My Petty Retaliation Against the Far-Right
The U.S. Capitol insurrection on January 6th struck a nerve for me, prompting a few too many Facebook posts and for me to commit an act that my wife calls “trolling”.
Okay, it is trolling and it was petty.
Antifa Did It!
Almost immediately after the nation witnessed live streams and news coverage of insurrectionists brawling with police, baseless claims that “Antifa” members were the ones provoking violence at the U.S. Capitol started circulating. That night on the House floor, Rep. Matt Gaetz started a statement with, “I don’t know if the reports are true, but…” and went ahead and continue nonetheless.
“…the Washington Times has just reported some pretty compelling evidence from a facial recognition company showing that some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters. They were masquerading as Trump supporters and in fact, were members of the violent terrorist group Antifa.”
As I listened to this statement live I cringed for several reasons that I’m not going to get into. Gaetz was referring to a story that has since been retracted by The Washington Times when it became apparent that the facial recognition claim was entirely a work of fiction.
Kevin Sorbo made a series of tweets contributing to this narrative. In case you, like me, didn’t know: he’s the actor who played Hercules in the ’90s and has since gained nearly a half-million Twitter followers made up of mostly political conservatives and evangelical Christians.
This all was a clear attempt by Trump supporters to distance themselves from the reality that a mob of their cohorts organized, lead, and carried out violence against the police.
Honestly, I can imagine the cognitive dissonance caused by seeing “Thin Blue Line” flags being used to beat police officers.
Motivated Reasoning rearing its ugly head, the “Antifa” narrative continued strong despite the evidence.
By the afternoon of the 7th, there were already a handful of perpetrators positively identified. The clear trend with those identified? Not Antifa. Regardless, the far-right latched onto two individuals as being Antifa: Jake Angeli and John Sullivan.
A conveniently cropped photo of Angeli at a BLM protest was used to claim that he was an Antifa member. The uncropped photo of course showed he was there as a counter protested against BLM holding a “Q SENT ME” sign.
John Sullivan is a bit more tricky. On the surface, he does indeed appear to be a Liberal activist who covertly infiltrated and tried to promote violence at the U.S. Capitol to make insurrectionists look worse. Sullivan has a strange history and many protest organizers distanced themselves from him back in November calling him an “infiltrator/agent provocateur” within their ranks. It’s complicated and so far is the closest thing to the far-right proving “Antifa” involvement. I expect more to come out about Sullivan’s story shortly given that he has Federal charges related to his activity at the Capitol.
I was pissed and felt like a little retaliation.
My native language is Meme (Shaka, when the walls fell) and I’ve been known to do some trolling. So I created 13 “profiles” for individuals that had already been identified as playing roles in the Capitol insurrection. To spice it up I spun up a story about hacking the “ANTIFA headquarters” to find the identity of their infiltrators.
- I included two key hashtags: #satire and #trolling
- I gave each one a ridiculous and, some might say, funny nickname
- I mostly used their iconic pictures from Jan 6th
- I wrote absurd commentary
All this and, as I guessed, a few people believed it.
Over the past year on Facebook, I’ve removed or was removed by nearly all my Trump-supporting friends and family (good riddance) but one uncle remained… and he tagged his buddies. I laughed, a few friends laughed, and it fizzled out with only 10 shares. By design, I don’t have a lot of friends on Facebook so it’s about what I expected.
Twitter, A More Perfect Platform
I’ve had a Twitter account for 10+ years but don’t really use it. I had 28 followers, most of which were follow-backs from businesses. Since its inception, my feed has been mostly made up of random video game clips and occasional political commentary when I remembered I had a Twitter. I don’t Twitter, so to speak.
After getting my forgotten password sorted out, I logged in and reposted my fake “ANTIFA” profiles via a series of tweets (turns out Twitter caps you at 4 images per tweet). I also changed my profile name to “The ANTIFA Hunter” totally unaware of the history with that moniker (Google it).
It started slowly; a few accounts that I suspect were bots re-tweeted me soon after posting. Within an hour I had my first victim; a total stranger Quote Tweeted my creation in all seriousness. Hurrah.
I woke up on the 8th with over 100 re-tweets. Scanning the RTs, it seemed like a lot of bot accounts in the mix but. After the initial series of RTs that looked like bots, most of the rest appeared to be real people who really don’t critically think about things they RT as long as the headline fits their narrative. I also had my first co-conspirators in on the joke.
As we watched the number of RTs and hearts go up we laughing-face emoji’d together at their expense.
As of writing this, the primary Tweet had 391 RTs and 444 hearts/likes. Obviously, small-time numbers in comparison to major Twitter personalities but it’s about 391 more RTs than my other posts got.
With watching several conspiracy theorist communities as an unhealthy hobby, I’ve witnessed the rise of the QAnon movement from its early days. For about a year now, I’ve taken to calling the people an Information Age cult and the followers of the Q movement “cultists”. As so, while viewing them as victims of a cult I also believe they are dangerous if given legitimacy. The cult has gained it’s perceived legitimacy due to figures, such as Trump, not clearly and definitively denouncing the ideology.
People I care about have been caught up in the Q snare. I don’t hold my punches when it comes to Q cultists.
The logic was simple: if Antifa were the ones causing trouble at the U.S. Capitol, it stands to reason that Ashli Babbitt was an Antifa agent. In reality, Babbitt was a vocal QAnon cultist with a recent history of increasingly extremist views.
That hashtag “#insensitive” on my tweet was in reference to this particular fake profile. Surprisingly, only a couple of people called me out of this between Facebook and Twitter. I really expected more backlash. I am, of course, opening myself up to backlash now…
Sidenote, if someone you love has been pulled into the QAnon movement, check out this thread for resources to help deradicalize them: https://twitter.com/QWatch_org/status/1349783731683393539
New Profiles and Arrests
After the first 24 hours of low hanging fruit, most of those positively identified were not publicly known until after their arrest. I started posted profiles with “ARRESTED” stamped over their uncreatively fake profiles for these new names of people in custody and those previously named having been arrested.
I was particularly pleased to be able to post an update about Kevin Seefried identifying him as well as noting his arrest a week after he proudly carried the Confederate battle flag into the U.S. Capitol building.
Your Joke Is Bad and You Should Feel Bad
I inadvertently tricked several people I didn’t intend to. Most just lambasted me directly via a reply. One investigative journalist grabbed my tweet.
I replied noting that it was satire and to my surprise Sargent replied.
I’ll admit my satire piece is probably not up to par with The Onion but that was harsh.
Hilary did totally hit the nail on the head about getting out of the movement. For example, remember Jake Angeli? The buffalo horns guy accused of being a member of BLM and/or Antifa by the far-right. He’s been a loyal Trump supporter and an icon in the QAnon cult and yet, he’s been disavowed and become the target of these very same communities.
I can’t say that I set out to intentionally redirect some of the far-right anger inwards towards their own but to some small extent, I might have contributed to that.
Fizzling Out
About 10 days after I posted the first set of fake profiles from my fake “ANTIFA headquarters” hack, the flow of RTs slowed down to a trickle and I started to think about what should be next.
I got called “Antifa” by a few, umm, clever(?) people who figured out I was trolling them. I made contact on Telegram with one concerned Trump supporter who turned out to not have anything interesting to say requiring end-to-end encryption. I also learned a lot about Twitter.
475 new followers (up from 28) and lots of LOLs, the troll is over. I suppose my next move is to remove the Tweets so they hopefully don’t come up out of context during an employer’s due-diligence check.
Secondly, I’m breaking the news to my 507 followers. Given that they’ve already demonstrated they don’t bother to read, I expect the Tweet to not get much engagement.
In case you are curious, here is the tweet: https://twitter.com/BrianWendtHere/status/1351762884909359106
Update | 22 hours | -24 followers
