I ran a Political Satire Account — Until Anonymous, PropOrNot and the HuffPo decided I was a Threat to National Security
Or how I fell foul of the Resistance Troll to Media Pipeline
I was Progressive Dad, a political satirist in a similar vein as Godfrey Elfwick and Titiana McGrath. I mocked internet outrage culture both left and right. My modus operandi; if you are mad online and looking for a straw man to prove your point, I’m available. ProgDad made international headlines several times like the time he tried to convince gun enthusiasts to use “words not guns” in home invasion situations and the time he heroically chased MAGA hat-toting racists off a bus. An avid vegan, ProgDad went viral on Christmas 2018 when he gave his partner’s children kinder surprise eggs filled with raw duck liver to teach them an important moral lesson about the slaughter of animals for human consumption. It was a particular hit in Poland.
ProgDad was never hateful nor did he ever initiate conflict with individuals though some did choose to take offence. It was a parody intended to mock the ridiculous, tone-deaf attitudes of white, upper-middle-class progressives and anyone looking to use Social Media to profit from outrage. Even comedian Joe Rogan was a fan.
Of course there were plenty of death threats and abuse from the perpetually enraged on Twitter but generally speaking, once someone found out that they had been fooled they laughed it off and hopefully were more cautious about stoking tensions the next time around. It was overwhelmingly my experience that those on the conservative side (warning, contains strong language)were more likely to respond with anger and threats of physical harm when they encountered ProgDad but once they realised that they had been fooled, they laughed and moved on. Many even followed me. On the left, the reaction was generally different with humour usually absent. Especially those on the far-left and in the #Resistance would become angry at me for parodying progressive talking points and were far more likely to block and attempt to have me suspended from various social media platforms. I never minded either reaction. As ProgDad I understood that social media, particularly Twitter, creates polarised environments (echo chambers) wherein verified accounts and their followers act like tribes, possessing their own set of passionately held beliefs. Presenting a counter narrative to these beliefs was always going to result in an emotional knee-jerk reaction and a passionate defence of their tribe.
Before long I realised that it was next-to-impossible to run a centrist political satire account making fun of extremes on the left and right. Social media is so toxic and polarised that humour gets lost when people feel too aggrieved to be able to laugh at themselves. I realised that ProgDad could be more useful as a means to studying both the far-right and the far-left on twitter and I gained access to both left (#1MillionVeteransMarch) and right wing groups to learn more about their dynamics. You can read some of my findings (work in progress) here, here and here and I have presented some of my findings to the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, spoken as an analyst on Al Jazeera and written for various counter-extremism organisations such as EER.
My research interest in online extremism went back long before ProgDad (which started in October 2017). I had taught classes with a focus on educational technology at the university where I was undertaking my Dr. Phil., I had written articles for several global EdTech companies and I had invited several experts into my classroom whose focus was countering political extremism. I was to take up a position producing curriculum documents for educators to use to teach about online extremism for the Tony Blair Faith Foundation in 2016 before restructuring at the foundation led to it being indefinitely postponed. By the beginning of 2018 ProgDad had been retooled. Alongside being a comedic means of pushing back against outrage culture, it would now become a means of delving into the psyche of the far-right and the far-left to help with my professional goals of producing documentation for educators to help combat online extremism.
What I could not have anticipated however, is that in early 2018, ProgDad would become the centre of a bizarre conspiracy that would identify me, Dr. Eoin Lenihan, as the leader of an international “bot” army intent on dismantling US democracy. Here’s how that happened.
In July 2018 I was forwarded an email that had been mass-emailed to department heads and lecturers at my university. It was written anonymously on behalf of “Millions of Americans who are fighting white supremacy, disinformation and domestic terrorism.” According to the hysterical screed I:
- ran a “private Nazi army”.
- threatened and terrorised people, celebrities and activists.
- used parody and comedy to hide my true racism and extremist intentions.
- was guilty of providing foreign interference in US politics.
Tired of being spammed, my head of department asked me to explain myself and while I was supported by my doctoral supervisor (former head of department) and by my contact at the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, it was decided to cancel my last seminar of the year so things could settle down. As I was not scheduled to teach any further seminars at the university as I graduated the following October, that was the end of my time there and I left on good terms.
The story behind the email is worth telling however and in many ways it summarises the current toxic state of Social Media and political discourse online.
In December 2017 ProgDad undertook a comedic study of the then new phenomenon “Groypers”. Having been portrayed by Will Sommer (and others) of the Daily Beast as being a more racist Pepe the Frog, I wanted to take a less alarmist look and duly found that the group held no collective ideology that could identify them as a coherent extremist group by any definition used by counter-extremism experts. Back then the group drew mainly from conservative and libertarian individuals with a smaller number of liberal and far-right individuals making up the peripheries. Of course some were, individually, racist, sexist, anti-semitic and more but they generally constituted a collection of individuals who liked to troll and push social boundaries on Twitter and 4chan. They were bad but not extremists.
The comedic ProgDad review was seen as balanced and several Groypers reached out to me and brought me into their world. That was the point at which I realised that my ProgDad persona could grant me access to people and places that my professional “Dr. Eoin Lenihan” persona could not. If I wanted to reach those most vulnerable of far-right radicalisation this was my best opportunity. I took it.
My “ride-along” with the Groyper nation did indeed open doors to the far-right and, through careful navigation, I was able to get into contact with members of the actual far-right who I was able to interview for my research (here and here for previews). Importantly, I kept my contact at the Tony Blair Faith Foundation informed of my actions as I went deeper into the far-right. I left a paper trail of my intent if you will. My way into the far-right was unorthodox — as it must be to get into a position of trust where you can observe and interview individuals — but my interviews were conducted with full disclosure and met academic ethical standards.
As ProgDad I had never concealed my identity and I knew using ProgDad for research would prove risky. I had always advertised my ProgDad videos from my personal FaceBook and professional Twitter account. I managed this well within the Groyper group. As individuals looked into who I was and saw that I was an academic with an interest in online extremism it naturally caused concern however, I built up enough trust within the group that even those who suspected that I was interested in making an academic study of them believed that I would do so in a fair manner — like ProgDad had done.
As it turned out the Groypers made no study at all. As mentioned, the group did not meet essential criteria to classify them as an extremist group. Secondly, I had interacted with them, “lived” with them, exaggerated my personality and blurred the line between my comedic persona and my professional persona to a degree that I could only use the Groyper group as a gateway to further study. For my academic research, I was too involved with the Groypers. When I did get further into more extreme groups I was able to observe from a distance to maintain objectivity and then solicit interviews.
The Mensch/Orr Trolls
In early 2018 the Groyper chatroom was leaked by a troll named Cody Webb, a wannabe hacker who went by several usernames including @akrolla47 (and variations thereof) and @D0xxer_SeuSS. He had a reputation in Anonymous circles for over-estimating his tech skills, for harassing women within his movement, and for his role in doxing ICE agents, conservative media figures and the First Family. He had gained entry to the Groyper room by threatening to dox a member of the group. Once in, he downloaded the chat as a text file which he could manipulate as he saw fit. Initially the chat logs were altered to make it look as though I had given Webb and his group entry to the Groyper room. The intention was to sow division within the group. Webb believed that I was the leader of the Groypers because he couldn’t understand my presence there. All other members had Groyper avatars and I did not — I must be special. They gave me access to the group because I had produced a balanced video about them. Webb, possessing a simplistic idea of group dynamics in fringe social media groups, assumed that every far-right (in his view) group must have a Führer-like leader, with a fixed chain of command through which actions are dictated and group goals are accomplished. As I explained, Groypers possessed no such structure and no fixed goals. Wrongheaded, Webb decided I must be that leader. He assembled a group of seasoned trolls to target me.
After Trump was declared president of the USA Louise Mensch became the darling of the Resistance movement. A chief proponent of the Trump/Russia collusion conspiracy, Mensch’s Twitter account was a regular stream of manic conspiratorial accusations including, among many, that Putin had Andrew Breitbart murdered. To sustain her non-stop Russia paranoia Mensch relied on a massive network of trolls, information diggers and an assortment of shady anonymous individuals with various backgrounds in cyber security, data analysis etc. One troll — William Welna aka @Grandexhaultedone and @MauhFeels — who would become one of my chief tormentors and who claimed to be one of the leading figures in Anonymous (2010–2012) worked closely with Mensch to scrape data from social media platform Gab among other tasks in his role as a cyber security advisor.
Another of Webb’s friends was a member of Anonymous, Andrew Davis, better known as A__ofAnon (and variations thereof). Davis, who has been suspended at least 14 times from Twitter, had founded a group named Alphabetsec who Webb aligned himself with in late 2017. Davis and Alphabetsec operated as a subgroup under the larger umbrella of the Anonymous collective of international, anonymous and decentralised hactivists. However, Davis and his associates had garnered a reputation within Anonymous for being focused on harassment and abuse rather than contributing to any of the wider goals of Anonymous.
It was only after Mensch’s decline within the #Resistance that Webb would assemble the rest of his harassment crew. After Louise Mensch became a divisive figure in #TheResistance routinely accusing opponents of being Russian assets and seen to be splitting the movement, a new conspiracy queen arose — Caroline Orr. The paranoid, Russia-obsessed Resistance flocked away from Mensch and to Orr and with the flood came the trolls who fuelled Mensch and now Orr with open source data to support any theory no matter how off-the-wall. It was a pipeline that wowed some incredulous outlets, astonished at how Orr was single-handedly “cracking the Kremlin’s code.”
An ideal example of the troll to Orr network is the very case of Cody Webb. In a recent article entitled In Defence of Antifa Orr wrote about how fake Antifa accounts on twitter impersonate Antifa, stating that it is “a common tactic used to falsely portray the movement as ultra-violent.” This is silly. The fake antifa accounts that appeared on Twitter prominently in early 2018 were clearly comedy accounts. They were, on the whole, comedic exaggerations of Antifa earnestness and tropes. Orr links to an archive of said accounts in her piece and a quick leaf through it shows that far from being a sophisticated propaganda push, these accounts are obvious satire and the joke is on anyone who would mistake them for real Antifa accounts. Orr’s po-faced protestations that these are serious propaganda make her look silly and unable to differentiate between actual propaganda and internet clowns having a laugh at an extremist group who want to be taken seriously.
Of course, perhaps Orr was writing with the false understanding that all of the fake Antifa accounts on Twitter belonged to one shady international operator. What Orr does not mention in that article is that the source for her information on fake Antifa accounts was Cody Webb. On July 17th, 2019 Webb provided Orr with the images used in the article and also an analysis of the fake antifa accounts. There’s one problem with this — Webb believed that I, Eoin Lenihan, ran all 400+ fake Antifa accounts.
Having seen references to the fake Antifa accounts in the Groyper room Webb again came to the stunningly wrong conclusion that they were related to the Groypers and because I was king of the Groypers, I must also be king of the fake Antifas. To this end he enlisted the help of an Antifa account called @An0nCa1m, @Karmatic_Antifa (and currently @karmaonesixone).
Webb told @An0nCa1m that I was the creator of over 400 fake Antifa accounts and Ca1m took charge of this aspect of the harassment campaign.
Ca1m believed that I was a strategic foreign actor intent on interfering with the US political system and that I unleashed 400 fake Antifa accounts onto Twitter to make Antifa appear more violent than they really are in order to turn Americans against the far left. Ca1m was so obsessed with the notion that in May of 2019 when a comparative analysis of language used by the Antifa and the far-right on Twitter was published by the EPJ Data Science Journal, Ca1m harassed the editor of the journal stating rather menacingly “You’re being formally advised that your research and dataset are corrupt. Retract your inaccurate study. Ask Eoin.” He went on to again blame me for all of the fake Antifa accounts on Twitter before claiming that their whole study was “dog shit”.
Cody Webb now had Andrew Davis, William Welna (and his girlfriend Nicole Shoshenskiy — known as @politemouse1 and variations thereof) and Ca1m fully behind the takedown of Eoin Lenihan, “king of the Groypers” and “king of fake Antifa”. He rounded out his team with a ragtag of individuals who had participated in the trolling of Louise Mensch. At this point however, Webb had made plenty of enemies within his own circles. Several individuals who had, up to that point (late 2017) been friends or on the same side as Webb regarding the Mensch drama, began to tire of his obsession with trying to become famous and his unhealthy obsession with initiating drama with individuals rather than focusing on “ops”. Three females and two males who had worked with him, Davis and Welna in the Mench years told him that his obsession with me was wrongheaded and that I was simply a comedy channel. They told them to stop harassing me (among others) and when they would not, these 5 individuals contacted me at various times to inform me about what was happening and to apologise for their part in it. For the first time I was able to understand this whole other, insane, paranoid and deeply unhealthy side of Twitter and to understand how it was that a handful of unhinged individuals were capable of upending your life if they choose to do so.
While it was welcome to have contact with individuals who could inform me why I was being targeted it also simply brought more harassment in my direction. These two sides — Webb’s crew and the defectors — brought with them a great deal of baggage and drama from their years of trolling. When Webb and his crew found out that the others had made contact with me and were genuinely upset on my behalf that I had been dragged into their world, he and his people used it as an opportunity to harass me even more. To this day on Twitter these warring factions toss my name over and back like a beachball in order to agitate the other side. Whenever one of Webb’s people wish to harass a defector they attack me, hoping a defector will take the bait. I have received countless menacing, bizarre and upsetting Tweets and emails from individuals who claim all kinds has been done “in ProgDad’s name”. The most persistent of these “in ProgDad’s name” trolls has been Welna and his girlfriend Shoshenskiy who have engaged in an astonishing campaign of harassment even though I have no contact with either one.
In September of 2018 Welna live-tweeted himself preparing a package to send to police in the city where I worked and he called on people in my area to spray paint my house. Shoshenskiy claimed she would contact a local Antifa chapter in my city while Welna tweeted direct threats of violence. Click here (Welna) and here (Shoshenskiy) to see a fuller extent of the harassment.
Webb, Davis, Welna and Shoshenskiy saw an opportunity to simultaneously boost the “ProgDad is king of the Groypers/Antifa” myth as well as mire my name in their never-ending feuds with other factions in their online “Ops”.
PropOrNot
With a seasoned troll crew and a good narrative about my supposed influence to the far-right in place, Webb reached out to a number of groups who could help amplify his narrative.
In November 2016 the Washington Post published a highly controversial piece on a new group of researchers called PropOrNot who described themselves as “an independent team of concerned American citizens with a wide range of backgrounds and expertise, including professional experience in computer science, statistics, public policy, and national security affairs.” Their stated aim was to “identify propaganda — particularly Russian propaganda — targeting a US audience.” The Washington Post reported that a study by the group identified 200 news outlets that shared Russian propaganda and they went on to estimate that during the 2016 election cycle, these 200 websites had an American audience of at least 15 million and via FaceBook stories pushed by Russian propaganda were viewed more than 213 million times. The Washington Post were roundly condemned for the article with New Yorker and The Intercept pointing out the many flaws in the study. The latter branded the list — which included The Drudge Report, Wikileaks and other Clinton-critical outlets — a “McCathyite blacklist”. The New Yorker summed up their efforts: “Despite the impressive-looking diagrams and figures in its report, PropOrNot’s findings rest largely on innuendo and conspiracy thinking.”
Much like Orr and other leading Social Media propaganda and disinformation “experts”, PropOrNot was simply another group of Russia hoax conspiracy theorists fuelled by Twitter trolls. Webb claimed to be one of PropOrNot’s group. In messages sent to two fellow accomplices who later defected as outlined above, Webb told them that they “unofficially work for PropOrNot”. Another troll associate of his and Andrew Davis’, Libby Shaw, who goes by the username @StBridgetAthena, @EllaMae and variations thereof also claimed to be part of PropOrNot.
A major coup for Webb, who claimed that his trolling crew “unofficially” worked for PropOrNot, was getting major PropOrNot affiliate @OpWolverines to take his claims about my supposed influence as a foreign operative seriously. OpWolverines appeared on Twitter in early 2017 as leader of a “team” of accounts (largely since abandoned) under the title #SamEagle who’s chief aim was to harass Trump and spread anti-Russian conspiracies. Immediately upon arriving, Wolverines started tagging PropOrNot in tweets and after OpWolverines was finally suspended by Twitter, PropOrNot wrote a glowing eulogy and acted as a spokesperson for the account as it appealed its permanent suspension. If OpWolverines was not a part of PropOrNot like Web and Shaw claimed they were, then at the very least it is fair to say that OpWolverines and PropOrNot were close allies and they did work together on several “ops”.
Webb and OpWolverines published a “study” of the Groypers together in March 2018 on Medium. In later iterations of the article it only mentioned Webb’s name. OpWolverines’ role in my harassment was particularly abusive. In the months leading up to the email being sent to my university he, Webb and their crew engaged in a prolonged campaign of psychological abuse.
Over a period of four months OpWolverines engaged in a drip-drip form of abuse. They began by using illegal phishing links to obtain my personal information and dox me. As stated, there was no need to do this as I was always open about my identity but being conspiracy enthusiasts they went all out. Using “sock” (alternative) accounts they posted my personal information online several times. It was an attempt to intimidate and goad me into interacting with them. When I didn’t interact they escalated the abuse.
The next step involved posting several screenshots of my place of work with #SOON written on it and they played a game whereby they rhetorically asked if anyone knows how to extract all emails from a domain (my workplace website) and send out an email blast to everyone working there. After two weeks I got a tweet from a locked account “@sm0ke” (the account they used to post my full dox on Twitter) that showed numerous emails lined up and ready to send to accounts in my workplace and even to Heiko Maas, the German Minister for Foreign Affairs. They tried to delete the tweet quickly but I was able to get a screenshot.
OpWolverines took perverse pleasure in letting me know he was going to harass me at my place of work. He and his sock/friends teased images of my university and images of me from my teaching portfolio again over months. The most vile abuse (which I will not link to because of its upsetting nature) was directed at me from a member of their group called @Looking4lulz @BotCorrectly @BadlyBot @ProgdadsDaddy and many more. This user (banned for harassing me more than half a dozen times but returned every time) repeatedly posted images of my family and mocked my father — using my father’s image as their avatar. This person made grotesque memes by manipulating my father’s face and spammed my @ProgDad threads with them. This user even called me at my home to harass me. In this same period I had dozens of attempted hacks of my email, Netflix and social media accounts. All of these events were, of course, coordinated and an attempt to inflict the greatest amount of emotional and psychological harm possible. It was an attack on all fronts, personal, professional and familial.
Webb intensified the abuse by contacting rapper Talib Kweli who I had made fun of as ProgDad. Talib has a reputation as being one of the most divisive figures on Twitter for constantly using his feed to accuse others of being racist. Webb contacted Kweli trolls to engage in his doxing campaign by spreading the rumour that I was secretly running some of the most vile racist accounts Kweli engaged with. Webb stated that I owned a particularly racist account @NotMeAreU to get Kweli’s trolls to turn on me. This is a common tactic with Will Sommer ally @RespectableLaw falsely claiming that I also ran a groyper account called “Irish Groyper”. Inflamed, Kweli’s trolls dutifully did turn on me. Both Greene and his most diligent trolls — among them Mary N. who has been banned dozens of times and at least 6 times along for doxing and harassing me — repeatedly doxed me and tried to get my university to notice by linking them in to threads.
Anonymous
The final piece of the campaign against me was the involvement of Anonymous. Anonymous is an international collective of anonymous hactivists that originated on 4chan in 2003. They gained global media attention in 2008 when they launched Operation Chanology, a pushback against the Church of Scientology who they believed were pushing internet censorship having successfully removed embarrassing videos of Tom Cruise from YouTube. In their pomp, Anonymous was strictly non-partisan and chiefly focused their efforts on highlighting government corruption. After the Operation Chanology, it became commonplace for serious efforts by the group to be referred to as “Ops”.
In February 2018 the biggest Anonymous channel on Twitter (1.5 million followers) @YourAnonNews announced that it would be participating in #OpDomesticTerrorism. Andrew Davis (@A_ofAnon), his group, Alphabetsec, and Cody Webb decided that they wanted to be part of this movement. Cody Webb told several in his group that he helped @YouAnonNews to create a video for the Op on one of @YourAnonNews’ side channels. Webb and Ca1m decided that this op would be the ideal umbrella to pull all of their conspiracy theories on me together.
I spoke to @YourAnonNews by telephone while researching this article. Michael Womack from Illinois he confirmed that he co-manages the channel and that Webb helped make the video. When I asked him why he joined in the harassment of me at my place of work he simply said “if you are not a Nazi, no problem. If you are a Nazi, then I don’t care.” Throughout the conversation he kept raising his voice and looking for an excuse to hang up. He got angry when I asked him for evidence that I am a “Nazi” and asked him to take responsibility for slandering me. When I repeated my question in a calm manner he became belligerent and he hung up the phone. Shortly after he posted the following tweet on his other Twitter account:
Womack states “If any Nazis do show up at my doorstep”. This implies that I have control of Nazis because I am one or that he’s a very important Nazi hunter with many enemies (inflated sense of self-importance that comes with years of anonymously trolling, harassing, doxing and abusing others). Telling me not to “put people’s lives on the line for a grudge against an ancient op” is gaslighting, a manipulation tactic common to these trolls whereby he’s attempting to make it seem as though I am the aggressor and not the victim. I will get him or someone else killed if I seek to clear my name publicly though he has harmed countless and will continue to without any remorse. And that is the most disturbing part of the tweet. Womack believes that I am not allowed to be upset that he tried to ruin my reputation, my career and potentially put my life in danger because what he and others did to me is in the past: “a grudge against an ancient op.” Now that I have finally found him (via a google search — his information was already posted) after three years of brutal abuse and harassment, doxing, having my family live in fear, I am not allowed to seek justice. I don’t even get an apology. The tweet has the same sociopathic blasé as his justification for his role when I talked to him on the phone. “If you’re not a Nazi, no problem…Don’t hold a grudge against an ancient op”.
The Troll to Mainstream Pipeline
I take a number of observations away from this experience.
The legacy of the Mensch-era Resistance is toxic. Mensch’s brand of no-holds-barred Trump/Russia conspiracy theories brought to the fore a flood of deeply unstable trolls and individuals with cyber security and research skills. They were highly partisan and they operated without ethics or care for the truth. This has continued in the post-Mensch, Caroline Orr era.
Both Orr and Mensch purposely sought out the “expertise” of anonymous individuals who had long histories with Anonymous or with partisan political meddling. Mensch and Orr gave an acceptable and polished face to the unethical and often illegal activities of those who feed them a constant stream of conspiracy and information to support their narratives.
Mainstream media outlets, depending on their political bias are happy to report even the most off-the-wall conspiracy theories that these two launder. And it is, of course, not just Mensch and Orr. While my experience may seem like an astonishing pile-on by disparate groups it actually isn’t. The circles of those who move in these information warfare bubbles are small and it is very easy to get the attention of anyone you want to using the right # or by having friends in other groups. In many cases the names of groups change but the personnel stay the same. Just as my tormentors by and large were members of anonymous who followed Mensch, then Orr and now PropOrNot etc., so too are all the people around them familiar. A casual user of Twitter and/or a well-intentioned member of the media wishing to make sense of it all could be forgiven for being overwhelmed by all the seemingly different groups and ops but that is all intentional. This is a small group of well-connected agitators capable of mobilising tribes. They very often belong to or obtain their information from hackers, trolls or other partisan parties that are not subject to any form of ethical practice or vetting.
There is a pipeline from unstable troll to presentable conspiracy theorist to media. Though it is those at the bottom who are most likely to harass, intimidate and abuse you, they are only doing it because they are incentivised by those at the top thirsty for clicks.
None of what I experienced would likely have happened if media outlets did not have an insatiable thirst for 24-hour news cycles and online clicks. In my case as I outline here the individuals who harassed me were encouraged and incentivised by Luke O’Brien of the Huffington Post. Added to that report, O’Brien also recruited OpWolverines to help him to dox Any Mek around the same time as they were harassing me. No legitimate journalist would employ the services of someone who employs the methods that OpWolverines employs. Since I exposed O’Brien’s role in working with Antifa last year he has engaged in an astonishing campaign of abuse on Twitter that has included trying to get my editors to turn on me, interfering in my professional work with AlJazeera, contacting anonymous individuals on Twitter to harass my wife, referring to a life buoy behind a former editor in a holiday photograph as my “bloated corpse”, all while repeating (though never committing to print where he and HuffPo would be liable) the conspiracy theory that I am king of the Groypers. For over a year O’Brien has employed the same tactics that these trolls did, attempting to psychologically and emotionally harm me through a drip-drip release of slander and promises of a damning article about me — always #Soon.
If Twitter wants to regain its reputation as the place where the most important news stories of the day break, they need to reign in the conspiracy theorists, the anonymous harassers, the “ops” and “secs” that encourage mass harassment and most importantly, they need to break the troll to mainstream news pipeline that is poisoning actual journalism. At the moment, Jack is under the impression that these are somehow the good guys.
