A year ago, this column introduced you to the army of liberal trolls who propagate, propagandize and proselytize progressive opinions online. Liberal trolls are the legions of left-wing shills who can be counted on to shriek Democrat mythology at every utterance on social media, blogs, website comment areas and so on. Liberal trolling got so bad on this very news site, in fact, that WND was forced to take steps to deal with individuals who did nothing but trawl through the comments fields of our news stories and columns, spewing hatred, threats and wide-eyed adoration for Glorious Leader Obama. Trolling is, in other words, an incredibly common thing, and the term has passed into common parlance.
The problem with this, however, is that “trolling” has now become some monolithic concept, not unlike “hate speech,” “racism,” “sexism,” or a variety of other liberal bogeymen. To accuse someone of trolling is the new scarlet letter, meant to dismiss them and marginalize them (at least in the eyes of the leftists). With true liberal hypocrisy, of course, it is the left that shouts down all opposition, denounces and insults all dissent and – most recently – seizes authoritarian control of the Internet in the guise of “net neutrality.” In other words, while the libs march about the Internet attempting to form speech vigilance committees (remember the Obama administration’s various attempts to have conservatives “turned in” for expressing opinions, online or in real life, that Obama considers heresy?) and punish retroactively any citizen who has ever uttered a politically incorrect word in his or her lifetime, they are themselves trolling conservatives and libertarians with their progressive hate.
“Remember that Mozilla’s CEO lost his job because he once held an opinion that is considered by liberals to be politically incorrect,” I wrote a year ago. “…This is a slippery slope because liberals already feel quite free to threaten conservatives with death. They particularly enjoy threatening conservative women with rape. And now that there are liberal voices calling for the imprisonment of those who ‘deny’ man-made climate change, does it really take a leap of logic to see where this leads society? If the demonization, marginalization and persecution of conservative opinion does not stop, we’re one short chute away from a world in which liberals might actually screw up the courage to murder the conservatives they hate so much.”
Express this opinion, point out this fact, challenge progressives on social media even once, and you will forever be the recipient of an avalanche of liberal trolling, threats and lies. Take, for example, one Michael Ross, the liberal operative profiled in “An army of liberal trolls.” A year after that column was published, Mr. Ross is still traveling the Internet denouncing conservatives (myself chiefly among them). Calling me a “shrill hell-whore,” a “miserable little turd,” a “wingnut psychotic” and various other terms of endearment, Mr. Ross opines at his blog that all conservatives are bad, that all conservative opinion is conspiracy and hate speech, and that it is terribly unfair that things he has posted to the Internet should ever be mentioned by anyone with access to Google and five minutes to spare (Mr. Ross is, you’ll recall somewhat embarrassingly, a “furry” who once described his “fursona” as the “tiger of truth”). Mr. Ross even even claimed that I personally had dispatched unnamed operatives to conduct denial-of-service attacks on the discussion sites he frequents. “A few people from other websites have confirmed to me that they too are now dealing with harassment from Phil Elmore and/or his supporters,” he wrote online.
Mr. Ross is just one example of the trolling you’ll experience if you express online opinions that are not rigidly in line with left-wing talking points. What we forget, however, is that all this talk of trolling has consequences in the “meatspace” of actual life. For example, in Britain – whose government has taken an increasingly Orwellian approach to speech codes and punishment for political incorrectness – you can go to prison for saying the wrong thing online. Patrick Smith, writing for progressive propaganda sheet BuzzFeed, explains, “More and more people are being arrested and convicted for Internet trolling. According to figures from Big Brother Watch, 6,329 people across the U.K. were charged or cautioned for malicious communications-related offenses between November 2010 and November 2013. Of these, at least 4,259 were charged and 2,070 were cautioned, and 355 cases involved social media.” Of course, often these offenses involve the making of threats, which is not free speech at all. The cases are nonetheless repeatedly presented as arrests and convictions for trolling as such.
Then there is the recent case involving former Major League pitcher Curt Schilling. When abusive statements were posted to his daughter on the micro-blogging site Twitter, Schilling showed the world that his Google-Fu is strong. He searched the usernames of the people involved, tracked down several of them in real life and shamed them for their behavior, causing at least one of them to be fired and another to be suspended from school. The incident illustrates beautifully that running your mouth online does not occur in a vacuum. There are always consequences for speech, even though our default attitude seems to be that talk conducted on the Internet is somehow less than real.
Many instances of trolling are apolitical, but many more center on nothing but ideology. This trend is worrisome if only because the libs already dominate both popular culture and the Internet. Obama’s control of the Web only makes it that much easier to harass conservatives online for holding their opinions – while simultaneously and falsely accusing conservative and libertarians of “trolling,” “stalking” and “harassment” whenever we challenge progressive ideas or confront a lib with an opinion he dislikes. This is not a theory; it is a reality … and it’s a reality we are all going to have to come to terms with if we are to continue expressing our opinions online and in social media.
Media wishing to interview Phil Elmore, please contact [email protected].
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