Hartley: You suck, but the love group loves you anyway
Opinion | December 16, 2016
Todd Hartley
I'm With Stupid
There's nothing worse about Donald Trump, I feel, than his penchant for lashing out at people with his tweets. It's so pathetic. Seriously, did we elect a mean girl for president? All hail the cyberbully-in-chief.
Bad as that is, though, what's much, much worse is how Trump supporters, or people pretending to be Trump supporters, then attack those people online and over the phone and threaten to rape them or kill their families. If you've ever done that, even as what you thought was a joke, you're sick and you need help.
Last year, an 18-year-old college student in New Hampshire told Trump she didn't think he was a friend to women. Trump tweeted about the incident, calling her "arrogant" and "nasty." Soon after that, the young woman started receiving harassing phone calls, emails and Facebook messages, including one that threatened to "stomp her head on the curb and urinate in her bloodied mouth."
More recently, a union boss named Chuck Jones correctly pointed out that Trump only helped keep 800 Carrier jobs in Indiana and not 1,100, as Trump claimed. Trump responded with a Twitter hissy fit, and within 30 minutes Jones was receiving threatening phone calls and messages telling him "you better keep an eye on your kids" and "we're coming for you." It's like Trump was Mr. Burns releasing the hounds.
To me, there's only one logical response to scuzzballs who use social media and email to threaten people: We need to do away with internet anonymity. I know that may be a pipe dream, but we need to at least try. If everyone had to own their words and could be held accountable, I guarantee you most of the trolls and other jackasses would disappear.
I know, for those of you who frequent X-rated chat sites, that it would be disappointing to find out that you're all married, middle-aged guys, and I'm sorry for that, but I feel that would be a small price to pay for personal accountability in the cyberworld. Sadly, though, that's never going to happen, is it? There's really just no way you could ensure that everyone is who they claim to be, so we're stuck with trolls and scuzzballs forever. Yippee.
With that in mind, here's what I propose we do: You know how there are hate groups? I think we need to start love groups. Fight fire with syrup. It's sort of like a good guy with a gun fighting a bad guy with a gun, except that the good guy's gun fires Skittles instead of bullets.
The way it would work is that when some tool threatens to stomp a teenager's head on the curb, love-group hackers would figure out who the tool really is, and then love-group members from around the world would flood the tool's voicemail, email and social media accounts with messages of love.
An example might go something like this: I say Trump is a buffoon. Some classy Trump sycophant threatens to rip out my guts and poop on them. Love-group hackers reveal that the threatener is a redneck from Mississippi, and then gay Muslims from France and countries the redneck can't pronounce send the redneck emails saying things like, "You may hate me because I'm not exactly like you, but I love you anyway."
The key to the whole strategy is volume. If only one gay French Muslim sends our hypothetical redneck a love note, the redneck will just respond with threatening messages. But if thousands of gays, Jews, Muslims, people of color and pretty much anyone who isn't a straight, white male send that redneck love messages, it'll make his head explode.
Actually, no, it probably won't. And it probably won't make the redneck suddenly stop being angry at everyone else. But at least it'll keep him so busy responding furiously to all the love messages that he won't have time to troll anybody else.
So that's the basic idea: Form love groups and flood all the rabid Trump lickspittles with messages of devotion and acceptance. Someone should get right on that, preferably someone who can look a random schlub in the eye and say, "I love you," with a straight face. That person is definitely not me.
Yeah, in case you're wondering, I won't be joining any love groups myself. I hold myself personally accountable for my online words, and I'm not going to lie and tell some troll I love him when I really think he's a scumbag.
Todd Hartley reminds you that a love group is not the same as group love. There will be no orgies. To read more or leave a comment, visit http://zerobudget.net.
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