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Transcript:
Here’s a little peek behind the scenes: the first part of making these YouTube videos for you is that I have to find something interesting to talk about, which requires a lot of bopping around the internet, reading news articles, social media posts, and scientific studies to see what catches my eye. And so during that stage, before I find something I want to dig into, I often have something playing in my headphones in the background. Sometimes it’s music, and sometimes it’s YouTube videos. I watch a lot of the Majority Report with Sam Seder and Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, and sometimes the algorithm suggests similar progressive content that I click on or just let autoplay, which sometimes works well, as that’s how I discovered Lance from The Serfs, who is great and who had me on his livestream recently. Go check that out if you haven’t!
A few months ago, one of the recommendations was a creator who was criticizing Elon Musk, and he suggested people check out a channel called “Thunderf00t” to enjoy more anti-Elon commentary. This surprised me, because I knew that name. I couldn’t NOT know that name, because Thunderf00t, real name Phil Mason, spent years harassing me and other feminists, most notably Anita Sarkeesian, about a decade ago.
I didn’t have a chance to make note of who the creator was, but recently it happened AGAIN and this time I made the note. It was Kyle Kulinski, who hosts the “Secular Talk” YouTube channel and otherwise seemed fairly progressive to me. So I left a little comment letting him know but it’s been a few weeks now and he never replied. Which, fair enough! I don’t even see every comment on my videos, let alone respond.
But over the weeks, I became curious about what Thunderf00t has been up to, and what I found was so interesting, to me at least, that I figured I’d sit down and tell you guys about it.
But first, in the interests of full disclosure, allow me to give you a very brief history. I first became acquainted with Tfoot in the late 2000s, when he was posting almost exclusively videos debunking creationists. A lot of those videos focused on another YouTuber called VenomFangX, who was completely unhinged, and honestly it was fun seeing him get wrecked. And for real, the guy was unHINGED.
TF00t’s style clearly wasn’t for everyone but he had a relatively HUGE audience on YouTube, to the point where I even suggested that he be invited to a large conference in London in 2009, but the organizers declined. Wisely, in retrospect. Because within a few years, TF pivoted from dunking on creationists to dunking on feminists, either because he genuinely hated us or because he saw other atheist YouTubers like the Amazing Atheist making tons of money off of “men’s rights activists” and incels who hate women.
He made several videos about me, personally, even putting my cute little face on the thumbnails. He called feminists liars, said that we were “poisoning” atheism by doing things like pointing out that we were getting a lot of really misogynistic hate from fellow atheists, i.e., TF’s own audience. He was also very critical of a group of Indian feminists urging society to teach men not to rape, and stop blaming victims. His response was to blame victims harder, something I found so repellent that I finally made a video in response to him. This was before I did full transcripts for my videos so even though I hate watching myself on video (yes, post-production is brutal for me), I decided to watch it today to refresh my memory. And I am not ashamed to admit that I laughed out loud at my own decade-old jokes. Seriously, guys, I COOKED.
At that point, TF’s fans were already brigading every video I posted, telling me that they were going to rape me regardless of what I was wearing, calling me a cunt, and completely missing any semblance of a sense of humor.
For as much vitriol as TF and his fans sent my way, it paled in comparison to what he focused on Anita Sarkeesian, who committed the cardinal sin of producing a high-value series exploring how video games deal with gender and misogyny. TF was legit OBSESSED with Anita, to the point where he even appeared in a documentary a couple of incels made about her.
Anyway, that’s about when I just kind of blocked TF and forgot about him. I assumed he was still hustling in the anti-woman space, because it seems like that might still be a winner with the YouTube algorithm.
But clearly, I was wrong! Over on Xitter, someone let me know that TF stopped harassing women when “someone died,” a comment that obviously required way more context as I had no idea what they were talking about. Luckily, they came through: back in 2017, a man named Aleksandr Kolpakov shot and killed his girlfriend, Heather Anable, apparently while on mushrooms. The couple had previously hosted a YouTube channel called “The Skeptic Feminist,” which I’ve never heard of before but obviously because of the name alone TF’s fellow anti-woman “skeptic” commentators like Sargon of Akkad to hop on a livestream and joke about it. This, at last, was a bridge too far for the valiant TF, who could joke about men threatening to rape and murder me, to the point where I had to get the FBI involved and hire private security to come to a few talks, but joking about the murder of a woman he did NOT previously hate was absolutely off limits, so he took to YouTube to lambast them. Oh, but obviously, he had to start his video by whining about me and a random joke I made at a conference several years prior poking fun at the childish way misogynists view feminists. Because that’s a normal way to criticize your peers for being misogynists.
So yeah, I guess TF “left” skepticism at that point, because obviously he thought that hating women was skepticism, which honestly, sure, I can see why he would get that sense. But it was important that he “left” while making sure that everyone knows he still hates some women, like me, and, of course, Anita Sarkeesian. In case you were worried.
With so many people telling me that TF had officially changed his ways after that incident, like this extremely committed fan over on Bluesky, I decided to have a look at his channel. Surely he must be embarrassed by the spittle-flecked misogynistic ranting role he played back then, which is why supposed progressives today are recommending him to their own audiences. But oh, what’s this? His channel features a few playlists, one of which is “Feminism vs. FACTS,” featuring me, Anita Sarkeesian of course, and…is that Beyonce? Uh, okay! And wow, one of mine has more than two MILLION views! I wouldn’t even know how much money that must have made him but Google’s AI says it was maybe like $4,000! I really fucked up by not also jumping on that woman-hating train, huh? Do you think two million people would watch a video about how much I hate myself? I should have taken advantage of that depressive period I went through last year when my birth control implant went on the fritz. Now I love myself again. Stupid self-esteem.
Okay, so TF isn’t exactly hiding how much he used to hate and obsess over women online, but still, people assured me that his new and improved content criticizing Elon Musk is top tier. So I thought it was only fair to take a look at that and judge it on its merits. I decided to check out his latest livestream, in which he live reacted to a SpaceX launch. Here’s a taster.
Okay, so…I understand, or was told at some point, that TF is a working scientist. I believe he is a chemist. There’s a very good chance that whatever job he does, he is good at it. I do not know. But he is quite clearly not a physicist. Or an engineer. Or a person who knows how to turn the audio on a livestream so he can hear an engineer or physicist explain what he is watching. This is so fucking embarrassing. I would like to report this video to YouTube for glorifying self-harm because this level of cringe is beyond my ability to continue living.
As you all know if you’ve been on my channel for more than a minute, I think Elon Musk is a stupid asshole. I think SpaceX is a complicated problem, in that there are obviously many talented people there doing fascinating work, but ultimately we cannot and should not leave space exploration to the private sector for many, many reasons. I am very, VERY open to criticism of Musk, and SpaceX. But this ain’t it. To illustrate how embarrassing TF’s coverage of SpaceX is, check out this video from fellow YouTuber Timmytoina, who appears to actually know what’s happening.
Looking at TF’s Xitter feed, it is now almost exclusively about Elon Musk, except for when he took a quick break to shame a victim of the LA fire for not installing a “Roof sprinkler system and a 100 dollar pump? backed up with $100 generator and a gallon of gas,” wondering, “….am I missing something?”
Yes, Phil, you are missing something. Roof sprinkler systems do sometimes work to protect houses, but not in 100MPH winds that blow the water away before it can hit the roof, and not when your neighbors’ houses are all on fire, and not when you don’t have enough water to draw from to keep the sprinklers running for at least eight hours either through the municipal system (at which point you’re draining water that firefighters might be able to use to better effect elsewhere) or through a tank you previously sunk into your yard. You see, I happen to know about this topic, having researched it because I live in an area that is at high risk of wildfires. I’m not just some jackass who couldn’t even be bothered to Google before shitting out misinformation online.
The fact that TF could be so wrong, even about something as easy to be right about as “why Elon Musk is terrible,” really made me stop and reconsider some things. During my research for this video, I stumbled across an hbomberguy video I had never seen, in which he hilariously destroys TF for an extremely sad rant he made about a trailer for the Kristin Wiig Ghostbusters movie in 2016. And he includes this clip, which probably comes from the very same time that I thought TF was fun to watch.
“Even when he’s right, this guy’s bad at arguing.”
Yeah, that.
I knew TF was a grifter thanks to him jumping on the anti-woman money train, but I didn’t realize just how incompetent he was, regardless of the topic he chose. And I knew he was ignorant, but again I (ignorantly) assumed that was just about women, because, well look at him. Sorry, that sounded meaner than I meant. I just mean, look at his online record–I don’t know anything about his personal life but if he has been anywhere near a woman it probably wasn’t because the woman wanted him there. So it made sense to me that he didn’t, or perhaps couldn’t understand anything about women’s lived experiences. But no, he’s really just that ignorant about every topic he blindly attacks. And I knew he was obsessive, but again I thought that that was just because obsessively hating me and Anita Sarkeesian was making guys a lot of money back then.
But after doing all of this research, and feeling a bit dirty from it if I’m honest, I see the pattern. First TF was obsessively and, in retrospect, ignorantly hating VenomFangX and Eric Hovind. And then it was me and Anita Sarkeesian. And now it’s Elon Musk. Sometimes I might agree with his targets, but when I objectively look at his arguments, it’s all just…sad. He doesn’t argue from a place of knowledge and critical thinking, but from a place of wanting to look like he’s smarter and better than whoever he has chosen to be his opponent du jour. And because of that, his audience won’t learn how to critically evaluate bad arguments, but only how to yell louder than the other person, how to fake it until enough people assume you’re in the right. Just sitting around waiting for the other person’s rocket ship to blow up so you can smirk and pretend you did something.
I started this journey annoyed that progressives are telling their sizable audience to go patronize a man who spent years harassing me, a man who I found morally repugnant. And while I do hold on to that annoyance, and that disgust, now, I more just feel an overwhelming pity.
When we first met, we were both edgy atheists in our 20s laughing about creationists. I had no idea that hating creationists was just his entire personality, and when it was time to do something else he made his entire personality about hating another type of person, and now that he’s moved on from that it’s time to make his entire personality about hating a new person, singularly focused, at all costs, with no context, with not even a passing interest in what’s true or what’s not. The only way to do something like that for more than ten years now is to live a life devoid of joy, curiosity, or love.
It’s just so very sad. I genuinely hope that one day Thunderf00t is able to see that this behavior is not healthy, and I hope that he learns to find some sense of balance in his life.
But also…I do have to admit…I laughed really hard at this guy dunking on him.
