Portrait of a fake news troll and the racist retiree who believes everything he writes

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/11/20/pahrump-for-trump.html

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He’s a 46-year-old professional internet troll. His mama would be so proud.

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Seems whenever I click on snopes.com, a story spread by “America’s Last Line Of Defense” is there being debunked yet again.

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He’s the 400 pound guy sitting on his bed in his underwear. Trump warned us about this guy.

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To this point…are we more ashamed or disillusioned by him for doing this? or is it far more shameful and more disturbing that she and so many like her cannot seem to separate fact from fiction?!

It astounds me that they conservatives like her scream about how liberals and hippies live with their heads in clouds and enjoy fantasy and science fiction and exclaim that lefties need a reality check. Yet they are the ones who very LITERALLY cannot discern fact from fiction. They cannot trust their own eyes and ears to help them know what truth looks like.

I don’t like what he has done…but its far more disturbing that he’s shown who these people are.

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Please don’t fete the trolls.

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It’s projection. It’s always projection.

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Honestly, I feel badly for both Blair and Chapian.

Chapian seems like she had led a more cosmopolitan working life but has been sucked into an echo-chamber hellhole that has reinforced her worst inclinations. Maybe this is the recent 40-years-after-Jonestown coverage that makes me think about it, but it seems like she has fallen into a cult – the Cult of Right Wing Facebook – and needs someone to stage an intervention and deprogram her. The people in Blair’s invective-spewing “hey, you idiots, you’ve been had” “community” do not remotely qualify.

At the same time, Blair was dead broke before he hit on this as a way to make a living. I very much disagree with his choices – protestations about how clearly he labels his posts as “satire” notwithstanding – but I understand how he might start posting these pieces and then things just snowballed from there. At this point, though, the clear moral imperative is to shut the whole thing down and walk away.

I’m reminded of a story James Randi told about publishing satire, over-the-top internally-inconsistent horoscopes in an alt-weekly or something. He and his collaborator thought they were pulling a good joke, but ended up shutting it down after a few weeks when they happened to see readers with the newspaper in-hand paying rapt attention to his Fake News Horoscopes.

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So…fuck trolls, right? That’s what I learned. No matter which side trolls which, just…fuck trolls. Period.

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Wait…

So this article isn’t about ⊥rump :grey_question:

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You know it was upsetting me a lot but I started to realize there have likely always been some people who are simply incapable of gathering objective data and are desperately easy to con. As much as it can be entertaining to watch some one go from behaving like a raving jerk to having egg on their ignorant face… I can’t get behind people who recognize how desperately simple people often are and exploit it. People need to learn how to conduct research on their own… it’s an essential life skill.

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The phrase is “There is a sucker born every minute” right?

But I have to be honest here…this woman…these are some of my family. Educated. Well read. Intelligent. But so willing to believe ANYTHING that runs their party line.

These people are far worse than the man who trolls them and exposes them. they are far more dangerous than anything IMO. See our 2016 election.

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I’m not into the generational warfare thesis to explain politics, but sometimes I wonder, what is wrong with Boomers?

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From the article:
“In a good month, the advertising revenue from his website earned him as much as $15,000…”

As much as I’d like to take the high road here, I have to admit, if I could earn that much money a month from posting pictures someone else took, and barf out unbelievable nonsense about its meaning… well, that’s a pretty powerful temptation.

Vonnegut give me strength: You are what you pretend to be, you are what you pretend to be, you are what you pretend to be… Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt…

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He is assuming the loony-right even knows what that word means. I bet some of them even think it means ‘true’. He’d be better labelling it ‘fiction’ - but even then…

Anyway, he’s doing much more harm than good.

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It isn’t just boomers. See my comments throughout the BBS. While some of the boomers in my Northeast family are delusional like this…there are those around my age and younger (I’m 45) who are exactly the same way.

It’s simply not generational.

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From the article, he seems to be going to reasonable (if unsuccessful) lengths to make sure people know his posts are jokes. To that extent I’m not sure what he’s doing is much different from the Onion or Daily Mash (or the James Randi horoscopes you mention).

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“Genuine 100% placebo”

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Nah, fuck that guy. It doesn’t matter what his stated goal is his actual accomlishment is radicalizing people like her, only he manages to make several of her while she is unlikely to have even close to the same sphere of influence.

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