About ten years ago a Usenet crank by the name of Michael Vandeman took offense to a short response I made to something he wrote — I believe my response was, in its entirety, “Ha!” — and wrote complaints to my employers about my conduct online. Said employers were Gar Smith, then-editor of Earth Island Journal; his boss David Phillips; and EII’s founder Dave Brower.
I was lucky. For one thing, Vandeman graduated from sending harassing emails to committing criminal assault. For another, my employers responded to Vandeman’s barrage of complaints merely by asking that I be sure to use my own personal email. Dave P. tends to take pissing off the whackoes as a mark of successfully making a difference in the world, which came in handy a few years later when a corrupt former CITES official who was pocketing ivory trade money sued Earth Island over an article I printed. For Dave Brower’s part, when I mentioned Vandeman’s name he rolled his eyes harder than was probably advisable for a man of his then-advanced years.
But not everyone has employers as supportive. For instance, Vandeman targeted another person with whom he’d argued under Sierra Club auspices by harassing that person’s employers, and that went less well. More recently, the popular public health blogger EpiRen was asked by his employers to stop blogging — even under a pseudonym — when said employers were contacted with a stream of threatening email from one Rhett S. Daniels, a self-described “owner of 11 pharmaceutical companies” who objected to EpiRen’s defense of vaccinations.
You can read the increasingly bizarre threats leveled by Daniels at Liz Ditz’s place, and there’s some good commentary by Orac’s and PZ’s blogs as well.
I don’t have much to add except for a little bit of Google juice to cement Rhett S. Daniels’ reputation as an anti-intellectual thug who uses threats and harassment to prevail where his arguments cannot possibly do so. But having been more or less there, I have to say something.
Thanks Chris for the mention.
Three points:
1. Ren was (is, and will be) a great educator about public health issues—not just vaccinations, but all things epidemiological. I think that science education is generalizable—if you learn to think in a nuanced way about one scientific issue (say, epidemiology or vaccine safety) you are more likely to be able to think in a nuanced way about another (such as climate change). So Ren’s silencing is a loss to the larger public discourse about science. I do hope it is temporary, as he has a gift for explaining complex issues for lay folk.
2. Ren is Mexican by birth and nationality. He moved to the US legally and is either (I can’t remember, and since his blog is dark, I can’t verify) a permanent legal resident or a citizen. His extended family has folk who are still Mexican citizens and resident in Mexico; American citizens; and legal residents. Ren lives in a state near Washington DC; his town had an upswing in anti-immigrant (specifically, anti-Mexican) sentiment. What did Ren do? Appear at a town hall meeting to represent people like himself. I would love to link to the series of posts he wrote about his experience as a bi-national person and a contributor to the American experience….but I can’t, because his blog is now dark.
3. There’s been a veritable barrage of support for Ren—because he has earned a lot of friends for his stand-up ways over the past few years. I really wonder how many other bloggers (or other social-media users) have been silenced—without being noticed at all. I know about threats to other bloggers (your story; Peds_ID_Dr was threatened; Orac | David Gorski was threatened ... but who else has just silently gone away? Their voices, however small, are gone without a public outcry. I wish there was some sort of way to identify and recognize those silenced voices.
I second Liz’s comment about those who may silently disappear. It’s important that nobody who suffers from online bullying should be allowed to feel alone and undefended.
Daniels is back and gloating. If he threatens Ren again or starts attacking someone else, I don’t think we should wait 20 years to petition the local fuzz to do something, even f it’s only the local equivalent of “remanded for psychiatric reports”.