Now Paging Doctor Bones

it's time to never write an article like this again

From Medium by Prosper Bonhomme (January 23, 2020)

I’ve started smoking again.

It’s not allowed in the house, just the back deck. It makes the whole thing sort of futile when it’s nine degrees outside and I’m sniffing so much snot back into my sinuses I can’t even taste the tobacco. There’s a joke about how smoking takes seven minutes off your life, so it’s a good thing American Spirits last nine minutes, but in this weather I put it out in the snow a third of the way through and go back inside.

Stepping in the sliding glass door, I look at my reflection and think the same thing I did when I saw myself in the glass on the way out:

Gods damn, I miss Doctor Bones.


What Poor People Do in a Hurricane is still a masterful essay. That’s indisputable. It was one of the first things Bones wrote that started to distance him from anybody else in the anarchist writing game. It wasn’t some heavy handed academic struggle session; you could argue that it wasn’t even anarchist at all if you squinted a little and tilted your head a bit. It was just a story about some guy in Florida making it through a hurricane with his friends. But there were still lessons in it, the struggle of poverty in the face of an uncaring government, how a community of neighbors stepped up against perceived lawlessness when the police were busy making sure the rich white people were taken care of. It showed how a community could come together and take care of its own, how it takes an act of God to make people see their neighbors.

You don’t get content like that anymore, there’s no grit left in the game. You get impassioned grandstanding and vampire costumes with green screen castles. Bones used to record his videos on a cell phone; he didn’t need a high definition camera or makeup to do his work for him. The strength of his content was enough. The lessons were enough. That was why people brought him on planes to speak instead of being content to see him in a video, because seeing Doctor Bones in person was worthwhile, it was filling. When you left, you were inspired. You never left wondering “is this all there is?”

And BreadTube is fucking worthless without him.

I used to joke (sometimes, I still do) that the only way we knew Doctor Bones wasn’t Hunter S Thompson’s reanimated skeleton was because Hunter had the sense to get himself cremated. I was shocked when he told me he’d never read Transmetropolitan because I was almost sure that, were I to shave him bald, I’d find a spider tattoo on his scalp. That was the flaw everyone always liked to lean into, how he was unoriginal in how vitriolic he was. We’ve seen it, it’s been done! Everyone’s watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, get a new bit! Now, I’m not so sure. There isn’t that same sort of anticapitalist, egoist venom anymore; it’s all gone a bit tasteless.

If you lined every so-called leftist personality up side by side and handed them a Molotov, do you think they’d throw it? Or would they be more inclined to take a selfie with it, make a video about how a single Molotov wouldn’t solve the world’s problems (but like, subscribe, and donate, that will!) and then ramble for an hour about how, actually, the unlit, unthrown Molotov is just a symbolistic construct about how fucking boring they all are?! In the end, there isn’t a single scorch mark, just a line of trophies on a shelf they can point to with a pouting “Am so!” when someone suggests they aren’t as radical as they say they are. Radicalism isn’t meant to be a conversation piece. It’s meant to be a call to action.

Besides, Contrapoints might break a nail! Inconceivable.

“BreadTube” has become the celebrity left. Merriam Webster defines a celebrity as “a famous or celebrated person” and famous as “widely known, honored for achievement.” It doesn’t take a genius or an academic to apply those brushstrokes to Contrapoints, Angie Speaks, and Peter Coffin. Angie makes $1,351 a month from 402 patrons as of this article’s writing; Contrapoints and Peter Coffin have (wisely) not disclosed the amount their patrons give them. But if we assume their patrons are as generous as Angie’s, we can divide her average and apply it to their numbers: Coffin’s 1188 patrons would make him around $3,992 a month, Contrapoint’s 12,704 patrons have her raking in $42,694 per month.

Nobody’s saying people shouldn’t make money off their work, but there is a lack of transparency as to where that money’s going. Forty-two thousand dollars in a month means that in a year, Contrapoints is making a little over half a million dollars. That’s enough money to pay off a person’s house and their student loan debt in the course of a year. All that, for videos whining about how people are mean to her on the internet, and for praxis like “are traps gay” and “are nonbinary people actually people?” Give me a break. And leftists online wonder why there’s no unity in the left. How are we supposed to take them seriously?

Bones put his money where his mouth was. People like to joke about how one of his articles was essentially “my first may day rally” but when did you see anybody else with his level of recognition going out and attending protests? Where do you expect to find an antifascist protest in Florida anyway, land of Trump and Mar-A-Lago? He wrote articles about slumlords threatening apartment complexes and workers who needed two, sometimes three jobs to survive.

We crucified him because it “went to his head” but at this rate, maybe it’s that the survivability of leftist renown is 0.

At the beginning of February, a little over a month after I —

(This is always hard for me to write. What do you call it? Did I out Doctor Bones as a predator? Did I take him down? Did I, Gods forbid, “cancel” him for “clout?” The narration always pivots to him, and what I did to him. In this case, perhaps in a bid of selfishness, let’s turn the spotlight back to me, and the impact this had on my life.)

— spoke my truth, I got a visit from the FBI. I was living with my father at the time, in the off season of my work. He let the two agents into the house before he came to wake me up. They knew my name. They knew who I was on Twitter. More importantly, they knew I was affiliated with Doctor Bones. They knew his name, they knew where he lived, and they wanted to ask me questions about him: they wanted to know if he, to my knowledge, had ever engaged in child pornography.

I laughed. I told them no. I told them they had the wrong guy. They left.

After Doctor Bones exited the stage, people theorized that he would come back. I thought the same, assuming he’d sneak back into the community under another penname and would eventually end up unmasked again. To my surprise, this was not the same view others had of him; they suspected he would be back, but carrying the banner of the alt right, fleeing to another radicalized community with stories of how “unhinged” the online antifa were. He would write articles about white supremacy and the banner of safety that libertarian belief held over the heads of the people.

I laughed. I told them no. I told them they had the wrong guy. They stopped talking about it.

There were a lot of crazy theories back then. Bones was an FBI plant. Bones was a cryptofascist. Bones was a serial rapist, working his way through marginalized communities. Bones wasn’t pagan at all, but a Christian trying to undermine the community. I’d say there was a theory about him selling his soul to Satan, but that would have made him sound cool.

I laughed. I told them they had the wrong guy.

Bones was just a guy that was in an unhappy marriage. That’s all.


What is the shape of justice? What constitutes as remuneration? Can you put a price on pain? If someone had asked me last January what I thought justice looked like, I would have told them I thought things should have been worse for Bones. He lost his income and he lost his audience, he lost the trust from his marriage and his dignity. But had he really lost enough? What more could I make him lose?

That changed in February, when the FBI showed up at my house. I thought about Bones sitting in jail. Just one word from me could have made that happen, not on pedophilia charges, but on a number of other misdemeanors that Uncle Sam would have loved to jump on to put an anarchist behind bars. The thought crossed my mind. I was being forced to rehash the trauma I was able to walk away from online. I was in a delicate place. I won’t claim that I took a moral high ground when I said nothing; that was just me being a decent fucking person. There shouldn’t be praise for that. If anything, the idea of selling Bones out to the FBI in the first place should have earned me a cancellation of my own.

Looking back a year later, I’m a lot less angry now. Alas, one of my character flaws is disassociating my current self from my past self. What happened almost two years ago, in March of 2018, is not something that happened to me. Maybe if had happened to someone else I would be more upset, I would still see them as them, still feel that venom bubbling up between my teeth like I did for so long. Now I just wonder: who gets to carry out the sentencing of justice? In the court of the people, who is the judge and the jury? What qualifies as an adequate sentence? I never wanted Doctor Bones to go to jail because I don’t trust the government’s prison system. I fight against the injustices of that system.

What qualifies me, or any of us, to pass our own judgement?

A favorite among BreadTubers is “cancel culture,” the idea of “clout” and what “chasing” it looks like. It all started when, in the wake of Doctor Bones’, the issue of Laurelai Bailey came up (again) and people were calling for her to be shut out of the community (again) which led Peter Coffin and Angie Speaks to start rallying against cancel culture. Once they realized that’s all they ever need to talk about for the next 15 years, they’re more than happy to beat that dead horse until it stops spitting out money.

Angie approached me after I spoke up about Bones claiming he also tried to “groom” her as well. I believed her claims at the time, and have since come to doubt them. It’s neither here nor there, really, except that I find it hard to believe she would go through that experience just to turn around and stick up for a rapist that’s giving her money. I can’t speak for what she’s gone through, but I can say that if it’s true, that makes her a shitty person in my eyes. Not that it took much to think that anyway.

As I finish writing this, the current fever pitch left twitter has been whipped up into is how twitter user @CoffeeSpoonie had the audacity to stand up for her rights under the law as a disabled person. The short version is that she had been denied multiple rides from multiple Uber drivers, filmed an interaction because non-disabled people couldn’t believe it was happening, and then, upon verification it was happening, they had to find another avenue to harass her. So, when the worker got fired, they started coming after her.

Gods damn, I miss Doctor Bones!

Could you imagine what he would have written about this? Oh, it’d be scathing. If I close my eyes I can all but read the headline, something along the lines of “Say It Ain’t So! Discrimination? In MY Gig Economy?!” He would haved banged out an article in a week. He would have told some fake egoist who had the audacity to question whether I was disabled because I didn’t “appear” to be apart. But the best part is, Bones has never half-assed any article he’s ever written. He would have interviews, he would have statistics, and he would have plans of action lined up in neat little rows, all with language you don’t need a dictionary just to make sense of. No using it to grow his Twitter audience. No expectation of blind compliance, no softness around the edges to keep from alienating his base.

You either liked Bones or you didn’t. There was no in between.

All this to say, I made a joke when all of this first started: “I burnt down The Conjure House.” And I did. I threw gasoline on that shit and I lit it on fire, I watched that motherfucker burn with glee and I danced in the ashes, did cartwheels in the ashes, snorted those ashes like a line of coke. I won’t pay penance for my joy. You can’t make me.

But over the year, as those ashes have been swept away, I’ve found the truth of it, as always, is that you can’t burn down an idea. Those foundations are going to stay there, rock solid concrete. Even with the scorch markers, there’s no getting rid of it. Standing on that foundation, I don’t feel pain anymore. I don’t feel like I have to take a sledgehammer to it in some deranged twisting amalgamation of “justice.” It’s overgrown, it’s forgotten, and there’s something almost… Sad.

This is Prosper Bonhomme, paging Doctor Bones. You’re needed on the floor.

It’s time to rebuild The Conjure House.

There are 41 Comments

Can you not?

i'd figure he would have disappeared, and for the most part he did i guess with him taking down his conjure house. Wierd eclectic mixture of words and ideas, i do want to read the hurricane essay now.

I feel like it was actually dr. bones who wrote this article...

As they both asked as I do now, what did Bones do that was so bad. Basically all I recall was drunk sex and infidelity nothing forced or overtly involuntary. I saw this as a sort of trial by tumblr femoid feminists and their male simp orbiters. There was nothing I recall that was pathological. Perhaps others can give a counter opinion.

In regards to Bones I'm not either or love or hate. I always said he was a great writer. Original no but there's a difference between non original and unoriginal. The latter is a failing, the former might simply be operating in a language and discourse of diminishing returns(see rock and roll and metal). There is a LOT worse then Bones in regards to just a lack of concrete hard hitting everyday life(in this case H.S Thompsonian) writing. His failing for me was not really understanding the finer points of Stirnerian discourse and playing friendly with a fucking Maoist as well as rocking the hammer and sickle(a symbol far worse then a certain Archaic sun symbol-which I don't think is bad at all as someone who likes archaic symbols) as part of a greater libertarian anarchic orientation. That's just bad. Also the Wolfi affair which was truly disgusting given that Wolfi is part of the reason he's reading an english translated Novatore. That to me was the worst thing he did.

Other then that to me there's more good about him then bad and I'm intrigued with what could be a better downstream discursive development on his part. Give up the commie cause bones and just embrace raw anarch-egoism already. The occultist element would only make it better and interesting.

that he seems to be such a great self-promoter, and doesn't seem to care much with the elements of communism that I agree but with the revolutionary buzz words that seem to get people on the left excited. And the whole thing with pointing a finger at wolfi landstreicher for having his book published by Richard Spencer fans (once again, supposedly, even though the satanist stuff tends go in that direction).

The problem i have with the article above is it's written very much in the style of hot-shot journalism.

But yeah on the allegations, how would i be able to believe or not believe them? Yeah sure taking sexual advantage of drunk people is not cool in my book, but what if the person who made the allegation was drunk?! That's really the disturbing thing about a lot of these rapist accusations, it gets out there on the merit that it's disturbing alone.

Dr bones is garbage! Not only because of the sucky stuff he did in her personal life but his ideas too. His weird mishmash of communist egoism was confusing and bad. It mostly seemed like a very memeable ideology. His writing was the same old buzz words and virtue signaling you see in any other left activist anarchist discourse. People just liked that he had some goofy ass persona. The author of this makes it sound like he was going to lead the rev when he couldn’t even keep his marriage together. He wasn’t a man of action he’s just a feeble dude who was on the internet.

I mean infidelity is something that I don't take a hard judgement on good or bad. And the charge against him to me is completely unconvincing. Yes his ideas were a mishmash(and mismatch) but there was some good stuff there AND good writing. They were not the same buzz words considering that there is a whole lot of either IDPol(acute or structural) garbage or stale cliched zine anarchism which has lost the ability to express concrete ideas. Bones can do this. Honestly, as I've said before, he comes off as a 1970s ultraleft radical with better ideas to come(think Bob Black as a young man starting off with new and ultraleftism).

He was/is a product of his time but times and individuals can change for the better.

this whole debacle is why leftism(tm) is dumb. careful what you do EVERYONE. you can't take it back so easily. also why does anyone care about the private lives of others? it's like peeps thrive on it for the production of garbage texts. but as a consumer of garbage texts, i liked bones' essays. i also liked the above "nice try FBI" essay. in any case, this shitty "get out! wait no don't!" situation is what he gets for making friends with maoists. the egoist-communist thing was interesting to observe play out theoretically. it deserves to be explored... but if the end result is getting #canceled, then it's clearly incompatible. i gotta ask then, is communism subservient to the #canceled hashtag too? feels like neither theoretical framework would accept it: communism because "economics" and so fuck persons and causes extraneous to material control, and also it's dehumanizing; egoism because "me," and so "me" and "the others" work it out ourselves, and also ME. so who the fuck is this third wheel in this case of adultery?!

the left has so many spooks! There was someone on a radio show page for dr. bones who just left a comment and said "dr. bones is a rapist", but i've never heard about him RAPING anyone even, so clearly a call out shill from ultra-left anarchism.

So i think i've found out the truth about this dr. bones figure now: he made a huge mistake by making friends with ultra-left anarchists! This has almost nothing to do with the philosophical issues of being both a communist and a stirnerian egoist, because stirner also did reject the bourgeoisie and all their spooks of morality and property owenership, as dr. bones pointed out so many times.

So thank you dr. bones for your writing and inability to please guilt mongering fascists. Stay away from hipsters, plz! They'll kick you out into the cold for sure!

Communism is the original cancel culture. Self crit or die or self crit and die anyways.

Well actually primitive communism, or proto-communist from want of a better term to describe hunter-gatherer societies were a major influence upon Engels social theories which he shared with Marx. Communism is as old as the Paleolithic era. The nuanced type of communism you are describing should be prefixed as totalitarian-communism.

No European philosophers named a wide array of indigenous life ways primitive communism. Those life ways predated communism. Engels and Marx were also fairly racist in their progressivism. Below is a quote from Engels ...

“In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States”

Now hold on, I named indigenous society as being primitive or proto-communistic, because I've lived amongst indigenous people, though I prefer the name "Those who preceded the present occupiers" No one was ever first, let's just get that clear. I'm not saying Engels took some beautiful ideas and created another beautiful idea, I'm an individualist-nihilist, and I loath all of communism, whether it be close to the earth H/G or industrial. I was merely being casually anecdotal about the similarity of cultures still enamored with snivelling sheepish herd moralities and hierarchies, whether they be tribal, feudal monarchy, democratic parliamentary, congressional republic, libertarian communist state.
All white people in the 19th century were racist if you include paternalism, even your great great grandparents. They were probably fascists and capitalists also ;)

Wait so did you invent it or did bad boy Marx? Either way it’s reductionist! I don’t care about your credentials. I have plenty of experience doing work in indigenous communities and I’d say I’m also influence by nihlism. Sure I agree all communities have sniveling. Communism just has it structurally built into it along with a long history of dramatic purging. Bones aligned himself with those politics and he went down with it!

Its not invented by anyone, I just noticed mostly that "those who were here before the present occupiers" did not own land and shared some stuff more than the occupiers, and sitting around a fire pondering the values they had, independently coined the term "primitive communism." It was only later that I came across the wiki article on the early writings of Marx's and Engel's and what inspired some of their theoretical sociology. I am not a stranger to theorizing about sociology and politics myself and have some heavy and enlightening theories and proposals myself.

let's point out the obvious. Marx's critique of work resembles an academic pre-crime thinc. version of it, "the alienation of labor".

To a certain extent Dr. Bones is to blame for his situation, as we all are, talking about him was NEVER my intention to re-ignite a drama, it was my somewhat happy and renewed interest in seeing that he's still writing so aggressively.

But it does seem to be a problem for everyone these days: the need to sell your time to other people, the burdensome expectations of morality, the dread over the future looking hopeless, broken families and tribes, all the same things that people in industrial nngland were getting a taste for when Karl Marx, Engles, and Stirner were writing their critiques.

The problem with communism is that it was a failed authoritarian revolution, and their enemies reacted to it by policing the world very aggressively. They understand how to implement control via cops and banks way better than their ancestors did.

There will not be a communist international anytime soon. Chairman mao basically made sure of that with his identity politics and aristocratic control. However, there will be anarchists, right around the corner, trying to do something similar, and that does not make them authoritarians, screwballs, or dousche bags. What does it make them? I don't know! Nothing! It doesn't make them anything! I know you are but what am I!

Which communist revolution are you talking about? I think I’m some parts of the world they’d argue it succeeded. Authoritarian state control and the exploitation of others through primitive accumulation for capital is just a function of communism.

I agree that anarchists are going to try to do the same thing around the corner. Bones is proof of that and that’s reason to be wary. I’m not interested in ideologues and would be authoritarians.

some communists wanted it to be a dreamland industrialist utopia.

There's no need to be afraid of Dr. Bones, he writes essays. If there's something specific you want to point out then do it.

For example, above he appears to be giving information about his location and habits...but then again, the person writing it may not be dr. bones.

I absorbed all that without flinching, thankyou.
Talking about selling your time to other people, or just selling things to other people, becoming immersed in transactional relationships, then one mixes some alcohol and a joint, it gets funny, crazy, the whisky or tequila shots get bigger,,,,,,,plop, some marriages go astray, but they're old enough and tough enough OR ARE THEY? Has their graceful rebelliousness also gone astray? Behind the wheel of a car the toxicity could have spread to innocents, best to just hide away and keep a low profile, the fear and loathing takes its toll in the end,

people on this website are so defensive. I would think it natural enough to just ask someone a question, all this creepy back handing and information control.

This is what i get for noticing the infamous "dr. bones", i mean wtf? who is this person? occulty spiritual shit? Wanted by the FBI? Took his own publishing house down in 2018 the year of our lord in response to VARIOUS allegations?

So I'm an idiot, for asking questions about the various spooks/characters on this website? Well, the answer is fuck you, and get off the internet, because like i shouldn't be typing this, you shouldn't be creepily hiding behind your goddamn computer managing this website. CREEPS. EVERYWHERE. REAL LIFE, THE INTERNET, EVERYWHERE, CREEPS.

Imagine being able to claim your thing was the original thing by creating an immortal “science” called dialectics.

It was original if that means the first initial communing amongst post-clan associations of early hominid species. Can I be any more historical?

Such a lovely valentines day card! You kids are so cute! pls get back together and start a hobo folk punk band - you would be perfect headlining act for the green scare bookfair!

Dr bones and everyone involved listed above are leftist snake oil salesmen. That’s why they have a cult of personality around them. They make money after peddling their terrible ideology on patreon to people. They develop toxic relationships with fans who they then hurt and afterwords they split when the jig is up.

on the internet, frightening the philistines, keeping them from saying what they want in real life, it's terrifying!

You’re right stirner larper I do believe the internet was a mistake actually thank you! End civ you dweebs.

was already larping anyway. Should we implement a rule against that on here, or should we all just continue trolling till the end of time? The first one sounds like a nice joke to put on the site, the second appears to be this website for the many years i used it.

I have a lot of time, but for sure don't want to use it decide whether dr. bones is a good person?

Folks who’ve never tasted alligator and never will like to believe a hurricane is just like any other big storm. Nothing could be further from the truth. A tornado strikes out of nowhere, disappears and leaves a confused or dead populace; a blizzard pours sheets of sleet and snow but never gains a personality, never gains a spirit.

A hurricane is a different beast entirely. From the moment it is born on the coast of Africa it is named, tracked, and plotted by nearly 20 million Floridians, an energetic focus that might convince most chaos magicians to call it a goddess. It is alive, in every sense of the term, and power is added to it with each word spoken in hushed tones of fear and worry. A hurricane lingers long after the damage it leaves behind. Big storms will be spoken about like dragons seen once in a lifetime, plywood saved for the inevitable next storm bearing the names of previous combatants; these wood shields are often scrawled with dire prayers for the storm to spare them or intimidating calls to “go fuck yourself.”

very powerful, descriptive, makes life a little more fun for some.

LOL at chaos magic. Are anarchists going to get into Wicca next.

Bones was a boring charlatan that tried way too hard at being an Hunter S. Thompson clone.

i fucking swear, if doctor bones returns, but a! doesn’t....

Yeah, fuck it! Come back Dr Bones. Drop the baggage and the boring compromise and grab another guise. As well as talent for writing and a passion, he was headfuck enough for me to appreciate his presence. We may well be lamenting his loss in 20 years; who the fuck knows?!

yeah I miss him too. I appreciate this, especially coming from you. I imagine you have his direct contact info, hopefully you could reach out. You started one of the most effective cancel campaigns in leftist history. kinda intense how quick he dipped.

He and Bonne basically had drunk sex. The reaction to it from this bitch is straight out of a stereotypical millennial consent fundamentalist female that makes sex less fun on the whole. A puritanical step down from better boomer or Xer time periods. For all my issues with her and her tendency someone like Anna Kachiyan is at least a nice break from all that scott pilgrim puritanical female crap.

As with Bones, I've always said that he would have been a notable 1970s era ultra leftist. One of the better members of a group like for ourselves(authors of the right to be greedy). These views don't quite cut the mustard for the quarter point of the 21st century. Still an interesting guy though with loads of gonzo journo ideational potentially if he could just drop the commie crap.

Sucks that Dr Bones was purged by the leftist community as I just started reading his work. I think his ideas are really needed right now. Anyone know what he’s been up to and is there a way to reach him?

Nice try, FBI!

haha! are the feds usually this funny? "his ideas are really needed right now" lol

*knee slapping noises*

I stumbled upon Dr. Bones first on Rev left radio. The FAI episodehit so hard that I sat down on the middle of the walk, ona log in a Forrest, sparked a joint and just listened in amazement. The energy of this person is infectious. His makes these grim kind of jokes that make you giggle from somewhere deep inside. And his takes are so scandalous that the entire episode feels illegal. His writing is no different. I'm working myself through all of it and sharing in with anyone I feel it could have an impact on. I'm thinking of printing them into Zines to hide in librarys and to lay out in the bookshelves at occupations, squats and action camps. A lot of people can take something away from him. I always felt that anarchism didn't need big theory or fancy action plans. Anarchy is a gut feeling, something that sporadically happens, a release of stored energy. His texts really convey this gut feeling
...
I feel it's important to not forget Dr. Bones. I want his name to live as a whisper, a infamous ghost, unknown by the organisations, the broad public, the law. It should be a ghost haunting leftism, offering a space for those burnt out and dissilusioned. I will make sure to spread the name.

And as much as I'd like to see his triumphant return, as much as I'd love to receive that sign of live, I can't help but to think that bones choose this. I think this is his making, his choice. And I'll respect that.

So all that's left is to continue to whisper his name and to keep the energy alive.
May it fuel fire and rage in so many of us and may it show people that there are friends and beauty between the rubblem

So long Dr. Bones. May you live in infamy, and not in a cell.

C.

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