Friday, Milo Yiannopoulos published a lengthy examination of Sarah Nyberg’s pedophile-themed online chats. These conversations, which occurred circa 2005-2006, involved Nyberg (a male-to-female transsexual) expressing sexual attraction to his/”her” young female relative. At the time, Nyberg was earning a lucrative income as proprietor of a forum devoted to discussion of a videogame called “Final Fantasy.” In 2014, however, Nyberg became an outspoken critic of the #GamerGate movement:
[Nyberg] tried to shut down funding for the website 8chan.net, which had supported #GamerGate, by falsely accusing them of hosting child pornography. However, he/she failed to anticipate the reaction, i.e., that the people he/she had attacked would figure out who he/she actually was, connect the dots, and expose [Nyberg’s] unsavory background. . . .
He/she had attempted to deprive the proprietors of 8chan.net of their right to free speech and had falsely accused them of a very serious crime in an attempt to cut off their funding or otherwise drive their site offline. . . .
It was this anti-free-speech campaign, part of a “Social Justice Warrior” (SJW) battle against #GamerGate, which (a) made “Sarah Butts” a public figure, and (b) inspired the question, “Who is ‘Sarah Butts’?”
You can read the rest of that Aug. 8 post from my blog, which was explaining why my Twitter account had been temporarily suspended. It was apparent that Twitter support staff were assisting Nyberg in an attempt to suppress certain facts about Nyberg’s past, including his/”her” original name. Why? Well, at one point in the chat log discussions, Nyberg indicates that police had seized one of his/”her” computers, and Nyberg referred to an encrypted hard drive containing material related to Nyberg’s pedophile interests. We might speculate that, if the police who reportedly investigated Nyberg in 2005 only knew Nybergs male name, then concealing that name could prevent law enforcement from connecting all the dots. In this scenario, it would not be merely Nyberg’s reputation as a “Social Justice Warrior” that was at stake in concealing his/”her” male identity, but also this concealment would shield Nyberg from renewed law-enforcement scrutiny.
Or so we might speculate.
Beyond mere speculation, however, was the reality that people were being silenced for writing about Nyberg’s shady past, and Nyberg was using an obvious trick to posture as a victim of injustice:
It appears Ms. Nyberg is leveraging friendships with Twitter support personnel in order to delete any mention of Ms. Nyberg’s male past and male name. You will call Ms. Nyberg “Sarah” on Twitter or else you will be shut down. . . .
DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender — it’s a rather well-documented tactic, and when I see people (a) with sexual idiosyncracies (b) allying themselves with a “social justice” movement and (c) claiming that people who tell the truth about them are “bullies,” my suspicion is (d) they’re just angry their shady hustle got busted and (e) they’re trying to exploit sympathy by (f) posing as a victim.
You can read the rest of that, which was posted after my Twitter account was suspended for the second time within three days. At that time I warned that this would likely lead to a “Streisand Effect,” wherein efforts to hide online information have the opposite effect, calling new attention to whatever information a person is trying to conceal. This warning proved prophetic. People began looking closely at what Nyberg wanted to suppress and, barely three weeks later on Aug. 30, a YouTube video presented the most damaging evidence against Nyberg. This video, in turn, caused Milo Yiannopoulos to write his article about Nyberg at Breitbart.com, an article for which Yiannopoulos interviewed the parents of the girl who was reportedly the object of Nyberg’s pedophiliac interest a decade ago. According to Yiannopoulos, the parents were willing to seek a new law enforcement investigation of Nyberg who, just coincidentally, is also reported to owe $100,000 in delinquent taxes.
It is not wild-eyed speculation, but ordinary common sense, to say that someone who acts like they’re trying to hide something may actually have something to hide. And in response to Yiannopoulos’s article, Nyberg published a genuinely fascinating counter-attack that elaborately manifests the DARVO tactics I’ve described. Whereas some of Nyberg’s defenders had previously claimed the chat logs were forgeries, Nyberg instead (a) admits the chat logs were authentic, but claims (b) that these chats were a sort of facetious or ironic satire and (c) implies the chat log transcripts were obtained illegally, so that (d) it is Nyberg’s critics who, by illegally obtaining information, were the real criminals.
This is a classic example of DARVO tactics. Nyberg uses all kinds of rationalization and smokescreening to explain away the known facts, to delegitimize critical scrutiny, diverting attention away from the obvious questions about Nyberg’s behavior, toward those who have exposed Nyberg, portraying them as wrongdoers.
How will this story end? I don’t know. Perhaps it’s all a bunch of noise about nothing and, if that’s the case, interest in Nyberg may just slowly fade away. On the other hand, we have the example of a notorious troll known online as “Nick Bate” who claimed on April 19 to have been exonerated by a criminal investigation, only to be arrested a week later:
Nickalaus B. Stoutzenberger, 23, was charged Wednesday [i.e., April 26] with one count of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a child, and three counts of indecent assault of a child.
The alleged sex assaults occurred in Washington Boro in 2009 to 2010 when the female victim was between 5 and 7 years old, according to Manor Township police.
Stoutzenberger was arraigned before District Judge Joshua Keller, and sent to Lancaster County Prison in lieu of $150,000 bail.
Sometimes bad things happen to people like that.
They are liars and creepy freaks who should never be trusted.
“God gave them up unto vile affections . . . God gave them over to a reprobate mind . . .”
— Romans 1:26-28 (KJV)
Beware of reprobate minds. Crazy people are dangerous.
