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When Hate Takes Over – Saboteur Aesop

Blurry image of a bookish looking woman in glasses wearing a dowdy fleece and glasses.

As many of you know, myself and a group of Black women called out a ‘socialist’ who was making racist comments while building a huge following on the back of the #SocialistSunday hashtag. We were attacked by dozens of left-wing accounts in retaliation and found ourselves the focus of a yearlong campaign of racial hatred. Up until then, I’d seen Saboteur Aesop around, even followed her for a bit. I’m not sure why I unfollowed. Probably the constant stream of hate coming from her account. And it is constant. One of the most prolific of our abusers, Aesop, very obviously has little in her life beyond Twitter. To trick her rapidly vanishing followers into believing she is a normal person, Aesop spams them with hundreds of socialist related posts every day, in the hope that her fascism will only be seen by those who it’s directed at. Mainly Black women, though the net has widened significantly over the last few months to include trans men and women, disabled people and most recently, the Gypsy Roma Traveller communities.

Saboteur Aesop Tweet reading 'The one I called it because IT was a troll abusing me nothing to do with being trans or not and they all WENT wild and called me a Nazi yes that one. Hypocrites the lot of them

Evelyn is another who is quick to follow the racist, wannabe child abuser Joker when he respawns on a new hate account. A middle aged man who uses the N word, mocks our comrades for being disabled and (his favourite) sexualises and threatens my 11 year old son. She’s never far away from him, always on hand to goad and encourage his hatred. Always looking for approval from someone from some of the worst fascists on Twitter. You know the most terrifying thing about Evelyn? She used to work with children. A woman who spends 18 hours a day, 7 days a week harassing Black women online and terrorising trans women with dead names and doxes, used to have access to vulnerable children. I won’t speculate about what she has or hasn’t done, but unless her mind has become progressively more toxic with age (she’s in her seventies) her bigotry and bias make her entirely unsuited to teaching.

Saboteur Aesop Tweets claiming she loves bananas and posting banana emojis

Early on I could see that Evelyn really enjoys seeing us being racially abused by people like Joker. She’d be right behind him, basking in his filth, insisting that he’s not a racist and smearing the characters of Black women with lies and unfounded accusations. When Joker started using banana emojis to provoke Black people, Evelyn got onboard, sending out dozens of Tweets that featured bananas to deliberately goad us. She even admits to deliberately provoking us so she can report us. She’s a skilled Karen, her talents for gas lighting, DARVO and making herself the victim, precision honed over almost a century. Her delight is palpable as she surrounds herself with some of the most sexually aggressive, problematic males on this app. They lavish her with attention, knowing that it’s the only attention she gets and she responds with horny fervour, to the flattery of dangers like John West aka The Tuna Trouser Danger, who likes to make rape threats and expose his withered tackle in DM groups.

Like most of our abusers, Evelyn has a long track record of harassing strangers. A quick search of her name and former handle, Nemesis Republic, leads to several former victims who have had the misfortune of encountering her online and in real life. Like Liverpool Preservation Trust, who ran into Evelyn 12 years ago at a Heritage wine and cheese evening and found themselves bombarded with over 400 emails from her. A look at the comments on the article, addressed to Evelyn by a frustrated Liverpool Heritage member, reveal that Evelyn is well known for causing trouble in heritage circles. So much so that one onlooker recalled a poem that I think sums her up perfectly.

I shall not, I think grow
round, brown and sweet as a cobnut,
but sour and suck-cheeked
as a December crab-apple. I shall sit,
Narrow-eyed, wide-kneed, clot-veined,
in a chair by the porch
malodorous as slurry

A user Tweets 'No one should use racist language against anyone, whether you happen to agree with them or not; no one is censoring your right to be rude to those who you consider rude to you, but use of slurs tars innocent people and shows your contempt for whole communities. Case in point.' Another Tweet below reads 'Lol is the little gypo Crying' The same user replies to an unseen Tweet by Saboteur Aesop and say 'I'll delete it but only coz you asked.'

My blog yesterday about Evelyn’s sister in hate, Sarah Wiles, sent Evelyn into overdrive. The pair of them have barely slept, but they’ve had to take time out from their joint damage control exercise to tend to more pressing matters.

Recently, Aesop’s favourite racists have turned their attention to members of the Gypsy Roma Traveller communities who have made their own stands against the racism coming out of Aesop’s camp. Using obviously racist language that stereotypes and criminalises Gypsies, Aesop’s friends are accusing a prominent Gypsy account of being part of the ‘Gatiss Gang’, an accusation they throw at anyone who is rightly appalled by their racism. He’s not. We’ve never even had a one-on-one conversation, but this is the level of propaganda we are working with. Trumpian levels of deflection and deceit. Evelyn has worked so hard to convince her crusty corner of Twitter that the Black women suffering at the hands of the racists are the bad guys. That none of this would be happening if it weren’t for us, ‘dividing the left’ as she likes to say. Occasionally though, the racists from Resisting Hate do something that penetrates the white liberal haze and now Aesop has had to speak out about the racism ripping through left Twitter that she was instrumental in inflaming. Here she is calling off her dog Joker, who will stop being racist at her command.

We are dividing the left. None of us set out to do it, none of us knew how badly the left needed dividing, nor did we have the numbers or resources to do it. However it came about, our encounters with shitlibs like Saboteur Aesop, Joker and the rest, have shone a light on a fact that few want to recognise. When it comes to antiblackness and general bigotry, the left is no safer haven than the right. In fact, most of us have expressed we prefer our racism wrapped in the Union Jack, reeking of Stella and ridden with typos – to the sly, pervasive threat of the white liberal, stinking of cheese and wine and draped in an M&S cardigan.

UPDATE

Since I wrote this blog, it’s come to my attention that the unsourced poem I quoted was not, as I thought, a forgotten, copyright expired rhyme. Given the factual nature of this blog, it’s only right, to quote the full works and give full credit.

I shall not, I think, grow
round, brown and sweet as a cobnut,
but sour and suck-cheeked
as a December crab-apple. I shall sit,
narrow-eyed, wide-kneed, clot-veined,
in a chair by the porch,
malodorous as slurry.

I shall slew gossip with rancour,
dispense trench-mouthed wisdom,
breathe on the embers of old feuds,
espouse boundary disputes,
and cast pervading doubt
regarding the parentage
of the village’s chidren.

Those same village children
will find me repellant,
but be unable to run
from my gin-trap of tales
of ailments, vile cures, Rubik’s cube,
drowned farmgirls and kittens.
I will cause many a wetted bed.

Naturally, my cottage,
unkempt and unlovely, with its
inappropriate windows, will ensure
depression in property values,
an explosion of dandelions.
There will be nostalgia, I know,
for the use of the ducking stool.

And when incomers ask of me,
as I know they always will, if
I’ve lived here the whole of my life,
I’ll stretch into my bumpkin smile,
narrow eyes, and give the unvarying reply:
      Oh, no my dears,
      no, certainly not yet.

Evelyn Cook 2004

Here’s the link to the source of the poem. If this is the work of Evelyn (it’s very well written so that would be a surprise) it reads like a statement of intent and a pledge to make everyone she encounters as miserable as she is.

5 Comments »

  1. A few minor inaccuracies, but there’s no disputing Saboteur Aesop’s hateful behaviour. If you don’t think the screenshots show the real person, go over to @TheFabledAesop and look at her Tweets and Replies, rather than the main page, which will be mainly innocuous retweets.
    Her venom is quite breathtaking.

    Like

  2. Fair comment. One or two inaccuracies but people can go look at Aesop’s Tweets and decide for themselves.

    Like

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