Fuck Trolls: For Whom the Bell Trolls

I apologize for the bad pun. Not just because it was a bad pun. But also, because it undermines the seriousness of the matter. So please allow me to clarify.

Fuck, Fuck, Fuck trolls.

Our country has descended into a corrupt, mostly foreign controlled oligarchy. Monied foreigners, especially Saudis, hold our lawmakers in their pockets like so many nickels and dimes. (Apologies to Mario Puzo). That is far and away our biggest problem and many days it seems insurmountable.

My book “Why The Fuck Not” goes deeply into how it happened and what we can do about it to bring about a resurrection of our national greatness. Yes, I know I keep saying it’s coming, and it really is. It just happens to have a particularly meticulous editor. (Not blaming you Paul, I know it’s a pain in the ass).

But today I want to talk about our second biggest national problem which in some ways is quite entangled with our biggest problem. Yes, I’m talking about trolls. On the off chance you don’t know what “trolling” is, here it is.

Trolling is an intentional effort to offer divisive, distracting, emotional and hateful commentary in order to disrupt orderly and natural public discourse. In other words, Shit Disturbers.

I cannot go further with this without acknowledging the unrivaled king of the trolls: Steve Bannon. He was in charge of the right-wing troll machine Breitbart and Senior Chief strategist and counselor to the svelte and athletic 6’3, 215-pound President Donald Trump.

Bannon invented the phrase “flood the zone with shit”. Consider this phrase carefully. They may be the most anti-democratic, anti-American and anti-patriotic words ever spoken. Because the idea is to fill the media and public spaces with so much garbage, so many lies and so much SHIT as to deprive Americans of any sense of reality and fact. To leave us adrift in a sea of lies and nonsense. Unable to find or agree on any set of facts. He is the king, and in many ways the father of modern-day trolls.

A solid runner up for the crown of shit is the infamous evolution denier Duane Gish. A man who I am not sorry to say has evolved into the afterlife, or wherever harmful, dishonest shitbags go when they die. Gish is known for a debate technique appropriately named The Gish Gallop. Although calling it a technique is probably giving this fuckface too much credit. He would participate in formal debates and use his allotted time to jizz out a stream of lies, half-truths, outright nonsense and misrepresentations. So much so that his opponent would not have time to refute each of his arguments in their allotted time. You might recognize this tactic also being used by a certain rather rotund orange jerk-off who is currently facing numerous indictments. It’s actually quite effective if you happen to be a low life with no moral compass and absolutely no regard for truth or reality.

Bannon and people like him are the lowest of the low. They have deprived our country of any common set of facts on which to have any kind of dialogue to benefit our nation. And caused us to blame our national problems on each other. While the foreign corporate oligarchs laugh at us and buy up our real estate.

They have also turned roughly a third of Americans into blind, delusional hate machines. They are in favor of nothing. They only know what they hate. And that changes daily based on what the right-wing hate troll machine tells them to hate. Mostly they prey on aging white Christians.

They are convinced that it is the poor immigrant, or their poor neighbors on food stamps, who are the enemy. Or gay people. Or trans people. Or even their own fellow white people, should they not sufficiently hate who and what they are supposed to hate on any given day.

When it comes to trolls and trolling, I will break them down into three broad categories. You can decide which is the most repulsive.

• PROFESSIONAL TROLLS – This would include Bannon, Fox News, OAN, Trump and a host of other outrage generating machines. The greatest irony of this group is that they, as a group, are the least genuinely dedicated. The reason being that many of them make their living at it. I know for a fact that a good slice of the pros are actors. They are acting a role in order to gain fame, fortune and for one of their obese orange ones, the presidency. In some ways I think that makes them even worse than the next group.

• THE TRUE BELIEVERS – That includes the crazy uncle who ruins your families Thanksgiving dinner. They are your friends and neighbors who have been brainwashed after decades of a steady diet of Fox News and social media memes and paid trolls.

• FOREIGN – This is a huge and still growing segment. It’s been pretty well documented that there are literally dozens of office buildings in Eastern Europe full of low paid professional trolls. You could call these tens of thousands of people the fast-food workers of trolldom. They are the ones that churn out thousands of memes, posts, and comments on social media. This form of trolling is so incredibly cheap that it penetrates every square inch of social media. They turn up in virtually every group. Even many that are not at all political. I have a couple of friends that are marginal celebrities. And even they have several assigned trolls that stir up fights in the comments of even the most innocuous posts. And when they expose and block one, another pops up like a toxic weed. It is so prevalent that it would be the real life equivalent of hiring someone to go to every public gathering and stir up trouble. This is not an exaggeration. Imagine people at every football game, every bar, every family gathering, and every wedding whose lone reason for being there is to stir up hatred and fighting. That would not be overstating the effect of foreign trolls on our online lives.

All of them have one thing in common. That is to turn Americans against each other. All of it is to pit:

red vs blue,

black vs white

left vs right

north vs south

and the only way to fight it is if we can find a way to remember that we are one country and one people.

We must remember that this country is not and never can be red vs blue.

WE ARE RED, WHITE, AND BLUE.

That’s not to say that we don’t have real disagreements and real issues that must be addressed. But we must do so without letting foreigners and scumbags divide us from each other.

Your enemy is not your neighbor who may believe differently than you do.

You and your neighbor share a love for the same country. The real enemy is those who would use our own internal family squabbles to turn us against each other.

We are one country!

We are one people!

Fuck the trolls!

Maybe I can find a country artist to make a song out of this.

No charge.