First Public Statement from Joshua Goldberg

If you are reading this, then you are doubtless aware of the lurid saga of my sordid online misadventures, which culminated in my 2015 arrest on high-profile terrorism charges. I was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison, and I am putting this out as my first public statement to clear up some misconceptions that have been circulated about me.

The public thinks that I’m a sick, evil, flagitious terrorist, as that’s what the news coverage surrounding me portrayed me as. When I spoke to Luke McMahon, I wanted him to be intimidated by me, so I tried to portray myself as a frightening psychopath, like a cyber-Hannibal Lecter. But, while I may not be a paragon of virtue, I am not a terrorist either. In reality, I never remotely thought that my actions would cause real terrorist attacks. It was always my intention to infiltrate online jihadist spheres so that I could eventually become either a journalist, an FBI agent, or both. My lawyer found that I had indeed searched for anonymous FBI and AFP (Australian Federal Police) tip lines, supporting my claim that I would have tipped off police about the bogus terror plot that I was false-flagging. But, in all honesty, I didn’t think that anyone who I was chatting with would actually carry out a successful terror plot anyways. I never thought that it would actually even get that far. I’m on the record as telling Luke McMahon that I didn’t think that any of the jihadists who I was talking to would actually do anything because, in my own words, “these guys are pussy keyboard warriors”. I knew that anyone who attempted to attack Pamela Geller’s agitprop “Draw Muhammad” event would get shot immediately since the event had extremely heavy security (and, indeed, that’s exactly what happened). Likewise, I knew that the Kansas City Stairclimb had heavy security as well, and that anyone who attempted to bring a bomb there would get arrested. If I was really trying to incite real terrorist attacks, I would have just told someone to ram their car into pedestrians.

When the undercover FBI informant asked me for bomb-making instructions, I literally just Googled “how to make a bomb” and sent him some links. When he asked me for further instructions on concocting a pressure-cooker bomb, I made a thread on /k/ asking them for advice on making one, and then relayed that advice to him. In reality, I know absolutely nothing about making bombs. And I did not think that there was any chance that this individual — who claimed to be a teenager — would actually be able to make a real, working bomb anyways. I figured that they would blow themselves up and that, even if they did somehow manage to create a bomb, there was zero chance that they would actually be able to place it at the Kansas City Stairclimb (an event with HEAVY security) without getting caught.

There is one individual who I told about what I was doing prior to my arrest. She has known me for years and, of all of the people who followed me on Twitter, she is one of the only 2 who ever met me in real life (the other one being my sister). Luke McMahon contacted her after seeing me chatting with her on Twitter, and she inadvertently helped him verify my identity. I then had a conversation with her about it, and I told her that I had been posing as a terrorist in an effort to infiltrate their ranks and hopefully become a journalist/FBI agent. I also later told her to send a message to Luke McMahon saying: “Did you seriously think that this was anything more than just another persona?”. She did, but he laughed at it. After my arrest, my lawyer communicated with her over email and used my conversations with her (regarding what I was doing and my intentions behind it) in his evidence for my case presented to the judge. I will not say her name here, as I’m sure that she does not want anyone contacting her inquiring about me.

At the same time, I think that, on some level, I wanted to get caught, as I made very little effort to cover my tracks. But it’s very difficult for me to pinpoint what, exactly, I wanted. My motives are as tortured, befogged, and abstruse to me as they are to you. In addition, nothing felt real to me, and it’s still like that to a significant extent. I often find myself lost in a world of solipsistic existentialism, cogitating whether my life is real, whether it’s all some kind of dream/simulation, whether I’m the only real person and everyone else isn’t real, and so forth.

I really wish that it hadn’t been revealed to the public that I have autism. I do not have a positive view of autistic people, and neither does anyone else (although many will pretend to). Autism is a giant mark of shame that I will carry around on my shoulders for the rest of my life. But, if you look at my online activities, there are a number of tell-tale signs that I’m autistic. Aside from being extremely sarcastic and adept at metaphors, there are very few characteristics of autism that I don’t demonstrate.

I also wish that I had taken greater care to ensure that there were no pictures of me on the internet. If I had seen my sister post that family photo with me in it, I would have asked her to take it down. There are very few things that I hate more than having my picture taken, and I like to have a mysterious, enigmatic aura surrounding me. With that said, I am a bit confused about the descriptions of me as being fat. I mean, I honestly couldn’t care less if people think that I’m fat, but I’m not. I’m not even chubby. I weigh about 190 pounds. All I can figure is that people are extrapolating. They think that, since I was an internet troll living the sessile, tenebrous life of an asocial recluse, I must therefore be fat. My cloistered lifestyle was indeed characterized by listless indolence, but I wasn’t exactly eating a surfeit of junk food on a regular basis.

In addition, I wish that my “Mariam Veiszadeh is a Muslim whore” comment hadn’t been published, as it made me look like an alt-right bigot. I honestly don’t even remember saying that. I have a tendency to just say things for shock value, which has gotten me in trouble for my entire life.

I am not remotely a bigot in real life, nor am I even a conservative, nor am I a #GamerGate loser or a supporter of that attention-seeking buffoon Milo Yiannopoulos (Milo is one of the most pernicious and deleterious commentators around, although I do have to give him credit for making bank out of being a troll). Conservatives are just as stupid as leftists, hence why they so eagerly ate up everything that I posted under my various right-wing Twitter and Reddit accounts. Subreddits like /r/CoonTown and /r/AntiPOZi were basically just the uncensored versions of /r/conservative. Mainstream conservatives use dog-whistle language to conceal their true intentions, whereas someone like “European88” makes their true intentions explicitly clear.

People would often tell me that I was quite vagarious and mercurial in which political viewpoints I espoused. Indeed, I often capriciously espoused an extremely eclectic array of wildly incompatible ideological viewpoints — ranging from far-left to far-right — basically just going out of my way to always be as iconoclastic and contrarian as possible and to always disagree with whoever I was arguing with at the moment. With that said, I have always been very obdurate and pertinacious about civil liberties like freedom of speech because I want limits placed on power. I am also adamantly pro-choice and anti-death penalty. But there is really no political ideology that I do not hold in the utmost contempt, hence why I went absolutely out of my way to enrage every single political sect on the planet, from the extreme left to the extreme right and everything in between.

I have no real political allegiances, and I never really gave a damn about dumb neckbeard political movements like #GamerGate. My trolling was purely of the equal-opportunity “doing it for the lulz” variety. To use one perfect example: when I got Milo Yiannopoulos to publish that “expose” on Shaun King, I did it purely to see the shitstorm that I knew it would create, not because I actually care in the least about anything involving either Shaun King or Milo Yiannopoulos (both of those people are complete and utter clowns as far as I’m concerned). I couldn’t have possibly hoped for a better outcome: it trolled both Shaun and Milo equally, and both wound up with massive amounts of egg on their faces. I was the only one who walked away from it unscathed, laughing at the dramasplosion from the shadows.

After my arrest, braindead partisan hacks like Arthur Chu and Markos Moulitsas tried desperately hard to project me into their blind and tendentious political dichotomies, while white supremacists did the same. Markos Moulitsas — the Sean Hannity of the left, dogmatically pontificating regurgitated DNC talking points like a glassy-eyed automaton — attempted to paint me as a conservative ideologue trying to cause terrorist attacks so that I could then blame them on Obama, which is a supposition that anyone who knows me would absolutely laugh at (and I love how he name-dropped the Australian Human Rights Law Centre, even though he had indubitably never even heard of them before). In 2012, I was incredibly vociferous and obnoxious in my vehement support for Obama’s re-election.

The best analysis of me was in the last place that you would expect: in the thread about me on white supremacist forum Stormfront (where I had 800+ posts as “WakeUpWhiteMan”, an extension of “Michael Slay”). While most of the thread was the kind of moronic garbage that one would expect from neo-Nazis — complete with the usual anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and users wishing for me to get gang-raped by blacks and Mexicans in prison — one post stood out to me as really hitting the nail on the head. When the question was posed as to why I did what I did online, one user summed it up as follows: “The fun of stirring things up and causing trouble I suppose. Rebelling against everything, because he hates normal life and doesn’t fit into it.” There has never been a more accurate description of me than that.

I’m actually not a full-blooded Jew. I’m just… uhhh… Jew-ish. My father is of Jewish descent, but my mother is of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant lineage and Judaism is passed down from the mother, so I’m technically not a Jew. And, despite what white supremacists might claim, I am not even remotely a Zionist either. I went after Israel on a regular basis. I am an atheist, have never been to a synagogue in my life, couldn’t care less about the Jewish interest, and have never considered myself to be anything other than white. Rest assured that I had absolutely no involvement in any shadowy Jewish conspiracies, nor did I ever have any Jewish agenda.

The Reddit hivemind is extremely predictable and extremely easy to manipulate. I had 27 different Reddit accounts that I remember (and I won’t say what they are because I want to keep Reddit neckbeards guessing), but some of the Reddit accounts that have been attributed to me were not, in fact, me. I was not /u/Jewish_Neocon and I was not /u/PhilosophyOfRape either. While I briefly had European88 latch onto the whole “Philosophy of Rape” thing in order to establish him as the most vile and despicable neo-Nazi on the internet (and, of course, to drum up outrage), that was the full extent of my involvement (the alt-right constantly spews vitriol about the evils of pure white women being raped and defiled by filthy shitskins, yet they themselves tend to view rape as a suitable punishment for those winsome trollops gallivanting about in wanton licentiousness). I had nothing to do with the original /r/PhilosophyOfRape subreddit. I had spoken to /u/PhilosophyOfRape a few times (as European88) and he really came across like a genuine rapist who sincerely believed his sick ideology, rather than just a juvenile troll merely trying to get a rise out of people. Rest assured that I am not now, nor have I ever been (and nor will I ever be) a rapist. Troll, yes. Rapist, no. Of all of the bottom-feeding plankton that I’m surrounded by in prison, the sexual predators are the ones that I despise the most.

Under my various online accounts, I’ve posted all manner of straight porn, gay porn, lesbian porn, and sick fetish porn. In reality, I don’t like porn and I don’t like sex. With that said, I have always had a detached, morbid fascination with sick and deviant sexual practices. By the time I was 11, I had already received heavy exposure to the sickest, most depraved porn that exists on the surface web. When I was 12, I maintained a massive list of shock sites over at BluWiki (a list which I’m sure is still up), was a regular on the Meatspin forums, and frequently used shock images (especially the notorious “BABYFUCK, BABYFUCK” page from Mai-chan’s Daily Life) to get a reaction out of people on forums like Gaia Online. No child who is exposed to stuff like that on a regular basis is going to come out normal and with conventional attitudes about sex.

While I did create the Ben Garrison “kill all Jews” quote image in question, I had absolutely nothing to do with it being planted on Professor Anthony Hall’s Facebook page. I had never even heard of that individual before. His article about me — “Hate Speech Deceptions: Joshua Goldberg’s Prolific Production of Discordant Fake Voices” — is pages and pages of dense, diffuse, ultra-pretentious verbiage of the sort that could have only come from the pen of an elitist college professor (or an elitist douchebag like… well, me). That article is tumid, prolix, bombastic, elephantine circumlocution at its finest — the kind of turgid, ponderous, ostentatious wall of rigmarole claptrap that, again, only a college professor could write. What many of these intellectuals fail to understand is that sesquipedalian loquatiousness and verbose periphrasis do not necessarily equate to intelligence. If your intelligence was measured by your ability to churn out incredibly long, incredibly pretentious walls of maundering, fustian, stream-of-consciousness text with lots of big words, then I would be, without a doubt, the smartest person in the world. It would seem that Professor Hall and I are kindred spirits in that regard. Being laconic and to-the-point — without any excessive, orotund, magniloquent superfluity of words — does not come easily to people like us. Regardless, Hall has apparently also appeared on No Lies Radio (a whacko conspiratard outlet similar to InfoWars), spinning all manner of insane conspiracy theories about me. Evidently, he doesn’t even think that I’m a real individual person. But, to his credit, at least he doesn’t think that I’m a shape-shifting reptilian alien.

Honestly, for me and many others, the funniest thing about trolling Ben Garrison was his hysterical, over-the-top reactions to absolutely everything that trolls did, employing heavy use of ridiculous, cartoonish, one-of-a-kind language that nobody else on the planet would use. For example, in his first blog post acknowledging how trolls were editing his cartoons to make them neo-Nazi, he stated that he was “swasticked off”. Who else would say that? That sort of thing is precisely what made it so endlessly amusing for trolls to poke and prod him for reactions. With that said, Benny G VASTLY overestimates the extent to which I was harassing him. I did create most of the neo-Nazi “Ben Garrison quote” images attributed to him (which were made in MS Paint), but that was pretty much all that I did. I never edited any of his cartoons, as I don’t know Photoshop, and I had nothing to do with the “Goldman Sachs paper rain” series of Facebook pages either. Also, I genuinely had no idea that the trolling had any real effect on his personal life/finances. To the contrary, in fact, I thought that it was helping him by making him more famous. And, in the end, it did help him. He himself said that, without the trolls, he would still be just some obscure Montana crank posting cartoons on a blog. But, because of that vigorous trolling campaign, he’s now a world-famous cartoonist with over 100,000 Twitter followers who recently got retweeted by none other than President Donald Trump himself. You’re welcome, Ben.

The real Caitlin Roper is a hardcore TERF who would wholeheartedly agree with the bilious anti-transgender messages that I sent out under her name: http://archive.fo/d4KHN

As “Michael Slay”/”European88", I often tried to see how disgusting and repugnant I could possibly get before even neo-Nazis would begin to raise objections. Unsurprisingly, they never did. Regardless, The Daily Stormer took a momentous hit to their credibility when it was revealed that one of their writers was really a “Jew” with multiple personas. Webmaster Andrew Anglin’s piece “Whacko Jew Terrorist Joshua Goldberg Tried to Infiltrate the Daily Stormer” was one of the most amusing vituperations of me, as the tone of desperate last-ditch damage control absolutely oozed out of it. “Michael Slay”’s unmasking as a “Jew” was a massive, devastating blow to Anglin’s already-tenuous reputation. Among his neo-Nazi base, he was scathingly upbraided for allowing a “Jew” into his ranks, and it added further fuel to the widely-circulated rumors of Anglin being an undercover shill/government informant and his site being a government-run front/honeypot.

It was extremely easy for me to hoodwink Anglin because is such a drooling imbecile. He’s a churlish, brainless, knuckle-dragging neanderthal of the lowest order — exactly the kind of boorish clodhopper that you would expect a neo-Nazi skinhead to be. There genuinely is not one slightly positive thing that I can find to say about him, as he is an individual who does not possess a single remotely redeeming characteristic. I could expatiate at great length about how utterly execrable he is, but that would be deviating from the intention of this article. But suffice it to say that, if one of Anglin’s targets wound up killing him in retaliation, the world would be a better place, and I highly doubt that even his family would miss him.

Say what you want about my character, but I did what no “le Anomalous leejun” idiot could ever do: I completely humiliated and discredited Andrew Anglin, and I also humiliated and discredited the jihadist Twitter sphere that embraced “Australi Witness”. That’s the kind of thing that no V for Vendetta mask-wearing script kiddie could ever dream of accomplishing.

With that said, I never really set out to discredit Anglin. I had no Jewish agenda behind posing as a white supremacist, nor was I an alt-right goon trying to shift the Overton window to the far-right. Rather, I did it for the same reason that I did most things: because I could. I liked the idea of having a virtual army of neo-Nazi troglodytes at my disposal, which I could use to wreak havoc on the internet. And, indeed, that’s exactly what I did. As Jim Treacher put it when describing me in The Daily Caller: “He set Jews and Muslims against each other, feminists vs. videogame nerds, Nazis vs. everybody.” Motivated by the misanthropic desire to act as a nihilistic chaos agent, there was zero ideology behind the anarchic mischief-making that I engaged in online. Much like The Joker, I just wanted to watch the world burn.

While I have been widely labeled as a NEET/hikkikomori, I was not. I did live with my parents at the time of my arrest, but I was enrolled in college courses and was moving to a college campus soon. And I was not a basement-dweller, as there are no basements in Florida. But I did generally base my life around avoiding other people as much as I possibly could. However, in stark contrast to the average basement-dweller, I had no social life not because I was a disgusting creep (I wasn’t), but simply because I generally can’t stand being around other people in real life. I could have had an active social life (and sex life) if I had wanted to. It was simply that I didn’t want to, and I still don’t want to. I guess you can chalk that up to me being a sperglord.

For me, the hardest thing about being in prison — aside from not having access to the internet, of course — is having to be surrounded by other people 24/7… and not just any people, but the absolute worst that humanity has to offer. When I was on the street, I tried to be alone as much as I possibly could. I did not have any friends in real life, and I tried my best to keep it that way. Every time I got invited to do something social, I would always find some way of evading it. Socializing with other people in real life is pure, unadulterated torture for me. But, in prison, being alone is not a choice. You have absolutely no privacy whatsoever, and you cannot avoid the truculent bottom-feeders that surround you. And, while I’ve already stated that I didn’t have or want any friends on the street, there are certainly no friends in prison. If you try to befriend any of these feral, pugnacious, predatory, sick-minded animals, it is 100% guaranteed that you will eventually come to deeply regret it. It’s a good thing that I never trusted anyone to begin with, because being trusting is one of the worst things that you can possibly be in prison. Whether you’re in the relentlessly obstreperous milieu of the Butner FMC psych ward or a comparatively placid one like Coleman FCC Medium, it’s best to always assume bad faith when dealing with any inmates. That’s fine, because I’ve learned over the years that it’s best to always assume bad faith when dealing with everyone. At the very least, prison cannot possibly turn me into any more of an extreme misanthrope than I already was. To steal a line from Daniel Day-Lewis, I look at people and I see nothing worth liking.

Acclimatizing to the thoroughly insalubrious environment of prison is never easy, especially for someone who based their entire life around the internet. When one is in prison, it is extremely difficult to feel anything other than total impuissance. But that’s how I felt when I was on the street as well. I feel utterly trapped and completely powerless in this horrible world that I never would have willingly chosen to be born into. I’m terrified of death, but I truly wish more than anything that I had never been born in the first place.

The vast majority of prisoners are not people who deserve even the tiniest iota of sympathy. They are, to put it bluntly, the absolute scum of the earth. As such, I try to be as taciturn as possible and avoid talking to them. The only inmates who I genuinely sympathized with were the valetudinarians at Butner FMC — sickly, ashen, emaciated, confused, and languidly zombie-walking through the unit with hydrocephalytic torpidity. When I was there, I tried my best to take care of the guys who couldn’t take care of themselves, like the blind and demented ones. That — coupled with my love of animals (to the extent that I was actually a vegetarian from the time I was 10 right up until my arrest) — provides perhaps the most compelling evidence that I am not a sociopath.

To all of the people scurrilously wishing for me to get raped in prison, I regret to inform you that it has not occurred and, where I currently am, is extremely unlikely to occur. I have been sexually harassed, propositioned for sex, and threatened with rape countless times (and, at Butner FMC, the staff members might even join in), but I have not been sexually assaulted and, unless I ever get shipped off to a maximum-security penitentiary, I won’t be. Despite popular belief to the contrary, rape is not an everyday occurrence in prison, and is exceptionally rare at well-run medium-security prisons like the one that I’m currently at. With that said, if I ever did get sexually assaulted in prison, I would have to go absolutely out of my way to make sure that staff didn’t find out about it, or else I would be spending at least nine months in solitary confinement. I once knew an inmate who told me that he got raped by two guys at Philadelphia FDC, but that he didn’t report it to staff because he knew that, if he did, he would be spending nine months in solitary confinement while they investigated. To most people, it simply isn’t worth it. Spending nine months in solitary confinement can have an even more devastating effect on one’s psyche than being raped. The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) was intended to ameliorate the problem of prison rape and assuage fears of being raped in prison, but it has mainly been used as a homophobic weapon against gay inmates who haven’t carried out any sexual assaults. It’s the sad reality of human nature that, no matter what it is, people will always find some way to use it for malefic purposes. I could go on at great length about these subjects (and I could also go on at great length about the contumelies that I experienced at Butner FMC), but, again, I don’t want to divagate too much from the original crux of this article.

Below are four cringe-inducing paragraphs excerpted from a frightfully pretentious essay that I wrote while I was at Butner FMC, titled “Persona Factory”:

The Joshua Goldberg who wrote for Thought Catalog was a persona as well. Everything that I do — both online and offline — is a persona. Virtually all of my words and actions — on the internet and in real life — are just me taking on roles or putting on an act. I have no real idea of who I “really” am and what my “real” personality is. And I can analyze fictional characters, but I can’t analyze myself, so I suppose that I sort of have to turn myself into a fictional character (or numerous fictional characters) in order for things to make sense to me. I have no real sense of self or any real self-identity. I have no idea what I “really” am. I can’t just “be myself”, because I have no idea who “myself” really is.

On websites where one is asked to give a short self-description in their profile, my description of myself would always be “Who am I?”. Indeed, that’s a question that I find myself pondering every single day, but I have no real answer to it. I have no idea who I am, but I know who I have pretended to be: everyone from a European-American Jew to a Japanese teenage girl to an Inuit in Greenland. On the internet, I could be whoever I wanted to be, and that is exactly what I did. In an article by Cathy Young published shortly after my arrest, the twisted saga of my internet antics and my subsequent exposure as a troll with countless personas was described as “a cautionary tale” reminiscent of a well-known editorial cartoon in which two dogs are seen at a computer, with one dog telling the other that, “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Young concluded that, on the internet, one can sometimes get the sinking feeling that everyone online is just “you and one very busy troll with many faces.”

Creating personas is not just something that I do on the internet. A few times when I was at Butner FMC, I told people that I was Apollo, a computer hacker from Hagatna, Guam. If I had been living on a college campus, I probably would have gone as far as dressing up like a woman, putting on a voice modifier, and passing myself off as Ponette LaCroix, an exchange student from Paris. Then I probably would have changed my outfit and wig, adjusted my voice modifier, and told people that I was Pandora Baskova, a Russian-American painter from Anchorage, Alaska. In many ways, this behavior is very similar to the character Roger Smith from the (awful) Seth MacFarlane cartoon American Dad! — a space alien with a “persona factory” where he constantly invents new human personas, both male and female, for himself to act as in public. In one episode, Roger has an emotional breakdown and burns down his persona factory after coming to the realization that he only creates these personas because he is utterly hollow inside, with no real sense of self.

Perhaps, at the end of the day, that’s all that I really am: a persona factory. Is that really something that anyone should aspire to be? No, of course not. Much like Roger, I am little more than a hollow shell of a person — able to put on an act and pretend to be whoever I want, but not able to have any real sense of who I truly am. So, as my old online self-description goes: Who am I? Well, that sure beats me.

Am I sorry for the puerile trolling that I carried out on sites like Reddit and Twitter? In all honesty, no. But, if there is anyone who I am eternally sorry to, it’s my family, whose name I have forever besmirched. They are the only ones (besides me, of course) who were truly hurt by my actions. The amount of stress that I put on my family was overwhelming. My mother already has multiple sclerosis and a myriad of other problems to deal with, so the last thing that she needed was for her son (and, by extension, her) to be thrust into the middle of a high-profile terrorism trial and accompanying international media frenzy. When I was first arrested, I truly feared that my mother would end up in the hospital, if not the morgue.

I also cannot shake the feeling that, in the long run, my family would ultimately be better off if the FBI had shot and killed me when they raided my house. My family will love me no matter what, but I do not remotely deserve their unconditional love. From my early childhood right up to the present day, I have done nothing but create constant grief and hardship for them, and, to be perfectly honest, I really don’t see that ever changing.

I’ll admit, I do perfectly fit the mold of the typical mass shooter. Someone on IMDb once told me as such: “Okay, so let’s recap: you are sexually repressed, you hate the human race, and you identify with homicidal maniacs. I really hope I don’t live anywhere near you.” But, while I might constantly vent violent fantasies (I’ve repeatedly been castigated for expressing fantasies about torturing and killing the sex offenders in prison), I have never actually been violent with anyone and I never will be. At my trial, my mother said to the courtroom, choking back tears, that “the only person I ever thought Joshua would hurt was Joshua.”

If there was ever a major firestorm on the internet, you can rest assured that I played some role in it. For example, remember that “Yes, Diversity is About Getting Rid of White People (and That’s a Good Thing)” article by “Emily Goldstein”? That was me (I assumed that the alt-right would be stupid enough to fall for it, and I assumed correctly). Remember #EndFathersDay? That was mostly my handiwork as well. There are countless more examples. Make no mistake about it: I was, without a doubt, the most prolific and successful troll in the history of the internet. But, much like being a persona factory, is being the world’s greatest troll really something that anyone should strive for? Is “KING OF TROLLS” really something that anyone should want on their tombstone? No, of course not. In the end, I accomplished absolutely nothing other than landing myself in federal prison.

I suppose, for me, internet trolling was a cathartic way of releasing some of my pent-up hatred and anger back out at society — the society that I would never belong in and would never want to belong in anyways. But, obviously, you can see where it got me. On that note, I hope that my story will provide a cautionary warning to any other internet trolls out there. You’re never as anonymous as you think, and the life of a troll will only lead you down a road to ruin. You have nothing to gain and everything to lose.

If anyone would like to contact me, you can send all letters to:

Joshua Goldberg

63197–018

FCI Coleman Medium

Federal Correctional Institution

P.O. Box 1032

Coleman, FL 33521

Card stock cards and colored envelopes are not allowed. Also, you may want to leave your email address on your letter, as the prison email system is the easiest and most convenient way of communicating with inmates.