America the gullible
BLOGGER SHOWS HOW EASY IT IS TO GET US TO SWALLOW BALONEY
NORTH WATERBORO, Maine — The only light in the house comes from the glow of three computer monitors as Christopher Blair, 46, sits down at a keyboard and starts to type. His wife has left for work and his children are on their way to school, but waiting online is his other community, an unreality where nothing is exactly as it seems. He logs onto his website and begins to invent his first news story of the day.
“BREAKING,” he writes, pecking out each letter with his index fingers as he considers the possibilities. Maybe he would announce that Hillary Clinton died during a secret overseas mission to smuggle more refugees into America. Maybe he would award President Trump the Nobel Peace Prize for his courage in denying climate change.
A new message pops onto Blair’s screen from a friend who helps with his website. “What viral insanity should we spread this morning?” the friend asks.
“The more extreme we become, the more people believe it,” Blair replies.
He had launched his new website on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign as a practical joke among friends — a political satire site started by Blair and a few other liberal bloggers who wanted to make fun of what they considered to be extremist ideas spreading throughout the far right. In the last two years on his page, America’s Last Line of Defense, Blair made up stories about California instituting Shariah, former President Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former President Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9.
“Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook, most of whom do not recognize his posts as satire, click “like” and then “share.” Instead, Blair’s page has become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trumpsupporting conservatives over 55.
“Nothing on this page is real,” reads one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018, his stories have become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who think his posts are factual. What Blair first conceived of as an elaborate joke has begun to reveal something darker.
“No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair wrote on his personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”
Blair’s own reality is beyond the shuttered curtains of his office: a three-bedroom home in the forest of Maine where the paved road turns to gravel; not his house but a rental; not on the lake but near it. Over the past decade, his family moved around the country a half-dozen times as he looked for steady work, bouncing between construction and restaurant jobs while sometimes living on food stamps. During the economic crash of 2008, his wife had taken a job at Wendy’s to help pay down their credit-card debt, and Blair, a lifelong Democrat, had begun venting his political frustration online, arguing with strangers in an internet forum called Brawl Hall. He sometimes masqueraded as a tea party conservative on Facebook so he could gain administrative access into their private groups and then flood their pages with liberal ideas before using his administrative status to shut their pages down.
He had created more than a dozen online profiles over the last years, sometimes disguising himself in accompanying photographs as a beautiful Southern blond woman or as a bandana-wearing conservative named Flagg Eagleton, baiting people into making racist or sexist comments and then publicly eviscerating them for it. In his writing Blair was blunt, witty and prolific, and gradually he’d built a liberal following on the internet and earned a fulltime job as a political blogger. On the screen, like nowhere else, he could say exactly how he felt and become whomever he wanted.
One day, while scanning through conservative forums on Facebook for something that might inspire his next post, he noticed a photo online of Trump standing at attention for the national anthem during a White House ceremony. Behind the President were several dozen dignitaries, including a white woman standing next to a black woman, and Blair copied the picture, circled the two women in red and wrote the first thing that came into his mind:
“President Trump extended an olive branch and invited Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton,” Blair wrote. “They thanked him by giving him ‘the finger’ during the national anthem. Lock them up for treason!”
Blair finished typing and looked again at the picture. The white woman was not in fact Chelsea Clinton but former White House strategist Hope Hicks. The black woman was not Michelle Obama but former Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman. Neither Obama nor Clinton had been invited to the ceremony. Nobody had flipped off the President. The entire premise was ridiculous, which was exactly Blair’s point.
“We live in an Idiocracy,” reads a small note on Blair’s desk, and he is taking full advantage. In a good month, the advertising revenue from his website earns him as much as $15,000, and it also won him a loyal army of online fans. Hundreds of liberals now visit America’s Last Line of Defense to humiliate