I found it pretty difficult to write during the pandemic for a few reasons. One, I didn’t feel like I had much to say about the current state of the world that no one else could have said or, frankly, wanted to read a blog post about. Two, I felt like there were important things going on in the world, like Black Lives Matter protests, and I didn’t need to put out my brand of navel gazing in that climate. There has also been a fair amount of malaise during the pandemic. So, even if I did have something to write about, I didn’t feel like doing it.
Despite this lack of writing one thing remained consistent and it was the number of hits on my number one post of all time: “Fuck Donald Trump and Fuck You If You Still Support Him.”*
* As of this writing, it has 12,296 views. In second place is the homepage with 6,335 views. In other words, this post is roughly twice as popular as the blog itself.
It was a rant I wrote in 2018 because I meant it. I posted it on Facebook and likeminded friends got a kick out of it. It even made its way to a few degrees of separation from me. Some actress started following me because of it and I saw that she was getting a bunch of comments for sharing it but she was giving back as good as she was getting.
I’ve pruned my feed of vocal Trump supporters, so I didn’t get any angry comments. Any of my friends who are nominal Trump supporters are more like dyed in the wool Republicans who were in the “well, at least it’s not Hillary” camp, which I understand if not condone.
And that was that. I published a rant. Some people liked it, other people let it go without comment.
I just re-read it and I stand by what I wrote. I really do hate it when people say, “I don’t think he means that.” Or they deflect and pivot to Hillary/Bill/Barack. I hate the false equivocation of Donald Trump just being “the other side.” He’s not. He’s a cancer on the United States. He campaigned on Islamophobia, hatred of immigrants, and just general boorishness. It was awful and his entire presidency played out exactly as we thought it would.
The rant, in retrospect, is pretty general. It’s not about the details of specific policies, it’s more of overarching disagreement with everything Trump stands for.
Cut to 2020.
I start getting some comments on it. True to form for not just Trump supporters but internet comments in general, the comments I got had nothing to do with what I wrote.
One commenter kept coming back with things like, “What about Joe Biden?!” or Hunter Biden and Burisma and whatever else Fox News told him to think that day.
I didn’t mention Joe Biden in the post, let alone Hunter. Joe Biden was not the Democratic nominee for president in 2018. But people would come by to just leave comments concerning the issues of 2020 and the election. Even after the election, one commenter wrote back about Dominion and voting machines and election fraud: things that were not in my post.
I didn’t engage because I know better but that’s not the point. Here’s what I want to know. How did these people find this post that and why are they commenting on it?
This isn’t a popular blog. If you are reading this, it is likely that we know each other. We might be from the same hometown, high school, college, or perhaps we run in similar improv circles. The nation at large doesn’t check in with the Penty Report.
Then I started getting strange comments. For example:
“Go fuck yourself liberal. Fucking disease on this earth”
And
“You deranged FUCK UP….man move out of this country you anti american liberal turd…..Ya Rob you….communist little bitch”
And
“Fuck you none Americans ass holes if you’re not for trump your ignorant China communist dumb bastards”
Ya Rob you? Your ignorant China communist dumb bastards? What?
I would get comments like this in my inbox through my blog’s contact form. I got comments like this on my Moth StorySLAM stories on YouTube. Some of these comments were on posts about sketch comedy. They were all similar in that they were of a similar length, weren’t complete sentences, and had some strange grammatical error.
It seemed like this new batch was coming from bots.
As I said, this isn’t an influential blog. So, how did I manage to get targeted by bots? Are the Russians just doing their due diligence? What’s the strategy here? I have no influence and the trolling isn’t enough to silence me. It’s on the level of stakes of the mafia saying to a little league umpire, “Anthony Lucchese better not get any called strike threes, or we won’t like you anymore.”
I made the post private so you can’t read it anymore, not because I couldn’t take the trolling anymore but because I was sick of it being the most read thing on this blog. If anything, it was an out of character one-off.
In closing, I’ll spare you the f-bombs but if you still support Donald Trump, after two impeachments, the January 6th insurrection, and the dangerous lock step loyalty he has engendered in the Republican party, you are the problem. You are lost, morally and intellectually. You make me sick.
I look forward to your comments.
