This is just a bit amusing:
Amateur pro-Trump ‘sleuths’ scramble to unmask whistleblower: ‘Your president has asked for your help’
"The looming battle over President Trump’s potential impeachment has sparked an online hunt in the far-right corners of the Web as self-styled Internet sleuths race to identify the anonymous person Trump has likened to a treasonous spy.
Their guesses have been scattershot, conspiratorial and often untethered from reality, spanning a wide range of such unlikely contenders as presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and Vice President Pence.
“Carpet bomb the memes. Everywhere,” one anonymous poster on the message board 4chan wrote in response to one of Trump’s angry tweets about the whistleblower. “Time to rise up. Your president has asked for your help.”
The quest to identify the person who crafted the politically explosive complaint against Trump has become a fixation across the most extreme corners of such platforms as Twitter, Reddit and Gab — and has spread onto conservative news sites, radio shows and TV broadcasts.
The president’s scornful portrayal of the whistleblower shaped and stoked the online conversation throughout the week, as it descended into a case study of the Internet at its worst — frenetic, fueled by rumor and frequently racist, misogynistic and crude.
The hunt for the whistleblower revealed a glimpse of how polarized partisan media and the Internet have become, in which every news event becomes an opportunity for online brawlers to steer mainstream conversations and defeat the other side.
“We’re seeing all the elements of information warfare play out online during this episode,” said Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the think tank New America. “There’s this crowdsourced manhunt to find out who did it, and once that identity comes out, everything in their life — what they majored in in college, where they like to eat dinner, where their kids went to school — will be pulled out in the hope there is one little nugget that can be weaponized against them.”
After the complaint was made public Thursday morning, pro-Trump commenters guessed the whistleblower is Hispanic or Jewish or Arab or African American and, many were sure, a woman — though rarely did the commenters use such delicate terms. A top choice soon became Susan M. Gordan, a former deputy director of national intelligence, though others thought a more probable candidate is CIA Director Gina Haspel."
The guessing game took another twist after the New York Times reported the complaint was made by a CIA officer detailed to the White House. A conservative writer, Stu Cvrk, tweeted out his guess a few hours later.
“Is This Guy The Ukraine Phone Call Whistleblower?” Cvrk tweeted, linking to a post he wrote on RedState, a conservative news and commentary site.
“A source known to me at the State Department, who will remain anonymous, tells me that everyone is pointing to Edward ‘Ned’ Price as the whistleblower who came forward with the accusation that President Trump ‘abused his office’ during a phone conversation with the Ukrainian president,” wrote Cvrk. Price is a former CIA officer who retired in 2017 and is now a political analyst for NBC News.
Price, who was more amused than upset at the claim, said it made him concerned about the development of “discourse that is just divorced from the facts.”
“It’s part of the political atmosphere that we live in now,” Price said. “People are looking for anything on which to hang their tinfoil hats.”
Cvrk, in a direct Twitter message to The Post, stood by his assessment. “You didn’t seriously think he would admit it, did you?” he wrote, adding that he was insulted by the inference “that I am a tinfoil hat guy.”
On Friday, the Washington Examiner spread word of a $50,000 reward offered by two pro-Trump political activists known for smear campaigns, who called the scandal a “national disgrace” and said they hoped identifying the whistleblower would help put “this dark chapter behind us.”
Amateur pro-Trump ‘sleuths’ scramble to unmask whistleblower: ‘Your president has asked for your help’
"The looming battle over President Trump’s potential impeachment has sparked an online hunt in the far-right corners of the Web as self-styled Internet sleuths race to identify the anonymous person Trump has likened to a treasonous spy.
Their guesses have been scattershot, conspiratorial and often untethered from reality, spanning a wide range of such unlikely contenders as presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and Vice President Pence.
“Carpet bomb the memes. Everywhere,” one anonymous poster on the message board 4chan wrote in response to one of Trump’s angry tweets about the whistleblower. “Time to rise up. Your president has asked for your help.”
The quest to identify the person who crafted the politically explosive complaint against Trump has become a fixation across the most extreme corners of such platforms as Twitter, Reddit and Gab — and has spread onto conservative news sites, radio shows and TV broadcasts.
The president’s scornful portrayal of the whistleblower shaped and stoked the online conversation throughout the week, as it descended into a case study of the Internet at its worst — frenetic, fueled by rumor and frequently racist, misogynistic and crude.
The hunt for the whistleblower revealed a glimpse of how polarized partisan media and the Internet have become, in which every news event becomes an opportunity for online brawlers to steer mainstream conversations and defeat the other side.
“We’re seeing all the elements of information warfare play out online during this episode,” said Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the think tank New America. “There’s this crowdsourced manhunt to find out who did it, and once that identity comes out, everything in their life — what they majored in in college, where they like to eat dinner, where their kids went to school — will be pulled out in the hope there is one little nugget that can be weaponized against them.”
After the complaint was made public Thursday morning, pro-Trump commenters guessed the whistleblower is Hispanic or Jewish or Arab or African American and, many were sure, a woman — though rarely did the commenters use such delicate terms. A top choice soon became Susan M. Gordan, a former deputy director of national intelligence, though others thought a more probable candidate is CIA Director Gina Haspel."
The guessing game took another twist after the New York Times reported the complaint was made by a CIA officer detailed to the White House. A conservative writer, Stu Cvrk, tweeted out his guess a few hours later.
“Is This Guy The Ukraine Phone Call Whistleblower?” Cvrk tweeted, linking to a post he wrote on RedState, a conservative news and commentary site.
“A source known to me at the State Department, who will remain anonymous, tells me that everyone is pointing to Edward ‘Ned’ Price as the whistleblower who came forward with the accusation that President Trump ‘abused his office’ during a phone conversation with the Ukrainian president,” wrote Cvrk. Price is a former CIA officer who retired in 2017 and is now a political analyst for NBC News.
Price, who was more amused than upset at the claim, said it made him concerned about the development of “discourse that is just divorced from the facts.”
“It’s part of the political atmosphere that we live in now,” Price said. “People are looking for anything on which to hang their tinfoil hats.”
Cvrk, in a direct Twitter message to The Post, stood by his assessment. “You didn’t seriously think he would admit it, did you?” he wrote, adding that he was insulted by the inference “that I am a tinfoil hat guy.”
On Friday, the Washington Examiner spread word of a $50,000 reward offered by two pro-Trump political activists known for smear campaigns, who called the scandal a “national disgrace” and said they hoped identifying the whistleblower would help put “this dark chapter behind us.”
