Things Have Taken a Very Dark Turn
I used to laugh about my internet notoriety… now I wish it would just go away
Hello! Welcome to Moronitude! It’s been a very interesting week for our hero. Something from my past has reared its teeth and bitten me squarely in the ass.
For those of you who got in on the ground floor of this silly little newsletter, you may remember a post I made about all of the various weird things that I have done for work. In that newsletter I spoke about the time that I pretended to get “Trump” tattooed on my forehead for an April Fools’ Day prank that absolutely nobody gave a shit about at the time. I lamented what a colossal failure the prank was on the day we produced it, while also laughing about the way it exploded a few months down the line.
It’s been over five years since that was published, one would assume that I could go about the rest of my days without seeing it again. With Trump out of office and slowly fading from our collective consciousness, one can’t help but hope there wouldn’t ever be another reason for that silly photo to have any relevance. It could just gracefully fade away…
But, as I’m sure you’ve already ascertained, that’s not what happened. No, my 15 seconds of internet fame took a dark turn this past week when the story of a Brooklyn man named Jacob Fauci broke. An avid zionist, Mr. Fauci allegedly stole a home from a Palestinian family. He was even caught on camera saying “if I don’t steal it someone else is going to.” The video went viral, Vice interviewed him, he gained some notoriety. As such, people on the internet shared the story of a callous man traveling all the way from his home in the United States to kick a Palestinian family out of their home. Online sleuths dug deep to discover exactly who Fauci was and what his beliefs were, but as you’ll see just below, they apparently never bothered to do a reverse image search.
Yup.
This all came to my attention when I started getting DMs on Twitter from strangers letting me know that my picture had been cropping up in some pretty incendiary posts. So that’s when I started looking into it. At first, I laughed, “There’s that picture cropping up once again, haha.”
About 30 seconds later, I stopped laughing. This was decidedly different.
When we made the post way back in 2016, I was definitely putting myself out there for mockery. That was the entire point. I wanted people to look at the photo in disbelief, read the article, check their calendars and then have a good chuckle about the whole thing. I sure as hell didn’t think Trump would actually win, and I most certainly didn’t think the last five years would have been as batshit crazy as they have been. Every time there was a story about unhinged Trump followers, I knew this thing would circulate again, but that’s what I signed up for.
This time my face was being specifically associated with an actual human being, not just some trope of “deranged Trump supporter.” When you add in that not only is Fauci an actual person, but that he’s a reprehensible scumbag gleefully kicking people out of their homes, well, I think I have some cause to be pretty upset about this.
Sure, I guess you could say that we look similar. There are some stark differences. For example, while we are both quite hirsute, his beard isn’t as full as mine while the top of my head isn’t as full as his. I’m also not wearing a head covering, something Fauci is doffing in almost every single photo I could find of him. My glasses are rectangular, his are rounded. My eyes are blue, his are brown. There are a lot of differences.
Not to mention, if anybody decided to fact check with a simple reverse image search both the Inked article and the Snopes article debunking it come up immediately. But, this is the internet, so nobody did this.
And when it was brought to peoples’ attention that the man with the Trump tattoo was this rapscallion, not Jacob Fauci, surely people took down the posts immediately, right? Of course not.
This is the part that makes me irate. Once you know the post you’ve made is incorrectly identifying me with Fauci, why in the world wouldn’t you take it down? There is clear and obvious harm in letting the post be seen by the 15,000+ people who have liked it (which pumps it into the feeds of all of those peoples’ followers) and the 8,000+ who retweeted it. Smuggly saying that Snopes sees a difference that you fail to recognize about 12 comments into a thread doesn’t really do anything, most people likely didn’t read that far into it. It’s so easy to just delete the thread, say “whoops” and move on.
I reached out to many of the people who I saw post it and asked them to remove it. Usually in a kindly manner, some in a less kind manner depending on how frustrated I was at the time. Yeah, I got admittedly a little shitty with some of the people… but this is infuriating. I don’t want to be associated with Fauci in any way, shape or form. And, as happens to many people who have been defamed on social media, I was mostly left screaming into the void.
Thankfully, Lexi Alexander—a Hollywood director who posted the tweet that was getting the most traction by far—deleted the post. Not after I commented in the thread that it wasn’t me, but after I reached out to her agent since it was a pretty easy thing to figure out. But she took it down and I’m grateful for that.
Most of the others haven’t responded in any manner. TRT World—tagline: “Where News Inspires Change”—never took down their video montage featuring the Trump photo in it, which is where I think most of this came from? It’s hard to tell, they don’t exactly “credit sources” or “do due diligence” or “have ethics.” [I really hope you were imagining Chris Farley throwing up some very sarcastic air quotes during that last sentence]
Right around the 50 second mark of the video you’ll see my face appear. If you want to see why I’m taking this so seriously this time around, well, read the comments.
Honestly, it’s a little scary. The chances of anybody running into me on the streets of Jersey City and mistaking me for Fauci are remarkably slim, but they aren’t zero. As I’ve been wrestling with all of this in my head I keep thinking I’m making a big deal over nothing. After all, in a way, it’s what I signed up for.
But that’s bullshit. I’m the editor at a tattoo lifestyle magazine (you may have heard of it, it’s called Inked and you can read my latest feature with Dave Bautista right here!) and we would never publish a photo of somebody without, you know, verifying that the picture is ACTUALLY OF THAT PERSON. Not to make light of what we do, but we sure aren’t claiming to be a news source or a documentary filmmaker or the holder of a PhD teaching Middle East history, and we would have vetted the photo before publication.
The thing that irks me the most is how easily all of this could have been avoided. Well, that and how could anybody mistake a true smokeshow like yours truly for Jacob Fucking Fauci?
That’s it this week, no history corner because I’m lacking some inspiration, but I’ve got something cooking for next week. But before we go…
Weekly Song to Rock Out To
“Racist, Sexist Boy” by The Linda Lindas
These girls rock harder than I ever have or ever will.
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