According to the Washington Post, amateur sleuths are rallying around their man in an attempt to determine the identity of the whistleblower. Yes, we are here. Trumpers want to support their leader by unmasking a patriot.
It would be funny if it were not so dangerous.
The looming battle over President Trump’s potential impeachment has sparked an online hunt in the far-right corners of the Web as self-styled Internet sleuths race to identify the anonymous person Trump has likened to a treasonous spy.
Their guesses have been scattershot, conspiratorial and often untethered from reality, spanning a wide range of such unlikely contenders as presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and Vice President Pence.
Some of the online commentators and anonymous posters said they have been spurred to action by Trump’s fury, foreshadowing the online clashes that are likely to engulf any upcoming impeachment hearings and the 2020 campaign.
“Carpet bomb the memes. Everywhere,” one anonymous poster on the message board 4chan wrote in response to one of Trump’s angry tweets about the whistleblower. “Time to rise up. Your president has asked for your help.”
Then, this gem:
“The whistleblower is not white,” one 4chan commenter asserted Thursday, probably misreading a part of the complaint in which the whistleblower calls himself or herself a “non-White House official.” “see second set of bullet points on page 3. trump only has a handful of non white staff. I wonder who it might be.”
“We’re seeing all the elements of information warfare play out online during this episode,” said Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the think tank New America. “There’s this crowdsourced manhunt to find out who did it, and once that identity comes out, everything in their life — what they majored in in college, where they like to eat dinner, where their kids went to school — will be pulled out in the hope there is one little nugget that can be weaponized against them.”
After the complaint was made public Thursday morning, pro-Trump commenters guessed the whistleblower is Hispanic or Jewish or Arab or African American and, many were sure, a woman — though rarely did the commenters use such delicate terms. A top choice soon became Susan M. Gordan, a former deputy director of national intelligence, though others thought a more probable candidate is CIA Director Gina Haspel.
More names were mentioned and we know what is going to happen to the people mentioned. And, of course, it is not just individuals:
On Friday, the Washington Examiner spread word of a $50,000 reward offered by two pro-Trump political activists known for smear campaigns, who called the scandal a “national disgrace” and said they hoped identifying the whistleblower would help put “this dark chapter behind us.”
Probably the most chilling part of the article comes in the first quote, above: “The President has asked for your help.”
When? When he discussed how ‘spies’ were punished in the past? When he stated he wanted to know the identity of the persons involved? Of course. That was seen as a call-to-arms by the craziest of the crazy. I sincerely hope that intimidation of a witness will be made one of the articles of impeachment based on Trump’s comments.
The anonymity of the whistleblower must be of paramount concern. Alas, we know ultimately, we will learn the name. Not via the efforts of the crazies mentioned in the article, but through someone in this regime.
I could list the ways in which this is classic, old-school mafia behavior but, well, it is all so self-evident.
This is where we are.