"he sees himself in a “downward spiral which may end in prison.”"
"may" seems a bit light.
What strikes me about this - if you're someone from the perspective who thinks women will claim rape even after consensual encounters - then going out and creating as many borderline non-consensual encounters (and then documenting it in writing, lol) seems like an obvious stupid thing to do.
I guess that's why people find it compelling, but guy is basically playing a rape charge version of russian roulette.
It's actually kind of a brilliant defensive strategy because any woman who claims rape after going behind closed doors with someone who brags about rape looks ridiculous. It doesn't necessarily have the best shelf life, but it demonstrably has worked for him short-term.
I don't know. I think in his drug addled state (which he is in most of the time) he thinks he will somehow get away with it all without facing significant legal consequences. WBE is too much of a "sensitive young man" (read: spineless coward), to be stoic in the face of being sent to prison.
1) WBE is substantively correct about women and consent. In basically any good heterosexual encounter the "consent" status of the act is radically underdetermined in the moment and subject to aggressive post-hoc revision based on how you treat her later, whether she turns out to have a boyfriend, whether her friends find out, and how your somatically felt status position changes over time. Those are the operative invariants--NOT your behavior in the moment. If anything the MORE aggressive you are with bae the more likely she is to parse it is "confidence" and feel safe with you, whereas playing Mother-May-I tends to register as vaguely rapey. in my rakish years in Orlando there were multiple girls who from my end it felt like I forced myself upon initially despite them ending up as my loving girlfriend almost immediately, as well as several girls early on when I was still inexperienced and overly permission-seeking who sent me a scary text a week later saying they were "fawning" etc. The mainstream discourse straightforwardly doesn't have adequate language for talking about any of this because it presumes a symmetrical notion of liberal personhood that simply doesn't bear out in reality, which is why #MeToo is seen as such a joke by heterosexual men. I wrote a piece about this here: https://www.waltbismarck.com/p/consent-isnt-real
2) WBE is plainly arbitraging the gap between the operative rules of the game and the ostensible rules to make an artistic point that resonates with men and women both whilst simultaneously milking that same gap for his own benefit, not infrequently in ways that the women involved find harmful or humiliating after the fact. But he's also quite good at keeping most of said women under his thumb and controlling the publicly accepted narrative--recall that TJ has a background in marketing and is genuinely very talented at it--and most of them are plainly the type to get off from being humiliated qua itself, which if anything he foregrounds and so would make them look ridiculous in their public life if they ever came out about it.
3) He's very obviously a narcissistic sadist--which I can hardly judge him for because so am I and so are basically all men to SOME extent. The difference is that TJ is good at marketing himself as a mischievous scamp and all the men who go after him as contemptible incels. And again, most men do that to SOME extent. Where TJ is somewhat unique is that he has no respect for settled masculine life and is aggressively identitarian about boundlessness qua itself--and that more than anything is what girls find appealing about him. And it's an impulse I understand because I 100% have it in me too, but it isn't exactly durable in the long-term, deriving power entirely from one's enemies perpetually deciding it's not worth it to go after you, which means in turn that you can't stop winning or you're fucked. And precisely no man is fortune's favorite forever.
4) Once the dude DOES lose, there's going to be an immense defection cascade against him from both women and male fans. He understands this, and so is living it up while he can.
5) As a monogamous gay man you presumably are immune from jealous beta aspersions, but the line I'd take against you if I were him is that gays are overly protective toward women and often don't understand their culpability in subtextual hetero power games. Now I personally think you have this blind spot less than 99% of gheyguise, but it will still have visceral credibility with most red-blooded straight men. That said I suspect this article will meaningfully decrease his status with disinterested parties while making him more appealing to young women in the short term (which btw is the secret sauce of his power; literally anything said against him just makes him more erotically appealing to female fans while making low-status Zoomer resonate with him as the rogue pissing off the establishment).
6) Since I know he'll read this: it's a shame we couldn't stay friends, as I'm pretty sure we're the only people on this website to understand each other. Alas, that's not really how the world works.
While I mostly agree with your framing of certain heterosexual dynamics. In this case I think you ascribe a bit too much calculated premeditation to WBEs path in life. I think every transgression he has gotten away with (without severe consequences) has emboldened him. I view him as an adrenaline junkie who needs to transgress more and more each time in order to maintain the level of thrill he seeks.
I recommend watching The Dark Wizard. It is a documentary about Dean Potter. He was a climber who became famous for free-soloing and eventually progressed to up the risk curve until he died in a wingsuit flying stunt. WBE shares many personality traits with dean potter (including viewing his endeavor as some sort of performance art).
Having met the guy I agree he isn’t especially premeditated in day-to-day life, but I think he has a deep intuitive pulse on all of the power dynamics I write about while his branding instincts are objectively superb. The thing is his biggest marketing coup is convincing people that he isn’t calculating at all, when that’s literally the character he’s playing.
I know little about WBE, but being in this online space I can't help but occasionally see reposts of his notes or articles. This isn't surprising to me at all.
When someone looks down on others like "you may think you enjoy your way of life but actually it's bad because of long term consequences" it's rightly rejected. Often times they'll be religious, imagining hell or purgatory punishing a person for each of their sins, or maybe they're more prudish and secular, and think the long-term consequences will come in this life. But in this case I think it's pretty apparent that WBE is a broke, depressed, loser.
It's interesting since I can't tell whether his following is there because they admire his way of life, or because he's a spectacle to watch burn from afar.
I think the sort of disgust towards sexual immorality needs to be revived and repurposed. It's weird to say since I don't think this about many things that were traditionally considered immoral (LGBT stuff). The tolerance for strange sexual proclivities creating by the movement for LGBT rights has seemingly extended towards stuff like WBE. The Stanford Sexual assault case is another example that comes to mind where society just no longer has an agreed framework around sex to deal with these things people consider wrong, but can't easily specify why they're wrong without appealing to sexual immorality, which is taboo in the mostly secular coastal elites these days.
Possibly the central issue here is that people are willing to have sex with people they don't know well enough to trust, but that's precisely what exposes you to this sort of dodgy situation.
It's not so much about sexual immorality than it is about trying to reduce sex to an animalistic act of little significance, when the reality is that it is a deeply vulnerable act that can seriously hurt you if done wrong. So it's more like there is a widespread immature understanding of what sex is.
Literally the ENTIRE POINT is that it hurts them. They're decidedly NOT trying to reduce it to an insignificant act; the significance is precisely that it hurts and humiliates them.
Any man who doesn't understand this doesn't get women.
In many ways many of the women he has "raped" are a mirror image of him in that they are self-destructive risk seekers in search of some sort of catharsis. However, we put plenty of drug dealers in jail every year even though they don't "force" anyone to take the drugs they are selling.
I agree with the first sentence. I believe Mr. Woodgrains does amazing work (his analysis of the consequences of DEI in the FAA was a tour de force).
I’m puzzled by your second sentence. As stated, it’s axiomatic. But… like I say, I don’t really know what you’re driving at. We need to stop pretending that the only way to signal consent is to say words like “I consent” and similarly that the only way to signal withholding consent is to say words like ”I do not consent.” Are you talking specifically about the sequence of events? “When I kissed her, without first asking consent, she responded by kissing me back enthusiastically.” Is that an example of what you mean?
If a woman fantasizes about rape and orgasms from being raped, she was still raped. Worst Boyfriend Ever seems to think that women fantasize about and sexually enjoy being raped--this may well be true, but it's irrelevant as to whether the sex is consensual or not.
This guy is such a bad writer. I hate these cliches but what he says about "the longhouse" and women's sexuality is basically true. In a less repressed culture, guys like this would just be garden variety losers instead of minor internet celebrities.
He's not exactly Nabokov, but as much as it pains me to say it, he is undeniably funny and entertaining. That talent could have been put to much better uses, but alas, his self-destructive impulses are too strong.
I don't see any evidence of talent. People today have a hard time separating the writer from the writing. This guy leads an interesting life, no question. I mean, he lives in his car and shits in a bucket and takes advantage of women who've been groomed by online progressivism. He's a scumbag, but it's an undeniably interesting life. But if you can forget about his life and just focus on the writing, you'll see there's really nothing in it. Read Henry Miller and you'll see how short of the mark this guy is falling. He's good at marketing himself, not writing.
I disagree. He is a good comedic writer, much of his humor is edgy dark humor which may not be to your taste. However, that is a subjective critique. I guarantee you that many people have lived similarly amoral and dissolute lives, yet maybe 1 in 1000 of them could write about it in as engaging of a way.
If you want to read a good contemporary writer who writes about ass a lot, read Delicious Tacos. He writes in a narrow style, but within the confines of that style he knows what he's doing. He's funny and self-aware.
WBE is not edgy or dark. It's just callow. The most enduring piece of writing he will leave behind is his yet-to-be-written Wikipedia article, and he won't even be its author.
I love your work and your writing, and this is interesting, but it is also very bad.
You're pushing in the direction of trial by internet, setting an extremely dangerous precedent that risks eclipsing the last two decades' worst orgies of personal destruction.
Assuming WBE has reported his actions accurately, the appropriate response is report him to law enforcement, or encourage people who are in a position to do so to do exactly that.
WBE built a persona that might overlap precisely with real-life WBE, but it's impossible to tell from the evidence that's available here. Do we credit Hunter S Thompson's claim that he purchased and ingested adrenochrome extracted from a living person by a Satanist? Online communities are not capable of adjudicating that question fairly or accurately.
The internet a galaxy of strangers with a variety of motivations. You may have good reasons to trust Ava, Cairo Smith, or Faceless Francis (and, curiously, WBE), but I do not. I don't have to believe they are liars to come to this conclusion, I only have to recognize the sharp limits on what I actually know about them or WBE that second- or third-hand sources cannot overcome without significant effort. As much as I trust your insight and intelligence, that does not extend to your judgement of strangers.
I'm pushing in the direction of reporting and investigative journalism, with the principal difference between this and many of my prior articles being that the subject matter is uglier. If women he assaulted say he assaulted them, people he has met in real life say he has assaulted women, and he says he has assaulted women, it is not stepping down a slippery slope to write an article reporting that he has assaulted women. Courts are not now and have never been the only appropriate venues for reports of misbehavior, because many people are in positions where they need to make smaller-scale decisions than the ones enabled by courts.
The claims you're talking about come from fictional works and a fictitious persona.
WBE intentionally blurs the lines separating the fictional events from reality, but your reporting offers nothing that would enable readers to transcend our own lurid suspicions or resist our priors.
The claims I’m talking about come from direct firsthand confirmation from participants who knew they were talking to a reporter in a journalistic context. He complained in his reply to me — which I linked in full — that breaking character always ruined things a bit, but he was not writing as a “fictitious persona” when he was answering my direct questions about serious allegations.
Your standards here are leading you wrong, and encourage a sort of epistemic nihilism.
"The claims I’m talking about come from direct firsthand confirmation from participants who knew they were talking to a reporter in a journalistic context."
I just re-read the article: am I mistaken that only Ava corroborated specific events with first-hand knowledge and she declined to talk to you?
The other forms of corroboration were "oh yeah, he's a bad guy who's totally capable of that stuff", right?
"WBE built a persona that might overlap precisely with real-life WBE, but it's impossible to tell from the evidence that's available here."
From the article -
"When I asked him about this and the other two interactions, he confirmed that “they are all actual events I am describing literally as they occurred,”
If he's being asked about if it's true, and he says "yes this is true", then why should we believe that it is not true?
> If he's being asked about if it's true, and he says "yes this is true", then why should we believe that it is not true?
I am not arguing that. I'm saying that statement should not make us (strangers) update in any direction at all. The speaker is conflicted; his statements are not transparent.
For what it’s worth, this is a standard much stricter than even courts use. Admissions against interest are legitimate reasons to update. If someone whose interests are served by not saying something says it anyway, reasonable people can and should conclude that makes it more likely that what they are saying is true.
You should also consider that the utterer knows that game theoretically and so esp if blessed with a talent for rhetoric is likely to make such admissions strategically to gain your trust--or because he's playing a semiotic arbitrage game where something that seems Bad to you seems Good to the audience he ackshully cares about.
First, is this even an admission against interest? Yes, it would be in a court of law - but WBE is operating in a different environment where this improves his prospects.
Second, the US legal system is designed to provide outcomes that ae broadly considered fair and tolerable, not to find the truth.
WBE applied to Inkhaven 2 (application window was in Feb/Mar, for the event held in April 2026). The Inkhaven organizers knew he was a scumbag immediately from his writing samples. They not only rejected him from the program, but banned him from the property for the duration of Inkhaven 2. He has been on Lightcone Infrastructures’/Lighthaven's radar for a while as a scumbag.
WBE's post about getting kicked out of Lighthaven was when he snuck into an unrelated conference held in June, a few months later, wherein he started a bunch of shit and sowed a bunch of chaos.
He has subsequently been banned from all events at Lighthaven.
This is the most serious level of ban. Lighthaven (the venue) is run by Lightcone Infrastructures (the org). (Lightcone also maintains the LessWrong website.) If someone is an asshole, usually Lightcone will only ban them from Lightcone-sponsored events held at Lighthaven, eg LessOnline and Inkhaven. However, other conference organizers who rent out Lighthaven as a venue can usually invite ~whoever they want, even if they're on the LC-specific ban list. To have someone be banned from all events at Lighthaven entirely is a Big Fucking Deal. Lightcone takes this shit extremely seriously.
Look, I personally disapprove of WBE to such a degree, that last year I left a discord group that I enjoyed being in because I felt they were glazing him way too much, and because they wouldn’t allow me to shit on him openly (he was also a member of the discord). However, I beseech you to read the post by deepleftanalysis “rape is ok when WBE does it” (Look past the title it is intentionally provocative). He masterfully explains why the current mini moral panic about WBE is unprincipled and dumb.
I don't much care whether someone is a "hater" or not here, and I don't much care how many encounters he's had where the other party reports enjoying the experience. If someone has assaulted multiple people who unambiguously rejected his advances throughout the assault and reported it as assault afterwards, a lot of other details fall by the wayside for me. Red lines exist for a reason.
Come on man, you can't possibly be this naive. DLA explained it perfectly "If a man makes his entire identity 'I rape girls who DM me,' and they do exactly that, then this is just a CNC fetish community with very little risk to outsiders or innocent bystanders."
Ava was not a participant in any sort of "CNC fetish community" you could imagine. She was a painter who treated him as a subject and interacted with him exclusively in nonsexual ways. He assaulted her because he wanted to assault her.
If you're going to respond to my article, why not respond to my actual article rather than come with predetermined claims of naivete?
Thank you for engaging with my comments rationally without resorting to moralistic hyperbole (it may not have come across in my earlier comments, but I do take this topic seriously). I am beginning to feel that my inherent contrarianism and disagreeableness have led me down the wrong path in my interaction with you.
When WBE first became popular, I was disheartened to see that such a clearly unrepentant moral midget was being praised as perceptive and insightful. Upon seeing him lose this public admiration, I felt an impulse to defend him (in order to balance the scales in some sense). However, upon reflection, I agree with the overall sentiment of your essay.
While I do not necessarily think that drawing clear “red lines” can be done coherently and consistently in this case (at least not without him having his day in court), I think there is enough circumstantial evidence for me to support your conclusion that “If you are a woman and you spend time alone with him, you risk being sexually assaulted.”
Furthermore, I wholeheartedly agree with his own statement that he is in a “downward spiral which may end in prison.”
The idea is more that reaching out to and going behind closed doors with a man with that reputation is itself a form of functional covert consent. Plenty of women want to feel like they're actively resisting the whole time and being Taken, and it's entirely plausible that such a woman would reach out in an ostensibly nonsexual container to feel extra Taken. Consent as such just isn't an analytically useful concept for understanding female sexual behavior.
Note I say all this as someone who has every incentive to see WBE go down.
His real crime isn't "rape" so much as classlessness, fecklessness, and dishonorable conduct toward male peers, which the liberal-mainstream prestige grammar not only permits legally but socially punishes men for complaining about.
In a just world he wouldn't be imprisoned for "rape." He'd have his face blown off in a formal duel everyone would make fun of him for trying to chicken out of. But under late modern liberal democracy WBE is just the optimal strategy.
Also, if anyone doesn’t believe in my credentials as a WBE hater, look at my post history. I wrote one of the earliest Substack takedowns of WBE way back in December of 2024.
I made a deliberate choice in this article to attach only his pseudonym, and I would ask commenters to respect that choice and avoid attempting to dox him in comments here. This is a serious enough topic that more restraint in presentation is ultimately more useful and more impactful.
Okay, that is absolutely legitimate. this is your space.
Just know you aren't saying anything new. There are countless WBE takedowns with hundreds of restacks and comments, this is the same song and dance we've been watching for a year.
Your work is appreciated, but I'd recommend stealing yourself against any expectations.
A great many men like imagining combat. This doesn't mean they want to be dragged onto a battle field.
Kind of depends how the battle goes.
Which one doesn’t know until after the battle.
Fantastic observation.
"he sees himself in a “downward spiral which may end in prison.”"
"may" seems a bit light.
What strikes me about this - if you're someone from the perspective who thinks women will claim rape even after consensual encounters - then going out and creating as many borderline non-consensual encounters (and then documenting it in writing, lol) seems like an obvious stupid thing to do.
I guess that's why people find it compelling, but guy is basically playing a rape charge version of russian roulette.
It's actually kind of a brilliant defensive strategy because any woman who claims rape after going behind closed doors with someone who brags about rape looks ridiculous. It doesn't necessarily have the best shelf life, but it demonstrably has worked for him short-term.
"but it demonstrably has worked for him short-term."
For sure, but keep playing with fire and you will eventually get burned.
Only if someone is willing to keep holding the blowtorch.
I don't know. I think in his drug addled state (which he is in most of the time) he thinks he will somehow get away with it all without facing significant legal consequences. WBE is too much of a "sensitive young man" (read: spineless coward), to be stoic in the face of being sent to prison.
Always the ones you least suspect. Great article
lol
My meta view is that the validation / fame junkie economy has to end. Shaming is like honey for a certain demographic.
Interesting article. My thoughts:
1) WBE is substantively correct about women and consent. In basically any good heterosexual encounter the "consent" status of the act is radically underdetermined in the moment and subject to aggressive post-hoc revision based on how you treat her later, whether she turns out to have a boyfriend, whether her friends find out, and how your somatically felt status position changes over time. Those are the operative invariants--NOT your behavior in the moment. If anything the MORE aggressive you are with bae the more likely she is to parse it is "confidence" and feel safe with you, whereas playing Mother-May-I tends to register as vaguely rapey. in my rakish years in Orlando there were multiple girls who from my end it felt like I forced myself upon initially despite them ending up as my loving girlfriend almost immediately, as well as several girls early on when I was still inexperienced and overly permission-seeking who sent me a scary text a week later saying they were "fawning" etc. The mainstream discourse straightforwardly doesn't have adequate language for talking about any of this because it presumes a symmetrical notion of liberal personhood that simply doesn't bear out in reality, which is why #MeToo is seen as such a joke by heterosexual men. I wrote a piece about this here: https://www.waltbismarck.com/p/consent-isnt-real
2) WBE is plainly arbitraging the gap between the operative rules of the game and the ostensible rules to make an artistic point that resonates with men and women both whilst simultaneously milking that same gap for his own benefit, not infrequently in ways that the women involved find harmful or humiliating after the fact. But he's also quite good at keeping most of said women under his thumb and controlling the publicly accepted narrative--recall that TJ has a background in marketing and is genuinely very talented at it--and most of them are plainly the type to get off from being humiliated qua itself, which if anything he foregrounds and so would make them look ridiculous in their public life if they ever came out about it.
3) He's very obviously a narcissistic sadist--which I can hardly judge him for because so am I and so are basically all men to SOME extent. The difference is that TJ is good at marketing himself as a mischievous scamp and all the men who go after him as contemptible incels. And again, most men do that to SOME extent. Where TJ is somewhat unique is that he has no respect for settled masculine life and is aggressively identitarian about boundlessness qua itself--and that more than anything is what girls find appealing about him. And it's an impulse I understand because I 100% have it in me too, but it isn't exactly durable in the long-term, deriving power entirely from one's enemies perpetually deciding it's not worth it to go after you, which means in turn that you can't stop winning or you're fucked. And precisely no man is fortune's favorite forever.
4) Once the dude DOES lose, there's going to be an immense defection cascade against him from both women and male fans. He understands this, and so is living it up while he can.
5) As a monogamous gay man you presumably are immune from jealous beta aspersions, but the line I'd take against you if I were him is that gays are overly protective toward women and often don't understand their culpability in subtextual hetero power games. Now I personally think you have this blind spot less than 99% of gheyguise, but it will still have visceral credibility with most red-blooded straight men. That said I suspect this article will meaningfully decrease his status with disinterested parties while making him more appealing to young women in the short term (which btw is the secret sauce of his power; literally anything said against him just makes him more erotically appealing to female fans while making low-status Zoomer resonate with him as the rogue pissing off the establishment).
6) Since I know he'll read this: it's a shame we couldn't stay friends, as I'm pretty sure we're the only people on this website to understand each other. Alas, that's not really how the world works.
every time I read something you've written, I think two things:
1. yeah this sounds/feels about right
2. this dude is really fuckin smart
While I mostly agree with your framing of certain heterosexual dynamics. In this case I think you ascribe a bit too much calculated premeditation to WBEs path in life. I think every transgression he has gotten away with (without severe consequences) has emboldened him. I view him as an adrenaline junkie who needs to transgress more and more each time in order to maintain the level of thrill he seeks.
I recommend watching The Dark Wizard. It is a documentary about Dean Potter. He was a climber who became famous for free-soloing and eventually progressed to up the risk curve until he died in a wingsuit flying stunt. WBE shares many personality traits with dean potter (including viewing his endeavor as some sort of performance art).
Having met the guy I agree he isn’t especially premeditated in day-to-day life, but I think he has a deep intuitive pulse on all of the power dynamics I write about while his branding instincts are objectively superb. The thing is his biggest marketing coup is convincing people that he isn’t calculating at all, when that’s literally the character he’s playing.
Fair enough, I'll defer to your assessment of him since you've actually spent time with him in person.
I blocked that evil piece of scum the very first time I encountered him and am puzzled as to why everyone hasn’t.
If I were to find a dead rat in my living room, I’d get rid of it immediately. Why would anybody choose to keep it around?
I know little about WBE, but being in this online space I can't help but occasionally see reposts of his notes or articles. This isn't surprising to me at all.
When someone looks down on others like "you may think you enjoy your way of life but actually it's bad because of long term consequences" it's rightly rejected. Often times they'll be religious, imagining hell or purgatory punishing a person for each of their sins, or maybe they're more prudish and secular, and think the long-term consequences will come in this life. But in this case I think it's pretty apparent that WBE is a broke, depressed, loser.
It's interesting since I can't tell whether his following is there because they admire his way of life, or because he's a spectacle to watch burn from afar.
I think the sort of disgust towards sexual immorality needs to be revived and repurposed. It's weird to say since I don't think this about many things that were traditionally considered immoral (LGBT stuff). The tolerance for strange sexual proclivities creating by the movement for LGBT rights has seemingly extended towards stuff like WBE. The Stanford Sexual assault case is another example that comes to mind where society just no longer has an agreed framework around sex to deal with these things people consider wrong, but can't easily specify why they're wrong without appealing to sexual immorality, which is taboo in the mostly secular coastal elites these days.
Possibly the central issue here is that people are willing to have sex with people they don't know well enough to trust, but that's precisely what exposes you to this sort of dodgy situation.
It's not so much about sexual immorality than it is about trying to reduce sex to an animalistic act of little significance, when the reality is that it is a deeply vulnerable act that can seriously hurt you if done wrong. So it's more like there is a widespread immature understanding of what sex is.
Literally the ENTIRE POINT is that it hurts them. They're decidedly NOT trying to reduce it to an insignificant act; the significance is precisely that it hurts and humiliates them.
Any man who doesn't understand this doesn't get women.
In many ways many of the women he has "raped" are a mirror image of him in that they are self-destructive risk seekers in search of some sort of catharsis. However, we put plenty of drug dealers in jail every year even though they don't "force" anyone to take the drugs they are selling.
Well put.
I appreciate your work here. I just want to add that sexually enjoying something is not the same as consenting to it.
I agree with the first sentence. I believe Mr. Woodgrains does amazing work (his analysis of the consequences of DEI in the FAA was a tour de force).
I’m puzzled by your second sentence. As stated, it’s axiomatic. But… like I say, I don’t really know what you’re driving at. We need to stop pretending that the only way to signal consent is to say words like “I consent” and similarly that the only way to signal withholding consent is to say words like ”I do not consent.” Are you talking specifically about the sequence of events? “When I kissed her, without first asking consent, she responded by kissing me back enthusiastically.” Is that an example of what you mean?
If a woman fantasizes about rape and orgasms from being raped, she was still raped. Worst Boyfriend Ever seems to think that women fantasize about and sexually enjoy being raped--this may well be true, but it's irrelevant as to whether the sex is consensual or not.
Thanks for explaining.
This guy is such a bad writer. I hate these cliches but what he says about "the longhouse" and women's sexuality is basically true. In a less repressed culture, guys like this would just be garden variety losers instead of minor internet celebrities.
He's not exactly Nabokov, but as much as it pains me to say it, he is undeniably funny and entertaining. That talent could have been put to much better uses, but alas, his self-destructive impulses are too strong.
I don't see any evidence of talent. People today have a hard time separating the writer from the writing. This guy leads an interesting life, no question. I mean, he lives in his car and shits in a bucket and takes advantage of women who've been groomed by online progressivism. He's a scumbag, but it's an undeniably interesting life. But if you can forget about his life and just focus on the writing, you'll see there's really nothing in it. Read Henry Miller and you'll see how short of the mark this guy is falling. He's good at marketing himself, not writing.
I disagree. He is a good comedic writer, much of his humor is edgy dark humor which may not be to your taste. However, that is a subjective critique. I guarantee you that many people have lived similarly amoral and dissolute lives, yet maybe 1 in 1000 of them could write about it in as engaging of a way.
If you want to read a good contemporary writer who writes about ass a lot, read Delicious Tacos. He writes in a narrow style, but within the confines of that style he knows what he's doing. He's funny and self-aware.
WBE is not edgy or dark. It's just callow. The most enduring piece of writing he will leave behind is his yet-to-be-written Wikipedia article, and he won't even be its author.
I love your work and your writing, and this is interesting, but it is also very bad.
You're pushing in the direction of trial by internet, setting an extremely dangerous precedent that risks eclipsing the last two decades' worst orgies of personal destruction.
Assuming WBE has reported his actions accurately, the appropriate response is report him to law enforcement, or encourage people who are in a position to do so to do exactly that.
WBE built a persona that might overlap precisely with real-life WBE, but it's impossible to tell from the evidence that's available here. Do we credit Hunter S Thompson's claim that he purchased and ingested adrenochrome extracted from a living person by a Satanist? Online communities are not capable of adjudicating that question fairly or accurately.
The internet a galaxy of strangers with a variety of motivations. You may have good reasons to trust Ava, Cairo Smith, or Faceless Francis (and, curiously, WBE), but I do not. I don't have to believe they are liars to come to this conclusion, I only have to recognize the sharp limits on what I actually know about them or WBE that second- or third-hand sources cannot overcome without significant effort. As much as I trust your insight and intelligence, that does not extend to your judgement of strangers.
I'm pushing in the direction of reporting and investigative journalism, with the principal difference between this and many of my prior articles being that the subject matter is uglier. If women he assaulted say he assaulted them, people he has met in real life say he has assaulted women, and he says he has assaulted women, it is not stepping down a slippery slope to write an article reporting that he has assaulted women. Courts are not now and have never been the only appropriate venues for reports of misbehavior, because many people are in positions where they need to make smaller-scale decisions than the ones enabled by courts.
The claims you're talking about come from fictional works and a fictitious persona.
WBE intentionally blurs the lines separating the fictional events from reality, but your reporting offers nothing that would enable readers to transcend our own lurid suspicions or resist our priors.
The claims I’m talking about come from direct firsthand confirmation from participants who knew they were talking to a reporter in a journalistic context. He complained in his reply to me — which I linked in full — that breaking character always ruined things a bit, but he was not writing as a “fictitious persona” when he was answering my direct questions about serious allegations.
Your standards here are leading you wrong, and encourage a sort of epistemic nihilism.
I understood you to have communicated exclusively via text and email.
If you met any of these people in person, that would not cure all the epistemic defects, but I would put more weight on your judgement.
"The claims I’m talking about come from direct firsthand confirmation from participants who knew they were talking to a reporter in a journalistic context."
I just re-read the article: am I mistaken that only Ava corroborated specific events with first-hand knowledge and she declined to talk to you?
The other forms of corroboration were "oh yeah, he's a bad guy who's totally capable of that stuff", right?
"WBE built a persona that might overlap precisely with real-life WBE, but it's impossible to tell from the evidence that's available here."
From the article -
"When I asked him about this and the other two interactions, he confirmed that “they are all actual events I am describing literally as they occurred,”
If he's being asked about if it's true, and he says "yes this is true", then why should we believe that it is not true?
> If he's being asked about if it's true, and he says "yes this is true", then why should we believe that it is not true?
I am not arguing that. I'm saying that statement should not make us (strangers) update in any direction at all. The speaker is conflicted; his statements are not transparent.
For what it’s worth, this is a standard much stricter than even courts use. Admissions against interest are legitimate reasons to update. If someone whose interests are served by not saying something says it anyway, reasonable people can and should conclude that makes it more likely that what they are saying is true.
You should also consider that the utterer knows that game theoretically and so esp if blessed with a talent for rhetoric is likely to make such admissions strategically to gain your trust--or because he's playing a semiotic arbitrage game where something that seems Bad to you seems Good to the audience he ackshully cares about.
Two things.
First, is this even an admission against interest? Yes, it would be in a court of law - but WBE is operating in a different environment where this improves his prospects.
Second, the US legal system is designed to provide outcomes that ae broadly considered fair and tolerable, not to find the truth.
Adding some more details re: WBE and Lighthaven.
WBE applied to Inkhaven 2 (application window was in Feb/Mar, for the event held in April 2026). The Inkhaven organizers knew he was a scumbag immediately from his writing samples. They not only rejected him from the program, but banned him from the property for the duration of Inkhaven 2. He has been on Lightcone Infrastructures’/Lighthaven's radar for a while as a scumbag.
WBE's post about getting kicked out of Lighthaven was when he snuck into an unrelated conference held in June, a few months later, wherein he started a bunch of shit and sowed a bunch of chaos.
He has subsequently been banned from all events at Lighthaven.
This is the most serious level of ban. Lighthaven (the venue) is run by Lightcone Infrastructures (the org). (Lightcone also maintains the LessWrong website.) If someone is an asshole, usually Lightcone will only ban them from Lightcone-sponsored events held at Lighthaven, eg LessOnline and Inkhaven. However, other conference organizers who rent out Lighthaven as a venue can usually invite ~whoever they want, even if they're on the LC-specific ban list. To have someone be banned from all events at Lighthaven entirely is a Big Fucking Deal. Lightcone takes this shit extremely seriously.
These are rare insights into the mind of a total psychopath. Deeply uncomfortable reading.
Look, I personally disapprove of WBE to such a degree, that last year I left a discord group that I enjoyed being in because I felt they were glazing him way too much, and because they wouldn’t allow me to shit on him openly (he was also a member of the discord). However, I beseech you to read the post by deepleftanalysis “rape is ok when WBE does it” (Look past the title it is intentionally provocative). He masterfully explains why the current mini moral panic about WBE is unprincipled and dumb.
I don't much care whether someone is a "hater" or not here, and I don't much care how many encounters he's had where the other party reports enjoying the experience. If someone has assaulted multiple people who unambiguously rejected his advances throughout the assault and reported it as assault afterwards, a lot of other details fall by the wayside for me. Red lines exist for a reason.
Come on man, you can't possibly be this naive. DLA explained it perfectly "If a man makes his entire identity 'I rape girls who DM me,' and they do exactly that, then this is just a CNC fetish community with very little risk to outsiders or innocent bystanders."
Ava was not a participant in any sort of "CNC fetish community" you could imagine. She was a painter who treated him as a subject and interacted with him exclusively in nonsexual ways. He assaulted her because he wanted to assault her.
If you're going to respond to my article, why not respond to my actual article rather than come with predetermined claims of naivete?
Thank you for engaging with my comments rationally without resorting to moralistic hyperbole (it may not have come across in my earlier comments, but I do take this topic seriously). I am beginning to feel that my inherent contrarianism and disagreeableness have led me down the wrong path in my interaction with you.
When WBE first became popular, I was disheartened to see that such a clearly unrepentant moral midget was being praised as perceptive and insightful. Upon seeing him lose this public admiration, I felt an impulse to defend him (in order to balance the scales in some sense). However, upon reflection, I agree with the overall sentiment of your essay.
While I do not necessarily think that drawing clear “red lines” can be done coherently and consistently in this case (at least not without him having his day in court), I think there is enough circumstantial evidence for me to support your conclusion that “If you are a woman and you spend time alone with him, you risk being sexually assaulted.”
Furthermore, I wholeheartedly agree with his own statement that he is in a “downward spiral which may end in prison.”
The idea is more that reaching out to and going behind closed doors with a man with that reputation is itself a form of functional covert consent. Plenty of women want to feel like they're actively resisting the whole time and being Taken, and it's entirely plausible that such a woman would reach out in an ostensibly nonsexual container to feel extra Taken. Consent as such just isn't an analytically useful concept for understanding female sexual behavior.
Note I say all this as someone who has every incentive to see WBE go down.
His real crime isn't "rape" so much as classlessness, fecklessness, and dishonorable conduct toward male peers, which the liberal-mainstream prestige grammar not only permits legally but socially punishes men for complaining about.
In a just world he wouldn't be imprisoned for "rape." He'd have his face blown off in a formal duel everyone would make fun of him for trying to chicken out of. But under late modern liberal democracy WBE is just the optimal strategy.
Also, if anyone doesn’t believe in my credentials as a WBE hater, look at my post history. I wrote one of the earliest Substack takedowns of WBE way back in December of 2024.
I made a deliberate choice in this article to attach only his pseudonym, and I would ask commenters to respect that choice and avoid attempting to dox him in comments here. This is a serious enough topic that more restraint in presentation is ultimately more useful and more impactful.
Okay, that is absolutely legitimate. this is your space.
Just know you aren't saying anything new. There are countless WBE takedowns with hundreds of restacks and comments, this is the same song and dance we've been watching for a year.
Your work is appreciated, but I'd recommend stealing yourself against any expectations.
Cheers