How to Spot A DNC Troll (2020 edition)

With the collapse of the Bernie 2020 campaign, the DNC has unleashed a new army of trolls. Just as in 2016, they've descended on every progressive, socialist, or Bernie campaign they can find. Their mission: shut down those groups. Sow dissension and despair. Crush the progressive movement.

But we don't have to just give in. There are ways to spot a troll. Here are a number of typical troll warning signs:

Fear-mongering

Fear (and deception) are the primary weapons of the troll, but fear of Trump is by far their first choice. The DNC has been weaponizing fear of Trump for five years now. If a post is all about how terrible Trump is, and doesn't reference progressive goals, you've almost certainly found a troll. "I'll support Biden now because Trump, but wait until 2024!". Sure you will, troll.

"But what about the Senate?" is very "in" this year. For some reason trolls assume that we'll buy the idea that if the Democrats took over the Senate, they'd enact progressive goals and policies - as if the last forty years haven't proven over and over that they'll do whatever the oligarchs want. Only a troll would try that arguement.

"Concern" about the Supreme Court is another classic troll topic. It completely ignores Joe Biden's role in attacking Anita Hill and getting Clarence Thomas confirmed - not to mention his support of corporatist judges over his entire career. If someone starts talking about Ruth Bader Ginsberg and "losing" the SCOTUS, odds are they're a troll. And why haven't they noticed that the Supreme Court is already lost to corporate "justice", with the happy assent of the Democratic leadership? (Because they're paid not to notice, that's why.)

A fourth form of fear-mongering is for the troll to accuse anyone who questions their logic of being a Russian agent. Even if it doesn't silence the questioner, they'll almost certainly feel it necessary to defend themselves...and the whole discussion will be diverted into the Russian issue, leaving the troll's original "poison pill" argument there to fester.

The Pied Piper 

"We must follow Bernie". "I'm listening to Bernie - why aren't you?" "Bernie has a master plan - trust him!". Pure trollsign. No progressive signed a blood oath to follow Bernie into extinction. We didn't join a cult. And we won't mindlessly follow Bernie over the DNC cliff. We supported him because he stood for the same principles that we do. Now that he's given in to the DNC, we're under no obligation to join him. The DNC may want to believe that we're sheep, but they're wrong - I hope.

Occasionally you'll find a smarter troll, one that operates under deeper cover. They'll spend some time making "good" posts to build up credibility. There's a good chance that they'll be lazy about it, though, and just copy and paste memes. Once they've established their bona fides, they start "evolving" towards full troll status. It takes a keen eye to spot in the early stages, but once they're out in the open you can identify them. If it talks like a troll, it IS a troll - no matter what history it has.

Bernie Bros redux

"You're all so RUDE!". Attacking progressives who won't go along with capitulation and voting for Biden is another popular tactic. This usually takes the form of a dramatic announcement that the troll, who claims all sorts of progressives bona fides, is outraged and repulsed by the rude, crude, hateful talk of people in the group who oppose Biden. But don't worry. The troll will be back right away - using a new name, of course.

 

False Equivalence

Some trolls push an "enlightened" talking point: that no one in the group should be allowed to promote ANY candidate. This isn't an ideal outcome for them, but it's just an excuse to principle-shame progressives who resist the DNC candidate. But why shouldn't we try to persuade people not to vote for the candidate who undermined democracy and stole our votes? And whose fossil-fuel-friendly climate and fracking policies will literally kill off the human race? That he's a almost certainly a rapist is just the cherry on top.

Insults

"Take your ball and go home." "You're acting like a baby." "Adults realize that sometimes you have to make compromises." "Purity test much?". "You're Putin's lapdog." All classic attacks used by trolls to get under our skin. If they can get us pissed off, they're halfway to victory. Don't get mad - report them instead!

Hit & Run Posting

Always remember that the goal, from a troll's point of view, is to stir up trouble and waste our time. When someone (usually without much of a posting history to the group) comes in, posts something inflammatory, and then doesn't respond to most or any comments on what they said, it's a safe bet that they're a troll. And now they're off in another progressive group, doing a hit-and-run there.

Useful Idiots

Not every troll is necessarily a paid professional. Part of the troll's job is to recruit and encourage the development of "useful idiots": weak-minded people who frequent progressive groups, but are easily persuaded by DNC propaganda. They often start parroting the DNC line, even working together with trolls without realizing it. Make no mistake: it doesn't matter if a DNC troll knows what they're doing and who they're really working for. If they're trolling, they're the enemy whether they're paid or just stupid. Treat them as such.

The Swarm

Some trolls work in groups. These can be particularly difficult to handle. They'll support each other, do their best to protect each other, and may even start accusing those who point out what they're doing of being trolls themselves. The goal in such cases is usually to work the moderators, wear them down, get them so overwhelmed that they'll either give up protecting the group or start banning anyone who complains about anything. This generally happens when the a group has been targeted for takedown.

Troll Stages

In the initial stage, the purpose of the troll is to persuade, propagandize, and inspire useful idiots. Their targets at this point are the members of the group. Call this the "infestation" stage, if you like. They'll keep their heads down, and they'll be relatively rare. Only the clumsiest troll will be easily detected.

After a point, the inception approach gives way to a more active, hostile approach. Trolls become more numerous and more blatant. Presumably more funds have been allocated to online propaganda by the DNC at this point; usually there has been a triggering incident, such as the recent suspension of his campaign by Bernie Sanders. In any case, troll tactics shift. The goal now is to make the group an unpleasant place to be; for this reason, I call this the "curdling" stage. Arguments become common. Battle lines are drawn. Schisms are set up and stealthily encouraged. At this point accusations of trolling become much more common, and in some cases the most outspoken progressives will find themselves accused of being trolls by the trolls. The target is now both the members, and the moderators or administrators. Both are to be driven away or to at least be made reluctant to participate. Moderators in particular should feel overwhelmed at this point, trying to handle constant complaints and arguments. In large groups, it's typical for many mods to quit or simply stop moderating.

We now enter the "takeover" stage. If there's a need for moderators (which is likely), eager new volunteers pop up. At least some of these will be trolls. While their initial actions may appear to be fair, they'll do everything they can to bring "friends" on as moderators. It won't be long before they begin to purge progressives, particularly those who catch on quickly to trolls. Schisms and battle lines in the group harden. At this point the group is becoming actively toxic. Members start leaving in larger numbers, some announcing their departure, others simply fleeing. The new moderators begin purging real progressives wholesale, generally labeling them as troublemakers. The group can no longer accomplish anything positive, not even in terms of boosting morale.

In some cases at this point groups have been simply bought. In 2016 a number of progressive group administrators came forward to announce that they'd been offered a large sum of money (typically $10,000.00) to either close their groups down, or to hand over control of the group to the purchaser - presumably, someone working for the DNC through David Brock's army of paid trolls ("Correct the Record"). The DNC has spent millions of dollars on Brock's services. And now they're spending $175 million - supposedly against Trump, but Brock's specialty has always been attacking progressives online.

It's clear that at least some admins accepted those offers. Some groups quickly swung 180 degrees, quickly moving from supporting Bernie to Hillary within a few days. Groups with thousands or tens of thousands of members were reduced to mere hundreds, with the new moderators combing through members' history and banning anyone who ever said anything negative about Hillary or the DNC. Within weeks (or less), nothing is left but a hollow shell. Often the group is simply deleted.

If the group can't be bought, it's scheduled for the takedown phase. At this point the masks and gloves are off. Photos may be posted which violate Facebook's terms of service (or whatever social media the group is on; the troll phenomenon is hardly limited to Facebook!). In 2016 extremely offensive photographs were posted by trolls, immediately reported to Facebook, and the groups were inevitably shut down. This technique is particularly preferred shortly before elections.

While the group owner can protest to Facebook and request reinstatement, remember that Facebook is owned by an oligarch itself: Mark Zuckerberg, who is anything but shy about abusing his power to crush movements that threaten his status. Although groups are taken down immediately when attacked, reinstating them can take weeks or months...or never. In any case, by the time they're allowed back online it's too late. The election is over.

Another form of takedown is to simply swamp the group with new troll members. This is a relatively rare approach, presumably because it's expensive. It's much easier to simply post some grossly offensive photos to a group and have it taken down that way.

So what can you do when you have a troll infestation?

Step one is to recognize them. A troll can't troll without trolling; as long as you have a good eye for troll activity, there's no easy way for them to hide.

But just recognizing a troll isn't enough. You have to deal with them. Some people believe that they can argue with trolls, convince them of the error of their ways; this is both arrogant and foolish. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair. They aren't there to discuss: they are there for a paycheck. There's no honesty in them. You might as well try to argue with a bullet being shot at your head by an enemy soldier. They simply don't care. I sometimes suspect that at least some who want to "discuss" issues with trolls are trolls themselves.

Some people argue that trolls are protected by the First Amendment. That's simply wrong. Facebook and other social media services are privately owned; the First Amendment doesn't apply (perhaps it should, but that's a different issue. Personally I'd argue that Facebook should be turned over to public ownership by the members). In any case, the First Amendment doesn't require that a group leave itself open to attack by mercenaries. It's the height of arrogance to insist on leaving a group open to abuse by hostile agents in order to prove moral superiority and supposed understanding of Constitutional rights.

Time and again I've seen groups leave themselves open to trolls in the name of tolerance, the First Amendment, and increasing understanding. In every case, those groups have ended up being destroyed. And that's what the trolls want; to make smoking wreckage out of every possible group that could lay the seeds for resisting the DNC and the oligarchy that they serve. It always happens.

The only effective response to trolls is simple: stamp them out. Fumigate them. Treat them like the cockroaches they are. This puts a huge burden on group moderators, and a responsibility on members to be alert and report trolls. I've written this guide to help progressives to recognize trolls for that reason. Recognize that your moderators work for you, and that they represent the group's primary defense against trolls; support them! Volunteer to be a mod, if you have the time. Think of it as paying the group back for what you've gotten out of it. And paying it forward, for others.

The DNC spends millions of dollars to shut down progressives online. They wouldn't do that if they didn't fear us. That's a comforting thought...and good reason to fight them, and their trolls.

Good luck!

To "Vote Blue No Matter Who":

Trump and Biden are both tools of the elite that is squeezing lower classes to death and working overtime to make the planet uninhabitable. You've fallen for the "good cop, bad cop" routine, and are trying browbeat the people who've caught on to the scam into adopting your delusion.

Presumably you do this so that you can feel virtuous and self-righteous. That's nice. Your current role is effectively persuading abuse victims into staying with their abuser. Don't expect a lot of gratitude.

Again:

A) Biden will almost certainly lose to Trump. He's a lifelong corporate servant, responsible for countless deaths as a career-long warmonger, and has been trying to gut Social Security and Medicare ever since he got into public office. He is in every sense except the literal one, a Republican.

B) As if that weren't enough, he is also clearly suffering from dementia. He should be in a nursing home, not the White House with his finger on the button. In that regard, he is again no better than Trump.

C) His policies on climate change will kill off the human race as surely as Trump's will. That's because they are the same in all but cosmetic ways. They both work for the oligarchs. It wouldn't even cross their minds to try to stop the extraction of fossil fuels or take any of the major actions necessary for the human race to live.

What you are advocating will kill off the entire species and many others. You are literally trying to shame us into approving the murder of every child who will ever be born from this day forward. More than that; when the human race dies, not a single goddamn policy that you claim to support will matter.

Identity politics? Everybody's the same color when they're dead: bone white and ash gray. Genitalia, gender preference, and gender identification are less then meaningless to the decomposed.

Immigration? The dead don't migrate, and it doesn't matter to them if they're in a cage or on a golden throne; they'll rot equally wherever they are.

The Supreme Court? It's been in the pocket of the oligarchs for a long time, and now is even more blatantly so with the assent of the DNC. So is the federal judiciary. Everything was lost long ago, because of sellout Democrats such as yourselves.

So if you think that you're going to get any of us to vote for your senile old crook, I suggest you hold your breath and wait.

What We Can DO

It occurs to me that _if we all do the same thing_, we can make a huge impact. If all of us who see that humanity is going to die if we don't take drastic action can agree on a course of action, we can be effective. We all tried supporting Bernie. That didn't work, but it wasn't because we failed; it's because we were fighting on the system's terms.

OF COURSE we lost. The game was rigged from the beginning. But if we fight on our OWN terms...we can win.

The occupy Movement scared the living s*** out of the establishment, both parties. They rolled out tanks in a coordinated nationwide attack to shut it down. They revealed the iron fist behind the velvet glove, and they usually try to avoid doing that. Why did they take that chance?

Because Occupy wasn't playing their game. They were beyond the control of the Establishment. They met face to face, making it harder for the establishment to monitor or troll them. They had no leaders (despite the best efforts of the Democratic party to claim leadership), so there was no one to corrupt or intimidate. They met in public spaces, so that the vast oppressed people of this country could see them and know that they weren't alone. THAT'S why Obama coordinated the nationwide crushing of the Occupy Movement: they were a real threat to the power of the elite.

What does that tell us?

I think it tells us that we have the power to threaten them, if we use it right. More than that: we can overthrow them. It's just a matter of fighting on our ground and our terms, not theirs.

Right now there's a hell of a lot of people who are (like me) angry and scared. There are more of us than we realize. A hell of a lot of people understand that what's happening is going to end up killing us all. So if we all can find a way to act together effectively...without being co-opted by Democratic groups or leaders or allowing trolls to overrun us...

We can win. All it will take is to figure out what approach to take. Maybe we need to revive the Occupy Movement, with improvements so that it can't be wiped out by denying it access to public spaces. Maybe we all need to join something like Extinction Rebellion or some other mass protest group. I think it's pretty clear that politics is not the way to go. Starting a new party is a nice fantasy, but it by itself will never be able to get the kind of power and traction in time to save billions of lives. That's not to say that we can't have a new progressive political party. It's just saying that depending on any one angle of attack is a mistake. We are multitudes; the numbers are on our side. We can take more than one avenue of approach at the same time. A new Occupy. Mass protests. A new political party, maybe. But altogether, the goal has to be survival. Because it's down to that, now.

"Fair Share" for Billionaires?

There has been a lot of talk lately about getting the oligarchs to pay their "fair share".

But they can't. These fortunes are founded on robbery and crimes on an unimaginable scale. How many lives has each billionaire ruined by sucking wealth upwards from the working class? How many lives have been blighted by loss of funds to education, special needs, the arts, and the sciences?

How many people have killed themselves due to debts and depression from living in a society that is being squeezed to death for every last penny?

How many people have developed cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and other "diseases of the poor" due to the pollution that we are all forced to breathe, eat, and drink so that these psychotic billionaires can continue to amass more and more?

The dead can never be made whole. Neither can children with lead poisoning. Or any of the other millions of victims of these monsters.

It's not a matter of them starting to pay their "fair share", although even that is something that the elite would die rather than allow. It's reparations for mass murder and torture. It's making a planet whole that they have set on fire with their unbounded greed.

There is no way that they can repay what they have stolen. There is no punishment severe enough to somehow balance their crimes. They cannot make right the wrongs that they've done. Even death and the death of their families, along with complete confiscation of everything they all have, wouldn't come close.

You can't repay one single baby for a nervous system that suffers from lead contamination. It can't be done.

The only possible action for a just people is that the oligarchs and their servants in politics and the media - all of them - should lose everything of material value that they have, and spend the rest of their lives as the poorest people on Earth. But still with food and shelter; because we aren't like them.

Let them spend the rest of their lives working to try to restore the Earth, and make good a fraction of the damage that they've done.

The DNC Online War Against Bernie

The DNC launched a massive attack online yesterday. All of a sudden posts from strangers appeared in progressive and Bernie groups across Facebook. They proclaimed that that we had to "vote blue no matter who". Their use of phrases like "Bernie Bros" was another giveaway. The whole thing was blatantly coordinated. One day nothing, the next day a flood of David Brock's trolls. It was just like 2016.

Do you remember 2016? I do. Every online group for progressives was hit by wave after wave of trolls, supporting each other and parroting the latest line of attack. Admins were approached to sell control of their groups; the going price was reportedly $10,000 for a healthy group. Many of them DID sell out, and those groups quickly converted to Hillary groups. New mods were brought on, and anyone who protested the new policies were purged without warning. Posting histories were reviewed and used as a basis for purging, too.

In groups where the admin wouldn't sell out, mods would get in somehow and abuse the hell out of their powers. They'd suspect or censor pro-Bernie posts and posters, and protect pro-Hillary and pro-DNC posts. Or new members would appear, post child pornography, and then report the group to Facebook. The groups were usually shut down. It was, frankly, frustrating as hell.

But it was effective. The DNC put at least $10,000,000.00 into online action - probably much more - and they shut down or crippled the vast majority of Bernie groups online. Progressives became refugees, a people without a home.

Today's attack shows that the DNC is sticking with the old playbook. We can expect them to escalate. We can protect ourselves somewhat by reporting DNC trolls to the admins - NOT to Facebook - and by the admins acting vigorously to ban the trolls. It won't be easy. But it has to be done.

Here's the key takeaway: The DNC is doing this for a reason. They want to see if they can shut us down again. *That means that they are planning to cheat us (and Bernie) out of the nomination again.*

We can't let them do that. We have to fight back and stay strong. We need to become good at recognizing enemy action and agents. They're not that good at disguising themselves, so this is something we can all do.

Social media is just one front of our political revolution. But it matters. If we show them that they can't silence us, can't get us to attack each other or accept their sleazy framing of issues, we can win. And that just might make them thing twice about cheating us out of our votes.

We need to make them afraid of us. We need to stand up against them. If we don't, they'll crush us into the dust. And that means the end not just of Bernie's campaign, but almost certainly the end of a future for the human race.

Warren's backdoor screw job

Elizabeth Warren's proposal is actually a back-door way to make working people pay more without realizing it. Right now, for those who get health care through their employer, part of their compensation is their health insurance cost. Say your health insurance costs $15,000, and you make $50,000; your total compensation is actually $65,000. Under Bernie's plan, your employer would have to give that $15,000 to you as part of your salary, once Medicare for All was implemented. You might pay (for example) $4,000 more per year in taxes, but you would be GETTING $15,000 more per year - PLUS full medical, dental, and vision coverage, with no premiums or co-pays. That's a huge increase.

But Warren wants to take that money and use it to pay for her "Medicare for All". That means that you would lose that $15,000! Ordinary workers will be footing the bill, if they happen to have been getting health insurance through their employer. It's a massive screw-job, carefully engineered to avoid "raising taxes" while nonetheless sticking the working people of America with most of the bill.

That Warren is willing to do that shows just how much she's in the pockets of the elite.

Nancy Pelosi Is Very Concerned

Apparently Nancy Pelosi is very concerned that Democratic candidates might have Democratic positions - except for matters of identity politics and talking about workers rights (as opposed to actually doing anything about them, of course).

But that she ridicules the idea of even trying to shut down the fossil fuel industry in 10 years shows that she really doesn't believe that we are facing potential extinction if drastic action isn't taken about the climate.

Or she just doesn't care. Either way, she might as well be a Republican.