(UPDATE) Aaron Walker Still Inflicting His Delusions On Other People

UPDATE at bottom. Above left: William Hoge. Right: Aaron Walker.

Aaron Walker, the unemployed and useless attorney whose unending legal shenanigans have kept the insane fires of ‘Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin’ sputtering along for the last three years better than any other figure in the wingnutosphere, is convinced beyond doubt that his obsession tweets as @WhoIsNumberNone. And he’s reportedly convinced Scott Hinckley of Shirley, Massachusetts to swear as much in a courtroom this week.

It was the latest effort to harass former BU writer Bill Schmalfeldt through abuse of a state’s restraining order process, a scheme in which Walker has played legal adviser to people living in states where he is not licensed to practice law.

Schmalfeldt had recently moved from Maryland to the Midwest, spoiling a similar campaign which William Hoge had conducted against him in that state for the better part of the last two years.

Using the screen name ‘agiledog,’ Hinckley is a frequent commenter at Hoge’s blog, where almost all original material is focused on Kimberlin and Schmalfeldt. The website, Hogewash.com, has drawn a small collection of trolls who go to extraordinary lengths trying to entrap, frame, and harass Schmalfeldt in the mistaken belief that doing so will somehow ‘expose’ Kimberlin.

In fact, these efforts merely highlight just how deranged their quasi-religious mania really is.

To obtain his restraining order against Schmalfeldt, who suffers from Stage V Parkinson’s Disease and cannot walk without assistance, sources tell BU that Hinckley claimed to live in fear of Kimberlin, telling the Ayer District Court that his bogeyman communicates with Schmalfeldt on Twitter as @WhoIsNumberNone.

It appears that Hinckley succeeded in convincing Judge J. Elizabeth Cremens of this nonsense because Schmalfeldt could not attend the hearing in person. Being unable to freely travel to defend himself, Schmalfeldt makes an easy target for these kinds of vexatious intrigues.

In the three days since the hearing, Hoge’s readers have commented and tweeted with joy at the results of Hinckley’s action, for they seem to believe that it has ‘proven’ Kimberlin is @WhoIsNumberNone, better known by the nickname ‘Zero.’

But IP information from BU comments, and a simple phone call with BU, have confirmed that the much-ballyhooed Zero is definitely not Brett Kimberlin — and doesn’t even live anywhere near Maryland.

“These people are living in a fantasy world,” said @WhoIsNumberNone on Thursday night. Furthermore, Zero is convinced that Hinckley, Hoge, and the rest are following their paranoid attorney friend down a lunatic rabbit-hole: “I believe that Aaron Walker is a paranoid delusional.”

Zero is hardly the first observer to suggest that Walker suffers from mental illness.

Recollecting the history of their exchanges, Zero says that Walker has maintained this peculiar fixation with their identity since the very first encounter, which took place after Walker started an argument with another friend.

“The first real contact I had in this whole case was with Aaron, and at the time he declared that I was Brett Kimberlin because he and I both knew who Emmett Till was, and that’s just too big of a coincidence.”

Till, of course, is a very famous victim of Mississippi racial violence who was lynched in 1955 for the crime of supposedly flirting with a white woman.

Walker typically makes that kind of bizarre association very quickly, then sticks with his conclusions in spite of all contrary evidence. I have observed this confirmation bias happening in Walker myself.

During the time that I wrote for BU under the pseudonym ‘Xenophon,’ Walker remained adamant that I was actually a woman living in Washington, DC. When I debunked this claim, Walker strenuously questioned my conclusions on Twitter. Since I unmasked myself as the author, however, Walker has resorted to accusing me of merely being Kimberlin’s paid agent.

Kimberlin has no editorial control of any sort at BU and I do not receive anything of value from him in order to write here. People who say otherwise are often disgusting, sometimes amusing, and always wrong.

In fact, according to my records, I have only ever spoken to Kimberlin on the phone eight times, for a total of less than three hours, and always in the act of reporting on the right wing gang of creeps and weirdos who obsess over their conspiracy theories about him.

But I am still familiar enough with Kimberlin’s voice to know immediately on hearing Zero speak that this person is certainly not him, or any of the people in his organization with whom I have spoken, for that matter.

Zero considers Walker’s schizophrenic behavior on Twitter — alternately blocking and then trying to follow the @WhoIsNumberNone account — a sign of frenetic dissonance born of a sincere, if misguided, belief that Kimberlin is tweeting through the account.

Taken from the most recent revival of Dune Patrol, a series intermittently published by DC Comics, the handle @WhoIsNumberNone should also be a huge clue that the person behind the account is someone other than Brett Kimberlin.

Kimberlin has never been enthusiastic for comic book superheroes since his childhood, much less shown any fondness for the eccentric and obscure DC series which inspired Stan Lee to create a much more famous Marvel Comics imitation, The X-Men.

Hoge is undoubtedly aware of Walker’s behavioral issues, for he once admitted to Kimberlin’s wife that he considered the disgraced lawyer “a sociopath.”

That awareness may explain a recent rhetorical shift at Hogewash.com, where the eponymous writer’s posts regarding Kimberlin are now all self-centered ‘jokes’ regarding his own individual legal situation rather than expressions of solidarity with allies, including Walker.

Buried under Kimberlin’s lawsuits ever since he took part in Walker’s scheme to suborn perjury from Tetyana during a marital dispute in 2013, and now nursing a wife sick with cancer, Hoge’s seeming desire to separate his own legal interests from Walker’s is completely understandable.

Meanwhile, as he embarks on his latest failing legal effort against the Kimberlin family, Walker no longer enjoys the amplifying effects of Breitbart News, Pajamas Media, Michelle Malkin, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Gateway Pundit, Popehat, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze.com, or any of the other conservative and libertarian news and opinion outlets which supported his cause more than three years ago.

Always his own worst enemy, Walker’s most recent court filings regarding Kimberlin have become so novel and fantastical that his newest contrived ‘facts’ must give even the most rabid conservative readers pause.

But even as the culture warriors who once arrayed themselves behind Walker’s crusade scatter and separate, Scott Hinckley comes late to the party — and wants to become a new blog martyr in Walker’s harebrained endeavor.

Sadly for Mr. Hinckley, he will not succeed in ‘proving’ anything about @WhoIsNumberNone this way, nor will he ever even attract the notice of the man that he says he fears most. Supposing that he has embarked on the path to final victory, Hinckley will instead find that he stands at the well-trodden dead end of Aaron Walker’s imagination.

UPDATE

I held this story all weekend while emailing Mr. Hinckley for comment. Late yesterday evening, several hours after this story was published, Mr. Hinckley finally responded to my queries with the following email that reads exactly like something Aaron Walker or William Hoge would write. Note that at no point anywhere has he denied anything I wrote above:

Mr. Osborne, you are to consider this a formal Cease and Desist Demand from me to you. I do not want you to contact me in any way, including, but not limited to: in person, by phone, by email, or through any social media. You are not to contact me, my wife, or either of our places of employment. Any contact you have with me should be through the U.S. Mail, and only those things required by court rules.

Bill Schmalfeldt acknowledged today on his website that the two of you are friends. As the Harassment Prevention Order I have obtained explicitly prohibits contacts including through a third person, I will consider all contacts by you to be contact through a third person, and to be a violation of that order. Violation of that order is a criminal offense, and there are no exceptions to the court’s order for “the press”.

Get that? Like a mentally ill person lashing out at anyone who speaks aloud of their condition and refuses to be medicated, Hinckley considers any contact asking him to explain his lunatic conspiracy theory to be a form of ‘harassment’ — one that magically makes the First Amendment disappear. Should I ever dare to speak to the Great And Wonderful Scott Hinckley again in any capacity, he promises to hurt Bill Schmalfeldt as much as possible by running back to the Ayer courthouse, weeping like a terrified child, to tell the judge a new lie that I am some sort of legally-recognizable representative of the former BU writer instead of a free agent perfectly capable of asking my own questions.

Why? Because attacking the disabled person is always preferable to taking on an able-bodied reporter who is both willing and capable of showing up to defend himself in court. Attacking Bill is a good way to crow about imaginary or contrived legal ‘victories,’ whereas filing for a restraining order against me is an excellent way to get embarrassed with an expensive anti-SLAPP motion. Mrs. Louise Hinckley might be willing to put up with her husband abusing the restraining order process against someone she doesn’t know or care about, but I expect she would have a much harder time accepting, say, the loss of their dog training business due to the substantial judgment which would probably be incurred by that false move.

Of course, having sent me this thin-skinned missive, Hinckley turned on a dime and commented at Hoge’s blog to allege that I had erred in my journalistic duties by writing this story without contacting him. See how that works?

Scott Hinckley is a cowardly, lying little twerp who hangs out with other cowardly, lying little twerps. As I already said in the post above, if not for his abuse of Schmalfeldt over a conspiracy theory, Hinckley would be of zero interest to me whatsoever. I’d rather not waste another keyboard stroke on Mr. Hinckley as long as I have breath, but I have seen this game play out before, so I am familiar with all the moves; like an ignored child, he will soon crave attention.