Con-man Scribe Ian Miles Cheong lumps Ender with Offender
By Bernie Najarian
The internet these days is chock-full of bad people who write bad news stories. These web-based news stories share in the fiction level of the old grocery store tabloids – the sites don’t shrink from alien visits or satanic happenings – but they have levels of malice that the 20th-century hair-in-curlers set could never have dreamed of.
My story today is about one of these stories. It’s a story written by a genuine online grifter, a con man who has lied and cheated for money throughout his career, and admitted doing so. Ian Miles Cheong is his name.
This is someone who has published that Adolf Hitler, the most prominent sponsor of ‘Big Lie’ propaganda, is his “fucking hero” – though he was young when he wrote that, and in later years retracted the remark.
The Big Lie has lived on in Cheong’s heart even when its historic sponsor was no longer being saluted.
Before I get to the story built on the current lie, let’s give some background – important background that Cheong omitted when he wrote his piece.
I’ll start with the subject of the story, that is, the target of the malice. The Twitter poster who pseudonymously styled himself as ‘Enderphile’ or ‘Ender Wiggin’ began posting in February 2015 under the slogan “Believe it or not, there are pedophiles who never harm kids. Pedophile ≠ Molester.” He was a prominent member of the anti-contact (anti-child-abuse) website Virtuous Pedophiles (virped.org), although not one of the two main organizers of the site. He was articulate and energetic, and had a lot to say about how he had come by his beliefs that people who had grown up discovering they were sexually attracted to young children should ensure that they NEVER exploited those children for sexual purposes. He was instantly attacked by people who read “pedophile” in his self-description and aggressively spun him as an infiltrator on behalf of child rape. He replied with vigor and was able to learn from his opponents’ patterns. Many of his insights were then written up in his blog at https://medium.com/pedophiles-about-pedophilia/
[Update: Blog was deleted in a medium.com purge: see story at https://justpaste.it/7gtqd]
About his own life, he let it be known that he was married with a young family and that he was sexually rewardingly engaged with his wife, and monogamously so, even though his primary sexual attractions were to pre-pubescent boys. The touching story of how he came to self-awareness, turned away from despair, and became fully honest with his spouse is told in a blog piece at https://medium.com/pedophiles-about-pedophilia/comfortably-numb-d305cde6709f [Update: https://justpaste.it/4gim0]. Other pieces shed light on how he dealt with looking after his own children – the incest response negated sexual attraction – and put away any flickers of attraction that might arise about their friends – he simply ignored any attraction and acted normally.
He also let it be known that he spoke Spanish. Indeed, he often interacted with other Spanish speakers on Twitter and could be seen to write Spanish text that was grammatically correct, colloquially up-to-date and set in a proper font for the language. He sometimes got into trouble for a factor that often plagues second-language speakers of English – he was somewhat tin-eared about offensive language, and rebutted particularly illogical and offensive attackers with terms like ‘moron,’ ‘retard’ and (rarely) ‘twat.’ Such terms, especially the last two, are now considered inflammatory enough that kids in some parts of the Anglosphere can be suspended from school for using them. (It’s axiomatic that foreign-language speakers tend not to consider English-language profanity to be the real profanity, which means that the best place to go to hear uncensored versions of American songs on the radio is Europe – something that was especially obvious when American singer Eamon’s oath-cobbled "Fuck It [I Don't Want You Back]" became a number one hit across western Europe in 2003.) Enderphile’s over-the-edge vituperation cost him some days of having a locked Twitter account – but then again, such responses were always in response to the most egregious insults conceivable, including constant, daily accusations that he was a child rapist.
His main support, other than from fellow members of virped.org, came from academic researchers. They knew his statements about pedophiles not being pathologically driven towards rape were correct, and they were delighted to finally break out of offenders-only ghetto they’d been researching in for years. Now, via Enderphile and colleagues, they could interact with some of the many pedophiles who abstained from sexual crimes. Enderphile’s blog posts struck them as eminently reasonable, and the more ambitious posts often became recommended reading for students in psychology and related fields.
In June 2015, an anonymous person reading some 5- to 15-year old exposés reposted from the long-defunct Evil-Unveiled website, constructed by ex-Perverted Justice vigilante Cynthia Jean Harvey, noticed that one person profiled as an online pedophile, a Canadian called Justin-Georges Stephen Coulombe, had shown a fascination with Catholicism and also an interest in Orson Scott Card’s 1977 science-fiction short story ‘Ender’s Game’ and its spin-offs. By chance, Enderphile, who had used an image from the 2008 Marvel Comic series about Ender’s Game as a profile photo, was also Catholic. The 2013 Ender’s Game movie alone generated $128 million in sales, and the Catholic church has 1.29 billion members, so the number of Catholic Ender fans in the world is surely in the millions. Still, in keeping with the tactics of current conspiracy theories like Pizzagate (https://justpaste.it/18t8f, https://justpaste.it/19845) where any stray coincidences are taken to be utterly damning as long as there’s a political objective in sight, the bedroom investigator decided that Catholic + Ender + pedophile must add up to a firm identification. Dozens of identical ‘d0x’ posts appeared in pastebin and on another paste site called skidpaste (now defunct except for one police ‘wanted' notice) saying that Enderphile had been identified, and his real name was Justin Coulombe.
Coulombe at the time was not known to be an offender, but he had made some statements in his historic posts, mostly prior to 2010, suggesting he was not completely dedicated to the concept that children should be subject to current ages of consent. He had had a cherished clandestine affair with a 13-year-old school chum when he was 14. Enderphile, on the other hand, was adamantly against any suggestion of sex with minors, and had never had a sexual experience with a male. He wasn’t attracted to adolescents. Also, Enderphile hadn’t been seen on pedophile sites prior to late 2014, and his autobiographical blog post (linked above) makes it clear why that was. Coulombe, meanwhile, had withdrawn from open internet publication after his Evil-Unveiled exposé page had appeared in 2013 (https://web.archive.org/web/20160120045045/https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Bean's_Shadow). Vigilantes continued to track his movements, and he apparently strove to evade them. As later events showed, he remained on the internet under his own name in sites set to private settings, and chatted with teenaged boys who had aged far beyond Enderphile’s stated ‘AOA’ (range of ages of attraction).
Coulombe was obviously different from Enderphile in other ways. A French Canadian, he spoke French fluently and, partly because he had long dreamed of becoming a priest, had learned to write fluently in Latin, and occasionally did so online. He was a placid and contemplative writer, who, even in annoyance, gave out no sign of having a peppery temperament that would lash out at a tormentor as a ‘retard.’ He went to workshops for prospective seminarians and volunteered for church functions. Enderphile, in contrast, was a professional who had never had priestly aspirations. Spanish, the main alternative language he used, was never associated with Coulombe’s writings.
The ‘d0x’ of Enderphile as Coulombe was enthusiastically supported at first by Daniel “Thomas” White, on Twitter as @iKonroi, the main administrator of the skidpaste text-pasting site. The material listing all of Coulombe’s Evil-Unveiled information and some updates, along with the known material about Enderphile, appeared prominently on the site. Later, however, around Sept., 2016, White discovered that Enderphile couldn’t be Coulombe, and a venomous retraction paste appeared on the website. The retraction’s author, who may or may not have been White himself, admitted that “this man actually has a wife and kids” and gave the typical hate-steeped assessment “someone actually let this vile creature stick his pathetic dick into them.” He or she appeared to retract an original error, made by him/herself, in the statement “Contrary to previous belief, this pedophile is NOT the same as fat boy Justin-Georges Stephen Coulombe … Must have gotten mixed up a little bit by the fact that Coulombe is ALSO a creepily obsessed Ender’s Game fan-boy.”
At that point, the ‘faild0x’ seemed dead. Innuendo, however, always has market value on social media. In January 2017, a far-right wing Jewish lesbian and Muslim-hater who dubbed herself ‘TacoDealer53’ began afflicting Enderphile on Twitter as a devious sex offender. She resorted to invented stories to wage war against him: for example, she accused him of coaching a 15-year-old boy on Twitter about how to masturbate. Nothing of the kind had ever happened, but Taco was determined to drive the uppity deviant off the internet. When her Googling disclosed the faild0x, she began calling Enderphile ‘Justin.’ Even a faild0x repudiated by its author could serve conveniently as a Big Lie hammer. After Ender’s supporter Kamil Beylant blew the whistle on TacoDealer to her state nursing association as a virulent hater of “dirty Moslem pigs” - she worked as an emergency room nurse and was clearly deeply biased against some potential patients - she closed her Twitter account and the faild0x seemed to die once again.
Nearly a year later, however, in Dec., 2017, the faild0x began to heat up again. Its retraction had been removed from skidpaste and the mind-bending disinformation was free and clear to serve a new swarm of Big Liars. Moreover, in a golden moment of hate opportunity, the real Justin Coulombe had been arrested for sexual crimes with teenaged boys in Edmonton, Canada on Aug. 1, 2017.
In the same period, a Tweeter calling herself ‘CarrieAnne Faithfull’ (the maiden name of Carrie Dennis, 38, from Dallas, TX) aligned with Pizzagate stalwarts Paul Etheredge, ‘Anti-Pedo Angela’ (Angela Warren) and Travis Neliton (see https://justpaste.it/19845) had decided to attack Enderphile as a clandestine child rapist. She became incensed when, according to her, he reported her account for harassment and had it suspended. When she started up her replacement account @MarianneTexas, she made it her main order of business to try to return the suspension. To her delight, she discovered both the faild0x and the Canadian news stories. Among her long-time contacts was @stillgray, Ian Miles Cheong.
The faild0x was just what she needed, and she deployed it with great enthusiasm. Her persistence was so intense that Enderphile, who was on an international trip to California, broke one of the major rules of internet anonymity and disclosed his precise current location with a geotag and photos.
Just then, an apparently completely independent calamity happened to Enderphile’s Twitter account.
On 12 December, 2017, reporters Ben Lazarus and Chris Pollard of the UK tabloid the Sun published a news story decrying the existence of non-offending pedophiles on Twitter ( https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5117958/twitter-allows-perverts-to-share-child-fantasies/). Some of the non-offenders, all or nearly all of whom were members of the non-offending Virtuous Pedophiles organization, used animé images as avatars on Twitter since they couldn’t safely use their own photos. Lazarus and Pollard elected to spin these cartoon images as an attempt to lure children, even though Twitter isn’t available to children in age groups that might be influenced by cartoons. They also spinterpreted factual statements about the pedophiles’ ages of attraction – stated for the purpose of allowing fellow-pedophiles to identify with them and join in the non-offender ethos – as an exchange of sexual fantasies. No actual sexual fantasies were published by any of those accused.
With their two invidious spins in hand, Lazarus and Pollard telephoned some politicians and collected predictable expressions of outrage.
[blockquote]
Labour MP Yvette Cooper said: “This is very disturbing. How does this fit with Twitter’s community standards?
“Twitter should not be allowing accounts that defend or normalise the sexualisation of children.
“They can’t just shrug their shoulders and pretend it’s none of their business.”
[/blockquote]
How accounts that urge people not to engage sexually with children “normalize the sexualization of children” is a question to pose to logicians of muddle.
Two days later, a large number of the non-offender accounts were locked under the usual internet ruse that “unusual activity” had been observed. Such fake spammer accusations are routinely used by companies like Google and Cloudflare to harass users of Tor and other proxy systems, who can’t be tracked for advertising or web surveillance purposes. The account-holders were obliged to provide a phone number to unlock their accounts. Two of the most prominent accounts, those of Enderphile (@enderphile2) and Czech non-offender Šimon Falko (@simgiran) were suspended completely, and have remained so since then (There is an appeal process that appears not to have succeeded for the two account-holders). There was no suggestion that these accounts had broken any of the posted Twitter rules; they were simply inconvenient, and were removed to show the scandalized politicians that something had been done.
Falko had recently obtained a complete record of all his tweets, and the records of the days prior to the suspension, posted later as a Twitter screenshot by non-offender TNF_13, showed only mild-mannered and completely rule-abiding content.
Enderphile had not been so cautious in documenting his recent content.
Suddenly, with Enderphile not available to defend his reputation, he was open for slander.
On Dec. 21, about a week after the suspension, Ian Miles Cheong, writing for alt-right slagmeister Milo Yiannopoulos’s Dangerous.com, came out with his attempted spike shot, “Twitter’s ‘Virtuous Pedophile’ Enderphile Charged with Sexual Assault and Child Pornography.’ (https://www.dangerous.com/39338/twitter-virtuous-pedophile-enderphile-charged-with-sexual-assault-and-child-pornography/)
Smoothly blending the skidpaste faild0x with the actual Canadian news stories about Coulombe, he wrote:
[blockquote]
Edmonton man Justin Georges Stephen Coulombe, better known under his Twitter handle @enderphile, is accused of offenses against two teenage boys. He was arrested in August.
Investigators also believe that Coulombe may have also victimized children in Langley, British Columbia, where he used to live.
Going by the name @enderphile and later @enderphile1 on social media, Coulombe often tweeted about being turned on by young children, stating that he would never harm them. He described himself as a “non-offending, anti-contact pedophile,” or “virtuous pedophile.”
“Believe it or not, there are pedophiles who never harm kids. Pedophile ≠ molester,” Coulombe tweeted in 2015.
[/blockquote]
Cheong editorialized:
[blockquote]
Many believed his schtick on the social media platform to be some sort of elaborate joke about child molesters. His tweets were often shared and retweeted, to the disdain of many on Twitter, prompting his accounts to be reported and suspended multiple times.
[/blockquote]
Actually, Enderphile’s account had been suspended twice previously, the first time probably as a Twitter bot response to malicious mass reporting. The second suspension appeared to have been in response to mass reporting of an insulting retort.
Cheong was not embarrassed at all that during Aug 4-21, 2017, a period in which Coulombe was known to be incarcerated and offline following his arrest, Enderphile kept tweeting as usual. The wily spinner simply played the conspiracy theorist’s ‘false flag’ card:
[blockquote]
Coulombe’s account spawned several impostors pretending to be him, who continued to post after his arrest, prompting some confusion that he was not the man behind the original account. The impostors have not been identified.
[/blockquote]
All who had seen the Enderphile2 account before, during and after Aug. 4-21 agreed that the tweeted expressions were by the same individual as usual, with characteristic linguistic talents and tropes, as well as a distinct and rich collection of graphical memes. Now, however, with the account suspended and invisible, the unscrupulous Cheong could make up anything he wished.
And who could answer him but pedophiles, conveniently stereotyped as always self-interested, narcissistic people with no credibility in objective reporting? It was beautiful, the perfect crime, the perfect way to make money from a big splash into deliberate falsehood.
Cheong was not new to malicious fabrication journalism and other forms of online unethicality. He had been caught on numerous previous occasions in breaches of factual reporting in a time when he focused on online games and the Gamergate scandal. He responded to critics in frustration on Oct. 27, 2014 by tweeting “Ethics in game journalism? It’s fucking game journalism. Who gives a flying fuck. Holy shit.” Being entertaining, clearly, was more important than being truthful in reports on online life.
Prior to 2012, Cheong, under the pseudonym SolInvictus, had been a highly placed and influential Reddit.com moderator, but also a cheat. As reporter Kevin Morris stated in a 26 March, 2012 article in dailydot.com (https://www.dailydot.com/news/solinvcitus-ian-miles-cheong-reddit-spam/):
[blockquote]
Spamming Reddit is no easy task. The social news site’s users are a volunteer army who monitor Reddit profiteers with untiring vigilance. Once their spam radar starts beeping, even buying upvotes won’t help.
So why did it take Reddit so long to ban chronic spammer Ian Miles Cheong, the news editor of gaming site Gameranx and a top Reddit moderator?
Under the pseudonym SolInvictus, Cheong had inserted himself as a moderator at many of Reddit’s largest forums, including r/AskReddit, r/Politics, r/WTF, and r/TodayILearned, all of which boast more than 1 million subscribers.
Meanwhile, he relentlessly promoted content from Gameranx and other sites, including news site Global Post, and Web culture site Uproxx. It’s not clear what formal association, if any, Cheong had with the latter sites, though they comprised an overwhelming majority of his submissions.
[/blockquote]
Cheong was banned from Reddit for his incessant flouting of the spamming rules.
In his Enderphile caper, Cheong had found a perfect partner in crime in the aggressive and unscrupulous CarrieAnne. On Dec. 13, eight days before Cheong’s article appeared, she made one token attempt to fact-check the synonymy of Enderphile and Coulombe by asking another Pizzagate poster, the now suspended @grannypi (Update: re-emerged as @PiGranny).
[blockquote]
@GrannyPi is there anyway to confirm @ Enderphile is or isn't Justin-Georges Coulumbe? They're both prominent pro-pedo activists online.
[/blockquote]
The reply of the normally fanatical ‘granny’ is now lost to suspension, but whatever it was didn’t favor the actual checking of facts. CarrieAnne then began plugging the faild0x both inside and outside the 36-member ongoing Pizzagate thread she belonged to. Her subsequent tweets made it clear that she had two motivations that were far stronger than any dedication to realism. One, expressed many times, was political: “There's no such thing as a Virtuous Pedophiles only pedophiles who haven't been caught, yet.” (https://twitter.com/MarianneTexas/status/943967392539009024) The other was personal: “They shouldn't have tried to dox me posting my information in the first place. Something happens to me they are liable. I just googled his [Enderphile’s – BN] handle. May not be correct. Only speculation” (https://twitter.com/MarianneTexas/status/940580228702855168).
There is no evidence that Enderphile had actually produced information revealing Carrie Anne’s identity, and perhaps she merely felt that Enderphile was trying to do this. Incredibly, after admitting that the faild0x (which she posted a photo of) “may not be correct… only speculation…” she clearly decided to go right ahead.
Career opportunist Cheong was right there to back her up.
Enderphile, in the meantime, has been frustrated in his attempts to return to Twitter to defend himself. He has suffered instant Twitter takedowns of new attempts to set up an account. On Dec. 21, he posted a furious comment in the comments section under Cheong’s article:
[blockquote]
Dear Ian,
This article amounts to nothing but slander and libel. I am Ender Wiggin (enderphile on Twitter), and I am NOT, have never been and will never be Justin Georges Stephen Coulombe. You should not believe everything you read on the internet. There is absolutely no evidence proving that I am this Justin person, there never has been and there never will be, because I simply am not. Of course, if you had read any of my tweets or my blog posts on Medium you’d know that, since I’m a married man with children in Europe and not an ex-seminarist single man in Canada.
As you can see from the article you linked to, Justin was arrested in August for sexual abuse of a child and possession of child pornography. Do you seriously think I would be allowed to continue my online activities on Twitter and Medium if I had been arrested for such crimes? Do you think my online activities would not be monitored by law enforcement? Are you seriously this naive? Just last week I was traveling internationally and I proved with geotagged tweets that I was taking a flight out of San Francisco airport. Do you think a person on bail awaiting trial for molesting a child would be allowed to travel internationally freely?
The only link between this Justin guy and me is that we’re both Catholic (though I’ve never even been remotely tempted to join a seminary and become a priest) and that we both have used Ender’s Game related usernames online at some point. To the best of my knowledge, and from information about Justin collected in vigilante sites like Perverted Justice, Justin has not been active online as a pedophile in many many years, and I only started doing so a couple of years ago (you can look at my first post on Medium to give you an idea). There’s absolutely no hard evidence proving that I am Justin or that Justin is the person behind the enderphile accounts on Twitter.
What began as a stupid assumption by pretty unintelligent wannabe vigilantes who thought two coincidences conclusively proved that I’m Justin is now becoming an orchestrated campaign to discredit everything that I have been saying on Twitter and Medium over the past several years. I have never sexually abused a child, I have never been arrested and/or convicted of any crime related to pedophilia and I do not advocate for adult-child sex to be allowed in any way (in fact I loudly advocate against it and it can be proven by many of my tweets).
One day, Justin will inevitably go to jail, and I will continue with my online activities raising awareness and educating the public about the difference between pedophilia and child molestation, and what it really means to be a pedophile (and what it doesn’t). I wonder what excuses you people will find to continue to promote this idea that I’m Justin once he is finally behind bars. Perhaps I’ll be tweeting courtesy of free WiFi in Canada’s jails?
[/blockquote]
Armed with the ‘false flag’ rationalization, of course, Cheong was free to dismiss this answer as coming from an imposter, or perhaps from the now bailed-out Coulombe. He has not published a retraction.
Despite Enderphile’s comment about “nothing but slander and libel,” a pseudonym is exquisitely difficult to defend. It can’t sue anyone. Cheong is safe behind his long-trailing cover of gutter-journalistic snail-slime.
The remaining non-offenders on Twitter, along with supporters, have worked hard to reproduce Ender’s rebuttal comment and his photos showing he was in California when CarrieAnne and Cheong accused him of being Coulombe.
In other supportive moves, social psychologist Craig Harper (@craigharper19), at Nottingham Trent University, published a blog post lambasting the Sun’s coverage that led to Enderphile’s suspension (“Sun [In]Justice Strikes Again”, http://craigharper.org/sun-injustice-strikes-again/, Dec. 17, 2017), as did Oakland, Ca., internet lawyer and policy geek Jeremy Malcolm (“Should Pedophiles be Allowed on Twitter?” https://medium.com/@jmalcolm/should-pedophiles-be-allowed-on-twitter-1d88c355031a, Dec. 22, 2017). Numerous researchers have tweeted their support of Enderphile and the other non-offenders. Child-protectionist non-offender TNF_13 has mounted an especially energetic defense of Enderphile and Falko (Twitter’s Suspension Of Ender Wiggin and Šimon Falko, https://medium.com/@TNF_13/twitters-suspension-of-ender-wiggin-and-%C5%A1imon-falko-7672d59350c5, Dec. 16, 2017), as has Kamil Beylant in a protracted series of tweets.
Justice clearly has not been done, however, and won’t be until Enderphile is back on Twitter and Cheong and his fellow disinformers have been recognized as perpetrators of a deliberate scam.
Who’d have thought that Twitter would need pedophiles in order to maintain an ethical standard?
The year 2017 has turned many accepted attitudes and beliefs upside-down, and the twist that makes pedophiles and their supporters the standard-bearers of honesty and decency online is by no means the least of these reversals.