Defamation by Impersonation
25th January 2018
The Other McCain turns over a rock and watch the creepy crawlies thus exposed.
Jack Posobiec is a conservative activist with more than 250,000 followers on Twitter. A woman claimed to have discovered that Posobiec had a profile on the feminist dating app Bumble, and BuzzFeed claimed that Bumble verified this was actually Posobiec’s account. Posobiec is married and his wife is pregnant, and he has threatened legal action against those he says have defamed and harassed him by “criminal fraud.”
One of the pernicious effects of ‘social media’ is that, on the Internet, not only does nobody know you’re a dog, but also nobody knows that you’re not a dog, or at least not the particular ‘dog’ they have in mind. I suppose that every celebrity (plus and minus) has had to cope with people pretending to be them on Facebook and Twitter, for good or ill. (I’m immune from this because those who know me know that I loathe Facebook and Twitter, and those who don’t know me are of no importance.)
This is also a familiar tactic. In 2010, Democrat operative Neal Rauhauser was caught red-handed organizing a Twitter harassment campaign against Tea Party activists. Rauhauser then persuaded Adrian Chen of Gawker to publish an article explaining this away as an innocent “prank.” Left-wing journalists are willing enablers of this kind of harassment, even while they claim that conservatives are perpetrators of harassment. This was the liberal media’s narrative of #GamerGate, after all — supposedly, Anita Sarkeesian and others were victims of right-wing “harassment,” which became a pretext for Twitter’s shutting down the accounts of various conservatives (myself included), but no one at Twitter ever took action against Neal Rauhauser or any of the left-wing trolls who participated in his anti-Tea Party harassment campaign.
Proglodytes accept as proof things that not even High School students ever would. This fits under the Dan Rather ‘fake but accurate’ rubric.
What has happened, during the past year or so, is that Democrats and their media allies have played their customary connect-the-dots guilt-by-association game. It works like this: Person A (e.g., Richard Spencer) becomes notorious, and then everyone on the Right is expected to denounce Person A. Prior to becoming a notorious symbol of “hate,” however, Person A had some association with Person B, Person C and Person D. These three persons who were in some way associated with Person A are now deemed “radioactive,” and everyone associated with them falls under the penumbra of suspicion, even if there is no actual evidence that they share the “hate” that made Person A notorious.
This is a combination of the proglodyte neo-Puritan Hunt for Heretics and Sinners with the proglodyte cultural Marxist inheritance of the Stalinist Hunt for Revisionists and Counter-Revolutionaries. Virtue Signalling is an outgrowth of the requirement to line up to denounce Emmanuel Goldstein lest you be suspected of suspicious lack of Zeal for the Narrative.