This will put a bright spin on your day: Apparently the unstoppable force of Westboro Baptist Church has finally met its own immovable object in the hactivist collective known as Anonymous.
Westboro has never backed down from anything to our knowledge, but they recently pulled out of their planned picket of Reddit co-founder and Internet activist Aaron Swartz’s funeral. Why? Because Anonymous apparently threatened them, and after causing them all sorts of “financial difficulties,” WBC apparently listened.
Smell that? It’s fear being turned on the fear-monger.
HuffPo reports that members of Anonymous and their supporters showed up to Swartz’s funeral to block Westboro’s picket line, but the Christian-esque hate group was nowhere to be seen.
But Westboro did promise to be there in a lengthy press release titled “GOD H8S Cyber Criminal THUGS.”
“Cyber criminals are the latest face of this nation’s and this world’s raging at God and His Servants at WBC,” said the press release. “Now the gloves are off, cyber rebels! … We will picket the funeral, the LORD willing, so that in that Great Day of His Wrath, your blood is not on our hands.”
Despite all that bark, Westboro’s presence consisted of a phone call from WBC’s lawyer to local police, confirming that they were staying in on the day of Swartz’s funeral.
Earlier this week, a video was uploaded to YouTube by ChannelZeroYT11 , (an allegedly Anonymous-controlled account) announcing that the group would protect Aaron Swartz’s funeral from Westboro Baptist, and apologizing to Swartz’s family and friends for their “continuous condemnation and attacks against this cult” as the likely “reason Aaron is being targeted by them.”
You can watch that video below. In any case, we’re betting that this is a game-changer against the WBC and that Anonymous, though controversial, might play a huge role in giving them their just desserts … even if all they do is intimidate them into silence.
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