lgf charles: liberal plants and extreme comments

charles has been spending much of his time engaged in pathetic twitter wars and he can always find an eager opponent in andrew breitbart. these tweetwars are generally about comments left at breitbart's various sites which charles has cherry-picked and presented as representative examples breitbart's thinking. now, there are a lot of ways to push back against the sophomoric tactic charles is plying here; perhaps the most dignified method is to point out how sophomoric it is.

but breitbart has chosen instead to come back with the broad allegation that objectionable comments at conservative blogs are the handiwork of progressive agent provacateurs merely impersonating conservatives with the intent of tarnishing the good name of the conservative blog-o-sphere. the problem with this tact is not that such things never occur. i personally caught a specimen of this particular variety of troll by the toe once...

the problem with it is that unless breitbart is able to demonstrate that the specific commenters who posted the specific comments @Lizardoid and @Eboelert are pointing to are in fact liberal trolls, then he isn't doing anything but opening himself up to further derision. the empty, generalized allegation sounds like a conspiracy theory, and even if you are willing to admit that it does happen sometimes, it can't possibly explain away every objectionable comment at every conservative website. breitbart makes it worse by then double-dog-daring charles and boelert to "prove" the negative proposition that liberal trolls don't leave objectionable comments at conservative websites under the guise of false conservative identities. 

charles is over the moon with this, of course. at his blog, he is taking special delight in showily scoffing at the notion that anyone could dream up such a wild conspiracy theory:

139 Charles

It's funny - wingnut blogs are starting to delete racist comments now, but only because they believe leftists are planting them.

141 Obdicut

Do they actually believe their own bullshit about that?

144 Charles

The dumber ones probably do. The smarter ones know they're lying.

it's a whirlwind of fail, but it needn't be so. the phenomenon breitbart cites is known well enough that there is a name for it: moby. the term was first formally defined at .... littlegreenfootballs:

An insidious and specialized type of left-wing troll who visits blogs and impersonates a conservative for the purpose of either spreading false rumors intended to sow dissension among conservative voters, or who purposely posts inflammatory and offensive comments for the purpose of discrediting the blog in question.

...and though today charles scoffs at the very idea of such a thing, it wasn't always so:

One type of troll we see all the time at LGF is known as a “moby,” after the pop star Moby—who publicly advocated posting “false flag” comments at right wing web sites, posing as extremist nut jobs, in order to discredit those sites.

charles has even claimed to have positively identified one or two in the act, as i did above:

...I made an interesting discovery. This stalker was using one of its accounts to post really extreme anti-Palestinian comments at LGF. Comments like this one (now deleted):

When you put your life on the line to protect worthless scum like terrorist scum like all Palestinians are, you get what you deserve. I don’t want to hear any of the PC police come here and say that not all Palestinians are terrorists, yes they are ! Those people are the absolute scum of the earth. It’s like they have some genetic mutation in all of them. We need a final solution to the “Palestinian question ”, if you know what I mean.

That comment was deleted within a few minutes of being posted, of course. “Final solution,” indeed. 

But the important thing to note here is: this creep was what we call a “moby,” calculatedly posting over the top comments to discredit LGF. In truth, as you can see by following the link to the “Anti-Neocons” site above, this stalker is rabidly pro-Palestinian—but it was posting rabidly anti-Palestinian comments at LGF. This is solid proof that at least some of the comments at LGF are being planted with deliberate intent to deceive and defraud.

in fact, as i noted elsewhere, this sort of claim was a major component of charles' defense strategy when comments at his own blog prompted an fbi hate crimes investigation. perhaps for breitbart's part in these little twitter battles, rather than try to get charles to grant him a premise he's disinclined to, instead let everybody witnessing know that charles knows for a fact that the premise is valid and disputes it dishonestly.