The Media Outlets & Millionaires Enabling The Elderly Edgelords

As the slaughter continues in Gaza, so many turn to trolling - and they're being enabled by the media & millionaires.

Hi,

I am sort of loath to write this newsletter today because I fear it’s playing into the hands of a bunch of elderly edgelords.

These are typically older white men who generate their income by saying the most hideous stuff they can, all while self-righteously screaming about the merits of free speech — they, the saviors of debate and stewards of a free internet.

Then I look at the media outlets enabling them and I think this is maybe worth writing about. And I’m forging ahead as Webworm is a safe space, you get it, you understand the context.

This is a niche story about New Zealanders, but you can find these characters everywhere in 2024. They’re doing quite well, they have an audience, and no — they can’t be canceled — because even if they lose one job they’ll happily pop up somewhere else.

As I’m sure you’re well aware, Israel is pushing into Rafah — Netanyahu as usual claiming this is only about annihilating Hamas (of course Hamas recruits have simply increased since Israel’s near-constant barrage of Gaza). As I put it in a May 10 Webworm: Total annihilation [of Gazans] is the end goal here.

Over the weekend Israel launched an airstrike (allegedly on two Hamas operatives) that also managed to hit a camp of civilians, a fire torching tents and humans alike:

“Images showed the area engulfed in flames as screaming Palestinians fled for safety, with some video shared on social media showing disturbing images, including severely burned corpses and a man holding what appeared to be the headless body of a small child.”

On X, formerly Twitter, New Zealander Sean Plunket quoted a tweet showing a decapitated child, adding a cheery “They must have been on holiday on October 7th then!” — the line constantly repeated to justify the future death of every single Gazan civilian still breathing.

I have not included the screenshot Sean shared below of the dead kid being cradled in a parent’s arms.

Some context.

Sean and I have a history in New Zealand. I wrote about him ages ago on Webworm, talking to staff who’d worked in the same building as him before he was taken off air:

“Magic Talk was pumped into the bathroom so we all had to listen to homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic rhetoric all day long. I think I was particularly affected by stuff around young women and sexual assault. And he’d say this stuff on air then come out of little fucking studio and walk amongst all these young women he worked alongside.”

Sean now runs his own online talkback show in New Zealand, backed by a multi-millionaire.

Sean Plunket.

When Mister Organ came out, Plunket distributed a bunch of court documents given to him by Michael Organ, which insinuated I’d committed physical violence against someone. You can read all about that here.

That case was generated thanks to — surprise surprise — Michael Organ, who’d submitted a bunch of fictitious claims to the New Zealand courts. That material was then given to Sean Plunket, who gleefully distributed it all over social media and his online radio show. The court case cost me about $10,000 to clear — but of course by then the damage had been done.

So I acknowledge that when I see Sean callously tweeting perspectives that might as well be memos dictated by Benjamin Netanyahu, I feel a pang of personal angst in the mix.

I don’t like the power he holds over me in that way, but here we are. New Zealand is also so small it’s hard not to notice this stuff, and it’s hard not to feel grateful I’m not there right now.

One of Sean’s friends is another old white guy called Damien Grant, a convicted fraudster (time served, good on him).

Damien Grant.

Like Sean, Damien also likes questioning the deaths in Gaza:

“Perhaps the 33,000 figure is a lie?” he posits, no doubt loving the reaction he’ll get — including me writing about him right now. He goes further, sarcastically tweeting that the dead kids in Gaza are not real, but AI generated.

This is the stuff of a 14-year-old shit-posting on 4Chan — but Damien Grant is a grown man, and he’s given a platform by New Zealand’s biggest media outlet Stuff, writing a weekly column for them.

As with Sean, he and I have a history in New Zealand — and I am loathed to write about this as it’s so fucking small fry when tens of thousands of Gazans are dead and dying — but I suppose it’s context in this very small world of New Zealand.

Last year, Damien joined forces with Sean to sort of “take down” my documentary, using his column over at Stuff to write about it:

“If I wasn’t labouring under an obligation to produce content […] I would have avoided seeing the film.”

“It is incomprehensible that this production was allowed to continue”

“This wasn’t a documentary.”

Over on Twitter, he went on — insinuating I was friends with people in my documentary and that’s why I made it (all implied things were incorrect).

I say this to note how small, incestuous and fucking weird New Zealand can be.

At the time I wrote to Stuff saying of course they can publish what they want — but I wanted them to be aware of what was going on. Credit to Stuff’s Editor-in-chief Geoff Collett for replying, even it was to essentially tell me to get fucked:

“We give all of our regular opinion contributors significant freedom around the topics they write about. We considered the column carefully before publishing it, as you would expect, and we stand by that.”

All that is to say that when I read Damien’s tweets suggesting the dead kids weren’t real, I had that context in mind.

The context of how Stuff — New Zealand’s biggest media outlet who wants us to take them seriously (including in the TV news game come July) — feels about Damien Grant.

And so last night I wrote to Stuff’s owner (Sinead — she does good work, so this frustrates me even more) and their Editor in Chief. It wasn’t particularly well thought out, it wasn’t particularly well articulated, but it’s how I felt:

Over on his Facebook, Damien Grant loved all of this.

Free speech all the way.

Damien Grant posts on his Facebook page.

You can almost hear the pompousness and posturing in the text as Grant proudly extolls “discussing, debating, or event trolling.”

And so much of this is trolling — something that outlets like Stuff ultimately end up banking on.

Meeting the Master Baiters

As well as previously writing about the master baiters, Webworm has also looked at free speech absolutists like Damien Grant, Hayden Donnell noting that, “Pointing out the double standards of the armada of grifters afflicting every echelon of our global political sphere has long been pointless. They don’t care.”

“Hundreds of people have lost their jobs for expressing what many would interpret as relatively anodyne views on current events. Universities have banned advocacy groups they don’t agree with from their campuses. The might of the state has been brought to bear against legitimate protest and legal speech.

Unfortunately for these so-called free speech advocates though, these reprisals are being doled out to people opposing the massacre of Palestinian civilians, so most of them don’t give a shit.”

And that’s what all this comes down to: People not caring about the ongoing massacre of Palestinian civilians, choosing instead to posture and pontificate.

It’s frustrating to see this certain set of people playing out these narratives, some of them proudly hoisted up and enabled by millionaires or giant media entities.

It’s maddening.

And you know what? Me writing about it won’t change a fucking thing.

Words don’t help Gazans, and they don’t help others in horrific situations in Myanmar or Sudan or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

And so, because I can at the moment, I keep donating the likes of Doctors Without Borders because money talks on this hellhole of a planet, and if we’re not at least trying to help what’s the point of any of this.

David.

PS — share this newsletter if you like, send it to someone rich: maybe it’ll make them donate to those in the middle of something more horrific than we can ever imagine: https://www.webworm.co/p/rafah

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