conservative politics - The Art of the Prank

The op-ed site Quillette has risen to prominence in the Trump-era conservative firmament by condemning progressive orthodoxies around race and gender, providing a platform for accused sexual predators, defending “Google Memo” author James “Fired4Truth” Damore, and promoting the “Sokal Squared” hoax, an effort to discredit academic disciplines by categorizing them as “grievance studies.”

This week, the site took a blow to its own credibility when left-aligned mischief-maker “Archie Carter” submitted a critique of the Democratic Socialists of America littered with lies, cliches, and errata. The piece was promptly published and promptly retracted by Quillette, leaving leftist publications Alternet and Jacobin (along with broad swaths of Twitter) to gloat over the fallout.

Will Sommer, a journalist/provocateur focused on far-right movements, scored an interview with the hoaxer.

Quillette Duped by Left-Wing Hoaxer Posing as Communist Construction Worker
by Will Sommer
The Daily Beast
August 9, 2019

Construction worker and avowed Leninist Archie Carter has plenty of gripes with the Democratic Socialists of America, the left-wing group that’s enjoyed a new wave of popularity during the Trump era.

In an essay published Thursday on the conservative op-ed website Quillette, Carter declared that DSA had been overrun with overeducated, oversensitive college graduates, blinding itself to the true needs of the working class.

“DSA is doomed,” Carter wrote.

Carter’s piece seemed like exactly the kind of argument that’s turned Quillette, a self-described “platform for free thought,” into a hotbed for the right-wing online “Intellectual Dark Web” movement. Carter had impeccable blue-collar bona fides, with his Quillette bio describing him as a committed union member who’s always “watching the Mets blow a lead.”

But there’s one problem with Carter’s story: He doesn’t exist.

DSA members started picking holes in Carter’s story almost as soon it went live on Quillette. New York City’s DSA local couldn’t find any record of a member, current or former, named Archie Carter. And while Carter claimed to have participated in sit-in protests as part of his DSA work, the group hadn’t organized sit-ins in New York in years.

By Thursday evening, Quillette had retracted Carter’s essay, saying Carter had failed to “supply answers to our follow-up questions in timely fashion.” Read more.

From Peter Maloney:

Stinger: James O”™Keefe”™s Greatest Hits
by Zev Chafets
The New York Times
July 27, 2011

The temperature was hovering near 90 degrees on the afternoon of Memorial Day when James O”™Keefe III emerged from the woods and ambled over to my car. He was tall and thin, with pale skin and matted reddish hair. When his mug shot ran in the papers, some people told him he looked like Matthew Modine. Others said Lee Harvey Oswald. On the day I met him, he wore muddy work boots, filthy jeans and, despite the heat, a long-sleeved shirt. “Keeps the mosquitoes off,” he said. All day he was in the outback of a regional park just west of the Hudson, breaking rocks with a pickax to construct a trail. As a boy he was an Eagle Scout, but this wasn”™t a nature project. O”™Keefe, the man whose video stings helped take down high-ranking people at National Public Radio and led to the demise of Acorn, the nation”™s biggest grass-roots community organizing group, was doing federal time.

Eighteen months ago O”™Keefe and three confederates, two dressed as telephone repairmen, walked into the New Orleans office of Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. This was during the debate over President Obama”™s health-care plan, and angry opponents of the bill, which Landrieu supported, claimed their calls weren”™t being answered. Landrieu”™s staff said the voice-mail system was not working properly because of high call volume, and O”™Keefe”™s guys were out to get her staff to say that the phones were really fine while he captured the exchange on film. Similar strategies worked well in the past, but this time he was arrested and brought before a federal judge. In the end, he pleaded to a misdemeanor charge of entering federal property under false pretenses, paid a $1,500 fine and was sentenced to three years of probation and 100 hours of community service. Continue reading “The New York Times on Conservative Sting Artist James O’Keefe”

Tag: conservative politics

Right-Wing Website Dosed With Own Medicine

The New York Times on Conservative Sting Artist James O’Keefe