DCP 10/5/2022 wrote:I know that at least a few folks are really indignant about what my wife and I are doing, because I’ve received several anonymous and very crude emails denouncing me for it. (I routinely receive angry notes about our travels, and this trip has been no exception.)
DCP 9/26/2022 wrote:Dan's blog entry: Please note that this trip to Newport Beach and environs was entirely at our initiative. No organization sponsored me. No travel company hired me. We paid all expenses ourselves. No tithe payers were harmed in the production of this vacation. (Some of my obsessive critics have already been frothing with indignation at the fact that I’m here.)
Seatimer: "I am chagrined that there are those who weep and wail and gnash their teeth at every travel move and vacation instance that our dear Professor makes."
Dan to Seatimer: And yet, they're out there. In fact, I've received anonymous hate mail this very day about the very blog post to which you're responding. Among other things (some of them obscene), one fellow tells me that absolutely nobody is interested in my travelogues. Which is fine with me, since nobody is obliged to read them. And yet, obviously, that very fellow clearly is interested in what I wrote. Were he not, he wouldn't have written to me to complain about it.
DCP Aug 2022 wrote:A few folks out there in my audience continue to be deeply interested in my personal finances and, it seems, rather disturbed by my travels. So, yet again, I’m going to endeavor to set their minds at ease, even though it’s really none of their business:
I’m fully aware that the explanation that I’ve just given — which follows several previously-given explanations that have said essentially the same thing — won’t help my most obsessive and hostile critics. That’s sad, but it’s okay. There’s really nothing that I can do for them. They’re determined to regard everything I say as a lie and everything I do as mean-spirited and deceptive. Still, perhaps what I’ve written here will assist in calming those down who have recently expressed curiosity and concern about how I spend my money, where I get it, how much of it I may have, and how I can possibly afford to travel so often.
DCP March 2022 wrote:He is not, by the way, to be confused with his less-talented wannabe, who also posts anonymously on the Peterson Obsession Board and whom I call my “Mini-Stalker.” And both are distinct from the anonymous fellow who has sent me hundreds and hundreds of personally insulting and increasing foul-mouthed emails over the past decade. (For the past year or two, his effusions have gone automatically into a file on my computer. Checking that file, I find that he’ll be able to celebrate his tenth anniversary this coming August.)
DCP Feb 2022 wrote:There’s my Malevolent Stalker, for example, and my Mini-Stalker, and several others. And there’s the fellow at the POB who’s been sending me obscene and studiously semi-literate personal insults since at least 4 August 2012; they now go directly into a special file, where — I checked just now — well over eight hundred specimens are available for study by interested mental health professionals. (I have no idea how many of his creations have been trashed over the past decade, or otherwise sadly lost to science.)
DCP Sept 2021 wrote:I mention these things not only in case somebody is in the Newport area or planning to visit it, but because I know that my references to good food that I’ve enjoyed drive certain critics almost berserk. I’m not a “foodie” — very far from it, in fact — but my sounding like an epicure is, for a certain small online subset of my most obsessive critics, like waving the proverbial red flag in front of a perpetually enraged bull. Or, since they seem to enjoy it, one might say that it’s like catnip for them. They will squeal with gratifying outrage and thrill with mocking and denouncing me for several deliriously enjoyable days.
DCP Jan 2021 wrote:I would like to share with you, in its entirety, an important anonymous essay that I received this morning:
It’s possible, even likely, that I’ve missed one or more of the vitally significant contributions made by the modestly self-concealed gentleman and scholar who sent it to me. But this is the 639th such composition that I have on file, dating back to 4 August 2012. Taken together they provide a remarkable glimpse into the mind of one of the great moral leaders and one of the deepest thinkers of our time. Their themes have been extremely consistent over the past roughly eight and a half years; their length and their verbal expression have varied remarkably little. They’re all quite plainly the products of the same incisive brain, unmistakably written by someone who is associated with the predominantly atheistic ex-Latter-day Saint message board established some years ago by one Dr. Shades. (He must be very proud.) That is where my Malevolent Stalker holds court, although this person himself — while driven by the same unmistakable charity and love — seems too different in rhetorical style to actually be my Malevolent Stalker."you’re a twisted lyin cultist propaganda pimp who don't give a whit bout truth….liar legacy of a vxx weak minded coward. people like you otta get the boot ya bloated parasite."
DCP Sept 2020 wrote:We went to Rocky Mountain National Park and to Dinosaur National Monument, complying with all masking and distancing regulations, gaining access only subject to careful limits and control by the National Park Service. We wore masks. We washed our hands frequently. We carried hand sanitizer with us and in our car, and we used it often.
This angered my most obsessive online critics, nonetheless. (Big surprise!) They pronounced me selfish, arrogant, hypocritical, and indifferent to the suffering and possible death of those upon whom my baneful shadow might fall. On several occasions, one of them labeled me a “murderer.” My Malevolent Stalker, unusually candid about the judgment of me that has inspired him to devote daily time to condemning me for the past fifteen years, declared me “human garbage.”
DCP June 2020 wrote:I have an anonymous critic — I call him my Malevolent Stalker — who has been publicly faulting my character, my appearance, my literary tastes, my religious views, my travels, my scholarship, my friends, and indeed all my works almost every single day for the past fifteen years or so. Yesterday, he accused me of holding non-Latter-day Saints, non-Latter-day Saint religious faiths, and non-Latter-day Saint beliefs in disrespect and contempt, effectively of being a religious bigot.
I honestly don’t see the point of such transparent falsehoods as this one, leveled by my Malevolent Stalker. Granted, he posts his accusations in a small corner of the internet, to an audience pre-programmed to accept them. But the offense is particularly egregious in this specific area, where my record is so long, so public, so unambiguous, and so well-documented. It’s presumably not coincidental that my accuser takes his online pseudonym from that of a character on a popular television crime show — a highly intelligent but boundlessly malicious and unscrupulous stalker, psychological manipulator, and serial murderer. People find inspiration where it suits them.
DCP March 2020 wrote:For roughly thirty hours, thus far, the message board where my Malevolent Stalker, his mendacious wannabe the Mini-Stalker, and several others have anonymously published their work for approximately a decade and a half has been down. Now, I know that I should have more sympathy. But I frankly think it’s rather pleasant that, for part of two days now — to pick up just a few of the Peterson-related themes that were really, literally, trending on the board immediately before it went down — they’ve been unable to continue with their earnest discussions not only of such standard-issue topics as my 2012 purging from the Maxwell Institute, my mean-spiritedness, greed, dishonesty, physical ugliness, racism, and hatred of homosexuals; the viciousness of this blog; and the embarrassingly low quality of the Interpreter Foundation’s yet-unreleased Witnesses film; but of how, by distracting one of its central participants from his urgent professional work, this blog has interfered with Utah’s response to the coronavirus, and how my hatred and fear of science, if they were to spread to the general public, would make fighting COVID-19 almost impossible, and how I need to be more charitable to others.
DCP Dec 2019 wrote:My anonymous but indefatigable Malevolent Stalker has just posted a condemnatory analysis of the way I spent my time on Thanksgiving Day 2019. Based on his careful study of my blog posts for that day, last Thursday, he concludes that I neglected and ignored my family on Thanksgiving.
This is important to him. He cares. He cares about me. He cares about my family. He’s been closely monitoring me for fifteen years now, and commenting continually about me during that time — always negatively — online. So I want to set his mind at rest, and, at the same time, to set him another task.
Jun 2019 wrote:There’s a fellow who has devoted considerable effort to defaming and demonizing me over the past decade and a half. I call him my “Malevolent Stalker.” (He attacks me from a position of deep anonymity.) He’s a clever boy — well, of course, he’s no longer young anymore, since he’s been at this particular gig for approximately fifteen years — and sometimes even I am impressed by the cunning cleverness with which he cherry picks and twists and distorts and consistently misreads things that I’ve done and said. In order to find material that he can exploit against me, he’s located decades-old second-hand accounts about my days as an unmarried student in Israel, combed through IRS records, and burrowed into my then pre-teen son’s Christmas wish list on Amazon.com. To me, anyway, such obsessive behavior is unspeakably bizarre.
There’s another fellow, though, a relatively late and distinctly less talented arrival, whom I call my “Mini-Stalker.” He plainly wants to grow up to be a Malevolent Stalker in his own right. Accordingly, like the real Stalker, he posts anonymously. But he’s considerably lazier than his hero. He simply makes things up out of thin air — inventing fictional trips to Israel with me, for example, or creating fictional but lunatic quotations and attributing them to me. It’s the same malice, obviously, but it lacks the Malevolent Stalker’s craftiness and guile.
DCP May 2019 wrote:Roughly fifteen years into his remarkable, unsleeping, virtually daily, nearly fifteen-year-old anonymous campaign of defamation and character assassination against me, my Malevolent Stalker has declared that the only genuine way in which I can demonstrate that I don’t accompany these tours for the money that I earn from them — naïvely, I had imagined that the fact that I earn no money from them might suffice on that score — would be to prove that I accompany them entirely at my own expense.
That’s not likely to happen. Notwithstanding the many millions that I earn each year from apologetics, I’m simply not wealthy enough for such a demonstration of virtue.
DCP April 2019 wrote:I’m about to undertake another round of travel in (among other places) Israel and Egypt in order to (among other things) accompany tour groups there. So, as regularly as Swiss clockwork, one of the most dishonest of my anonymous critics is accusing me of “priestcraft,” profiteering enormously from such tours — as he has also accused me of scheming to make money from a fraudulent film project, just as he and his cleverer and more cunning role model, my Malevolent Stalker, have routinely (and falsely) accused me of generating considerable income from defending the claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and so forth.
Personally I find DCP's posts about his stalkers to be the best part of his blog. They keep me coming back week after week.DCP Dec 2018 wrote:Nearly two weeks ago, I posted a brief entry titled “The Odd Couple (Part One)” about my Malevolent Stalker and his wannabe sidekick, who plays Lefou to Stalker Sr.’s Gaston. Mini-Stalker, or Stalker Jr., rarely posts on any subject other than Daniel Peterson. Unlike Stalker Sr., though, whose approximately fifteen-year anonymous public crusade against me has manifested a certain weirdly determined and (to me, anyway) psychopathologically perverse talent, Stalker Jr.’s rather limited repertoire seems largely confined to manufacturing and publishing outright lies about me. He arrived on the scene several years after Stalker Sr. had launched his campaign, but his obsessive personal hatred is much more crudely overt, far less suave and ironic, than is Stalker Sr.’s. His lies and misrepresentations are designed to make me look absurd on the rare occasions when they don’t depict me as cruel and morally depraved.
For at least the past six years, I’ve been receiving personal emails from someone whose consuming hatred plainly needs more gratifying release than he can achieve by posting anonymous public attacks on me. Is this a separate case of Peterson Derangement Syndrome, inquiring minds might ask, or is it related to the Odd Couple? The answer is beyond reasonable dispute: For various reasons of theme, timing, and vocabulary, it’s undeniably clear that, whoever the person sending them may be, he is part of Gaston and Lefou’s circle.
His emails are typically short and coarse, occasionally more than a little opaque, often obscene, and invariably insulting. Very, very odd. They come under various pseudonyms and by various circuitous routes, and I don’t know who is behind them. Perhaps, if it’s ever advisable, law enforcement authorities will know how to figure it out.
But they’re all unmistakably from the same person. And, if I were compelled to guess, I would place my bet on the Mini-Stalker. This is subjective, of course, but, to me, they feel like his work. They steam with the same animus.
Characteristically, these emissions are limited to roughly one daily. (Occasionally, several days will pass without any at all.) Sometimes, though, for whatever reason, the sender’s productivity will rise. Today, for example, he’s carefully crafted not one but two such works:
He hit a double yesterday, too:"how to vacation with cult tour dude denial c. pasterson…. use a walker.
cult road show with pasterson-smeldrum…cult hand signals past and present…pantomimed in cult magic underwear…disregard pasterson shill dirty ass…dude been eatin nacho cheese…gobble gobble"
Perhaps this is how the spirit of Christmas manifests itself in his life. Fortunately, the language over his past two workdays has been quite clean."wow liyin [sic] bloated shill at his trough…
cult pyramid scheme"
His highest recent creative spike, however, came on 28 November, when he managed to produce not one, not two, but fully three of his characteristic communications in a single day. Two of them cannot be quoted on a family-oriented blog such as this. However, the third one cited an email that I wrote from Jerusalem back in June 2012 to the then director of the Maxwell Institute, after receiving his note dismissing me as (founding) editor of the Institute’s principal journal and announcing an enormous unilaterally-chosen change in direction for the Institute.
My email to the director was leaked shortly thereafter and has since been read by Gaston and Lefou and by a few others among Stalker Sr.’s small circle of followers as damning proof that, notwithstanding my denials, I’ve pocketed great gobs of cash from my efforts to defend the claims of the Restoration—that, in other words, I’ve been paid, and paid well, for apologetics. (For a while, at least, they tried to claim that my recent lecture visit to Australia was funded by gullible and unsuspecting donors to the Interpreter Foundation, which, in fact, laid out not a single cent, neither American nor Australian, for that trip.)
All of these and more can be quickly sourced from the following search of DCP's blog:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... ?s=stalker