Ten Thousand Mutants

Why the doxxing of Howling Mutant is no laughing matter

They just created ten thousand Howling Mutants.

Actually, wait. That’s a lie. There’s only one Howling Mutant—pound for pound maybe the greatest, certainly the funniest, Twitter poster of our age—and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. There won’t be another. But you know what I mean. We all stand in solidarity with our hilarious friend as yet another bunch of leftist freaks attempt to ruin his life.

Fuck them.

Before you read any further, if you don’t already follow Howling Mutant on Twitter, go and follow him. The Vice President of the United States does. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

So last week, a very well-liked Twitter poster had his identity revealed by a newly formed activist group dedicated, in its own words, to “identify[ing] and expos[ing] fascists, whether they are wearing khakis, a suit, or a badge.”

Never mind that Howling Mutant is an account primarily dedicated to making jokes about this size of his penis and his wife’s boyfriend’s: He hangs out with right-wing people and dunks on leftists, trannies, race grifters and other weirdos—so I guess that makes him fair game to be doxxed and face opprobrium and probably lose his job too.

The broke take on Mr Mutant’s doxxing goes something like this: “Yet another anonymous right-wing poster has been revealed to be a handsome, successful, popular guy. And look at the people who doxxed him: ugly, weird losers who get their kicks harassing handsome, successful, popular guys because they have nothing better to do in their sad little lives. Another great victory for the right and its coalition of handsome, successful, popular guys!”

I’ll call this the slap-on-the-back take, because it’s mostly intended to make us feel good about ourselves, we happy few, we band of handsome, successful popular guys who’ve been doxxed by leftists.

Yes, Howling Mutant is handsome (no homo), and this only makes his online persona all the funnier—here’s a guy who pretends to be the most Prufrock-esque underground man possible, the kind of dude whose photograph would make a woman scream, without thinking, “THAT’S HIM, OFFICER! THAT’S THE MAN WHO MADE LOVE TO MY THANKSGIVING TURKEY!”—but that’s hardly the most interesting thing going on here.

The bespoke take, by contrast—my take—is that the doxxing of Howling Mutant shows anonymous posters are now back on the menu after a brief period of respite offered by the re-election of Donald Trump. What’s more, this is a first taste of what’s to come if there’s a Democrat in the White House in 2029. So get ready, anonymous posters.

The outfit that doxxed Howling Mutant is called Decoherence Media, based out of Austin, Texas. It hasn’t been around for long, and there isn’t a great deal of information about it besides its own website.

Time will tell whether we can find out who is funding it—it’s a non-profit, so that already complicates matters—but if we look at the people running the operation, we see a familiar pattern.

The two main people behind Decoherence—Tristan Lee and Jennifer Harper—both have connections to Bellingcat, a cutout that’s been used to carry out deniable dirty work for Western intelligence agencies for more than a decade. The agencies pass off classified data to Bellingcat, which then presents them as the results of their own investigations, through a process known as “parallel construction.”

This is exactly what happened when Western intelligence agencies wanted to finger the Russians for shooting down flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, and that same process of handing off “grey” or even “black” data has also been used to doxx and harass people intelligence agencies want to be doxxed and harassed, almost exclusively on the insurgent right wing, from Europe to North America and Australasia.

Other activist organizations like Hope Not Hate in Britain—the group that doxxed me in 2024–have the same cozy relationship with intelligence agencies and use the same tricks. This is well established.

It’s very clear from the official account given of Howling Mutant’s doxxing that we’re looking at a case of parallel construction. His identity obviously wasn’t revealed simply because he got careless posting on his real-life Goodreads profile, as is claimed, in the same way mine wasn’t revealed by a picture of my squat rack on the patio, clothed with wisteris. Hope Not Hate actually said it was, by the way. They also said I’d carelessly posted my first name on my Twitter profile—like I’d ever have done that.

As if to underline the true political nature of the doxxing—and the actual target—Decoherence released a companion hitpiece about Vice President JD Vance and six “fascist and antisemitic” accounts he follows on Twitter. One was Howling Mutant and another was me. This isn’t the first time Vance has been attacked for who he follows and interacts with on Twitter, but it is the first time someone has been doxxed to get at him.

The prototype for this kind of sting is, of course, Douglass Mackey, a.k.a Ricky Vaughn, the Twitter poster who was unmasked by the liberal media, hounded and then railroaded by the Biden DoJ for posting memes about Hillary Clinton in 2016. There was no evidence the memes affected the election in any way, apart from making quite a lot of people laugh at the stupid, corrupt woman who really thought she was going to be America’s first female president. Mackey didn’t even make the memes himself: He found them on 4Chan.

But none of that mattered. Mackey was charged with election interference under a Reconstruction-era anti-Klan statute and found guilty by a partisan jury in New York. His enemies in government waited four whole years, and then within days of the usurper Biden entering the White House, the FBI was kicking down Douglass Mackey’s door and hauling him away.

Trump’s enemies went after all the Big Beasts who helped him win, against the odds, in 2016—Bannon, Flynn, Navarro, Jones—but they also made sure to go after a little guy too, a representative of the ordinary people who organized in a more humble but no-less-meaningful way.

The message was clear: Anonymity won’t protect you. We can find you and we can send you to prison for posting on the internet. So don’t.

The persecution of Douglass Mackey was a testament to the importance of the internet and the “meme war” to Trump’s rise and enduring popularity, but also, just as importantly, a sign of how far his enemies are prepared to go to put the lid back on the America First populist movement.

Thankfully, Mackey’s case was dismissed on appeal. He never went to jail. But for four years his life was effectively ruined. And even before he was prosecuted, he was forced to leave behind his old life and move halfway across America, to Florida, in an attempt to get away from the people hounding him.

In reality, an entire decade was stolen from Douglass Mackey.

Over the last month, we’ve heard talk from prominent Democrats like JB Pritzker of a “Project 2029,” a detailed plan to get even with President Trump, members of his cabinet, prominent supporters and even educational institutions and corporations like Paramount that have come to some sort of uneasy settlement with the admin. The Democrats know they didn’t go hard enough under Biden—Trump got back in—and they want to make sure that mistake is never repeated again. With the midterms, they can smell blood too. By winning back Congress, they can begin laying the groundwork for 2029. Of course they’ll start by trying to impeach President Trump.

I’m in no doubt that if the Democrats return to power in 2029, they won’t stop at prosecuting Pete Hegseth, Greg Bovino, Elon Musk and David Ellison. They’ll be coming for the Douglass Mackeys too, and I mean that in the plural because it won’t just be one poster this time.

So yeah, I’m glad Howling Mutant is a handsome dude. That’s good news. He has a lot of friends rooting for him. I think he’ll be all right. But make no mistake: if 2028 goes the wrong way, there really will be ten thousand Howling Mutants, but they’ll have the government so far up their asses it will be impossible to crack a good joke.