Trolled into Clarity
Our rancid internet, illustrated by a Trump-worshipping cartoonist
In 2008, a Florida teenager named Joshua Goldberg started messing with the online political cartoons drawn by a Montana-based libertarian artist named Ben Garrison. Goldberg did this a lot, as it turned out, and to many people other than Garrison. When Goldberg was found out, in 2015, it was revealed that his work recirculating Garrison’s comics after having made them overtly anti-Semitic was part of a vast and deeply sad gambit. Goldberg, who lived in virtual isolation in his parents’ home and had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, spent his days indoors and online and hard at work making various partisan debates worse, posting from every extreme on the political continuum on a dizzying number of platforms, under various aliases.
Goldberg left comments and wrote tweets and authored whole blog posts under a series of different personae: a left-wing activist named Tanya Cohen, a neo-Nazi named Michael Slay, an Australian ISIS sympathizer who went by “Australi Witness.” Posing as a Jewish attorney from Australia, Goldberg wrote a vicious anti-Palestinian blog post, then ran it on the Times of Israel’s website under the attorney’s name; he created a Twitter account in the man’s name and promoted luridly anti-Arab tweets from it. Goldberg did the same thing with an Australian…
