I have been an online forum moderator twice in my life. It’s a kind of miserable volunteering gig in many cases.
One of the things you have to deal with is trolls. An online troll is an individual who intentionally posts provocative, offensive, or disruptive content on the internet to elicit strong emotional reactions or disrupt conversations. In other words, an asshole.
So, based on this experience, I can recognize a troll rather quickly. And I also know that trolls do not exist only online, they can work their dark shitty magic in real life.
This leads me to my Democratic senator, John Fetterman. I volunteered in his senate campaign, felt horrible when he had his stroke, and defended him against jerks who mocked his poor post-stroke debate performance. I liked him because he was a smart progressive who often made many great points, and when he won, I was over the moon.
The honeymoon didn’t last. In fact, it was surprisingly short. Seemingly starting after the Hamas terror attack and Israel’s over-the-top vicious right-wing-driven response, Fetterman became more of a troll that was punching down, not up.
Part of Fetterman’s style has always been snark. For example, during his senate campaign he had a plane flying at South Jersey beaches trailing a message about his opponent, Dr. Oz, actually living in New Jersey and not Pennsylvania. Shrewd move, given so many southeast Pennsylvania folks head to those beaches in the summer.
But soon after the Hamas terror attack and while Israel was responding by killing children, pro-Palestinian protestors showed up outside Fetterman’s home. He responded by taunting them by waving an Israeli flag from his roof.
This of course infuriated a lot of Democrats, and Fetterman seemed to revel in it. The right wing loved it and soon began to heap praise on Fetterman.
Fetterman openly trolled Crooked Senator Bob Menendez by hiring George Santos to make a video mocking him. I agreed with his overall point but paying Santos was an odd move. More recently he referred to Trump’s picking sex offender Matt Gaetz as his attorney general nominee as “god-level trolling” to “own the libs” and he sounded less like he found that to be bad and more like professional admiration of a fellow practitioner of a craft. As you probably have noticed, trolling is a key part of being MAGA.
Fetterman also did a Trump thumbs-up pose with Elise Stefanik and talked about how excited he was that the MAGA congresscretin was going to be our ambassador to the UN, including sounding a lot like a far-right Republican about making the UN pay for not supporting Israel. And yesterday, he announced he will be the first Democratic senator to meet with Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago.
These are all troll moves. Part of a troll’s game is to do things that are upsetting, enraging, and hurtful to their target but also leave just enough plausible deniability. The “who me?” bullshit that is a form of gaslighting is key for the troll. This is because it enables them to enlist people who will say “How do you know that’s what they meant?” as unknowing pawns to inflict even more damage. Fetterman knows this, much in the way Krysten Sinema knew what she was doing when she wore the Fuck Off ring in that infamous social media photo.
You might be tempted to say, big deal, so he’s a jerk, there’s so much else to worry about. The problem is that a lot of Democrats, especially younger Democrats, voted for Fetterman based on how he presented himself. He can gaslight all he wants (another symptom of a troll) about how he never said he was progressive, but do a search on news articles about him prior to his election to the Senate. The funny/sad/pathetic thing to me is I have noted that some of the people who seem to agree with him that he was never a progressive are also the same exact people who used to say he could never get elected to anything beyond small-town mayor because he was too far left.
Don’t feed the trolls.
So, many of those voters feel conned, disillusioned, and turned off of politics. Screaming vote harder at them is simply not going to work, and it makes one look sort of silly because a lot of that crowd goes on about how progressives can’t win elections, and then promote telling part of the base how much they suck, and well, yeah, that isn’t a defensible opinion.
None of us who voted for Fetterman voted for MAGA’s favorite Democrat. And I’ll close with that.
The last word goes to John Lennon.
