For starters, as an olive branch to insulated and often-retarded #Resistance journalists everywhere, I would like to give this lady all credit possible for a.) agreeing to meet a Deplorable in person and b.) not totally but only kind of turning the encounter into a smear-job hit piece like it certainly would have if the opportunity ever presented itself for, say, a Taylor Lorenz.
Jen Golbeck, according to her official bio, is a caricature of a hyper-elite corporate media liberal:
A professor at the University of Maryland where she studies extremism, social media, malicious online behavior, and artificial intelligence. She writes the MAGAReport, a newsletter reporting on the far right with a focus on trends and plans for violence. She splits her time between Washington, D.C. and the Florida Keys.
Jen’s heart, we learn, is so hardened that she began an online interaction with a real MAGA supporter whom, by her own account, she refused to believe to be a real person, assuming presumably it was one of those anti-Democracy™ Putin bots Hillary Clinton is obsessed with.
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Via HuffPost (emphasis added):
I was pretty sure this tweet, sent in response to a recent essay I published on HuffPost detailing my summer interviewing people at Donald Trump rallies, was written by a bot. It had all the telltale signs: mudslinging; a username consisting of a first name followed by a bunch of numbers; and the “MAGA” sign-off.
“Thank you for your comment, name bunchanumbers!” I replied ― to which the account responded: “You are welcome. I have lived in MD a long time and have never seen anyone as biased and full of shit as you are. MAGA.”
We continued to tweet back and forth at each other a few times. I asked for croissant recipes and answers to math questions in hopes of getting the AI I believed to be running the bot to reveal itself. Instead, I eventually got a reply I never saw coming: “Let me take you to lunch next week and discuss how you can help Make America Great Again! My treat. MAGA.”
This was a first for me. As a journalist and researcher who has spent much of the past decade studying the psychology of far-right movements, I’d interacted with countless MAGA die-hards, but none of them had ever invited me to a meal. I was intrigued, so I agreed, and within an hour we had exchanged cell numbers and made a date.
Again, taking her account at face value, Jen deserves credit for making the date happen, as she explains below — it would have been far easier and more convenient for her to just write him off.
Maybe she just wanted a free lunch (although I imagine she gets paid handsomely for her HuffPost propaganda) and the opportunity to finesse a smear job out of the experience in the process, but maybe, if we’re giving her the benefit of the doubt, she was genuinely interested in dialogue.
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Continuing:
We met on a late Tuesday morning just outside D.C. at Parkway Deli in Silver Spring, Maryland...
My friends and colleagues know about the work I do, but when I told them I was lunching with a MAGA guy I met on X (formerly Twitter), they were worried for my safety* (and, in a few cases, my sanity). Two people offered to come to the restaurant and covertly keep an eye on the situation. I later learned that his friends were also opposed to our meetup. He told me they were convinced I was going to doxx him and ruin his life. That is never my goal when I meet with a subject — no matter what their political beliefs are — so I’m not using his name in this essay. Instead, I’ll only refer to him as “Bunchanumbers.”
Bunchanumbers is an energetic family man in his mid-50s with swept-back silver hair who looked comfortable in his shirt and tie. We kicked off our conversation noting that we both split our time between homes in Florida and Maryland. We ordered bagels, plus bacon and iced tea for him. We chatted about how long we’d each been married, where we went to college, and how he takes care of his aging parents and finds fulfillment in helping people…
Bunchanumbers is earnest in his belief that Trump’s policies are best for the country, and that we will be more united and prosperous under a second Trump term. I was impressed with how much he reads and internalizes information (and, yes, misinformation).
*I guarantee this lady half or fully expected a guy in camo fatigues with an AR to show up and start shooting at random with a strong bias towards any minorities he found. Such is the caricature of flyover people that an individual of Jen’s demographic profile typically embraces, not knowing any of them in real life.
My liberal aunt, once, in an event that I have recounted before, was informed by my grandfather that a church had burned down in Topeka, Kan. Without skipping a beat, her rapid-fire follow-up was: “Was it a black church?” (It wasn’t, and the fire was an accident, not arson.)
These are the labyrinthine machinations of the liberal hivemind. So kudos to Jen for at least, tepidly, beginning their deconstruction.
