Bob Lord

First in a multi-part series

Since Thucky, who we now know is John Huppenthal, is front-page news these days, I thought a rewind of our history together might be interesting to some. Only our very loyal readers likely followed my “Thucky” posts when Thucky was only Thucky the blog troll. Many asked: Why’s he paying so much attention to this blog troll (and rightly so)? Now, those posts may have newfound relevance.

This will be a multi-part series, which for the most part will be chronological.

I checked to see when the whole thing started between Thucky and me, and discovered that our “relationship” lasted exactly one year and one day. It was June 9, 2013, when my first Thucky post went up. On June 10, 2014, I received what Thucky has promised will be his last comment ever to Does ANYONE Actually Like John Huppenthal?

One year ago, when this whole thing started, I had no idea who Thucky, then Thucydides, was. I knew he had extreme conservative economic views, many of which were demonstrably wrong. What I found interesting was that he had read a lot of right-wing economists and threw around their names and the terminology they used, but his intellectual grasp was weak, to put it politely. I saw some similarities between him and our other troll, who went by the screen name NidanGoju.

So, my first post speculated as to whether “Thucky” and “Dang” actually were the same troll. The post follows after the jump.

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[Distributed via OtherWords.org]

[Note to BfAZ readers: I’m posting here my op-ed piece for OtherWords.org, the free syndication site operated by the Institute for Policy Studies. Although the discussion of Huppenthal has shifted in the past few days from his demonization of the poor to his apparent racism, the message here I think still is important]

When I unmasked an Arizona official who made outrageous and anonymous comments on blogs, it revealed more than his bad judgment.

By Bob Lord

For years I’d wondered about the identity of a gaggle of anonymous commenters on Blog for Arizona, the website to which I frequently contribute. These guys weighed in a lot and were very eager to burnish the reputation of Arizona School Superintendent, John Huppenthal.

Ultimately, my fellow writers and I explored the source of the comments. With only modest effort, we figured out these commenters were all aliases of Huppenthal himself. Among other things, the 60-year-old official was posting from the Arizona Department of Education and providing details of his own childhood.

Nonetheless, we were stunned. By then, I’d had a year-long dialogue with “Thucky,” (a riff on one of his aliases) and knew his economic views were beyond extreme and demonstrably wrong, and that he resorted to intellectual dishonesty without hesitation.

As this strange tale draws increasing media attention, it’s clear that one of his many unvarnished and outrageous opinions is drawing the most fire: Huppenthal believes that people who benefit from food stamps and other features of America’s safety net are “lazy pigs.”

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[Cross-posted with permission from three sonorans]

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