"Mr. X" is an extraordinarily annoying persona on the Internet (the persona may be backed by one or more people, it's hard to tell) who endlessly heckles me on my blog and Twitter and other forums — he once falsely accused me of being La Russophobe, a virulently critical anti-Russian blogger — before finally being forced to conclude that he was mistaken.

Mr. X also goes by the name "Jack Montana" and other survivalist names.

He bombards my blog with long, crazy conspiracy theories and rants that mainly involve me, Craig Pirrong (A Streetwise Professor) and a few other bloggers critical of the Kremlin. He does this from some wild extreme right position that seems like a hodgepodge of Ron Paul, LaRouche and the John Birch Society.

My policy on my blog is to default to open comments, and to allow people to rant and rave if they like. I'm a big believer in free speech, and my rule has only been that people who rage here and call me names — which they're allowed to do — don't incite damages. My one rule is that you cannot incite damages or violence. My threshold for that is pretty high. What it usually means is that if people threaten me with libel lawsuits, I don't keep providing them with comment space. If they threaten to come visit me in real life and whack me, obviously they can do that elsewhere.

Mr. X is always rambling and publishing long conspiracies, but lately he seems to have gotten more agitated and virulent. He is repeatedly invoking this theme that "true patriots" — those "bitter clingers to their guns and religion" are going to rise up as one and shoot people like me and Craig Pirrong because we're ideologically incorrect somehow, and we've been too supportive of the government or something.

At this point, because Mr. X fills up the comments day after day with these violent scenarios, ordinary people don't leave comments because they start to think they are in a context of craziness. That's unfortunate. Most people would have banned Mr. X long ago for that reason alone, because he sucks all the oxygen out of the room.

I want to make it clear I'm banning him because his violent comments are escalating and just creating too much creepiness with the constant endorsement of wild mobs rising up and shooting people he thinks aren't politically correct. That's wrong.

I don't believe that because I maintain a critical blog on Internet policy and that I criticize hackers of a liberal democratic government that I am a "bootlicker" of the NSA and that I deserve to die either by starvation shivering in my dark apartment or at the hands of gun-toting urban mobs whose EBT cards don't work (!) or gun-toting crazies who are now going to descend from the hills where they were living perfectly well on their stored stocks, ready to settle scores with the Stasi state.

One reason it takes time to block Mr. X and I've put it off is that he uses so many IP addresses. I probably haven't found and blocked them all.

FYI, Mr. X is @SenorEquis1776  and likely operates under various other names — this hypothesis comes from their obsession with me and a few others and the same topics and terms.

@SenorEquis1776 is now suspended on Twitter (not because I reported him — someone else must have) –  but I doubt it's for calls for violence. I've reported Anonymous hackers who have literally threatened to come to my home on certain dates and harass me, but that's never enough for the Twitter devs — for them, the only abuse they're likely to accept as a reason to suspend (and likely not permanently) such an account is that they use the @ sign too much on people who have blocked them, constantly arguing with them and writing to them although blocked. Since this could only bother the blocker if he does frequent vanity searches on himself, I question this as an offense, but it can amount to spam and that's something Twitter rightfully responds to.

Because "Jack Montana" once linked one of his articles to a writer for one of those survivilist online magazines, some people think his identity is now outed, but I'm not sure about that.

 

Here's a post from July 7:

And I love how Pirrong keeps citing you as an authority on William Binney, as if he's somehow debunked a single thing Binney has said or written. Or Kirakiou. Or Russ Tice who said he SAW WITH HIS OWN EYES proof NSA was spying on an obscure Illinois State Senator Barack Obama in 2004. Would that have been because of his cancelled British passport, his old work for CIA front companies, his CIA mom or grandma, Rashid Khalidi, or just because they wanted to watch an up and coming?

Guess what Catherine you articles about Binney are so pathetic in their readership that even I can't find them when Gov-oogling 'Catherine Fitzaptrick' 'Prokofy Neva' and 'William Binney'.

And the above commenter is such a joke. The Russians are so thuggish to EUrope, they tell the French and Italian governments to deny overflight rights to heads of state. Ha ha ha.

You and Pirrong should read Mike Vanderbough more. If Civil War 2.0 comes to America, Bill Clinton's 1999 rules of engagement against the Serbian media will be in effect. Meaning no distinction between those who do the blackbagging/droning of fellow Americans and those who cheer it on from the sidelines. I'd think about it if I lived in a state surrounded by 'gun nuts' not inclined to think highly of the NSA.

Here's his last post, which contains the various themes he's been agitating about — and I'm done! He can write on his own blog from now on.