Provocateur

new cat 6/17 related to paranoid style aha: pension plan, pundits can't fail be drummed out because the test is not talent/ability to do analysis correctly but faith (and in djt case, loyalty)

see cyber-war troll eg black hat russian hackers IRAgy

but also alt rt troll

see trigger own pwn the libs

early rejection of PC woke?

don jr declares himself general in the meme wars, book title triggered (some scam on sales?)

made possible by soc media no filter algo boost monetization?

ideological entre a more general class?

===

salty cracker sp ed tchr 10 yrs

===

aha/ hmmn always have finger in the wind, going for some kinda ctr-intuitve hot take to prove they have clout/ inside info? smarts? eg coulter?

an 12 24

During Donald Trump's 2024 campaign, billionaire Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and far-right MAGA conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer were among his aggressive, outspoken supporters. Musk was a major donor, and Loomer traveled with Trump's campaign.

Trump has proposed a new advisory committee that would be called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and he has chosen Musk and MAGA businessman Vivek Ramaswamy to lead it. But Loomer has been expressing her disdain for Musk and loudly questioning his MAGA credentials.

In a Christmas 2024 post on the Musk-owned X, formerly Twitter, Loomer wrote, "Is DOGE real? Or is it a vanity project? Can we have this conversation without people crying?"

READ MORE:[Lauren Boebert's replacement in her old district vows to be different — but not by much

The following day, Loomer tweeted, "Is DOGE a way to 'cut spending' or REDIRECT the spending toward the pet projects of tech bro billionaires? It's looking like the latter TBH. 'Hey let's convince the peasants that we are saving them money as we enrich ourselves! Then when they find out and speak out, we will have the Indian Mods Ban them!'"

Loomer, in a separate December 26 tweet, predicted that Trump and Musk will have a falling out.

The Florida-based conspiracy theorist posted, "Don't worry guys. The divorce is coming soon."

Musk was dismissive of Loomer's posts, tweeting, "Loomer is trolling for attention. Ignore."

READ MORE:['Very troubling': Leader of 'Abandon Harris' movement now anxious about Trump appointees

But Loomer has continued her attacks on Musk.

Loomer also tweeted, "The elephant in the room is that @elonmusk, who is not MAGA and never has been, is a total fucking drag on the Trump transition. @realDonaldTrump He's a stage 5 clinger who over stayed his welcome at Mar a Lago in an effort to become Trump's side piece and be the point man for all of his accomplices in big Tech to slither in to Mar a Lago."

The New Republic's Hafiz Rashid noted the "racism" that has been evident in Loomer's tweets.

Rashid, in an article published on December 26, wrote, "Loomer, renowned for her Islamophobia, racism, and conspiracy theories, appears to be opposing Musk for those very reasons, as her virulent racism drives her anti-immigration views. Her attacks on Musk are flavored with that racism, from her invoking of China to repeated attacks on people from India."

===

---

an 7 24

Jeremy Sherman

July 06, 2024

The culture war is not fundamentally between left and right, liberal and conservative, progressive and reactionary, tolerant and intolerant.

Fundamentally it has nothing to do with ideals, values or visions of the future. It’s a fight between decent people and sociopaths.

Psychopaths are congenitally shameless. Born, that way, they are neurologically deaf to the inner nag of empathy.

Sociopaths aren’t born but made. Some are brainwashed but many are not. Many are motivated sociopaths because being one is tempting, satisfying, efficient and effective.

Sociopaths learn how to be shameless. We underestimate the appeal of shamelessness. Shame constrains us. Shamelessness is a liberation. If you learn to be absolutely shameless – even shameless about your shamelessness, you grant yourself the ultimate dream come true, a reliable feeling of perfect freedom and perfect invincibility, as though you can do anything and whatever you do beats all. Sociopathy is like being granted a wildcard/Trumpcard.

Learning to be absolutely shameless is easy. It takes no study and very little practice before you get the hang of it. Whatever path you’re on has easy detours down to the haven of motivated sociopathy.

There are many ways to learn it. They all boil down to learning to blurt words as if you really mean them, without you thinking about their meaning at all.

What words? Any words that declare you the winner. No matter what you do, you can always find words to blurt that will do the trick and if you don’t care which words you use, but use them with intense conviction, the trick will work – so long as other people misinterpret you as meaning your words

Once you’re getting away with it, it’s smooth sailing. Even if people say “shame on you!” you can just blurt more shameless words that make you feel like a winner.

Once it’s smooth sailing your conscience just atrophies. You don’t need it anymore and it only gets in your way. Eventually you become a proud, deaf shameless sociopath blurting whatever makes you feel invincible no matter what you do.

People become proud motivated sociopaths by many routes. Some just get fed up, say “Aw, hell no! I’m tired of being pushed around” and start blurting cliches they get from popular culture. For example, they can say “just deal with it” to people who are already dealing with it by challenging them. And weirdly the people back down. If they grab a cliché that works, they’ll use it more.

Some people fall into a patch of such cliches all clustered around some brand-name ideology which enables them to make a crusade out of proudly, shamelessly insisting that they’re the winners. It could be any brand, left, right, spiritual, religious, philosophical, whatever.

As a cluster, the words are hypocritical ways to play god or a god or demagog’s humble servant lording it over everyone.

Omnipotence: “I’m heroic because I’m winning/I’m heroic because I’m losing.”

Omniscience: “I know everything/I don’t know about that, so it’s irrelevant.”

Omnificent: “Shame on you for not living up to my moral standards/Moral standards are for losers”

Motivated sociopaths take shameless pride in their hypocrisy. Still, they’re consistent about one thing: “I never contradict myself and no matter what happens, it proves I’m right, righteous and heroic.”

Sociopath simply means “socially-sick” – pretty vague. There are vulgar names for them too, also vague. I call them Trumpbots – lowercase “t” not after the Donald though he fits the description perfectly as would a leftist parroting the same cliches.

The word “trump” means both fake as in “trumped up” and “beats all.” A Trumpbot robotically plays fake trump cards. Again, it’s a tempting lifestyle that one can fall into from any angle, left, right, center, religious, spiritual, philosophical. One can become a Trumpbot for anything or nothing. Once one falls into this tempting lifestyle there would be no reason to leave so long as one can get away with it.

So how can we keep them from getting away with it? How can we make motivated sociopathy costly? How can we honorably shame the absolutely shameless? How can we humbly humble people who will say anything to avoid humility?

The answer is simple and obvious and yet consistently overlooked in our culture wars: Expose and flout their Trumpbot formula; taunt and flaunt the alternative.

Expose and flout their trumpbot formula:

Flout: Care about their words as much as they do: Not at all. You’ve been taught to listen, value and be open to everyone’s ideas. That’s wrong. Do that with decent people but with trumpbots it’s as enabling as listening to a psychopath.

Expose: If you have to deal with a trumpbot, simply declare over and over that they’ll say and do anything to pretend they’re right and righteous. You know what they’ll do in response? They’ll confirm your diagnosis. They’re one trick phonies. They’ve got nothing else. When they trumpbot at you in response, say “there he goes again.” Again and again. They’ll give up and declare themselves the winners but you will have cost them, especially if you do it in front of others.

Taunt and flaunt the alternative:

Taunt: What’s the alternative to being a trumpbot? Being human, trying to guess what best to do. Experiencing ambivalence and being brave enough to show it. Trumpbots want you cornered, wincing at your moral failings. Trying to prove your morality to them is deadly. They don’t care about morality. They’ll shame you for immorality and then laugh at you for caring about morality. So be yourself. Stand your ground without trying to prove it. Your power lies in taunting them with brave honest humanness while they’re robotically playing God.

Flaunt: If they accuse of you of violating some moral code (that they don’t care about) don’t deny it. For example, if they shame you for shaming, say “Of course I shame, like everyone, like you just did, trying to shame me for shaming. I try to shame where it’s deserved whereas you pretend you don’t shame while shaming.”

It is our civic duty to make motivated sociopathy costly.

an ah 12 22

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top White House medical adviser to President Joe Biden and long-time director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has been serving in the United States’ federal government since the late 1960s. Fauci, who will be celebrating his 82nd birthday on December 24, 2022, has been in the United States’ federal government since the late 1960s. And he has never had a problem serving under conservative Republican presidents, including Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.

The younger President Bush, in fact, had nothing but praise for Fauci when he presented him with the 2008 Presidential Medal of Freedom.

But during the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci became a major target of the MAGA movement. Countless MAGA culture warriors, consumed with identity politics, have turned hating Fauci into a popular pastime. Tesla CEO and new Twitter own Elon Musk, who supported President Joe Biden in 2020 but often sounds very MAGA in his rhetoric, bashed the retiring NIAID director when, on December 11, he tweeted, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” [// desantis BS]

Many Twitter users have been calling Musk out for that tweet. But liberal Washington Post opinion columnist Greg Sargent, in his December 13 column, stresses that Musk is unfazed by such critics because his motivation is appealing to the “right-wing information ecosystem.”

“By now, it should be obvious that for large swaths of the right-wing media ecosystem, the Triggering of the Libs has become an end in itself,” Sargent explains. “In the brutal competition of the so-called attention economy, provoking large-scale outrage and loathing is not an incidental feature of making controversial arguments. It has become a key marker of success.”

Sargent continues, “Over the weekend, Elon Musk called for the prosecution of Anthony S. Fauci, the leading infectious-disease expert in the Biden Administration. 'My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,' Musk tweeted, mocking transgender people for good measure. Musk then endorsed a complicated right-wing conspiracy theory about Fauci’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic. Democrats and other Musk critics reacted with an explosion of outrage.”

Twitter users who vigorously defended Fauci against Musk ranged from Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota to former CIA Director John O. Brennan. The latter told Musk, “Dr. Fauci is a national hero who will be remembered for generations to come for his innate goodness & many contributions to public health. Despite your business success, you will be remembered most for fueling public hate & divisions. You may have money, but you have no class.”

Sargent stresses, however, that while Brennan and Klobuchar’s defenses of Fauci are “reasonable,” they also “seem fundamentally out of touch with basic realities of how right-wing information warfare really works.”

“This sort of info-warring, at bottom, is what characterizes Musk’s transformation into the world’s richest right-wing troll,” Sargent explains. “Tons of pixels have been wasted on efforts to pin down Musk’s true beliefs, but whatever they are, we can say right now that he’s consciously exploiting fundamental features of the right-wing information ecosystem.”

Sargent adds that offending liberals is the whole point of an “info-warring” tweet like Musk’s December 11 attack on Fauci.

“It’s understandable that Musk’s critics are trying shaming and outrage, in that this could further drive advertisers away from Twitter,” Sargent writes. “But paradoxically, it might also help Musk…. In much of the right-wing info-ecosystem, liberal outrage is a sign of an attack’s effectiveness. It can be only confirmation that the Libs Were Owned. Shaming is useless in such an environment, and in some ways can backfire.”

===

===

an 10 22

In avideo posted on Twitter on October 11, frequent Fox News guest and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard announced that she was leaving the Democratic Party. Gabbard’s talking points were right out of the MAGA playbook when she slammed Democrats as “an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness” and declared, “The Democrats of today are hostile to people of faith and spirituality. They demonize the police and protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans. The Democrats of today believe in open borders and weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents.”

Gabbard has gone from praising Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in 2016 and running for president as a Democrat in 2020 to endorsing far-right “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theorist Kari Lake in Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial race. Right-wing media, following Gabbard’s October 11 announcement, were quick to paint the former Hawaii congresswoman as an example of someone Democrats have alienated.

But one conservative who isn’t the least bit impressed with Gabbard’s defection from the Democratic Party is Never Trumper and Daily Beast opinion columnist Matt Lewis. In a biting October 20 column, Lewis is vehemently critic of Gabbard and slams her announcement as a cheap political stunt designed to promote “her new role as celebrity influencer.”

“To the degree that ‘wokeness’ is the 2022 update of ‘political correctness meets identity politics,’” Lewis argues, “Dems have been trafficking in that for decades…. So, why did Tulsi decide to break up with the Democrats, and why now? Gabbard may want to take a page from ex-Democrat Ronald Reagan, who famously said, ‘I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the party left me.’ But the two are hardly analogous.”

Lewis continues, “I struggle to find any coherence in Gabbard’s political philosophy or strategy, but as a lifelong conservative, one possible answer may be that the Republican Party has left us. It has become the kind of MAGA party that is attractive to people like Lake, a former Obama voter; Donald Trump, a former Clinton supporter; Kanye ‘George Bush doesn't care about Black people’ West; Dr. Mehmet Oz of ‘Oprah’ fame; and now, the ex-Bernie-booster Tulsi Gabbard.”

The conservative columnist goes on to describe Gabbard’s defection from the Democratic Party as an example of former President Donald Trump’s toxic influence.

:{“In these reactionary times,” Lewis explains, “ambitious right-wing newbies just have to make the right enemies, and they are parlaying their fame into taking over not just the GOP, but the conservative movement…. A common thread among the MAGA upstarts is that they are opportunistic and attention-starved. Politics, once dreary and boring to the general public, is now a gateway to widespread attention, and the far right has by far the lowest barrier to entry. In this regard, Gabbard is merely the latest celebrity brand to hop on the conservative entertainment wing’s wagonin pursuit of even more clout.”

Lewis continues, “Seen in that light, Gabbard’s conversion, seemingly timed to coincide with the launch of a new podcast, is less confusing…. Tulsi didn’t have to pay her dues or show her conservative credentials — all she had to do is slam her own party. Instant MAGA stardom!.... Welcome aboard, Tulsi. You’ll fit right in!}:”

===

node skeptic contrarian 11 21 sparked by bigthink techno-optimism

note that deniers have often/always cloaked their BS in brave david and goliath speaking truth to power, hence mod galileo cosplay

and/or hard headed rationalism unswayed by the deluded mob

===

aha 820 hmmn, dunno what to do with this category, // own the libs?

in age of plandemic qanon reptilian cannibal pederasts, what is provocative? if loomer realy believes islamophobia what makes her differnt than geller?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/the-gop-is-the-party-of-leftovers-political-observers-rip-far-right-activist-laura-loomers-primary-victory-in-florida/

proud boys gavin mcinnes at party, roger, and milo

no lnx

only a week after QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene won a GOP congressional primary in Georgia, Laura Loomer won a GOP congressional primary in Florida — and now, Loomer will go up against incumbent Democratic Rep. Lois Frankel in the general election. Given how Democratic Frankel’s district is, Loomer will be fighting an uphill battle — unlike Greene, whose district in Georgia is deeply Republican. But Loomer’s campaign is sure to embarrass her party. This is the same Loomer who was banned from Twitter and other social media platforms because of her hateful rhetoric attacking Muslims and others — and who is so extreme that she was even banned from the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference after harassing and badgering reporters (a practice she calls “Loomering”).

President Donald Trump was quick to congratulate Loomer on her win:

Great going Laura. You have a great chance against a Pelosi puppet! https://t.co/pKZp35dUYr

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2020

And Greene congratulated her as well:

Congratulations to Laura Loomer on her primary win!

Now Twitter should re-instate her account. @jack pic.twitter.com/SlDPToCS0X

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/the-gop-is-the-party-of-leftovers-political-observers-rip-far-right-activist-laura-loomers-primary-victory-in-florida/

proud boys gavin mcinnes at party, roger, and milo

no lnx

President Donald Trump was quick to congratulate Loomer on her win:

Great going Laura. You have a great chance against a Pelosi puppet! https://t.co/pKZp35dUYr

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2020

And Greene congratulated her as well:

Congratulations to Laura Loomer on her primary win!

Now Twitter should re-instate her account. @jack pic.twitter.com/SlDPToCS0X

The issue of expertise and knowledge caught the attention of another communications expert, Dr. Dannagal Young, author of “Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States” (Salon interview: Part 1/Part 2). “Truth still exists, and there are those working to study it, report on it, and illuminate it,” Young said. “We are still here. And we will be here, regardless of the economics of digital and social media that prioritize and reward spin and partisan mis- and disinformation over tedious truth”:

kpfa greg? eggers new satire bk capt aND glory went to early trump rally, says it's entertainment, andrew dice clay

sort of explains dingell? provocateur? // coulter?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/senior-gop-congressman-warns-trump-could-lose-michigan-alone-thanks-to-hateful-attack-on-late-rep-dingell-hes-playing-with-fire/

aha: descendent of pundits and shock jocks, evil spawn/love child? both amplif matthew effect b/c must up the ante?

aha: conservatives claim to be unfairly silenced by labels, sexist, racist, but i'm coming to see it as central to identity/reverse victimhood

white guys once had assured status/living in factories

related?

see provocateur eg milo; coulter does standup?!

beck and rush used to retreat when busted as just entertainer/clown

alt rt trolls get to spew hate then say, just kidding, just pwning/ owning the libs, can't believe you fell for it? feminists and lesbians said to have no sense of humor?

ok to trigger the snowflakes, yet rt is under attack, free speech being crushed, identity politics, victim narrative (mirror)

===

C&C kathy griffin severed head to sharon angle? bull's eye over rival cands, "2nd amendment remedies"; tiller baby killer, pipe bombs mail; stella ilhan hanged as traitor...

something awful: faggot was a term appropriated by senior members of a board? prophylactic co-opt of term as self defense? I am so secure in my identity/status/rep here that i can use this insult term without harm? pre-emptive? bannon/mercer had a plan/project in mind that morphd into dang faggt tour?

// cuck squish ?

milo latest frontier in renta-toms? you can't call us homophobes anymore b/c we have token one as proxy for trump./alt rt; child molestation a bridge too far?

why wd milo release this? settling score trumps ideol solidarity [// don jr ucla factionalism, who is more hard core?]

NOVEMBER 4, 2019

Former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos published a leaked audio recording that he claims shows white nationalist leader Richard Spencer shouting racist slurs and threats after the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.

Yiannopoulos, who reportedly worked with white supremacists to mainstream their rhetoric through Breitbart News before he lost his job there, published the audio in a blog post. The audio, which Yiannopoulos claimed was confirmed by a source close to Spencer, appears to capture the prominent white nationalist unleashing a flurry of slurs aimed at Jews and African Americans after the murder of Heather Heyer at the 2017 rally. The audio has not been verified by Salon.

===

no lnx

Here’s how techno-utopianism decayed into alt-right madness

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon October 9, 2019

New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz put his sanity on the line in order to take a deep dive into two parallel worlds: the reactionary universe of the alt-right, and the technological triumphalist paradigm of Silicon Valley. The latter is responsible for selling us a utopian vision of the internet that would (supposedly) bind humanity, yet which instead has stoked political division and created, indirectly, the alt-right. In “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation,” Marantz offers readers an explanation as to how social networks created by idealist techies were co-opted by a rat’s nest of bigots, trolls, and fascists, who exploited the supposed “neutrality” of platforms to spread hate.

Marantz spoke to Salon about his new book and how the internet is changing democracy. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

This is a book about how the advent of social media really opened up the social and political discourse in this country to the people that Hillary Clinton aptly deemed a “basket full of deplorables.”

I think the deplorable part was more apt than the basket part. But, yeah.

How much do you think tech matters in the rise of not just the alt-right, but Donald Trump?

Tech matters hugely for the rise of Trumpism and for nationalist populism around the world. That’s not to say that it’s the only source of energy for those movements, and it’s also not to say that there aren’t huge benefits to opening up discourse in all kinds of ways.

I don’t want to paint a monochromatic picture or say that tech has only led to deleterious outcomes or antisocial outcomes, but I think for too long there was this tacit assumption among tech bros, and also just among the general public, that on the whole the internet would make the world more open and connected and set us all free and make it more fair and tolerant and generally be pro-social. And I think we’ve seen pretty definitively that that hasn’t entirely been the case.

What I like about your book is you really do talk about some of the historical antecedents to the rise of social media. This is something that I’ve been boring my friends with, pointing out, you know, it’s not like the printing press didn’t lead to violence, too.

Exactly, right. In fact, it led to many of the same kinds of violence, antisemitism, bigotry, and misinformation. None of this is new. It’s just that we’ve kind of forgotten those lessons of history.

As you said, the tech industry was very idealistic, promoting the idea that social media would connect people, would help spread good ideas. The Arab Spring was a big marketing event for social media, even as it was a real thing in the real world. Why do you think there was an unwillingness to look at the possibility that it would also give rise to hate speech, violence, bigotry, things like that?

Part of it is just that it’s uncomfortable and unpleasant to think about bigotry and hate speech. So people would rather not do it.

I’ve faced that even while reporting this book. I like to think that the book is engaging and even darkly funny. But I’ve had people indicate that they are scared to read it, because they would just rather not think about this stuff.

I think that the only way out is through, which is why I used James Baldwin as an epigraph. Nothing can be changed until it’s faced.

I happen to think this stuff isn’t as depressing as people worry it’ll be, but that’s a separate topic. But yeah, it’s not fun to think about.

Also, we tend to get stuck on this dichotomy of optimism versus pessimism, and I think that’s just the wrong way of thinking about these things. A more useful frame than either optimism or pessimism is what I refer to as contingency.

Tell me more about that.

I borrowed that concept from the philosopher Richard Rorty, who wrote one of my favorite books called “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.” And contingency, boiling it down a lot, just means we don’t know what’s going to happen. We can’t have a teleological view of the future. We can’t assume that things are pre-ordained to happen in a certain way. We have to look at the facts as they are and make an informed judgment about whether we’re going to inevitably have a more perfect union and inevitably make progress.

Often we just assume that those things will just happen inevitably. A more contingent view of history would suggest that they don’t happen automatically, and they don’t happen at all if you don’t work for them to happen.

In this book, you often explore your own emotions about institutions versus the “disruption” of the tech industry,and express some longing I think for some of the gatekeeping power that old institutions had before the time of social media. Having gone through the entire process of writing and publishing and now marketing this book, where do you fall on that scale right now?

I see it as a trade-off. By no means do I want to pretend that the whole gatekeeper model was perfect or even very good. It was flawed in all kinds of ways. It was run by upper middle-class white men who didn’t have a very nuanced view of the country for the most part. There were all kinds of problems with corporate control. Nothing about our past should be construed as a golden age.

It’s just that when you tear down all those structures, and don’t even try to even pretend to think about what’s going to replace them, or you replace them with something worse, then the problems don’t get better. They get worse.

Before even there was a term, the alt-right, feminists and social justice activists were observing that social media was allowing uglier forms of bigotry to flourish. A lot of the blame was kind of put on the white maleness of the tech industry, that there was a blindness of the people running it. How much do you give credence to that?

I definitely give credence to it. I think the basic critique that you can’t really readily empathize with people if you don’t have representation of all people within your company, I think is an apt critique.

But I don’t think that it would solve everything if the tech companies had diversity and inclusion statistics that accurately reflected the country. I think that would help, but I think the problems are deeper and more systemic than that.

The discourse around this particular problem has often been one of ignorance, right? There’s a sense that a lot of the white male leaders of the tech industry have progressive values.

Some of them.

On the other hand, you ran into Peter Thiel, at the DeploraBall.Do you think that’s an element of the problem right now? That we just have bad actors in tech leadership?

Well, my critique of Peter Thiel in the book was not based on his support for Trump, although I find his support for Trump extremely regrettable. My critique of him was based on the fact that I tried to engage him in a dialogue about the fundamental problems at Facebook, which arguably could not have become as successful as it is without his early investment. And instead of answering my critiques, he just left and didn’t respond to me at all. And didn’t respond to followup questions during the fact checking process.

So my critique of him is really more substantive. I mean there are lots of Trump supporters in the country, Peter Thiel being one of them. I can debate with them or decry their views, but really my issues with Thiel are that he got rich off of Facebook. I’m just curious whether he knew that there would be all these negative impacts on our society, in addition to the positive ones. And if he did know, why he didn’t do more to stop it?

Shifting over to the systematic issue, in this book you analyzed the concept ofvirality, which you frame in a Darwinian sense. Could you explain that more for some of the readers of Salon?

There’s this concept of the old gatekeeper outlets, specifically the New York Times, that they give you all the news that’s “fit to print”. It struck me that that word, “fit”, has the unintended double meaning. They mean “fit” as in what’s appropriate.

But social media algorithms, for the most part, are not concerned with what’s appropriate. They’re concerned with what gets engagement. Engagement can be anything. It can be positive engagement like likes, and it can also be negative engagement like hate reads or shares for the reason of saying, take a look at this asshole. Algorithms are neutral with regards to that. Their job is to keep you hooked and keep your brainstem fired up so that you stay on the platform.

That’s what leads to this Darwinian outcome. A Darwinian system, like nature, doesn’t care whether you’re a surviving by being nice or surviving by being red in tooth and claw, as they say. All that matters is whether you pass on your genes.

The same is true in the world of memes, which is a term coined by a very prominent Darwinian biologist to explain how ideas struggle for dominance. These systems create a world in which the way that ideas struggle for dominance is pretty red in tooth and claw.

On Twitter, if you write a “look at this asshole”, you get yelled at by people saying don’t give trolls attention, that it just raises their profile. The counter argument to that is, if we don’t look at it, we can’t criticize it. How do you kind of feel about the debate? Is there anything that we, as individuals, can do to change the incentive structures of the internet?

To take the first part first, there’s no good answer to the question of how to respond to noxious trolls, because if you give them attention, even negative attention, then you’re feeding them oxygen. If you ignore them, then you are risking seeming complicit. So that’s why that’s such a vexing problem because there really is no good individual answer to it.

Systemically, there are ways to tweak the systems to diminish that kind of stuff, but as a person, I don’t really see an easy way out.

I think the flippant answer that a lot of people land on is to just say, I’m just going to log off, which is really good for your mental health. And I recommend it for a lot of people in a lot of circumstances. But you don’t get to log off of the country, right? So these systems can still be affecting who your president is, and whether you get to live in a country that has environmental regulations and all the rest of it. So you can’t opt out of that.

So let’s talk about some of those trolls, because they are admittedly fun to talk about. You spend a lot of time in this book engaging them as personalities. You went to the DeploraBall. The right wing trolls, they really think of themselves as rebels. It’s both their identity and their justification. But I couldn’t help but think that their ideologies are just old-fashioned racism and sexism, their behavior is like out of a bad beer commercial and their jokes reminded me of the lame jokes from some high school locker room. How on earth are they holding themselves out as rebels?

Yeah, they’re really bad at it. Yet it’s still really effective. It reminds me of the kind of comedian who is not a good comedian but just gets laughs anyway because he or she — let’s be real, it’s usually a he — will just say whatever makes the audience uncomfortable and get those kind of uncomfortable laughs from the crowd. It’s just cheap.

A lot of this rebel attitude is so central to a lot of these people that “The Rebel” is a name of one of their big media companies. This woman, Faith Goldy, got fired from The Rebel. The line she crossed was going on a Nazi podcast during the march in Charlottesville. When she got fired for that, there were commenters online who were saying to the owners of that media company, “You guys should change your names from The Rebel Media to The Conformist Media.”

And it’s like, so being a Nazi is being a rebel? That’s just a really, really shitty and unoriginal way to be rebellious, in addition to being terrifying and disgusting and all the rest of it.

When I think of the Nazis, I don’t think of people that were really into rebellion as a concept.

[Scoffs] Yeah, free spirits.

One of the interesting paradoxes of the entire alt-right is they often get called contrarian, provocateurs, transgressive, but the values they stand up for don’t remind me of transgression at all. They just remind me of the same old sexism and racism that was socially normative when I was growing up.

Well, they’re transgressive in the sense that they’re saying things that you’re not supposed to say in polite company. That doesn’t make it interesting or cool or original. It does make it transgressive in the sense that you can offend people. You can freak them out. And then, if you created a set of norms within your own little subculture that declares that anybody who ever gets offended or freaked out is therefore triggered and whatever, then okay.By the terms of that self-sustaining logic, you can quote unquote “win”, because you triggered people. But ultimately, you’re not serving any very interesting end other than having a moment of infamy.

There’s a lot of hiding behind the term “free speech”, which is treated as a kind of empty set value, because nobody’s really taking anyone’s free speech away. Why do you think that there’s so much emphasis on topics like free speech and supposed transgression, and very little about the actual content of this “free speech”?

This is part of why I thought it was so important to actually spend hours and months and years of my life hanging out with these people. It wasn’t because I enjoyed it, or because I preferred to get dinner with Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec rather than hanging out with my wife and child. It was because the real way to understand how these people think and talk and interact with each other is just to hang around them for long enough that they forget you’re there.

The free speech thing is one example of that. They can talk about this stuff in the abstract and use language that sounds really principled, but when you hang around for long enough it becomes clear that it’s just a tool they’re using. Like anything else, it’s a weapon.

If they can use “free speech” as a talking point to advance their agenda, they’ll use that. If they can use something else, they’ll use something else.

At no point did I want to be so contrary to the contrarians that I became anti-free speech. It’s just that when you see what’s really motivating them, you can see through their game. But that only happens when you put in the time.

Having spent as much time as you did with them, do you have any advice for readers on self care and mental health management when faced with this vile stuff?

I do think it’s appropriate a lot of times to step away from it and log off. Being a keyboard warrior 24 hours a day is not healthy for anyone. But I also wouldn’t want to live in a world where social media were only inhabited by nihilists and trolls and bigots. So I don’t want all good people in the world to permanently abandon all internet spaces. But I do think it’s worth just stepping back and thinking in a slightly broader way about what is all this and what are we trying to accomplish?

The larger frame of the book is about the hijacking of a national conversation.On any given day, you can sit out all of the trending topics and not weigh in and not even know they’re happening and you will be totally fine. The world will go on without you and you won’t really miss anything.

In a larger, more sustained sense, I do think that part of the job of being a fully engaged citizen of a putative democracy is to have a stake in the national conversation. If part of that or a lot of that is happening online, then so be it. But I think it’s just worth doing with as much of a clear head and a sense of purpose as possible.

Amanda Marcotte is a politics writer for Salon. Her new book, “Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself,” is out now. She’s on Twitter @AmandaMarcotte.

Kathy Griffin still gets death threats: ‘People want to kill me on stage’

Mary Elizabeth Williams / Salon

She’s been pushing buttons for three decades now as a comic, a reality star, an actress.

AHA ette: not sure this fits here, but remember when beck or rush get slapped back for stepping over line, they fall back on i'm just and entertainer, a clown [rodeo?]; alt rt troll thugswarm is about pwn owning/ triggering the lib snowflake/ sjw; asymmetric warfare/ leverage, a tiny effort creates a large effect [police mobilize in whitefish mo, but not thier intent? but maybe welcomed not b/c pisses off their ally racist cops, but b/c it proves effect/they matteer/ have power.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/neo-nazi-troll-andrew-anglins-celebratory-mood-crushed-by-14-million-judgment-against-him/

david n kos

Over the weekend, Andrew Anglin was in a celebratory mood, thanks to Donald Trump’s racist tweets telling congresswomen of color to go back to their native countries.

Then, on Monday, the hammer fell on the notorious neo-Nazi troll and publisher of The Daily Stormer. A judge in **Montana**, ruling in a lawsuit brought by a Jewish woman from Whitefish and the Southern Poverty Law Center, determined that Anglin owed the woman $14 million in damages for the “troll storm” he unleashed on her in early 2017.

Magistrate Judge Jeremiah Lynch found Anglin had acted with “actual malice,” declaring his conduct was “egregious and reprehensible,” and recommended that real estate agent Tanya Gersh be awarded the maximum in punitive damages under Montana law ($10 million) and more than $4 million in compensatory damages. The findings now await final approval from a federal judge.

Suddenly, after crowing all weekend about Trump’s tweets, The Daily Stormer fell silent and disappeared from the “dark web” site where it now resides. On Monday, Anglin had posted several laudatory pieces about Trump: “This is the kind of WHITE NATIONALISM we elected him for. And we’re obviously seeing it only because there’s another election coming up. But I’ll tell you, even knowing that, it still feels so good,” he wrote.

Noting that among the people Trump attacked was an African American congresswoman, Ayanna Pressley, who was born and raised in Chicago, Anglin said, “This is not some half-assed anti-immigrant white nationalism. Trump is literally telling American blacks to go back to Africa.” He later added, “All Trump is doing is once again expressing our collective anger. … This is what elected Trump and this is what will always be the best way for him to gain support."

Anglin and his fellow neo-Nazis have openly and avidly supported Trump since the fall of 2015 and all during the 2016 campaign, thanks in large part to the signals he regularly sent through social media and his speeches indicating his support for their views. After the election, these same white nationalists and far-right extremists have continued to march in his name, resulting in a wave of hate crimes in which the perpetrators have used Trump’s name to terrorize vulnerable minorities.

The Montana lawsuit resulted from Anglin’s attempts to defend fellow white nationalist Richard Spencer, who resides in Whitefish part time with his parents. Concerned by his rising national profile after the election, a number of community leaders in Whitefish, including real estate agent Tanya Gersh, began raising concerns about his presence there.

Anglin became involved in the controversy by publishing Gersh’s name and addresses, as well as the names of her children, as well as those of several prominent Jewish leaders in Whitefish, alongside their photos and superimposed Star of David patches, claiming they were responsible for the Spencers’ problems.Simultaneously, an online army of “trolls” descended en masse on some of the people in Whitefish who had been identified as opposing his parents’ business. Their Twitter and email accounts were flooded with anti-Semitic and misogynistic threats.

“So Then—Let’s Hit Em Up. Are y’all ready for an old fashioned Troll Storm?” Anglin wrote. He demurred that he was not advocating “violence or threats of violence or anything even close to that.” A week later, he published another post claiming he was preparing to bus in skinheads from the Bay Area of California: “I have already worked out most of the details with the leaders of the local groups,” he wrote. “We are continuing our barrage against the criminal Jews of Whitefish,” he wrote. “We are planning an armed protest in Whitefish … we can easily march through the center of the town carrying high-powered rifles.”

Anglin’s threats initially spurred Whitefish’s police chief to step up patrols, particularly for the people Anglin named in his posts.

For his part, Spencer attempted to tamp down the controversy—but only by heaping blame on his critics while rationalizing Anglin’s behavior and suggesting the whole thing was a “joke” and a “troll” prank. Appearing on white supremacist leader David Duke’s radio program, Spencer claimed he wanted to try to keep his part-time Montana home out of the limelight created by his white nationalist activism. “I don’t host conferences, I don’t hand out fliers here,” he said. “It’s just a place I go to get my work done. I like being out here. I don’t want my daughter growing up in Washington, D.C. – I don’t need to tell you why.”

The problem, he claimed, was caused by local Montana activists who had organized to oppose his efforts several years before, notably local anti-hate group Love Lives Here and the Helena-based Montana Human Rights Network. He claimed they had attempted to strong-arm his mother into denouncing him but had failed.

In a YouTube rant, Spencer called for the controversy to just go away: “I’m just saying this—let’s just end this. Let’s put it to bed. The controversy’s over. Don’t bring it up again. I won’t bring it up again. I’ve said all I need to say.” As for Anglin, Spencer explained, “He’s wild. We have different styles. But this is one thing I will say, and I will say this with confidence. Andrew Anglin is a rational person. Andrew Anglin has specifically stated that this is nonviolent and that no laws are broken. This is—this was atroll. So that’s what it is. People were pushing back.”

The larger Whitefish community’s response to the threats to Jewish community members spoke loudly. “It’s important to know that the businesses that were hit by this were strongly supported in the community,” said Will Randall of Love Lives Here. “Their businesses are booming now. They were hit at the beginning and were frightened, scared. And then the community came in and said, ‘Well, I’m going to buy your product. I’m going to buy your soap, or your services. We’ve got your back.’”

The threats created a national stir, with various media organizations ranging from CNN and The Washington Post to local Montana news outfits picking up the story and magnifying it. Eventually, it emerged that Anglin had not obtained the proper permit for a march, and he announced it was being postponed. He promised to file for a permit later, but never did.

In April 2017, the SPLC and Gersh filed suit against Anglin, noting, “The threats took an emotional and physical toll on Gersh. She experienced panic attacks and feared answering the phone. She often went to bed in tears and woke up crying. She had trouble leaving her home and felt anxiety in crowds. She gained weight, lost hair and was in physical pain. She had been prescribed medication and had sought other treatment, including trauma therapy.”

In response to the suit, Anglin allegedly fled the country to avoid being served the court papers—reportedly to places such as Cambodia and Albania.

Anglin lost a similar lawsuit earlier this year to comedian and pundit Dean Obedeillah, who was awarded $4.1 million in damages after The Daily Stormer falsely claimed he had masterminded a London terrorist attack.

Monday’s ruling is a court victory, but it’s unclear whether Gersh will ever collect the money from Anglin, who could remain in exile abroad in order to avoid being forced to pay. “The significance is not in whether we will collect the money,” SPLC attorney David Dinielli said in an emailed statement to The Associated Press. “The significance is that Tanya Gersh, a real estate agent from a small town in Montana, stood up to fight the most notorious neo-Nazi on the web, and she won.”

===

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/04/13/problematic-white-supremacy-roots-heartland-institute-tim-benson-satire

On Wednesday, the Daily Caller published an opinion piece by Heartland Institute policy analyst Timothy Benson that we can only assume is satire. Benson argues in the piece that when it comes to addressing the existential threat of climate change, “if we can’t persuade” the current-top-emitters of China, Russia and India to cut their emissions, then the U.S. “will have to invade and occupy these countries” and force the emission reductions.

The only way to do this, per Benson, would be by “reinstitution of the draft.” This shouldn’t be a problem, he explains, because progressive “children should be filled with patriotic zeal and fervor” and be excited to “be the first kid on their block to get a confirmed kill in the name of saving the planet.” Benson concludes by admitting that “perhaps millions of American youth will die ridding the world of the climate menace, but what a noble sacrifice.”

It’s obvious that Benson simply intended his piece to mock calls for the WWII-style mobilization to fight climate change. He isn’t the first, because no one is seriously going to propose sacrificing millions of American children and, by extension, millions of Russian, Chinese and Indian citizens. After all, the whole point of fighting climate change is to prevent death and destruction, not to merely cut emissions at any cost.

But a glance at Benson’s Twitter account reveals similarly problematic, joking-not-joking comments that also deserve attention. For example, in the context of hostilities between India and Pakistan, he tweeted “a reminder that the British ruled the Subcontinent, Muslim and Hindu, relatively peacefully for over 100 years with only 25,000 men.”

Just a reminder that the British ruled the Subcontinent, Muslim and Hindu, relatively peacefully for over 100 years with only 25,000 men.

— Tim Benson (@BenceAthwart) February 27, 2019

Given that British rule included a massacre of approximately a thousand innocent civilians and a famine that killed millions more, describing Britain's rule as “relatively [peaceful]” is quite a stretch. And of course, the fact that controlling the region took “only 25,000 men” speaks pretty plainly to the brutality required to keep power.

No doubt, though, that if pressed on this and other risible tweets (“you can take Thriller out of my cold, dead hands”), Benson will fall back on the old reliable defense that “it’s just a joke!”

Comments like these are certainly jokes, but that doesn’t make them harmless. Jokes that derive humor from the slaughter of mainly non-white populations at the hands of white colonialists, be they British forces or American children drafted into service, aren’t just jokes–they’re a key tactic for spreading white nationalism and anti-Semitism. The use of “ironic” racism was an informal strategy during the first rise of Nazism, and it has since become a formal part of the neo-Nazi approach to messaging.

We know this because it is literally written in the style guide for the anti-Semitic neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, as HuffPost’s Ashley Feinberg revealed in 2017.

The guide’s section on tone notes that “the unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not.” The use of racial slurs, of which there is an approved list, “should come across as half-joking” so that “the reader is at first drawn in by curiosity or the naughty humor, and is slowly awakened to reality by repeatedly reading the same points.”

While we doubt anyone is going to use Benson’s naughty humor as an excuse for real-world violence in the name of climate change, the link between online jokes and real world violence is hardly obscure. On the same day Benson’s piece ran, the Daily Beast reported on how the man who burned down three black churches in Louisiana also made “white power” jokes on a neo-Nazi-adjacent Facebook page. Similarly, the manifesto for the New Zealander who murdered 50 people in two Mosques was filled with satire, memes, and irony-rich “jokes.”

So while we usually try and end these roundups with something light-hearted and funny, in honor of Benson’s “jokes,” today we’re going to instead provide some links: to how fighting climate change needs to include facing up toan imperial history, to how plastic pollution intersects with colonialism, to how Bill “Gates’s favourite infographic takes the violence of colonisation and repackages it as a happy story of progress” and, perhaps most importantly, to how climate solutions like “the Green New Deal can avoid climate colonialism.”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/right-wing-groups-are-training-young-conservatives-to-win-the-next-meme-war/

april 2019

no lnx twit

POLITICS

APRIL 2, 2019

“The Left Can’t Meme”: How Right-Wing Groups Are Training the Next Generation of Social Media Warriors

Memes helped elect Donald Trump. Now well-funded conservative groups are using them to proselytize.

STORY BY STEPHANIE MENCIMER, VIDEO BY MARK HELENOWSKI

Benny Johnson took to the stage at the convention center in Palm Beach, Florida, before an audience of cheering young Trump supporters in December to lead a session titled “How to Own the Libs.”

“I ask myself every day: How do we own the libs?” said Johnson, at the time a reporter for the right-wing Daily Caller. “How do we do it in a way that makes a difference? Because these people deserved to be wrecked.”

According to Johnson, the answer to that question is memes. These bits of humor or political propaganda—generally images overlaid with a caption designed to go viral—are best known for littering social media, but some experts think they might have helped elect Donald Trump. Or as notorious internet troll Chuck Johnson has said, “We memed the president into existence.”

Following that unexpected meme-driven success, well-funded conservative groups are making a more organized push to train young internet-savvy right-wingers in the art of meme-making, enlisting a growing army in what they see as the coming meme war of 2020.Turning Point USA, the conservative campus group that organized the conference, is merely one of these organizations seeking to sway hearts, minds, and elections via meme trainings. And it’s clear that when it comes to political memes, the left—which has never taken them very seriously—is trailing the right badly, and falling even further behind.

“Right-wing speaker training has been around for decades,” says Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters, which did a study of Facebook memes last summer. “Memes are a new front in the asymmetry. What you’re looking at here with memes is storytelling around the bend, and what you’re seeing is the future.”

Memes are best known for littering social media, but some experts think they might have helped elect Donald Trump president.

Trump’s presidential campaign keyed into the power of memes early on, monitoring obscure meme sites and boosting pro-Trump images and videos onto mainstream platforms like Facebook. Facebook’s algorithms favor images and videos over more nuanced text posts or links to news articles, so pro-Trump memes quickly went viral. During the campaign, memes also helped spread misinformation about Hillary Clinton’s health and the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that prompted an armed North Carolina man to show up at aDC pizza parlor to break up a nonexistent child sex ring supposedly led by Democratic Party operatives.

Perhaps no one understood the effectiveness of memes better than former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon, who had served as executive chairman of the far-right publication Breitbart News. In 2016, only 5 percent of Breitbart‘s posts were of images, but those images accounted for half of the site’s most-shared posts on Facebook.

Jeff Giesea, a consultant who has worked with venture capitalist Peter Thiel and the Koch brothers, is a self-described “memetics” expert. During the 2016 campaign, he joined with men’s rights agitatorMike Cernovichto organize MAGA3X, a grassroots army of online trolls who worked to meme Trump to the White House. The effort produced tens of thousands of social media accounts, all working in concert to promote Trump, with a heavy emphasis on iconography. They even created a flash-mob meme generator to make it easy for Trump supporters to hook up in real life.

Giesea has long argued that memes are such a powerful tool they should be used as cyberwarfare to combat propaganda from ISIS and other foreign threats. In 2015, he wrote in a NATO journal on information warfare that “it seems obvious that more aggressive communication tactics and broader warfare through trolling and memes is a necessary, inexpensive, and easy way to help destroy the appeal and morale of our common enemies…Memetic warfare is about taking control of the dialogue, narrative, and psychological space. It’s about denigrating, disrupting, and subverting the enemy’s effort to do the same.”

The same could be said of memes in politics. Cheap, subversive, and designed to provoke an emotional response, memes are a disruptive form of information guerrilla warfare. Republicans have gotten Giesea’s message, while Democrats have all but ignored it.

“Right-wing speaker training has been around for decades,” says Media Matters president Angelo Carusone. “Memes are a new front in the asymmetry.”

Johnson’s skill in this area launched him to Washington media fame for a while, until he was ousted from BuzzFeed and then the Independent Journal Review after being accused of plagiarism. He seems to have found his calling with Turning Point USA, the conservative campus activist group that sponsored the student convention in Palm Beach and is itself something of a meme factory.

Founded in 2012, TPUSA got its startup funding from Foster Friess, a wealthy Republican donor, and it has since raked in donations from the oil and gas industry and organizations affiliated with the Koch brothers. With a budget of more than $8 million last year, TPUSA amplifies its campus presence by churning out endless “Big Government Sucks” memes on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Turning Point USA

Like most memes, a few of TPUSA’s are clever and spread far, and many more have been trashed by internet trolls, who have created a whole meme subgenre they call “Toilet Paper USA.” Johnson was on hand in Florida to help TPUSA members up their game.

Johnson started his tutorial with “based Lindsey Graham,” a video montage of the South Carolina senator’s angry performance during the contentious confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in high school. “That is a special moment,” he explained, noting that Kavanaugh was confirmed in spite of the allegations.“In your lifetime, there has never been a culture war that conservatives have won except for this.”

He proceeded to walk the audience through the evolution of Graham memes that went viral during the hearing and may have helped change public opinion on Kavanaugh. On the big screen, Johnson showed photos and a video he had taken of Graham coming out of the Capitol after a day of hearings. In the video, Graham is coolly adjusting his tie and smiling, while in the background, a police officer restrains a hysterical-looking woman who’s screaming at him about Kavanaugh. Johnson tweeted that he had just taken “the most thug life @LindseyGrahamSC photos of the entire Kavanaugh saga.”

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Benny

@bennyjohnson

I hate to brag.

I just took the most thug life @LindseyGrahamSC photos of the entire Kavanaugh saga.

[Story soon]

From there, the internet took care of the rest. “Did this sucker meme?” Johnson asked, laughing. The answer was yes. Creative internet users tweaked and photoshopped the image, both still and video, as it spread. Johnson showed one meme of the tie-adjusting Graham superimposed on the burning Twin Towers. Then one featuring Joe Biden planting a kiss on the screaming woman. And finally, one that turned Graham into a “thug life” rap video star.

Embedded video

Benny

@bennyjohnson

???? MUST WATCH: SOUND ON ????

???? MUST WATCH: SOUND ON ????#kavanaugh

2,539

8:16 PM - Oct 7, 2018

818 people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy

“This is how you know you’ve made it in this profession,” Johnson told his audience. “When memes take life.”

In February, TPUSA hired Johnson to do this sort of thing full time as its chief creative officer, a sign of just how seriously well-funded pro-Trump organizations are taking the business of memes.

The TPUSA conference also included a second, more interactive session on memes, hosted by two minor Instagram stars, Rogan O’Handley (Instagram handle DC_Draino) and Grant Godwin (the_typical-liberal), who got into the nuts and bolts of the art form—or, as Godwin explained, how to get your Pepe the Frog memes to go viral.

Two weeks earlier, meme training got top billing at the American Priority Conference, which billed itself as an “America First,” pro-Trump political gathering.Speakers included Roger Stone, the longtime Trump associate who was indicted the next month for obstruction and false statements in the special counsel investigation, and AnthonyScaramucci, who lasted less than a week as White House communications director. The conference featured a session on memetics by Tom Shadilay, a producer for Mike Cernovich. (Shadilay’s name may itself be a meme: It’s a popular hashtag on Gab, the social media site favored by the far right, and a code word for trolls on 4chan. Shadilay is the name of a 1986 Italian disco song by a band called P.E.P.E., whose album art featured a cartoon frog that resembles Pepe the Frog. Tom Shadilay does not appear to have any internet presence before his Twitter account was created in May 2017. He stopped responding to my emails after I asked whether that’s really his last name.)

In January, Liberty Con, a national convention of libertarian students, offered advice from David Gay, a libertarian activist who runs the Facebook group Liberty Memes, which has nearly a half-million followers spreading his political message through memes. (Until late 2016, Giesea, the meme expert, was on the board of Students for Liberty, which sponsored the conference.)* Johnson has four events scheduled this month on college campuses on “winning the meme wars.”

Boston University professor Gianluca Stringhini studies memes for a living. When I told him that well-funded right-wing organizations were specifically training activists for the next great meme war, he was surprised. Typically, he says, memes are seen as organic, emerging from the dark corners of the internet, not propaganda directed by people in politics. “Memes are tools for information warfare,” he says. “Probably this is a new way of doing politics. A new weapon that campaigns can use.”

It’s not clear exactly whether memes do, in fact, change public opinion, but conservative groups working to train grassroots troops seem to think so. So do the Russians. In the 2018 report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm that meddled in the 2016 presidential election, researchers discovered that the IRA was especially fond of memes put out by TPUSA. Using accounts that it created to look like ordinary Americans and spread misinformation and propaganda, the IRA gave TPUSA memes a boost across multiple social media platforms. But the researchers couldn’t determine exactly what the impact of all those memes was.

Last year, Stringhini and six colleagues published a study on the origins of memes, analyzing more than 2 billion social media posts on Twitter, 4chan, Reddit, and Gab, tofigure out where the most popular memes get their start. Stringhini says the most trafficked memes start on right-wing internet forums, places like 4chan’s politically incorrect /pol/ channel and Reddit’s /r/the_Donald/ subreddit. From there, the far right has been extremely successful in getting its stuff to take off on mainstream platforms.Stringhini notes that after the 2016 presidential election, Trump’s campaign spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson, tweeted her thanks to 4chan and Reddit users for making it all happen, putting a sharp point on how much people on the right believe that memes are influencing public opinion.

As a result, conservative groups seem to be incorporating memes into their training arsenal for grassroots activists in a way that has no parallel on the left. In fact, “the left can’t meme” is itself a subgenre of memes, reflecting an idea accepted on both ends of the political spectrum that progressive activists are really bad at this form of political warfare.

One potential exception is long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who has recently catapulted to fame thanks to memes. But those memes are coming from the same sources, on Reddit and 4chan, that promoted Trump, not from liberal groups, creating a bizarre movement of Yang fans among white nationalists.

Media Matters’ Carusone says people on the left are more concerned with nuanced facts and gray areas that can’t always be boiled down accurately into a photo with a caption. On the left, he says, “every meme has to have a million qualifiers, so that it’s no longer a meme. It’s a Medium post.” Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to communicate their ideas “in ways that are very reductionist. They’re also much more comfortable lying, and their audiences are much more likely to accept it.”

Benny Johnson has his own take on what makes a good political meme. The first step for successful lib ownership, he told the students assembled in Palm Beach, is to “challenge the culture,” as Graham did during the Kavanaugh hearings. Second, “join the conversation” by creating an interaction, but be sure it will “demonstrate the superiority of conservative ideas.”

As an example, he played a goofy video he made withFederal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. In the video, Pai is dressed like Santa Claus, wielding a light saber, and he defends his plan for “internet freedom” in response to criticism of the Trump administration’s move to end net neutrality. “We were trolling the internet,” Johnson said. And it worked.

He flashed through a host of viral memes that took off after the video was posted. In the video, there’s a shot of Pai in front of a screen eating popcorn and watching a movie. Meme-makers have swapped in clips to make it look like Pai is watching Hitler rallies or the burning Twin Towers. Even Luke Skywalker weighed in:

View image on Twitter

Mark Hamill

@HamillHimself

Cute video Ajit "Aren't I Precious?" Pai ??-but you are profoundly unworthy 2 wield a lightsaber-A Jedi acts selflessly for the common man-NOT lie 2 enrich giant corporations. Btw-did you pay John Williams his royalty? @AjitPaiFCCorpShill #AJediYouAreNOT

The third step in successful lib ownership, Johnson instructed the crowd, was critical: “Have more fun than the left.” He played a video he had made in 2015 of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz cooking bacon on a machine gun. “Can you think of three thing libs hate more?” he exclaimed with a laugh. “Ted Cruz, bacon, guns.” All the ingredients for a good meme.

Finally, Johnson concluded: “Smile. You’re on the winning side.”

j sherman

“News” means two things, what’s happening and what’s surprising. In information theory, it means surprise. It’s not news that you still have air to breathe or that millions live in poverty. More of the same is not news because it’s not surprising.

By information theory’s standard, it’s no surprise that news reporting is all about surprise, shock and the extreme versions of everything. Extremist trolls are surprising and therefore newsworthy, dominating subtler interpretations of what’s going on.

There’s a fundamental human bias toward “trolltalitarianism,” domination by the extreme, trolling version of any idea.There’s a strong bias toward extremism built right into our powers of attention. We ignore what’s subtle, we perk up about what’s extreme. Even when an idea originates as subtle, what makes the headlines won’t be.

Newsmakers play upon the trolltalitarian bias from opposite extremes. Proponents of an idea will be tempted toward extremism in order to cut through the din. Conversely, opponents of the idea will want to paint it extreme as possible to make a salient caricature of it. Shades of gray turn black and white to capture our attention.

Trolltalitarianism is frustrating for those who hold a subtler version of an idea. Religion and spirituality take many subtle forms, but what we hear about are the extreme versions. Likewise, political views get oversimplified toward ideological purity, absolutism and impracticality, because that’s what shocks, sells, emboldens and worse, wins simpler hearts and minds.Extremist loud-mouths capture attention by appealing to people who don’t have the bandwidth to think subtler thoughts – people so harried by everyday life or so education-deprived that they can’t handle subtlety.

It’s easy to point fingers at the extremists we oppose and to claim that our ideas are misunderstood but the problem runs deeper than that. It’s about attention, our extreme of consciousness and how it always shifts toward surprise. Trolltalitarianism isn’t about one extremism or another dominating but about the distracting allure of extremism in general.

Extremism is a relative term: Extreme compared to what? What’s the reference point by which you can claim that some other idea is extreme. Elsewhere, I’ve favored the term absolutism based on its original meaning “dissolved away,” in other words, ideas insulated from all possible challenges. Absolutism is often the means to extremist ends a way of making an idea shocking, new and threatening enough that it turns heads.

The term “extremism” is useful but doesn’t speak to the appetite for it, or its tendency to dominate the news. Hence, we need a term the way extremism prevails, for which I’d suggesttrolltalitarianism.

Advances in media technology don’t cause trolltalitarianism; they exacerbate it. The problem originates in how attention works, again, the extreme of consciousness. We’re all living in the 21st century, ADHD.

We’re often told that we should be more grateful for what we have, more attentive to what’s already working in our lives. Still, among the things to be grateful for is our inattention to what’s already working. It frees attention to focus on problems yet to be solved, for things that can’t be handled by unconscious habit. Whatever keeps happening we handle unconsciously. Nobel prize-winning decision theorist Herbert Simon called this human trait “satisficing.” We don’t obsess over what’s sufficiently satisfying when there’s a squeaky wheel we grease it just enough to dampen the squeaking and then shift our attention to the next loudest squeaky wheel. We don’t optimize; we satisfice, shifting our attention away from the sufficiently satisfying.

As such, conscious attention is not a computer but something akin to a computer programmer. Anything that stays the same can be handled with unconscious habit, the equivalent of a computer algorithm. What rises to consciousness are matters as yet unsettled, the doubts that arise from surprising events. Consciousness stuffs as much as possible into unconscious habits, in order to free up attention for surprises.

Satisficing is efficient. We should all be grateful for our ingratitude. Still, it has a variety of perilous side-effects, chief among them our rubber-necking toward what information theorists call “surprisal.” Here’s another perilous side-effect.

These days, most of us feel pretty independent. We think we don’t need other people so much. Labor-saving technology means we don’t have to get people to do this, that and the other thing for us. We assume that we could go it alone if we had to.

Actually, we couldn’t. Our false sense of autonomy results from the reliability of our the people and things we depend upon. Lose electricity, the internet or public services during a government shutdown and you’ll soon notice how dependent you really are. When the habits of what service us, serve us reliably, we form unconscious expectations. We accumulate habits of unconscious dependence. We ignore what we depend upon.

The same can happen in a relationship. When your partner is always there for you, you’ll tend to assume them. Ironically then, we notice our dependency most when what we depend upon disappears. We feel most dependent when we’ve lost what we depend upon. As the song says “You don’t miss your water ‘til your well runs dry.”

Combine these two side effects and you’ll get extremist versions of autonomy, for example, Libertarian and anarchist extremists, loud-mouths proclaiming their absolute independence. They don’t need other people, their burdens and their challenges. What use are fellow citizens who disagree with them? People who disagree with their extreme trolling opinions are dead wood, second class citizens little better than illegals. Liberty is a virtue we all value. Libertarianism extremism ignores liberty’s cost. For anyone to feel independent, what they depend upon must be kept reliable.

Is there a remedy for our innate trolltalitarian tendencies? Is there any way to counter the extremes of consciousness so we can hear the gray within the black and white fray?

Education perhaps which, at its best, cultivates greater tolerance for, and curiosity about ambiguity and subtlety. Or maybe we just have to wait until we get jaded by the din of attention-seeking extremism and tune it all out.

proto troll roger stone?

trms calls him a gadfly?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/roger-stone-is-more-than-a-toxic-clown-hes-a-danger-to-democracy/

Poor Roger Stone. Donald Trump’s former campaign adviser and longtime whisperer told reporters the other day that federal agents treated him worse than Osama bin Laden when the terrorist kingpin was killed by Navy SEAL forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan. While Stone wants Fox News viewers and Trump’s Red Hats to believe FBI agents somehow accosted him in a way similar to being shot in the head and dumping his corpse at sea, the reality is that Stone is doing what he’s always done: He’s gaslighting the public, scamming his fanboys and generally poisoning the discourse.

Since we’re talking about Osama bin Laden in this context, it’s not an exaggeration to suggest that Roger Stone also happens to be a villain. Since we’re referencing the post-9/11 era, he’s an evildoer. I hasten to note that he’s not a villain on the same level as Bin Laden, duh. But he’s definitely somewhere on the evildoer spectrum, and is thoroughly contented to be there.

SPONSORED

Stone’s modus operandi has always been to carry himself as a garish fashionista, unfurling his peculiar clothing ensembles in D.C. social circles and dark alleys alike, demanding attention and then, when he gets it, micturating all varieties of toxic carcinogenic slag onto whoever was dumb enough to return his call. Not unlike Trump himself, Roger Stone is a real-life Batman villain with less humor and more tricks up his Day-Glo sleeve. He’s the manifestation of nihilism and disruption in an age of unapologetic digital trolls. He’s patient zero for Trumpism and all of its damaging influence. In case I’m not being clear enough here: Stone is a malignant tumor on American politics, and I’m sure he’d be totally OK with that metaphor.

In fact, one of several key differences between Stone and Osama bin Laden is this: The latter thought he was doing something good, according to his bastardized view of Islam and his bloody understanding of jihad. Stone is happy to just be a villain with no real goals linked to his actions, other than attention-whoring and his own delight at observing the mayhem he inflicts upon the nation. Morgan Pehme, the director of the shocking and salient Netflix documentary “Get Me Roger Stone,” told NPR, “He absolutely wears his infamy, and is only too happy to be the despicable villain that everybody hates.” Mission accomplished.

A man who’s content to be hated, and who indeed seeks out the hatred of the world, is capable of anything and should never be trusted or enabled. Likewise, anyone who believes his agitprop deserves to be burned by Stone’s bug-eyed chicanery. Along those lines, Donald Trump doesn’t realize it yet but he could easily wind up as Stone’s next victim. We’ll circle back to that.

Roger Stone’s indictment on seven counts — including witness tampering and lying to Congress about his and the Trump campaign’s mutual conspiracy to obtain stolen documents from hacker Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks — is absolutely a colossal step toward ripping this tumor from the sickly gut of American politics, while sending a signal to copycats and fellow rat-f**kers: This is how it ends, with federal agents, pre-dawn raids and incarceration at government expense.

It’s impossible to emphasize this enough: Stone’s brand of random disruption must itself be disrupted immediately or else the entire fabric of American democracy republic could rapidly unravel. Given the ascendancy of Trump as a viral carrier for Stone’s dirty tricks and disruption, it’s already underway, heaping further urgency onto the crisis with every new day.

Indeed, as we frantically sandbag against the long term damage of Trumpism, we have to give ignominious credit to Stone for essentially inventing it and then selling it to Trump. The entire goal of the president’s political movement is to irreparably scramble the board — to dissolve alliances, coarsen the dialogue, stoke racial animosity and undermine institutions.

Rather than convincing voters to support a policy agenda, Trump and Stone seek to confuse voters into believing all sides are wrong and everyone else are the real evildoers, despite Stone’s relentless bragging about his own villainy. The consequence of this approach is mass disillusionment with politics and the establishment, birthed from a sinister message intended to frustrate Trumpism’s target audience, and especially those who pay only casual attention to political debate. Not coincidentally, all of this is Vladimir Putin’s dream scenario.

Stone’s Trumpism exists not just to agitate the opposition but to scam its own supporters into believing nonsense and obvious lies, while rejecting facts and reality. It sounds Orwellian for sure, but it’s arguably worse than that. Orwell’s “1984,” after all, was about the imposing of strict order while Trumpism is all about igniting disorder. This post-apocalyptic master-blaster of Trump and Stone resembles a sociopathic bully who routinely shakes up his ant farm just to watch the ants freak out and die. There’s no “and then” here. The goal is the freakout itself. The goal is disruption, and both of these guys are delighted to be the delivery mechanisms for that.

Why else would Stone, along with his former business partners Paul Manafort and Charlie Black, offer their lobbying services to many of the world’s most despotic dictators? Sure, there was a fortune to be made, but the “Torturer’s Lobby,” Black, Manafort & Stone, also served as a way for Stone to pursue his reputation as a professional troll who isn’t fulfilled unless turmoil and pandemonium of his own invention are sucking the oxygen supply away from more noble and respectable ends.

It’s worth noting that in addition to murderous strongmen clients like Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Donald Trump was one of Black, Manafort & Stone’s first clients. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Later on, GOP strategist Lee Atwater, known for his racist “Southern strategy” politics and Willie Horton fear-mongering, would become a partner in the firm. Speaking of racism, it was Stone’s idea for Trump to revive “birtherism” long after Barack Obama had won the 2008 election and been sworn in as president.

The irony beneath Trump’s alliance with Stone is that such disruptors are ultimately disloyal to everything but their own deceptions. Amid Stone’s various media appearances last weekend, the freshly indicted psycho-bomb casually mentioned that he hasn’t ruled out cooperating with Robert Mueller and flipping on Trump. Again, chaos agents can’t be trusted and, as usual, Trump always makes things worse for Trump. His relationship with Stone might have propelled him to the 2016 Republican nomination and then the White House, but it could also be the relationship that robs him of the presidency. But who the hell knows what Stone will do? At the very least, he might be trolling the troll-in-chief.

Nevertheless, with the election of Trump and with every assault by the firehose of insanity erupting from the president’s Twitter feed, Stone’s trolling-for-its-own-sake has, for now, metastasized in the White House, effectively shaking Article II of the Constitution off its foundations. The government shutdown that just ended (at least for now) wasn’t as much about building a wall as it was about opening up gigantic loopholes in executive authority, unleashing the ability for chaos agents in the West Wing to institutionalize Stone’s shenanigans and paving the way for the slow amputation of vital government services.

The Joker has annexed the Batcave, and few observers believe he can be easily evicted.

Knowing this, here’s hoping that Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in the near term, slaps Stone with a gag order to keep him from further polluting the atmosphere with his self-aggrandizement and deliberately manufactured BS. The sooner he’s locked up and removed from the bloodstream, the better off we’ll all be. The same goes for his favorite client in the White House. Meanwhile, yeah, I know: There’s a good chance Stone will be delighted to read this article. In his twisted skull, I’ve just paid him a series of glowingly effusive compliments. He can feel free to smile about it all while he dons the fashionable garb of a federal prisoner.

...Wikistrat is essentially a think tank for rent. The firm, which only has a few full-time employees, contracts with foreign policy and national security experts to produce reports for corporate and government clients about specific geopolitical issues. The firm’s analysts also sometimes produce reports that aren’t for clients, according to people close to the firm; the firm then displays those reports on its website to demonstrate the quality of its work, or markets them to potential buyers.

The report The Daily Beast reviewed includes several different conversation threads, like a high-end version of Reddit. It was titled “The Rise of the Cyber Mercenary.”

In a discussion of how a hostile foreign government could weaponize social media against an adversary, one Wikistrat analyst put it this way:

“Cyber-mercenaries are mainly hired by governments as online counter-information and counter-counter-information officers. Disguised as ordinary citizens, these cyber-mercenaries are experts at sensationalizing and distorting political issues in a manner that appeals to common sense. Their objectives are not to convince explicitly, but rather subconsciously, by inserting a seed of doubt that leads to confusion and encourages fact-skepticism. Their ultimate targets are foreign governments, but their attacks are launched on proxy targets, ordinary citizens, chiefly ignorant, vulnerable, and uneducated populaces of a particular nation-state.”

The analyst then noted that entities like “Russia’s ‘Internet Research Group’”—likely a misnomer for the country’s Internet Research Agency, which Mueller indicted in Feb. 2018—already weaponize social media to shape their countries’ domestic politics.

“As a foreign policy tool, misinformation can be used to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt among the population of antagonist countries, therefore furthering the instigator’s own agenda,” the analyst added. “Instead of direct government involvement, using cyber-mercenaries to enact these operations would create a degree of indirection and a veneer of plausible deniability that would make it harder to clearly separate propaganda from facts.”

Another analyst then sounded off on what makes trolling effective.

“[T]hese ‘cyber-trolls’ are trained controversialists: they openly engage in public controversy…People are drawn to the excitement of controversy and these cyber-trolls are experts in sensationalizing a political issue. The objective of cyber-trolls is not to convince explicitly, but rather subconsciously, by inserting a seed of doubt that leads to confusion and encourages fact-skepticism. They are not afraid to use provocative and confrontational language, as it is to their advantage if it leads to an emotional rise in the reader because the reader is then more likely to engage in debate, which in-turn, creates more buzz and attracts a greater audience, increasing the potential number of people exposed to this misinformation campaign.”

The analysis was written after the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency had begun its U.S. election interference campaign, but well before the American public knew about it. In the end the troll factory controlled thousands of fake organizations and personas on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, which it used to push out divisive rhetoric and fake news—overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump’s candidacy.

In another discussion thread that was part of the Cyber Mercenaries project, analysts scrutinized the possibility of a hostile foreign government targeting the U.S. elections.

aha: provocateurs and (mindless?) catalyst that sets of reactions they can control or predict? dangerous in tribal destabilized world? but MLK and other activists look for event to trigger media coverage, change of mind/heart tipping point/ leverage?

see sandmann Black Hebrew Israelites

===

FIND:__

// to denier corp buffer, trolls alt rt do 3 step strategic retreat? "own the libs" say stuff we don't believe b/c it forces the left to react (transaction cost?), get left to display the absurdity of their position by their over the top response; [we are manly and rational, those women and gays are hysterical]; this has bonus advantage to grant immunity from being called our for racism, homophobe etc (b/c the ppl are irrational, the claim must be crazy too); we are being silenced for having traditional commonsensical views, so we are the TRUE victims [and explains why our ideas are not accepted by majority]

spark 1: rove? says to journo: oh, you're one of those truthbased journalists, those don't matter anymore because our story will beat you

bannon declares himself a disruptor, who wants to deconstruct the gov't (drown it in a bathtub)

spark 2: ann coulter starts doing standup, goes to berzerkely, james o'keefe incompetent and gets busted but remains useful idiot

daily show?

spark 3:

"post-" truth (post being prof speak for a thing we are about to be blind-sided by)

Both the right-wing echo chamber and the mainstream media don’t quite know how to categorize Breitbart and what he does. The Philadelphia Daily News called him a “rising conservative media figure.” The Washington Post called him a “conservative activist” and an “internet entrepreneur.” NPR described him as a “conservative online news entrepreneur.” The New York Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called him a “blogger,” while Newsday and the New Republic called him a “conservative blogger.” The Las Vegas Review-Journal called him an “online muckraker and journalist.” Sean Hannity, the San Francisco Chronicle, and ABC’s “Good Morning America” labeled him a “publisher.”

===

12/18

alt rt thug swarm try to take ironic stance as insulation for hatespeech, we're just pwning/ owning/ trolling? the libs?

but anonymous in gab chatroom, constant one-up some ppl irony impaired and take it literally [all talk when are u gonna do something pussy?]

JOK seems to be poster boy for something, maybe this? he comes out of incubator (tossed from old school leadrship inst b/c endanger nonrpit irs status [no worries there!]

sex toy houseboat 'sting"? bin ladin rubber mask at so border? // milo renta-tiffany? social media boosts outrageous, but additiction requires bigger hits. Rush limbaugh starts as provocteur? shock jock howard stern anti-woman (but self deprecating tiny penis?] nappy head

beck called himself a rodeo clown? when busted on facts, retreated to i'm just an entertianer/ so did rush?

but JOK starts as pol opps dirty trickster, goes into "investgative reporting" a la Bern and Wood, but actually character assasination/ oppo research standard going back to irish revo scandal (parnell: The bitterness of the split tore Ireland apart and resonated well into the next century. Parnell soon died, [891?]and his faction dissipated. The majority faction henceforth played only a minor role in British or Irish politics until the next time the UK had a hung Parliament, in 1910.[andrew jackson wife?]

but what about liddy (shoot jack boots in head? j corsi, Bossie just anything to get notoced, do harm, ctr the left narrative? any lie to win?

comedian and chameleon provocateur Sacha Baron Cohen has been traveling the country and duping clueless Republican lawmakers and their supporters has been known for weeks, but as his new show—titled "What Is America?"—readies to drop its first episode for Showtime on Sunday night, clips have surfaced in which actual adults are seen endorsing the preposterous idea of arming children as young as three and four years old with guns in order to possibly intervene in case of a school shooting massacre.

According to Reuters:

In the first episode of “Who is America?”, previewed for media by Showtime, Baron Cohen poses as an Israeli anti-terror expert who gets two U.S. congressmen to voice support for his fake “Kinderguardians” scheme for children as young as three. The scheme includes a fake instructional video featuring children’s songs and “gunimals” — weapons adorned with soft toys — that would purportedly help kids confront the school shootings that have plagued the United States for the past decade.

Republican congressmen Dana Rohrabacher of California and Joe Wilson of South Carolina, along with former Senate Republican leader Trent Lott, who is now a lobbyist at a Washington law firm, are shown enthusiastically backing the idea, alongside gun rights advocates and a former congressman-turned-talk radio host, Joe Walsh.

While official trailers have not been released, some on social media have been posting portions of the episode:

In his reviewfor Variety, television critic Daniel D'Addadario says the show is Cohen's best work in some time:

“Who Is America?” feels both as richly comic as anything Baron Cohen has done in the decade-plus since “Borat” and urgently resonant with our own era. The show’s format—using four new Baron Cohen personae in order to expose the nature of contemporary American culture—is particularly effective, moving as it does beyond the boldface names who’ve come forward to say they’ve been pranked by the comic. The first episode, for instance, puts gun lobbyists in conversation with Erran Morad, a former Israeli colonel played by Baron Cohen. “Morad” is traveling the U.S. to learn more about gun policy and to share his full-throated support for a particularly libertine understanding of the Second Amendment; by episode’s end, gun lobbyists as well as past and present members of Congress are on tape endorsing his “Kinder-Guardians” program, designed to teach children of three and four how to shoot.

...

https://www.alternet.org/think-gop-lawmakers-arent-unhinged-enough-endorse-program-called-kinderguardians-puts-guns-hands-4

===

...ANDREW BREITBART jacked into the Web early and never unplugged. As someone who worked on the Drudge Report and The Huffington Post in the early days and was busy building his own mini-empire of conservative opinion and infotainment at Breitbart.com, he understood in a fundamental way how discourse could be profoundly shaped by the pixels generated far outside the mainstream media he held in such low regard.

Mr. Breitbart, as much as anyone, turned the Web into an assault rifle, helping to bring down Acorn, a community organizing group, with the strategic release of undercover videos made by James O’Keefe, a conservative activist; forcing Shirley Sherrod, an Agriculture Department official, out of her job with a misleadingly edited clip of a speech; and flushing out Representive Anthony D. Weiner, Democrat of New York, when he tried to lie about lewd pictures he had sent via Twitter.

Less watchdog than pit bull (and one who, without the technology of the 21st century, might have been just one more angry man shouting from a street corner), Mr. Breitbart altered the rules of civil discourse.

Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, said that Mr. Breitbart “used the tools of invective and polemic to change the conversation, to try to turn it to his advantage.”

Mr. Breitbart was a ubiquitous presence on and off the Web, though not one who ever managed to have significant business success there. His star rose along with the Tea Party, of which he was an early and frequent defender.

But he cut an odd figure for a conservative, holding forth with lectures on political theory that name-dropped Michel Foucault and other leftist thinkers. He could also be mordantly funny. (His Twitter avatar was an echo of the apocryphal Jesus imprint on a piece of toast.) Matt Labash, senior editor at The Weekly Standard, described him as “half right wing Yippie, half Andy Kaufman,” in his column after Mr. Breitbart died.

In 2011, while various religious groups boycotted the Conservative Political Action Conference because of the inclusion of gay Republican groups, he helped hold a party for the gay groups.

He was conversant in pop culture — the Cure and New Order were particular musical favorites — and thought nothing of wearing in-line skates, his longish hair trailing behind him, as he confronted protesters at a rally outside a conservative event hosted by David and Charles Koch in Palm Springs, Calif., in 2011. Once he was done berating the protesters, he took some of them to dinner at Applebee’s.

Mr. Breitbart took in life in big gulps, but he spat out even bigger portions of bile. The day that Senator Edward M. Kennedy died, he called him “a special pile of human excrement" and tweeted, “Rest in Chappaquiddick.” Matt Yglesias of Slate returned the favor after Mr. Breitbart died, tweeting: “Conventions around dead people are ridiculous. The world outlook is slightly improved with @AndrewBreitbart dead.”

Many of his familiars called him a “happy warrior,” but worried about his health because he never seemed to unplug.

“If Twitter ever killed anyone, it was Andrew,” said Mr. Labash of The Weekly Standard. “Andrew was a magnet for hatred, and he used Twitter for a full frontal assault, a tool of combat,”

Friends and colleagues described Mr. Breitbart as both jester and provocateur, one who enjoyed soy lattes (a family friend sprinkled coffee grounds from Starbucks onto his grave) almost as much as waging war on what he saw as Democratic hypocrisy.

“Andrew was a kind of human pinball, always doing something while doing something else, but he never took himself all that seriously,” said Greg Gutfeld, the host of “Red Eye” on Fox News, who frequently booked Mr. Breitbart as a guest. “He was the least serious, serious person I ever met.”

A student of the tactics of the leftist organizer Saul Alinsky (if not his politics), Mr. Breitbart played defense by giving offense, subscribing to Alinsky’s theorem that “the real action is in the enemy’s reaction.” He wielded a network of conservative sources, including a number of members of Congress, four of whom spoke at his Washington memorial, to sow mayhem opportunistically.

As is often the case, there is no more ferocious advocate than a convert.

...

===