Mike Huckabee: Stop Feeding the Troll

Recently Mike Huckabee said he doesn’t approve of the gay “lifestyle” but he would be friends with gay people. While Mike's movie is full of plot holes that I would like to explore more deeply, I’d like to point out that this isn’t the dumbest thing said by a conservative in recent years. It’s not even in the top ten. Who could forget Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” or Michelle Bachman’s whole witchcraft tirade or Todd Akin’s asinine “legitimate” rape comments? Oh, and of course our beloved Joni Ernst and her bread-bag clad footsies. Need I go on? No, Mike Huckabee is more like an internet troll. (I am imagining him dressed as a treasure troll with bright pink Don King hair.)

As you already know because you’ve been keeping up with me on Facebook, I have already rejected Mike’s overtures to friendship. (No, Mike, I don’t want to hang out with you. I’m busy washing my cat for the next six years.)  If you’re not yet friends with me on Facebook don’t fret. Simply send me a friend request. I’ll probably accept it. Unless you’re bat-crap crazy, or an idiot, or Mike Huckabee. Sorry, I said that three times. Actually, I will probably still accept friend requests from idiots and crazy people. Facebook friends aren’t the same as real friends by the way, so don’t worry, I may stalk you on the internet but probably not in real life.

As I was saying, Mike is a troll and I know something about trolls. Trolls have been around for as long as the internet has been around. I recall being involved in an online community in the early 2000s in which we had a barely literate bible-thumping troll who would come around regularly spouting incoherent nonsense on our message board. (That’s an old-timey comments section with multiple posts.) This troll was actually sort of clever in that it would create a new screen name every time it got banned from the site. This led to problems because community members would accidentally engage the troll in conversation before realizing what it was. Important conversation threads got smeared with troll goo and had to be abandoned.

I ended up creating a separate user handle, Spiderman, and would post that my spidey sense was tingling any time there was a suspicious new user saying hateful things. This was an early warning system, which kept everyone else away from the troll post, effectively “shutting that whole thing down.” This works for internet trolling. It is not a pregnancy prevention method, Todd. The community thrived under the friendly neighborhood Spiderman’s gentle warnings and the troll lost its ability to sneak a seat at the grown-ups’ table.

In summation, gay is not a lifestyle, conservatives say some stupid sh!t, and don’t feed the trolls.