I’m going to share four incidents that occurred after my last update on David Deutsch’s harassment campaign. This is with my blog comments disabled and my forum paywalled; otherwise it’d be much worse. And, again, none of these people have taken any steps to improve the situation, reduce harassment or negotiate a solution.

I received information about a CritRat leader. They:

• Privately trash talked me.
• Tried to turn a CF community member against me.
• Encouraged doing things to me that the CritRat believed would trigger me.
• Encouraged knowingly, intentionally doing things that I regard as seriously mistreating me.
• Encouraged adopting a mindset of blaming things on me and viewing me as malicious.
• Suggested that if you have any negative emotions related to Elliot, you should trust them and act on them.
• Pushed the idea that if Elliot could maybe be in the wrong, you should assume he is, reject all alternatives, and stop thinking about it. They said basically that it’s bad to even consider Elliot’s side of the story because he’s a bad faith actor. (They apparently don’t understand fallibilism or rationality.)

The overall message was that praise, acceptance, friendship and rewards are available to people who join the harassment campaign.

And the CritRat leader said this to someone who they were suspicious of! They must say much worse to people who they trust not to tell me anything. It seems that trying to cause harassment is such a habit that they can’t fully turn it off even when trying to be on good behavior.

The CritRats do this stuff routinely. They want to continue and escalate their harassment campaign, and they are putting ongoing effort into that goal. I usually don’t find much out, besides the downstream consequences (the harassment itself), because they work in the shadows and punish people who provide me with any information.

A long time DD/TCS fan paid $20 on a credit card in order to make an account on my paywalled forum in order to harass me there. They’ve been banned from all my stuff for years but are unwilling to leave me alone.

This harassment is linked to the CritRat community. The harasser and her close associate have been tweeting with multiple CritRats and trying to get their attention. (I don’t know how much success they’ve had because the CritRats have a lot of private conversations, plus I just skimmed through a couple things without really investigating.) They both believe that attacking me is a way to get friendliness and social acceptance from CritRats. A CritRat leader publicly tweeted back to the harasser a week before this harassment incident. This harasser is a person the CritRat leader is highly familiar with from past events, and has reason to fear, so their public encouragement of the harasser was knowing and intentional (and stupid).

A CritRat leader brought me up and then his conversation partner, another CritRat, harassed me on Twitter using an anonymous account.

A CritRat contacted me repeatedly without disclosing he was a CritRat and he exploited a misconfigured forum setting in order to post and violate my forum’s terms of service. When I found out he was a CritRat and confronted him, he refused to say that he thinks harassment is bad, even in principle or in general. He claims the harassment issue is too boring to look into. He claimed to be neutral, but if you’re going to hang out with the CritRats and refuse to address the harassment issue, do not contact me. If you’re a CritRat and won’t leave me alone, you are violating my consent and harassing me.

Here’s some text I wrote to try to explain the problem to him:

Please condemn the harassment and the people who refuse to say they are opposed to harassment. Alternatively, push for people to participate in conflict resolution and condemn those who refuse. If you won’t, and you continue to have friendly interactions with them, then you’re encouraging them to think their harassment (plus refusal of all conflict resolution) is OK, in which case you wouldn’t be welcome to contact me.

After I told him personally “do not contact me again”, he said “Ok”, but then a few weeks later sent me a very nasty email to harass me. He purposefully violated the no contact request and my consent. In that email, he communicated that when he said he was neutral earlier he was lying, and he actually hates me and thinks I’m badly wrong about the harassment issues that he supposedly finds too boring to read about. He claims I should have somehow already known that he despises me, even though it’s different than everything he said to me before when he was pretending to be neutral because he wanted free philosophy help from me. He also claimed that I was coercing him by ordering him to stop emailing me, which I guess is his justification for violating my no contact request (he’s fighting my coercion that consists of the no contact request itself). The reason he thinks reading my explanations about the harassment would be boring is because he has a predetermined conclusion that I’m wrong, so the only things he could learn are how badly I’m wrong and in what ways I’m wrong (he communicated that). He also purposefully used something else that he believed would trigger me in order to falsely attack me – he chose that unconventional, atypical attack specifically because he thinks it’s something I care about and could be triggered by. He purposefully broke a no contact request to try to hurt me.

I suspect he was aware of my generic no contact request to all CritRats like him, which is on my blog, before he contacted me several times while hiding being a CritRat. I suspect he was already purposefully violating a no contact request at the time I individually, personally asked him not to contact me (which he agreed to before breaking his word). But it’s hard to know.

They won’t leave me alone and they’ve never been willing to discuss any conflict resolution. I don’t do anything like this to them.

Conclusion

Do you think they’re doing something bad? Tell them, particularly their leader, David Deutsch. Demand that he answer for what he’s doing. Bring it up and ask challenging questions. Expose him. Please help. Besides defaming me, he has too many loyal fans willing to attack people he signals should be harassed. It’s a nightmare. Supporting messages to me are also appreciated.

After Deutsch turned against me, I left him alone and didn’t complain about him (like my posts about his harassment campaign) for over 5 years but he grew more hateful over time not less. I tried ignoring the problem for over 5 years and that didn’t work; he seems to have a lifelong obsession with me; there’s no option for me where I could simply be left alone going forward. (I think he’s scared that I could critique and refute anything he publishes about philosophy, and he uses that as an excuse for not writing much, so year after year, in his mind, he blames me for his lack of productivity. Using me as a scapegoat is my best understanding of why he won’t move on. In other words, he feels like I never leave him alone because whenever he considers publishing philosophy he remembers that I could potentially write a rebuttal. I got this idea from Lulie Tanett, who told me about it based on her personal conversations with Deutsch, and it makes sense to me.)

Similarly, part of why the CritRats won’t just forget about me is that a bunch of them think I’m a great intellectual, so they keep reading my stuff and trying to learn from me (and sometimes plagiarizing me). It’s partly a love/hate relationship they have with me, not just a hate relationship. I wish they’d stop reading my stuff, stop watching my videos, and stop remembering that I exist, but I have no way to get rid of them while sharing ideas with the public. The combination of trying to get value from me, while being so nasty to me, is really screwed up.

If people stand up to Deutsch, he’s likely to back off. He’s only able to harass me so much due to the lack of attention it gets and the lack of pushback. If thousands of people were watching and judging him, I’m pretty sure he’d mostly stop. He cares deeply about his reputation and what people think of him. Please try to raise awareness and to show him that people actually care and disapprove of his actions.

I want to be able to reopen my blog comments and also have philosophy discussions on other websites without them being disrupted; is that too much to ask?

I wrote a new article which attempts to better explain why I blame Deutsch: David Deutsch’s Gossip and Harassment Leadership.

Here are some updates on David Deutsch’s (DD’s) ongoing harassment campaign against me.

A DD fan repeatedly broke my no contact request and e.g. emailed me about their support of DD.

Someone who appears to be a DD fan has been editing subtle attacks against me onto Wikipedia.

A while ago a different DD fan harassed me a bit and I directly asked him to stop contacting me. He said he agreed then later purposefully broke that no contact request to harass me again, but then went back to leaving me alone. Now he has subscribed to my curi YouTube channel. These people are so obsessed with me and won’t go away and just forget I exist. If you hate me so much and are unwilling to speak with me at all or do any problem solving about this conflict, stop following my stuff and keeping me active in your minds. Their refusal to keep their distance from me leads to more harassment. (I do not actively follow/read/watch any of them.)

A CritRat leader did something so bad that I don’t want to repeat it or draw attention to it. DD has pretty direct responsibility in this case.

A CritRat community leader tried to promote CritRats (including multiple harassers) on one of my old forums. I never interacted with that person before, so I wrote an explanation of the situation in case it was an innocent mistake. They were unwilling to speak to me at all or attempt any kind of problem solving, so now I doubt it was innocent. Dear CritRats: As I’ve said before, if you aren’t willing to engage in any problem solving regarding the harassment issue, you’re not welcome on my forums; leave me alone.

I’m pretty confident those were five different people. I don’t think Andy B was involved. He may not have done anything bad for over a year, and I heard a rumor a while back that he’s not an active CritRat anymore. He has come back after taking a break before so who knows; I haven’t investigated. The situation with DD, on the other hand, hasn’t improved.

Overall, my strategy of closing all my forums (and largely staying off social media and other forums) except my paywalled CF forum has reduced the direct harassment incidents to a more tolerable, manageable amount. But it really sucks to have my conversations with the world significantly reduced due to the harassment campaign. And they’re still spreading lies to harm my reputation.

Help with solving this problem would be highly appreciated.

One of my new forum members expressed doubt that the harassment campaign against me is “led by Deutsch” as I claim. He said:

I’d definitely agree with his [Deutsch’s] actions being tacit endorsement [of the harassment campaign] (i.e. being publicly silent on the matter) and instigation (e.g. the lie about no contact requests). But I don’t understand him to have an ongoing active involvement which I infer from “led”.

I’ve written a lot about this, but not recently, and it’s quite long. So I’ll try explaining again by focusing on two lists of key points. Be aware that this explanation leaves a lot out. If you want additional details or evidence, check out my previous writing, or contact me at my forum or by email.

Also, this post is about DD’s leadership role and gossip. It’s not about explaining the more direct harassment. Incidents have included hundreds of harassing comments from many false identities, ban evasion, DDoSing, doxxing, plagiarism, no contact request violation, spam, fraud, threats, and lying to people that I threatened violence. Because DD’s fans have been so unwilling to leave me alone, year after year, I’m now using a paywalled forum to minimize the direct harassment.

DD’s Responsibility

If DD started and caused the harassment but then stopped doing anything and just watched it actively continue by itself, then I’d hold him responsible until he stopped it. It’s like if you turn a machine on, then you’re responsible for it running until you press the off button.

If DD made vigorous efforts to stop the harassment but found that he couldn’t, that would remove lots of his responsibility, but instead he has publicly tacitly endorsed it and defamed me.

Also, TV mob bosses often don’t give direct orders but still communicate what they want and are responsible for the murders that other people carry out.

But DD isn’t just passively watching while giving a few public hints that he wants me to be harassed. He actively gossips and lies about me, but only where you can’t observe it. His actions are the root cause of most of the harassment.

How do I know that DD privately says bad things about me? I’ll give six points. Then I’ll give seven more points elaborating on one case of his gossip.

DD Gossips

First, like many people, DD is a two-faced, mean gossip. That is his personality, as he revealed to me on a regular basis for a decade. (I didn’t participate but was somewhat oblivious at the time. I saw it a lot more when reviewing chat logs and emails after being harassed.) DD even treats people that way when he’s publicly friendly with them, like with Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins. I shared some examples towards the bottom here.

Second, a decade ago, DD personally tried to turn two of my current forum members against me. Due to the severe, direct harassment, they forwarded those emails to me. One case was blatant and one was subtle enough that the person didn’t recognize it, at the time, as an action against me. I’ve also received reports of DD’s close associates trying to turn people against me. My information sources don’t offer any kind of completeness, so there’s probably a lot more that I don’t know. I presume everything I’m sharing to be representative examples.

Third, the behavior of multiple people towards me has been really unusual, but this only happens with people interested in Critical Rationalism. This includes people speaking to me in a friendly way but then abruptly refusing to speak to me at all with no explanation. It has also included some people never speaking to me in scenarios where that’d normally be unlikely. My best explanation for this phenomenon is that these people were told some gossip about me. I’d guess that was mostly done by DD’s associates rather than DD personally. I think some people wouldn’t speak to me because they’d already heard the gossip, and others were told gossip after they were seen publicly speaking with me which is why they abruptly stopped (I have lots of evidence that multiple DD fans closely watch my public discussions). I know some specific false claims that are likely being spread by gossip which are nasty enough to get results like this.

Fourth, Lulie Tanett (LT) repeatedly observed DD gossiping about me and shared examples. She observed this in person as a frequent visitor in DD’s home, and he also sends her copies of tons of his emails and often tells her about his recent activities by instant messages, in person or on the phone. LT recruited many of the Popper-interested young people that DD talks with in person, so she’s often present when he talks with someone she brought to him, and she can also talk with them about him afterwards. LT also shared her opinions with me and summarized some trends outside the specific examples she shared, e.g. that DD disliked me and was repeatedly speaking negatively about me.

In one example, DD told someone that an anonymous post might be written by me because it had some ideas similar to mine (it actually wasn’t by me). This undermines me by suggesting my community is small and that few people agree with me (so if someone has ideas like mine, there’s a good chance it’s my sockpuppet). On multiple occasions that I know of, DD relied on information from our personal friendship to help him speculate more effectively about which anonymous posters were me, so he was violating my privacy, which mistreated me. Mistreating me himself is a way of leading by example that encourages others to mistreat me too. DD also came up with the idea that my fans should be treated like my sockpuppets, even if they aren’t, because if someone talks like me they count as a copy of me instead of an independent person (meanwhile he denies responsibility for the actions of his fans that he won’t say anything against). I think this contributed to my fans also being harassed during the harassment campaign, not just me.

Fifth, DD’s negative ideas about me have repeatedly been said later by harassers. That shows that he shares his hateful ideas and then the gossip spreads, including to people who do direct harassment actions. For example, Andy B brought up the idea that many anonymous posters in my community are my sockpuppets.

Sixth, DD spent around 5 years turning LT against me. As context, he’s a father figure to her. I know DD did this because LT told me about it. DD often made negative comments about me to LT that she disliked and found coercive. She told me that he scared her that, unless she turned against me and otherwise believed and behaved as he wanted, he would cut her off from further help with her career and money (she has had severe financial problems). She found that extremely pressuring and coercive. DD has pushed her into being a philosopher since she was a young child even though she’s never been very good at it (she tried to pursue art and photography but DD preferred she do philosophy instead). She has no other career prospects and relies on DD’s social status and influence to get followers and career opportunities, as well as relying on his help in order for her to try to learn philosophy and to have philosophical ideas to say (besides teaching her, he lets her take credit for some of his ideas that he tells her privately). The majority of the pressure took place before she had even started her Twitter account, which now has 12,350 followers thanks to DD’s help. Later, after she turned against me, DD let her move into his house.

There have been no signs that DD has changed his behavior to stop thinking and gossiping about me. It’s been over ten years since DD stopped being friends with me, six years since he turned LT against me, and two years since I wrote most of my complaints about the harassment campaign. But DD hasn’t gotten over his grievances (that he won’t tell me); he remains very hostile.

The Impact of DD’s Gossip to LT

DD’s gossip to LT was his most impactful gossiping. It’s both an example of the kind of gossiping he does and, out of all his actions that I’m aware of, it did the most harm. Let’s examine the impacts and what we can learn from this evidence.

First, LT very likely could have stopped the harassment campaign after I caught Andy B’s sockpuppets, if she wanted to. (I contacted both DD and LT privately before publicly complaining, so almost all the public drama could have been avoided if either of them had wanted to avoid it.) LT had the social contacts, community reputation and influence to do that. Previously, for example, someone in her social network anonymously pointed an automatic spam bot at my blog and she quickly identified the person and got them to stop. She could have spoken to Andy B directly (he admires her) and also influenced DD fan community leaders.

Second, I was good friends with only two people now in the DD’s community: DD and LT. They’re the two people who personally betrayed me. One consequence is they can spread false personal information about me and be believed, because they’re actually in a realistic position to know those kinds of things about me. This makes their gossip more effective than anyone else’s and enables lies about me personally to circulate (other people can spread false personal information too given the understanding that DD or LT was the original source who could have actually known it).

Third, DD is fairly distant from most of his fans. He only gossips to a limited number of people. He needs people like LT to spread his messages to the broader community. When he wants to say something publicly he can just tweet it and his fans will see it, but when he wants to spread gossip without taking responsibility for it then he needs helpers to signal boost it. DD might only tell a dozen people but they can spread it to a hundred additional people for him. I also know that LT is a gossip who would spread this stuff (in the past, she shared many examples of her gossiping with me).

Fourth, turning LT against me took a huge amount of effort sustained for years. Why? Because she was a huge fan of mine and a friend and she vigorously resisted the pressure to turn against me. DD intentionally took a thing she liked (my philosophy) and ruined it for her, and ruined the friendship, which was mean. And it shows the huge level of effort DD is willing to put into harming me and controlling people. He has written nothing of note about philosophy for over a decade now, and he’s willing to spend a lot of energy working against me instead of doing philosophy.

Fifth, DD encouraged me to become friends with LT in the first place, and also encouraged LT to become friends with me in the first place. He knew us both, wanted us to be friends, and influenced both of us. That didn’t work initially, but he kept encouraging it for years until we eventually became friends. That makes it especially awful for him to later destroy that friendship that he had pushed both of us into. He also told LT basically that her philosophical success and rationality depended on learning from me (she was pretty stuck and having trouble learning philosophy or being good at it). After years of persuading her that she needed me or else she was doomed to be an irrational failure, he then decided that he didn’t like me anymore and therefore decided to deny that resource (my ideas) to LT. DD may have actually done even more harm to her than he’s done to me.

Sixth, after turning against me, LT spent the next couple years frequently tweeting negative things about me without using my name. She no longer does that very much. But, for years, she posted lots of stuff to undermine CF. She was getting her followers to preemptively dislike ideas related to me so that if they ever found me and read my essays, they’d quickly find something that they already “knew” was bad and stop listening. She used lots of straw men and distortions to do this. This wasn’t all an intentional plan. A lot of it was her coming up with rationalizations for disliking me in order to feel better, but publicly tweeting about those rationalizations primed other people to use the same rationalizations to dislike me.

LT also frequently attacked Ayn Rand (sometimes openly, sometimes not) who she used as a proxy for me. This is DD’s strategy: he couldn’t call me a non-Popperian but needed to differentiate me and himself philosophically, so he turned against Rand (after previously being her fan and recommending her books to me) and started basically saying that I’m bad because of a few mistakes I got from Rand. DD and LT both specifically attack some of Rand’s ideas that they think have something to do with me, and apart from that they generally don’t mention Rand. I believe they explain the connection between Rand’s alleged errors, and me personally, in private gossip.

Seventh, Andy B (the worst direct harasser) admired LT and brought her up multiple times, when he was trying to learn from me, before he harassed me. That was after she had turned against me, so I didn’t want to talk about her much. Andy B was bothered by the conflict between my community and DD’s community. (Similar things happened with multiple other DD fans who talked with me but also liked LT and DD, and were bothered by the schism, before they turned against me.) Andy B wanted to be friends with both groups, especially me and LT.

As explained in the sixth point, many of LT’s ideas (or DD’s ideas she was spreading) were designed to subtly or indirectly undermine me. (They keep it subtle in public, while their private gossip is sometimes blatant and sometimes subtle.) So discussing her tweets basically meant trying to explain first how it’s actually a poisonous attack on me followed by then trying to neutralize the poison (that I’d just made worse by clarifying it) by explaining how it’s false. It wasn’t good faith philosophy. I wanted Andy B and others to stop reading and bringing up LT’s veiled attacks on me, which I was trying to ignore. Especially because they didn’t actually understand her points (which she didn’t explain much), so they wanted me to explain her criticisms for them. I would have been happy to debate the matter if DD, LT or someone who could speak accurately to their perspective was willing to debate, but they weren’t. So the undermining tweets (in addition to private gossip) worked to stir up conflict in my community.

Conclusion

DD is a gossip who has been working to make people hostile to me for over ten years. That makes him the active leader of the harassment campaign even though he’s only taken a few direct, public actions against me. Eventually, the hostility he intentionally caused spread to a big enough group that some of them started taking more direct actions against me, like leaving hundreds of harassing comments on my blog from many false identities.

DD’s five-year gossip campaign to LT is the largest and most impactful example of his gossiping. He presumably also does some ongoing maintenance – keeps saying some negative things about me to remind her never to change her mind. He’s done similar types of gossiping with other people. Many of them, like LT, have then repeated his messages to others.

DD socializes with a limited number of people, but LT and some of DD’s other friends socialize with a ton of people which is how his gossip reaches his wider fan community. The direct harassment activities are downstream of this gossip campaign that he’s still doing today.