The big dumb ballad, revisited
When government Twitter trolls gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes back.
When in doubt, write the thing you haven’t read.
To that end, I didn’t want to write about Tru-Anon again — heck, at this point I’m practically over-qualified to self-identify as some “Tru-Anon disinformation expert” on Twitter — yet in the time between publishing The big dumb ballad of Mark Gerretsen: Government Twitter troll, and Canada’s state media apparatus taking issue with being accurately labelled as “government-funded media” (read: losing their minds), the tone and tenor from ‘liberal’ professionals who have more in common with Marjorie Taylor Greene than they care to admit has reached radical new lows.
The last time we here at Acceptable Views caught up with the parliamentary equivalent of a guy who still wears his high school letterman jacket, anonymous strategists were telling us that “his auditioning for a Cabinet spot is just sad. [Gerretsen] dances like a monkey for a job he will never get.”
Well, to borrow from the ending of one of the great American works of fiction, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, wherein the novel’s spiritual antagonist, ‘the judge,’ dances in a saloon following an unspeakable act of vengeance:
Gerretsen’s feet remain light and nimble. He never sleeps; he tweets. He says that he will never tire. He dances in light and in shadow and he believes himself to be a great favourite. He never sleeps, the Twitter troll. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never tire.
Replace the endless cycle of violence with a perpetual state of trolldom, and it’s as fitting an analogy as any. For every Q-Anon-adjacent professional elected down south, a Tru-Anon member has been elected up north. And while there may still be no cure for arrested development, and it’s safe to say that if the PMO were going to take away tweeting privileges they’d have done it already, surely — eventually — a line has to be drawn somewhere.
On April 17th, Mark Gerretsen found what should have been the line. Remarkably, but perhaps not surprisingly, it was met with utter silence from mainstream sources.
Somehow, it wasn’t the dehumanizing language surrounding who is pure enough at Liberal heart to maintain their Canadian citizenship. (And so much for “a Canadian, is a Canadian, is a Canadian,” eh Mark?)
Nor was it the near-militant displays of lack of self-awareness:
It wasn’t even his early spring offer to take independent MP Kevin Vuong out back for a beatdown. (A challenge Vuong surely would have come out on top of, seeing as how he’s a Naval Reservist with a fitness standard beyond just running one’s mouth.)
Desperate for ammunition on an embarrassing day for the Liberal brand, and enraged by some ‘conservative’ trolling coming back the other way, the “Minister of Beatdowns” turned to what appears to be a radical offshoot of the hacking group Anonymous, an international activist and hacktivist collective, known for cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions, government agencies, and corporations.
The threatening retweet, which borrows almost word for word from Gerretsen’s regular personal salvos against the Leader of the Official Opposition, remains up to this day.
Even as a writer who is known to enjoy the odd sh*tpost, retorts of “PeePee,” poo-poo, and ominous warnings aimed at those who have the audacity (!) to oppose statist expansion, handouts to friendly corporations and media, and policies of managed decline that continue to distance the working poor from their Laurentian masters cannot become the standard of decorum on the left end of that Extremely Online horseshoe.
In The big dumb ballad, version 1.0, the conclusion was that at the very least, if his Liberal betters weren’t going to take his phone away, they could at least open up his restricted Twitter replies to “constructive criticism,” but that’s not going to do it either. Ever petulant, the dancing monkey even chooses to view the daily quote-tweet-ratio as a sign of self-worth.
When the subject is this far gone — and is allowed to continue down this path — what notes are there possibly left to give other than “expect for this to get much, much worse”?
Mark Gerretsen finally found the line — and then blew right past it.
That’s supposed to matter, even to “government-funded media,” and even to desperate and intellectually-deficient partisans.
When a government Twitter troll gazes long into the abyss, the abyss gazes back.
I cant believe ( i mean i do but...) he reposted that Anon account. Holy smokes.