Secretary of Defense and probable owner of dozens of Coed Naked Lacrosse T-shirts Pete Hegseth might be clobbering the morale and readiness of America’s armed forces. But who needs any of that when you can hire some of wingnutdom’s most insane civilians to build your Pentagon-based troll army?
Yes, a troll army on the government’s payroll. If the battlespace is Iran, Hegseth can wave his arms impotently while depleting the nation’s munitions stockpiles and driving the Navy so hard that its sailors decide jumping off ships in the middle of the sea is the better option. But if the battlespace is the warped brains of the sort of paranoia-riddled right-wingers who spend most of their free time watching dimly lit TikToks explaining how Islamic militants are allying with George Soros-funded NGOs to turn all of America’s universities into communist madrasas, then he’s Douglas MacArthur.
Let’s meet a couple of the Pentagon’s trolls, so that we may laugh or weep for the Republic. Or both. Call it weeplaughing.
First up, meet Jennica Pounds, or @DataRepublican, as she is known on X, the everything app. Pounds has made a name for herself the last couple of years by massaging and fondling government data to come up with such groundbreaking insights as — we’re paraphrasing here — The government spends lots of money on some things I don’t think it should spend money on, but it doesn’t spend as much money on things I think it should spend money on.
We’re not even exaggerating, if the publisher’s description of her upcoming book is any indication.
Last week came the revelation that Pounds recently became a “special government employee” for the Pentagon. Doing what? It is impossible to say. But on Friday, Pounds released a data tool that purports to map all the links between the Democratic Socialists of America and “the wider anti-imperialist solidarity network,” whatever the hell that even means in her obviously conspiracy-addled brain:
Good God. This tool makes Glenn Beck’s old chalkboards comprehensible by comparison. Apparently in Pounds’s world, literally every left-leaning organization and figure in America is tied together as part of a “Marxist-Leninist vanguard” or “Islamist/resistance axis” or who knows what else. Even Beck would tell her to take it down a notch.
This all appears to be part of the government’s push over the last year and a half to label anyone that disagrees with it as some sort of antifa-aligned militant. That gives it legal cover for pursuing people for what has traditionally been First Amendment-protected tradition of peacefully opposing the government.
But nothing beats the disclaimer Pounds put at the top of the tool:
Disclaimer: Provided for research, educational, and journalistic purposes only. ... [I]t may contain errors or omissions and is not represented as complete, current, or 100% accurate. Inferred, ideological, and patron/sphere associations are analytical interpretations, not statements of fact, and nothing here alleges unlawful conduct by any named person or organization. Do not rely on this material without independent verification. The author disclaims all liability for any use of, or reliance on, its contents.
So the tool is not accurate and should not be used for anything without doing your own research. Great. We’re sure that will be comforting to people in this database who will suddenly be inundated with death threats from wingnut shut-ins convinced that Cuba is funding a fifth column of Marxists advocating for more solar power in the US. Should go great.
This tool is, as The New Republic put it, a “disgusting attempt to target Americans for their political affiliations.” And taxpayers are paying the salary of the person behind it, a woman who would have fit right into the Pepe Silvia scene in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia:
And Pounds is relatively sane compared to a couple of the other special government employees that The Bulwark and The Washington Post have uncovered.
One of the SGE’s is our old friend, cement-headed fascist Kurt Schlichter. He is working in the office of Anthony Tata (himself no slouch in the “wingnuts whose brains are rancid cheese” department). What’s he doing there? We’re not sure, though the Post mentions that Tata’s department has been scrutinizing America’s war colleges for “woke” ideology. (What, like teaching climate science?)
Schlichter is famous for being shitballs nuts. Seriously. As a longtime wingnut columnist for outlets like Townhall, his writing is chock full of suggestions for how to deal with leftists in language that strongly indicates he has been skipping his lithium.
One of Schlichter’s fetishes is the idea that red states cannot live with blue states and therefore must subdue them by any means necessary. He also wrote a series of novels that could best be described as fascist porn that, before the internet and Amazon self-publishing, would have only been found as poorly stapled sheets of paper stacked up for sale on the same table as Nazi memorabilia at a gun show:
America’s growing political and cultural divisions have finally split the United States apart. Now, as the former blue states begin to collapse under the dead weight of their politically correct tyranny, a lethal operative haunted by his violent past undertakes one last mission to infiltrate and take out his target in the nightmarish city of Los Angeles, deep in the heart of the People’s Republic of North America.
In other words, the fever dreams of every heavily armed wingnut who has ever cooked his brain in the right-wing blogosphere.
This might be slightly more aboveboard if any of these people were revealing their connections to the government when they are publishing and commenting in public. For example, Rob Maness, a retired wingnut Air Force colonel, has been placing editorials in The Daily Caller and letters in The Washington Post in which he defends Pete Hegseth’s efforts to purge the Pentagon of “disloyal” employees, without revealing that he is working for the dang Pentagon himself.
There are others. Like Adam D’Ortona, an active duty Army officer who works in Hegseth’s office while trying to get people fired for saying mean things about Charlie Kirk after Kirk was shot last year.
As former congressman Adam Kinzinger asked,
“How many more people that are blue checkmarks on X, that are putting out information on behalf of the federal government and Donald Trump and the Republican party . . . are actually special government employees being paid by your tax dollars?”
We dunno. We bet the answer is “a lot.” These guys are trapped in a fantasy world where evil, violent leftists are hiding under every bed. Unfortunately, we’re all trapped there with them.
[WaPo / New Republic / The Bulwark]
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"the wider anti-imperialist solidarity network,"
Imagine looking at that collection of words and seeing something sinister.
"Blue states collapsing under their politically correct tyranny," like California, the 4th largest economy in the world?