Screenshot of Paul Elam appearing on a YouTube gabfest hosted by his long-time friend and collaborator Tom Golden. Notice the Twitter handle next to Paul’s name. (I added the arrow and the highlighting.)

By David Futrelle

Yesterday, I posted a screenshot from a Twitter account that appeared to be a not-so-clever attempt by Paul Elam, founder of the Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men, to evade a Twitter ban.

I sent a link to Elam’s tweet (archived here) to two of Elam’s best known, and more-or-less mainstream, supporters, filmmaker Cassie Jaye and author Warren Farrell, to see what they thought of it. Some hours later, Jaye tweeted this at me:

I have added Paul’s denial to my original post. But as someone who does not generally confuse “whatever shit comes out of Paul Elam’s mouth” with the truth, I’m not going to issue a retraction.

Because either Paul is lying … or somehow a phantom Paul Elam impersonator managed to bamboozle the real Paul Elam’s closest collaborators into thinking he or she was the real thing — to the point that they repeatedly promoted the @MRApsychic Twitter account as Paul’s real account. Not only that, but they bamboozled Paul himself into thinking the account was his, at least up until the moment that Jaye contacted him yesterday.

Or maybe it was mysterious hackers?

I’m going to put my bet on door number one, the “Paul is lying” door.

Let’s take a look, shall we, at the account in question and some of the evidence that shows, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it is Paul’s account.

Though the person behind the account took it down last night after I posted the screenshot from it, it’s still visible via Google cache and via the Wayback machine. Let’s start with the account profile:

First off, a fan account that “channels” someone is not a thing. But if the owner of the account were indeed channeling Elam, they really would have to be psychic, as the tweets on the account are virtually identical, in style and substance, to the updates Elam posts regularly on Facebook and to AVFM posts he’s written over the years.

Hell, the alleged channeler, in the women’s suffrage tweet posted above, even knew to incorrectly use the phrase “voting block” rather than the correct “voting bloc,” making the same mistake the real Elam has made in posts he’s written or published on AVFM.

This alleged “channeler” is also a generous sort, referring possible donors to the same bitcoin account that’s used for AVFM fundraising. And the “channeler” is also aware that Elam recently moved from Texas to Virginia.

All this is suggestive, if circumstantial. But what really makes it clear to me that @MRApsychic was Elam is that his two closest collaborators — one of whom has appeared on innumerable livestreams with Elam and the other who has co-authored numerous articles and even several e-books with him — have promoted that account as Elam’s own. You can see here how often the Tom Golden and Peter Wright have tagged @MRApsychic in tweets having to do with AVFM. (In case anyone starts deleting tweets, I’ve archived these tagged tweets here.)

But the real smoking gun?

Elam is a regular on Golden’s YouTube, er, show Regarding Men — and Golden has repeatedly promoted @MRApsychic as Elam’s Twitter account. You can see it in the info boxes under the videos here and here (archived here and here); it’s also here on Bitchute. And in this video from a little over a month ago, it’s RIGHT THERE ON THE SCREEN THE WHOLE TIME AFTER THE 7 SECOND TITLE SEQUENCE.

I suppose I could leave it there, but I also wanted to address the “nor does it reflect my feelings” part of Elam’s denial. If opposition to women’s suffrage is something Elam would never agree with, it’s certaintly, er, interesting how often and enthusiastically he has praised and promoted the writings of the gentleman mentioned in his tweet above, Mr. E. Belfort Bax — a strident antifeminist who wrote a century ago and who was most famous as a socialist (of sorts) who strenuously opposed women’s suffrage.

Take a look at the dozens of times Bax has been mentioned and/or republished on AVFM over the last several years. And consider that one of the first things Elam did after setting up his own tiny, ill-fated publishing house a couple of years back was to publish a three-volume collection of Bax’s writings, including his attacks on women’s suffrage. Announcing the publication of the first volume, Elam wrote that

In the process of assisting Peter with [the] editing, reading article after article penned by Bax, I was for the first time perhaps appropriately stricken with the utter brilliance of the man. 100 years later if the colloquialisms of Bax’s time were converted to more modern vernacular, he would have become an instantly recognized men’s rights luminary in 2015 and beyond.

At one point Elam actually did float the idea of literally translating “the colloquialisms of Bax’s time” into “more modern vernacular.” The “translation” didn’t work out very well, and Elam dropped the idea.

In any case, it seems to me that a raging misogynist who publishes three volumes of the writings of an anti-suffragist from a century ago, hailing his “brilliance” and declaring him a “luminary,” might just have a teensy bit of sympathy for Bax’s anti-suffrage views. Indeed, AVFM regularly runs articles attacking the suffragists of the early twentieth century, often describing them as if they were all literal Klan members; only a couple of months ago, the site published an article decrying women voters as a “gynocentric female mob” promoting “female superiority.”

Oh, and I almost forgot (to change metaphors a little) the final nail in the coffin of Paul’s denial: A tacit admission from Paul himself that the @MRApsychic account was/is his.

Last week, you see, I did a post quoting from Elam’s Facebook page and the @MRApsychic account. Elam wrote an annoyed little note about my post on his Facebook page (archived here), accusing me of, in his words, of “stalking my social media.” You may notice that he did not say “stalking my Facebook page and the Twitter account of someone who isn’t me but posts under my name.” Nope, until Cassie Jaye asked him about the women’s suffrage tweet last night, he seemed happy to acknowledge that @MRApsychic was in fact his account.

Faced with all of this, it seems there are three possible explanations as to what has happened here. I will post them in what I consider the order of plausibility, starting with the exceedingly plausible and moving quickly to the utterly and completely implausible. (Indeed, the latter two scenarios are so implausible that they are difficult to even describe coherently.)

EXPLANATION ONE: TRUE LIES

@MRApsychic was/is indeed Paul Elam’s hamhanded effort to get around a Twitter ban; the women’s suffrage tweet was written by him and reflects his views. But after being contacted by Cassie Jaye and perhaps others, he realized that it might make him look bad in her eyes, and perhaps the eyes of some of his other supporters who like to pretend that he’s not the bigot he actually is, so he issued a denial and took the account down in a (failed) attempt to hide the evidence that it was in fact his.

EXPLANATION TWO: HACKED UP!

A rogue hacker took control of Elam’s account and tweeted something only slightly more misogynistic than the kind of stuff he usually says but that also reflected Elam’s longstanding admiration for E. Belfort Bax. Then, instead of posting more tweets designed to make Elam look a tiny bit worse than he already does, the hacker decided to take down Elam’s account so that no one else could see the result of his or her hacking, because THAT makes sense.

EXPLANATION THREE: BAMBOOZLED!

@MRApsychic bamboozled Elam’s closest friends and collaborators into thinking he or she was really Elam for more than three months, actively promoting the fake account in countless tweets, on YouTube, on Bitchute and who knows where else, and the real Elam somehow never noticed and corrected them until Cassie Jaye contacted him about it yesterday. At which point the person who really was running the account somehow learned — perhaps through their psychic ability? — that Jaye had contacted Elam and for some unknown reason decided to take it down.

Indeed, in this final scenario, the bamboozling Paul Elam impersonator was so good at the bamboozling that he or she even bamboozed Elam himself into believing that the account was his.

These are the three most plausible scenarios I could come up with; if you can think of any other, please let me know. But I think it’s fairly clear that the latter two explanations are exceedingly implausible and basically make no fucking sense.

So I’m going to stick with my choice: the door marked “Paul, a liar who often lies. is lying again.”

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