rumps Most Influential White Nationalist Troll Is A Middlebury Grad Who Lives In Manhattan

[still_one]

"rump’s Most Influential White Nationalist Troll Is A Middlebury Grad Who Lives In Manhattan"

Who is Ricky Vaughn? That was one of the big questions for anyone following far-right politics during the 2016 presidential election. The Twitter troll who took his name and avatar from Charlie Sheen’s character in “Major League” was everywhere on social media, an indefatigable circulator of edgy memes and rah-rah Donald Trump boosterism.
And anti-Semitism and white nationalism:

There was no mistaking Ricky Vaughn’s influence. He had tens of thousands of followers, and his talent for blending far-right propaganda with conservative messages on Twitter made him a key disseminator of extremist views to Republican voters and a central figure in the “alt-right” white supremacist movement that attached itself to Trump’s coattails. The MIT Media Lab named him to its list of top 150 influencers on the election, based on news appearances and social media impact. He finished ahead of NBC News, Drudge Report and Stephen Colbert. Mainstream conservatives didn’t know they were retweeting an avowed racist and anti-Semite, but they liked what Ricky Vaughn had to say.
There was no mistaking Ricky Vaughn’s influence. He had tens of thousands of followers, and his talent for blending far-right propaganda with conservative messages on Twitter made him a key disseminator of extremist views to Republican voters and a central figure in the “alt-right” white supremacist movement that attached itself to Trump’s coattails. The MIT Media Lab named him to its list of top 150 influencers on the election, based on news appearances and social media impact. He finished ahead of NBC News, Drudge Report and Stephen Colbert. Mainstream conservatives didn’t know they were retweeting an avowed racist and anti-Semite, but they liked what Ricky Vaughn had to say.

“He did this thing that people connected to organized white nationalism have not been able to do ― walk both sides of the extremist line in the sand,” said Keegan Hankes, a data intelligence expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Ricky Vaughn also played an important role in amplifying disinformation injected into American politics by the Russian government. HuffPost and a team of data scientists known as Susan Bourbaki Anthony that tracks online propaganda analyzed who was retweeting the now infamous Kremlin-controlled Twitter account @TEN_GOP, which consistently praised Trump, attacked Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and churned out a vile medley of racism, Islamophobia and “fake news.”


https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-white-nationalist-troll-ricky-vaughn_us_5ac53167e4b09ef3b2432627

[marble falls]

1. This is dangerous person. He needs his privacy peeled back.

[AmandaRuth]

2. the interesting thing to me is,

from the comments, he has no viable means of income, but lives in Manhattan. So who is paying him? The Mercers?

[Raster]

3. Amid all this infighting, an angry Nehlen dropped Ricky Vaughns real name:

Douglass Mackey.

The name ― with the double-s ― checked out. So did many other details. In October, I’d spoken with Loren Feldman, a filmmaker in Los Angeles who interviewed “Ricky Vaughn” in 2016 for a documentary project. Feldman agreed not to show the far-right troll’s face on camera and never learned his full name. But Ricky Vaughn, whom Feldman described to me as a nervous, slightly built blond man in his mid- to late 20s, had introduced himself as “Doug.” He told Feldman that he was from New England and had gone to a private school and worked in “consulting or finance” in New York. He was smart and well-heeled, an urbane cosmopolitan elite. “You would never ever in a million years think that was Ricky Vaughn,” Feldman said.