🔒Why We Need to Unmask Trump's Troll Army

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.

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.

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.

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