*LIZARD SCREECH*

One of the tactics that Andy uses is tailoring his narratives* to be simple and easy to fit within his target audience’s normal understanding of the world. He can present a straightforward and emotionally compelling narrative that completely mischaracterizes his history, but contains just enough truth that breaking down the lies and explaining what actually happened may require delving deep into the details of more than two decades of lies, cons, and abuse. And while some people will see the words, “LOTR hobbit cult”** and immediately drop everything to find out more, others will see the walls of text and bounce off completely – leaving them with, at best, the impression that there was a lot of weird drama in the past, maybe?

*At least, the initial narratives he uses to draw people in. The grand conspiracies come after you've already been hooked.

**By the way, serious trigger warnings for abuse, sexual abuse, and violence and suicide for all of the links I'm posting here. I'm really, really not joking when I call Andy a destructive cult leader.

For example, let’s start by looking at one tweet from the middle of his thread. This is how he presents the warning post’s disclosure that he was AFAB.

Most people (or at least the intended audience for this tweet) recognize that outing and deadnaming trans people is a really bad thing to do! And furthermore, that implying that trans people are engaging in deception by transitioning and using a name other than their deadname is also a really shitty thing to do! The narrative Andy is presenting ('I was outed against my will, and people are using the fact of my transition to claim that I am engaging in deception') is very simple. It’s also rooted in some degree of reality – there are people who have and will argue that trans people are engaging in deception by changing their names.

However, that’s not what is happening when people point out that Andy is AFAB and disclose his past names. In the specific post he is clearly responding to, the poster included his status as AFAB in a very specific context. She pointed out that although he is presenting himself as an ally to queer people, he has been disdainful of and to trans and other queer people in the past. She then noted that he uses the fact that he was AFAB “when it’s useful to get sympathy.” Andy has a long history of using the fact that he was AFAB as both a shield (to protect himself from assertions that he is being transphobic/homophobic or inserting himself as an authority in a space that he has explicitly denied belonging to) and as a sword (to attack his critics as transphobic). As she says in this follow up, “I didn't want to give him the opportunity to use his identity as a ‘get out of being transphobic’ card.” And indeed, in this very thread, note that three out of seven tweets are focused on his gender identity, when the post he is responding to mentions it only briefly as an aside, alongside a host of extremely serious allegations. He doesn’t substantively address any other of the specifics of the post, instead using an allegation of transphobia to divert and distract from the substantive criticisms of him.

In addition, while the warning post he is responding to does not include his deadname, several of the sources it links to do, but again, they do so for a very specific reason: because the actions he did under those name(s) were a substantive and important part of his history of abuse. And even more specifically, there were occasions in the past where he tried to deny those actions by pretending that someone else committed them. When people say, “Andy tried to deny the accusations against him by saying that his evil twin sister was the one who did those things, and he is an innocent man,” they aren’t repeating a transphobic stereotype: they are accurately reporting a thing he actually did in real life; yes, really.

For comparison, imagine if Bernie Madoff, Ponzi schemer extraordinaire, transitioned and renamed herself Bernice. If Bernice started a stock exchange firm, it would be wrong and transphobic for people to say, “Bernie is faking being trans to trick people.” However, it would be perfectly appropriate to say, “Bernice was behind the largest Ponzi scheme of all time, which is documented under her previous name, Bernie.”

To return to why this manipulation tactic by Andy can be effective, look at how many paragraphs I just had to write (with citation links to even more pages of information) in order to refute a single tweet by Andy. His narrative is simple and straightforward and easily digestible, while the truth is unusual and often bizarre and requires explanation and extensive documentation. To a casual observer (or to someone already primed to believe him), his narrative may thus be much more compelling.

With that in mind, let’s turn to some of the other manipulation tactics Andy uses in this thread.

This is how Andy starts his thread. Before we begin, it’s important to know that this isn’t Andy’s first rodeo – there is a history (almost as long as his history of abuse) of people calling out Andy’s abuse and sharing warnings about him. And there is an equally long history of Andy trying to manipulate his way out of these accusations. For comparison, this is how Andy began a tumblr post in 2014:

Let’s break this down sentence by sentence.

First, Andy refers to the warning post as, “some things being spread about me.” This downplays the seriousness of the accusations against him. “Things” could mean anything; in this case, it’s a well-documented history of serious allegations of abuse, fraud, and leading multiple destructive cults. But the audience for this tweet has no way of knowing that. The phrase “being spread about me” is associated with rumors, lies, and smear campaigns. It allows him to deny (by implication) the accusations against him, without outright denying anything (and thus risk being caught in a lie).

You can see him starting the 2014 post in the same basic way, but the manipulation is much better in the updated script. Once you know the seriousness of the allegations against him, his use of the term “wank and rumors” to refer to things that include “multiple sexual abuse allegations” make him seem callous and dismissive in a way that is hard for him to paper over. In contrast, referring to the allegations as “some things” gives him a bit more wiggle room to claim that he was just speaking casually, or that he was trying to use the broadest term possible and didn’t mean to downplay the seriousness of the allegations. Likewise, saying that he’s “been informed” (as opposed to knowing about a “near constant stream” for “the last several years”) allows him to try to wiggle out of admitting that he knows the extent and specifics of the allegations against him.

Similarly, his second sentence, “Some of it is true, some is conjecture, some is exaggerated, some is 20+ year game of telephone false” (or as he put it in 2014, “These have ranged from absolutely true to grain of truth to subjective opinion to misrepresentation to hyperbole to speculation to outright falsehood”), allows him to broadly deny the allegations without denying any of the specifics.

This is beneficial to him in two ways. First, it allows him to avoid exposing his audience (some of whom will have never heard about his history before) to the actual specific allegations against him. Second, it makes it harder to provide specific evidence that he is continuing to lie (although he will still lie later in the thread, those lies will be about – relatively – less serious things). If he says, for example, “I never sexually abused anyone,” people can link to the post where he confesses to sexual assault (and then link to the people he sexually abused stating that this confession was manipulatively framed to continue to try to mitigate his guilt and speak over them). But by admitting that “some” of what people are saying about him is true, he can pretend that he has already admitted to anything he is directly confronted about. (This allows him to neatly pivot to a narrative, “I did bad things, but I’ve admitted it and I’ve changed!”)

Finally, his last sentence in this tweet, (“I’ve long ago learned that getting into public fights about that sort of stuff is worse than useless”) allows him to once again downplay the seriousness of the accusations by presenting them as matters of private (as opposed to public) concern. It also invokes, like his first sentence, the specter of the smear campaign, of rumors and minor (or private) matters that are, as he says, “exaggerated” and transformed by a “game of telephone” into smears that aren’t worth the time to address publicly. It invokes the idea of “don’t feed the trolls,” which is a legitimate stance to have when the “things being spread” really are exaggerated and overblown rumors and smears.  

All together, this first tweet is a masterclass in denying the allegations against him, without making any specific denials that would allow people to catch him in an outright lie. Furthermore, it primes his audience to see any allegations they stumble across as either an exaggeration or malicious smears – as fandom drama and decades-old wank that is being dredged up long past its relevance to smear a nice man who just wants to talk about costuming and his cats.

Which leads us to his second tweet:

This is as close as Andy comes to actually addressing the allegations against him. And thus it serves as a good example of why he can’t actually address any of the claims against him. Even before we get into the manipulation tactics of this tweet: this tweet is full of lies.

First, he is absolutely raising money. Less than two weeks before this tweet thread, he posted these tweets raising money for supplies for his son pet sparrow*:

*At one point, Andy claimed to his followers in his second cult that his evil ex had taken his child from him. Said evil ex, the incredible Abbey Willson/KumquatWriter, his former girlfriend who escaped his first cult, responded by revealing not only his identity as the same person who had started the first cult, but that his “son” was in fact a sparrow.

And this wasn’t a futile post into the void: his followers delivered:

Even if this was just an emergency fundraiser for his bird, his claim that he is not raising money would be a lie. However, he didn’t just post the request for help with his bird: he posted the requests through his wedding registry, which at the time of this post is still active. Is he also planning on donating the $200 “ULTIMATE Molecular Gastronomy "Made Easy" Starter Kit ⊘ Non-GMO Gluten-Free” and the $165 “Chill Sack Bean Bag Chair: Giant 5' Memory Foam Furniture Bean Bag - Big Sofa with Soft Micro Fiber Cover - Royal Blue” to the California Wildlife Rescue “when no longer needed”?

Second, he is absolutely trying to use twitter to gain social status. He positions himself as an expert in his field (his pinned tweet states: “Search “Pro Tips” for sewing/crafting bits”), and has, as of this writing, 4,708 followers on twitter.

Now, he says that this is “against his will.”

But! Fun fact! I actually don’t, and have never, wanted followers on twitter, even before Musk took it over. I’ve had my main account on twitter for six years. I have five followers. My alternative account has even less. It’s actually really really easy to not build a twitter following! And if you start to get followers you don’t want, there are all sorts of actions you can take to stop it (privating your account, starting over with a new main account, not posting lots of pictures of your cute rescue bird right at the same time that you have a thread go semi-viral while welcoming a “pile of new follows,” etc.)

Moving on from the substance of the second tweet in the thread, let’s look at how it tries to manipulate the audience. First, notice to focus on money: he’s “not selling anything or raising $.” This focus on money in response to allegations of him being a grifter and a con man are a long-running tactic for him. Over his decades in fandom, Andy’s grifts and cons have not been about making himself wealthy. While he does grift money from people, often these are in the form of either material donations (see above), or donations to “charity” or fandom events, where he may see little or no material advantage, but instead benefits (or attempts to benefit) from the attention and clout associated with the event. He also grifts people’s time, energy, and attention (because he’s a cult leader). But by focusing on whether or not he is asking people to personally send him money, Andy is subtly but substantially shifting the focus of the allegations against him. It’s another method of priming his audience. In this case, it is priming them to expect to see proof that he materially enriched himself through his previous schemes and behaviors, and therefore to dismiss the actual evidence of his grifts as irrelevant to the claim (as he has reframed it).

Next, note his focus in the second sentence on formalized groups, relationships, and organizations. The implication of this second sentence is that if he isn’t trying to pursue (presumably romantic or sexual) relationships, seek status in existing groups, or organize events, he must have moved on from his cult-building activities of the past and changed his ways. But this is not a framing that we have to accept. Take, for example, his time with Abbey Willson/KumquatWriter, when she was the only remaining member of his (first) cult. During that time, he appeared to be focused solely on her (so not pursuing other relationships), he wasn’t pursuing status in any groups (because he held supreme status in the group he had invented) and he wasn’t organizing anything (except fantasy “missions” that required her constant attention and energy). In that time, he still managed to do enormous harm to her, culminating in them being homeless and attempting an illegal border crossing into Canada during a blizzard.

This tweet also sets up Andy’s framing of how he wants to be seen. “Just a simple artificer” who “share(s) sewing tips, my cats, and my bird, talk about things that matter to me, and live my life.” This is setting up to suggest that the allegations against him, even if true, are all things that are being dredged up from the past. It suggests that he is living as a private person in a way that has no connection to his past. After all, don’t we all have the right to live our lives, share the things that bring us joy, and talk about the things that matter to us?

This framing ignores that he’s not just ‘living his life.’ He is specifically living his life publicly, in a way designed to attract public attention, and set himself up as a figure of trust and authority. And you lose the right to do that after you use those tactics to make your first cult; let alone your second cult.

Finally, he brings up his long COVID. And to be clear, I have no reason to doubt that he has long COVID. But he also has a long and documented history of using medical diagnoses and conditions (and fake medical diagnoses and conditions) to grift attention and sympathy, as well as to try to excuse his horrible behavior. With that context in mind, it’s worth asking: why did he bring up his long COVID in this tweet? Why is it relevant to the accusations against him – sorry, “things being spread about” him? Maybe he could say it’s relevant to how his life is going in general – but the final sentence of this tweet is the only part of the thread that talks about that. It’s a complete non-sequitur. The only purpose that bringing up his long COVID serves in this context is to draw on his reader’s emotions, make them sympathize with him, and by contrast set up his critics as people who are attacking someone who is already down.

As further indication that his remark about long COVID was irrelevant, the transition to his next tweet doesn’t flow very well from the sentence, “Long COVID aside, it’s a pretty good life.” Instead, structurally, it’s a perfect transition from the sentence right before his COVID remark.

There are two pieces of manipulation going on in this particular tweet that I want to look at. First is Andy’s request for “no one to ‘come to my defense’ or any drama like that.” Notice again how Andy downplays the seriousness of the whole situation, using the word “drama.” Like before though, he attempts to use the word in a plausibly deniable way; if called on it, he can say he was referring to anything his followers might do as “drama,” not the accusations themselves. This doesn’t work, however, because the accusations against him aren’t overblown fandom disputes; they are widely documented and reported accusations of abuse, fraud, and, it really can’t be emphasized enough, running multiple cults. If his followers did have legitimate defenses for his behavior, providing that evidence wouldn’t be “drama.” It would be providing extremely valuable information to a community.

More importantly, it frames the criticism of Andy not as a warning to the community about a dangerous actor, but as an attack directed at Andy. The warning post doesn’t advise anyone to do anything, other than warn them away from following Andy. I haven’t even seen any evidence – including from Andy himself – that he has received any attacks or harassment in response to the warnings and information about him recirculating. He’s not responding to a need to stop people from defending him; he’s the one bringing up that people might want to (and could) defend him. This also allows him to preemptively claim a moral high ground. He doesn’t want to get involved; he doesn’t want there to be “drama;” to the point that he doesn’t even want people to defend him (even though he is being attacked).

The second piece of manipulation is far more dangerous. He invites people who have questions to DM him. Following from his previous sentence, he frames this as an attempt to not avoid drama. This might be an appropriate request in the context of “things being spread” that are private or personal matters. However, the things he is accused of are 1) already very public and 2) are very specifically that he is a manipulative abuser who lures vulnerable people into this “confidence” and uses that to build cults! Multiple! Multiple cults! I’m sorry, I’m getting worked up here, but once you make multiple cults through cultivating online connections and confidences, you lose the right to do this shit! If he had actually changed and recognized any of the harm he’d done, one of the first things he would need to accept is, hey, maybe even if I think I’m a safe person for my online followers to confide in, reasonable people shouldn’t trust me and maybe I shouldn’t trust myself! I don’t have to keep doing this!

Anyway, the other thing about only being willing to answer specifics in private DMs is that it allows him to avoid accountability and fact checking. He says he will “answer honestly,” but if he could respond to the accusations against him honestly, he would be able to do it out in the open, where people can fact check his statements against the public record.

This seems like a nice, innocuous statement! He’s focused on his own life, and just wants followers who also want to hear about his life.

…except, whoops. He doesn’t want followers, because he can’t want followers. He’s not “trying to have any status.” In fact, he has a following entirely “against his will!” So he’s just “happy to have you here.” (AKA, because this is social media, is “happy that you are following him.”)

There’s another bit of manipulation here too. The suggestion in this tweet is that the people who ignore the “things being spread” about him are, like him, nice ordinary people just interested in sewing and cats and birds, in contrast to the “drama” of the accusations. May people prefer to think of themselves as above gossip and drama, and this framing validates and encourages such individuals to not look up what the “things being spread” about him actually are. After all, you’re just here to enjoy the pictures of his rescue bird (and maybe give him some money for the bird) and hear about his sewing (and maybe come to trust him as an expert).

The next tweet is the one I began with, where Andy goes on the offensive and presents his critics as transphobic for disclosing his deadname and the fact that he was AFAB.

I’ve already discussed this in detail, but one thing I want to add: as Andy notes, this is the only part of the warning post that he is discussing publicly. Presumably, his followers have not read any warning posts about him (or are already in his sway and believe his narratives). If they did, they would presumably have much more pressing questions and concerns, like, “wait, you started how many cults?” “Did you actually sexually abuse people? If not, why did you admit to it?” “Why are people saying you lied about having a heart condition?” “You did WHAT to your ex-girlfriend?!”*

*I know I already put up blanket content warnings for all of the links, but I literally do not have enough warnings for the emotional abuse and sheer nastiness of how he treated her and her body. This is the same man (who in that very link refused to admit or apologize for what he did) now gaining followers and acclaim for posting about how he is "trying to secure EVERY SINGLE HUMAN the right to bodily autonomy and the safety and freedom for the gender expression that works for them.")

So, his intended audience in this post would not know that he was AFAB without him choosing to disclose it here. He is the one outing himself and disclosing and discussing his identity. And why does he claim he has to do this? Why is this, of all the accusations and allegations, the only one worth addressing? Well, according to him, from a response to his thread:

No.

It is, in fact, “just about [you].” While there has been transphobia directed against you in the past, in the case of your current critics, when they mention you were AFAB, or otherwise connect you to your previous names, it is for specific reasons based on specific actions you have taken and continue to take.

And meanwhile, you are the one repeating and disseminating the malicious lie that trans people not disclosing their status (or declining to identify as trans) is “inherently shady.” No one else involved in this situation said that. And worse, you are the one conflating your malicious actions with all trans people. You are standing there, a man who, again, tried to convince the followers of you second cult that you first cult was really started by you evil (nonexistent) sister, pretending that trans people who choose not to disclose their identity are doing the exact same thing as you! You are framing yourself as an ally while you explicitly using trans people as shields and repeating transphobic talking points. Fuck you.

Returning to the thread.

The last two tweets are more of the same. The only thing worth mentioning in the first tweet is the lie – he has absolutely claimed to be cis. I don’t care whether or not he identifies as cis, but I do care that he continues to lie about well documented facts in order to divert the narrative from himself using trans people as a shield.

Which goes to the important part of his last tweet. He says, “I don’t want to talk about that aspect.” But he spends three out of seven tweets talking about it. He hates this, he hates talking about it, but please, everyone, focus on this. He wants to talk about “anything else,” but this is the only thing in the warning post that he directly addresses.

So where does that leave his followers at the end of this thread? What impression has he tried to create? People are out there, online, spreading nasty rumors about Andrew Blake, a chill disabled dude who is living a quiet, private life and isn’t interested in money or attention. Because he’s uninterested in drama and online fights (just like you!), he doesn’t want to answer anything publicly, but because he’s transparent and open he’s leaving his DMs open for private questions. But, even though he hates doing so, the one thing he will publicly fight against is his critics’ horrible transphobia, not for his own sake, but for the sake of trans people. Because he’s such a good dude and a passionate ally. Wow, what a trustworthy, compassionate, and intelligent man.

None if this is new behavior from Andy. It’s the same pattern over and over, with small adjustments over the years. The only thing he learns is how to make his manipulations smoother. But the naked and disgusting use of trans people as a shield in this response, especially when the community is already facing such serious and sustained attacks in the U.S. (where he lives), and especially when he is currently riding a wave of attention based specifically on presenting himself as an activist and an ally? Fuck this fucking guy.