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November 20, 2018 03:08 pm PST

Portrait of a fake news troll and the racist retiree who believes everything he writes

In the Washington Post, Eli Saslow profiles Christopher Blair, a 46-year-old "liberal" hoaxter whose Facebook group, "Americas Last Line of Defense," is full of far-right hoaxes that he creates and then reveals, in order to humiliate the Trumpist "taters" who spread them; and Shirley Chapian, a 76-year-old retiree who believes and repeats all the racist hoaxes Saslow creates and will not disbelieve them, even when Saslow reveals the gag.

Saslow's portraits are full of contradictions: Blair and his friends use the hoaxes to push Trump supporters into making racist statements that violate Facebook's Terms of Service and then get them kicked off (the same tactic the dictator of Cambodia uses to get opposition leaders kicked off the service), and they also get Macedonian hoax-sites shut down for plagiarizing their own hoaxes. But at the same time, they turn a real profit from allowing ads to run against their hoax stories, which are repeatedly labeled "satire" but whose satirical nature is lost on the right-wingers who repeat them.

Chapian is also a complicated figure who once belonged to the National Organization for Women and campaigned for wage equality, but who is so willing and eager to repeat the racist hoaxes that Blair creates that it's obvious where her credibility springs from -- that is, which of her beliefs is being confirmed by Blair. But Chapian is also a tragic figure, someone whose bad decision to retire to Pahrump, NV has taken her far from the movie theaters she loves, and whose obsession with keeping up with all the bad news about the rise of Sharia law and the invading waves of immigrants has supplanted the needlepoint she once found such satisfaction in. Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/AAiI_gETiXQ/pahrump-for-trump.html

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