Chapter 4: Here Come the Trolls

[See chapters one, two, and three.]

As soon as I agreed to run, the news reached various libertarian contingents, some of whom immediately began trolling me on X. When I filed with the FEC, the trolling only intensified. At first the incoming fire came from the so-called “lolbertarians,” who suggested that I was some right winger because I had, prior to being asked to run, posted Murray Rothbard’s 1992 “rightwing populism” platform on X and merely asked what people thought about it.

But soon the attacks came from a swarm of trolls under the direction of Joshua Smith, the candidate most threatened by my candidacy. He felt entitled to the support of the Mises Caucus, despite having quit as the LNC vice chair and, as Heise told me several times, after doing little to nothing while in office.

Josh Smith had assembled an entire army of trolls, who were fed “opposition research” by a team devoted strictly to attacking and defaming me. Smith’s entire campaign seemed to be oriented toward trying to destroy me. Some of the criticisms were downright absurd.

For example, Smith’s opposition research team found a paper or two that I had coauthored for the Intelligent Software Agents Lab, an AI lab in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon, where I worked as a writer and editor while I was also working on my dissertation in the English department, a dissertation on nineteenth-century British science and culture. The paper listed DARPA as one of the funding sources. From this scant information, some clowns suggested that I had written software to spy on U.S. citizens. I had never even written software. I was a writer documenting the lab’s work for the broader public.

Meanwhile, I was an antiwar activist, writing, speaking, and marching against the Iraqi war in New York, Washington D.C., and Pittsburgh. I also appeared dozens of times on MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, where I called George W. Bush a war criminal and was perhaps the only person on mainstream media to ask what George H.W. Bush had been doing having breakfast with Osama bin Laden’s half-brother on 911:

On one occasion, a five-star general came to the lab to watch a demo of the software, while just six to eight feet from him I sat writing an antiwar action item for legitgov.org, an activist and news website I founded after the 2001 election and which has since been run by my closest associate, Lori Price.

I found it ironic that I was being attacked for co-authoring a couple papers funded by DARPA, when Josh Smith had admittedly participated in the Shock and Awe bombing campaign while in the military. But I couldn’t mention this, Heise told me, because libertarians honor military service. I know Smith was a young man during this time and had been duped by propaganda to serve, which is excusable. But I must say that I have never been duped by war propaganda, not even when I was a nine-year-old watching the Vietnam War on TV. During my life, I’ve opposed every military venture of the U.S. government.

Some of the other criticisms had to do with the fact that I voted for Trump in 2016 and gave money to his campaign when he was indicted. Both actions had to do with my opposition to the regime, which I have explained on numerous occasions. The vote was an FU to the regime, and the donation was the same. I have never supported Trump per se. Sometimes political actions are merely symbolic and given that I’ve seen numerous Libertarians say since Chase Oliver was nominated that they’re going to vote for Trump, I was hardly the political criminal Smith’s mob tried to make me out to be.

In subsequent chapters, I will have much more to say about Josh Smith and the way he conducted himself and led his followers to behave during the campaign. Suffice it to say that during the first few months, the Josh-Smith-directed trolling was relentless. He only changed course after such tactics backfired. He returned to such tactics at the end of the campaign, out of desperation.

For weeks I had no backup at all, nobody coming to my defense. As I look at it now, it’s a miracle that by the last several months of my campaign, I had amassed a huge number of supporters, who saw @RecTheRegime as the only viable LP presidential candidate and who defended me against such criticisms. #RecTheRegime became a rallying cry and thousands were attracted to my message, as attested to by my X follower count, which grew by over 20,000 followers.