Here Is a Collection of Twitter Trolls Teaching Photoshop to Ann Coulter
Ann Coulter's bullshit conservative troll game is slipping. In her zeal to land a jab against... Twitter? Michelle Obama? Nigerian schoolgirls?... she opened a door for her detractors, and they jumped through it with a two-leg flying kick of Photoshop fury.
The way Coulter's game is supposed to work is 1) she says something bigoted or just plain dumb and trollish, 2) outraged critics say something she can twist as sexist, 3) she positions herself as the victim, 4) she wins. But if she looks like a fucking tone-deaf joke of a demagogue instead of a victim, it doesn't really work.
That's where Twitter comes in. Here's the backstory: Michelle Obama, among others, made the hashtag #bringbackourgirls trend, a viral if superficial way to draw mainstream attention to the plight of the 234 Nigerian teen girls kidnapped by an Islamist militant group called Boko Haram. Never mind that anti-Islam conservatives were the first folks to scream for media attention to this story; the nascent right-wing meme is now that Michelle Obama trivialized the story by hashtagging it. So Ann Coulter responded thusly on Twitter yesterday:
One could read a bunch of racial shit into a tweet like that, but why bother? It's just stupid "Oh my team isn't winning so fuck this fake version of America" sunshine patriotism. It's poor form and poor discourse.
More to the point, it's indicative of how a conservative doesn't get social media. Here is how social media responds.
Uh oh.
Childish? Sure. But that's just the frigging point. Coulter's performance of discursive outrage is not only infantile, it's not even up on 2004-era outrage technologies. If you can't figure out how to win teh Twitterz with an old copy of Adobe Creative Suite, how quaint is your rhetorical position? Play to your strengths, kid: Go back to selling obscene amounts of dumb books to the olds before they all die.