Photo by CHRIS BUCK
PHILADELPHIA MAGAZINE: Jack Posobiec — born in Norristown, proud “Philly kid,” Temple grad, onetime Santorum intern, former WPHT account exec — is a relentless, ruthlessly effective pro-Trump political dirty-tricks operative/fake-news ninja/social media assassin who salts the fields of the Internet with alternative facts and dank counter-factual memes that he blasts out to his 199K Twitter followers at least 20 times a day. Posobiec studied the dark arts of ratfuckery — a Watergate-era term for Nixonian political dirty tricks — at the feet of the master, GOP strategist Roger Stone, who regards him as the torchbearer for his toxic legacy. Stone’s prime directive is, “Attack, attack, attack. Never defend. Admit nothing, deny everything” — a mantra Posobiec has honed like a razor.
Posobiec’s infamy stems in part from his status as one of the prime figures in the #Pizzagate hoax, the viral dissemination of French President Emmanuel Macron’s leaked emails, and the RAPE MELANIA protest-sign fiasco. All of which, when lumped in with the rest of his exponentially expanding body of work — filing a human-rights complaint against a Brooklyn theater’s ladies-only screening of Wonder Woman; standing in front of Auschwitz and lecturing the Anti-Defamation League about the Holocaust; tweeting fake news that fired FBI director James Comey “said under oath that Trump did not ask him to halt any investigation”; smearing net neutrality advocates as satanic porn fiends; tweeting fake news that pro-Trump neo-Nazi James Alex Fields, charged with the second-degree murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, was an “anti-Trump, open borders drug addict” hours after Heyer’s death — has made him the Trump troll the Internet loves to hate.
Young, hip and telegenic, Jack Posobiec is part of a new breed of far-right social media “influencers”—Twitter trolls, YouTube monologists, Medium town criers, Periscope Platos, and the fake newsboys of Facebook. They’ve built massive six-figure online audiences to which they endlessly evangelize the gospel of #MAGA—“Make America Great Again”—over hot cups of liberal tears. Posobiec’s known associates include: date-rape denialist and white genocide alarmist Mike Cernovich; flamboyant controversialist/fame whore/pedophilia apologist Milo Yiannopoulos; tinfoil-hat haberdasher Mike Flynn Jr., the Hillary-hating scion of Trump’s disgraced national security adviser; and Alex Jones, conspiracy nut job whose show, Info Wars, Posobiec has guest-hosted.
“These guys are all proponents of information warfare—a hybrid of regular warfare and psychological operations, or psy ops,” says David Carroll, associate professor of media design at Parsons School of Design. “Their willingness to militarize the media space in the spirit of political warfare, I think, is extremely disturbing and characteristic of what makes these guys different from anything else that’s come before them.” MORE