crogin
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Trump's most influential white nationalist troll...
emphasis added
Qquote:
...is a Middlebury grad who lives in Manhattan
HuffPost US
LUKE O'BRIEN
Apr 5th 2018 1:41PM
Who is Ricky Vaughn? That was one of the big questions for anyone following far-right politics during the 2016 presidential election. The Twitter troll who took his name and avatar from Charlie Sheen’s character in “Major League” was everywhere on social media, an indefatigable circulator of edgy memes and rah-rah Donald Trump boosterism.
And anti-Semitism and white nationalism:
Lots of it:
There was no mistaking Ricky Vaughn’s influence. He had tens of thousands of followers, and his talent for blending far-right propaganda with conservative messages on Twitter made him a key disseminator of extremist views to Republican voters and a central figure in the “alt-right” white supremacist movement that attached itself to Trump’s coattails. The MIT Media Lab named him to its list of top 150 influencers on the election, based on news appearances and social media impact. He finished ahead of NBC News, Drudge Report and Stephen Colbert. Mainstream conservatives didn’t know they were retweeting an avowed racist and anti-Semite, but they liked what Ricky Vaughn had to say.
“He did this thing that people connected to organized white nationalism have not been able to do ― walk both sides of the extremist line in the sand,” said Keegan Hankes, a data intelligence expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Ricky Vaughn also played an important role in amplifying disinformation injected into American politics by the Russian government. HuffPost and a team of data scientists known as Susan Bourbaki Anthony that tracks online propaganda analyzed who was retweeting the now infamous Kremlin-controlled Twitter account @TEN_GOP, which consistently praised Trump, attacked Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and churned out a vile medley of racism, Islamophobia and “fake news.”
In the data set of significant accounts we looked at, Ricky Vaughn retweeted @TEN_GOP the most, by far. Although Twitter shut down his @Ricky_Vaughn99 handle in October 2016, another handle he used, @RapinBill, took over and retweeted @TEN_GOP at least 162 times between early March and late August 2017. (@RapinBill also retweeted @Pamela_Moore13, another Kremlin-controlled account, at least 37 times during this period.)
Curiously, @RapinBill, which is still active and followed by Donald Trump Jr., does not appear to have received a single reciprocal retweet from @TEN_GOP in this time period, perhaps indicating an attempt to conceal the connection @RapinBill retweeted @TEN_GOP until the end. When Twitter finally shut down @TEN_GOP last August, after having ignored numerous complaints about the Russian account, Ricky Vaughn did not take it well. He groused that @TEN_GOP had been “banned for supporting our president.” Within hours, he was steering traffic to the Kremlin’s backup account:
Ricky Vaughn was able to remain anonymous ― until this week.
On Monday, white nationalist Republican candidate Paul Nehlen, who is running against House Speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin, grew upset about criticism directed at him ― and seemingly not disavowed by Ricky Vaughn ― as the alt-right fragments under the weight of infighting, lawsuits and anti-fascist opposition. Two main camps have emerged: the real-world extremists who want to continue holding rallies and mixing it up in the streets, and the “optics cucks” who think the best approach to the mainstream is to keep pushing alt-right ideas through better propaganda. Ricky Vaughn is in the latter camp. And he hasn’t been shy about it.
“I’m dividing the movement between effective people and dumb losers,” he wrote on Gab, a social media platform overrun by white supremacists.
Amid all this infighting, an angry Nehlen dropped Ricky Vaughn’s real name:
Douglass Mackey.
The name ― with the double-s ― checked out. So did many other details. In October, I’d spoken with Loren Feldman, a filmmaker in Los Angeles who interviewed “Ricky Vaughn” in 2016 for a documentary project. Feldman agreed not to show the far-right troll’s face on camera and never learned his full name. But Ricky Vaughn, whom Feldman described to me as a nervous, slightly built blond man in his mid- to late 20s, had introduced himself as “Doug.” He told Feldman that he was from New England and had gone to a private school and worked in “consulting or finance” in New York. He was smart and well-heeled, an urbane cosmopolitan elite. “You would never ever in a million years think that was Ricky Vaughn,”Feldman said.
On Monday, I sent photos I’d found of Douglass Mackey online to Feldman. I did not mention Mackey’s name or any identifying details. I simply asked Feldman if he recognized the man.
“That’s him,” Feldman said.
“Who?”
“Ricky.”
On Tuesday, Christopher Cantwell, another white nationalist who is feuding with Ricky Vaughn, posted a more recent photo of the propagandist to Gab that wasn’t readily available online. It appeared to be an older, heavier Mackey.
“Several photos have been showing up in several different mediums by which I communicate with my audience,” Cantwell said. “I don’t remember who gave it to me, but it matched the face I’ve seen in several other photos purporting to be him. I know people who have met Doug, and nobody who knows him has bothered to correct me, so I’m operating under the assumption that it’s authentic.”
The voice checked out too. Ricky Vaughn has done numerous white supremacist podcasts, andthat Feldman recorded for his film and to which I listened. A former colleague of Mackey’s who listened to one of Ricky Vaughn’s podcasts also deemed the voices a match. “That does sound like Doug,” he told me. I asked him how certain he was. “I don’t think you’re wrong,” he said. “It’s him.”
Another source, one who worked for the Trump campaign and is friendly with Ricky Vaughn, told me on Monday that the troll was desperately trying to get Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab, to remove the information about him that Nehlen had posted. All of which would seem to further confirm Ricky Vaughn’s identity as Douglass Mackey.
So who is Doug Mackey?
The 28-year-old has done a good job keeping information about himself off the internet. Either before or immediately after Nehlen published his name, Mackey, who did not respond to requests to comment, removed all his personal social media accounts, traces of which remain online. But here’s what we know so far. (We will update the story as more information becomes available.)
Mackey is from Waterbury, Vermont, a small town of around 5,000 people in the middle of the state. His father, Scott, a lobbyist who focuses on tax policy affecting wireless communications and the digital economy, was a former legislative aide to the late U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords (R-Vt.). When contacted by email, Scott told HuffPost that “this is a very difficult time for our family and I don’t have any comment.”
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Don't try to tell me the only way left is up.
There's always more down!
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4/5/2018, 9:38 pm
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