John Huppenthal

[Fifth in a six-part series]

[Previous parts in series: Thucky and Me, Our Magical Year (Part 1); Thucky and Me, Our Magical Year (Part 2); Thucky and Me, Our Magical Year (Part 3); Thucky and Me, Our Magical Year (Part 4)]

Thucky’s Racism, Elitism, and Psychopathology

With full knowledge of who Thucky was, I decided to engage in some amateur psychoanalysis with him. For the most part, he was quite a willing patient, generally willing to engage in the comment section of each post. He also was commenting like a madman on all my tax and inequality related posts. Those comments often helped with the “research.”

At this point, there was a complete disconnect between me and our readers. I felt bad, but I didn’t see a way around it. The readers, quite understandably, were thinking “why is he spending so much time writing about some moron blog troll?” Their comments are starting to reflect this annoyance. At the same time, I’m thinking “Wow, I’m going one-on-one with one of the highest elected officials in the state, and he’s an absolute mental midget. How long can I keep this going and how far off the rails will he go?” In the featured post below, I tried to justify my focus on Thucky without revealing his identity, but I doubt many of our readers were buying it. Eventually, the disconnect came to a head, in a friendly way, and actually added some levity to the outing process (not that the process was short on levity, but I was happy to have more). More on that in the next installment.

The psychoanalysis plays out primarily in three posts, Thing Two About Thucky; Thucky: Textbook Case of a Neo-Religious Conservative; and Things Three Through Thirty-Three About Thucky.

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We now know that John Huppenthal is a Birther from this comment :

“bat shit crazy stuff”!!! Its in Obamas book, Obama said he was born in Kenya!!!! If this were a Republican, you would be going nuts demanding those college records.

But is he a modern-day Bircher (as in John Birch Society) as well? Here’s Huppenthal in September 2013 commenting on the poor in America:

Let me assure you that the poor in the US are much better off than the poor in an other country. Our poor are very asset wealthy and consumption wealthy as compared even to typical people in most other countries.

Compare that to these excerpts from a John Birch Society screed, circa 1965, which were part of its “What’s Wrong With Civil Rights” campaign, as reported by The Progressive:

The average American Negro has a tremendously higher material standard of living than Negroes anywhere else; and far higher, in fact, than at least four-fifths of the earth’s population of all races combined.

The average American Negro not only has a far higher standard of literacy, and better educational opportunities, than Negroes anywhere else; but a higher level of literacy, in fact, than at least four-fifths of the earth’s population of all races combined.

See the similarities? They’re awfully hard to miss.

Okay, so Huppenthal thinks like a Bircher, but how does he feel about Blacks?

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[Fourth in a multi-part series]

[Previous parts in series: Thucky and Me, Our Magical Year (Part 1); Thucky and Me, Our Magical Year (Part 2); Thucky and Me, Our Magical Year (Part 3);

Februrary 2014: We Figure It Out

After Thucky’s really bad September, he and I go back and forth for months on tax and economic issues. I notice in this timeframe that he’s commenting at all hours of the day and night.

My fellow writers and I are by then becoming more convinced that Thucky is not just “some troll,” but I led us down a bit of a rabbit trail for a while, thinking Thucky is someone else. We had failed to focus on the comment to Craig’s post, where Thucky reeled off the names of Huppenthal’s Hispanic childhood friends. One of us became convinced Thucky was John Kavanagh, which was a bit strange given John’s complete comfort in commenting under his own name.

Finally, in early February, we figure it out.

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