I am not neurotypical. I am neuroextraordinary.

I have never been diagnosed as autistic or anything like that, but I have sometimes wondered if I might have been in an alternate timeline where the facts of my life panned out in a slightly different way. I really do not care about the answer to the question and have no desire to be labeled as such. My interest is more in exploring how I would go about answering that question, and whether it would provide me any useful self-knowledge.

Part of the reason that I am not particularly interested in such a diagnosis is that I would never want to use it as an excuse to defend aberrant behavior nor to set an expectation that anyone should treat me differently. As I see it, the ways that I am not neurotypical are gifts that have given me enormous advantages in the world and have allowed my star to shine brightly. I would rather be celebrated for my talents than observed like a curiosity in a museum.

I am sure that if I ever were diagnosed with something like autism that it would be an extremely high-functioning variety of it, the kind of thing that I suspect someone like Will Anderson might have. If anything, I think that might explain why Will and I have gotten along so well and genuinely liked each other in many of our in-person interactions.

At the same time, as someone who has worked as a mathematician, standardized test teacher, and computer programmer and has spent many years in the worlds of competitive chess and Scrabble, I have certainly been around many autistic people, including a fair number who are far more socially awkward than I am. I do not mean to exaggerate my coolness. I have at various times acted and appeared very socially graceful and at other times quite awkward or worse, and I certainly do not hold myself up as a paragon of etiquette and social mastery.

At the same time, I have occasionally received very high compliments for my degree of emotional intelligence, especially after I read and internalized many of the messages of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in 2005. That book was the beginning of a year-long reading binge. Over that year I read about 50 books, a very high percentage of which were in the realms of self-help and organizational improvement.

I am not even sure that the praise I have received about emotional intelligence was always right on. I think I might be one of those people who has learned to borrow from my cognitive intelligence to strengthen my understanding of the emotional world around me. I suspect that this is something that Will Anderson and I share in common, and it is a phenomenon that Stephen Covey mentioned in his book.

One thing that used to piss off my then wife in those days is that she would think I was not listening nor paying attention to her when she told me something, as I appeared to be looking in a different direction and focusing on something else. But she was often surprised later to learn that I had heard what she had said to me very precisely and that I had carried out the exact thing she wanted me to do. A big part of what I learned from those interactions is that it is not enough for most people to listen to them well. It very much helps to show them eye contact and body language that indicates to them that you are listening and do care about what they are saying.

I have also learned that in processing people’s stories quickly and being eager to get to the next part, I have sometimes come across as dismissive. Many of these people process the interaction much more slowly than I do and need the reassurance of me overtly showing that I share or sympathize with their feelings in this part of the story before they want to move on.

I had a few poor interactions with students of mine early in my high school teaching career because of ways in which I mishandled these situations, and learning to be more patient with the cadence of the other person and give them affirming signs of my understanding along the way went a long way toward improving my working relationships with my students. I got a lot of concrete feedback from both teachers and students in my school that they saw a massive difference in me over the years, especially after 2005, and that I became a lot more likable and easy to work with.

I also must credit my dear friend Bob Seltzer, a brilliant man whom I have known since we were children, with teaching me the value of paraphrasing people’s stories back to them, in order both to verify that you have gotten the details correct and to affirm to them your understanding. This has helped in countless aspects of my life. I believe it is especially important in technical jobs like software development, in order to cut across jargon and oversimplified summaries to ensure that different developers mean the exact same thing when they are writing pieces of code that need to interact with each other.

I think that I was so much more socially well-adjusted than many of the weirdo autistic people in some of my communities, including the Scrabble community, that many people in those communities could not have imagined that I might be on the spectrum myself. If anything, just the opposite. I was often perceived as one of the “normals.” This is not my ego talking. I am thinking of very specific interactions from my past, including one male player outright telling me that he did not think I was autistic, far from it, and one female player telling me that she had literally used me as an example of good social graces when trying to coach some other male players about how to interact with people better.

However, there are some funny things that happen when you spend so much of your time living and socializing in communities where the ratio of autistic or other neurodivergent people is high. You might pick up certain mannerisms or behaviors more due to social influence than because of how your own mind works. Also, there can be a kind of “reverse snobbery” in which the usual pecking order gets reversed because of the ways the values of that community become different than the norm elsewhere.

I’ve seen a very clear example of this in the software development world: When people are seen in an office dressed up in formal business attire, such as a suit and tie, they are often assumed to be less technically competent. The smart developers tend to wear shorts, t-shirts, and hoodies, and the only people who dress up are the business guys who probably don’t know anything about the technology.

I heard a funny story recently about a mother and son who are both tournament Scrabble players. The mother is clearly autistic and comes across as eccentric in many of her social interactions. Some people who know the son better than I do mentioned that he seemed to show a lot of outward qualities of eccentricity when he was living with her, but once he became an independent adult and got out of the house, he started to come across as a lot more normal. The person who told me the story described it as how some of the seemingly outward signs of autism might actually be things that he acquired from that living situation, and that he might have “uncaught” the autism by getting out.

I do not think either of these anecdotes captures my own experience, but I mention them to preface me describing ways in which my own behavior has given off different vibes at different times. I believe that when my life was going well, I was often very far from giving off an autistic vibe, but as I have suffered the trauma and PTSD of the last several years, I have seen behavior, mannerisms, and poorer social interactivity in myself that have probably come across to some people as something akin to autism. Heck, it’s been bad enough that it has sometimes across that way to me, not just to others.

I find myself thinking back to the few minutes that Lola and I stood near each other in the hallway outside the playing room of the January 2022 New Orleans tournament, when we were both watching the dramatic Austin Shin comeback over Puneet Sharma on the television. Everything I wrote about that interaction in my response to the incident report was true, and I now think it is likely that Lola felt much more awkward about our proximity than I did. It was the last time we were near each other before the incident in the tournament room right before the awards ceremony in which the other woman helped her run away. But I felt some awkwardness too.

At that moment, I felt in my head and heart that the best thing to do would have been to make some benign conversation about something of little importance just to ease the tension, the kind of social grace that someone like Jeremy Cahnmann is very good at. I have praised Jeremy before for his gift of gab and putting people at ease. While I am not nearly at his level, I am far from the worst person at this skill, at least when I am in a good head space.

But the awkwardness I had been experiencing both with Lola herself and with so many others in the CoCo crew over the last several years left me so tongue-tied that I could not think of anything to say in those moments in the hallway. And my complete silence might have just made her more uncomfortable and helped build the false story in her head that I was behaving in any way like a stalker, when the truth was that I had just passed through the hallway accidentally at that moment and been as entranced by what was on the TV as she was.

It was only much later that I thought of a good topic of conversation that I thought would be benign, and I decided in my head that the next time I saw her I should probably bring it up, just to reduce the tension in her head. That’s why I tried to walk up to her in the tournament room to say something quick before I found my seat for the awards ceremony.

Keep in mind that at this moment in time, I had no idea that Lola might have been panicking on the inside about me and told her friends that I had been any sort of problem for her at the tournament, because she had not shown any outward signs of distress in any of our very limited interactions. This was also before I ever knew that Lola would paint me as a potentially violent person to the Clinchys and that they would run with that idea in their documents trying to get me banned, which happened only a few months after this tournament, which is still the last time Lola and I were ever in the same place.

I mentioned in my previous writing the supposedly benign topic that I intended to bring up with Lola, a TV show that she had recommended and I had liked. I did not mention that the woman who pulled her away was Nits, who has since that time become more well known in the Scrabble community for doing online commentary. I still have never met Nits nor talked to her at all, and I did not know who she was at that moment. The only reason I learned her name later was that Cesar told me. I have no idea what Lola had told Nits previously, what Nits thought about me then, and what Nits thinks about me now. I hope that our strange introduction does not too seriously impair the chance of future civil interaction.

Although from my point of view Nits’s behavior in that moment seemed like a severe overreaction to me just taking a few steps in a particular direction in a crowded room, I understand she was working from very imperfect information. However, I believe that Nits inadvertently did both me and Lola a big favor through her action of hastily extricating Lola from the room, though not the favor that either she or Lola might have thought that she did.

See, the name of the television show that I wanted to casually chat with Lola about was “Killing Eve.” We had watched “Fleabag” together, and Lola had recommended this other show by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. “Killing Eve” is a great show, by the way. The name is suggestive enough by itself, but the content of the show is even darker than the name. In retrospect, if I had succeeded in delivering what I thought was a benign message about a TV show I enjoyed to Lola in that moment, I think there is a good chance that it might have set her off even worse than she was set off when she wrote her letters to Jennifer, WGPO, and Woogles that became part of the incident report.

Whether Lola’s imagination had already run wild to the point of believing I was a violent threat, or whether Lola was disingenuously trying to paint the story that way does not matter. Either way, she would have probably used me name-dropping that show as further “proof” of what a maniac and a threat I was. So I am grateful to Nits that I never did get to mention the name of that show, both to spare me that particular attack and to spare Lola any more undue mental distress.

I mentioned the name of the show because at this point I find it a humorous detail, but the main reason I told this story is not about that detail. It is because I have at so many times over the last decade found myself in social situations that I would have been able to navigate much more easily years earlier. But my nervous system has become so fried from the tension of knowing that other people were gossiping about me and had built a view of me that was so separated from reality, that I have often found myself tongue-tied and awkwardly silent in a way that probably gives other people bad vibes. It has been much harder to give off the good vibes that I used to be able to radiate in my happier days, and sometimes I fear that this causes a snowball effect of people tending to believe the more absurd things they might have heard about me.

They would be less likely to believe all that crap if they just hung around me and saw me acting like a normal, fun-to-be-around human being, but the exact reason they don’t see that is the psychological trauma of the rumor-mongering and ostracism. I have also previously mentioned that my separation from all of these people during the COVID lockdowns contributed to the rumors about me becoming so disconnected from reality.

A person who was a friend at the time read through the entirety of my July 2020 blogs, The Crucible and The Ostracism, and gave me frank feedback that she thought I had not done anything wrong in the story except for asking Jennifer to take down the Facebook picture of me. I thought that was a great take. I have always known that as much as that picture bothered me at the time, Jennifer had every right to keep it up on her Facebook profile if she wanted to. At the same time, I never demanded she take it down. I asked politely. I even used the word “please.” When I tried to point out that particular detail to Jeremy Cahnmann, he made the ridiculous argument that it “came across” like a demand.

I did not argue with him about this, but I found his line of reasoning completely unpersuasive. There is no factual way that you can read my letter and see the sentence about the Facebook picture as being a demand rather than a request. What I think Jeremy really meant is, “we avoidant people are so unused to talking directly to other people and saying what we mean, we are so afraid of even the possibility of imposing on someone else, that we take even the most polite request to do something a different way as an overstepping demand.”

That is the heart of my problem with avoidant people. They are so afraid of emotional confrontation that they build so many rules for themselves about how you should and should not talk to other people. With them everything needs to be interpreted through a code. They often do not even realize how much they are speaking and listening through implication rather than through literal meaning, and they think that everyone else has or should have signed a contract to speak through the same prism of implication that they are used to.

Yet I am the one who is possibly neurodivergent because I try to say precisely and literally what I mean. I understand that this is often a trait people associate with autism, and to me it is a desirable trait. But I do not even think that is where I got it from. I got it from being a mathematician, and from having been coached in my writing by other mathematicians. I remember when I was writing a particular mathematics paper on a job. One of my mentors reviewed the paper thoroughly and helped me vastly improve it. There were various times in the paper in which I said things that were metaphorical and not quite accurate, but in a way that would come across as totally normal to most casual English speakers. Even if they were not literally exactly true, I figured that they were cases where a casual reader would understand the gist of what I was saying, and that by using this informal language I would make the paper more readable and less boring to readers who were not used to the somewhat stilted-sounding formality of many mathematics papers.

However, my mentor repeatedly nitpicked all these cases in which I said things that might have had the right general idea but that oversimplified or slightly distorted the exact mathematical truth. He helped me see the importance of precision in language, and that I could make arguments in the paper that were more readable than those in papers by other mathematicians who were not as gifted writers as myself without sacrificing any rigor.

I have said recently that I believe that it is likely that the journalist who tried and failed to get an article published about my Scrabble story might have given too much credence to the other side. I did not get to read his article. This tentative criticism only comes from what I detected between the lines of our interactions, but I also have a bit of tentative praise about something that I believe he probably tried to emphasize in his telling of the story: How Jennifer’s freakout after my final email to her before the 2017 New Orleans tournament was fundamentally borne of her misunderstanding my intentions. When I wrote “I am almost certain if that happens you will regret not having this conversation in private,” I meant exactly, literally what I said. I was making a prediction of what her reaction was going to be if she chose that particular course of action. I did not express any desire to cause her regret nor to threaten her in any way. The idea that my letter was threatening her was entirely her inference and was not in any way explicitly stated in that letter.

I tried to write the language of that letter as clearly as possible with no subtext. However, avoidant people like Jennifer who are so afraid of having an uncomfortable conversation at all see the act of having that conversation as a threat. They will imagine subtext and assume intention in the writer’s mind, because how dare you put them in a position of having a conversation they desperately want to avoid! And I am the one who is not normal? If that is what being neurotypical is, I want no part of it.

Not only do I still believe I was doing entirely the right thing by trying to have a conversation with Jennifer before we sat down to play our tournament game at the 2017 New Orleans tournament, specifically to avoid the situation she put herself in, of her upset with emotion while we were both trying to focus on playing a Scrabble game. But I also am completely okay with the part of my brain that became temporarily fixated on that Facebook picture of her. It is the same brain that had the motivation and drive to learn so much of the Scrabble dictionary and to master the strategic and mechanical elements of the game so well that I have won so many tournaments and had so many great results against other top players in the world. It is part and parcel of how my brain works that I hyper-focused on that picture of her and looked back at it so many times as our relationship was falling apart. And in the time leading up to that tournament, I used that picture as a tool, juxtaposing thoughts about it with the thoughts about how little she cared for me now and how callously she had ghosted me, to train my brain to unlearn my attachment to her.

When I sent her that January 5th letter, still eight days before the New Orleans tournament, that was marking the moment at which I had gotten over my fixation on that photograph and was ready to move on and play my best Scrabble, regardless of how she behaved toward me before or during that tournament. But why did I feel a need to send that email at all? It was because I am a man of my word, and I still had a little bit of fear that she might say something across the board that would unsettle me again, making it hard for me to play my best Scrabble. I interpreted that the sentence in my previous email “I would prefer to avoid that situation and not accidentally air any of our issues in front of other Scrabble players,” had made an implicit promise not to say anything about our past history in the tournament room. And I knew that if she did say something to make me uncomfortable before the game, I could not simultaneously do what I needed to protect myself and keep that implicit promise. So I felt a moral obligation to let her know that I was no longer restricting myself by that rule that I had set for myself earlier.

You know, kind of like how Jennifer had set a rule in 2015 that she was only going on first dates with other guys and not sleeping with them while we were dating, and then how she set a rule that she was “never ever, ever, ever getting back together” with the guy she dated in the springtime, only to later change her mind about what rules she was going to abide by? Except that I had the morality to actually inform her that I had changed the rules I had set for myself.

Now I get that none of the rest of you, not Jennifer herself, nor Jason Broersma, nor anyone else who was at the 2017 New Orleans tournament, could possibly have imagined or unpacked that that was what was going on in my head, and I totally understand how you misinterpreted me as a potential stalker who was not over his ex.

But here is the thing: I had already done the self-work so far in advance and understood this so well about myself, that I could have explained all of this to you just as clearly in January 2017 as I have right now, or at any point in the nine years in between. And the day before Jennifer and I played at that tournament, I wanted to explain this to Jason Broersma, if he had ever been willing to shut the fuck up and let me tell my story, instead of being so insistent that he had to commandeer the conversation in an irrelevant direction because he so thoroughly misunderstood where I was at.

In shutting themselves off from uncomfortable conversations, avoidant people so often prevent themselves from gaining the exact information and understanding they need to make situations better. They maintain tensions and misunderstandings for years or decades that could have been resolved in minutes. The number of times both the Clinchys and other people in Scrabble could have resolved this situation earlier and more quickly by just having a conversation with me at any point over the last decade has become almost uncountable. But I will try to enumerate some of the more obvious times.

If Jennifer had just talked to me before we went to New Orleans, or even at the tournament before we were scheduled to sit down and play our tournament games, none of this bullshit would have happened. If Evans had just talked to me before the tournament, we would have probably been able to smooth it out too. If Jason Broersma had let me tell my story the night before. Even after the tournament was over, if Jennifer or Evans had just called me and talked about things afterward. If either of them had talked to me at the Charlottesville tournament two months later, or at the Niagara falls tournament two months after that, or the 2018 New Orleans tournament, one year after this started, at which I played Evans twice.

If they had talked to me after I had moved to Seattle. If they had talked to me after Walker Willingham sent an email to them and me inviting all of us to get together at a bar to play casual Scrabble games in Seattle, instead of them refusing to respond to the emails and show up at all, and Evans just pissily privately emailing Walker to browbeat him for including me at all. If they had talked to me at the small one day tournament on May 20th, 2018 in Portland, when we all arrived at the pizzeria early enough in the morning to have a conversation before the event began, and we all sat down to play each other. And Jennifer wasn’t even pissy about it; only Evans was. That is still the last time we have ever played in the same tournament.

I do not blame them for not talking things out at the July 2018 wedding of Chris Lipe and Randy Goldberg in Aruba, as that was not really the time and place for such a thing, even though it was the last time we were ever in the same place, until we accidentally crossed paths at a Portland food truck pod on June 29th, 2025. Even so, Evans did not need to be a dick to my wedding date.

If they had just emailed me back or called me after I sent the unequivocal apology to them on September 17th, 2018 after they had returned my entry fee to the Hood River tournament. (This is the most obvious one. Many other Scrabble players, including Terry Kang and Sue Tremblay, have said that Jennifer and Evans should have just talked to me after that email and straightened things out.)

They still had nearly two years to talk to me after that, before I put out the July 2020 blog posts The Crucible and The Fallout. And they very easily could have reached out to me and talked things out after those blogs came out, or at any time for the next two years after that.

But instead, four years after our last contact, they unleashed an all-out attack to get me banned from Scrabble in April 2022. But a year after that, when I took them to court for defamation in April 2023, they could have easily set up a meeting to talk to me with both of our lawyers present and learned that I would happily have been willing to settle out of court with them and take many embarrassing things down from my blog, if they had been willing to recant the statements they made to the Scrabble associations.

Then, after their evil lawyer Michael Fuller sent me a letter on March 28th, 2024 asking for mediation, that was more likely about him trying to weasel his way out of the ethics complaint against him than it was about the Clinchys wanting anything from me, I sent him a letter on April 9th, 2024, and had my friend Scott Appel independently send a copy of the same letter directly to the Clinchys, in which I spelled out that I thought a meeting between me and the Clinchys was a good idea and said I would be willing to follow it up with mediation if we could not get a good result by just talking things out ourselves. (See pages 3-5 of this document.)

I will not even begin to enumerate the multitude of ways that the boards of NASPA and WESPA could have gotten much better results if they had ever been willing to have an actual conversation with me instead of doing everything they could to minimize communication with me and abuse me from a distance. I will mention though that the one person I ever spoke to on the phone during all those debacles of disciplinary processes was Jason Idalski. He and I got along very cordially, but after a couple of phone calls, he was instructed by the Advisory Board of NASPA not to talk to me on the phone anymore and to do everything in writing, still well before I had submitted my defense. The reason for this was probably that they already knew they wanted to kick me out of Scrabble unfairly, and they did not want to risk anything coming out in their communications to me other than what was written in letters that were probably tightly vetted by their lawyers.

Lola, of course, could have talked to me sooner a number of times to smooth things out, but the most obvious was after her lawyer contacted my lawyer for a settlement, and I wrote up a proposed public statement for Lola to make that would have extracted her entirely from the court case in a way that made both her and me look good. Even if there were things she did not like about the wording of that statement, I was completely amenable to her changing the wording of it. Instead, Lola and her lawyer never followed up on this, and I had a hearing at the court, which Lola and the Clinchys did not even attend.

When I flew to Accra, Ghana in November 2025 to try to play in the World Scrabble Championship, I was able to have face-to-face meetings with both Chris Lipe and Lukeman Omo-Owolabi, prior to the World Championship beginning, thanks to the efforts of Limo Kipkemoi.

I gave Chris the specifics of a deal that would have allowed me to have my punishments vacated, me to be allowed to play in the tournament, the Clinchys to have no penalty whatsoever, and there to be no subsequent legal action between any of us, if Chris had been willing to remove himself from the WESPA Board election, make a statement restoring my reputation, and himself sit out a suspension equal to the time I had already been unethically forced to sit out.

The next day, when I spoke to Lukeman, I gave up very quickly on trying to fight for admittance to the tournament when Lukeman made clear he would not budge on that, and I just wanted to attend the BGM to make a statement. I was even willing to share the entire wording of the statement with Lukeman ahead of time to make sure he approved me saying it.

If Chris or Lukeman had been willing to accept either of those deals, I never would have needed to publish The Reckoning, in which I revealed to the world that Chris Lipe is an alleged rapist, and The Contrition, in which I revealed the multitude of massively unethical and narcissistic things that Jennifer did while we dated between 2014 and 2016. Note that some but not all of those personal details about Jennifer were intentionally edited out of the original September 6th, 2022 response to the incident report but later included in the May 26th, 2023 appeal document, specifically because Jennifer’s extra September 9th statement (that NASPA hid from me for two months) included extra defamatory material that pertained specifically to details of our personal relationship that I was trying to avoid talking about.1

This is by no means a complete list of times that the Clinchys and other parties who wronged me could have talked things out and worked on resolving things with me sooner, but I believe I have more than thoroughly made my point. Everyone who has been part of this debacle of banning me has consistently taken the path over the last nine years of refusing to have any honest, good-faith dialogue with me, and has chosen the path of maximum public embarrassment for all of them.

Chris Lipe and Lukeman Omo-Owolabi are the two people who are most to blame for the publication of The Reckoning and The Contrition. I specifically tried to talk to you both about a path by which I did not need to publish those blog posts.

Your shame and your public humiliation is your own fault, you avoidant morons.

John Wick is a man of focus, commitment, and sheer fuckin’ will.

Despite all of the continued mistreatment I have received from the Scrabble community, including supposed “lifetime bans” and being disallowed from playing in the Continental Championship in Budapest and the WESPA Championship in Accra, after flying thousands of miles to get to both events, I have persisted in telling my story, mostly through YouTube videos over the last year. (13 months and 40 videos is the latest count, as of this writing.) While there is some redundancy with what is in this blog, much of the content of the videos focuses on additional stories of what has happened in 2025 and beyond. The videos also highlight some details of the blog posts that you might have glossed over on a first reading.

I believe the videos have helped many readers and watchers to understand the story in greater depth than they might have from the blog alone. They may have attracted more of an audience who prefers to watch rather than to read. They have also helped document my PTSD, which may become relevant as I apply for disability and if I ever have to take later legal action for the damages of this community against me. But none of those is the primary reason I have made the videos.

The primary reason is just to cope with the abuse that you all have wrought on me. I make those videos for me, and I have loved rewatching many of them. Even the small number of videos in which I have lost my shit and yelled are helpful, because I can watch myself yell to expunge the anger while saving my vocal cords from me actually yelling again. At the same time, there are a few that are hard to go back and rewatch, especially the one about my childhood abuse. But I am also glad I recorded it so that if someone else later wants to know more about my past, I can point them to that video rather than having to relive the trauma of telling the story again.

Even if making those videos did not help my cause in any other way, the degree to which they have helped me would be worth it. But I do believe that a number of them have aided my advocacy. I have dispelled a lot of the myths and lies that my defamers have made about me, both through the way I have chosen to tell my stories, and also through some of the comments I have received and how I have responded to those comments, as I pointed out in this recent video.

After only making one or two videos a month for the first year, I have rapidly stepped up the cadence of my videos in May and June of 2026, and I have also begun to include Scrabble instructional videos as well as some videos about general ideas in moral and political philosophy. Somehow, a three minute video about how to tie a bandana around your hair has recently overtaken all of those to become my most popular video. The popularity of that video did not even begin to take off until six months after I posted it, which is a good reminder that any compelling material I put up there could go viral at any time, not just when I first post it.

My overall viewership has increased significantly over the last few weeks as I have increased both the diversity and frequency of my videos. I know my YouTube presence is still very small compared to many content creators, but I am trending in the right direction. I like what I am doing, and I plan to continue it for the foreseeable future. I do not even care whether it ever makes me money. It gives me something to look forward to on a daily basis. And I like to believe that I am leaving behind some good food for thought. I care more about the quality of what I leave behind than the quantity of people who appreciate it.

My videos have been, to me at least, an interesting mix of planning and improvisation. I am trying to tell a larger story with the majority of the videos, and even many of them that are overtly about philosophy are intended to play into some of the ideas and themes of the story of my Scrabble banning. At the same time, my banning from Scrabble is not the only inspiration for the larger story. The tribalism and rampant disinformation of the current political age is also a large source of inspiration, and in many ways I feel that what I am trying to do is a continuation of what I did in my first full-time career out of college as a high school mathematics teacher: to teach people to think more objectively and rationally. While it has not yet reached the popularity of several of my other videos, one of my proudest YouTube accomplishments yet is that my video “We don’t have an empathy gap! We have a rationality gap!” was briefly featured on the homepage of YouTube. (Yes, it was probably only for an hour or so, but it did provide me a substantial spike in views.)

So the YouTube thing has been amusing for the first year that I have been doing it, but I never dreamed that it would, just within the last couple of weeks, provoke my abusers to do something so mind-numbingly stupid and counterproductive to their cause.

It started off innocently enough, when a new YouTube account made a couple of comments on a relatively uncontroversial video of mine called “Message to Will Anderson during the coverage of the 2026 Causeway Challenge.” I had begun to criticize Will openly for his role in my banning in The Gaslighting and then in an earlier YouTube video, in which I briefly lost my cool and shouted. But while the underlying message of the “Message to Will Anderson…” video might have been quite critical, it was delivered in a calm and polite way, and the comments that this anonymous YouTuber wrote were seemingly benign.

I was pointing out how Will Anderson was not allowing my comments to be visible on his YouTube videos, and this user pointed out that the example comment I gave had a link in it, which sometimes causes comments to be filtered out. I had actually made many previous comments on Will’s videos that had all been kept invisible, including ones that were linkless, benign, and relevant to the topic of the video, and others in which I had directly called out some of Will’s behavior toward me, and I was quite sure that Will was censoring all of my comments. I patiently explained this to the commenter and received no further argument.

On the surface this seems like it could be an argument from someone who was trying to give Will the benefit of the doubt, to provide plausible deniability that Will was not trying to censor me, the type of argument that Chris Lipe and Conrad Bassett-Bouchard had made frequently in July 2020 when I made my first blog posting revealing the ways the Clinchys had been wronging me for years. But at the same time, I fully recognized that this could have just been someone who was a YouTube nerd, who knew about the technology and policies of the platform and was trying to help me. I made no assumption of bad intent on the part of the commenter.

It does seem funny, though, that someone who created this user account on June 2nd, 2026, two days after I created that video, would have such extensive knowledge of the inner workings of YouTube. It definitely smelled like a burner account that someone was using to hide their true identity.

On that same day, June 2nd, I put out another video called “Bobby Fischer & When I Really Had Homicidal Feelings Toward Chris Lipe.” The provocative title of that video quickly caused this video to be my most popular one ever by measure of views in the first couple days of its posting. While the title might seem like a shock to someone unfamiliar with the story, it was not really a revelation. The Clinchys and Lola had falsely accused me of having homicidal intent toward Evans Clinchy back in April 2022, and that was a significant part of the reason for my initial banning. The Scrabble associations had doubled down by giving me a lifetime ban in June 2025, based on their interpretation of a single text message I had sent Chris in May 2025 as a death threat. And a few days earlier than when these YouTube comments were happening, I had released a video on May 27th in which I had mentioned, only in passing, that I had never had homicidal feelings toward Evans Clinchy but I had had homicidal feelings, that I had never acted on, toward Chris Lipe, years earlier than when this lifetime banning occurred.

Despite the name, the “Bobby Fischer…” video was not particularly shocking. Indeed, I explained that I was making it as a quick statement to elaborate on the surprising thing I had mentioned in passing on the May 27th video. I further said that I had no intention to give short shrift to the topic but intended to explain myself further on the blog, by which I specifically meant this post.

On this video, the same anonymous YouTube commenter made an extensive series of comments that were much longer and more argumentative than on the “Message to Will Anderson…” video. These comments revealed a lot of familiarity with the story of my blog and an absurdly pro-Chris Lipe and pro-Jennifer Clinchy bias in the mind of the author. The person claimed to have an understanding of the Scrabble community’s attitude toward my banning and made a huge stink about me revealing the rape allegation toward Chris Lipe when I was not in contact with the person who made the allegation, notwithstanding the fact that I had left the person’s name out of what I said and had protected their anonymity, had made very clear that this was a second-hand recounting of the story, named the person who had told me the story, and confirmed that that person heard it directly from the woman who alleged it, and even stated very clearly that Chris should not be punished for this unless the woman was willing to speak out herself.

The only person in the world who would make the argument that I did something wrong in how I presented that information and go on the attack toward me while not having a shred of anger toward Chris Lipe is Chris Lipe himself.

Chris, you do not realize how stupid and obvious you are.

I gave the commenter the benefit of the doubt that the person was not necessarily Chris, but that the commenter had read the argument from Chris Lipe elsewhere on the internet. After all, this person claimed to know a fair amount about how the rest of the Scrabble community perceived me and this situation, so it made sense that the person might be in some Facebook groups associated with WESPA or some of the other Scrabble organizations, all of which I have been banned and blocked from. It made sense to me that a person who had been reading posts in that environment where I had been blocked from participating, would have developed an extremely biased view of my story, against me and in favor of my abusers.

So I made a new video in which I specifically pointed out that any arguments Chris Lipe might have made against me in a private forum could still be legally considered defamation, and I asked the anonymous commenter or anyone else who had seen postings like this to please send screenshots to me.

The commenter quickly commented with this hilarious crock of shit:

I don’t really play Scrabble outside of occasional board game nights with friends. I stumbled across one of your YouTube videos a few weeks ago and went to your blog to get context. After the first chapter I found it so hard to sympathize with you based on how you described your treatment of Jennifer that I kept reading. All the way through.

I have no connection to Chris Lipe or anyone else in your story. I don’t follow them in any forums. I had never heard of any of these people before finding your video. Your hunch that my questions were shaped by Chris Lipe is simply wrong.

And honestly, I don’t think Chris Lipe is thinking about you very much at all nowadays. I know this conflict is a defining part of your life. But from the outside it looks like the effort here is almost entirely one sided. The people you are fighting have jobs, relationships, and other concerns. You are the one making videos, writing blog posts, and flying to Ghana. That asymmetry is worth sitting with.

Chris lipe pretending to be an anonymous youtube commenter

Chris, I was still able to give the benefit of the doubt that the commenter was just mimicking an argument from you rather than actually you in disguise before you made this comment, but you completely gave yourself away here. There is no way an occasional living room Scrabble player who is not on any of the Scrabble forums could have shown as much insight into the attitude of the Scrabble tournament population as a whole, or at least claimed to have that knowledge. Furthermore, the idea that the person was motivated to read through my entire blog just based on a hatred of how I had treated Jennifer is laughable.

Your absurd bias is not allowing you to see how completely stupid you sound. This is not a believable lie in the least, and anyone with half a brain can see this is you now. Furthermore, you are specifically saying, “I don’t think Chris Lipe is thinking about you very much at all nowadays,” when you created a burner account and are now commenting on my third YouTube video in a row!

You have done a better job of proving yourself to be a dishonest hypocrite who is interested in nothing other than putting a false view of things into other people’s heads than I ever could have done. And you’ve done it specifically through an anonymous account because you thought it would be more believable if someone other than you said it. You can’t find another person in the world who agrees with you, so you had to make someone up.

Nonetheless, I responded in a way that did not immediately give away that I knew it was you, and just pointed out a very obvious way that you were not ignoring me in my response.

I’ll take your word that you’re not connected to Chris Lipe. He got the President of the Ghanaian Scrabble Association to completely unnecessarily hire security guards to accost me, and he tried to sic those security guards on me when I was having a civil conversation with Lukeman, but sure… Chris isn’t thinking about me very much at all.

me responding to the youtube commenter whom i now know is chris lipe

And it is a good thing that I did not immediately reveal that I was on to you, because you then continued to talk too much and also reveal that Jennifer Lee Clinchy was one of the people behind the account.

You claimed to have dismantled my argument that your handling of the rape allegation was wrong. I strongly disagree. You addressed almost nothing. You told me I don’t know anything about your current relationship with the alleged victim and that I should apologize for my presumptuousness. That is not a rebuttal.
My concern does not depend on what has happened between you and her since publication. It depends on what you did at the moment of publication, which you described yourself in your own words. You published a rape allegation against a named individual based on second hand information, without consulting the alleged victim first. That is the concern. You have said nothing that makes it less valid.

Let me ask you three direct questions. Please answer them directly.

1.) Do you believe it is acceptable to publish a rape allegation publicly on the internet, including offering the alleged victim’s name to organizations, without first obtaining her consent?

2.) Have you told the alleged victim that you published this allegation and offered her name to Scrabble organizations?

3.) Has the alleged victim explicitly told you she supports the publication of this allegation?

jennifer clinchy pretending to be the same youtube commenter

At this point I can recognize Jennifer’s writing style a mile away, and she definitely penned this. But the real dead giveaway was that she used the exact same format as she had in the first email I had received from the CoCo conduct team back in 2022. (I’m pretty sure that email was also written by Jennifer despite having other people’s names on it.)

The next morning I recorded yet another video, revealing the connection between this last comment and the Coco email, though I still did not definitively say that the commenter account was run by the two of them, but simply raise the question, “Is wwrf-s8s a burner account for Chris Lipe or Jennifer Clinchy?”

That video quickly received two thumbs down clicks that I am sure were from Chris and Jennifer themselves. What y’all don’t realize is I like the thumbs down clicks just as much as the thumbs up ones. More clicks is more engagement is going to help boost these videos in the algorithm regardless of which way you vote.

I will give you a little bit of credit for the comment you made on that video.

Congrats Dave, you caught us. I’m a joint account by everyone who ever wronged you in the scrabble world.

the final comment made by this anonymous youtube account

It is clever, because it sounds like something you could pass off as just some anonymous YouTuber making a sarcastic joke, but you could also say that it’s not a lie and pass it off as an admission of what you had done if it ever came to that. You tried to give yourself plausible deniability while making sure you weren’t saying anything outright false, as you had already done in some of your previous comments.

You are both missing the point, and honestly, Jennifer, this is a point you have been missing for as long as I have known you. Jennifer, you are a terrible liar, and I have always been able to read you like a book, since the entire time that we dated. But you seem to only care about what people can legally nail you for, and not about what is intuitively obvious to others if it does not carry any legal weight.

I may not have reached a strict legal burden of proof that this anonymous YouTube commenter was the two of you, but I do not care about that. I am not trying to hold you accountable for legal damages for these YouTube comments. I am trying to hold you accountable in the court of public opinion.

And you have more than given yourself away. Anyone who looks at this story honestly and is not hopelessly biased in your favor can tell now that you two quite obviously wrote those YouTube comments. And you did it specifically to try to undermine faith in me, to try to get people to believe that there was a neutral reading of the story by an outsider that made the two of you look like the good guys and me look like the bad guy.

You achieved the exact opposite of your goal. You proved that you had to create a fake person, because there is no way an outsider would have the views that you do. And when the possibility that the account was actually you came up in conversation, you had to blatantly tell the flimsiest lie ever in a desperate attempt to get someone to believe that you had not just been trying your damnedest to get other people to believe the counterfactual worldview that you were spinning.

And Chris, you had to lay it on even thicker than that, by trying to convince people that you didn’t care about me and what I was writing at all, while your actions were proving the exact opposite of what you were saying.

Thank you both. You did a better job of stepping onto the public gallows and putting nooses around your own necks than anything I could have ever done to make you face the judgment that you deserve.

Footnote

  1. A few specific examples:

    Jennifer’s claim in her September 9th statement that I called her a “dirty whore” referred specifically to the relationship she had with the man she cheated on me with while I was on the west coast the previous week, and whom she dated for a short time in the spring of 2015. This story was in the snippet from the first draft of the 2020 blogs that was included in The Contrition, but I had not mentioned it in the original response to the incident report. I did explain a little bit about that story in the appeal document, specifically to defend myself against the accusation of calling her a “dirty whore.”

    I told nothing about the story of how Jennifer had lied to me about her ex-husband being out of her life and had literally contacted him to pick her mother at the airport while she and I were on a date in Washington DC in either the response to the incident report or the appeal document. That is a story that only came out when I published the snippet in The Contrition.
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