Twitter’s Incoherent Case of Benjamin Brody

Documenting yet another social media dumpster-fire singeing real life.

Last weekend a scuffle broke out between two far-right groups protesting a Portland suburb’s first ever Pride Night.
It appeared that a well known “shirt” group, the Proud Boys, got into it with a lesser known local hate group wearing gaiters calling themselves the “Rose City Nationalist Club.”

In the melee, two of the RCNC gaggle had their masks removed. As it goes nowadays, others nearby had their cell-phone camera apps up & running. Within a few post-fracas breaths, more than a few versions of footage of the slap-fight were quickly uploaded to social media.

As a testament to how the Tesla CEO’s recent purchase is quickly becoming the new chan site, one video in particular, which briefly showed two maskless neo-fascist pugilists’ faces, was uploaded and swiftly spread around by accounts by twitter accounts big, small, and mostly with little $8 blue-checks in them.

It seems the video may have been first shared by the now-suspended @OMG_Like_Really account. It took little time for more heavily-followed rather-right-leaning twitter accounts to relay the short flick into their like-minded fans’ feeds. And when viral tweets from these kinds of accounts get rolling, the site’s owner comments:

And so by the troll law of online-nature, the video was boosted like a phallic rocket ship powered by millions of views and the replies swelled with conjecture of “paid crisis actors,” “antifa,” or worse.

As we saw on January 6th and in Allen, Texas and in Buffalo, NY and so many other times when far-right individuals (who share and even act on the shared rhetoric of a slightly less far-right) get caught doing something horrible or embarrassing, they are quickly thrown under the proverbial bus. Exciting podcasters and “citizen journalists” to sprint to their mics and social media to share their excessive outrage; labeling the miscreants a “false-flag,”ƒ “ANTIFA,” “BLM,” or “Trans” and squeezing synthetic indignation out of how preposterous it is to think that conservatives like themselves would ever do something like that. And pedal-to-the-metal it until that rage-fueled bus is running on “Empty.”

From small-time MAGA grifters like FemalesForTrump and AMERiKANgriLLL and RickTheTank to bigger names like Glenn “I haven’t found an authoritarian I didn’t like” Greenwald and Tim “I’ll never wash this beanie” Pool, they bused it out to the masses.

But instead of reckoning with the fact that these are the kind of groups that often show up to protest a LGBTQ event, something neo-nazi-attracting moral-panic-pumping accounts like LibsOfTikTac, GaysAgainstGroomers (who organized the protest), and a myriad of culture warrior accounts would advocate for, organize, and actively cheer on, the accounts shared their anger about having found a “fed” (or in some cases an “antifa”) false flag and the pixelated faces of two unmasked men undeniably proved it.

Under a tweet from Benny Johnson (1.6M followers) sharing the video and “viewed” 32 million times, a blue-checker account kicked it off with a “Here’s two who were unmasked. Do your thing, sleuths.”

The reply guys were giddy because they believed they had finally found two real-live “feds” in the wild.

Or in rare cases, excited that there was finally proof that the Proud Boys weren’t connected directly with neo-nazis (spoiler: they are) because it sort of looked like they were sort of kicking some Nazis’ butts.

So they got to sleuthing. Sort of.

The masked Proud/PF/RCNC Boy

Some infinitely more familiar with the local fash-scene easily identified one of the masked men as RCNC’s founder/leader Casey Knuteson, a former Portland-area Proud Boy who had left for the Whiter-Powerier pastures of Patriot Front. (Patriot Front is believed to be “feds” by these same context-adverse twitterers).
Several had been exposing “Canute the Great’s” travels and his most recent spin-off group, the “Rose City Nationalist Club” for a while now.

While online “sleuths” thought they had a case, unsurprising to everyone else, Knuteson was plainly one of them and the brouhaha was simply internal beef over who was more fash-y and less cuck-y. As the local PBs explained on their “memes by angry white guys” telegram channel:

The Patriot Front leaks published by Unicorn Riot show Casey had been a kind of go-between the local PBs and PF.
And as it has so often been with the Traditional Values “We’re Fighting To Keep Kids Safe” crowd, Knuteson was also apparently found guilty of physically abusing his own child and 9 years later he still doesn’t have custody.
(again, we must note that in those 9 years, he’s been a member of Proud Boys and two White Nationalist groups; a common thread that maybe we should get into in future writings)

There is heaps more context we could get into, but that’s enough to kick off this shit-show and surely others can do a better job breaking it down than we ever could. We are not journalists. Nor do we live in Portland. We just do basic investigative stuff to expose & debunk bad things that people being bad do to people that don’t deserve it. That’s why we are here. To help Benjamin out.

The second unmasked boy in a fuzzy screenshot

Although local activists recognized him from other RCNC actions, as of today (1st of July, 2023) the skinnier second unmasked man from the video has yet to be identified by anyone the author has heard from.

Or at least he hasn’t been identified in the reality that we reside in.

Some top-notch keyboard “sleuth” has stumbled on a twitter profile that maybe possibly perhaps look like it fit the supposed “fed” stereotype in the story that the riled up crowd had spun.

Their man had been found and no further investigating or confirmation was necessary. They announced that the search was over and the twitter-troops retweeted it up and down the with app with two short button taps on their tiny screens.

All sorts of similarly much-followed $8/month-clout accounts, like russia-buddy inside-trader ̶T̶y̶l̶e̶r̶ ̶D̶u̶r̶d̶e̶n̶ ̶D̶a̶n̶i̶e̶l̶ ̶I̶v̶a̶n̶d̶j̶i̶i̶s̶k̶i̶ @zerohedge (1.6M) to smaller ones like Alex Sheppard (72K) and even smaller fake doctor rage-farmers who have to rely on AI to make their pfp and their friends look decent, “Dr. Frensor” (13.5K), jumped in to spread it faster than a Tesla-battery fire.

They had settled on the offender being a young Jewish man named Benjamin Brody, who had just graduated days earlier from UC Riverside and was trying to enjoy the beginning of his summer with friends and family.

From the outside, it’s utterly confusing as to why one would assume Benjamin would be a wily FBI agent so far from home.
Apparently if someone viewing the grainy images on their phone or an outdated monitor squinted juuusssttt right, he slightly looked like the skinny kid in the pixelated video screenshot. And an older Instagram post from his fraternity mentioned his desire to work for the government and was on his way to a “polysci” degree.
And as everyone knows, if you want to work for any governmental agency, you must first do untrained undercover work for the federal bureau of investigations. Normal stuff.

Last Sunday (6/25) Benjamin Brody woke up to harassment from terminally online weirdos who think that the FBI, antifa, trans-people, immigrants, Jews, reptilians, and/or some combination of all or none of the above are behind everything that makes their crazy-ilk look as crazy as they do.

Egged on by accounts with millions of followers & an edge-lord billionaire who is open about his fondness for tin-foil hat-shaped logic.

The trolls from twitter tried their darnedest to reenact the odious doxxing and skewering we’ve been accustomed to seeing oozing out of 4chan, 8kun, and kiwifarms. Noteworthy stochastic menaces came from even less fun corners of the social platform, from über-Musk-fan Matt Wallace(1.1M followers) to Ian “confused about Orwell” Malcolm 1984 (4K) to QAnon-conspiracist ReturnOfKappy (87K). And naturally, the multitudes of lower-ranked angry-mob comments and replies were outlandishly gross as well.

With haste, they smeared the news around the social medias and began harassing him and his family through his accounts. The author is unaware what Benjamin dealt with in person, but it was evident what was happening online.

Much of it packed a noticeable antisemitic edge to it. Some dishonorable mentions are tweets and replies from JD Sharp (36.8K) and @Chaos_Memer giving a wink & a nod to the worn out “the Jews are behind everything” tropes that have been given renewed juice from the recent rise of the alt-Right and QAnon movements.

The “we found the fed” panic spilled into other expected edgy realms. On GETTR, Proud Boy founder Gavin “choke a tranny” McInnes shared screenshots with the familiar regurgitated childish commentary…

And naturally the image boards of 4chan, where this stuff normally starts out, shouldn’t be left out either…

The author has not spoken with Mr. Brody, but it’s pretty safe to assume that the young man is occupied living his post-graduation life. His rather compact online footprint makes it glaringly obvious that he is an average middle class kid who posts selfies and group photos with buddies and is too busy to do much interaction with much else online.

To the chronically-online, that in and of itself may be “suspect.” But for those of us who aren’t stuck in their phones, grinding our teeth anxiously awaiting our next dopamine hit from online interactions, this is actually quite common, if not the norm.

While the obsessed rabble aren’t likely to be convinced by anything that sounds like logic, the rest of us should assess Benjamin’s case and how these inane conspiracy theories being thrown at him fall apart…

Olympic leaps in logic failing to even qualify

In a sane world, Benjamin Brody is entirely none of our business. His mostly anonymous life has suddenly been subjected to scrutiny by the modern equivalent of a lynch mob propagated by millionaires, billionaires, and well-off grifters who get clout and make loot from the amount of rage that they can build up in their enthralled fandom. This is a young man who has been thrust into a clown-shaped storm of ire overnight while literally having absolutely nothing to do with an event 1,000 miles from where he resides. The iota of specious “evidence” they’ve scraped together takes incredibly insane stretches to connect at best. Yet amazingly there is an ugly mass of internet gremlins who are obsessed with them being true. Let’s quickly run through them and examine how they hold up.

According to nutters like Matt Wallace’s reply-guys, Benjamin is a “federal agent.” Demonstrating the stretchiest taffy-like logic, they point to his social media accounts that he and his fraternity limited or shut down soon after the deluge of harassment. Especially where it mentions that he was planning to get a Political Science degree and hoped to “work for the government.”

It is a leap in logic to just assume that a PoliSci degree means that one is destined to immediately work in law enforcement or federal investigations or, in this case, even do undercover work 48 hours after graduating from a school on the other side of the country from where the FBI trains new recruits.

The conspicuous problem with this is that Benjamin earned himself a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology. There are around 23.7 million Americans working for federal, state, and local governments. And “the federal government is arguably the largest employer of anthropologists outside of academia.” Governments use anthropologists to plan, research, and manage projects.

No offense Ben, but it’s mostly pencil-pusher stuff. Anthropology is just not “undercover in extremist hate groups to make them look bad” exciting stuff. And as stated above there are millions upon millions of “government jobs” from social service to meteorologist to political aide to dog-catcher. So it’s one super weak Charlie Kelly-esque stringed out connection to make.

Benjamin received his degree on Wednesday evening at a graduation ceremony at UC Riverside. Degrees take stress and time to get through. Fitting in training with the FBI would take a huge chunk of time away from said education. Part-time jobs while in school is enough. FBI training would take a clone.

Despite what very smooth-brained nutters may believe, one cannot simply become an on-the-ground FBI agent 2 days after graduating either. It takes at least 20 weeks of intensive training in Quantico, VA before moving on to other specific areas of expertise. 21 Jump Street was a fictitious TV show. This is not how real life works.
Even more outlandish, the unmasked goof has been a regular at RCNC hootenanies for while.
So that would mean a heck of a lot of trips from Southern California to a boring corner of Oregon just to build up an undercover presence to make some white power group (that few had heard of until less than a week ago) look bad. And he would have had to have driven or hopped on a plane within 48 hours after graduating just to get in the middle of a scuffle between two far-right groups so if someone filmed it, he could mess with their optics in a small PNW suburban town. Huh?!?

If the feds knew someone would be shooting for internet content, then in brain-worm world there would be a good chance that whoever filmed the OMG_Like_Really video is also a “fed”!!! No wonder that Pokemon-pfp-ed account got suspended! <envision a thinking-hard emoji here>

The more we ponder it, the more insane the Olympic-level stretching gets. But that is standard conspiracy theory thinkin’ for ya.

Speaking of magnificent feats in logic & obsession:
Internet-famous Amiri “let me remind you again that I was in prison” King used one of the blue-check features he pays good money for to babble (almost as bad as this article does) on about Mr. Brody, regurgitating the same flavor of nuttery Gavin had spewed on GETTR:

So its making the rounds on social media that one of the demasked Patriot Front members is allegedly a Ben Brody, who is a member of a Jewish fraternity.
If someone accused me of being somewhere I wasn’t, I would immediately take to social media (or hold a presser) to provide evidence that I was NOT.
With ease.
It’s 2023. There are fucking cameras everywhere.

But, without seeing any of these internet philosophers’ pontifications, Mr. Brody had already done just that with a video on his Instagram account explaining that he didn’t know or care to know about what had been going on in wacky online spaces because it sounded absolutely preposterous at best. He just requested that he and his family be left alone.

Soon after he followed up with screenshots of receipts from that day around Riverside, CA. Someone else even posted footage from one of those “fucking cameras everywhere” of him picking up food at a restaurant in Riverside.

Yet none of that mattered to the chan-infected twitter accounts. Conspiracy theories are hard to shake and people would much rather double-down than admit they are easily convinced by even the most spurious claims.

And Benjamin being Jewish added to the obsession. The (((echoed))) responses left in comments of his Instagram posts, the focus on his Jewish background relating to “false flags” by well-followed accounts and their reply guys hits that point home.

Regardless, the clincher is that Benjamin looks only vaguely like the dweeb who lost his mask in the Portland suburb. He was living life 1,000 miles away when the Oregon City skirmish went down. If he really could have teleported up there, he must’ve gained a few pounds on the way back along with some extra facial hair. And it seems that his nose, eyes, and eyebrows changed shape as well.
Also, he would’ve healed up that head wound he received in the filmed scrimmage inhumanly fast.
If he is a federal agent, then Holy Moly do they have everyone beat with how well they can now bend time & space and transform human bodies overnight.

(several twitter accounts claimed that Benjamin’s shorter hair was part of the coverup. Sure, but if we were trying to hide, we’d probably give ourselves at least a hair dye, a different style, or shave all of it off. Not just a light trim that changes little of our overall appearance. But that’s just us being not idiots)

A related but semi-sad issue is that, in reality, almost all of us look like a lot of other people. No kidding. Each one of us are likely to have a doppelganger somewhere out there. In light of the grainy video screenshots going around, there’s bound to be plenty more young men out there that sort of look like that doofus.

For instance, here’s an Instagram post from a Fenerbahçe football club fan account with an almost identical dude…

(it’s from several years ago, so probably not him)

Or there’s the ex-singer from Canadian band “Hedley”…

(except he’s currently in prison for sexual assault)

Speaking of singers and grifters, how about MAGA up-and-comer Joey Mannarino?
He nailed the look of “Unmasked Boy #2” while singing “Desire” for a Philly community cable show that never took off. According to the caption, “This young man has big things in his future.” Fitting because he’s made the shortlist of grifters to showcase in the near future…

We should also consider “Green Libertarian” Ron Paul fanboy, Steve Bannon War Room guest, and opinion writer for the Moonie’s Washington Times Kyle Olbert who also had a wonderfully tin-foil-covered reply to @Chaos_Memer’s “crisis actor” tweet with:

“Mark Zuckerberg and Wolf Blitzer are alumni of the PatriotFront-linked AEPI.
Andrew Borans, CEO of the Alpha Epsilon Pi Foundation, served as an advisor to Turning Point USA, which helped organize the January 6th Rally in front of the White House.
Counterintelligence asset?”

“PatriotFront-linked AEPI”??? And the only one that liked his tweet was Olbert himself. There is too much ignorance to unpack there, but even worse, this genius also looks like the second unmasked jerk in the “ ̶P̶a̶t̶r̶i̶o̶t̶ ̶F̶r̶o̶n̶t̶ RCNC-linked AEPI” crew…

Apologies to Ben for pointing out how many not-good people he might look a little bit like, but this just means there are likely a whole bunch of you out there that look like Benjamin Brody in lo-def photos taken of you as well.

Trendy tin-foil hats

Benjamin Brody is not just the victim of mistaken identity, but also of an unhinged world built by opportunistic grifters using social media to build their perpetual manufactroversy machines. The US is built on conspiratorial thinking. That’ll never go away, but the paranoid silliness has had an obtrusive resurgence in recent years. The flat-earthers and moon-landing skeptics of the past are now looking around going “WTF?!? Y’all are crazy!”

The thing is that conspiracy theories tend to break down when we take into account the aspects of people, time, and scope.
If the “conspiracy” takes a lot of time, then it will inevitably be found out. Conspiracies can be a slow burn, but they can only remain under wraps if there aren’t many people involved.
Because if it involves a lot of people, it is insane to think that it would never get out.
And if it involves a large scope, many locations, or too many elements, then there’s even less of chance the real story would be kept under wraps.
And if we consider removing any thing from the equation, would the whole thing crumble.

Let us take the Patriot Front:
If the PF were a “fed” operation, it would be the worst ROI being an extremely limited “psyop” that involves wayyy too many white boys out there without a single anybody leaking that they happen to be a huge “fed-op.” Leaked records show a group of goofballs spawned from another group of known white supremacists who were at the Unite the Right rally coordinating for years and years around the US. If this were all just a big “psyop” to make white nationalists look bad, then why? White Nationalists already do the job of making themselves look bad all by themselves. They don’t need the government’s help to make it worse, let alone a kid who just graduated college a few days earlier.

Seriously, check out the above link filled with 400+ GB of media and files. They also cover conversations Patriot Front members had with Proud Boy leaders to plan and coordinate actions, including Knuteson’s discussions with his ex-buddies from the same group of pee-fetishist polo-wearing bros. Or you can download it all from DDOSecrets, a site conveniently banned from a billionaires jalopy of a “free speech” platform.

But this is about Benjamin and how the “conspiracy” around him falls apart. The notion that him and many others remained hush-hush for at least a year while Mr. Brody simultaneously was undercover as both a student in a Southern California University and an active member in a Northern Oregon hate group and somehow fitting in around a year of training that would take him away from his schooling, is loony.
And the scope being him having to regularly travel 1,000 miles to make a small handful of goofs look bad. Granted, these goofs are connected with a whole lot of other goofs throughout the US. Which makes this conspiracy theory downright moronic. There is a whole bunch of these PF and PB boys. So one has to go to great lengths to believe that the federal government spent a ton of resource to have videos of themselves training all these goofs in various places across the US over the last 6 or so years to make them look like goofs and all of the aggrieved white boys stayed quiet about it.

And one of them was a Jewish kid graduating with a BS in Anthropology that they flew up and down the west coast? And he was so instrumental that he had to be quickly flown in after walking across a graduation stage two days earlier because they couldn’t get anyone closer to show up to an anti-LGBTQ hangout?

We mean this with all due offense…
This is brain-worm level stuff.
This is beyond ludicrous thinking of how things work with the government, time, and space.

And speaking of look-a-likes, take another gander at the photos of these PF goofballs. There’s more than a few that look close enough to “unmasked guy #2” that you can have your pick of neo-nazi doppelgangers. And yet none of them are Benjamin Brody.
(it is sort of awesome that not only does unmasked goof #2 have to keep his head down now, but many of his fellow antisemitic right-wingers also think he’s Jewish)

9chan

All this is yet another unwarranted outrage machine amplified by social media and the rage they have farmed is pointed at another innocent random person who could not have cared less about Oregon City but now has to deal with a barrage of hostility coming at him and his family.

It’s been obvious for a while now that he would rather sink his ship than have it be held accountable. But before it finally goes under, we’d like to point out that it’s quite rich that the same guy who pronounced that his platform doesn’t allow doxxing, has no issues with doxxing an innocent man who he has been suckered into believing is involved in a plot to smear his fellow antisemitic alt-Right buddies as the bad guys.

These angry twitter-folk have been riled up by a micro-blogging network quickly morphing into the newest chan and it’s trust-fund turned government-contract-funded owner seems to embracing it with glee.
But they are not all that mad that there were Nazis at an anti-LGBTQ shindig. That’s standard operating procedure nowadays.
They’re mad at the fever-dream notion of the FBI trying to make people, who these folk at least tacitly agree with, look bad.
And by extension, it makes them look bad.
Because in this nefarious plot to make hate groups actually look like hate groups they are the real “victims.”

So while the rest of us in reality are subject to their wrath, the bogeyman is yet again their own shadows.

Luckily, this seems to have remained an online debacle. And as debacles that arise suddenly from micro-blogging platforms, they tend to dissipate rather hastily. But these things sometimes have a way of spilling over into real-life-land. So we need to realize that what happens online still has real-world consequences.

We hope that Benjamin Brody comes out of this unscathed. These troubles may have sent him in an interesting & positive life direction. And luckily he seems to have strong support from his former classmates. If you see this Ben, let us know if you’d like anything corrected. We tried to only look into enough details to confirm how preposterous last week’s social media silliness has been. Apologies for invading your personal life in anyway. We simply wanted to document the bullshit and point out that it is indeed bullshit.

Good luck out there.

(epilogue: apparently, Ben didn’t take this lying down. good for him.)

• Two of the Worst Far-Right Groups are Now Fighting Each Other — Vice
• Conspiracy Theorists (and Elon Musk) Falsely Accuse Student of Being ‘Fed’ Posing as Neo-Nazi — Vice follow up mentioning this article. ThanX for the nod, Mack!
• Online hate and harassment continues to rise
• ‘Hugely damaging’: Most Americans are being harassed online when using Facebook, Twitter and Reddit
• Twitter, others slip on removing hate speech, EU review says
• Twitter may face fines in Australia over hate speech
• Patriot Front: Behind Conspiracist Claims That the Far-Right Group Are ‘Feds’

addendums:

• The RCNC has offered to have a “mutual combat fight” with the PBs. Probably akin to what football supporter groups sometimes do in Europe. Quite an interesting turn of events that most of these MAGA-y normies also may have trouble wrapping their heads around.

• Amari King got himself a bit too obsessed with Mr. Brody, so he kept JAQing off with impressively lengthy tweets. If one is in need of a chuckle, the original version of this article on a Fediverse-friendly blog includes snarky answers for him at the end.
• Luckily a few of the accounts who had gotten caught up in the wave of accusations reconsidered and apologized. Unfortunately there are still many out there that will never give up on the “Fed in Oregon City” story no matter how silly it sounds.
  Yet bearing in mind what Elon has been doing to Twitter over these last few days (we may have archived some of the last tweets to ever be archived), all of this will likely be just a footnote in the waning days of a micro-blogging platform he purchased only 8 months earlier.

that epilogue:

29MAY2024

A day or so after publishing this, we tossed a link for this post over to a Vice magazine journalist who had written the first decent article covering the Oregon City dust-up in hopes that he would at least pass this on to Ben.

(FUN FACT: Oregon City used to be the home of a white supremacist “Patriot” militia named “Republic v. Democracy Redress.” We wrote up a humongoid 4-part article on the racist history of the phrase “We are a Republic, Not a Democracy” which includes a mention of these lily-white weirdos. yay, Oregon City.)

A week later, the journalist, Mack Lamoureux, wrote an article focused on Ben’s situation which included a link to this post. That was nice.

We thought, like most online shenanigans, that may be the end of it and Ben at least had a better understanding of the silliness that was affecting his novice-anthropologist life. But a few months later, a Huffington Post article announced the filing of a lawsuit by Benjamin Brody against Elon Musk for libel.

We were taken aback when we found out that the attorney who took Ben’s case on was Mark Bankston, the fella who took on Alex Jones for the Sandy Hook parents. And phooey was the lawsuit awesome to read.

Also, rather cool to see this story covered by national and international news, from NPR to CNN to Bloomberg to Reuters to arstechnica to Forbes to Verve to the illustrious KnowYourMeme.

Even funner, is the current owner of X-twitter demonstrating for the court, his deep non-understanding of how things work and some other sketchy goofballness. His fan-club may not agree, but it really seems to be a bit of of a theme for him.

Extra neato to see tidbits we wrote up here getting used in a court case. Apparently, the screenshot that we had taken (but forgot to archive) of his reply to the ZeroHedge account is being used as consequential evidence. Fun stuff for sure.

Fingers & toes crossed for Benjamin.