Karl Jobst versus Billy Mitchell: The fallout roundup (part 2)

by ersatz_cats

Howdy everyone! Wow… Has it… been that long?

[awkwardly shuffles feet]

Hey, listen. I’ve got plenty of excuses, most of which I’m sure you’re dying to hear. I was legitimately away from home for the entire month of October – a fact I didn’t want to advertise too much, for website-moderatory and other obvious reasons. (I’ll be writing about my October adventure another time.) And then the holidays came, and then in January my trusty cheap keyboard I’d typed this entire site on finally went tits-up. Then SURPRISE, my Seahawks made the Super Bowl! I can apologize for the delay, but I cannot apologize for not telling you there’d be a delay, because I totally did that, as a top comment.

With that said, in the course of researching this installment, it was heartwarming to come across folks in various spaces, expressing their interest in “fallout roundup” part one, and anticipating part two. So thank you all, as usual, for the kind words. And apologies in advance for disappointing you so thoroughly today.

Just kidding, of course. We are indeed back! Our continued topic is the fallout of the verdict in the Billy Mitchell / Karl Jobst legal battle in Australialand. Last time out, we discussed Billy’s nuclear insecurity, his recent lies about Karl and Twin Galaxies, idiots on the Internet, Junior masquerading as his father on Twitter (a subset of “idiots on the Internet”), and of course, paint cans.

So where did we leave off again?

Oh, right. That. This blog did not exist during the RWhiteGoose Discord drama, or else I would have covered it at the time. I told myself I wasn’t gonna do a full dissection of this issue now, in 2025… er, 2026. But then, as usual, I sat down and kinda wrote one anyway. Whatever, I pared it down as much as I could. And this absolutely does relate to the Australia judgment fallout, although the way it does may not be obvious at first.

A few quick disclaimers are in order. Today’s topics will focus more on the Karl side of things, with a few appearances by Billy (or his son) by way of social media. Don’t worry, there will be a “part three” with the focus back on Mr. Mullet. Also, fair warning, there will be a lot of politics today, including heavy-duty stuff, which means some of this will be on the serious side. While politics are important to me, I’ve chosen to mostly avoid discussing political issues on this blog, for a few reasons. But if you know the RWhiteGoose backstory, then you already know it’ll be unavoidable. And since there’s no way around it, I’m just going full ham. It’s okay if you disagree with me on some stuff. Literally everyone reading this will be offended by at least one thing I say or do today. Think of this as Thanksgiving dinner with the extended family, minus aunt Judy’s mystery casserole, and also that guy who cheated at Donkey Kong got invited somehow.

Don’t worry, though. We’ll have some fun too, starting with a topic near and dear to each of our hearts. A topic we’ve had the joy of discussing many times before, and will no doubt continue to inspect long into the foreseeable future. Ah, you guessed it, my friends. We’re gonna begin today by talking about…

…more idiots on the Internet!

NO SHORTAGE

During the nadir of Billy Mitchell’s popularity, people used to ask me if he actually had fans – as in, literally any fans. And he did have a few, including a couple folks I mentioned last time. But oh man, after Billy’s court victory, the cockroaches came out of the woodwork to heap praise on him and apologize for ever doubting him.

We truly live in a post-shame society. Note that this is different from simply “Billy sucks, but Karl sucks more recently for losing”, which I disagree with, but which is an expected immediate reaction to the giant court loss. No, we’re talking straight up full-throated Billy praise. I could show many more examples of the above. One unmitigated loser spends his time replying to Billy with recycled Chuck Norris jokes, with Billy in place of Chuck. You get the point. As I’m happy to remind anyone at any time, we are talking about the dude who got so butthurt that someone was better than him at Donkey Kong that he lied about having super-duper-higher scores, then produced fake tapes and phony scenarios to justify those scores, and then threw a massive lawsuit tantrum when his video game cheating was outed by gamers way more skilled than him. Yeah, real untouchable Chad material lol. Imagine the pouty fits he must throw over mundane life inconveniences he can’t sue.

If you do have the stomach to peruse Billy’s timeline, be prepared for a lot of second-hand cringe. The fawning worship is out of control. Yes, I’m sure a nonzero percentage of it is intended to be ironic – although, I don’t get the sense either Billy Senior or Junior are above basking in ironic praise as if it’s sincere. (See Billy’s early appearances with East Side Dave to see what I mean there.) But the vast majority of this text diarrhea is definitely not attempting to be ironic.

Here, let me show you an example of what I mean. While researching Billy’s post-verdict Twitter, I noticed a subtle interaction which made me laugh. It involves an account that has since been suspended, but I took screenshots of everything relevant. First, Billy posted the following on the morning of September 4th:

Two minutes after retweeting some news with commentary, someone dares inform “King” Billy that he has a bad take. (I’m not going to argue over the take itself. You can in the comments if you want.) Four minutes after that, Billy responds by basically saying “Nuh-uh, it wasn’t my take, I just relayed it from a friend. It couldn’t be my opinion, even though I shared it and represented the source as trustworthy, because that would make me wrong, and I’m never wrong.” And instead of laughing in Junior’s virtual face over this dumbfuck chickenshit answer, the guy immediately resumes kissing his butt. “Oh, my bad King Billy! You’re still the greatest! LMAO Isn’t it funny how you sued that guy?”

Again, Billy’s tweet and his reply seen above were six minutes apart. Rando dude really bought the whole “Wasn’t me because I’m never wrong” angle at the drop of a hat. Total unyielding credulity with these people. Of course, someone else was willing to ask “So what is your take on it then?”, to which they never got an answer.

That’s funny by itself. But what really made me chuckle was, after this whole exchange, after giving this “Not my take” deflection, and after our featured Internet Dumbass of the Hour sucked it all up like a DustBuster for humiliation, Billy later retweeted his own “Don’t look at me, I didn’t say it, I just heavily endorsed it” take:

LMAO “Uhhh, I didn’t mean it, not me.”

And people still defer to this guy?

I know, I sound like a jealous coper here. But the thing that confounds me is, who would even want that kind of sycophancy? I get plenty of compliments on my writing, and I truly appreciate them. I imagine more talented and prolific content creators than I are accustomed to streams of praise. But if one of y’all started trying to smooch my buttcheeks this hard, I would physically feel uncomfortable. If someone began slotting me into Chuck Norris jokes, I’d be like “Please stop. You’re embarrassing both of us.” I guess that’s why some people like Billy? Because they can heap that sort of praise on him and he just soaks it up and wants more? So he validates the worship experience for them? And that would be why the horrifically insecure manchild who stands on paint cans in photos and still desperately needs you to believe he never cheated at Donkey Kong gets marketed as an alpha gigachad?

But of course, while irony may not be intended, that doesn’t mean the sincerity of these taint-treaders is above question. Modern social media as a whole is in a weird place with unearned trust. At some point in the future – and I realize I say this as someone who writes pseudonymously – uncritical acceptance of personal qualifications from anonymous Internetgoers will be met with the same derision as you would offer today’s boomers who credulously believe Microsoft would cold call you about your computer’s security. To put it another way, anyone can claim “I did this” or “I used to be that”, but we haven’t culturally advanced to where the general understanding is much of that sort of talk is just lies. Recall, as we discussed in “Part 1”, how once upon a time Billy/Junior had blocked anyone even remotely antagonistic – people who had never even had a single interaction with Billy’s account directly. As I speculated, the Mitchells probably used a bot to auto-block everyone who liked certain tweets from Jobst or whoever. So right away, I’m suspicious of anyone who wasn’t blocked proudly declaring that they were big Billy haters all along.

The poster boy for this is our pal ConcertCruizer – the one guy who publicly stood by Billy all along. CC’s whole shtick is (to paraphrase) “I used to be a member of the hate mob against Billy Mitchell, but then I asked the haters serious questions, and they couldn’t answer my all-important concerns, because they don’t want evidence, all they want is confirmation bias.” (See examples here and here and here.) Of course, none of us knew who this fucking guy was, nor have I found any record of him criticizing Billy prior to these pronouncements. Sometimes, if you ask him what these super-important questions were, he straight up ignores you. (That’s something of a habit.) If you do manage a response, it turns out his big concerns are idiotic nonsense like “Maybe the venue did something to Billy’s tapes” or “Maybe they mis-manufactured his game so it looks like MAME”. (Those are paraphrases, but he repeats these sentiments a few times.) And of course, CC unflinchingly repeats lies Billy told him – specifically, he loves pushing Billy’s story that Guinness was never threatened with a lawsuit – and then CC refuses to address the very simple evidence disproving what Billy told him. But hey, Billy is his “dear friend”, and certainly not a narcissist who manipulates useful idiots like him.

The one thing I’ll say sort of in defense of ConcertCruizer is, he’s not a fly-by-nighter like these other bandwagon jokers. He may be a sucker, but gosh darnit, he is a consistent one.

HATERADE

We could gaze into this abyss of a failed education system all day, but there is a point to be made. The other side of the “unhinged praise of Billy Mitchell” coin is “crazed slander of Karl Jobst”. Regarding the more rabid Karl haters, I think it’s safe to say they’re generally out of their fucking minds. I don’t mean that as a prerequisite, of course. It’s not like “Oh, you’d have to be crazy to hate this guy.” There are valid criticisms to be had – and we’ll get to one at a future date. I’ve spoken to people I respect who don’t like Karl, for whatever reason(s) they often struggle to articulate. That’s fine. Hey, trust your gut, as they say. You don’t have to like him, or me. What I mean is, when you find Karl’s most vocal detractors, it doesn’t take much prying to see they’ve chosen to completely detach themselves from reality and reason.

Karl’s dealt with this for a long time. He addressed some of it in a video titled “I’m being SUED and CANCELLED” in 2021, back around the time the Billy Mitchell lawsuit first dropped. My favorite was how Karl once joked in his Discord that if he got enough subscribers he’d get breast implants – clearly, a joke – and then that was twisted by bad-faith actors to mean that he would force his wife to get breast implants without her consent. Stuff like that. Obvious bad faith horseshit, which unfortunately well-meaning parties may get roped into if all they heard was the fifth-party telephone game version of the story.

I’ll discuss the RWhiteGoose topic in a moment, but excluding that, the vast majority of this stuff was utter nonsense. But that didn’t stop it from being dredged up again and again any time Karl stepped into any apparent controversy. And they’d invent new tripe, as well. Remember how upset some people were that Karl included a sponsor in his video on Jirard the Completionist’s charity fraud? I found this very peculiar, considering Jirard’s deeds were so much worse, and that Karl literally did not include a sponsor in his first video on the subject – just the ones where he was obliged to follow up on the worthwhile investigative story he had the courage to break. As Karl explained in his now-unlisted video responding to Moon Channel, Karl lost money by covering the story without a sponsor, and yet he still faces accusations he conjured the whole investigation as a way of making money.

It’s no surprise this existing smear parade went into overdrive the moment Karl lost a massive judgment to professional huckster Billy Mitchell. “Oh, Karl lied to everyone about the lawsuit” (even though he didn’t). “Oh, Karl’s evil for blaming Billy Mitchell for a suicide” (even though that’s not what Karl said, and nobody seemed to think Karl’s remarks were gross at the time he made them). Truth or context didn’t matter. Every assumption was negative. And of course, they had new fuel – Karl was found guilty of defamation by a judge in a court of law.

On r/youtubedrama, during Karl’s publicized post-judgment bankruptcy, someone posted a screenshot from Karl’s Discord where he explains his wife will buy out his share of their house. As you currently know from having watched Karl’s follow-up video, what this means is “The bankruptcy trustee took possession of Karl’s assets, and his wife is allowed first dibs to buy out his share of co-owned property from the trustee, which is standard bankruptcy process.” Of course, the title “Karl Jobst boasts about moving assets to his wife before declaring bankruptcy — a possible ‘creditor-defeating’ scheme” prejudiced readers into thinking this was evidence of nefarity. And most of the replies join in that tone accordingly, because that’s what people do.

I might give this a pass – after all, we can’t always have the benefit of certified Australian bankruptcy advice. However, one brave soul, one intrepid individual, months before Karl himself clarified the situation, dared possess the audacity to bring up fucking Google and spend two seconds discovering that what Karl described was entirely above board. This clever maverick of the Information Age attempted to share their wisdom with the masses, and of course, their efforts were rewarded with downvotes:

The whole post is archived now, so there’s no way to reply or alter votes. But wherever you are, HailSaturn, I see you, and I salute you.

These unhinged, frothing haters weren’t strong on concepts like evidence. I’ve since lost track of where I found this, but when skimming through YouTube replies a couple weeks after the verdict, I found someone this close to going full on “Mandela Effect” over Karl:

There didn’t seem to be deep acceptance among this crowd that many of us who support Karl knew all along that the case involved a statement about Apollo Legend. I, pseudonymous Internetgoer that I am, can attest that any time Karl released a new video on Billy, I watched and saved it as soon as I could. And I know I and others would have immediately gone “WTF” had Karl actually said the thing this person confidently recalls Karl having said at some point. But you know how it is. You try convincing someone that maybe their memory just sucks.

It got to a point where Karl himself couldn’t talk about Jirard Khalil’s blatant charity fraud without idiots barfing up the replies going “What about you and Billy Mitchell?” What follows is from the replies to Karl’s Reddit update on the Open Hand Foundation’s delinquency status. See how long it takes you to figure out what this person is referring to [sic]:

You should look at his report – it’s not actually about MAME, it’s about what happens on a hardware level regarding the video feed (I havn’t read the entire thing tbh). Regarldess, you are just assuming he is an idiot or underqualified to suit your purposes, much like Karl did. Karl could easily have presented his conclusion and then explained why he doesn’t think it’s credible – but it would require more than just “don’t mean he isn’t an idiot’. Federal courts qualified him as an expert, surely the weight of evidence is in his favour? This is exactly the type of thing I’m talking about with Karl, and now you. You just dismiss it because it suits you without any real reason to do so.

You guessed it. This was an attempted defense of Michael Zyda, Billy’s pervy “expert witness” who pooped out a two-page report about how maybe Billy’s MAME tapes were the result of dirty VCR heads and such. You may be inclined to believe this Redditor is an intentional troll, and certainly the “I haven’t read the entirety of two pages” bit points in that direction, as if they wanted you to know they were full of shit. But if you peruse the totality of the thread, the sincerity of this person’s engagement feels undeniable. Nobody’s writing all that crap without some belief in what they’re saying. Either way, “I was actually shitposting all along” doesn’t exactly dispel the point that any of this drivel has merit.

Speaking of sincerity of effort, remember Persephone van der Waard? She’s the verbose blogger who had a beef with “Gen-X Gamer” back in part one. She certainly jumped on the Karl hate-wagon, with her lengthy litany that includes such gems as “Karl is racist because he made LUS feel discriminated against in 2025 based on older material” – and yes, that is a direct quote. (Hey, it’s also possible LUS is a known bad-faith actor who makes up lies.) Persephone’s perspective is drowning in identity politics overall, as we’ll see. She has very little to say about me, outside of a compliment for my #FreePalestine hashtag in my Twitter bio. Luckily for you all, I’m not so easily flattered.

If I may continue this personal aside, one of my favorite reactions I see to my writing is where people refer to the content of my work, while inadvertently admitting they didn’t actually read it. You know what I mean. “ersatz here disagrees, basically saying X, Y, and Z.” How do you know what I said? Did you read it? Because it certainly seems that you did not. I don’t always make a big deal of this, because nobody’s required to read anything I produce. I understand, everything I write is hella long… although, in Persephone’s case…

If you’ve read my previous coverage, you can probably spot the issue here:

I didn’t write fucking anything with “568 citations”, lmaooooo. I was responding to a document consisting of 568 numbered passages, and I numbered my remarks to correspond. I also didn’t write 568 of them; I skipped a bunch of passages, and doubled- and tripled-up my remarks where appropriate. Hell, at one point I knocked off ten almost-sequential passages in a single remark:

And like clockwork, in [359] [360] [362] [363] [364] [365] [366] [367] [368] and [369], the convention-related testimony of Billy’s family, friends, and business partners (Billy Junior, Walter Day, Triforce, Michael McNutt, Preston Burt, and Steve Grunburglar) is all taken at face value.

And one would know this if they had read even a portion of the piece. But you know, if you just glance at it, you see these numbers that look like citations, and they seem to go in order, and the last one says [568], therefore one might assume…

Anyway, this lack of simple academic rigor seeps throughout Persephone’s analysis of Karl. One example she uses is from late April (following last year’s verdict), where Karl posted the following meme to his Discord:

I know it’s been a long year for politics, but for those who may have forgotten, this is a reference to a rather Nazi-like salute Elon Musk delivered with an angry face at Donald Trump’s second inauguration. As Elon did this, he said the words “My heart goes out to you,” prompting excuse-makers to say that’s what this gesture was meant to intend. Given Elon’s propensity for promoting “white solidarity” while retweeting straight-up Nazis, I’m inclined to believe it was the Nazi thing. (Heck, I’m old enough to remember when JK Rowling was believed to be a transphobe based on personal associations and Twitter likes, before she finally dropped the mask entirely.)

Getting back on track, Karl posted this meme to his Discord, back when everyone was excited to screencap and share and scrutinize every little thing Karl said or did. This led Ms. Persephone to the following conclusion:

This is racist, because the Nazi salute is racist, period. Using it makes you racist, ipso facto, but especially in light of past events that involve Karl and various racist people—most notably a Neo-Nazi named RWhiteGoose.

Again, I’ll get to the Goose stuff in a moment. Karl isn’t “using” a Nazi salute, you dummy. It is a joke. And I don’t mean “He says he’s joking, but he secretly means it.” There’s nothing here to mean. It’s literally, genuinely, a joke. It’s one I would’ve been comfortable posting to my own timeline, confident that my followers would be smart enough to understand and laugh and not assume I’m telegraphing my secret Nazidom. The joke, if you need it explained, pokes fun at the absurdity of the “My heart goes out to you” excuse, as the gesture as delivered is incongruent with any other love letter context. And you know Karl isn’t an Elon Musk fan, as he had already done a video mocking Elon’s silly stories of gaming prowess (something Persephone makes a quick acknowledgment of).

This is what I’m talking about. These motherfuckers see evidence – literally any evidence, of any kind – and they immediately jump to “How does this make Karl Jobst look bad?” Or rather it seems, “How can I use this to make Karl look bad?”

This brings us to our chief clown of the day – an absolutely prodigious shit take factory. You will definitely want to put on your stupidity safety goggles before you lay eyes on this one.

After perusing multiple social media platforms, attempting to make sure I had all the important bases covered for this write-up, I noticed a name that I’d seen before.

Apparently, this guy’s name is Denny Thray. Dude loves to post and reply about Karl, across different sites. Classic debate troll, always takes the antagonizing position. He’s quick to chide anyone for speculating on anything while engaging in wild speculation himself. And when that doesn’t work, he just flat out lies. He complains that not enough lawtubers covered Karl’s court loss. He says Karl lost because he didn’t listen to his attorneys. He asserts that Karl “has been shown in a court of law to be an arrogant, brazen child”. And Denny claimed that Karl, and I quote, “didn’t bring up Apollo in the context of the lawsuit. Not once.”

We’re on a clock today, so I’m not gonna sit and correct each of these examples right now. (Although that last one is an especially brazen lie.) Where Denny really elevates his commitment to his craft is, he doesn’t limit himself to attacking Karl irrationally; he goes out of his way to prop up anyone Karl has criticized.

Let’s start with Billy Mitchell, who apparently “helped build the high score and speedrunning scene from the ground up”. Billy’s score submissions from 2005-2010 were from “basically the wild west”, and thus it’s unfair to hold them to modern standards. MAME “wasn’t policed like it is now”, and wouldn’t have given Billy an advantage anyway. And besides, evil Karl is the one who made the Billy cheating narrative go viral in the first place. (Even though Karl said next to nothing about Billy until two years after the highly publicized score dispute.) As for the lawsuits, Denny suggests Billy only sues people because “his opponents are idiot children who don’t know when to shut up”. He claims multiple times that Twin Galaxies paid Billy Mitchell a bunch of money as part of their settlement, framing this as proof of Billy’s vindication. (This of course is another lie. If I don’t know for sure what’s in the confidential settlement, I guarantee this fuckhead doesn’t know either.) Denny claims that reports that Billy lied under oath, or that Billy gloated over a rumor of Apollo Legend’s death, are “allegations that one or two extremely unethical youtubers created to get views”. Denny says there’s no way Billy could have texted in the courtroom because, according to Denny, the court seizes your phone before you enter. (LMAOOO Has this man set foot in a courtroom once in his entire life?) Oh, and as for Billy’s financial woes, Denny speculatively suggests Billy probably didn’t care about the money anyway.

Again, this is all bullshit. If folks want to, we can hash any of these items out in the comments below, but I’m gonna speed right along. You knew this wouldn’t be limited to Billy. If you’re going to be a shameless liar trying to undo Karl’s work, you gotta get the lubricant and fluff up Jirard the Completionist and his charity fraud, too.

Let’s see… Denny insists it’s totally normal for charities to never donate money for years. He holds onto the wholly made up story that OHF was probably setting up an endowment fund. Alternatively, he says OHF was likely sitting on donations “until they can make one big restricted donation”. Except earlier it was “I didn’t say raise money for one big donation. I said endowment fund.” (You see how the expressed beliefs are malleable, while only the conclusion is consistent.) When people point out there’s no evidence OHF was going for an endowment, Denny says – and I quote – “That’s true. There is no evidence that they WERE NOT either. So it’s speculation either way.” As for why Jirard said nothing of any endowment strategy, Denny muses that Jirard “likely did not know about it.” After all, just because someone’s a “Director” doesn’t mean they have any idea what’s going on. Either way, mean old Karl didn’t know what OHF’s plan was, or why the money was being hoarded. (Despite, you know, Karl asking them directly and getting an unsatisfactory answer.) Denny says Jirard’s statements about working with UCSF and other orgs were “likely based on early outreach rather than deception”, and that it’s “entirely possible they had longstanding contacts” with those orgs that “fell through for reasons we are not privy to”. And when Jirard said OHF was the “number one support partner” of UCSF, he probably just misspoke. Denny adds that “there is important context you are missing”, and that context is, “I do not believe Jirard fabricated partnerships out of thin air.” Denny’s rants are characterized by sweeping denials of anything bearing Karl’s fingerprints, contrasted by excessive trust of anything Jirard says. For instance, he asserts that “it sounds like [Jirard] was in major arguments with his family” about how to donate the money. And Jirard doesn’t seem like a guy who would know how to embezzle money anyway. According to Denny, Jirard never even got a real chance to apologize, which was somehow Karl’s and Mutahar’s fault. After all, “Literally all of Karl’s video on the completionist was 90% conjecture and speculation.” (Literally all was 90%!) But don’t worry, even if OHF did keep all that Twitch revenue, OHF was registered at the time, so it still technically went to a quote-unquote “registered charity”. You cannot make this shit up! Oh, and that golf revenue probably all got used up by that expensive “fundraiser”.

Heck, even Moon Channel found a new defender! As Denny put it, “I did not find Moon’s video biased toward Jirard at all. It came across as level-headed and well-researched.” Denny also straight up lied about there never being a big argument between Karl and Moon in the sub, something longtimers there were quick to correct.

You laugh. So did I. But here’s the problem: At the height of Karl-Hate-Mania-Palooza, Denny Thray was getting a fair amount of upvotes for some of this nonsense. Check those links! Eventually, the heat cooled down, and people in r/TheCompletionist2 caught on to this guy’s shtick:

I doubt anyone capable of stringing sufficient words together could genuinely be this dense. I prefer to believe Denny enjoys triggering honest people by saying stupid, incorrect things, which naturally puts him at odds with anyone who deals in factual sincerity. So rather than being based on any true personal animus, it may all be business-of-a-sort.

And this practice of perpetual dipshittery and intentional wrongitude coincidentally happens to put Denny at odds with Karl’s journalism every single time, for some strange, inexplicable reason.

But none of this negates the effect liars like this have on the broader conversation, and how they get to shape the narrative. Imagine coming across some commentary on Karl in the wild. Maybe it’s talking about an aspect of the case you aren’t as familiar with. You go “Oh, I didn’t know that.” You figure, this person seems earnest, they know intelligent words, they include links to “receipts”, so they’re probably not just telling you a bunch of straight-up bald-faced lies. And you had no idea that all along it was this fucking Denny guy, who probably spends his free time boiling his own turds. (Hey, there is no evidence that he doesn’t.)

I could do this all day, but I figured this sample size would be enough to drive home the main point. There is, however, one more key remark I came across that caught my ear. I discussed a few YouTuber reactions in part one, but I missed a late arrival titled simply “Karl Jobst is a fat liar”, from someone who can’t decide if he wants to go by “Revolver Snake” or “Revolver666”. Both names are equally tough and manly, and picking one means not picking the other, so I understand the predicament. Revolver casually discusses his thoughts on Karl Jobst while playing a Batman game, using the dubious capture method of external video camera pointed at computer monitor. Dude could probably use some “direct feed” advice from Billy Mitchell’s technician. The video is only six minutes long, but Revolver makes even that feel like a God damn eternity. He begins by declaring that Karl “might be one of the most dishonest people on YouTube” – a claim so astonishingly out of proportion that it leaves me wondering if this was dude’s first day ever on the Internet. Revolver then displays several misunderstandings of basic facts, including an apparent impression that Karl sued Billy on Apollo’s behalf? (Huh!?!?)

Okay, this guy’s clearly just an idiot. Normally this slop would be beneath even my threshold of attention. But I allowed the audio to play out as I worked on whatever. And that’s when I heard something that made even my calloused jaw drop. The lead-up starts at around 4:10:

And I’m happy he got sued. And, you know, it’s just crazy, cuz honestly Karl’s just a terrible person. He… He’s just not, like he… He just lies so much, you know. And it’s okay to lie. I mean, everybody lies. I lie, too. The difference is is that…

Mr. Revolver gets distracted by his game for a moment, before continuing his excessive candor at about 4:50:

You know, overall, Karl is just a disingenuous person. Um… I’m not gonna feel bad if his cancer returns, to be honest.

Wow.

Wow.

Okay then.

It might be the casual way Revolver dropped this particular bar that struck me. Again, this guy’s one idiot. He doesn’t represent anyone beyond himself. Still though, part of me wonders if the Denny Thrays and Persephone van der Waards of the world would hear this and immediately distance themselves, or if their first instinct would be to follow the given lead, to defend yet another of Karl’s critics, and try to justify why Karl would deserve to literally die.

Regardless, I don’t think Karl Jobst is the one who needs to go touch some grass.

ENTER THE RACISM

Okay, that’s it. All fun is hereby cancelled. The remainder of today’s installment will discuss the RWhiteGoose Discord fiasco. (I use the term “fiasco” a bit liberally here.) And yes, this does mean politics. At times, this will feel like a very lengthy historical tangent not relevant to this particular three-part series. But I assure you, this is a crucial and inescapable aspect of the fallout of the Billy Mitchell verdict.

I should throw a big ol’ CONTENT WARNING at you all now. I have a practice of not censoring vile slurs of others when commenting on their use of those slurs, except when the forum I’m using requires redaction. (And hey, I have my own site now!) This is another topic for a longer conversation, but when faced with such journalistic choices before, the feedback I’ve consistently received from the people most affected has been along the lines of “I want everyone to know exactly what that bigoted motherfucker said.” I’m assuming we’re all adults here, and if you’re not, I dunno, you should be reading fucking Bluey or something and not my bullshit about ancient video games from the dinosaur age.

One thing I can say for sure about Karl’s courtroom loss: It made some very racist people, very happy.

Obviously, the immediate fallout of the Australia judgment was a busy time for me. But in addition to writing, it was important for me to follow discussions on social media. The above reply to Karl’s tweet (which wasn’t archived) especially caught my eye, as I remarked at the time:

Anyone who thinks the current outrage cycle against Karl Jobst is normal, reasonable, organic, or not being pushed by a relatively small group of a certain “political stripe”, is not paying attention.

It wasn’t that the post existed. You can see racist bullshit all over the Internet. And certainly Twitter getting taken over by Nazi salute guy didn’t help there. But what caught my eye in particular was the number of likes. Even in my outdated screenshot there, that’s way above average for the rest of the replies. We’re not talking about huge viral threads here. I’m kicking myself now, because I know I checked in on the above tweet later, and saw the number of likes had grown substantially, but I apparently didn’t get a follow-up screenshot, and this dipshit later got his account suspended, so it’s all gone now.

Once Judge Barlow handed down his dumbass opinion, it was totally expected that people would flame and troll Karl. “Ha ha, you lost to King Billy,” “Put the fries in the bag,” etc. And when the “Karl lied to everyone by not discussing his lawsuit in detail” narrative took hold, it was that instead. But nothing about that necessitates bigotry. People were seeking out Karl, and instead of going “Wait, the racial caricatures of his wife are gross, I’ll avoid that one,” they’re hitting that like button, saying “Yup, this, and more.”

It’d be one thing if this was limited to the trolls of the day. They’re just awful people, shitting on this vulnerable figure one day, then moving on to the next. But the telltale signs are A) they didn’t really stop, and B) they ordered the Denny special, where it’s not enough to attack Karl – they have to follow and support his rival, too.

I’m not showing these to make an argument of “Oh, these are Billy’s friends, he must endorse this.” (Although I don’t see him discouraging it.) Who knows, maybe that one guy had a different username when Junior replied to him? And let’s not forget, I moderate comments on this site, so I see all kinds of bigoted bullshit. I could show waaaaaaaaay worse, and indeed I have. Again, it’s not just that such comments exist. It’s the traction they received, on small Twitter threads, that I found interesting.

So bigots don’t like Karl, and they’re glad he lost. It’s strange, though. Reddit always told me that Karl Jobst is “def racist”, an “unrepentant racist”, and “known to be a racist for years”, with “a history of racist comments”, not to mention an “antisemite”, and “white supremacist”, meaning “not ‘secret'” “white supremacist”, but rather “publicly known to be a white supremacist”, as well as a “neo-Nazi”, and “a nazi who is very skilled at pretending he is not”. (And those are just the upvoted comments I found!) Right away, it does seem a bit odd that such a fervent and dedicated “white supremacist” would marry a woman of color and have a biracial family, but hey, fourteen words are a lot to follow.

So what’s going on? Is Karl Jobst really the second incarnation of David Duke? Is this some bit of intra-bigot infighting, where these racists over here don’t like that racist over there? Surely, that many people couldn’t all be jumping to conclusions, could they?

DUCK, DUCK

To answer this, we first have to discuss another “controversial” speedrunning figure:

For those completely out of the loop, this is Ryan White, better known as “RWhiteGoose”, or just “Goose” if brevity is your deal. He’s a longtime speedrunner, and YouTube content creator, holder of several high marks on N64’s Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, and HOLY FUCK!!

Yeah, so in November 2018, a big batch of screenshots from Goose’s community Discord was published, exposing some hardcore bigotry from Ryan and others in the Goldeneye speedrunning community. There were over 140 screenshots (though some are effectively repeats), which were taken at different times judging by different date references and variations in users’ roles (white names versus green names). It’s always possible for these things to be faked, but these are generally acknowledged as genuine, and so I will treat them as such. The bundle used to be located here on Imgur, with multiple captures on Wayback Machine. If you do examine those archives closely, you’ll notice the album changed over time, with some images being added and others removed. For analysis and archival purposes, I’ve uploaded this handy zip file, including each of the album screenshots I could identify:

https://perfectpacman.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Roundup-RWhiteGoose-Discord.zip

As for Ryan White, the highlights – if you want to call them that – include advocacy for ethno-nationalism and so-called race science, disdain for race-mixing, belief in “Pizzagate”, homophobia, transphobia, slurs, casual use of the n-word – the works. The discussions also included lots of virulent anti-Semitism – and to be clear, when I say anti-Semitism here, I’m not referring to pro-Zionist whining like “Waaaaah, your bake sale for Gaza amputees makes me feel unsafe!” No, Free Palestine, and Fuck you. But in this case, we’re talking about actual hardcore anti-Semitism: references to the “JQ” (“Jewish Question”), anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, frequent use of (((echo brackets))), etc. (Whoops, gotta watch out. Ms. van der Waard will think me showing these examples makes me the racist for “using” them.) And to top it all off, Ryan proudly refers to “not showing your power level”, which is a fashy way of saying basically “Don’t let the normies know how red-pilled you are” or whatever. (And this isn’t even getting into what the other participants in the Discord had to say.)

Look, this isn’t a mistake. It’s not a case of some naïve shitposting kid wading into Gamergate rhetoric he doesn’t understand. There’s a big difference between saying casually racist things like “Polish people are stupid” or whatever, and earnestly articulating racist beliefs. Ryan White – at least the 2010s Ryan White we see in those screenshots – is a fascist, pure and simple. It’s not that such people can’t be reformed – it’s that true redemption would require a sincere repudiation of one’s former views, acknowledgment of their harm, and steadfast effort. We’d need a little more than “Sorry, I changed my mind.”

I will admit, I wasn’t following this story super-closely when it all broke in November 2018. I was ass-deep in researching Billy Mitchell and Twin Galaxies, so this speedrunning drama was somewhat of a side story. Ryan did release a video on Billy Mitchell when the score dispute verdict was announced by TG, although when the lawsuits started flying, Ryan understandably changed the title and thumbnail, before removing the video altogether:

I would’ve paid more attention to this Goose drama at the time had I known Karl would become a key figure in that saga later, but Karl’s videos on Todd Rogers and company were still a year away. As a result, I acknowledge I’m missing some of the media such as livestreams that would go on to disappear. However, some material survives, and for Ryan’s part, I don’t find it very convincing.

The key remaining pieces to consider are a tweet issued by Ryan when the story broke, and a follow-up reflection posted about a year later. Ryan acknowledges he “fucked up” and wrote “a lot of idiotic things”, including “hurtful concepts” which he has “come to fully and completely reject” and which do not represent his “current values”. Curiously, neither of these statements include any variation of the word “racism”, which would seem like a glaring oversight in an apology for all the racism you did. Among other things, I would kind of like to hear in his own words why he no longer thinks interracial dating is a threat to white society – if he’s even changed his mind on that at all. Instead, Ryan emphasizes a focus on rejecting toxicity and having a “positive impact” on speedrunning. In other words, he doesn’t want to be such a drag and ruin people’s fun, which sounds good, but again, the racism. Was the racism the problem? Or was it allowing you and your racism to get caught with your pants down? You have to remember, if you’re a massive racist, you don’t think the racism is the problem; in your mind, you’re a realist, who believes in positivity for the people who matter, excluding the degenerate ethnicities who (as Ryan suggested in his Discord) can go find their own ethnostate somewhere else. So you can say this stuff, and you don’t even have to lie on your beliefs to do so. And that’s even assuming straight up lying is somehow off the table. Coming from someone who was proud to hide his “power level”, literally none of this reads as a sincere change of heart, outside of perhaps a sense of “I should be more careful where I run my mouth.”

As I said, I’m missing some vanished livestreams and such. However, as I write this, I see no reason to assume the media Ryan has swept under the rug would be more convincing than those thread posts he has allowed to persist. I’m really not sure why any of it would disappear, to be honest. I get that you wouldn’t want “I was an unhinged racist” to be your opening handshake with everyone, but surely with a self-sustaining story like this, you’d want your most constructive mea cupla to be somewhere, right?

THE MESSENGER

Although the question naturally flows from this discussion, my objective today is not to relitigate whether Ryan White is currently a massive racist. However, people might think it unfair of me if I did not point out a couple mitigating factors to all this, which are also broadly relevant to today’s actual topic. Obviously, it’s been several years since these screenshots emerged, and I’m not aware of any objectionable comments from Ryan since. That still begs the question of whether Ryan is genuinely reformed, or whether he’s better at keeping his social circle small and trusted.

But more importantly, there was one detail about this leak that never sat well with me – and I promise, this is at least thematically relevant to the Karl/Billy fallout. To illustrate what I mean, I’d like to call to a comparison. Shortly before SGDQ 2019, speedrunner SHiFT was the target of some online harassment. Actually… I’ll just quote my own words from the time, and I think you’ll get the idea:

Sorry, I like GDQ and support them on most things, but this situation is completely asinine.

First of all, Shift’s use of a casual homophobic f-bomb (which is not okay) happened one year ago. “Well, it doesn’t matter when it happened.” APPARENTLY IT DOES THOUGH, because GDQ only banned him until a year and a half from now. If the ban was lifetime, at least you could say it’s a consistent policy. Why is one year without recurrence unacceptable but 2.5 years is okay?

Then you add the fact that this was all known public knowledge at the time Shift was invited as a last-minute replacement. Do they regret inviting him? Do they feel they should have known better? At what point should they simply take their own regrets on the chin, rather than cancel on someone after they paid for all their accommodations per their invite?

Why, you ask, was this cancellation issued after accommodations were paid? Well, turns out that was by design! This all came about because a persistent online bully who has harassed Shift, including going into his chat and mocking his dead friend the very day this all happened, held on to the offending clip, and deliberately sent it to GDQ at the moment they could most hurt Shift. And then bragged and gloated about getting one over on him. Yes, this move by GDQ is 100% enabling online harassment.

For those curious, SHiFT did eventually return to GDQ, and it seems he still faces the same online harassment. Example 435,689,765 of why you don’t appease bullies.

Who you get your information and evidence from really does matter. You are not immune to propaganda. Are your sources trustworthy? Are they at least trying to convey accurate truth? Or are you just a target for their bullshittery? And what are they leaving out? Do they have an agenda they refuse to disclose? You could think you’re the savviest media skeptic ever, and that you can sit and watch Fox News all day and still see through all their lies. (If you prefer, you could swap “Fox News” for “MSNBC”, which qualitatively isn’t much different.) But even if you assume they don’t slip some subtle mendacities under your guard, you’re still allowing bad-faith actors to dictate your focus and frame the discussion. They’ll have you arguing over irrelevant nonsense, and oblivious to the news that should have your attention.

So right away, I wanted to know the source of this Goose Discord leak. Who is this coming from, and why?

I can only repeat what’s been said by others. Unlike Alexander Hamilton, I was not in the room where it happened. But the general understanding is that it primarily involved two people.

First, the screenshots were published by one “Antifa Andrea”, a.k.a. “Cyberdemon531”. We met Andrea briefly in part one of this series. When she’s not cackling uproariously at stock Magic: The Gathering art, she has a history of instigation in the speedrunning community. Most notoriously, she was banned from GDQ for her involvement in passing around Trump MAGA hats during a live run at AGDQ 2017, something she says wasn’t done out of support for Trump but rather apparently just for the lulz. Oh, and she has her own history of vile racist comments, although I must be fair and point out those are also super-old. Full disclosure: I did interact briefly with Andrea in 2019 while researching the bogus DMCA takedowns by Phantasy Star cheater Kevin Durden. I didn’t know her whole history at the time, and she was nice and helpful to me personally. Again, flattery. You may take that for what you will. But despite her “Antifa” handle, I think it’s fair to assume her motivation here was primarily a demonstrable attraction to stirring up conflict and drama.

Okay, not the best start. But who was the reported source of those screenshots?

Oh boy. This is Ohrami. He likes to do what I call the Tim Sczerby special, operating sock accounts to defend himself while referring to himself in the third person, as if he’s some uninvested third party. But being a general weirdo like Tim is far and away the least of this guy’s issues. Ohrami is a frequent instigator on forums and speedrun / high score sites. He has a documented history of beligerence, racial slurs, transphobia, unhinged threats, ban evasion, racist harassment that he claims was from his girlfriend and not him, and uhhhhh….. oh, advocating for child fucking pornography, and writing deeply disturbing descriptions of statutory rape. (There were also concerns over news reports that someone sharing Ohrami’s legal name was convicted of breaking his infant son’s leg, although it was never proven whether or not this person was Ohrami.) There’s probably sooooo much more to this guy that I didn’t find, but this was getting too much for even my battle-tested safety glasses.

You might be shocked to learn that some of this was a bridge too far, even for RWhiteGoose’s nutty Nazi crowd. Goose successfully pushed to have Ohrami banned from the Goldeneye and Perfect Dark speedrun leaderboards. There was some controversy over whether Ohrami’s achieved times would be removed entirely, or listed without his name. Ohrami, who remained convinced everyone was conspiring against him, insisted that nothing short of full name recognition was acceptable. This despite the fact Ohrami is a massive moron and a total psycho, and the site would be absolutely correct in wanting no association with him whatsoever.

This all unfolded about one month before the November 2018 publication of the RWhiteGoose Discord leak, which was clearly a retaliatory act on Ohrami’s part. This post shows Ohrami already had at least one of the screenshots at the time of his banning in October 2018. And this video of his shows several other innocuous screenshots likely from the same Discord. Obviously, Ohrami didn’t release these screenshots because he found anything Goose said offensive, or because he genuinely wanted to warn the community about Ryan. Ohrami did it because he knew you’d find Goose’s remarks offensive, and that you would act against Goose accordingly.

Hey, it looks like we did get some intra-bigot infighting after all! Look, what Goose and several others said in their fascist safe space Discord was inescapably reprehensible, and you absolutely should judge the shit out of them for their own words. However – and people don’t always understand this, which is why I’m taking the time to spell all this out – if I’m going to get worked up over it, it’ll be because the evidence is overwhelming and beyond doubt. I’m not going to do it strictly because the other racist bigot wants to point fingers and direct my attention toward his enemy. You have to know your source, you have to know if claims and evidence can be trusted, and you have to be willing to let minor things go when circumstances say you should. If you don’t exercise some judgment, you’re going to wander through life being a propaganda patsy for awful people.

I know, all of this feels like a massive aside to the Billy Mitchell stuff, but I promise we’re going somewhere.

LIVING ON THE EDGE

Before we continue, I must break some bad news.

Karl Jobst has also said offensive things.

I don’t mean to make light of it, as he did say some things in his youth I genuinely consider objectionable. (This includes items not addressed in Karl’s “sued and cancelled” video.) I wouldn’t say he was full-on edgelord, as the stuff I found was relatively tame compared to examples I’ve already linked from others, or what’s out there on the broader Internet. If you really wanna know specifics, you can look around and find it for yourself, like I did. In my opinion, it all falls under the realm of “Dumb young person saying stupid shit.”

There are a few reasons I’m not going to share examples here. First, what I found was all very old at this point – all prior to the 2018 Goose Discord leak. That alone is not enough reason to avoid confronting it directly. However, as we’ve seen, and will continue to see, there are so many bad faith actors trying to unfairly smear Karl with any fragment of kompromat they can get their grubby, unethical hands on. If I haven’t made this point well enough already, I have no interest in using my powers for evil. You ne’er-do-wells can do your own work. And while all of that is sufficient basis for this choice, as I’ll explain in a moment, I also don’t want to unfairly skew the following discussion, which focuses on the evidence being disseminated in 2018. But I wanted to be clear that my analysis, as always, has never hinged on whether Karl is perfect, or even personally likeable, just that he puts in a lot of work to report the truth. If your opinion does require these other things of him, you are free to come to different conclusions.

This brings us to what you all know is coming next. Among the 140+ screenshots from the 2018 RWhiteGoose Discord leak, there was a single one containing a lone remark from Karl Jobst. Here it is, as it was originally published:

Obviously what Karl said was ignorant. We’ll get to that. Worth noting is that “ignorant” is a far cry from all the other vile shit that was being said by other people in the other screenshots.

When I first perused all this in 2018, a few things stood out to me right away. First of all, the displayed date is “Today”. Most of the screenshots in the bundle show old dates, with just a few labeled “Today” or recent times like “Last Monday”. So… Did someone screenshot this one immediately upon sight, and then save it? Or did Karl coincidentally post this right as the whistleblower decided to start collecting screenshots? I guess in fairness we have to assume Karl wasn’t an intended subject, given that if they did search for his comment history prior to the current date, they apparently didn’t find anything objectionable. They did include a lot of screenshots, of a lot of conversations between a lot of people, including many repeat names, and yet Karl only shows up the once, as a spur-of-the-moment item.

Given the color of Goose’s name (assigned by server role), it’s probably the same server as the other items. But – and here’s the key – Discord servers can have many channels. We don’t know if this was in the same channel as the others, and we don’t know if Karl read any of the really awful stuff. (And no, I’m not going to take the word of Sergeant Shit-for-Brains Ohrami for anything.) Karl’s remark looks especially awful in the context of Goose’s reply, but we can’t even say for sure Karl read the reply when it was posted. He wasn’t tagged. Look, I’m in a few random Discords, owing to various TG challenges I’ve issued and advertised, and I would have no idea what goes on in most of them. Even the Discords I frequent, I usually stick to a single channel.

I realize some of this feels like a big stretch. The point isn’t that these circumstances somehow prove Karl’s innocence. As I’ll continue illustrating, if I was going to come to the suggested conclusion, I needed more than this one screenshot.

A Redditor by the name of “Emtech1” asserted that Karl lied about leaving this Discord “months and months” before the leaks. I’m skeptical because this person’s story seems to suggest the screenshots were collected all at once; this is not consistent with the bundle we see, where some screenshots with white names were obviously taken at different times, or perhaps were from entirely different sources. And as we’ve established, some people will go on the Internet and say anything. Fun fact though: Jirard the Completionist included Emtech1’s claims in his big “Research” folder full of dirt on Karl and Muta, so Jirard conveniently believes Emtech1’s story.

But let’s throw away the guesswork, and stick to the evidence. What we know is that Karl entered a conversation about white people using the n-word and said:

Imagine if whites said ‘blacks you cant use this word’

We also know that Karl continued to be friends with Goose for some time afterwards, although Karl was clear that “What Goose said/thought was terrible and unhealthy”:

Fair to point out, this also didn’t specify “Racism is bad”. Despite standing up for his friend in 2018, Karl and Goose eventually had a falling out… although we’ll get to that later.

Karl discussed the context behind his Discord remark in his “sued and cancelled” video from September 2021, and on a few previous occasions on Reddit. While the screenshot reads as though Karl was arguing for his own right to use the word, Karl clarifies that was not his intention. According to Karl, the topic was an incident at the “Hangout Festival” in Alabama, where rapper Kendrick Lamar invited multiple fans on stage to sing his songs. The issue was that one of these prompted fans – a white lady – chose not to omit the n-word in the lyrics as she sang. This resulted in news stories discussing whether the word should be included in lyrics if the expectation is that the lyrics will not be sung by fans in their entirety. (John Lennon seems to have gotten a pass for singing his own lyrics.) Karl was sympathetic for the fan being put in that impromptu position, as he explained at about 15:00:

At the time, more than anything, I wanted to defend the fan because I didn’t believe they had any ill intent. And I felt sorry for them that they were put into that situation and handled it incorrectly. I attempted to defend this position very poorly by stating that it should be okay for anyone of any race to sing the lyrics of hip-hop music as they were written. Despite the fact that I did double down on this position a few times when challenged on it, I have come to realize more and more that my opinion on the issue and especially the way I expressed it was extremely insensitive.

Karl then added that “It is definitely not my place to be deciding what people of color should or shouldn’t find acceptable, and I sincerely apologize for what I said.”

(For those curious, the Alabama concert was May 2018. Thus, if the Discord conversation labeled “Today” was contemporaneous, that would mean someone saw it and screencapped it immediately at that time, well before Ohrami’s ban and months before the leak was published. Again, the people privy to this evidence weren’t offended by it. They waited until a personal vendetta was at stake, at which point they wanted you to be offended by it.)

To be clear, it’s not my place to weigh in on the topic of what language should or should not be allowed in popular music. Just don’t fucking use the word if you’re not black. It’s that simple. You don’t need it. There’s no reason for anyone to assume you aren’t a massive racist, not if your priorities lie in being able to use that word. That said, I don’t think sympathizing with the fan making a dumb decision when being put in an awkward spot necessarily makes one a racist.

Others were quick to assume the worst about Karl, and I’m not going to chide anyone (especially not folks from marginalized communities) for being generally careful about who they associate with. On its face, none of this is a good look. But eventually, Karl branched out into covering the Billy Mitchell story I’d already been diligently researching and reporting on, and I had to make a choice. Given that I had chosen to insert myself into covering a cheating saga affecting other people, I had already decided to set my personal politics aside as much as possible. (That’s part of the reason I usually avoid political discussions on this blog.) But I had no interest in associating with the likes of RWhiteGoose or his decidedly Nazi friends. I had doubts in the back of my mind, but as I’ll explain, I decided to move forward, with some trepidation.

FIRST CONCERNS

I could point out that, unlike Goose’s disclaimers of “Whoops, forget I repeatedly said all those horrifying things,” Karl’s “sued and cancelled” video confronts his objectionable statements directly. He also goes into detail explaining his thought process, both on why he previously thought his words were justified, and how he came to understand his position was ignorant. And all of that is important, and is something to keep in mind today, in 2026. But as far as my immediate reaction to this drama when it unfolded, that video was not yet on the table. As always, I can not and do not speak for Karl. But I can tell you what helped inform my own decision at that time to give him a chance.

First off, Karl’s Australian, so some bits of language (especially those relating to race) aren’t going to mean the same thing there. For example, in the U.S., when you say someone is “Asian”, the default assumption is east-Asian (China, Japan, etc.), whereas in the U.K. the default assumption is south-Asian (i.e., from India). So right away, Karl’s otherwise cringy use of the term “blacks” should be taken in that context. Maybe that’s how this is commonly said there?

On Reddit, it was suggested that the n-word is just as volatile in Australia as in the U.S. And as evidence, it was shown that several places in Australia were named after the n-word. But I felt like this evidence in fact suggested the opposite, that the word was not considered as objectionable there. Heck, some of these location names were still in use in Australia after the year 2000! Sounds to me like they didn’t consider the word very offensive. Do you see what I mean? As I said a moment ago, people find evidence, and instead of weighing it fairly, it’s immediately framed as “This makes Karl Jobst look bad.”

But let’s even set that aside, and assume Karl should have known better. The remark was insensitive and ignorant… but does that make Karl a fascist? Or a pariah? Or just someone who needed educating?

I’ll address this with an example, which once again involves our old pal Persephone van der Waard, and her opus titled “Karl Jobst still racist (and fash) in 2025”. I don’t know how many of you read all her bullshit. Unfortunately, I did, and I noticed a certain… theme… which some of you may not have. See if you can spot what I’m getting at. Here she is, talking about “Gen-X Gamer” again:

Gen-X is a race traitor and traitors, race or not, classically harbor a contradictory worldview — one instilled into them by capital blah blah blah blah lorem ipsum lorem ipsum

She goes on, of course. We ain’t reading all that bullshit here. But she goes back to this well again when talking about the YouTuber LUS, an Asian-American:

LUS is all three — a class traitor but also race and culture traitor on account of their being Asian and GNC while, again in my researcher’s opinion, defending genocide…

And in case it isn’t clear who’s writing this drivel:

… it includes more privileged people like myself — a white, non-disabled American trans women…

Who? The fuck? Are you? A white girl? Calling anyone “race traitor”?

Why are you bringing up their race at all? What point are you making? Who the fuck are you!?

Criticizing people of color obviously isn’t the issue. You can call people sell-outs, generally speaking. And I think you can even extend that to say given individuals support policies detrimental to certain communities. I’m white myself, but I’m certainly not going to pretend Barack Obama didn’t sell out the people of Flint, or that Jim Clyburn doesn’t support policies which happen to be harmful to black communities – and don’t even get me started on that ghoul Clarence Thomas. But you as a white person can do these things without calling someone’s blackness into question. There’s no need to call people “kapos” or “oreos” or whatever, and it’s wildly insensitive as someone outside the discussed community to do so.

Given how these things go, I’d expect a 10,000-word response from Ms. Persephone titled “Here’s why I as a white woman should be allowed to call black people ‘Uncle Tom’.” Or given her apparent commitment to identity politics, maybe she’ll suddenly discover she was 1/64th Cherokee all along. But hey, I’m open to being surprised.

Okay, you could say Persephone’s just one nutjob. But many less nutty people were quick to assume Karl named his child – a living human – after a dick joke, because the kid’s last name (the mother’s maiden name of Chinese origin) sounds like a dick joke to them. You know… It might be insensitive to leap to that assumption. They’ll try to justify this by saying the name “Maximus” is too on-the-nose, without considering that they’d say the same thing if the given name was Richard (Dick), or Harold (Harry), or Woody, or Chad, or Hugh, or Lance, or Jack, or Peter, or Pierce, or Rod, or Heywood, or Miles. All of it hinges on “Chinese name sounds like a dick joke to me.”

Look, a lot of people say mildly ignorant things. Like, a lot a lot. It’s not okay, and I’m not trying to normalize it. But that doesn’t make someone an “unrepentant racist” or a “publicly known” “white supremacist”. These framings are well out of scale. I wouldn’t even be putting a spotlight on Persephone’s faux pas at all if not for the topic at hand and her writing about Karl. I’m willing to assume no nefarious intentions behind her racially insensitive comments. But I find it interesting how folks like her and others don’t give the same grace to Karl over this Discord remark he expressly regrets.

THE COMPANY YOU KEEP

“Well, the difference is, Karl was in a Discord full of these racists. So we can infer guilt by association.”

Look, I hate to disappoint you all, but I was once inadvertently in a Discord where people were saying awful racist things:

I wrote many, many words about it here. But in short, in 2018, I was invited to a private Discord for discussing suspected Twin Galaxies cheaters. After a few days, I saw Rudy Feretti – yes, that Rudy Ferretti – spewing racist bullshit, as seen above. When I saw it, I figured “Okay, obviously the moderators will put a stop to this, or give him a warning, so no reason to freak out.” But then the mod, a knucklehead by the name of Maris Memes, laughed it off instead. So I took screenshots, left, and then blew the whistle. (If you’ve ever wondered what Maris Memes is upset with me about, this is literally the extent of it.) Oh, and it turned out this whole Discord channel was borne out of a personal vendetta against a guy named Triforce, which is a whole ‘nother story. I swear, the Internet is just personal vendettas all the way down.

So is this comparable? No, not really. Karl didn’t blow the whistle on Ryan’s response to him, assuming he even read it. But again, I’m speaking of my own experiences and what informed my perspective. I wasn’t convinced by this “Karl was in a nasty Discord” argument, because it also applied to me. And while I as a white person have an obligation to always educate myself and challenge any racist assumptions I may unknowingly harbor in an effort to improve my impact on the world around me, I know I’m not a fucking monster.

“Well, one thing you can’t deny is that Karl continued to be friends with RWhiteGoose after the Discord publication. So he knew about all the vile things Goose said, and he continued to associate with the guy.”

This is true. Karl actually addresses it himself in his video, at about 7:50:

I know there was a percentage of the population that thinks you should completely cut off people who have bad views, but I don’t agree with that. For most of my life, I’ve wanted to be a psychologist. I studied psychology in university. I wouldn’t be a very good psychologist if I refused to speak with or help people with unhealthy ideas.

And prior to that passage, Karl also shared screenshots of his chat logs with Goose, corroborating this account. But I know, I know. “The source on those is still Karl.”

So whatever. Let’s throw out that answer, and I’ll give you a different one – one based on my personal experience with advocacy work.

Be prepared, because this is a wild one…

As a white person, your reaction to your friends and family saying racist things isn’t necessarily supposed to be “I’m immediately never speaking to you again.” Not unless you’ve attempted to correct the issue, and they’re just an asshole who doesn’t care. Obviously, you shouldn’t enable the racism. But you should be a positive influence, an example to say “You don’t have to be that way, and it’s actually kind of shitty and even self-destructive to harbor those beliefs.” Some people literally just need that example, of someone they know personally, who isn’t a caricature on politically-motivated media.

And I think this is something my fellow well-meaning white folk struggle with. They want racism to be a problem consisting of other people. Thus, the way to fight racism is to find the racists, and throw rocks at them. (I have referred to a similar phenomenon as “Let’s get a bunch of dudes together to go find patriarchy and kick its ass!”) Hell, you get to look like a hero! And the evil racists who have no place in the society they _{simultaneously can’t feasibly be excluded from} will have no choice but to run and hide with… all the other racists… who are more than happy to validate their shit.

I am not chiding any person of color whatsoever for telling racists to GTFO. I understand completely. But – and I understand this is all contextual – racism isn’t a people-of-color problem. Racism is a white people problem. It’s white people doing this shit. Always has been. I know, wouldn’t it be nice if people of color could do all the work themselves, on their own, and then they could just let us know when they’ve figured out this whole end to racism thing. But it doesn’t work that way, does it?

At some point you have to talk to other white people about racism. And that includes talking to your racist friends and family. And I know! It sucks! Both the act of doing it, and the fear of being seen associating with the pariah. You don’t want to be seen as racist, which… you know… if I may say… in the grand scheme of things… that might be the thing you’re afraid of more than the actual harm of racism inflicted on others, which is often invisible to you. Hey, it may be worth self-reflecting on that point.

(Yes, again, I am speaking from a western context, and obviously things get much more complicated when fully laid out. If you absolutely insist on discussing anti-Arab racism in India, or anti-Japanese sentiment in Korea, or African-Americans saying they don’t trust “whitey” after hundreds of years of systemic oppression, those are separate conversations. It doesn’t negate any point I’m making here. I also understand the contrary argument, that people never fundamentally change unless they’re forced to, or they hit rock bottom, and that narcissists want you to focus on their hypothetical ability to change which they selectively never choose to employ. I never said any of this wasn’t complicated. The things I’m describing absolutely will work with some people, but not with everyone. I’m sorry if you thought there was an easy answer to assholes being shitty and ruining things for everybody. I assure you, somebody would have found it by now.)

So is that what happened here? Is this what Karl was doing? Again, I don’t speak for him, and I can’t read his thoughts. But I don’t see any reason why his account of wanting to help his friend be a better person should not be believed. I have heard it loosely suggested by Internet strangers that the real reason Karl maintained his connection to RWhiteGoose following the Discord leak was simply to boost his budding YouTube career, but neither the facts nor common sense would seem to bear out that theory. I’m inclined to believe – strictly as my own personal opinion – RWhiteGoose was more concerned about preserving his own career as a content creator, which would be severely damaged by the racism, and thus Karl was being taken for a ride on a phony “redemption” tour. We’ve seen those, haven’t we?

Before we move on, allow me to circle back to something. Yes, if you scour the Internet hard enough, you can find “edgy” comments from Young Karl that haven’t specifically been addressed. Karl Jobst has had an online presence going all the way back to high school. (Or whatever they call high school in Australia – probably “Schoolwillibydoo” or something.) He said stupid shit a long ass time ago, relatively tame stuff that I’d find derogatory but which I have no interest in prosecuting for the benefit of smear merchants many years later, as the dude is approaching 40. And hell, maybe I didn’t find everything. So is it possible some of this other material – either valid or fabricated – was passed around privately in 2018, and informed some people’s poor opinions of Karl at that time? Is this why some people were so sure Karl was “def racist” or whatever?

I’m inclined to believe the people making these assertions were hastily jumping to conclusions, as people often do. Both Occam and Hanlon would remind us that this process need not be especially malicious or overly complicated. Obviously I can’t prove Karl’s youthful edgelordom wasn’t a factor in these people’s conclusions. But if it was, aside from a few things addressed here and in Karl’s video, nobody then was confident enough to publicize it and put it to scrutiny. That’s kind of an issue in and of itself, but let’s set aside the implications of guilt-by-secret-evidence. I said I didn’t want to skew the conversation. This isn’t just me defending Karl in 2026. This is about a time capsule from 2018, a conversational moment in history. Nothing else was being litigated at that time. Various things have been piled on by bad faith actors in the years since (as we’ll see soon), but in that moment, the evidence presented was simply “Karl was in a Discord where people said Nazi stuff, is he a Nazi too?” And sure, that was a fair question to ask. As I said before, if your analysis requires that Karl was always perfect, you may come to different conclusions. I’m merely laying out the reasons why I didn’t assume the worst at that time. If I was gonna think Karl Jobst was an evil dude, I needed a bit more. And “a bit more” never came.

JUXTAPOSITION

Let’s snap back to the present day for a moment. You may be asking “Okay, what the fuck does any of this have to do with Billy Mitchell and the judgment fallout?”

What you see above are all direct replies to RWhiteGoose’s tweets about the Karl/Billy verdict in 2025. (These were captured in my time zone, hence why some say “March 31st” when the verdict was read on April 1st in Brisbane.) And believe me, much worse things were said in those threads. But I thought this was interesting. Aren’t Goose and Karl supposed to be super-duper-friends? Reddit always seemed to think they were joined at the hip, inseparable, practically of one mind and utterly indistinguishable.

Imagine that, the guy who thinks Goose said “correct things” in that Discord also thinks Karl is a “libtard”. And there seems to be some misremembered history mixed in there as well. One might suspect that Ryan’s surviving community aren’t “forgiving” of Ryan’s words from his old Discord, as much as they were never so offended by them in the first place. They are, however, very upset with Karl about a perceived betrayal of their community.

I think it’s fair to say Goose is egging them on a bit as well. Now, Goose may still want the broader gaming audience to believe he’s reformed and moved past his hateful beliefs. Even lacking a sufficient public and permanent denunciation of specifically articulated views, one could argue that several years of no demonstrable recidivism is sufficient grounds to give someone another chance at being a respected member of the community. And I won’t fall into the trap of thinking Goose is necessarily responsible merely because pseudonymous idiots show up and say “I support Goose, and I’m a terrible person with abhorrent views.” Still though, I can’t help but notice Goose doesn’t appear to say or do anything to repel these types from his community. Is Ryan still hiding that “power level”? It would be very easy to make “correct things” guy look foolish, and dissuade his patronage. I can only assume Goose does not do this because he does not want to. Hey, I guess being a fascist and a coward really do go hand-in-hand.

Karl does mention in his 2021 video that he hadn’t spoken to Goose in a long time. So obviously there was some falling out between them, after the Discord leak and prior to that video. I didn’t ask Karl for specifics on any of this, because I didn’t want to involve him in my writing about these trolls. I sure hope when they say Karl “[threw] Goose under the bus” and “treated [him] as so utterly disposable”, they aren’t referring to that tepid pushback on Goose’s insane and toxic views we saw earlier:

Still, you have to appreciate the irony that these people over here hate Karl because they think he’s close buddies with the fascist, while those people over there hate Karl because they know he’s not buddies with that fascist. Man, Karl gets shit from every angle! He doesn’t talk about it much, for obvious reasons, and because it wouldn’t do him any good even if he did. Meanwhile, his supporters also don’t talk about it, because it takes 10,000 words to explain why Karl’s not guilty of all the shit RWhiteGoose said, and because they don’t want the racist-by-association blowback. (I’ve gotten to where I kinda don’t give a shit what people say about me.) So the conversation gets dominated by bad faith actors who are just out to bully and smear vulnerable people for reasons they aren’t up front about. Hence why this same shit comes up every few years, over and over, the same stuff regurgitated every time, whenever Karl ends up on the ass-end of some negative news.

Don’t believe me?

As I’ve discussed, some people on Reddit are very assertive about Karl’s nefariousness. Earlier, we saw Denny Thray on multiple websites and across several Reddit threads, persistently pretzeling himself into positioning Karl as the villain in every journalistic tussle this side of WATA Games. Understandably, things like this have left me a bit skeptical of the loudest voices condemning Karl.

Take, for instance, this brief diatribe from 2021 – about three years after the Discord leak – by a commenter on r/Speedrun:

Here’s some more receipts of him justifying using the N word, bragging about sleeping with many women, his past of being a pickup artist, him bragging about his “massive cock” and wanting breast implants for his wife. He named his son “Maximus Wong” I seriously can’t not think this is related to his penis/eggplant obsession.

Wow, this dude wants you to hate Karl! The “receipts” link to a screenshot collage this person made of random things Karl said. This collage doesn’t justify the more salacious claims except perhaps if Karl’s statements are taken in the most strained, uncharitable way possible. And Karl addressed literally all of this in his video.

However, that doesn’t mean this person’s a bad faith actor, right? They may genuinely believe all these awful things about Karl.

But you know… I wonder what this vigilant bigot-buster, this anti-racist activist extraordinaire, would have to say about RWhiteGoose himself, given Goose expressed waaaaay more vile, obscene ideas and sentiments than Karl ever did, both by intensity and by volume, and tried to pass it off with an “apology” that didn’t bother including anything to the effect of “Hey, sorry about all the racism”.

Remember, this is the exact same person speaking:

Whatever you think about Goose, he has been very apologetic for the last 3 years and I think he’s made a genuine effort to move in a positive direction. I believe this to be a genuine change in character, and if it isn’t, I’d rather accept someone faking being a changed person than turn my back on a genuine one.

LMAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I wasn’t the only person to notice this discrepancy. It was at this point the username caught my eye.

“Wait a second! This is ‘Emtech1’! This is that same motherfucker who called Karl an outright liar earlier.”

So I stumbled into yet another rabbit hole, wondering if I’d found another “Denny Thray” – obviously not Denny specifically, as the shtick is a little different. But it sure looks that way.

Let’s see… Karl must be “well connected”, and people “don’t understand the wrong with what he does”. Emtech1 oddly can’t make up his mind whether Australians know “JAP” as a shorthand for “Japanese” is offensive, but he’s very sure that Karl using it “is what racism looks like”, while being strangely confident that had Karl handled it differently “no one would have batted an eyelid”. (lol I’m sure!) And if you think maybe Karl’s merely a bit ignorant and slow to change, then “you’re racist as well”. He nitpicks in detail Karl’s “sued and cancelled” video, giving it an “Apology rating” of D-minus. But don’t worry, Emtech1 doesn’t think Karl is “confirmed to be a White Supremacist or a racist”, he just heavily suggests it.

In isolation, I don’t think the points about the need to be open to retiring one’s use of offensive terms are off-base, even if you think you doing it isn’t racist because you’re referring to inanimate objects like game cartridges or you don’t “mean it that way” or whatever. And I’m sure this is why this rhetoric landed with folks at the time. Much of it reads as someone super-concerned and vigilant about racism in the content-creator community. Nothing wrong with that.

But again, you fall into a parallel fucking universe when RWhiteGoose is the topic. According to Emtech1, Goose’s “apology on Twitter seemed genuine”. What’s important is that Goose tries to “foster a positive online environment.” Emtech1 offers that “Goose’s story isn’t too unique”, suggesting Goose probably got innocently sucked into Gamergate. He is “convinced that Goose’s change of character is genuine based off of him continuing to acknowledge the wrong that he’s done”, linking the non-apology and a brief note on Goose’s Twitch channel. (Guess what that note also said nothing about!) Besides, “if KKK members can be converted”, why can’t Goose?

I feel like this should go without saying, but former members of white supremacy groups get redeemed through strenuous anti-bigotry activism motivated specifically by a desire to undo the racist harm they previously caused. They don’t get a free pass for going “Whoopsie daisy, that made me look bad, let’s hit the reset button and pretend that never happened.” Does RWhiteGoose still dream of a white ethnostate? Does race-mixing in advertising still make his skin crawl? Does he still ponder the ol’ Jay Cue? All I can say for sure is, he doesn’t want your harsh vibes.

It’s amusing going through these old threads, because you find other people just as skeptical of Emtech1’s praise for Goose:

Those screenshots aren’t from a random server he participated in, it was his own server. He’s the one who created that community and curated its content. He was the one doing the radicalizing.

To me, he’d need to do more than apologize. It was very clear from the leaks that “hiding their power level” was a strategy. What I’d expect is actual restorative action being done. Volunteering for anti-racist causes, for example. Otherwise, it is such a ridiculous turnaround that it is difficult to trust just some writing knowing what we know.

I think he needs to explain what changed his mind, because those views [do] not simply disappear from your mind overnight.

I’m sorry to be blunt, but: believing his claim that, “th[o]se comments do not accurately represent my current values”, when he gets ostracized for being identified as a neo-nazi only ~6 months later is genuinely foolish.

Some people did catch on. One person was sharply critical of Karl (as is their right), while pointing out some of the information being spread wasn’t necessarily above board:

But it’s also one of those situations where not everyone going after the guy is doing it in good faith. Emtech1, whose comment you linked there, seems to do little but throw mud at Karl Jobst for being a racist while talking up Goose, who is way way worse in terms of what has been shown in public. This could be his old alt right pals seeing an opportunity for revenge for his “turning” on them and taking Goose’s channel niche.

Oh, there’s more. You might be shocked to discover that Emtech1 sarcastically suggests Karl is less credible than Billy Mitchell, who “has grown to become the more palatable person”. And this was back in 2021, when Billy’s public image was at its lowest. Man, people will go on the Internet and say anything!

All of this makes more sense when you delve deeper and discover Denny 2.0 here, in addition to claiming to have inside info on the Discord leak (thus being part of the very circle Karl was pilloried for associating with), is a moderator of a “Sam and Tolki” spinoff subreddit, where the sidebar features RWhiteGoose, and where Emtech1 tagged himself “Goose Sympathizer”:

Say it with me, my friends… It just keeps happening.

We can move on from Emtech1, but I do want to wrap this up into an important point – and this is the reason to go through all this history in the first place. These are the people who shape much of the Karl Jobst discourse. Emtech1, who claims to be Australian (and thus an authority on the subject) was very persistent in their narrative that Karl “outright lied” about the n-word not having “racial implications in Australia”. (The presented evidence again is a list of place names in Australia using the word, which as I said earlier, suggests the opposite conclusion.) Emtech1 pushed this line over, and over, and over, and over, and over, across many subreddits. So if you remember following this drama at the time, and if (like me) you vaguely recall someone asserting they were Australian and that Karl was totally for-sure dishonest about the n-word not being as taboo there, you were almost certainly listening to this fucking guy, who like many on the Internet is probably just lying his ass off.

EVERYTHING BURNS

Okay, so Karl said a dumb thing, and he was slow to apologize, and he was friends with a guy who’s a racist scumbag, who he didn’t immediately ostracize, and liars on the Internet use all this to smear him year after year. And they’re quick to hop on any bandwagon any time he’s vulnerable, such as when losing a massive court judgment to some Florida douchebag so high on his own farts his tonsils and his colon have fused together.

But you might still think, there’s just so much smoke, there’s gotta be a fire there somewhere. In other words, Karl has been too adjacent to this sort of hatemongery nexus – way too adjacent than you or I would ever inadvertently find ourselves – that there must be some nugget of truth to the underlying narrative. We may lack the “smoking gun”, but that doesn’t mean Karl is innocent.

And I can see why that argument was compelling in late 2018, and would have scared people away. Surely, the next big bombshell is just around the corner, right?

However – sorry if this makes you feel old – it’s been seven years now since that Discord leak. Still haven’t found that fire! This supposed deluge of horrific abuse from Big Bad Karl still hasn’t surfaced. These lying idiots apparently haven’t even had the gumption to try faking screenshots of Karl saying reprehensible things – although some did lie about Karl supposedly making racist remarks about SMB1 speedrunner LeKukie (as seen in Karl’s video at about 12:30):

Billy Mitchell and Billy Junior will blow smoke up your ass. Jirard Khalil will blow smoke up your ass. Randos on Reddit will blow smoke up your ass. But still, no actual, genuine, certifiable fire, anywhere to be seen.

But that’s not really true, is it?

There is a “fire” here.

And I can tell you where you can find it:

I’m not going to spend a lot of time debating the existence of trans people, but I realize not all of my audience may be on the same page with me. So I’ll give this a quick go. Transgender people are here, they’ve always been here, and they’re not going away. They’re not hurting anyone. They’re not going to bite you. You need to put on your big kid pants and accept it. Bigotry was wrong when it was about other people, and it’s wrong now.

I’m old enough to remember the anti-gay furor of the early ’90s, back when “LGBTQ” was called “gay and lesbian”. I remember when 1992’s “Amendment 2” passed in Colorado, legalizing anti-gay discrimination. And I remember when a harsher ballot initiative nearly passed in Oregon the same year. All of this was thinly justified with selective passages from the Holy Bible, while proponents curiously ignored similar verses denouncing gambling and jewelry and mistreatment of foreigners, as well as the book’s more overt themes. (Jesus of Nazareth himself could literally tell these homophobes “Please welcome everyone into my church, and we can deal with all of your sins at the appropriate time,” and they would be utterly confounded.) Hate groups used the same charged rhetoric they use against trans people today, calling nonconformity a “mental illness”, and imploring people to “think about the children”, which always intentionally excluded the organically non-conforming children. Then the people who had been fueling anti-gay hate for over a decade turned around and said “Oh, we’re not against gay people, we’re just against gays having ‘special rights’ the rest of us don’t have,” where those “special rights” were basic anti-discrimination protections against the bigotry these same people were continuing to incite. Meanwhile, all of this hatemongering had clear political motivations. In 2004 – another presidential election year – a slate of anti-gay initiatives in several swing states were used to drive conservative voters to the polls, where it was expected they would also vote for George Bush.

But hey, it’s 2026 now. And it turns out, gay people never were hurting anyone. And that’s true of trans folks today. Transgender people are here to stay, forever. And even if it were somehow possible to criminalize and eliminate trans people from society entirely, those same hatemongers would turn their sights right back toward “gays and lesbians” in a nanosecond. Yes, some details are complicated. There’s gendered sports, and communal bathrooms, and elective surgeries. There are always details. But it’s easy to spot when bigots don’t genuinely care about these concerns, and these questions all have constructive answers that can’t be arrived at as long as the conversation is dominated by bad faith nonsense. I can’t stop you from being transphobic. But I can absolutely judge you for being an asshole, and a total rube who allows yourself to be incited into hating and fearing your kind-hearted neighbor while wealthy monsters rob everyone blind.

Okay, so where was I?

Right. Lemme tell you, some nasty people FUCKING HATE Karl for this.

If you poke around, there’s some sweet irony buried in many of those replies to Karl. In some cases, you can actually see the metamorphosis play out in real time:

LMAOOO “I used to be a fan of Karl” indeed. The truth comes out! But no, I’m sure all of the outrage is over “kArL mIsLeD mE aBoUt tHe lAwSuIt”.

We can go on:

Same story. They used to love Karl, Karl takes a principled stand regardless of whether it alienates any viewers, transphobes storm off in a huff, and then it’s “I can’t believe I let Karl brainwash me [about Billy Mitchell]” and “Karl is spiraling big time” and “He’s lucky he isn’t being dragged into a class action by his GoFundMe donors.” All the bullshit you were hearing after the judgment. But here’s the key: Sometimes they let you know they’re bigots with a preexisting axe to grind, but sometimes they don’t.

You can also find a couple of the same Goose fanboys we’ve already seen, pushing the same stuff:

Oh no, a pick-up artist!? Remember, these three in particular are fans of Nazi Discord guy. Somehow, I doubt they’d actually be offended if Karl inexplicably lost his mind and dropped an n-word on stream, or hurled the f-slur at someone. I’m guessing they’d be thrilled to hear it, high-fiving each other, because it would be more ammo to use against the guy they’re already slandering.

My favorite is when they get worked up over a theory that Karl has gone “woke” in the fallout of losing to Billy, as if in a desperate plea to save his channel. This of course is about transphobia again, and Karl’s analysis of the RileyCS cheating allegations. Sure, those videos came months after the court verdict, but as we saw, Karl had made his position on transphobia clear months prior to that verdict, back when we all thought Karl was going to win. Some people literally cannot fathom the idea of someone simply believing in something, which is probably more of a confession than anything.

And sure, sometimes these individual posts don’t get a lot of traction. But it’s as much about volume as anything else. This guy here lobbed a transphobic remark at Karl, then sought out random threads to post Karl Jobst slander everywhere he could. But don’t just take it from me; after all, I am Karl’s chief testicle-gargler:

The nice part about all this is, you don’t even really have to concur with Karl or myself on transphobia to see how this misinformation plays out. “Oh, Karl Jobst opposes transphobia, that means his GoFundMe was a scam.” No, it doesn’t. “I disagree with some of Karl’s politics now, therefore Billy never cheated and isn’t still lying about his critics to this day.” Really? The overwhelming evidence hasn’t changed. Are you going to discard that evidence just because I, the notorious Billy Mitchell blogger, believe strongly and with ample justification that Israel is an apartheid ethnostate? And who do you think might be prompting you to weigh evidence in this peculiar way? Yes, as I said earlier, you should always be mindful of sources. But there’s no underhanded agenda connecting my political affiliations, which I’ve always been open about on other social media, and my work chronicling the Billy Mitchell saga. Meanwhile, my assessment of Karl or his legal defense never hinged on whether he was perfect – a conspicuously impossible standard – or even whether he was personally likeable. By the same token, my thoroughly researched and strenuously sourced material should speak for itself.

Heck, if RWhiteGoose himself ever found his missing balls again, he could restore his old Billy Mitchell video, or even produce an entirely new one, and I’d probably agree with everything he said therein. The fact Goose is likely still a closet Nazi might affect my inclination to praise or promote such a video, but it alone wouldn’t have me framing his content as materially incorrect. And if, for some bizarre reason, he instead published something defending Billy (or Jirard or whoever), misrepresenting the evidence in the process, I would address that evidence directly. I’d probably point out his apparent personal grudge against Karl, but my argument wouldn’t be “We know this is incorrect because Ryan is a racist.” That’s not how any of this works.

GETTING THE IDEA

Hey, I told you I’d offend you somewhere today! I realize I’m opening myself up to criticism for my beliefs, and that’s fine. I also may have spoiled the politically neutral experience for readers who appreciate that sort of thing. To that I can say, in these contentious, escalating times, it has been an endeavor to avoid talk of politics, and that such excursions (as was necessary today) will remain the exception here and not the norm. Ultimately, this isn’t a political discussion; this is an analysis of narrative manipulation. Thus I think, even if you disagree with my specific beliefs, you can understand and maybe even agree with some of the underlying points being made today. On the other end of things, I may end up invoking the attention of the same idiot far-right trolls continually slandering Karl for made-up bullshit. Heck, if I’m really lucky, they may even publicize my work while they’re at it.

I didn’t enter this topic with the intention of proselytizing (I spelled that right on the first try!), but I suppose I should wrap this up into some sort of moral of the story. If you think the takeaway here is “Right-wingers irrationally hate Karl, this is all their fault”, then you’re missing the point entirely. Despite what strangers on the Internet may tell you, Karl Jobst is neither a leftist nor a “libtard”. (Though to be fair, a political moderate in Australia would probably look like a hardcore communist to a “moderate” in the United States.) Obviously I am a leftist, but some right-wingers and transphobes also still support Karl and think he should have won his case:

It’s also fair to say most of the original “Karl is a secret white supremacist and neo-Nazi” discourse was fanned by leftists, even if some more straightforwardly bad faith actors ran with it later. I will say, in more abstract contexts, this leftist faction would probably be happy to discuss the societal ills of punitive justice and the prison-industrial complex, and would advocate a more restorative dispute resolution model, yet ironically they won’t allow themselves to simply get over the fact someone said something shitty years ago.

The point is, this isn’t a left/right issue. It’s a propaganda issue.

Here’s a clear example of what I’m talking about, and why all of this is particularly relevant to the litigation fallout. If you’ve been a regular reader of this blog, then you knew the Australia lawsuit was about a statement regarding Apollo Legend, and not cheating allegations. But for a moment, put yourself in the shoes of someone who was somewhat interested in this case, but never knew this site existed. We’re talking about Karl’s general audience, many of whom were sincerely confused about the nature of the lawsuit, up until the verdict reading. I’ve addressed that previously. It was surprising to me that so many people were on the wrong page, but in hindsight it was perfectly understandable. Many folks got their info on a lawsuit exclusively from the guy who couldn’t really talk about his litigation defense, and who in fact said that he wouldn’t be discussing everything, and they didn’t search out alternative sources reporting the whole story.

So if you were in these shoes, what would your reaction have been? Or if you were one of these people, and did not discover this site until later, what was your reaction? Again, it’s natural for one’s first response to be “WTF? What happened? I didn’t know about this!” And if you had time and interest, you could review Karl’s videos, as I did, and see that Karl made clear on multiple occasions the lawsuit had something to do with Apollo Legend (which of course places it beyond the sphere of simple cheating allegations), and that not everything was being made overly clear, for obvious litigatory reasons.

So it was an error to rely on a single, invested source. Okay. You made a mistake. People make mistakes. I make ’em too. That’s fine.

But was it an innocent mistake?

Or was this Karl’s fault?

Did he deliberately mislead you?

In the moment, you didn’t know. This whole bit caught you by surprise! But sure as shit, there were other people out there who were very sure, very quickly, that Karl had been straight-up lying to you the entire time. And that you should be angry and outraged at him for doing so.

In that moment, there was a narrative vacuum, and as power vacuums go, the most aggressive and opportunistic people seized on it. They didn’t have much evidence for any of it. But what they did have was confusion, cloudy memories about things Karl may or may not have said (like our Mandela Effect friend from earlier), and strong emotions following a shocking and crushing verdict reading. And just like that, “Karl lied to everyone about the lawsuit” was everywhere, even if it had no more evidentiary weight than all the other bullshit these same people try to peddle.

And yes, it sucks! I wish humans weren’t like this. You can’t even say “Well, I didn’t get my info from any of these bigots, I got it from my friend.” That may be the case, but where did your friend get it from?

Still to this day, even if we limit ourselves to post-verdict discourse, it’s easy to find people misremembering or misrepresenting the Goose Discord drama. “[T]here are images in the folder of Karl talking to Goose who is freely using slurs.” That is “images” plural, instead of a solitary one. “Karl Jobst is intimate friends with RWhiteGoose.” As in, present day. So cutting ties with Goose years ago – the very thing people ostensibly wanted of Karl in the first place – that still isn’t enough! Or how about this: “[Karl is] extremely racist. There are a lot of old screenshots of him being super racist”. Again, pointing out that Karl has a biracial family won’t get you anywhere, for the same reason you can’t logic someone out of an opinion they didn’t logic themselves into.

Wait… Hold up a second… Lemme stop and check…

Yup. Bingo again. I knew it! You could do this alllll day. If you have a spare moment, these snippets tell a marvelous story. SuleyBlack is super-upset that Karl may have allowed an inadvertent inference to slip through by way of republished news commentary. But when their own recollection leaves an objectively false impression with someone who asks for a direct clarification – “How can Karl […] do all of that” (emphasis mine) – SuleyBlack themself is more than happy to run with this stranger’s obvious and massive misinterpretation without being assed to correct it.

And all of this is still going on several years later. Gosh, I wonder why Karl doesn’t try to appease these people.

Anyway, circling at long last back to Billy Mitchell himself, he’s no stranger to these techniques. You may recall from way back in “Dot Six” that Billy seems to enjoy doing racial caricatures of Japanese translators who are otherwise said to speak perfect English. I’ll let you decide whether or not this sort of casual racism falls within the realm of “education should be the goal not canceling”, but suffice to say, I tend to doubt Billy’s sincerity when calling out the flaws of his critics. This doesn’t stop him, though! In July 2020, shortly after Karl had published his very first video discussing Billy in any capacity, Billy (or Junior) was quick to remind everyone of Karl’s inclusion in the Discord leak from almost two years prior:

Ah yes, super-concerned about the racism, and not opportunism. This has gone on with various people for basically as long as Billy has had a platform. After Minecraft creator Notch agreed to fund Karl’s legal defense, Billy pointed him toward the Karl controversy of the day. (This of course was literally the same controversy we’ve been discussing, which was mysteriously resurrected now three years later. Gosh, who keeps doing this?) Remember David Race? Billy had no misgivings about David’s politics when David was committed to clearing Billy’s name. But after David publicly acknowledged Billy had been lying all along, once again, Billy was happy to cast David’s politics in the most negative possible light. He doesn’t want you weighing the evidence against him; he wants you splitting against each other over racism or gender-neutral bathrooms or whatever.

No surprise then that Billy continues dredging up Karl’s old edgy humor following his court victory. And of course, Billy/Junior had to upgrade to the full Denny Grand Slam by trying to rehabilitate Jirard the Completionist, even as his followers, recoiling in horror, advised otherwise:

Lest you be tempted to think Junior’s merely having fun shitposting under his papa’s name and it therefore “doesn’t mean anything” or whatever, don’t miss the fact this only ever goes in one direction. He’s never joking that Todd Rogers really was full of shit, or pondering if his father really did cheat and lie about it for twenty years like the overwhelming evidence shows he did. It’s deliberate. It’s always deliberate.

Meanwhile, I took a chance on supporting Karl despite the smear campaigns against him, based on all the reasons I’ve articulated. I’d say that time has only validated that choice. The distractions were always lies. And I’m certainly not going to be derailed now. I know better than to take advice from people who want to see me and my causes fail.

The point of all this was to recap the lawsuit fallout, and not to impart some larger life lesson. But if one is looking for such a lesson, it would be this: Always be mindful of who you get your narratives from. And hey, that includes me! I deal in narratives like everyone else. As long as you’re operating with the facts, you’re under no obligation to agree with my conclusions. But I think I’ve sufficiently demonstrated over the years that, while I’m not perfect, and I may not always hit every mark, I’m trying my best to convey to you all the truth. I’ve never had any personal or financial stake in any of these outcomes. And sure, you may not agree with all of my politics, but at least I am clear with you where I stand.

Now, someone reading this might be thinking “Sure, that all sounds nice, but I heard on the Internet somewhere that this guy is Karl’s official taint-polisher. Dude will snipe at anyone who’s ever used Reddit, but somehow, he never has any ammo to criticize Karl himself for anything.” Of course, the person thinking this seldom articulates what exactly I’m supposed to be criticizing Karl for, and when they do, it’s either half-remembered bullshit, or things I’ve already covered in excruciating detail. And it turns out, I have in fact criticized Karl for things when I felt it was appropriate.

But if you’re the one thinking this, you’re in luck! In part three – whenever I manage to finish it lol – I’ll be criticizing something Karl did – or rather, didn’t do – in the aftermath of the Australia judgment. I guess that’s my preview? Plus, we’ll get back to the sort of silliness and Billy Mitchell lies we enjoyed in part one. So join me here next time, when we continue to investigate the lawsuit fallout.

Oh yeah, this shouldn’t be a surprise, but I’m going to moderate the replies to this one more closely than usual. If you’re coming here to debate the existence of trans people, that shit’s gonna get insta-sniped. Defending awful things RWhiteGoose said will also not get you anywhere. Good faith discussions of other topics, as judged exclusively by myself, will be allowed to the extent it doesn’t become a shitshow. If you don’t like the rules, there are other sites where you can discuss these things. Patrick Scott Patterson memes are allowed, as usual.

And as always, but especially this time, Thank you all for reading!