The right wing *keyboard kerning experts are back on the case
by digby
Carpet bomb the memes comrades!
The looming battle over President Trump’s potential impeachment has sparked an online hunt in the far-right corners of the Web as self-styled Internet sleuths race to identify the anonymous person Trump has likened to a treasonous spy.
Their guesses have been scattershot, conspiratorial and often untethered from reality, spanning a wide range of such unlikely contenders as presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and Vice President Pence.
Some of the online commentators and anonymous posters said they have been spurred to action by Trump’s fury, foreshadowing the online clashes that are likely to engulf any upcoming impeachment hearings and the 2020 campaign.
“Carpet bomb the memes. Everywhere,” one anonymous poster on the message board 4chan wrote in response to one of Trump’s angry tweets about the whistleblower. “Time to rise up. Your president has asked for your help.”
The quest to identify the person who crafted the politically explosive complaint against Trump has become a fixation across the most extreme corners of such platforms as Twitter, Reddit and Gab — and has spread onto conservative news sites, radio shows and TV broadcasts.
The Washington Post obtained video of President Trump giving a private speech to U.S. diplomats on Sept. 26. (Obtained by The Washington Post)
The president’s scornful portrayal of the whistleblower shaped and stoked the online conversation throughout the week, as it descended into a case study of the Internet at its worst — frenetic, fueled by rumor and frequently racist, misogynistic and crude.
“the whistleblower is not white,” one 4chan commenter asserted Thursday, probably misreading a part of the complaint in which the whistleblower calls himself or herself a “non-White House official.” “see second set of bullet points on page 3. trump only has a handful of non white staff. I wonder who it might be.”
Bless their hearts.
This is funny but Trump’s threats aren’t. He’s already inspired some followers to several mass shootings. And one of his nuts sent pipe bombs to a whole bunch of people on his enemies lists which luckily didn’t go off. When they say “time to rise up” some people might be thinking of something other than amateur internet sleuthing.
*For those who haven’t been around blogs since the dark ages, “kerning” refers to this.
.