MAGAReport 9/20/2024 - Black Nazi and the science of trolling
How a love of trolling provides a lens into the psychology of extreme MAGA fans
After a few hours of frantically building anticipation on social media, CNN broke the wild story about N.C. gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson’s porn site comments yesterday. If you haven’t read the story, you should. It includes gems where he called himself a “black Nazi”, blogged in graphic detail about his long term sexual affair with his wife’s sister, and said that slavery should be legal because some people need to be slaves and he’d buy a few. (If you don’t know, Mark Robinson is black, which adds additional texture to that comment.)
Discussion of this story on MAGA message boards has been light, but the most popular thread right now has this discussion, which I’ve included because it is such an accurate glimpse into the online MAGA mindset.
Everybody trash talks in online forums
This only makes me support him harder.
What the hell is a black nazi lmao
ahahha dude is a level 10 troll of power.
Thought this was gonna be some kiddie porno shit thats permanently damaging. I doubt this impacts anything at all
Some of his best gems are missing from the article.
Dude's got to go if this is verified. "Everybody trolls on 4chan" isn't a good excuse. There's too much on the line for this dude's trolling to drag down Trump even a little bit in an important state the we must win. There's enough time left for Republicans to put up someone who doesn't credibly have such baggage.
Mitt Romney won NC versus Peak Hussain Obama. I doubt this drags anything at all, let alone Trump who won NC in 2020 too. Robinson is already losing this race badly based on the polls.
does this make you want to vote more for him or less for him?
The part where he talks about liking tranny porn? That makes me want to vote for him less haha.
Yeah, one comment makes me want to vote less, the other dozen make me want to vote more. I say it's a net positive. CNN obviously put that at the top because they know how to piss off MAGA
Can't we find someone with no history of saying anything positive about tranny porn? Seems like a pretty low bar to clear.
As the olds age out, it will become more and more difficult to find anyone that doesn't have a crazy internet history.
This is interesting because it contains some pro-trolling comments, a little concern about whether this will impact the election, and a lot of waving off of those concerns. A lot of discussions about scandals or bad behavior roll like this in the forums I read.
The trolling aspect of this is really interesting, and key to understanding a piece of the psychology of the MAGA movement. A lot of people on these pro-Trump forums, especially those who are refugees from reddit which banned them for being too extreme, are very into trolling. They are the “own the libs” and “fuck your feelings” crowd. They call themselves the meme army. And their comments here, celebrating the trolling, give me an opportunity to talk about one of my favorite research papers.
A theory I have, and that I will academically research some day, is that trolling is kind of the sadistic form of bullshitting. I wrote about the technical definition of bullshit, which means saying things without any interest in whether they are true or not. Trolling is doing things to upset people, regardless of whether what’s said is true or not. People bullshit because they want to get something out of it. People troll because they think it’s fun.
Buckels et al. (2014) did a brilliant study into online trolling, published with the equally brilliant title “Trolls Just Want to Have Fun”. In it, they investigated the links between enjoying online trolling and the dark tetrad of personality traits:
narcissism, where you think you are superior to others and don’t get enough credit for it
Machiavellianism, where the end justifies the means
psychopathy, defined by a lack of empathy and remorse
sadism, enjoying seeing others suffer
This study asked people what they enjoyed doing most online and also measured people’s “trolliness” with a survey they called the GAIT (Global Assessment of Internet Trolling). They also measured subjects’ dark tetrad scores. The relationship between trolling and scoring high on these traits is very strong.
People who enjoy trolling score exceptionally high on all four traits. In fact, the authors wrote, "... the associations between sadism and GAIT (Global Assessment of Internet Trolling) scores were so strong that it might be said that online trolls are prototypical everyday sadists."
There is glee in the MAGA forums when liberals get upset, especially when they get upset about trolling. One study I’m working on for my book on MAGA psychology is investigating the connection between the traits listed above and support for Trump. If we see that everyday sadism is generally high among extreme Trump supporters, for example, it adds color to our understanding of how to interact with them…and when to avoid it.
Reference: Buckels, Erin E., Paul D. Trapnell, and Delroy L. Paulhus. "Trolls just want to have fun." Personality and Individual Differences67 (2014): 97-102.