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The curious case of Thunderf00t

Phil "Thunderf00t" Mason has the recognition of being one of the first big anti-feminist youtubers, starting his youtube career over ten years ago, and becoming rather notorious for his criticism of feminism, especially (but not exclusively) among the atheist community.

Back in those days he became quite notorious for being one of the biggest and loudest critics of the "Atheism+" movement. This was a relatively small (and as far as I know now mostly defunct) movement among the wider world-wide atheist community which tried to inject radical regressive leftist intersectional feminist social justice ideology into the community. It operated online primarily at the "free thought blogs" website, which their primary pundits would use as a "base of operations" for their activism.

Thunderf00t joined this blog website with an invitation from the members, but was quite quickly kicked out and banned when he started to create blog posts that were highly critical of Atheism+ in particular, and radical feminism in general. He continued his criticism of the movement and the website on youtube. He quickly became the enemy #1 of the community. So much so that the free thought blogs community actually tried to organize a smearing and harassment campaign against him, to make him a "pariah" of the atheist community (their own words). They tried all the dirty tricks in the book, up to including trying to get him fired from his job at the university where he was a researcher. All in vain, as their attempt was rather pitiful and powerless, and didn't even make a dent on his life, success or career.

(The "Atheism+" movement has been pretty much defunct for years now, and the free thought blogs website is but a shadow of its former self, with only very little activity from just a few fervent activists. Their major problem, as I see it, is that they are so extraordinarily zealous that they are highly exclusionary, kicking out and banning anybody who commits even the slightest of transgressions against the ideology. Thus, not very surprisingly, their numbers quite quickly waned, as even the most staunch feminists eventually were either kicked out, or got tired and moved to other forums.)

One would think that Thunderf00t, being one of the first and most long-lasting loud and influential anti-feminists, would be considered an enemy by the regressive left, being constantly attacked, harassed, and having smearing campaigns being written about him.

Yet... that's not what happened. For some astonishing reason it seems that he has completely dodged the bullet. The regressive left, for the most part, doesn't seem to care about him at all (and probably doesn't even know he exists). Perhaps no better indication of this is his Wikipedia page, which is amazingly neutral in tone (rather than being a smearing piece, like the vast majority of other Wikipedia articles about anti-feminists). The lead of his Wikipedia article says:
Philip E. Mason is a British chemist and YouTuber with the online pseudonym Thunderf00t. He is known for criticising religion, pseudoscience (including creationism) and feminism. He works at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
That's it. Nothing else. This is notoriously and unusually neutral and concise. (Compare it to the leads of the articles of most other famous anti-feminists, like Sargon of Akkad or Milo Yiannopoulos.)

Perhaps part of the reason why the regressive left hasn't taken notice of him is because a few years ago he loudly declared himself to be, essentially, an "anti-anti-SJW". He's still an anti-feminist (as demonstrated by some of his recent videos), but he also opposes most of the "anti-SJW" crowd as well. In fact, he has in recent years made more videos attacking notorious anti-SJWs than attacking feminism.

In essence, he is fighting a war on two fronts, as he seems to loudly oppose both camps. Quite ironically, he has made himself a "pariah" of pretty much everybody, and doesn't seem to support anybody, no matter which side.

But it seems that part of this "anti-anti-SJW" turn is that he has almost completely stopped making political videos. While he very occasionally still makes some anti-feminist videos, they are really rare (perhaps on average like two videos a year, or so).

Perhaps this is the reason why the SJW crowd hasn't taken notice. It probably also helps that he opposes Brexit and is mostly an anti-Trumper.

As for me, many years ago I used to watch his videos, but at some point I just stopped. And not really because he declared himself to be an "anti-anti-SJW", but because I find his videos boring to watch.

His videos have many major flaws, which make them really boring. They often are way too long for the content they have, and contain way too much repetition. (Most usually a 30-minute video of his could well be edited into a 10-minute video with no loss of information or quality of any kind.) He too often tends to go to irrelevant tangents, and talk too much about things that aren't important nor interesting. And he tends to repeat the same points (often ones that aren't actually relevant to the actual subject of the video) way too many times. He also often tends to talk too much about himself, what he does for his job and as a hobby, in a manner that tends to sound like tooting his own horn.

He is famous for making videos debunking all kinds of hoaxes and impossible promised technologies, but his videos tend to be too long and too badly edited for them to be all that interesting to watch.

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