I, Pedo

The trolls are at it again.

This morning I awoke to find my Twitter timeline flooded with MAGA/QAnon troll accounts calling me a pedophile. This has been a regular occurrence for me since 2018, when a far-right shitposter named Mike Cernovich went after director James Gunn for pedophilia jokes, resulting in Gunn’s removal from the Guardian of the Galaxy franchise. Having taken that scalp, Cernovich looked for new targets, landing on a few people, including myself. Cernovich combed through years of my Twitter feed, found a bunch of jokes – most of which had nothing to do with pedophilia – compiled them into a damning-looking screenshot and sicced his troll army on me. He also straight-up said, “Michael Ian Black is a pedophile.” His attack got picked up by a couple of websites.

Here's the screenshot:

Feel free to be offended, particularly if the idea of pizza upsets you.

As you can see, a few of them actually are jokes about pedophilia, but most are just dumb or tasteless, or unrelated tweets about pizza. Literal pizza. This was during the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which Cernovich promoted, claiming that a secret cabal of Washington DC elites was trading children out of a local pizzeria. That conspiracy only died when a gunman stormed the place to “discover the truth for himself.” What he discovered was that he’d been lied to. Thankfully, nobody was killed.

Keep in mind, 2018 is before right-wingers started calling everybody they disagreed with “pedophiles,” so the word still had shock value. I remember how devastating it felt to have my name being associated it – no matter how flimsy the connection. I lost sleep over it. To be tarred like that for no reason other than somebody doesn’t like your politics really wounded me. I didn’t understand why somebody would do that.

(In a piece I wrote from a couple days ago, I wrote about my own naivety about the world. This was another example of my not understanding that some people would actually try to destroy you over a political disagreement.)

I got death threats. My wife got death threats. I had been through the Twitter wringer before so I didn’t take the threats particularly seriously. But she’d never experienced anything like that. The threats scared her. Of course they did. She thought I had endangered our family with my jokes. What was I supposed to say? That she was wrong? That my freedom to make a tasteless iCarly joke was worth that fear?

I consulted with two different lawyers about suing Cernovich, but ultimately decided against it for a few reasons. For one thing, it would have been crazy expensive, and while I thought I had an open-and-shut case of libel, nothing is ever certain in the judicial system. Also, suing him would serve his purposes because it would continue to associate my name with that word, something known as The Striesand Effect. In effect, in proving my case, I ran the risk of further damaging myself. Finally, it was unclear whether Cernovich even had any resources to pay any eventual financial judgement against him, so I opted to let it go.

The decision to not fight back cut against every fiber of my being. I wanted to bankrupt that fucker for what he was trying to do to my family. Of course, that kind of anger isn’t particularly healthy and would not have served me well in the long run, so maybe letting it go was the better course of action, regardless of the indignation it cost me at the time.

Of course, my experience echoes what many people go through online. You can get pretty far trying to ruin somebody else’s life without that much effort. You can do it without any evidence. You can do it anonymously. There’s no remedy for this behavior. The First Amendment is a mighty amendment, and should be. I have no interest in fiddling with it. Whatever problems it creates are more than offset by the good that it does. In this case, I really do hate the player, not the game.

I don’t know why they decided to go after me again today. If I had to guess it’s because I attacked RFK Jr. after his antisemitic remarks. RFK, of course, is a stalking horse for the MAGA right. He also has the additional benefit of being a QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theorist. His antisemitism is just a bonus: when I say I’d been through the Twitter wringer before, I was referring to the death threats I received during Trump’s first presidential campaign. Many of those were antisemitic in nature. Plenty of Jews received those threats, which often featured our faces being placed in gas chambers.

An example of the kind of thing Jeews were getting a lot of on Twitter during the early Trump years.

Last night, my wife was telling me about receiving threatening telephone calls from debt collectors over her student loans when she was younger. She’d fallen behind on payments and she would get phone calls from collection service companies saying they were going to seize her parent’s home. We live in a world filled with bad people who will say and do bad things. They will lie to you and about you. That debt collector knew he was lying to her, just as surely as Mike Cernovich knew he was lying about me. Maybe those people are put in our paths to toughen us up in some way. But why should we need to be toughened up? Life is hard enough without shit like this.

One of the trolls on my timeline asked why I stopped making “jokes like this”? I guess the implication was, if I had nothing to hide, why stop? I responded: “Because I don't like being called a pedophile. So I stopped. If their aim was to get me to stop making the jokes, mission accomplished. If the goal was to shut me up, not so much.”

I have become more circumspect in the kinds of jokes I make. Maybe that’s a good thing, maybe not. I’m undecided on that point. In general, more thoughtfulness is always better than less. But I rebel against self-censorship when it’s made out of intimidation. Shutting up altogether, though, was never an option.