fall of New Atheism, the Internet stopped being like this. The topics that interest people today don’t get debated in the same way. People dunk on each other on Twitter, occasionally even have back-and-forth exchanges, but the average person doesn’t post long screeds and get equally long responses fisking each of their points. There’s less need for giant databases containing every fact you might need to win a particular argument, organized Dewey-Decimal-style by which argument you are trying to win. People just stopped caring.
>I’m not sure why this happened. Maybe it took about ten years from the founding of the Internet for people to really internalize that online arguments didn’t change minds. The first Internet pioneers, starting their dial-up modems and running headfirst into people outside their filter bubbles, must have been so excited. For the first time in human history, people interested in debating a subject could do so 24–7 out in a joint salon-panopticon with all of the information of the human race at their fingertips. Bible Belt churchgoers for whom atheists had been an almost-fictional bogeyman, and New York atheists who thought of the religious as unsophisticated yokels, came together for the first time thinking “Convincing these people is going to be so easy”. The decade or so before they figured out that it wasn’t was a magical time, of which the great argument-arsenals of the past are almost the only remaining monument.
>Or maybe it was something else. Maybe it was that getting online was actually pretty hard in those days, you needed to be technically inclined or attending a college or both, and so netizens were just more educated. Maybe the sort of people who interrupt any attempt at intellectual discussion with words like “rationalbro” or “mansplaining” or “well acktually” were still stuck in their caves, fruitlessly banging AOL CDs against rocks trying to create fire. Maybe it was something as simple as Wikipedia not existing yet, leaving the intellectual world in a sort of state of nature with every man for himself. Maybe it was just that the bulletin board format was more conducive to this than the later social media style fora.
I’m a bit too young to be of this old school ethos, having come of age in a considerably more 4chan way, but I’m a bit too verbose and nitpicky for the 240 character takedown on Twitter. And, information spreads through social networks in an extremely inefficient way, unless you have a central repository where all the information accumulates in a purposeful and organized manner, which really just bothers me.
Why am I bringing this up? Well, because Jesse Singal is frequently called a conversion therapy-supporting, DM-sneaking, transphobic bigot who sics his reply guy army on trans activists to shut them up [citation needed]. It is because of this [citation needed] that I am proposing the immediate creation of massive internet arsenals in both the pro-Singal and anti-Singal camps.
Luckily we have a couple good starts. This morning, Julia Serano has updated her 2017 blogpost “my Jesse Singal story”, a frequently cited piece by both Jesse and his detractors, with additional information and background, complete with ample links https://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2017/12/my-jesse-singal-story_11.html. I have not gone through all the links, but many are familiar to me, but the problem with just “familiar to me” is that I forget the exact “chapter and verse” (as Glenn Loury is fond of saying) that I have a problem with, or don’t agree with, or doesn’t make sense, etc. and there’s no highlighting of its connections to other pieces of evidence. I don’t have a clear vision of which of where each of these individual incidents are in the anti-Singal camp’s heirarchy between “clear and definitive proof of transphobic policy support” and “an amusing rumor about him not being a good person which is juicy gossip, but of relatively little actual merit”.
The other good start is Noah Berlatsky’s “Jesse Singal Resource Page” https://www.patreon.com/posts/jesse-singal-20353892 As with the other link dump, has anyone really taken the time to go through each one with “equally long responses fisking each of their points” as Scott Alexander says was done in days past? I doubt it.
The other good start is Jesse’s defenses of himself. Jesse is upset that he took a day to write a rebuttal to a tweetstorm https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/check-out-how-much-effort-it-takes . His other rebuttals focus on Nicole Cliffe’s complaints https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/nicole-cliffe-is-a-poor-choice-of , and Katelyn Burns’s complaints https://medium.com/@jesse.singal/so-about-that-katelyn-burns-thread-58c736647bc9 and https://medium.com/@jesse.singal/a-hopefully-final-update-on-this-katelyn-burns-thing-da17730e13aa I find the complaints about how long this took to be kind of overblown. If anything, I want him to take even MORE time and post a 100,000 word point-by-point rebuttal of everything people hate about him so that we can point to the Singal Master Article once and be completely done with it forever. I want the “Jesse’s Middle Finger” companion book to Galileo’s Middle Finger.
Most importantly, I want side-by-side comparisons of each point. In the latest substack post by Jesse, he says that Serano got upset about a link to one of her pieces about navigating the trans dating scene placed just before a critique of her position:
>In other words: I disagree with Serano on a technical matter involving desistance from gender dysphoria (see here and here for far more information than you need on that subject), but I did enjoy an article she wrote about dating while trans in San Francisco. Had I had any idea how she would have reacted, I never would have complimented her. Because Serano, through a logical process I cannot explain or understand, decided that in complimenting an article she wrote while disagreeing with or ignoring the rest of her vast oeuvre, I was “slut-shaming” her. She also suggests in her piece that maybe, what this (‘this’ meaning a brief complimentary aside) really comes down to is that I am sexually attracted to trans women, and specifically to her.
>[…] So, to recap: I am being accused of being creepy because someone I never met and have only fleetingly emailed with decided that the one time I complimented them about their work, that compliment constituted slut-shaming, and also, oh, by the way, maybe I am secretly into her. To repeat: I am the creepy person in this exchange. Me. Of course, Anderson provides none of this context. We just know that Julia Serano had “experiences with [my] behavior,” as it is summed up. ‘Experiences’! That sounds really bad.
Serano has responded to this section on her Twitter: https://twitter.com/JuliaSerano/status/1371497324590039041 (with the exact same degree of exasperation for having to fight this particular set of claims yet again) citing a 2018 twitter poll she had where her followers overwhelmingly (73.6%) understood the motive of the citation was likely slut-shaming https://twitter.com/JuliaSerano/status/1023985900890386433 and writing a blogpost to properly catalogue this particular debate for its future use in the great internet fight club. https://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2018/07/on-jesse-singal-slut-shaming-and.html
>4) On July 28, 2018, in a thread attacking Noah Berlatsky for his Jesse Singal Resource Page, Singal re-upped his claims that he simply “enjoyed” my dating article, and further argued that no unbiased person would view this incident as slut-shaming, and that any one who *does* view it as slut-shaming (aka, me) must be “hysterical and opportunistic idiots.”
>So yesterday I carried out the following Twitter poll, leaving out the specifics of this affair. Twenty people shared it (see here and here and here), so it most certainly reached some people who were not aware that this had anything to do with Singal. Here are the results: [screenshot of results]
>Contrary to Singal’s claims, only 1% (out of 246 votes) of people viewed citing an unrelated article about a woman’s dating experiences as showing respect for her work. 74% viewed it as slut-shaming, while the remaining respondents said they weren’t sure. In the comments, some of these people said that, while they might not call it “slut-shaming” per se, they believed that it was definitely a signal to readers that I was not to be taken seriously, as I write about frivolous topics such as “dating.” While this perspective makes sense non-contextually, I also know for a fact that Singal has read my writings on the effectiveness of sexualizing trans women (see above), and that he has attempted to use my own arguments against me more than once. https://twitter.com/JuliaSerano/status/1012405360664051712
In other words, both of them are equally upset of having to retread the exact same ground as 3 years ago, with both of them landing in almost exactly the same place as where they left off. And almost none of either of their audiences have been paying close enough attention to know exactly how much of this is a pure retread. (by the way, Serano’s piece goes on to lay into the “hysterical and opportunistic idiots” thing a bit more, much of which could probably be resaid for Jesse’s current “through a logical process I cannot explain or understand”. Drama archaeology is fucking fascinating.) I enjoy the fact that many of the people involved here are the sources of enormous argument arsenals, in addition to being the primary characters in the particular drama.
##Bring back the enormous internet argument arsenals
Since this subreddit is obviously made up of only the most intelligent, dedicated and esteemed members of the Jesse Singal fanclub, I leave it to you to build me an enormous archive of every word ever written for and against Jesse, complete with links and cross-references to every other complaint and rumor. Please also rate each one for truthiness, juiciness, and difficulty of refutation, so that I can tailor my arguments according to personal taste. I expect this to be done by the end of the week.
I will also settle for someone clicking and reading every link in the Serano update and beaming the information into my brain.
If you are particularly confused as to how we got to this point, Well, there’s some drama about substack courting “transphobes” to write for them, a policy that was most notably criticized by Jude Ellison Sady Doyle here https://doyles.substack.com/p/in-queers-we-trust-all-others-pay , and was later followed up with a tweetstorm by someone else, which is what Jesse’s post responded to, and was followed by https://doyles.substack.com/p/necessary-losses with various tweets and other substack pieces floating about between the various named parties. (https://www.garbageday.email/p/starting-to-think-we-are-acting-like for some, along with a Glenn Greenwald pieces https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-start-demanding-substack and maybe others, but interestingly Greenwald seems to be fairly new here https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1371490929622851594 ). The renewed drama due to Substack money and possible censorship has brought everyone back to the topic from whatever else they were working on.
The most recent development has been Brianna Wu claiming to have receipts of Jesse’s transphobia, to which both BARPOD hosts have demanded the immediate release of. They are simply begging to be cancelled, taunting Wu, and daring her to end their careers with her obviously extremely incriminating evidence. https://twitter.com/kittypurrzog/status/1371492671114506241 They have so far gotten promises for $5000 to the charity of Wu’s choice for the release of the receipts. https://twitter.com/kittypurrzog/status/1371540333301932038
Additional background may be found https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/lnp4rs/sincere_post_i_like_katie_and_jesse_and_see_them/go5j15a/ or https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/m5sma1/after_weeks_of_substack_drama_were_now_at_the/gr1s9v5/
The final block here is a lengthy gushpost about Katie’s exploits, from a much older post. I usually link to https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/cettpa/technically_its_ephebophilia_a_based_centrist/ which is the time she unironically wrote the article that everyone knew was coming, then trolled random twitter users. That then points to https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/9krd9c/when_you_realize_your_male_coworkers_will_go_to/?st=JMS5NSZM&sh=28a812d6
For those who are *uneducated* enough to not know about Katie Herzog, let me fill you in.
Most recently, she wrote a piece where she makes fun of a Jezebel piece where they #MeToo a guy that has been passed around by a bunch of feminist writers because, literally “Dick too bomb.” https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/9kk7gu/metoo_has_now_progressed_into_just_getting_guys/
However, that’s not the reason why we need to immediately find and mod her. Name any topic that we commonly discuss here as completely full of lolcows, and I can point to a time when she wrote a professional article making fun of them.
So, having covered the lowest of low-hanging fruit (mayo women), we move onto a completely unironic defense of Jordan Memerson and his army of incels and their enforced monogamy: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/06/22/27989222/my-night-with-jordan-b-peterson https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/07/09/28930684/the-lefts-mischaracterizations-of-jordan-peterson-will-make-his-followers-turn-right
More bussy: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/06/19/27872645/twitter-trans-kids-call-out-culture-and-a-10000-blunt
College Campus Riots:
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/09/13/32223915/why-liberal-arts-schools-like-evergreen-would-benefit-from-conservative-professors
More WW with their avacado toast and yachts: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/07/17/29312621/todays-best-hate-read
To top it all off, she also recently nuked her entire twitter (likely because of the analysis of the Jezebel article http://archive.is/FcodS): https://twitter.com/kittypurrzog
However, she literally can’t help herself from posting drama and has already said something that is guaranteed to get people’s panties in a bunch: https://twitter.com/kittypurrzog/status/1047167004300460032
Luckily, someone has been diligently archiving many of her greatest hottakes: http://archive.is/https://twitter.com/kittypurrzog/*
She also enjoys how truly insane twitter is, once derailing an interview completely to go on a tangent about her favorite lolcow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IRAKuB1JI8&feature=youtu.be&t=1347 (you can hear more about nberlat here http://archive.is/gavXe) Later on in that interview, she also explains the depths of TERF drama that she’s managed to get into https://youtu.be/2IRAKuB1JI8?t=3176
Someone else TL;DR’d me for that, so I responded:
Stay uneducated, you illiterate neandercuck. My opinions about a writer for a Seattle newspaper who says controversial things on twitter are the *most important and informative* things you will encounter in your lifetime, and are of **critical importance** to intelligent discourse on topics from national security to religion. If you’re too lazy to become informed on these pressing issues, then honestly you’re beyond help and deserve what’s coming to you.
