Show notes, citations & transcript: https://psychgrind.com/messenger/
The Messenger Gets Shot 002 - We’re talking about the mechanisms that make it increasingly difficult to share information in an effort to warn each other about things we absolutely should be warning each other about.
This podcast discussion is about the information landscape with a focus on influencers and the content creator gig economy, and the effects on society with your hosts CHLOE HUMBERT and MATT STRACKBEIN. Music and interludes by MICHAEL STRACKBEIN without use of A.I. Chloe Humbert has a weekly newsletter and podcast on substack called Don’t Wait For Everybody. Matt Strackbein, aka The Letterhack, makes comics and livestreams at YouTube.com/TheLetterhack.
References:
Pluralistic: They were warned; Picks and Shovels Chapter One (Part 4) (13 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow In 2001, the European Parliament capitulated, enacting the EU Copyright Directive, whose Article 6 is a copy-paste of DMCA 1201 (fuck all those people). Fast forward 20 years, and boy is there a lot of shit with microchips that can be boobytrapped with rent-extracting logic bombs that are illegal to research, describe, or disable. Like choo-choo trains. Last year, the Polish hacking group Dragon Sector was contacted by a public sector train company whose Newag trains kept going out of service. The operator suspected that Newag had boobytrapped the trains to punish the train company for getting its maintenance from a third-party contractor. When Dragon Sector investigated, they discovered that Newag had indeed riddled the trains’ firmware with boobytraps. Trains that were taken to locations known to have third-party maintenance workshops were immediately bricked (hilariously, this bomb would detonate if trains just passed through stations near to these workshops, which is why another train company had to remove all the GPSes from its trains – they kept slamming to a halt when they approached a station near a third-party workshop). But Newag’s logic bombs would brick trains for all kinds of reasons – merely keeping a train stationary for too many days would result in its being bricked. Installing a third-party component in a locomotive would also trigger a bomb, bricking the train. In their talk at last year’s Chaos Communications Congress, the Dragon Sector folks describe how they have been legally terrorized by Newag, which has repeatedly sued them for violating its “intellectual property” by revealing its sleazy, corrupt business practices. They also note that Newag continues to sell lots of trains in Poland, despite the widespread knowledge of its dirty business model, because public train operators are bound by procurement rules, and as long as Newag is the cheapest bidder, they get the contract
How-To Geek: What Does “Bricking” a Device Mean? By Chris Hoffman Published Sep 26, 2016 “Bricking” essentially means a device has turned into a brick. It may be an electronic device worth hundreds of dollars, but it’s now as useful as a brick (or perhaps a paperweight). A bricked device won’t power on and function normally. A bricked device cannot be fixed through normal means. For example, if Windows won’t boot on your computer, your computer isn’t “bricked” because you can still install another operating system on it. However, if you tried to power your computer on and it didn’t work properly at all, making it impossible to install an operating system, you could consider the computer bricked.
Electronic Frontier Foundation - Unintended Consequences: Fifteen Years under the DMCA March 2013
Simon Fraser University - Technological Protection Measures (TPM) - Fact Sheet
ACLU Ohio - SLAPPed: A Tool for Activists - What is a SLAPP Suit? SLAPP is an acronym for a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. The term was coined in the 1980’s by two University of Denver professors, George Pring and Penelope Canan, who co-authored SLAPPS: Getting Sued for Speaking Out. At its most basic definition , a SLAPP suit is a civil complaint or counterclaim filed against people or organizations who speak out on issues of public interest or concern.
More landowners settle with California Forever Other defendants still remain in price fixing case By Nick McConnell | the reporter UPDATED: February 20, 2025 at 3:58 PM PST Several more Solano County landowners have settled in a case with California Forever in which they allegedly engaged in horizontal price fixing against the company. Included in the settlement are Ian and Margaret Anderson, longtime holdouts and vocal critics of California Forever. Mayrn Johnson, a daughter of Ian and Margaret Anderson, spoke at the Rio Vista town hall hosted by California Forever in December and asked California Forever CEO Jan Sramek to drop the lawsuit then and there to the applause of those gathered. “Of course we talk to each other,” she said later in an interview. “Of course we have interacted with each other. The people that are named in this lawsuit are family even though we share different last names.”
Trump’s ‘Freedom Cities’? A Tech Blueprint to Dismantle the USA The Nerd Reich with Gil Duran Mar 14, 2025 So what’s their endgame and how are these new Trump Freedom cities part of it let’s start here this isn’t your grandfather’s corporate lobbying these billionaires don’t want to just influence government they want to become the government they seek a system that protects their wealth punishes their critics and uses AI and crypto to make their power permanent and having their very own new capitols to drive that power from is part of it here’s how we fight back expose The Playbook most Americans don’t realize this takeover is happening…
Landlords use Real Page to collude and artificially inflate rents. States are trying to stop them. More Perfect Union May 29, 2025 Real Page is now suing Berkeley after the city council ban their software – their defense: free speech. yes you heard that correctly the reason they did that is to prevent the law from even coming into effect.
How Citizens United Got Us Trump | Robert Reich Dec 30, 2019
The Post and Courier - SC county sued over its Google data center water-use secrecy By David Wren Apr 21, 2024 Frank Heindel filed the complaint in state court this month after Google’s projected water and sewer usage was redacted in a document he requested under the S.C. Freedom of Information Act. The county has said the information qualifies as a protected trade secret under state law — an assertion that Heindel, who lives in Charleston County, said is false.
Going Deep with Russ Baker Contrived Anti-Vaxxer “Exposé” on WhoWhatWhy Writer Reveals Movement Strategy I could see right away that it was some kind of hit piece APR 07, 2024 But in her anger at those who promoted and politicized what the majority of leading scientists considered faux cures for COVID-19, she used intemperate language. (Her apology appears below as an addendum.) Two doctors promoting the counter-scenario aggressively pursued her, and a process server even gained access to her apartment building to dramatically serve her at her door. And — on advice of counsel to avoid a long, drawn-out litigation (though they were certain she would win) — she agreed to a very measured apology of sorts in return for their dropping their action. The apology relates to minor mistakes or transgressions — trivial in their impact compared to the consequences of the allegedly bad science that Neitzel was calling out.
Why did ABC cave in to Trump? It didn’t need to. It shouldn’t have. But there’s a big reason why it thought it must. Robert Reich Dec 17, 2024 ABC filed a motion to dismiss the case, claiming Trump could not prove actual malice. In July, the judge assigned to the case rejected ABC’s motion and allowed the case to move forward. This subjected the network to the pretrial discovery process, meaning that Stephanopoulos would have his emails and other work materials scrutinized. The curious thing here is that when media defendants are unsuccessful at the dismissal stage of a trial, they typically move on to preparing for summary judgment and challenge the legal sufficiency of a plaintiff’s claim. Four media lawyers I checked with told me they didn’t understand why ABC would settle before trying for summary judgment, especially when it had such a strong case. Conservative radio host Erick Erickson, who used to practice law, says ABC and Stephanopoulos wanted to avoid discovery. The “$15 million settlement is not the cost of doing business. It is avoiding discovery.”
DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC) November 2-3, 2023 Atlanta, Georgia Record of the Proceedings “Dr. Wright reminded everyone that the committee very much appreciates diverse viewpoints that are respectful in nature and are not personally directed at individuals or that make individuals feel at risk for their public service.”
The Takeover and The Rebellion - The Insurgence: Sheriffs—Season 1, Episode 3 - Cloee Cooper Political Research Associates October 22, 2024 CLOEE: This was all coming from a sheriff who’s already criticized in the state for deputizing over 70 people in his county to be a part of his posse. John Sepulvado: Glenn Palmer essentially formed a posse of people who had not been through legal, uh, training, uh, not been through any type of, uh, insurance indemnity. what did he have like 65, 70 volunteer. I mean how ridiculous this idea that we’re going to deputize 65 people in a very small county.
Fog of war - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The fog of war is the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations.[1] The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one’s own capability, adversary capability, and adversary intent during an engagement, operation, or campaign.
Internet users encouraging self-harm to face five years in jail under new plans The addition to the Online Safety Bill will build on existing laws which make it illegal to promote or assist suicide, the Ministry of Justice said. Nina Lloyd Thursday 18 May 2023 00:01 BST“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” – Carl Sagan The Demon-haunted World, 1995
The Cognitive Crucible Podcast, March 12 2024 Becky Fair: “I would offer that we often frame this as a counter messaging opportunity or need. But one of the things I think we can be thinking about is getting ahead of counter and getting to a place where we’re more proactive. Some of the ways to think about that is, not just think about reacting to the message, but actually undermining or thinking about how to undermine the messenger. There’s a few ways we think about doing that based on what we see in the data in terms of what has been successful by a variety of folks who are trying to undermine the messenger.”
The Internet Archive saved: From Casetext: Smarter Legal Research Nader v. General Motors Corp., 25 N.Y.2d 560, 564 (N.Y. 1970) On this appeal, taken by permission of the Appellate Division on a certified question, we are called upon to determine the reach of the tort of invasion of privacy as it exists under the law of the District of Columbia. The complaint, in this action by Ralph Nader, pleads four causes of action against the appellant, General Motors Corporation, and three other defendants allegedly acting as it agents. The first two causes of action charge an invasion of privacy, the third is predicated on the intentional infliction of severe emotional distress and the fourth on interference with the plaintiff’s economic advantage. (...) Specifically, the plaintiff alleges that the appellant’s agents (1) conducted a series of interviews with acquaintances of the plaintiff, “questioning them about, and casting aspersions upon [his] political, social * * * racial and religious views * * *; his integrity; his sexual proclivities and inclinations; and his personal habits”
Robin Hanson’s 2020 Viral Valentine Tweet Chloe Humbert · Feb 29, 2024 And by viral, I mean the pandemic, because the tweet itself was not very popular at all. Robin Hanson @robinhanson 11:29 AM — 14 Feb 2020 “Though it is a disturbing & extreme option, we should seriously consider deliberately infecting folks with coronavirus, to spread out the number of critically ill people over time, and to ensure that critical infrastructure remains available to help sick.”
Slate - The Loneliest Anti-Vaxxer. Even the popular polio shot had its haters. By Nick Keppler, Nov 26, 2021 Under the banner of his organization, Polio Prevention Inc., Miller distributed hair-raising mailers with claims like “Thousands of little white coffins will be used to bury victims of Salk’s heinous and fraudulent vaccine.” A self-made shampoo magnate, he was one of the few malcontents who publicly campaigned against the polio vaccine. His crusade shows that even during a public embrace of the polio shot that many people frustrated at COVID anti-vaxxers have held up as the ideal reaction to a new lifesaving vaccine, there was dissent, some of it as vitriolic as that you find in the corners of Twitter that swap anti-Fauci memes and Bill Gates rants—and just as weird. To Miller, “polio” was not an infectious disease. It was a state of malnutrition caused by midcentury American diets, particularly soft drinks—his mortal enemy. “Disease and malfunction do not ‘strike’ us; we build them within ourselves,” he wrote in one of his two-sided handbills.
KRACOV1, DANIEL A. “Eugenics and the Development of U.S. Food and Drug Law.” Food and Drug Law Journal, vol. 77, no. 2, 2022, pp. 135–75. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27186356. Accessed 28 May 2025. Despite its focus on race and genes over environment, eugenics was seen as having a particularly important connection to hygiene, diet, and public health. In the eugenic mindset, “(c)leanliness often referred to as much having a pure hereditary lineage and unblemished moral record as it did keeping one’s body and home free from dirt.”68 Hygiene indicated “high evolutionary status, for by avoiding disease the health- conscious individual increased personal and national productivity, fitness, and superiority.”69 Eugenicists also had a preoccupation with efficiency and “flow” through the digestive system as well as optimizing the human body.70 A regular feature of eugenic displays at state fairs and national expositions were displays on hygiene and the ideal (and invariably white) human body.71 This was part of a broader “exhibitionary culture” at the time that utilized such events to reach “the multitudes with their messages of better healthcare for mothers and infants, immigration reform, and sterilization of the socially and racially unfit.”72 Advertisements presented the streamlined “eugenic ideal,” showing products in which eugenics ideas had a direct relationship to product design, from cars to kitchens to buildings to dinnerware.73 The objective was achieving an “earthly utopia”—”a seamless society made of perfected people and products.”74
Controlling Heredity Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man - University of Missouri “There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind.” - Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871
MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy - Thinker-Fest: Session 1 - Fireside Chat - How to Fix the “Splinternet” Mar 3, 2023 They are really invested in gaining social capital and reputation for participating in these types of industries. And they also have economic models at play. You can buy flat earth sweatshirts, you can buy anti-vax stickers and notebooks, you can pay subscription fees, you can watch videos that are monetized on YouTube. And this is also very much a reputational economy. We also have a factor that I don’t think is talked about a lot which are intentional antagonists otherwise known as trolls. What’s interesting about them from a digital community perspective is that they too are chasing social currency but the reputation that they’re cultivating within their own communities is one where the more chaos they create, the more reputation credibility that they have. And so these three forces are kind of at play when we look at what’s happening from an individual and community’s perspective. The issue is that if you broaden out, you start to see that all of these dynamics can take place because there are very clear revenue models and businesses. People are making money from this. For example I trace what’s called direct benefits. So these are companies that are selling products and services directly related to the idea that’s circulating. So if you are anti-vax, you are selling supplements right, if you are, you’re selling essential oils, you’re selling products that are directly benefiting from the disinformation or misinformation that is circulating.
And the nose hype continues… More pandemic profiteering that might violate regulations, and definitely isn’t ready for prime time. Chloe Humbert · Sep 30, 2024 The claim to be “drug free” is because reportedly the study authors deliberately went hunting for some ingredient already deemed safe and regarded by the FDA as an inactive ingredient, by selecting “several mucoadhesive biopolymers from the FDA’s inactive ingredient and GRAS databases” according to Chemical & Engineering News. C&EN also quotes: “Aaron Glatt, an epidemiologist at Mount Sinai South Nassau who reviewed the paper independently” who said “Without any clinical data, it’s extremely difficult to assess how well this spray works,” and “I would be very concerned about anybody using this without any evidence in humans.”
MarketWatch — Opinion: Harvard scientists say this $25 nasal spray beats flu, colds and COVID-19 with 99% success. This drug-free nasal spray could be a game changer if it lives up to the hype. By Brett Arends Last Updated: Sept. 28, 2024 at 9:59 a.m. ET First Published: Sept. 27, 2024 at 11:39 a.m. ET There are plenty of caveats. These results came from a study involving mice, not people. The study was conducted in a laboratory, not the outside world. The spray has not gone through the cumbersome process of getting regulated as a medical treatment by the Food and Drug Administration and is instead being sold as a personal-care product. Researchers used a 3D-printed replica of a human nose to test the nasal spray’s efficacy.
WHO - Polio Eradication Initiative - Egypt The earliest evidence of poliovirus comes from pharaonic illustrations in Egyptian artefacts from 3000 years ago, and since then the disease has paralysed millions of Egyptian children. WPV was stamped out in Egypt through diligent efforts to immunize every child through seven doses within the routine immunization schedule, and additional doses through regular supplementary activity. But the 2021 outbreak of circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2) has demonstrated that even countries with robust routine immunization programmes are vulnerable to polioviruses.
The Guardian - Top FDA official demands removal of YouTube videos in which he criticized Covid vaccines. Channel was an attempt to ‘preserve’ what officials in current Trump administration said during the pandemic Stephanie Kirchgaessner Sun 31 Aug 2025 14.14 EDT Although the videos Howard collected were often only viewed “dozens” of times, Howard included them in his online articles that appeared on the Science Based Medicine blog. Now those video links are dead. He noted that snippets of Prasad’s comments still appeared on anti-vaccine social media accounts, suggesting Prasad was directing his removal demand only at a critic and not anti-vaccine influencers. In the past, Prasad has complained about censorship by social media companies.
Government Executive - CDC employees given 2 weeks to return to headquarters following recent shooting Agency officials said that security has been heightened at the CDC’s Atlanta campus. Sean Michael Newhouse | September 2, 2025 04:09 PM ET “There will absolutely still be bullet holes in the windows,” said Peter Farruggia, executive board member of AFGE local 2883, in an interview with Fox 5 Atlanta. In response to a request for comment, the Health and Human Services Department confirmed the return-to-office date but did not address questions regarding employee anxiety and the state of building repairs. Some CDC employees have already returned to their Atlanta offices voluntarily or have had to because of lab work. The agency’s former acting COO, Christa Capozzola, wrote in an Aug. 15 email to staffers obtained by Government Executive that returning workers would notice an “enhanced security guard presence” for the “foreseeable future.”
CMD - How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On Covid By Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch | December 22nd, 2021 Lockdown measures drove down cases in the U.S. and likely saved millions of lives globally. But the decline of in-person shopping and work, combined with factory shutdowns in places like China, disrupted the economy. A 2020 report from the corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found the hardest-hit industries would take years to recover. One sector in particular that took a big hit was the fossil fuel industry. Oil demand fell sharply in 2020, placing the global economy on uncertain footing. Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines. Chief among them were groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world. The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.
Louisiana Illuminator - Louisiana senator sued over blocking critic on Twitter By: Julie O’Donoghue - February 9, 2023 An initial tweet from Detiege engaging with Jackson’s account included offensive language. She banished Jackson to hell and indirectly called the senator a bitch. “I say this with all disrespect: burn in hell. You don’t care about women. You don’t care about pregnant people. You don’t care about children. You don’t care about education. I don’t respect all black women. Some of you bitches are very dumb,” Detiege wrote, according to the lawsuit.
Federal court dismisses First Amendment lawsuit against Senator Katrina Jackson-Andrews By Madison Remrey Published: Aug. 15, 2025 at 5:10 PM EDT Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill sided with Jackson-Andrews in January 2025.”It is remarkable that, in 2025, the Attorney General’s office has been called to defend a Black state senator against allegations that the U.S. Constitution requires her to allow an anonymous and abusive troll to litter the senator’s personal social-media account with messages like ‘burn in hell’ and ‘you Black b**** ... are very dumb.’” Murrill wrote. “Yet here we are.”
Varn Vlog Solo: The Thought Terminating Phrases C. Derick Varn Premiered Sep 1, 2025
MEDPageToday: Who’s Really the Victim Here? — It’s time to end DARVO behavior in the healthcare workplace by Resa E. Lewiss, MD, David G. Smith, PhD, Shikha Jain, MD, W. Brad Johnson, PhD, and Jennifer Freyd, PhD Perpetrators use DARVO because it works. In one study researchers found that targets of DARVO were more likely to blame themselves. Self-blame is associated with self-silencing. In another study, researchers found that observers of DARVO tended to doubt the credibility of the true victim, believing the perpetrator instead. There is not yet systematic data on what makes certain institutions and certain people more likely to DARVO. Yet, there appear to be relevant characteristics associated with other types of harassment, and the field of medicine checks all the boxes: high prestige, male-dominated institutions and industries, hierarchical leadership structures, inadequate safeguards for employees and trainees, and a climate which tolerates harassment.
The Cognitive Crucible Podcast, March 12 2024 #185 Becky Fair and Hannah Lincoln on Disrupt and Overwhelm Strategies Becky Fair: “I would offer that we often frame this as a counter messaging opportunity or need. But one of the things I think we can be thinking about is getting ahead of counter and getting to a place where we’re more proactive. Some of the ways to think about that is, not just think about reacting to the message, but actually undermining or thinking about how to undermine the messenger. There’s a few ways we think about doing that based on what we see in the data in terms of what has been successful by a variety of folks who are trying to undermine the messenger.”
‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine Private messages detail an alleged campaign to tarnish Blake Lively after she accused Justin Baldoni of misconduct on the set of “It Ends With Us.” By Megan Twohey, Mike McIntire and Julie Tate Published Dec. 21, 2024Updated Dec. 22, 2024 “according to a legal complaint that she filed Friday. It claims that their P.R. effort had an explicit goal: to harm Ms. Lively’s reputation instead. Her filing includes excerpts from thousands of pages of text messages and emails that she obtained through a subpoena. These and other documents were reviewed by The New York Times. There have long been figures behind the scenes shaping public opinion about celebrities — through gossip columns, tabloids and strategic interviews. The documents show an additional playbook for waging a largely undetectable smear campaign in the digital era. While the film, about domestic violence, was a box office hit — making nearly $350 million worldwide — online criticism of the actress skyrocketed. “He wants to feel like she can be buried,” a publicist working with the studio and Mr. Baldoni wrote in an Aug. 2 message to the crisis management expert, Melissa Nathan. “You know we can bury anyone,” Ms. Nathan wrote.”
Transcript:
MATT STRACKBEIN
I’m Matt Strackbein.
CHLOE HUMBERT
I’m Chloe Humbert.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Welcome to The Psych Grind.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Psych!
MATT STRACKBEIN
If you like a lot of us get most of your information and news online, then you may have experience with certain social media accounts, or platforms turning from popular online politicos, to full on political influencer overnight. Random comments, replies, and posting articles shifts into outright propaganda. And so you’ve probably heard yourself saying something like, hey,
why didn’t anyone warn me about this? Especially upon realizing a reliable source is perhaps not so trustworthy. In this episode, we’re talking about the mechanisms that have been put in place to make it increasingly difficult to share information in an effort to warn each other about things we absolutely should be warning each other about.
As you listen along, if you’re thinking to yourself, wait, I have questions about this. Well, it’s good to have questions. So we’ve included references in the show notes. And of course, feel free to reach out to us with any questions, comments or concerns. And one last note before we get going.
Whatever you think of this episode, don’t shoot the messenger.
CHLOE HUMBERT
So there are a bunch of reasons that people get bad information or have important information kept from them. It’s a big problem even for the average person. It can separate targets from their money egregiously or even cost lives. There’s a story in Europe a company that used dirty tricks to disable actual public trains as a punishment to
a public sector train company that used another maintenance contractor. And when a group of people uncovered what was happening, the company just kept suing them using intellectual property law to oppose them and stop them from revealing the corruption and the bad behavior. This is a story I read about on a blog post by Cory Doctorow.
MATT STRACKBEIN
So we’re citing Cory Doctorow’s blog post, which is called Pluralistic. Even though this piece is in reference to a situation from 2001, Pluralistic published this as a four-part series in January of 2025. I just want to make that note as to why this topic is still relevant. So let’s go back to 2001, where he writes, quote,
In 2001, the European Parliament capitulated in acting the EU Copyright Directive, whose Article 6 is a copy-paste of DMCA 1201. Now let’s pause and explain what that is. The DMCA 1201 is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s Anti-Technology Circumvention Provision, and it has not done exactly what it was meant to do. Instead of safeguarding anti-piracy protections, the provisions,
according to a summary from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have been used to stifle a wide array of legit activities such as free expression and scientific research, jeopardizing fair use, and impeding competition and innovation. And that’s just a snapshot of why DMCA 1201 is problematic. They write,
The 2001 EU Copyright Directive Article 6 literally says that it requires member states to protect against the circumvention of technological measures. So it’s the same damn wording from 2001 and would likely result in the same damn problems. Now, continuing from Cory Doctorow’s account of this story, fast forward 20 years, and boy,
is there a lot of shit with microchips that can be booby-trapped with rent-extracting logic bombs that are illegal to research, or disable, like choo-choo trains. Last year, the Polish hacking group Dragon Sector was contacted by a public sector train company whose Newegg trains kept going out of service.
The operator suspected that Newegg had booby-trapped the trains to punish the train company for getting its maintenance from a third-party contractor. When Dragon Sector investigated, they discovered that Newegg had indeed riddled the train’s firmware with booby-traps. Trains that were taken to locations known to have third-party maintenance workshops were immediately bricked. Let’s pause here again to clarify.
A bricked train is a train that has been intentionally made inoperable by a software mechanism, usually by its own manufacturer. Bricked is used as slang because the affected thing is essentially rendered as useful as a brick. Now back to Doctorow’s account of this story. Quote,
this logic bomb would detonate if trains just passed through stations near to these workshops, which is why another train company had to remove all of the GPSs from its trains. They kept slamming to a halt when they approached a station near a third-party workshop. But Newegg’s logic bombs would brick trains for all kinds of reasons.
Merely keeping a train stationary for too many days would result in its being bricked. Installing a third-party component in a locomotive would also trigger a bomb bricking the trains. In their talk at last year’s Chaos Communications Congress, the Dragon Sector folks describe how they have been legally terrorized by Newegg,
which has repeatedly sued them for violating its intellectual property by revealing its sleazy, corrupt business practices. They also note that Newegg continues to sell lots of trains in Poland despite the widespread knowledge of its dirty business model because public train operators are bound by procurement rules. And as long as Newegg is the cheapest bidder,
They get the contract, unquote.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Brute force bullying by people who are leveraging the law as a club. And it sounds like in that story in Europe, they were even automating some of the sabotage so that it was creating collateral chaos and then getting away with it, too. Weaponizing the law is actually a specialty for some industries, and it’s an industry in itself,
Some people make a living weaponizing the law for big business, just like there is a specialty in tax law to find loopholes, usually for the very rich. So SLAPP suits and other bogus lawfare are a real and constant threat.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Speak out against the government or whatever and get SLAPPed with a lawsuit. ACLU Ohio has an article titled, SLAPPED, A Tool for Activists. What is a slap suit? And it says, quote, SLAPP is an acronym for a strategic lawsuit against public participation. The term was coined in the 1980s by two University of Denver professors,
George Pring and Penelope Canan, who co-authored SLAPPS, Getting Sued for Speaking Out. At its most basic definition, a slap suit is a civil complaint or counterclaim filed against people or organizations who speak out on issues of public interest or concern, unquote.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Journalists, and ordinary people face this when speaking out against powerful interests that have a lot of money and access to a lot of lawyers. It’s supposedly illegal to use lawsuits to silence free speech in America this way, but unfortunately, you need a lot of money to assert yourself.
You need money to go to court to defend your right to free speech, which is why the ACLU has a lot to say on this, because sometimes people ACLU is the only hero out there for some of these situations. Debunking disinformation or revealing corruption and scam stuff is financially disincentivized.
The bad actors benefit from poorly thought-out laws or even booby-trapped laws written by powerful interests, and then they hide behind them, impervious because they have tons of money to pay lawyers to tie things up.
MATT STRACKBEIN
tech tycoons, including prominent American software engineer and venture capitalist billionaire Mark Andreessen, who want to set up private cities that operate like monarchies, were buying up tons of land in California. And when some ranchers refused to sell, these guys sued their neighbors who didn’t want to sell just for talking to each Why?
Because they claimed it was collusion for price fixing. So they sued to keep the ranchers from even talking to each other about the network state plan, the tycoon takeover of their community. They can’t even warn each other about that under the threat of losing everything.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Yeah, so this is related to that whole network state garbage. There’s a good five-minute video explainer from Gil Duran on their wacky plans, if you need to get up to speed with that kooky aspect of this bizarre timeline we’re living in, and what these tech magnates have in mind as their preferred social order arrangement,
the billionaires have billions. It’s essentially so much money that they essentially can spread they can spend endless money on bullshit. They can hire tons of lawyers and operatives and PR teams. It reminds me of this board game I had as a kid. It was called Go for Broke.
And you were given a pile of money at the start, a lot more than if you played Monopoly. And the object was to spend all your money first to win the game. And it wasn’t easy. There was a casino and a stock market and such.
And you would wind up winning sometimes, of course, which would thwart the objective. And I can’t help feeling that tycoons essentially live in a real world version of that game where they can’t ever spend it all, but they continually spend it on really micromanaging level interference in people’s lives.
And the really galling thing about them suing these ranchers who were getting bullied and accusing the ranchers of collusion and price fixing, at the same time that that was going on in California, over in Colorado, the real estate corporation RealPage claimed price fixing is free speech in order
to try to stop a law against collusion that they were doing. So what’s good for the golden goose applies differently for the rest of us and so forth.
MATT STRACKBEIN
When it was the ranchers who wanted to just, you know, talk to each other about what was happening to their community, their free speech was squelched by big money litigation using laws meant to protect consumers. But when similar regulations are used to protect consumers, then suddenly corporations have free speech. Not to mention,
most people don’t have the legal team to go up against a tech tycoon’s legal team in court.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Google used claims of trade secret law to compel a municipal water provider to not disclose to the community in South Carolina how much water the data center was going to be using. The amounts were redacted when somebody made a FOIA request. They had to sue to find out.
MATT STRACKBEIN
the little guy is required to obtain legal representation and invest their own money to get justice, whereas regulations could have been implemented to protect residents of the community.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Right. And then there was the doctor who debunked anti-vax myths and called out people who were repeating these falsehoods. The doctor telling the truth and said something angry about the anti-vaxxers. And Russ Baker wrote that they, aggressively pursued her and a process server even gained access to her apartment building to dramatically serve her at her door, unquote.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Sounds like intimidation rather than that they’ve been, materially harmed by whatever she said.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Oh, yes. The lawsuit sounded very weak, frankly, and there was probably no way to win. But who has the time and money to defend themselves from something like this? And then there’s the discovery process issue where... These lawsuits can get very invasive, where they want to start rooting through your personal communications, and that might be the point.
Apparently not even ABC or parent company Disney wanted to go through the discovery process with Trump. Robert Reich, retired professor and former labor secretary from the 1990s, he wrote in his newsletter about how ABC settling the case was probably about discovery. He wrote, quote, Four media lawyers I checked with told me they didn’t understand why ABC would
settle before trying for summary judgment, especially when it had such a strong case. Conservative radio host Eric Erickson, who used to practice law, says ABC and Stephanopoulos wanted to avoid discovery, And Robert Reich quoted Eric Erickson saying that the settlement wasn’t the cost of doing business. It was the cost of avoiding discovery. So just that,
just having the courts poke nose into your business is a disincentive to get mixed up in that. And the doctor who was sued settled and issued an apology of some kind. I didn’t even bother reading it because, of course, who cares about an apology that somebody is bullied into issuing as some kind of,
some humiliation ritual or proof that she was in the wrong or whatever. So when I published a piece about a doctor connected to those type of anti-vax of course, I was cautious, even though I’m a nobody. The only reason I was writing the piece was because I saw that people on the left
and long COVID sufferers were being drawn into anti-vax and promoting the claims and the treatments offered by anti-vaxxers. I watched some Facebook interviews with no transcripts in some cases to find out what this doctor had said. And that’s not searchable if it’s in an interview without no transcripts.
So I laid out just what this one particular doctor had himself said, direct quotes, and what was already reported in the news. And I felt compelled to have 130 footnotes for a piece that was about 4,500 words long. That’s one footnote for every 35 words.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Why so few?
CHLOE HUMBERT
Oh, haha this kind of writing, this kind of documentation to be accurate and not say anything, someone can twist into some kind of SLAPP suit. It’s not easy. There’s definitely no incentives for doing this for free other than wanting other people to know.
I was just sick of having to send people individual links all the time and repeat myself. But let’s face it, who’s going to be doing this for you all the damn time? Not many people are going to be motivated to do so. And then there are times when things get
misinterpreted or real threats are used to twist it upon people. Like the claim that the protesters are threatening, for example. And in this time when anti-vaxxers have threatened and there was a shooting at the CDC in August 2025. And this is horrendous. And then crickets from the Trump White House on that, of course. But here’s the thing.
When Joe Biden was president, the CDC kind of twisted that against a normal regular person calling out conflicts of interest. This person was not anti-vax. In fact, they were speaking out in favor of infection control in hospitals. They were pointing out that there were conflicts of interest on a CDC committee panel where some had corporate ties.
And one is, in fact, an executive in the industry. And the hospitals have been so opposed to spending money for infection control and PPE, they lock up N95s and so on and so forth. So when this person spoke about the conflict of interest, you know what happened?
They invoked the threats from the anti-vaxxers as the reason to silence anyone calling out conflicts of interest on the committee. The person running the public comments actually made a veiled accusation that pointing out conflicts of interest was making the committee members feel quote-unquote unsafe. This clearly works to chill advocacy and stop anyone daring to complain about
people with conflicts of interest. So then, when the Trump administration brought in committee members with even worse conflicts of interest, those people can say anyone who criticizes is also a threat. And in this case, when it’s government, it’s not just threat of lawsuit, but potentially targeting someone with criminal law in order to shut them up
from talking about government officials with financial ties to industry that they’re regulating. It’s the very definition of the violation of free speech. This is the First Amendment. But in an age where things like January 6th happened and there are county sheriffs deputizing militia members and randos and shootings like the attack on the CDC in Atlanta,
the lines get burned. In a kinetic war, they call this the fog of war.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Fog of War from Wikipedia. The fog of war is defined as the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations. The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one’s own capability Adversary capability and adversary intent during an engagement operation or campaign. I personally don’t appreciate living in a society where we need to use these terms
in everyday life, but the ability to make quick decisions, to maintain quality forms of communication, and most importantly, to assess situations in real time are more vital than ever. Preventing the fog of war is the same as staying alert, staying on your toes, keeping your head on a swivel, keeping your eye on the ball.
These are all ways of expressing the need for situational awareness and, perhaps more importantly, engaging in critical thinking and the ability to accurately comprehend what’s going on around you whenever you might need to.
CHLOE HUMBERT
and when it’s unclear what is within the acceptable window, when norms shift, people start pushing the envelope. And of course, the dubious actors, the sketchy industry operators, the mercenary propaganda pushers, and the people disseminating disinformation are, of course, often the most litigious. And just like the government holds more power than the average person,
people with piles of industry money, it creates a power asymmetry. Uh, People with the most to lose often have the least ability to actually defend themselves legally or mount a legal attack on their own behalf, even if that made sense. I’ve been maligned and smeared multiple times, and I just had to wait it out.
I’ve had a famous author send his fans to hassle me. And yeah, that’s a thing. You can get if somebody wants to shut you up. I dared to use the word eugenics in 2022. So trolls told me to harm myself, and that’s a thing. They call them suicide trolls,
online mobs who blatantly or manipulatively encourage the victim to self-harm. And this should not be confused with rest-in-peace trolls, which is also, sadly, a thing. I’m afraid to ask what that is. No, those are the trolls that post horrible stuff on social media in response to death notices or memorial page comment sections.
That’s why Funeral Homes holds all the comments submitted for their website for review.
MATT STRACKBEIN
I suddenly can’t wait to see the comments and reactions to this podcast, or maybe I can. And can you imagine someone asking you what you do for fun? And you’re like, I’m a rest in peace troll. I mean, that is a genuine, like losing faith in humanity moment for me.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Not really much surprises me now about what some people will do for fun or money, but maybe that’s because I was playing Diablo online 25 years ago, which was a really mix of interesting people and fun people, and then this small percentage of weirdos who would create an outsized annoyance on purpose. I think that’s universal in gaming.
You know, online gaming, you will have that, the trolls, and the griefers. Even if you can avoid the worst of the oddballs, the general population of people who might wind up in your audience or in your social circles, there’s a certain amount of decent people who nevertheless will not just feed the but put faith in them.
and then react poorly by being warned when they’re making trouble or lying or aren’t who they appear to be. I’ve seen it happen in an online group of people who knew each other for a few years, and they wound up holding space for some newcomer nobody knew who just showed up, started spreading bullshit,
recounting misinformation and starting arguments, and a whole bunch of people just took the word and the side of the interloper, the provocateur, who nobody even knew, over the people they knew in person, the people they knew were real. I don’t know how that happens, but in some of these situations,
even when somebody is revealed to have been inauthentic or even just unreliable, there’s a resistance to acknowledge it. Because nobody wants to be told they’ve been bamboozled because nobody wants to be deceived in the first place, obviously. Getting the bad news is usually not pleasant. Sometimes people dig in and lash out.
And they lash out at the person telling them just because that’s who’s in front of that’s who’s available, or because they blame that person for shattering the illusion they quite liked for whatever reason. And I’ve been on the receiving end of those bad feelings.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Which is why it’s ironic when these same people essentially, shooting the messenger also wonder, why wasn’t I told about this?
CHLOE HUMBERT
Yes, it’s frustrating. I’ve been in situations where I’ve tried to warn people over and over again not to trust some online account, trying to show them evidence that the account is inauthentic. And then there would be times that finally things would go too far and everybody would act like they were shocked. Yeah.
People get attached to influencers to the point where they start defending them. So there’s like this level of denial and motivated reasoning. People even become vindictive sometimes. Sometimes people go back to the bad actor or the con artist or the snake oil salesperson or whatever. The person who deceived them. you know, or otherwise gave them bad information.
And they end up telling that person, hey, I’ve been warned about you. of course, the bad actor is going to say, well, who’s making that accusation against me? And then they tell them. Then the person who’s tried to warn people gets put on like a shit list and And often these bad actors are not acting alone.
They have both people who are in on the deception, and they have fans and followers who have been cultivated and convinced to stan to be loyal, fiercely loyal. So you know what happens then. Once all the stands and fans are informed, there’s a critic. More lawfare and more online dogpiles. Most of the time,
they just mention it to their fans and followers who then go after the person. So there’s a plausible deniability for the bad actor. Though in recent years, people haven’t bought that as much. We’re much more willing to hold people with large platforms accountable for inciting their loyal fans. But unless they’re on a ballot, apparently.
But basically, they get to work smearing the person. They dogpile them on social media. They find people in their network and try to tell their friends or even their family members rumors or whatever. This is certainly not a new tactic, though. Back in the 60s, the automotive industry didn’t want to have to put seatbelts.
or any safety features in cars. So what did they do? They went after Ralph Nader because he wrote a book called Unsafe at Any Speed, and that was published in 1965. And he was the face of the seatbelt law movement. He was an advocate.
There was a legal case you could read from 1970 where it’s described Ralph Nader’s reports about attempted honey traps and how they approached his acquaintances to question them and, quote, cast aspersions.
MATT STRACKBEIN
I’ll read from the case, quote, specifically, the plaintiff alleges that the appellant agents conducted a series of interviews with acquaintances of the plaintiff, questioning them about and casting aspersions upon his political, social, racial and religious views. his integrity, his sexual proclivities and inclinations, and his personal habits, unquote.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Very unseemly. Sometimes they’ll go after somebody’s YouTube channel, for example. Jonathan Howard got a takedown request from Vinay Prasad, and then YouTube deleted his entire channel, the entire channel.
MATT STRACKBEIN
I helped launch an online media outlet that uses YouTube’s platform. And I have, you know, a very recent experience with this. It happens a lot. Seeing the play-by-play when a colleague’s YouTube channel has been deleted. Just woke up one day and it was gone. And there’s this wild appeals process where you just,
you’re getting automated replies that in the end turned out to be completely wrong. They make it nearly impossible to get your account back and you basically have to fight for it every day. But to lose your channel, that’s apparently much simpler to do.
CHLOE HUMBERT
So the story here with Jonathan Howard is that he’s a doctor in New York City who volunteered to treat COVID patients at the outset of the pandemic. Back at the beginning of 2020, there were no vaccines. There weren’t drugs for coronavirus. There wasn’t even an established way to figure out how to best treat hospitalized patients.
They were doing the best they could. And healthcare workers dealt with unprecedented volumes of patients who were really sick. We remember the freezer truck morgue days. Some of us do, at least. Vaccines and also survivorship bias put that in the rearview mirror for most people.
But I’m sure it left an impression on the people who worked in those situations. Jonathan Howard went on to publish a book documenting all the terrible things, the deniers, the COVID deniers, the minimizers, the people who said to do nothing, and the people who pooh-poohed getting vaccinated, and all the kind of...
rhetoric and bad faith and all the rest of it, because it was harmful and it continues to be harmful. And people not getting vaccinated leads to suffering. I’ve done a lot of documentation about people who said really gruesome things regarding the pandemic. Like in February 2020,
when the economist Robin Hanson suggested in a tweet that Americans be infected on and he kind of described what sounded like what he thought would be a prescribed controlled burn or something, but not for a forest. I mean, for the American population of humans, it was really macabre stuff.
MATT STRACKBEIN
I have the footnote here from your Medium post. The headline says, quote, Robin Hanson’s 2020 viral Valentine tweet. And then beneath that. And by viral, I mean the pandemic, because the tweet itself was not very popular at all. Shots fired. Chloe.
CHLOE HUMBERT
No, it actually wasn’t very popular. It’s not like it got a lot of traction, but it. This guy is well known in economics and in astronomy circles because of his great filter theory, which in my opinion is a flawed economic theory slapped onto astrobiology, but that’s beside the point.
I saw the tweet at the time because Matt Stoller called it out as a wholly reprehensible suggestion. Little did we know there was a whole bunch of people ready to say the same thing and worse, and then they were all meeting at the White House that summer. While doctors like Jonathan Howard were taking care of patients,
they were meeting to draft up ways to have people infected on purpose. And among The people opposing public health interventions was Vinay Prasad, who was telling people it wasn’t all that bad, and that alone undermines vaccine uptake, of course. But he also just undermined trust in vaccines.
He once suggested that nobody needs to wear respiratory protection for smoke. He claimed that worrying about safety or using respiratory protection as required by OSHA standards is, and I quote, untreated mental illness. Not even kidding. There’s an irony that he complained that COVID contrarians like him were being censored,
but he was so prolific in his public statements that Like essentially calling people crazy for wearing masks for viruses or other respiratory hazards like smoke. He made so many statements like this. And I guess he probably figured pretty prominently in Jonathan Howard’s book of all the terrible things these people had said.
MATT STRACKBEIN
So Jonathan Howard is the good guy. He’s a doctor who treated COVID patients and then wrote a book documenting things that were said by anti-vaxxers and people opposing public health measures.
CHLOE HUMBERT
so Jonathan Howard is a doctor and an author, and he’s written various articles for a longtime blog debunking quackery called Science-Based Medicine. He’s a bit highly online. He’s a social media hotshot. But He’s trying to document what these people said so we don’t memory hole it. And people might trust these people. Every once in a while,
I found out something about someone popular right now about their history. And it’s one thing if they’ve done a mea culpa. If they’ve changed directions, admitted they were wrong or have made some kind of amends, but that’s often not what happens. What happens is that the Overton window just shifts and people get rehabilitated
and the general public just doesn’t know the history or the details. So somebody had to do the dirty work of documenting the modern day versions of the anti-vax Florida man polio denier from the 1950s.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Of course there was a polio denier. Why is there always a polio denier? How long before people admit polio is real? I mean, polio is, isn’t it as old as like recorded human history?
CHLOE HUMBERT
according to the WHO, their polio eradication initiative Egypt page says, quote, the earliest evidence of poliovirus comes from the pharaonic illustrations in Egyptian artifacts from 3,000 years ago. And since then, the disease has paralyzed millions of Egyptian children. Wild poliovirus was stamped out in Egypt through diligent efforts to immunize every child, unquote.
I’m sure there were other anti-vaxxers and polio-contrarians at the time, so I do think it’s good that Jonathan Howard put together a book with all the COVID deniers and such in one place, for the record. Because all I’ve ever heard about is this Miller guy from Florida back in the 1950s.
He owned a cosmetics company and opposed the polio vaccine, and he actually blamed polio paralysis for on Americans who made inferior dietary choices.
MATT STRACKBEIN
That sounds familiar.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Yes, anti-vaxxers often sell supplements and personal care items. This is true if you go online and look at what the marketing is and the economy going along with the eugenics ideas and a focus on nutrition. Lots of times people get around the rules, just selling stuff they market as treatments, but...
just by calling them personal care items or getting them classified as cosmetics, or whatever to get around regulations or standards for health claims, uh, There’s a great YouTube panel discussion presentation from MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy from March 2023. And one researcher in their presentation, they described the online marketing economy surrounding disinformation on the internet.
And they say, quote, the issue is that if you broaden out, you start to see All of these dynamics can take place because there are very clear revenue models and businesses. People are making money from this. For example, I trace what’s called direct benefits. So these companies that are selling products and services directly related to the
idea that’s circulating. So if you are anti-vax, you are selling supplements, right If you are, you’re selling essential oils You’re selling products that are directly benefiting from the disinformation or misinformation that is circulating, unquote.
MATT STRACKBEIN
But in the case of Vinay Prasad, the guy who compared COVID public health steps to Nazi Germany, he’s actually a cancer doctor and oncologist. And then he goes and gets a position in the second Trump administration as the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the FDA, where he’s, you know,
he’s helped make it more difficult to get the COVID vaccine.
CHLOE HUMBERT
And though I heard he almost got ousted by Laura Loomer, but that’s a whole other story. At any rate, Vinay Prasad has been financed by a libertarian funding organization that also funds pushing for school privatization. Hmm. The reporter Walker Bragman has documented quite a bit of evidence that people
pushing to shove kids back in schools before they had the chance to even get vaccinated for COVID, as well as all of the return to office bullshit, the demonization of remote work to get people commuting again, all of that has been shown to be backed by fossil fuel interests. the Koch brothers and other right-wing dark money connections,
getting kids on the gas-guzzling school buses, And even after an anti-vax shooter shot up the CDC Georgia campus and killed a police officer, people were only allowed to remote work again for like two weeks. They wanted them back in the office.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Back to Vinay Prasad and his getting Jonathan Howard’s YouTube channel taken down.
CHLOE HUMBERT
So now what’s happened, and I saw this first on social media posted by Jonathan Howard himself, but it was reported in The Guardian where apparently Jonathan Howard had some clips on YouTube of, I guess, Vinay Prasad, I think... probably some other COVID contrarians, the recordings of their own social media posts where they say shocking things
against public health or anti-science or anti-vax or whatever. And Vinay Prasad got YouTube to shut the whole channel down over this. And these clips, I guess they said they are not fair use because there was no commentary within the individual YouTube posts. They were just referenced in science-based medicine blog posts,
and that’s what he was using them for.
MATT STRACKBEIN
The Guardian headline says top FDA official demands removal of YouTube videos in which he criticized COVID vaccines. So they cited, quote, copyright infringement for a channel that was attempting to preserve what officials in the current Trump administration said during the pandemic. The videos amounted to a collection of real things,
which real people had said who were in or ended up in very influential positions of government. But apparently, you can’t just, you know, repost existing videos without commentary. Sort of undermines the need for these comments to remain in the public eye, but okay. It would actually seem that the officials themselves didn’t want that out there all
in one place, which has to make you wonder why they suddenly feared their own words. Unless, of course, they actually never counted on their remarks being used in that manner as a sort of, public service where they could easily be referenced.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Right. So you would think that this would be considered bad form for a public figure to be targeting their detractors, but it isn’t uncommon. I could just say that the Biden administration at least attempted the outward appearance of being better about this because I was highly critical of Ashish Jha. He was appointed as the COVID.
in the Biden administration, not an anti-vaxxer, but he waffled on mitigations and a lot of people were critical of him. And he had me blocked on Twitter on two accounts, I guess because he didn’t like my opinions or my criticism. When he was appointed to the Biden administration, the first thing I thought of was,
I’m going to complain about being blocked on Twitter. Except when I went to his account, I found that I’d been unblocked and it would have been recent, too, because I definitely hadn’t seen any of his tweets. I obviously don’t know for sure, but I suspect, because of things I’ve heard through the grapevine,
that when people were appointed to White House positions under Biden, they would make sure not to block anyone on Twitter because of people having sued over this for First Amendment rights. In 2021, Texas AG Ken Paxton had to unblock some people on Twitter after a lawsuit. of course, this isn’t all cherries and sunshine either,
because it was used as the basis of a similar lawsuit in 2023 by a constituent trolling a black state senator in Louisiana with racially specific, disrespectful comments where the black senator had blocked the person because they said they disrespected the senator, told the senator to burn in hell, quote, I don’t respect all black women.
Some of you bitches are very dumb, unquote. Two years later, in August 2025, a federal court dismissed the case, and the Louisiana attorney general was quoted in an article as saying, quote, it is remarkable that in 2025, the attorney general’s office has been called to defend a black state senator against allegations that the U.S.
Constitution requires her to allow an anonymous and abusive troll to litter the senator’s personal social media account with messages like burn in hell and you black bitches are very dumb, Merle wrote, yet here we are, unquote.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Yet here we are.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Yeah, Vinay Prasad going after critics while in a government position is not the norm.
MATT STRACKBEIN
This quote from the Guardian article is certainly something. Quote, Although the videos Howard collected were often only viewed dozens of times, Howard included them in his own articles that appeared on the science-based medicine blog. Now those videos, those video links are dead. He noted that snippets of Prasad’s comments still appeared on anti-vaccine social media accounts,
suggesting Prasad was directing his removal demand only at a critic and not anti-vaccine influencers. In the past, Prasad has complained about censorship by social media companies, unquote. Now that’s rich. Censorship for thee, but not for me. So here’s the thing. Let’s say Howard had adhered to fair use and added commentary and made edits to the
video clips he was, using right there on YouTube. They can still take channels down. They do it all the time and they don’t need legit reasons. Then sometimes like a year later, they just say, oh, it was a mistake. Even if, you know, like I was saying before, an account holder may take up the appeal process,
the real point here with Howard would be to keep him spinning his wheels long enough for the perpetrators to basically sanitize their reputations.
CHLOE HUMBERT
I can’t help it, but I want to say that the hypocrisy is the point. But I’ve heard that categorized as a thought-terminating cliche in a video that was recommended to me on YouTube.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Okay, so a thought-terminating cliche is a non-answer. A semantic stop sign. According to Wikipedia, quote, a form of loaded language often passing as folk wisdom intended to end an argument and patch up cognitive dissonance with a cliche rather than a point, unquote. And oh my God, I hate when people say it is what it is.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Don’t work for the government, then. You’ll hear it all the time. Though heaven only knows what you’d be hearing from federal workers anymore. it almost goes without saying, that the baddies never seem to concern themselves about being hypocritical or self-contradictory or even nonsensical.
And the real issue here is not that Jonathan Howard did something the wrong way and that he could be targeted on some technicality. We all know... the YouTube copyright strikes when it’s clear-cut fair use and that people get accounts suspended on social media because of automated systems making nonsensical decisions. That’s what happened to me on Tumblr.
I got shadow banned because of a photo of a fossil, a fern fossil that got flagged as explicit adult content. It was six years old or maybe even more, closer to like a decade old, and it got flagged. The point is that there’s an imbalance of power when Vinay Prasad is a public official now and getting,
a low view count, non-monetized YouTube suspended. It’s going to make people think twice about using clips at all. But even when it’s the target of an attack who is more well-known, sometimes you’ll hear about randos defending some fake account on social media and going after a critic who has legitimate criticism and does it under their own name
and then gets dogpiled by some anonymous troll accounts. Maybe they’re bots. Maybe they’re sock puppets. But you have a mob of online angry villagers with flaming torches coming for somebody. Every once in a while, you hear about somebody’s employer being called. And most of the time, it backfires in public opinion.
But sometimes people lose their jobs over these kinds of things that are ostensibly in the people’s private lives. But no lives are private anymore. If you’re online at all, especially on social media. So it’s natural that most people want to avoid risk. Yeah, nobody wants to be trolled, doxed, or worse.
And it’s really common to see people smearing the messenger on purpose because smearing the messenger is the best way to stop a message. It’s a well-known, effective tactic for counter-messaging. It’s been used by governments and industry interests and people, you know, probably forever. Because it works. Yeah, sadly, even when it’s DARVO. What is DARVO?
DARVO stands for deny the allegations, attack the accuser’s credibility, and reverse victim and offender roles.
MATT STRACKBEIN
That tactic comes up a lot.
CHLOE HUMBERT
There are firms that specialize in smearing people. That was reported in the New York Times in December 2024 with regards to the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni legal case. The New York Times reported, quote, according to a legal complaint that she filed Friday, it claims that their PR effort had an explicit goal to harm Ms.
Lively’s reputation instead. Her filing... includes excerpts from thousands of pages of text messages and emails that she obtained through a subpoena. These and other documents were reviewed by the New York Times. There have long been figures behind the scenes shaping public opinion about celebrities through gossip columns, and strategic interviews.
The documents show an additional playbook for waging a largely undetectable smear campaign in the digital era. While the film about domestic violence was a box office hit, making nearly $350 million worldwide, online criticism of the actress skyrocketed. He wants to feel like she can be buried, a publicist working with the studio and Mr.
Baldoni wrote in an August 2nd message to the crisis management expert, Melissa Nathan. You know we can bury anyone, Ms. Nathan wrote, unquote. The New York Times also reported that this Ms. Nathan had also other famous clients like Johnny Depp.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Well... On that note...
CHLOE HUMBERT
on that note, we’ll pick up next time with more tales of trickery and the reasons people aren’t warned.
MATT STRACKBEIN
In future episodes, we’ll have to cover some of the things that have been brought up this time but really deserve more attention, like bots and shadow banning and DARPA.
CHLOE HUMBERT
I don’t make the rules.
MATT STRACKBEIN
You literally made these rules.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Oh. Oh, yeah, you got me.
