ZDT CHILLSTREAM FREE ADVICE, BAN EVASION, HOWDY DUMMY [ZeroDarkTony] / September 18, 2026 / YouTube / NlQzGuqXFXk
Following the copyright strike campaign against Hero Not Zero’s YouTube channel, ZeroDarkTony spent three hours building a casde to tie Dodge Landesman, a critic he calls “Howdy Dummy” to HNZ contributor SisterBrightZoey, then hands his chat a channel to report: HeroLightCody.
Anthony D’Amato went live less than twenty-four hours after Hero Not Zero’s YouTube channel came down on D’Amato’s ninth copyright strike against it. Streaming as ZeroDarkTony, he opened by confirming the strikes were his, then spent the better part of three hours running two projects at once: an organized push to get a second channel banned, the one belonging to critic and HNZ contributor @HeroLightCody, and a slow, hedge-heavy build toward the identity of another HNZ contributor, @SisterBrightZoey. Both accounts are aliases, and have kept their identities private in order to report on the criminal activity of D’Amato.
In this stream D’Amato brought in another critic, Dodge Landesman, a YouTuber who has covered D’Amato’s various encounters with the law in Los Angeles, along with the anti-Scientology protests in Hollywood. D’Amato refers to Landesman as “Howdy Dummy.” Chat filled in what he wouldn’t say outright. By the end of the night he had named Landesman’s father, a theater, an unrelated actress, and told his audience which channel to report, and how often.
HNZ Contributor Note
D’Amato spends this stream doxing SisterBrightZoey, a contributor to HNZ’s reporting. This piece documents his conduct and claims; it does not confirm, deny, or add to the identifying details he assembled on stream.
The Subpoena He Already Lost
D’Amato reports that “Howdy Dummy,” Dodge Landesman is the son of Broadway theater owner and former NEA chairman Rocco Landesman. D’Amato has tried to obtain information about Landesman previously, through the courts. In 2025’s Willens v. D’Amato, his attorney Steven Tamer subpoenaed information from YouTube on a list of non-party critics that included Landesman, True Crime with Nora, Scientology Audit, CleaSpeaks, and HeroLightCody. A motion to quash succeeded, and the court sanctioned Tamer over the demand. A judge already told D’Amato he could not compel this information. This stream runs the same type of unmasking project without the court: no subpoena, no discovery order, just forty minutes of stacked coincidence delivered live to a paying chat.
Currently on Probation
According to Los Angeles Superior Court records (Case No. 24CJCM07073-01, The People of the State of California v. D’Amato, Anthony Robert), D’Amato is serving a three-year term of summary probation, imposed on December 23, 2025, after being convicted on two counts of violating a domestic relations court order (Penal Code 273.6(a)). His probation terms require him to follow all laws, comply with the protective order, and avoid using or threatening force or violence. However, his probation has been revoked due to a list of possible violations submitted to the judge by the city attorney. The September 19 stream described below occurred while this revoked probation was in effect.
The Stream
Exhibit A — The Confession and the Call
He opens by confirming, on his own stream, that he filed the strikes that took the channel down, nine of them by his count, and that he will keep filing them if it returns. In the same breath he opens a second front against what he identifies as the replacement channel. The “pull up, bitch” line is walked back as a joke, but it is aimed at the same target he is simultaneously asking his audience to mass-report. Calling it a joke afterward does not undo saying it to an audience he is actively directing, and it is the same kind of conduct the city attorney has already documented in filings in D’Amato’s criminal case.
Timestamps: 00:06:31 – 00:11:09 | Watch with a free account
“I don’t want to say the name,” D’Amato told his chat, “but I have, you know, done copyright strikes on a particular channel.” He refused to say the channel’s name, prompting the chat to guess. @CCRagan asked, “Hero Not Zero?” and D’Amato confirmed. He added that the channel now had a second account, which @CCRagan identified as “HLC,” which is the @HeroLightCody channel, accusing it of ban evasion. D’Amato then encouraged viewers to report the channel for this violation.
He confirmed the target had been terminated that day: “For copyright, I put about nine copyright strikes. And if that channel ever comes back, I’m going to keep doing them because I don’t care.” Asking his audience to “spread it far and wide,” he turned combative, demanding, “You got a fucking problem with me? Pull up, bitch.” He caught himself. “I don’t want anybody to pull up, actually,” he said. “I suggest I’m making a joke.”
Exhibit B — Setting the Board
This is the outline he spends the next nearly forty minutes filling in. A company, a board, a father, and a named associate, Jeffrey Augustine, are all on the table before he has offered a single detail about any of them. Everything that follows is texture on a canvas he has already built.
Timestamps: 00:11:52 – 00:12:49 | Watch with a free account
“They are all managed by the same company … it’s really weird that in this building and on the board of this company, are several people that have been involved with either Howdy Dummy or Howdy Dummy’s dad … this individual who is ban evading has a relationship with Jeffrey Augustine.”
Exhibit C — The Reveal
Timestamps: 00:43:44 – 00:44:24 | Watch with a free account
“And if you do your research, there was a play that Howdy Dummy was involved in … And you wouldn’t believe what the name of one of the actresses was that was in this play. One of the actress’s names was Zoey. That is a fact. Isn’t that strange?”
Nearly forty minutes of setup end on a name, delivered as a “fact,” to a chat he has already told is close to figuring it out. The actress he is naming is a real person with no connection to HNZ. The entire “reveal” rests on a coincidence: her first name closely matches the on-air alias of Zoey, the HNZ contributor whose real identity D’Amato is attempting to establish throughout this stream. The actress is not Zoey, has no connection to HNZ, and appears here only because D’Amato mistook a name coincidence for evidence and pointed his audience at an uninvolved woman.
Exhibit D — Piling It On
Timestamps: 00:47:18 – 00:48:12 | Watch with a free account
“Howdy Dummy has an aunt who has a dog named Tallulah … an actress in one of his plays that’s Zoey [surname redacted] … Isn’t that a little too many coinkydinkies in the same bucky?”
None of these details identifies anyone on its own. Stacked together and framed as too improbable to be coincidence, they are meant to read as proof. That is the entire mechanism of this segment.
Exhibit E — The Father, Named
Timestamps: 00:53:43 – 00:54:00 | Watch with a free account
“Three of those board members, three of the five, have work experience with a gentleman who is very public by the name of Rocco Landesman, Howdy Dummy’s father.” Rocco Landesman is real: former president and later owner of Jujamcyn Theaters, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts under President Obama.
The other connections to the board and management company we are unable to verify.
Exhibit F — The Scientology Insinuation
This is where “Dodge” first gets said on stream, plainly, and it happens two more times before the hour is out (01:00:29 and 01:01:39). Framed throughout as “just my opinion,” it is still an unsourced claim that a named, real businessman launders Church of Scientology money through his theater to subsidize his adult son, built on geographic proximity alone.
Timestamps: 00:57:56 – 00:59:01 | Watch with a free account
“Dodge’s dad has a theater that’s a two minute walk from the Scientology Manhattan org …”
Saying “just my opinion” or “I heard” doesn’t shield someone from responsibility. D’Amato suggests a financial tie between the theater and the Church of Scientology, claiming it has supported Landesman “his entire life.” The only “evidence” is that the theater is a two-minute walk from a Scientology building, which is a classic logical fallacy—proximity isn’t proof of connection. Presenting this as an opinion while making what sounds like a factual claim can still be defamatory if false, as it implies a hidden or unethical financial link. Wrapping an accusation in the guise of an opinion doesn’t protect the speaker if a reasonable listener would believe Landesman is secretly funded by Scientology.
Exhibit G — The Associates
Timestamps: 00:50:07 – 00:50:16 | Watch with a free account
“And who are they friends with? Jeffrey Augustine and Karen de la Carrière, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Oz.”
Two more names dropped with no accompanying claim, guilt assigned by proximity alone. Jeffrey Augustine and Karen de la Carrière are both prominent critics of the Church of Scientology, with no documented connection to Landesman’s identification other than sharing posts on social media. Naming them here, right before the insinuation that follows, groups anyone critical of D’Amato into a single conspiratorial “them,” whether or not they have any actual connection to each other. He offers no proof.
Exhibit H — The Hedge, Then the Handoff
During the broadcast, D’Amato offered a speculative theory: “It could be that someone framed Howdy Dummy.” He then quickly attempted to distance himself from the narrative driving his own three-hour stream.
“Don’t listen to me. Do your own research on it. It’s not hard to find,” he told his viewers.
This sequence illustrates a tactical use of plausible deniability to trigger crowdsourced harassment against a private citizen. By dropping the name Zoey [surname redacted] and connecting her to a volatile situation, D’Amato effectively painted a target on her back. Telling an angry audience to “do your own research” because the subject is “not hard to find” functions as a dog whistle; a coded signal that his followers instantly understand as an invitation to look up the target. It is a distinct form of mob-baiting: using a verbal disclaimer as a shield against platform bans while fully anticipating that the audience will isolate and target the individual online.
He pivoted straight from that hedge into a more explicit instruction related to another HNZ associated channel: @herolightcody. “So if you wouldn’t mind, and I’m just going to say the letters, go to the HLC channel and report it for ban evasion every day, twice a day, because that’s against the rules,” he told his chat, adding that “YouTube should be notified about this violator of the rules.”
Timestamps: 01:09:09 – 01:10:16 | Watch with a free account
The irony is that the instruction is itself the violation. YouTube’s Harassment and Cyberbullying policy prohibits what it calls brigading, encouraging the coordinated abuse of an identifiable individual or channel on or off the platform. A standing order to mass-flag one named channel every day, twice a day, fits that definition regardless of whether HLC has done anything wrong at all. D’Amato accuses his target of breaking YouTube’s rules while directing his own audience to break them himself.
Exhibit I — Standing Orders
Timestamps: 01:14:28 – 01:14:58 | Watch with a free account
Here D’Amato concludes an outcome without evidence. “So HLC is ban evading … make sure that not only do you go, but you encourage your chats to. Make sure the community is safe.”
Evasion means using another channel to keep doing what the terminated one was doing, continuing to post, continuing to reach an audience, working around the ban. A channel that predates the termination and hasn’t uploaded anything is doing the opposite of that. There’s no ongoing activity to evade with.
D’Amato’s own words undercut him here too. His theory only holds together if HLC is being actively used as a workaround, “another channel… which means they are now ban evading,” present tense, ongoing. If HLC hasn’t posted since HNZ came down, there’s nothing currently happening that the ban evasion policy is designed to catch. It’s a channel sitting still, not one circumventing anything. He has no proof that the channels are actually owned by the same person, so he’s just assuming.
Timestamps: 01:49:43 – 01:49:51 | Watch with a free account
He jumps back into the campaign twice more before wrapping up, the second time celebrating what he believes is a useful update to YouTube’s reporting interface. All nine exhibits together show a clear pattern throughout the September 19 stream. Calling out an HNZ contributor by name is a doxxing attempt that targets an innocent bystander. He carries out this doxxing alongside a coordinated, twice-daily push to report a related channel, all while D’Amato was still under active court supervision from his criminal case – a criminal case which was the result of similar online targeting and harassment.
Sources
- Original YouTube Video
- Full SRT Transcript: for HNZ Supporters
- Full Text Transcript: for HNZ Supporters
- Full Chat Transcript: for HNZ Supporters
- Date: 2026-09-18
- Stream ID: YOUTUBE · NlQzGuqXFXk
- Court record: LASC Case No. 24CJCM07073-01
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