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Why We Need to Unmask Trump's Troll Army

Meme magic may not be working out so well for Trump anymore, but we should consider its damage to society.

Now that the midterm GOPmageddon has blown through the US Congress and they’re lining up shots, do we know if they’re taking suggestions? Because I really think it would be fascinating to find out exactly who posts to the official US government social media accounts. Let me tell you why this is important.

This has been a fascination of mine for some time. If you try to look up the identities of the people who post to these accounts they will tell you obliquely that they’re basically a bunch of civil servants who work for teams with names like the Office of Communications and Outreach. They’re boring coffee-sipping office bureaucrats and don’t worry your pretty little head about it, they all look like Linda McMahon.

The problem is that I can guaran-fucking-tee you that Linda McMahon isn’t the one posting Malfoid to the Department of Education Twitter account.

Don’t worry, if you don’t know what “Malfoid” is then I’m definitely about to ruin your day.

What’s absolutely clear is that a bunch of the people employed to post to these accounts are deeply steeped in gen-Z meme culture. And I mean deeply steeped. They don’t just know what’s trending on Reddit. These are people who have spent much of their lives buried in 4chan and derivative sites like 8chan and Kiwi Farms. Despite the official word being that every communication is run through and authorized by a committee of bureaucrats, I believe that these kids post largely without oversight, and I believe this because their superiors wouldn’t understand anything about what they post.

The people most visible in this administration, as with the first Trump crowd, are very powerfully enamored with internet troll culture, but what’s important to know is that they don’t understand it. Trump himself, as well as Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth most notably, love troll culture as a general concept because they love that it’s mean for the sake of being mean. A bully’s entire ideology is that it is fun to make people angry because there is a certain power in making people angry. Donald Trump has always made the most out of being a bully, but it was Steve Bannon who introduced him to the concept of trolling as a kind of magic power.

I can't express enough how weird it is that so many of our problems are due to this creature's accuracy about the youth.

But he’s an 80-year-old real estate developer. He doesn’t know a damn thing about any of the extremely online gibberish the teenagers on his social media teams generate and throw up on Insta. Remember that time his Truth Social account posted an AI-generated image of him as Jesus Christ and he said he thought it just depicted him as a doctor? I actually believe him.

"Tariffs the best ballroom tariffs Barack HUSSEIN Obama covfefe"- *confused old man noises*

We know that the administration has a strategy of hiring teenage internet trolls and letting them off the leash in a decision making capacity because that’s what DOGE was. We know there is no framework of oversight because managing a troll doesn’t make any coherent sense. It would be antithetical to the whole point.

The DOGE boys were largely unmasked. I think the trolls in charge of social media messaging should be as well, because a lack of literacy into what these memes actually represent is part of the dire state of the Western political project right now and a step toward fixing that would be to find out how many of the people in charge of designing government propaganda were recruited from the moderator pool of Stormfront.

Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now:

If you’re a standard gen-X office bureaucrat (or, you know, otherwise just kind of a normal person) you wouldn’t have any idea that the Department of Education just tweeted out some deranged incel shit that looks, to the untrained eye, like an ordinary scene from Harry Potter.

The key here is the character in the foreground—a female gender-swapped version of J. K. Rowling’s blonde Aryan Nazi-coded child villain, Draco Malfoy, who in online blackpilled manosphere world is called “Malfoid.”

I hate that I know this, but “foid,” short for the original “femoid,” is the incel community’s word for women. Yes, it’s derogatory, and meant specifically to dehumanize—the complicated thing about these men is that their desire for women, their hatred of women, and their resulting hatred of their desire for women all kind off feed off each other in an unholy trinity of violently escalating psychological poison.

The idea behind “Malfoid” is basically a self-insert fanfiction fantasy in which men who imagine themselves as stoic and brooding versions of Harry Potter play out their own Hogwarts journey that is focused on a new love interest—the platinum blonde Malfoid; a 10/10, smoking hot, preppy, upper-class British “mean girl” who can’t fight her attraction to Harry, and by Harry I mean you, the guy churning the memes out via ChatGPT.

Inevitably, in these fantasies, Malfoid submits to her desires, gives up her mean bitch persona, and becomes Harry’s trad wife, giving him at least three children. Variously she is depicted as passionate or at least curious about white nationalist literature and philosophy and either redpills Harry, or is redpilled by him, into it.

It is, in its most basic form, the classic geek schoolboy fantasy of the unattainably hot mean girl being “brat-tamed” by the chivalry of the nice-guy supreme gentleman, mixed with the creepy, explicitly fascist aesthetic that has come to be associated with the whole incel thing in recent years.

This is not an accident and it’s not a reach. People who know the first thing about far-right meme subcultures in the worst and deepest corners of the web see constant nods toward this iconography in official federal communications. The Departments of Defense and Homeland Security accounts, for example, frequently make explicit references to an underground neo-Nazi music/visual aesthetic called “Fashwave.”

Frequently they will post memes or tweets featuring variations of the phrase “Which Way, Western Man?” which is the title of a notorious neo-Nazi book from the 1970s, adopted as a popular phrase on white supremacy forums like Stormfront.

Any time anyone attempts to track down the source of these government communications they lead back to loosely managed think tanks, often in communication via Signal or other such services, of anonymized staff officially-unofficially payrolled by campaigns and government departments, brainstorming how to properly hide swastikas and spinning sonnenrads in meme videos. The government will make no comment about their affiliation with these groups, but then out of nowhere an official government department will post Moon Man.

What these kids are doing, of course, is what they’re paid to do—they are trolling. I would doubt that they have been explicitly told by their handlers to flood social media with neo-Nazi and incel content under the banner of the United States government, but they have probably been instructed to troll and have fun, which is effectively the same exact command when you’re giving it to a bunch of disillusioned young boys who have had their brains melted by 8chan and groyper forums.

So why care, if it’s just kids having fun with memes? Well, because the trolling doesn’t just make normies mad, it also serves as a very real dogwhistle to groups of dangerous people who feel seen and called to action by the government itself. I’m not even necessarily talking about neo-Nazis here—Nazis are practically boring now. I’m worried mostly about the encouragement and validation of incel culture, and especially when the propaganda is targeted at children.

Just a few weeks after the US Department of Education caused a storm across incel culture by posting Malfoid on main, they did it again with another meme currently raging with popularity among the same community—they posted Anakin Skywalker.

Anakin posting was a huge phenomenon on Twitter toward the end of October as people began to interpret the Star Wars prequels as a story, not about Anakin’s tragic moral downfall, but about Darth Vader’s righteous moral rise as a fascist hero.

It seemed to make sense from the perspective of a whole bunch of angry young white men that this angry young white man was right about everything all along, and they saw his journey from Normie to Nazi as a mirror to their own experience as an average white male.

And of course, Anakin’s wife, Padme, tried to hold him back from his destiny, and his love and desire for the hottest foid in a galaxy far far away was his biggest weakness and mistake. In the end, he was right to kill her. (These guys really, really hate Padme, probably even worse than they hate Skyler in Breaking Bad).

It didn’t help that the richest and most powerful incel on Earth weighed in with a pretty explicitly fascist AI-generated image of the kind of world, I guess, he thinks “they” took from him? What, does he not feel like he lives as comfortably as Anakin does here?

I guess, when MAGA embraced Anakin’s story as representing their own heroic awakening, they missed all the parts of those movies that showed every beat of his downfall being caused by his unwarranted trust in one decrepit old politician who lies to him about everything. What does that remind you of?

The US government’s Mystery Teen Meme Team deciding to full throttle on signal-boosting this particular meme to drive voter energy into the midterms was, on one hand, incredibly misguided as to what issues most voters were actually seething about—for which we can all be thankful. But, as someone who’s currently writing a book that involves deep research into incels and associated cultures, I have to say that the US government itself boosting this kind of material and saying “I see you, and you’d be right to act on it” to a cohort of young men, who have been pushed toward breaking point for ten years now by the closest thing real life has ever seen to Palpatine … that scares me.

That’s how you get Elliot Rodger. That’s how you get Dylann Roof. That’s how you get Brenton Tarrant. They were all radicalized online. They won’t be the last. I think we should prefer that the next one not be ushered along by the implication that what they want to do is endorsed by the President.

I'm writing a book about right-wing reactionary movements in tech and geek culture in general. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and if you like this newsletter then you'll probably like my book. I've been dropping parts of the draft as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers.