thucydides

SB1070

Will the Real John Huppenthal Please Stand Up?

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SB1070
Protest sign from a Resist SB1070 demonstration in Tucson.

Since Blog for Arizona broke the story, new insights into Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal’s secret life as an Internet troll continue to be revealed as bloggers and journalists study years of online comments.

Between Tucson Progressive blog and Blog for Arizona (BfAZ), there are nearly 400 comments from Thucydides or Flacon9, but there could be more unknown Huppenthal posts out there.

An anonymous tipster now claims that someone with the online name “Thucydides” has made comments on at least one white nation (WN) website. Are BfAZ Thucycides and WN Thucydides the same person? No one knows. BfAZ figured out that Thucydides was Huppenthal by analyzing comments, e-mail address, and IP addresses. Three key findings cemented the identification: Thucydides posted from a Department of Education computer, Thucydides commented from a computer in Japan when Huppenthal was there, and one Thucydides comment was signed by Huppenthal. In the case of the alleged WN comments, the NSA probably knows if they exist and has access to the email addresses or the IP addresses for comparison– but we don’t… yet.

Would it be a big surprise to find out the Huppenthal is sympathetic to white nationalist beliefs? Not really. From his anonymous comments, we already have proof he is a racist– something he has been accused of for many years. Let’s look at his history and his policies.

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Huppenthal’s ‘Falcon9’ Comments Date Back to Election Day 2010

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HuppToon
Hat tip to the cartoonist XKCD for the comic and to Dave Safier for the derivative work.

I must say that I was skeptical that an elected official could be as dumb as Thucydides, when Bob Lord first posed the question: “Do you think that blog troll Thucydides could be John Huppenthal?” to the rest of us here at BfAZ. Yes, Thucky defended Hupp regularly, but that was not enough evidence to prove anything except that Thucky was an ill-informed, right-wing blowhard, and we all know there are plenty of those people trolling the comment sections on the Internets. But after Lord started matching up the sole email address used by the multiple Huppenthal aliases– including Falcon9– and matching up computer IP addresses (including a computer in the Department of Education), the rest of us became believers.

I remember Falcon9 well from my days writing the Tucson Progressive blog on the TucsonCitizen.com website. Falcon9, Fraser, and Leftfield (I wonder who those guys are?) were constant commenters on anything to do with Mexican American Studies (MAS) and Tucson Unified School District.

After Lord broke the Huppenthal/Thucydides/Falcon9 story here on Blog for Arizona, other bloggers started combing their comment sections. The Democratic Diva, Expresso Pundit, and the Three Sonorans have all posted stories about Hupp’s comments on their blogs.

The threads of racism and classism run deep through Huppenthal’s writing: people on welfare are “lazy pigs”, MAS teaches hate, Mexican restaurants should print menus in English, Spanish media should be silenced, Che Guevara’s memory should be defecated upon, and so forth. The last time I checked on this site alone there were almost 300 comments from Thucydides in less than two years.

The main stream media has reported that Hupp’s comments date back to 2011, but I beg to differ. The first comment that Falcon9 made on my blog was on election day 2010– the day he was elected.

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Huppenthal/Thucky was wrong on the Internet about Margaret Sanger, abortion

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sangernew

It’s pretty clear at this point that prodigious-commenter-on-blogs-at-all-hours-of-the-day “Thucydides” is none other than AZ Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal. Huppenthal’s other alter egos include “Falcon 09” and “Socrates” but we know him affectionately as Thucky around these parts. Thucky likes to opine on a variety of subjects, and here he is last fall weighing in on the misogynist-cesspool blog Seeing Red AZ about Margaret Sanger.

When Darwin wrote his treatise on evolution, it was titled ” Survival of the Favored Races.” There were two parts to his work, one was to give a foundation to evolution, the other was to explain the dramatic differences between species. As he explained it in his 1859 work, as a species evolves it begins to develop different races. When one of those races develops a superior advantage, it wipes out the genetically inferior race. It was Darwin, not Hitler who named the Germans the master race. It was Darwin who expressed approval of eliminating both Jews and Africans. Hitler worked to eliminate the Jews. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood was given the job of eliminating African Americans. Hitler fed 6 million Jews into the ovens. Sanger has fed 16 million African Americans into the abortion mills.

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Thucky and the Gish Gallop

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Frequent commenter Thucydides, who is affectionately known as Thucky around these parts and who may or may not be Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, has a familiar arguing style. DailyKos diarist AmBush referred to it after the first Presidential debate in 2012, where Mitt Romney “won” by spewing out a barrage of lies and distortions of his own positions. The technique is known as the Gish Gallop.

The Urban Dictionary defines the Gish Gallop thusly:

Named for the debate tactic created by creationist shill Duane Gish, a Gish Gallop involves spewing so much bullshit in such a short span on that your opponent can’t address let alone counter all of it. To make matters worse a Gish Gallop will often have one or more ‘talking points’ that has a tiny core of truth to it, making the person rebutting it spend even more time debunking it in order to explain that, yes, it’s not totally false but the Galloper is distorting/misusing/misstating the actual situation. A true Gish Gallop generally has two traits.

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