I’ll See You Anon

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Some Guidelines for Online Anons,
And Some Advice for Dealing with the More Angular Anons

Introduction

We live in a tumultuous time, a time in which we have recently seen specific anonymous accounts flame out in scandal—e.g. Patriarchy Hannah, or Josh Buice. In a different category, but still related, we have Bryan Chapell. That’s on the one hand.

But we must never forget that respectable corporations and establishment types can successfully cancel a man’s livelihood simply for saying online that little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. Not only so, but if you publish a transgressive opinion under your own name, transgressive in their eyes, the woke banshees can doxx you, putting your family at physical risk. So there are grave spiritual dangers for the anonymous polemicist, but there is also a legitimate place for the anonymous polemicist. How are we to sort this out? What should we remember? What do we need to keep in mind?

And for background reading on all of this, I would recommend A Justice Primer.

First, the Legit Anon

I want to begin with legitimate anon activity. The reason for this is simple. One of the signs of a sinful anon mentality is that they can’t afford to acknowledge that I believe there is a good way to do it. So what I am doing here is an example of what I have elsewhere called “the second paragraph rule.” This isn’t quite the second paragraph, but if I know I am going to outrage some unreasonable folks, I will anticipate and thwart their objections beforehand. This is because sinful anons reason like feminists. Any criticism that is aimed at some distinctive aspect of their activity is taken as an “each-and-every” attack on every conceivable member of that class. Thus any criticism of a sin that is distinctively feminine, e.g. nagging, is translated immediately into an assertion that I was saying that all women are nags, and then the response is, “Sir, how dare you?”

The Martin Marprelate tracts were published anonymously, at the risk of life and limb. Common Sense by Thomas Paine was published anonymously initially. John Dickinson published Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania anonymously, and that anonymity protected him from British retaliation. Before he gained international recognition, Solzhenitsyn circulated early drafts of some of his work via samizdat means, doing so without attribution. The Federalist Papers were written and published by anons. This kind of thing is totally legit because the arguments that are presented stand or fall on their own. No personal attacks are involved.

Say that a university professor starts publishing a series of posts, showing how climate change isn’t really happening. If his identity were known, he knows the university would retaliate against him, and his wife thinks that neither they nor their mortgage needs that. He is not violating any of the terms of his employment in any way—he simply holds sensible views about the weather that the university establishment finds distasteful. His arguments can be evaluated by the public without knowing who he is. His data can be analyzed without knowing who he is. His links can be followed without knowing who he is.

But if he were to publish a personal attack on someone, and our only basis for considering it at all it is the fact that the anon said it, and we still don’t know who he is, then this would be totally outrageous. Any man should have the right to face his accuser, and this cannot be done if the accuser is faceless. So if the climate change critic start to buttress his case against climate change by asserting that every lunch hour the chief climatologist at his university goes down into the basement of the admin building, together with his mistress and her current boy friend, in order to get their jollies by kicking puppies, this would be something that should all agree to call “out of line.”

What about the issue of whistle-blowing? Whistle-blowing really is about personal wrong-doing, and does not involve arguments that can stand or fall on their own. As with doxxing (see below), the word is too often used to cover things are not in the same category at all. A whistle-blower comes forward with hard evidence of misdeeds. He might even be able to do this anonymously—his anon account publishes links to the damning evidence. His identity need not be published in order for the receipts to be published. That evidence can be followed up on and examined on its own merits. The anon gives us the evidence, but the evidence is objective . . . it has to be more than the anon’s word for it. Those of you who have had the very great pleasure of reading my book Flags Out Front may remember that there is a character in there who does precisely this.

But if the anon publishes a “whistle-blower’s” account, and it consists of “I was at a faculty meeting once when the president told a misogynistic joke, one totally demeaning to women,” that is the kind of thing that should be round-filed. And not only round-filed, it should be round-filed with a yawn. This is not whistle-blowing at all. It is an ungodly attack, and very possibly an attack motivated by the relative righteousness of the target. Anyone who hopes to do any amount of good in this world should budget for being attacked in this way.

The person that the psalmist had in mind would not be able to defend himself against the charge by appealing to the laws protecting whistle-blowers.

Anons Wrecking Their Lives, Along with Others

Nobody wakes up in the morning, stretches, and then says, “I think I’ll ruin my life today.” There are such days when people do ruin their lives, but they usually get there by means of incremental steps, and the denouement comes to them as a total surprise. But why is that? We have been taught about the incremental steps that lead to adultery, or the incremental steps that lead to embezzling, and so on. But what are the incremental steps that lead to an online self-immolation?

There are danger signs to watch out for. If they are present, a person should not even think about it. These danger signs are simply vulnerability indicators. Just as lust is incipient adultery, so these things are an incipient indication that anonymous online activity for you is going to end in a very dark place.

Being allergic to real accountability. The fact that you don’t want to be held accountable by some raging leftist mob does not mean that you can get away with no accountability. We all need accountability. Someone who seeks out the “no accountability” of an anon account is likely someone who is averse to actual accountability in his real life. This being the case, if someone comes to the conviction that anonymous engagement online is a strategic necessity, he should go to his pastor and ask him to follow the account: “If you see anything dodgy, please let me know.” And if you can’t trust your pastor with something like this, why is he your pastor?

Having a deep hunger for solidarity. Men love the idea of being part of a “band of brothers.” This is a good and healthy thing. Men who have been to war together really do have a deep bond, whether they were together in a foxhole or a submarine. But as with all good things, the online world is a great place to find knock-offs and counterfeits—and an anon army is not actually an army. A troll swarm is not an army—but during “an event” it can sure seem like it is. Say that a registered doofus with The Gospel Coalition says something lame, and for his efforts he is getting a brutal ratio. Those who find the act of swarming attractive can feel like they are storming up San Juan Hill . . . but they actually are not. True solidarity can only occur in three-dimensional space, and it is not made up of ones and zeros. Building the kind of community out of which a true band of brothers can emerge is the work of decades. Online communities, including the militant ones, are a shimmering illusion.

Being unaware when key steps are skipped. C.S. Lewis talks about the vice of flippancy, which is the device of assuming that the joke has already been made, and then laughing at it. Actually making a joke takes intelligence, talent, and work, but the flippant are not up to that kind of challenge. The same maneuver occurs when it comes to online argument. When arguments are answered with insults, when facts are greeted with face palm memes, and when Scripture is answered with shocked face gifs, you can see that the refutation has not been made, but it has been serenely assumed to have been made by somebody somewhere. And of course there is always the old standby Bulverism, which is to say, to dismiss an argument with “boomer.”

Speaking of Bulverism . . .

But since I have brought up Bulverism, is it possible that this is something that I am somehow guilty of? Some people have alleged it, but the concern is misplaced.

Bulverism is when you don’t answer the argument as it was presented, but rather you go straight to explaining how the one who argued it got to be so silly. “You say that because you are a man.” “You say that because you are envious.” And so on.

Some folks are concerned—when we say that a lot of Jew-hate is driven by envy, or when we say that a lot of the anger online is fueled by father hunger—that this is Bulverism. A good example would be the reaction to Will Spencer’s recent article, in which he said that an epidemic of fatherlessness was behind a bunch of the current angst. Some of the responses to his article revealed the breakdown in communication that we are having. Stephen Wolfe said that he knew some anons who had great relationships with their fathers, and there were some first person squawks along the same lines.

Here are some thoughts about all that.

First, you’re an anon. One of the things you don’t get to do anymore is appeal to your personal ethos. You decided to forego that, as in, you don’t get to do it. For all we know, you did start three successful companies, you do have six hard-working children who are very good-looking, and you also taught Patriarchy Hannah how to bake sourdough. And for all we know, you didn’t do any of that. Anons don’t get to have resumes.

Second, we will know that fatherlessness is not an issue with this movement generally when it stops flying bitterness against boomers as their regimental flag. Figuring out that this movement, taken as a whole, has a problem with their fathers is about as hard as seeing that @IncelsUnite has a thing about girls.

Third, Scripture teaches us to reason this way about certain kinds of people. For example, Paul teaches slaves to be obedient to their masters, and then adds that if the master is a believer they should make it a point not to despise them—because the master is a beloved brother (1 Tim. 6:1-2). He then goes on to describe the character of people who reject this teaching out of hand—a number of whom are alive and walking around today. What are they like?

Fourth, I don’t doubt for a minute that there are exceptions. We are talking about people, after all. It is in the highest degree likely that Stephen Wolfe knows some of them. But that doesn’t touch the point at all, for which lesson please note the cartoon above that I helpfully supplied.

So there is a difference between Bulverism as applied to an individual, whose individual motivations you don’t know, and whose arguments you won’t answer, one the one hand, and large groups of people, who often tell you exactly why they are doing what they are doing, on the other. I would never dream of saying that Murphy is online saying stuff because he is driven by father hunger. How could I possibly know something like that? I don’t know Murphy. But I can say that he has, of his own volition, associated himself with a movement that is crackling with resentment against the previous generation. I know this because they bring it up all the time. It is one of their central themes. I am not playing at mind reading here.

On top of all that, they say that I use this as a jibe instead of engaging with the arguments. The problem here is that I do engage with the arguments in the books I have written, and which they clearly haven’t read, and refuse to reference in any debates we might have. So there’s that also.

Another example of the same kind of thing is the celebration that surrounded Andrew Isker’s famous retort, “What if it’s not envy?” I would argue that celebration was perhaps premature. It is like clapping loudly when the cartoon lady comes back with “I’m 5’6″ though.” I know that there are people who are critics of Jewish unbelief who are not driven by envy. I know that. I am one of them. But if the apostle Paul spends an extended section of the book of Romans warning Gentiles not to fall into the trap that the Jews fell into, perhaps it is not out of place to budget for the possibility that some Gentiles might give way to that temptation. Do you think? All Scripture is God-breathed and is profitable. And then, with that warning in mind, when I see large numbers of anons telling us that the “Jews are rich, and they are powerful, and they control everything,” it is an abstract possibility that they are telling us this simply as a dispassionate and judicious warning. But nothing about their online behavior says dispassionate, and judicious is a word that would never ever come to mind. So I am very sorry . . . I don’t believe that the devil has forgotten how to lie, or has become all that incompetent. Envy it is.

The Sin of Doxxing

Doxxing is a problem when people maliciously publish your home address in the hope that a mob will show up and start yelling at your kids. But it is not doxxing if the consequences are natural, measured, and appropriate to the situation. Let’s say that you discover that your child’s kindergarten teacher at a private Christian school has an OnlyFans account that she runs on the side. When it is discovered that she is an amateur pornographer, and she gets the sack because of it, she has no right to complain that the school was “invading her privacy.”

There is a difference between privacy and anonymity. Privacy should be respected. Anonymity . . . it all depends. The parents have every right to say that they don’t want that kind of person teaching their kids. The same principle would pertain if the high school civics teacher were to be discovered to be @JoJotheMagnificent, an account dedicated to a celebration of true masculinity, the kind on display in the Mongol invasions. His tag line is, “We need to make rape and rapine great again.” Fire that guy too. Employees of Christian institutions don’t have a right to a double life. Or perhaps they do . . . if they are Batman or something like that.

In short, it is not Christian cancel culture if someone loses their job for being a hypocrite. It would be hypocrisy on the part of the institution if such a person didn’t lose their job.

But we need to play this out in different ways. Take the OnlyFans kindergarten teacher again. She is certainly sinning, but the attack on her and the school could also be an example of a different kind of sinning. Say that some infidel out there puts two and two together, and the headmaster of the school finds out about his sexy-time teacher on the front page of the newspaper, and he puts the paper down on his desk, having just read the op-ed demanding that the teacher in question be fired, and fired right now. He has to confirm everything, and the time it takes to confirm everything looks like foot-dragging, and is represented as foot-dragging. The kindergarten teacher argues that “she has a twin sister, and it is quite a sad family situation, really . . .” The whole thing causes an uproar, and the uproar can be just as messed up as the initial sin was. The woman caught in adultery was certainly sinning (because Jesus tells her to go and sin no more), but the accusers who brought her to Jesus were also sinning (John 8:11).

Now let’s tell the story a different way. Suppose a father in the school discovered the identity of the kindergarten teacher while browsing sites that he shouldn’t have been browsing. After three days wrestling with his conscience, he confesses his sin to his wife. They get pastoral counseling regarding his porn use, but they also spring the news on the pastor about the identity of the teacher. He is on the school board, so he confirms the story, and goes to the headmaster. The headmaster meets with the teacher, hears her explanation, which was entirely unsatisfactory, and so he lets her go. Is this cancel culture? No. Not even close. Is the revelation of her identity doxxing? Again, not even close.

And none of this changes if we are found to have fired the Mongol-hordes fan also.

Conclusion

Are there occasions when a man could be called by God to sit behind an anonymous keyboard? There most certainly are. Does the law of God continue to apply to him when he gives himself to this work? It most certainly does. We are servants of the truth, after all.

So perhaps this is the time to come clean. Maybe there are three or four accounts out there that I am behind, done in order to make the dank side of anon army look bad. Of course this might not be true. But if it is, then I will leave you to guess accounts those might be.