This odyssey started when a friend of mine—an actual human who is not the same human as I am — got caught in a barrage of suspicious replies from a number of tenacious Pangburn defenders. We did some digging, and what followed was one hilarious revelation after another of what appears to be the most bumbling, obvious sockpuppet network ever assembled.

Come along with us on our journey, starting with…

The OG

“Retired Attorney Dave Schroeder” (@daveschlaw) is an atheist skeptic who loves science and Pangburn. Dave first tweeted on September 16, also known as Fuck Weasels Day.

Dave loves Pangburn so much that all of his tweets are either to defend or promote Pangburn or people with whom Pangburn aspires to associate. Being a retired lawyer, Dave’s specialty is telling Pangburn critics that Pangburn should sue them.

There are so many people Dave thinks Travis should sue.

Dave also has a keen eye for bots.

Issuing threats of litigation from an account purporting to be a lawyer is not very cool, nor is calling robots retarded, but Dave’s pinned tweet is on another level. Dave has issued a long “challenge” thread to Sam Harris’s recounting of “A Day of Reflection,” and it has quite the peculiar stat line:

How does 2–49–8 happen to a tweet?

Oh.

Brief Aside About Pangburn’s Incredible Popularity With Russian Bot Accounts

Russian bots love them some Pangburn. Travis’s last few hundred followers read like a phone book from Nizhny Novgorod.

If you scroll down far enough, you can pinpoint the exact moment Travis became acutely appealing to our borscht-eating adversaries.

Would it surprise you to learn that the vast majority of the hundreds of Russian bot accounts that started following Travis all at once were created in November 2019, just in time for dozens of them to retweet Dave’s “challenge” to Sam Harris?

Back To Our Man Dave

Travis leans heavily upon Dave’s pinned tweet thread in fashioning the “Response To Criticism” section of his new website, which addresses the fallout from “A Day of Reflection.”

Travis: “I agree wholeheartedly with almost all of Dave’s points.” (Which points, pray tell, does he disagree with?)

Let’s recap. A Twitter account that sure seems a lot like a Travis Pangburn sockpuppet (more, much more, on this below) issued a “challenge” to Sam Harris, Pangburn’s chief adversary in the omnishambles that was his past year and a half, which Travis found so compelling that he built the rebuttal to his personal Everything-gate around that tweet thread, and which Russian bots that were created and began following Pangburn at the same time found so compelling that they retweeted it en masse.

This seems fine.

Other than the Kremlin, who’s liking and retweeting Dave so often? Allow me to introduce…

The November Crew

HeatSeaker (@HeatSeaker6) discovered Twitter about two weeks ago and immediately began spamming Pangburn critics with Dave’s Russian Bot thread.

Our lovable Joker enjoys long walks on the beach, Andys Ngo and Yang, Every IDW Blue Checkmark, all the miniscule accounts in this article (and only the miniscule accounts in this article), and, of course, Travvy P.

PangburnWarrior (@PangburnWarrior) only speaks to Dave and to Pangburn (with literally one exception, when, after tweeting at Dave, he gleefully informed a Pangburn critic he was blocked). The rest of PangburnWarrior’s twitter time is spent retweeting Pangburn, people Pangburn likes, and the other members of this decrepit repertory.

It seems PangburnWarrior has feelings about Sam Harris that differ somewhat from Travis Pangburn’s stated feelings about Sam Harris. And PangburnWarrior has a “colleague”! Meet…

SkeptixSocial (@SkeptixSocial) and their separated shoulder appeared just in time to retweet Dave’s pinned thread along with Sergey and Natasha and 40 of their comrades. SS’s Twitter routine is a mixture of Dave and HeatSeaker: threatening Pangburn’s critics, retweeting Pangburn and those he aspires to befriend.

The only small accounts Skeptix has ever retweeted are Dave, HeatSeaker, and our next contestant…

The Weird Outlier

Jig (@JigIsUpp) explores the feminine side of Pangburn obsession, sporting a classy banner and an avatar identified as “Cute Girl Wallpaper” by a bunch of weird websites.

Our spicy bespectacled heroine is a bit different than the November Crew. She discovered Twitter a couple weeks earlier and tweets more often than they do, using flowery language and copious Emojis. Jig likes everyone Dave and the November Crew like, and she always shows up exactly on time for the dogpiles, but she also occasionally retweets random news stories and articles of more general interest.

Even more than the others, Jig leapt into twitter from the top rope. Claiming to be on the “security team for the Kootenay County Music Fest,” Jig’s first tweet was to call someone retarded for promoting a video called “The Pangburn Implosion,” followed by accusing the former Assistant Production Manager of Pangburn Philosophy interviewed in the video of getting the job by sleeping with multiple people. This is somewhat ironic given her purported professional relationship with Pangburn and the frequency with which she tweets heart emojis at him.

From a spicy note to a somber note, our final personality…

The Dearly Departed

JanJan (@JanJan53956976) appeared on Twitter at Pangburn’s personal invitation, followed Pangburn, tweeted a few times at Pangburn, retweeted some people Pangburn hopes will like him again someday, and then…

Rest in power, JanJan.