Some are relative newcomers to this scene. There is
The Palmer Report, the publication of record for anti-Trump conspiracy nuts who don’t care about the credibility of the record; Shareblue, a viral news site that aspires, according to its founder David Brock, to become the “
Breitbart of the left”; and Patribotics, home to Mensch’s Russia-related rumormongering.
Meanwhile, old-school platforms like Reddit and Daily Kos continue to host freewheeling forums that attract the kind of occasionally enlightening, occasionally deranged conversations that tend to thrive in those environments. And the
HuffPost contributor platform—an un-vetted, unedited section of the site that operates apart from its professional journalism—has been a vehicle for some of the most bizarre, and outright craziest, content to go viral on the left in recent years.
Just this month, editors were forced to delete a contributor
post that began, “Impeachment and removal from office are only the first steps; for America to be redeemed, Donald Trump must be prosecuted for treason and — if convicted in a court of law — executed.” And throughout last year’s primaries, Seth Abramson, assistant professor of english and writing specialist at the University of New Hampshire (and a former public defender), used his
HuffPost perch to churn out a procession of increasingly delusional blog posts explaining why Bernie Sanders would likely win the Democratic nomination.
Abramson’s arguments not only denied political realities and delegate math as the race wore on; they often denied basic human logic. But thanks to the hordes of Bernie fans desperately scouring the internet for some hope to cling to, Abramson’s posts consistently went uber-viral. (He eventually wrote a post defending this shameless play for clicks as a form of “experimental journalism” that embraced “the multi-dimensionality of metanarrative.”
The Washington Post’s Matt O’Brien responded via
Twitter: “Area Academic Writes Barely Comprehensible Defense of Lying.”) These days, Abramson’s main platform is Twitter, where he has over 150,000 followers, and specializes in indictment stories in the style of criminal complaints.