Some years ago, I had a minor entanglement with Alex Dally McFarlane and the notable hatemonger known as Requires Hate (also known as Winterfox, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, and too many other aliases to mention here), where they bullied a friend of mine off of Twitter and very nearly out of fandom altogether for the crime of Not Being Anti-Racist Enough.

So proud was MacFarlane of this feat, that she crowed about it on Twitter (tweet since deleted) and in a blog post on her own site which – at the time of this writing – is still up. (In case it should mysteriously disappear at some point in the future, here’s a copy from The Wayback Machine.)

As mentioned in the comments, the tweets MacFarlane presents are quite one-sided, and she tells a wee porkie about the number of people who confronted her for bullying. Alas, I didn’t screencap the whole conversation at the time, as like most of the people involved, I simply blocked and moved on, figuring – to quote MacFarlane’s own words to me – Not interested in working with idiots.

However, things have recently started to come to light suggesting that this was not simply an isolated incident.

It seems that MacFarlane and Requires Hate have a track record of attacking women on the Internet. Here’s another tale of their methods. And another.

Should you wish to go deeper down the rabbithole, Laura Mixon has a very fine overview of Requires Hate’s output over the last ten or more years.

These are not just isolated incidents. Many other people are now discovering that they, too, were bullied by Requires Hate, often abetted by MacFarlane. Many of them didn’t realise it was a campaign of deliberate hatred, and often blamed themselves. Others had seen how people who attempted to speak up against Requires Hate were bullied and attacked in literally every venue on the Internet where they appeared. Here’s Requires Hate attacking a rape victim for over six months.

And now, one-by-one, her victims are beginning to speak up. To realise:

No.

It was not me.

It was not my fault.

And I was not alone.

And people are beginning to realise that those who attacked anyone who dared to disagree with them under the battle flags of Justice For The Oppressed and If You Are Not With Us Then You Are Complicit In Oppression might not be doing it because they believed in the causes they espoused. Requires Hate, for example, has been sending death threats to people who disagreed with her for years before cloaking it in the flag of social justice.

And now all the karmic justice that has been piling up behind her has finally caught up. The mills of god grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.

If you’ve been harassed by Requires Hate, you may want to contact Laura with details. As Laura says, “BS/RH’s targets need to know that they are heard and believed.”

Each person who reveals their story makes it easier for the next person to reveal theirs.

It’s often said that sunshine is the best disinfectant.

Let us bring some sunshine into the dark corners of this world.