To Catch a Psycho

The Pure Living For Life channel is now hunting the professional cyberstalker who has been relentlessly stalking them for five years:

There are three groups currently, and two of them, the moderator, the leader, the admin, is the psychopath. This primary persona is actually a very caring and naive, even inexperienced woman that really doesn’t know anything about anything, she’s just “I’m just so naive, can someone please help me understand like how this Facebook thing works, I don’t really know much about Facebook Messenger, yeah, I don’t really use this that often, I need people to help me.” They give out lots of compliments, lots of pats on the back, they’re very nurturing, almost mother-like. They’re very good at making people feel like they belong.

When we first started clicking around these groups, we observed that a lot of the group members were what we would describe as throw-away accounts, they were all aliases, they had no history, no friends, it was very clear that these were fake accounts. What we didn’t know was who was behind them, and initially, we did suspect certain creators, but I think a lot of these were actually this one person. There were real people in the group, we do have proof of that, but I think initially the number of real people was actually quite small in comparison.

They would allow threads in their group like, hey, everyone why do you think they don’t live in their house? and they started having people watching our videos frame-by-frame trying to find evidence, holes in our story, if you will, and they would compile all this information and what this became was a recruitment tool for curious viewers.

Here are some of the ways that they would justify the existence and the creation of these groups: well, we only created this group because you don’t allow us to comment, you took away our freedom of speech, you have silenced us, you just have to admit that you don’t know what you’re doing – which we admit in pretty much every video – they said, you just need to tell the truth and we’ll stop but there wasn’t a truth to tell! We were telling the truth!

They began heavily recruiting to their groups through the comments section of other creators and people would come to the groups either out of natural curiosity, with malicious intent, or because they wanted to promote their own channels. They had hundreds or thousands of usernames that they kept unique across numerous platforms to make it look like the people on each platform were unique people creating the illusion of an angry mob. To be more specific, the people on Reddit don’t line up to YouTube don’t line up to Facebook, so it looks like, oh there’s all these people on this platform but those are not the same people on this platform, it’s all the same person.

There are several types of cyberstalkers. There are the curious ones, from the men and women who silently follow the Facebook and Linked In pages of their former romantic interests to old schoolmates keeping up with past friends and acquaintances and young people who have recently met potential new interests performing amateur background checks, but these harmless stalkers are bothering no one.

Then there are the organic stalkers, who are usually gamma males that have taken personal offense at the ideology, beliefs, behavior, or mere existence of a particular individual, usually some form of Internet or TV celebrity. Every actress, writer, streamer, and influencer has a few of these. As annoying as they can be, they are mostly harmless, as doxxing the targets of their obsession is usually the extreme extent of their behavior. In most cases, they do more harm to themselves than others, as they seldom bother to seriously disguise their own identities and they often put themselves in direct legal jeopardy due to their delusional state. Many of them are mentally disturbed, and one can sometimes even observe when they are on and when they are off their prescribed medications.

A secondary form of the organic stalker is the sexual obsessive, which is mildly amusing for male targets but can be deadly for female targets. Male targets typically receive long, narcissistic missives which eventually escalate to sending pictures of the obsessed individual wearing bikinis and other suggestive attire. Many women, particularly on Instagram, are plagued by these obsessives, and although it is very rare, there have been a few actresses killed by an obsessed stalkers who escalated to the point of physical trespassing and violence.

The third form is the corporate SJW. These stalkers tend to be employed by various corporations, although many of the 500+ Wikipedia admins also fit the profile. They’re better seen as thought police than stalkers, although they will literally camp on a Wikipedia entry or an Amazon product for more than a decade once focused on a particular target. The Wikipedia variety can be easily identified by simply examining the View History tab of any given page there; for example, the admin DragonflySixtyseven has been stalking the Wikipedia page about me since 2013.

There are three forms of inorganic stalker. The first is the hacker, which may be nothing more than a botnet, who attempts to break into the target’s site for the purposes of causing chaos and disruption. This is easily dealt with by maintaining proper site and operational security.

The second is the contextual paid hasbaran. These are contract employees of large operations that range from PR firms to state intelligence agencies. They scan the Internet looking for posts, comments, and reviews that contradict their established narrative, then engage in a number of familiar tactics to counter the anti-narrative and disrupt any discussions that appear likely to violate their narrative. They primarily engage in short-term drive-by actions, although I suspect the information they feed up the chain is used to provide targets for the more persistent operations.

And the third form of inorganic stalker is the dedicated professional. This is probably the individual with whom the Pure Living couple are dealing. Dedicated professional cyberstalkers have several identifiable characteristics.

  • They farm the dedicated hate community, which despite the dozens of sock puppets active in it is usually measured in the single digits.
  • They establish and moderate the forums hosting the dedicated hate community.
  • They are persistent over very long periods of time, but unlike the genuine psychos, remain emotionally cool and detached.
  • They tend to have more information much more readily to hand than the organic stalkers and often use it to correct the latter.
  • They relentlessly egg on the organic stalkers while never doing anything themselves.
  • They give out “awards” to the organic trolls and sockpuppets.
  • Their cover story to justify what is observably deranged behavior never makes much sense. It’s always something retarded like “I subscribed to Jimmy’s channel for a month back in 2012 but then I saw him wear a green t-shirt on a stream, which is why I’ve spent the last ten years obsessively farming this hate-Jimmy community on a daily basis.”
  • They strike grandiose poses and will affect to be experts on everything from financial and legal matters to child care and home repair to reassure the organic stalkers.
  • They’re very careful not to cross any legal lines themselves, while encouraging others to do so.
  • They often, though not always, pretend to be women even though their writing is quite clearly male.
  • They very quickly avert any questions directed at themselves by the organic stalkers.
  • They attempt to avoid the obvious distinction between themselves and the organic trolls they are farming and always prefer to utilize plural pronouns.

It’s important to remember that these inorganic stalkers are not crazy people who are obsessed with the target for their own deluded reasons, they’re merely paid to act like psychopaths in order to gather and focus the organic haters on the target of the desired harassment. Many of them, perhaps most, are convicted felons, often convicted for crimes that render them generally unemployable; several professional stalkers whose identities the VFM have identified are, like Kyle Rittenhouse’s attacker Joseph Rosenbaum, listed on a sex offender registry. They’re essentially professional Gamma farmers who are working from a recognizable script.

Systematic documentation is the key. There is no point in communicating with any inorganic stalker since they’re just doing the job they are being paid to do. Threatening consequences or modifying your behavior in accordance with their demands will accomplish nothing, the only solution is to patiently document each crossing of a legal line, in either your jurisdiction or the stalker’s jurisdiction, then present the collected evidence to the relevant police force. And remember, the objective should be to prioritize identifying the inorganic stalker’s employer, identifying the stalker himself is little more than a means to a more important end.

DISCUSS ON SG


A Stalker’s Defense

One of the lead cyberstalkers of the homesteading couple’s YouTube channel tries to defend his harassment of them. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it.

This place only started because of the complete censorship of critical comments during the build process. No matter how nicely advice was couched, it resulted in the comment being deleted and the user being blocked. That arrogance was the Zeus from whose head this place sprang fully formed.

There were thousands of well-intentioned viewers that felt betrayed by this. They felt betrayed again when you suddenly and without warning announced that you were abandoning the off-grid premise of the channel and were in fact tying into the grid. The final betrayal came when you appeared to abandon the building process and disappear. All the views, all the ads, all the patreon money — it looked to a lot people like you took those things and ran. A great many people felt — truly felt — as if you had stolen their time and money. You never offered an explanation, and so viewers rightfully formed their own conclusions.

Our concerns about a child living in a house under construction were always genuine concerns. One only need skim your videos from that period to see the drywall dust, the failed inspections, the tools laying around everywhere, the lack of safety railing, etc. In my opinion, it was (and may still be) an thoroughly unsafe environment for a toddler.

You can practically smell the stink of Gamma floating off the page. How dare a content creator control the discourse on his own channel! How dare he not accept unsolicited, but nicely-couched advice offered to him!

And worst of all, how dare he change his plans!

This last observation, by the way, is why you should IMMEDIATELY jettison any Gamma you discover working for you or in your organization. They will never, ever, be successful at anything they do, no matter how small, because they have a near-complete inability to grasp the way in which that changing circumstances always requires changing course to attain or maintain success. The only way Gammas can be “successful” is to have it given to them by someone in a position to do so. This is why they are such shameless suck-ups as well as why they rage when their “I’m your biggest fan” routine doesn’t translate into anything of material advantage to them.

“You have to give me the prize because I really, really want it,” is an effective summary of the core Gamma philosophy across every walk of life, from business to romance.

The inability to adjust to changing circumstances is why “but you said” is a reliable Gamma tell. As well as “betrayal”, “well-intentioned”, “truly felt”, “rightfully”, and “genuine concerns”. It’s all just rhetorical cover meant to excuse their lunatic obsessions, but no psychologically well-adjusted individual is ever going to fall for it, because the claimed objectives never come close to justifying the excessive means utilized.

You’d think this guy would be happy, because the channel he was attacking went dark for a long time and the attempt to build the house appears to have failed, but Gamma psychology is so dysfunctional that not even normal schadenfreude can satisfy it.

This commenter’s reaction to the gamma’s attempted defense of his actions fairly well represents the normal individual’s view of the gammastalker and his “well-intentioned” behavior.

You ‘felt betrayed’? Seriously? What kind of parasocial dysfunctional idiots are you people? I don’t care how many comments were deleted, the content of those comments or what they changed their minds about with the build…the fact that you people took it so personally to start doxxing and stalking them is laughable and the fact that some of you brought their child into this is downright reprehensible. Youtubers are NOT your personal friends. Youtubers don’t owe you a god damn thing. They put out the content and you vote for the quality of that content with your views and your wallet. If you don’t like the content or personalities of the Youtuber, STOP watching.

They’re Gammas. That’s the fundamental problem. Because Gammas are always and inevitably going to Gamma.

DISCUSS ON SG


The Troll Hunter’s Guide

It’s come to my attention that an increasing number of YouTube creators and other Internet figures are being actively harassed online. Here is a list of things required for a successful troll hunt for anyone who wishes to build a criminal case against their cyberstalkers. It’s based on my own experience tracking down an individual who was stalking a number of people, including a young family who had recently lost a child.

  1. Stay calm. The troll’s primary objective is to upset you. Trolls feed off attention and negative emotion, so it’s important to control your own reactions and deny them both. Staying calm serves two positive purposes, as it prevents you from establishing an emotional relationship with them as well as forcing them to increase their efforts in order to achieve the desired effect, thereby increasing the likelihood they will make a mistake or cross a line.
  2. Be patient. A security expert has told me that no one can regularly comment without giving away their true identity within one year. Remember, the troll is in it for the attention, so hiding even the smallest significant aspects of his identity places him fundamentally at conflict with his own instincts and desires.
  3. Directly inform the troll that he is banned from visiting your site and from commenting under all current and future identities, and that if he persists in his activity, he is engaged in illegal trespassing and cyberstalking. It is vital to put them on notice. For some reason, many people who are capable of understanding that physical trespassing is not only illegal, but can permit them to be legally shot in some places tend to find it hard to grasp that online trespassing is illegal. The fact that you CAN access a site does not automatically give you permission to do so any more than the fact that you CAN physically access someone’s lawn gives you permission to walk on it.
  4. Don’t delete the troll’s comments. It took me a long time to learn this; even though I saved them in a separate text file, I sometimes got lazy or couldn’t be bothered. It’s best to have them there, in the blog, where they can be easily produced as evidence or mined for investigative purposes.
  5. Don’t permit the readers to engage with the troll. They may mean well, but their reactions to the troll are usually a bigger problem than the troll’s comments are. Set a policy of “Comments responding to a troll will be deleted” and delete them on sight. Commenters cannot shut down a troll because he seeks their negative attention; them saying “shut up” and “go away” is something he desires, so their effort on your behalf are counterproductive. Don’t let them feed him.
  6. Look for the troll’s other identities. Trolls always have sockpuppets, and often they are less careful when using them. Yama had over 30. Even a cursory glance at the mined comments shows that NTA has at least three. And often, the sockpuppet identity is the troll’s primary identity on other sites. Yama did not use Yama here at all, he primarily used Will leFey, Dan Picaro, Luscinia, and Alauda. But once I was able to link him to the Yamamanama and Yama the Spacefish identities, I was able to learn considerably more information about him and those around him.

Read the rest of it on the original post. We could certainly add more to it now, in light of subsequent experiences as well as changes in the legal systems of a number of jurisdictions and the lessons learned from various forays into arbitration and court. But it will do for a start.

DISCUSS ON SG


Everyone’s Got Trolls

But Salman Rushdie’s are arguably more dangerous than most.

Author Salman Rushdie has been injured after being stabbed on stage ahead of a speech he was due to give in Chautauqua, near Buffalo.

The writer, 75, was attacked as he took to the stage for the CHQ 2022 event before giving a speech on Friday morning.

He was attending for a discussion of the United States as asylum for writers and other artists in exile and as a home for freedom of creative expression.

Witnesses claimed that he managed to walk off stage with assistance and the attacker is reportedly in custody.

This sort of attack should help your average actress, writer, or Internet celebrity keep their haters and stalkers in proper perspective. Anyone with even a modicum of success or fame is certain to attract trolls, but a few unfortunates have it considerably worse than others.

UPDATE: Apparently the attack was more vicious than originally reported.

Author Salman Rushdie has been airlifted to hospital after being stabbed up to 15 times, including once in the neck, as he prepared to give a speech in upstate New York. One witness told the New York Times that Rushdie had been stabbed ‘multiple times’ and had been lying in a pool of his own blood.

DISCUSS ON SG


The Rules of Trolling

The Saker releases a basic guide to trolling in the aftermath of the mass onslaught of neocon trolls on his site. A lot of it sounds remarkably familiar, does it not?

  • Rule number one: always make sure your comment is either the very first one (best!) or, at least, one of the top ones. This way you can best derail the discussion away from the actual article and make it all about your talking points. This was almost always the case when I was still writing for the Unz Review, and it is still very often the case on the Saker blog today. I would call this rule “the golden rule of trolling”.
  • Do not, ever, refer to the actual contents of article you comment upon. Doing so might lead the readers to familiarize themselves with the author’s arguments or, worse, the factual and logical substantiation of these arguments. You want emotion, not analysis.
  • Make sure to psychoanalyze both the author and the blog itself. Use sentences such as “you only write this because” or “in spite of the horrific censorship on this blog…” etc. This is basically the good old ad hominem disguised as some kind of insight into things the troll cannot – by definition – have any information about.
  • In your comment, make sure to align as many Neocon talking points as possible, you can join them together into (apparent) sentences and (apparent) paragraphs. This way you give the external appearance of making an cogent argument while doing no such thing.
  • Ignore the author’s arguments. If the author write “A”, do not directly dispute it, don’t even refer to it. Instead, write “non-A”. In fact, the ideal troll comment is one which never gives the reader a reason to look up the author’s actual arguments.
  • Make sure that your comment is formally polite. Thus not only do you sound respectful and sincere (“all I want is an honest discussion!“), but it reduces the chances that the moderators will send it to trash. You can be snarky, of course, but that opens up your comment to being sent to trash on formal reasons.
  • Claim the coveted “victim of censorship” status. Yes, even when you ignore (deliberately or not) the commenting rules! This technique is especially useful if your comment is illogical, off-topic or pain stupid. After all, in our times of “positivity” and “acceptance” it would be most politically incorrect to call any comment “nonsensical” or “stupid”!
  • Misuse terms, especially those which are often misunderstood by non-specialists. The perfect example would be the difference between “air superiority” and “air supremacy”, or use “contested airspace”. The goal here is not to make a fact based and logical argument, the goal is to repeat Neocon talking points as often as possible. With some luck, other commentators will pick up this misuse of terms and you will achieve a synergistic effect.
  • Go fishing. By that I mean this: post a number of statements and see if anybody else will “bite”, possibly a fellow troll (paid or not). Example, “it appears that a single Ukrainian MiG-29A shot 3 Su-35S in one mission“. With any luck, somebody will bite and, there we go, the synergistic effect will be achieved.
  • Ignore points made in the original article. This is a crucial one. If an author writes “A” and then goes into some details explaining the factual and logical basis for this argument, don’t engage, but ignore it! Pretend as if it did not exist. With some luck, those who just skimmed over and article won’t realize what you are doing.
  • “Bounce” external arguments. By this I mean simply write “I read fill the black” and ask for a rebuttal. The function and purpose of this technique is double: derail the conversation and (try to) force the author to waste his/her time debunking as many idiotic arguments as possible.

Fortunately, the development of SocialGalactic means our community no longer needs to deal with trolls or pay any attention to their ankle-biting antics any longer. And that’s all that matters, because as far as I can tell, there isn’t a single person of note anywhere who doesn’t have at least a few trolls incessantly posting nonsense about them on Twitter, on Reddit, or some other Internet cesspool.

Seriously, pick a random “celebrity”, however well-loved or trivial. I guarantee you a moment’s search will find trolls sniping at the late Olivia Newton John as well as at the latest Z-list British Love Islander and the most recent YouTuber to reach 100,000 subscribers. Self-appointed critics are the price of success, and it is one of the reasons why even the most famous attention whores who have assiduously pursued fame eventually find themselves backing away from the spotlights and the red carpets.

DISCUSS ON SG


Mailvox: it’s an ECHO CHAMBER

Phat Rephat, whoever that is, complains that excessive moderation is turning VP into “an echo chamber”:

VD, I’ve been following you for quite a while and appreciate your viewpoint and the information shared. Of late, however, it seems you’re shifting to the echo chamber model. I agree with your desire to keeping on-topic and without profanity. But not allowing contradicting views or the calling out of the GE when he appears to be losing focus, is not of value to any of us; concern trolls aside.

Well, obviously I am terrified of VP being called an echo chamber. I mean, what could be worse than an Alt-Right echo chamber? Where else will people be able to find conservative, or liberal, or mainstream media views being expressed?

Clearly we must act! I will take his well-considered advice.

Trolls, defeatists, anklebiters, have at it. Comment as you see fit. Be defeatist. Be despondent. Share your contradicting views. Call out the God-Emperor. Insult your fellow commenters. I’m not going to moderate anything at all. Moderators, stand down and let the commenters comment freely, as they obviously desire.

I will also unspam every spam comment that catches previous trolls.

It’s certainly less work and time-investment on my part. I look forward to seeing precisely how much the comments are going to improve and how much value is going to be added to everyone.

UPDATE: Four hours and 47 minutes later:

Hello VD:

It’s Phat Repat; I get your point.

PS This is a Mea Culpa. 😉

Point? What point could that possibly be? I’m just astounded by all the added value!


Pro trolls are the majority

This is why I don’t hesitate to nuke commenters who show even modest signs of possibly being hasbara, or, in the vernacular, paid trolls:

A majority of online and social media defenders of Obamacare are professionals who are “paid to post,” according to a digital expert.

“Sixty percent of all the posts were made from 100 profiles, posting between the hours of 9 and 5 Pacific Time,” said Michael Brown. “They were paid to post.”

He began investigating it after his criticism of the former president’s health insurance program posted on the Obamacare Facebook page. He was hit hard by digital activists pretending to be regular people. She reports that he evaluated 226,000 pro-Obamacare posts made by 40,000 Facebook profiles.

“Digital activists are paid employees; their purpose is to attack anyone who’s posting something contrary to the view of the page owner wants expressed,” he told Attkisson. “Sixty percent of all the posts were made from 100 profiles, posting between the hours of 9 and 5 Pacific Time.”

Translation: a paid troll will produce 1,356 comments on a single subject. One reason why we don’t see very much of that nonsense here is because the moderators and I operate on the principle that it is better to take out an honest critic than to permit a troll to comment freely.


This is why we de-troll

There is absolutely no point in tolerating endless repetitions of the same argument over and over again from rhetoric-limited SJWs who cannot learn from information and whose thick skulls remain impenetrable to facts, logic, science, and history. Case in point:

Sorry, but I happen to agree with the sentiment that many of the so-called “anti-amnesty” voices here and elsewhere are in fact, racist. I understand Ace’s use of the word “spics”- I do the same thing, in an ironic sense when I make the point that for many of you, “illegal aliens” is a code word for “dirty fucking Mexicans”.

I’m not slamming Mexicans, I’m slamming your attitude towards them and translating some weaselwords into their true meaning, without the code.
Posted by: docweasel at March 29, 2008 03:05 PM

Ah, the old “some of my best friends are dirty fucking Mexicans” ploy. I don’t know about individuals. Its possible you are not. I’m saying that by and large the “anti-amnesty” Malkinite argument is that Mexicans deserve special attacks and exclusion is that 1. Mexicans commit a lot of crimes (while posting anecdotal news items about illegal immigrant crime 2. Mexicans use a lot of services and cost the community more money than they are worth 3. Mexicans are uneducated and unskilled and unworthy of being Americans 4. go back to Mexico, we don’t want your culture here, we don’t want your language here, assimilate and “act white” or you dont deserve citizenship.

Maybe not you personally. But taht’s the way the argument has been framed. And I call racism. A lot of you say “I love Mexicans my best friend is Mexican I work with Mexicans I love Mexicans, btw, fuck Mexicans, we don’t need any more in this country, expel as many as possible and lock the rest out.

The bottom line is, I don’t believe the people who make racist arguments against Mexican immigration, then say they aren’t Mexicans: face it, live with it, if you try to STEREOTYPE an entire ethnicity by thea few criminals you are a fucking racist, period. You don’t like it and you reject it, but you are one anyway, motherfucker.
Posted by: docweasel at March 29, 2008 03:32 PM

And just 8 years later:

That image posted at the top of post isn’t what I’d call “Christian”- I’m the last one to be over-sensitive or pulling the race card, but that image is flat out racist.

No one who calls themselves Christian or bemoans the loss of Christian ethics has any business posting something like that, or else they have a thin grasp of exactly what Christianity is in the first place.

I only started reading this site regularly a few months ago when a link from somewhere else brought me here. If this is the tone I don’t guess this is the place for me.
Posted by: docweasel August 16, 2016 4:04 AM

Clearly the very last one to pull out the race card. SJWs ALWAYS lie. The appropriately named docweasel is banned for SJW. We neither want nor need SJWs here.


A new rule

Apparently this was insufficient warning for some commenters:

14. If you give a moderator reason to believe that you are not interested in honest, straightforward interaction, he will simply spam your comments. Continued attempts to post comments here will be considered harassment and dealt with accordingly. 
So, I’m adding a new Rule 17.
17. Speak for yourself, not for anyone else. If you falsely characterize or inaccurately summarize someone else’s statements, arguments, or conclusions, your comments may be deleted and you may be banned. This is particularly true if you attempt to falsely characterize or inaccurately summarize something I have written.

I’m not going to be playing Summary Cop, so don’t complain about this sort of thing at every possible opportunity. It’s not a weapon for commenters to use against each other, it’s intended to shut down a common professional troll tactic. The moderators and I will apply it judiciously, as we see fit.

You can speak your own opinion. You can criticize my opinion and the opinions of the other commenters. But what you are not permitted to do is to try to speak for others in order to set up straw men that you can criticize in lieu of their actual opinions.

And if you’re not sure of what someone else is saying, the solution is eminently simple. Just ASK them for clarification. It’s not that hard.


Trolls go pro

Keoni Galt explains why certain trolls are incredibly persistent these days and why they keep showing up under different names:

In the case of Vox Day, he’s certainly correct that trolls aren’t really a problem on both his Vox Popoli and Alpha Game blogs, since he is quick to identify and ban any obvious trolls that appear in his prodigious and popular comment threads.

But while the obvious trolls are easily identified as unhinged ideologues and usually true believers in the $ocial Justice Warrior cause (indoctrinated liberal progressive adherents of cultural marxism — useful idiots,) I believe the other, more insidious types of trolls, the paid shills and psy op agents are far more pervasive and common than honest to goodness “trolls.” – a.k.a. stunted individuals looking for cheap thrills by being an asshole on teh Interwebz.

These shills are trained in tactics to generate a “desirable outcome” of promoting and reinforcing an established narrative, and they are paid for by shady business fronts laundering Government agency funds in service to a covert agenda of FedGov PsyOps, all to promote and reinforce PC establishment propaganda.

In other words, their exists an entire industry of cubicle farm-desk jockeys who get paid to do nothing more than sit in a boiler room styled setup at all hours and troll teh Interwebz.

This is another reason that the moderators and I don’t hesitate to spam any commenter who exhibits any sign of being a troll-whore. How you can recognize these trolls for hire:

  1. It’s usually a new name you haven’t seen before, and often using a nomenclature that doesn’t quite fit the blog regulars.
  2. They tend to be monomaniacal and only comment on certain specific topics. Lately, those are a) immigration and b) Trump.
  3. Their comments are pure rhetoric and are either triumphal or defeatist in tone.
  4. They don’t pay any attention to dialectical responses, no matter how effectively their statements and arguments are addressed. They NEVER admit that they are wrong, even when it is clearly demonstrated.
  5. Unlike regular trolls, they don’t get upset when they are spammed and banned. They just quietly disappear, then return under a different name spouting very similar statements.
  6. They post similar, or even identical, comments on other right-wing sites such as Steve Sailer’s site or the Unz Review.
  7. They frequently have a written tic or some other tell that renders them readily recognizable.

How should you respond to them? By ignoring them. You are not helping when you engage with them, particularly when you attack them. That is exactly what they are seeking, to provoke some kind of reaction, any kind of reaction. Derailing the discourse is one of their top priorities, along with discrediting the primary blogger(s).

Just leave it to the moderators and I to handle them. We have various means at our disposal, from autovanishing comments with flagged words to spamming to simply deleting them as soon as they are posted. We’ve been doing this for a long time, most of the moderators are experienced and highly skilled in textual analysis, and it’s easy for us to keep these troll-whores under tight control as long as the regular commenters don’t fall for the bait and get in the way.