If you don’t know who Ethan Klein is, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.

Klein is the primary host of the extremely popular H3 Podcast, which is one of the most-watched podcasts on YouTube every week. Over the past few years, as he has engaged in a never-ending, largely one-sided feud with his former co-host Hasan Piker (the leftist Twitch streamer who has been profiled in the New York Times), Klein has also become more hated than ever before.

That’s saying something, because Klein used to happily throw the N-word around. But since October 7, 2023, Klein has repeatedly escalated allegations of antisemitism against Piker for his outspoken stance against Israel and in support of Palestinians. Klein is Jewish and has lived in Israel, while Piker is Turkish-American and was raised Muslim. Klein’s obsession with attacking Piker and anyone who agrees with or is associated with Piker has made Klein the repeated subject of viral content dragging him to hell and back.

This week, Klein continued to be so mad at Piker for being anti-Israel that he decided to sue three women about it. He filed lengthy, typo-ridden lawsuits for copyright infringement against female Twitch streamers who reacted to a nearly two-hour video Klein made about Piker in January, which he has since revealed was a trap to try and sue Piker for streaming the copyrighted content on his channel. Piker didn’t do it, but these women did, so Klein sued them instead. Klein’s announcement of the lawsuits featured him literally setting money on fire. The suits featured dozens of claims about Piker, including a paragraph comparing Piker to a prominent Palestinian who has been dead for 50 years but collaborated with Adolf Hitler and other Nazis to oppose the establishment of Israel.

The feud between Klein and Piker is so labyrinthian it would actually take hours to dissect it. But this most recent escalation troubled me on another level. Klein’s lawsuits against these three women are so frivolous that even he doesn’t think they’ll make it to court, despite his demand for a jury trial. But they are still going to be extremely expensive, time-consuming, and stressful. And they have provoked a torrent of misogynistic abuse aimed at these women, who were already frequent targets.

There’s also other stuff going on in the world

Let me take a quick break from unpacking Klein’s latest gift to the misogynistic cesspool of the internet to acknowledge that Donald Trump unconstitutionally bombed nuclear facilities in Iran over the weekend based on vibes—an unprecedented act of war that is already polling as dramatically unpopular.

War hawks rushed to praise Trump’s strikes in columns for The Atlantic and The New York Times, but the U.S. track record for violent interference in the region shows this a road to nowhere good, paved with human rights atrocities.

“This isn’t just hubris; it’s homicide dressed up as humanitarianism,” wrote John Mac Ghlionn in an appropriately scathing op-ed for The Hill. “And the victims aren’t dictators. They are doctors, shopkeepers, little girls clutching backpacks instead of rifles.”

New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani published an excellent statement condemning Trump’s strikes. Which leads me to ask any New Yorkers reading this to vote tomorrow in the mayoral primary if you can and haven’t already. I ranked Mamdani no. 1, and he’s surging in new polls. But whatever you do, don’t rank Andrew Cuomo.

Back to Ethan Klein tormenting women

Before Klein’s epic fallout with Piker over Israel and Gaza, Klein hosted an even more popular show called Frenemies with YouTuber Trisha Paytas in 2020 and 2021. The podcast was so successful that it elevated Paytas and Klein to new heights. But it crashed and burned after their numerous on-camera fights.

Again, to explain this lore would take so much time. Hours. Thousands of words. But what I wanted to bring up here is that after Paytas departed the show, Klein became a frequent visitor to a now-banned snark subreddit called Trishyland. I reported on the disturbing harassment the subreddit largely consisted of before it was taken down. The users delighted in grotesque bullying around Paytas’ appearance, tracked down her real-life location, tried to get her banned from various facilities, and—crucially—uploaded Paytas’ content (including her paywalled OnlyFans content) to avoid giving her views and contributing to her revenue. They were also egregiously antisemitic toward her husband, who is Klein’s brother-in-law.

It’s interesting that Klein showed Trishyland on his channel when his lawsuits against the three women—Twitch streamers who go by Kaceytron, Frogan, and Denims—includes that their streams were recommended by the H3 snark subreddit as a way to watch Klein’s content without giving him views. The lawsuits also seek to unmask the anonymous moderators of the H3 snark subreddit, several of whom the suits say are women. And Klein mentions other unrelated women in the lawsuits, too, including two female Twitch employees who the suits assert are “anti-Israel” and “antisemitic.”

The reason I bring up all these women is because Klein’s lawsuits are catnip for the misogynistic ecosystem in the Twitch community and beyond. Kaceytron, Frogan, and Denims all launched GoFundMes for legal costs—lawyers can cost hundreds of dollars an hour and cases can involve hundreds of billable hours—and they’ve been swarmed by sexist harassment (Frogan and Denims are both Arab women and Frogan wears a hijab, so they’re also targeted with other forms of bigotry). Someone told Denims to launch an OnlyFans to pay for legal costs. Other people are ranking the women’s funds based on their physical appearances. Well-known misogynists and bigots are in their replies mocking them. Fans of Klein are making small donations to their funds just to pile on more abuse in the payment descriptions. And depressingly, this is nothing new.

“When I first started on Twitch right off the heels of GamerGate I received so much harassment for just… being a woman who told jokes,” Kaceytron told me over DMs. “I honestly feel a sense of reliving some of that, just from the way some comments are talking about me.”

“Along with being fucked sued I have to deal with the man club underselling my life’s work all over again,” she continued. “I felt like I finally had these fucking losers off my back and have just been focused on streaming to my mostly LGBTQ/woman audience and now this […] It fucking sucks being a woman in this industry.”

Women with long online careers like Kaceytron have already endured harassment from internet figures who Klein has aligned himself with in his crusade against Piker, people who were ecstatic to see his lawsuit regardless of its merits. These women haven’t meaningfully threatened Klein’s powerful position on YouTube, the millions of views he gets, his millionaire status, or his legions of dedicated fans who are hungry to rip into his enemies. Klein is more powerful than them and he is reveling in it. The cost to women on these platforms is yet another chilling example of what powerful men can do to you if you piss them off. Klein didn’t respond to my request for comment.

Jameela Jamil said “I think I’m done with being interviewed by women,” but her piece actually made some good points

Subscribe to Spitfire News to read the rest.