“John H. Gohde - WTF ?” A Guide for Wikipedia editors.
Hello, Wikipedia editors ! From your emails, there seem to be a lot of you who found us by Googling “John Gohde”, hoping to find out a bit more about the man and his methods.
Well, you’re in the right place. Make yourselves a coffee, sit back, and read on. And remember: every single fact below can be found in Gohde’s very own posts during his 14 year abusive internet campaign.
“John Gohde - WTF ?”
Yes - that’s the reaction most people give when they’ve seen a few of Gohde’s posts on Usenet, or his work on Wikipedia. He is, as they say, a piece of work.
Who is he ?
Gohde is a notorious and dangerously obsessive internet troll, who spends a huge amount of time making abusive, threatening, women-hating, homophobic,anti-semitic or racist posts on the internet.
At best - if there is such a thing - he is merely an annoyance. At his worst, he is a venomous, bigoted and vicious old man who causes huge offence, disruption, and causes a great deal of grief to newsgroup users. There has also been clear and constant suggestions that his health advice in particular would be extremely dangerous - and possibly fatal - if relied on by others.
Gohde has a long and inglorious record of arriving at a newsgroup, pretending to be an ‘expert’ in the field, and then spending the next few months making a large number of on- and off-list abusive posts and threats to those in the community. Without fail, Gohde is then either thrown out of the group (eg Wikipedia, Google Webmaster Groups) or leaves of his own accord after the community rallies against him.
Want an example ? Take this disagreement when he was trying to pass himself off as a bodybuilder, where he called other posters with whom he disagreed as “cunts”, “ass-holes” and “child abusers” in quick succession.
Gohde is also no stranger to sockpuppeting and has used literally hundreds of different email addresses during his 14 year campaign on the internet. His email has changes partly because he has been thrown off several ISPs for abuse of service, but also to avoid killfiles on usenet groups such as sci.nutrition.
Is Gohde his real name ?
Yes. John Henry Gohde is now 57 years old (born 4th June 1950) and lives in Richmond, Virginia. He was briefly married, and has one son, now 29, who also works in Richmond as math teacher and artist. Gohde suffers from mild depression. Both of his “less than perfect “parents (his words) are now dead; Egon, his father died of leukemia at 73, and his mother died in 2003 at the age of 83.
Gohde is almost entirely friendless, and his brother and sister keep him at a distance.
Gohde avoided the Vietnam draft by registering on an accountancy course. He brands those who did serve in Vietnam as “morons” and “baby Gook killers”. While a devotee off right-wing shock-jocks, he has also stated that those who are currently serving in the military are “screwing the American taxpayer out of big money over their lifetimes”. He also signed a personal attack on Wikipedia as “John Gohde, the German Nazi from New York”.
Who else does he hate ?
Pretty much everyone. His personal hate list is long and numerous, but to give you a taster, he has professed hatred towards:
- The British (”a bunch of sadistic Homo’s”)
- People who eat organic food (”no brains! …no critical thinking skills!”)
- Web developers (” all web developers are nothing, but Fraudulent Spammers”)
- Linux users (”Any body Still using LInux is a self-admitted A-Hole”)
- African Americans (”Sadly, we continue to suffer from the presence of the negro variety of homo sapiens”)
- Anyone who hand codes HTML (”biggest A-Hole web designers”)
- Homosexuals (”When your brain is fucked up enough to be gay, then every aspect of your life is totally fucked!”)
- Doctors (”A doctor is a total idiot, just like you, who knows how to manipulate the system in order to make everybody else think that they are a lot smarter and more educated than they actually are”)
- The homeless (”Whether society should put [the homeless] in jail, in a work camp, or in a mental hospital is purely splitting hairs”)
- University graduates (”A-holes like you are a dime a dozen too. But, that don’t stop the universities from cranking out more idiots each year. “)
- New Orleans flood victims (”If an entire city, is dumb enough to live under sea level then THAT city is the party that should be paying for their own stupidity.”)
- Robin Williams (”slime ball actor”)
- Jews (”The ones who murdered Jesus”)
- Internet users (”a total moron who does not have a clue as to what they are doing”)
- Nurses (”money grubbing slime”)
- Lesbians (”fundamental lack of self-esteem”)
- Google (”Always unstable. Although I would prefer to call it a total mess. How it manages to function at all, with 100,000s PCs located all over the globe is beyond me”)
- Women (”The women of today do NOT know what it means to be a female”)
- Left handed people (”a mutation”)
- Those who rely on science (”Fools!”)
- Christians (”Quite disgusting helpless excuses for human beings”)
- Google’s Adam Lasnik (”a piece of shit that clearly should be terminated from Google under any standards”)
…and especially (and ironically)…
- Wikipedians (”mentally ill anti-alternative medicine bigots”)
Does he have a job ?
We’ll stick to what information Gohde himself has made publically available:
1. Gohde has previously said that his job involves dealing with immigrants
2. Gohde has said that he works locally to his house in Richmond, VA.
3. Gohde does not like immigrants, who he describes thus: “They all have one thing in common. They are ALL extremely greedy!!! “
4. Gohde likes to make anonymous edits on Wikipedia, including from the IP address “67.62.69.162″
5. This IP address resolves to Refugee & Immigration Services, 1512 Willow Lawn Dr, Richmond, VA.
Is he really a health expert ?
He would like you to think so, but the truth is somewhat different. Much of what John Gohde posts on Usenet and elsewhere is designed to present an image of a muscular, healthy man, with extensive knowledge of biology, nutrition and dieting.
The truth is that Gohde is thin and skinny, and whose diet for many years consisted almost entirely of Burger King fast food and cola: the former sent his cholesterol to dangerously high levels, while 30 years of the latter (combined with poor dental care) rotted his teeth to such an extent that they were all extracted in 1991 at the Medical College of Virginia School of Dentistry. He now wears dentures.
Gohde is keen to attack the medical credentials of others on Usenet, even when they are credential and experienced health professionals.
Gohde’s own credentials are rather less than impressive. He attended Brookside Elementary School in New York, before gradusating from high school in 1969. He claims to have graduated first from Bridgewater College in 1973 with a BA in Psychology, and then from James Madison University in 1976 with an accountancy degree. He later took a thirty hour graduate course in Information Systems.
What happens when he’s revealed to be a fraud ?
When cornered, Gohde will always try to bluff or bluster his way out of his ignorance with posts that suggest that the answer would be obvious to anyone with a brain and that he is not going to waste his time explaining it to people of lesser intellects.
Is he any kind of expert whatsoever ?
Well, you can’t blame him for not trying. He’s tried to be an expert on health (failed); an expert on bodybuilding (he weighs 145lbs, and has no upper body strength); an expert on computers (laughably); a medical expert (dangerously) and an expert in search engine optimisation (hilariously).
Is he for real ?
From emails we’ve had from those who know Gohde personally, the Gohde you find on the internet is pretty much the same Gohde you will find in real life: dumb, abusive, racist, keen to blame everyone else but himself for his current predicament, quick to dish out abuse, but very thin skinned when it comes to receiving it. In real life, Gohde comes across as even more bitter, though he tones down his racist views in public.
Who set up this website, and why ?
The group of people behind this website came together through a mutual desire to see Gohde not wreck yet another internet community. We began by researching his history on the internet - in just the same way as you probably found this site. We spent a lot of time collating the 20,000+ usenet posts Gohde has made under a huge number of different aliases, putting them together to paint a portrait of a man who has spent well over a decade abusing and attacking strangers. (We are helped in this that two of our team are also based in Richmond VA, giving us an opportunity to study him at very close quarters.) And once we did all that, we began to examine his family history, and to try and figure out what exactly motivates him to spend all his time creating so many enemies.
You must be very bitter to set up this website
Initially, possibly. Now, we’re just fascinated and repulsed, in equal measure. We believe that it’s very important that internet communities know of Gohde’s history, and the huge offense and disruption he has caused in the past. All the information we present here is publically accessible to those with enough time on their hands: we have just brought it together in one place for ease of use.
And what does motivate Gohde ?
In a nutshell ? Without being too unfair, John Gohde is a failure by anyone’s criteria, and most certainly his own. The internet gave Gohde a whole new chance to reinvent himself as a success and an intellectual heavyweight, which he seized with both hands. His attempts to portray himself as an expert in various subjects, is really an attempt to persuade himself, not others, that the 57 years he has spent so far on this earth have not been spent in vain - and that there will be some record of his life left after he dies.
What keeps bringing him back to Wikipedia ?
See the above. In the past (and in the near future !)has been banned from Wikipedia on numerous occasions for his inability to play nicely with others, causing bitter tirades such as this one, where he describes Wikipedia as “pure chaos and mob rule”, “Internet forum garbage”, policed by admins who have “absolutely no personal life” (rich, coming from the friendless Gohde) and who are “mentally ill individuals”. He also likes to let off steam with the odd bit of anonymous vandalism of wikipedia pages.
And in his revisionist version of history, why was Gohde thrown off Wikipedia ? “Personal attacks” says the Wikipedia report. “I was just too good at doing, what I did” says Gohde.
So who do you believe ?