John Huppenthal

Thucky and Me, Our Magical Year (Part 2)

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Second in a multi-part Series

After my “Thucky and Dang” post, Dang lost interest, but Thucky became my new pen pal. We were still early on in our “relationship,” and I still had hopes that logic could reach him, a hope that ultimately was dashed.

I wrote a lengthy post, Conflating Inequality and Unemployment, in which I tried, with zero success, to explain to the Thuckmeister that inequality in America was a problem far greater in scope than unemployment. My motivation for the effort was that each time I wrote a post on inequality, Thucky would use the comment section to repeat conservative talking points on job creation. The thoughtless repetition of talking points was not surprising, but his comments made it apparent that he thought unemployment and inequality were the same issue.

Soon thereafter, Thuckbrain showed me his true colors in a comment to one of my posts on inequality:

The typical poor person in America has a flat screen tv, cable, air conditioning, a cell phone and an automobile. Immoral? You can live well if you are poor and if you are rich but it is cheaper if you are poor and you have a luxury the rich do not have: time.

Wow! Unbeknownst to me, he’d already made his now infamous “lazy pigs” comment months earlier, but it was to another writer’s post, so this was my introduction to how “the poor live well” in Thuckyland.

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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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If only he’d been chummier…

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Per Tedski: By the way, after talking to a few legislators, it seems that Huppenthal wasn’t exactly chummy with his fellow solons back when he was in the lege. This is probably the bigger reason for the lack of the usual wagon circling by the Phoenix civic establishment than the racism and general unhinged nature … Read more

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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Those two times that Huppenthal defended Sylvia Allen for saying the Earth is 6000 years old on Democratic Diva

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Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

HuppToon

A reporter has asked me for all the comments John Huppenthal made as Falcon9 and as I was compiling them I noticed that there were two different times that he (hilariously) defended former Senator Sylvia Allen for saying that the Earth is 6000 years old at a committee hearing on uranium mining at the Grand Canyon.

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