The Greatest Trump Prank Ever

As long-time readers know, I am not generally a fan of President Trump, Trumpism, the alt-right, or anonymous internet trolls. But on the other hand, you have to pay respect where it’s due. Let us now discuss the greatest act of pro-Trump trolling, ever.

This entire story was beautifully reported by William Hicks at Heat Street, whose tale begins with Shia Labeouf’s self-made protest movement, the “He will not divide us” livestream.

But let’s back up for a second. If you don’t know who Shia Labeouf is, I envy you. He’s a child-actor, turned grown-up actor, turned performance artist, turned political activist. On the scale of annoyingly Hollywood busy-bodies, where 1 = Tom Hanks and 10 = Barbara Streisand, Labeouf is a 17.

After Trump was elected, Labeouf and a couple friends decided that, beginning on Inauguration Day, they were going to protest the Trump administration by having a video camera installed outside the Museum of Moving Images, in Queens. He invited people to come up to the camera at any time, day or night, and proclaim “He will not divide us.” And the video would be live-streamed to the world via the wonder of the intertubes.

It didn’t last. Pro-Trump trolls started showing up in front of the museum and performing in front of the camera. Labeouf got himself arrested for decking one of them. What did this gentleman do to deserve getting punched? Well, he proclaimed that “Hitler did nothing wrong.” Let us stipulate that no one should get punched for exercising their First Amendment rights. But if someone, somewhere, in America had to get punched? Well, it probably couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Following this incident, the space outside the museum was taken up by two camps, one made up of anti-Trump “resistance” protestors, the other by a group of pro-Trump trolls and white supremacists. The scene required a constant police presence.

It was not a moment where our nation’s political culture covered itself in glory.

On February 10, the museum finally said enough was enough and Labeouf took the stream down. Eight days later, Labeouf re-launched the “He will not divide us” livestream outside a theater in Albuquerque. That lasted for almost three weeks before the pro-Trump trolls shut it down, too.

At which point Labeouf valiantly re-conceptualized his project. Instead of having a camera live-stream people talking about resisting Trump, a camera was focused on a flagpole, which flew a white flag with the “He will not divide us” slogan emblazoned on it in black lettering. There were no people or buildings in the background—just a white flag flying against the serene, blue sky. It was broadcast 24-hours a day, seven days a week. From an undisclosed location.

And this is where the entire episode goes from depressing and disgusting to actually kind of charming.

On the 4chan message boards a group of trolls decided to find Labeouf’s hidden flag.

How do you find a flag with nothing to go on but the livestreamed image of a patch of sky? They started with Twitter, where eventually someone in a rural Tennessee diner posted a selfie with Labeouf. Guessing that Labeouf wouldn’t be in Tennessee for no reason, they used the diner as a rough approximation of the general geographic area for the flag. They were pretty sure they were looking at the Midwest and/or Southeast, not the West, Northwest or Northeast. Then the 4channers started analyzing the contrails that occasionally appeared in the background of the livestream from passing commercial jetliners.

By collating the contrails in the video with commercial flight trackers, they were eventually able to narrow the spot to eastern Tennessee. Eventually they captured a shot of three sets of contrails in the sky, which allowed them to triangulate to an even smaller area. But it was still too big to practically search.

So the 4channers started paying attention to the stars in the background during the nighttime portions of the livestream. And then, using the constellations, astronomy, and some geometry, they pegged the location to a very small patch of land.

The final bit of pin-pointing came from having someone in the area drive around honking his horn while people monitored the livestream for the sound. They found the flag.

And so, late at night, a group of Trump supporters snuck into the field, took Lebeouf’s flag, and in its place hung a red Make America Great Again hat and a Pepe the Frog t-shirt.

As pranks go, it’s not exactly MIT undergrads putting a police car on top of the Great Dome. (Or any of the other legendary MIT hacks.) But it’s pretty good.

And more importantly, it’s closer to the spirit of what we’d hope for in our political discourse.

JOHN KERRY EFFECTIVELY ENDED HIS political career on February 28, 2005, during a little-noticed event at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. Senator Kerry was being presented with the library's "Distinguished American Award"--a bust of John Kennedy. The artist had portrayed JFK with head slightly tilted. The bust looked puzzled. The award was presented by Senator Ted Kennedy, who phoned it in. Supposedly Kennedy was rushing to catch the "last plane out of Logan" to get to Washington for a vital debate on bankruptcy reform legislation. Why the other senator from Massachusetts wasn't vital was not explained. Nor was it explained why any Democrat was vital to a debate on legislation that was simply to be passed by the Republican majority and signed by the Republican president.

—P.J. O’Rourke “Kerry Loves the Mainstream Media,” from our March 21, 2005 issue.

Murder Most Foul: Agatha Christie’s estate goes noir.

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Can the supermarket save the mall?

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The Italian Job: How a crew of thieves stole $100 million in diamonds.

If Trump has reason to believe that there was an illegal wiretap, then he has to explain why he believes that. If the federal government surveilled a presidential candidate, even legally (that is, with a FISA Court order), then that is massive news. President Trump has levied an extraordinary allegation against another president. If he’s going to say something that explosive, he has to show proof. If there’s proof, that’s massive news.

But if Trump is just airing conspiracy theories, then that too is massive news, though of a different kind. It means that the presidency is occupied by a reckless fool who thinks nothing of destroying the authority of his office and the institutions of government for the sake of gratifying his own ego.

Which one do you want to bet on?

—Rod Dreher on the Trump “wire tapps,” March 6, 2017

A few years ago I wrote a piece for the Standard where I asked whether or the ’00s had been worse than the ’70s. At the time, I thought it was a close call, one that could go either way. Today, I’m not so sure.

I’d point you to two recent pieces that you simply have to read in order to understand America as it exists now. The first is by my colleague Christopher Caldwell, writing about the opioid epidemic over at First Things. It’s an amazing, magisterial piece.

In taking full measure of where we are and how we got here, Caldwell argues that the scope of the problem we face is difficult to fully comprehend:

Salisbury, Massachusetts (pop. 8,000), was founded in 1638, and the opium crisis is the worst thing that has ever happened to it. The town lost one young person in the decade-long Vietnam War. It has lost fifteen to heroin in the last two years. Last summer, Huntington, West Virginia (pop. 49,000), saw twenty-eight overdoses in four hours. Episodes like these played a role in the decline in U.S. life expectancy in 2015. The death toll far eclipses those of all previous drug crises. . . .

A heroin scourge in America’s housing projects coincided with a wave of heroin-addicted soldiers brought back from Vietnam, with a cost peaking between 1973 and 1975 at 1.5 overdose deaths per 100,000. The Nixon White House panicked. Curtis Mayfield wrote his soul ballad “Freddie’s Dead.” The crack epidemic of the mid- to late 1980s was worse, with a death rate reaching almost two per 100,000. George H. W. Bush declared war on drugs. The present opioid epidemic is killing 10.3 people per 100,000, and that is without the fentanyl-impacted statistics from 2016. In some states it is far worse: over thirty per 100,000 in New Hampshire and over forty in West Virginia.

And the causes are complicated. A big part of the story is the ascendency of corporate America at the same time that American communities were being defenestrated. But it also has something to do with a culture that can’t say no to anything, that doesn’t believe in taboo, that feels the need to excuse and expunge and relieve people of agency.

Again, go read Caldwell’s piece. It’s amazing.

The other blockbuster essay comes from my friend Nick Eberstadt in the new issue of Commentary. (And by the by, if you haven’t subscribed to Commentary, you should. It’s a truly great magazine.) In “Our Miserable 21st Century” Eberstadt takes a more general, 30,000-foot view of modern America. He examines reams of data—on finances, income, health, social mobility, and more—and the picture he paints is one of a nation in serious trouble. Decline, even.

Take economic growth: Economists now believe that the potential growth rate for the United States—that is, the rate at which the economy would grow at full employment—is just 1.7 percent. Which means that the long-term growth rate is under 1 percent. The work rates for the population have similarly been revised downward. The rosy unemployment numbers you hear on the news are based on the assumption that the percentage of Americans in the labor force will never again be as high as it was in 2001. Here’s Eberstadt:

As of late 2016, the adult work rate in America was still at its lowest level in more than 30 years. To put things another way: If our nation’s work rate today were back up to its start-of-the-century highs, well over 10 million more Americans would currently have paying jobs.

There is no way to sugarcoat these awful numbers. They are not a statistical artifact that can be explained away by population aging, or by increased educational enrollment for adult students, or by any other genuine change in contemporary American society. The plain fact is that 21st-century America has witnessed a dreadful collapse of work.

What’s worse, this collapse of work post-2000 has coincided with an explosion of wealth for the wealth-holders. There’s no way for these opposing trends to lead to either economic or cultural or political stability.

It gets worse. We are at a point where 1-in-8 American men over the age of 18 has a felony conviction. Where the average life expectancy of big chunks of the populace is moving backwards. Where geographic mobility is in its third straight decade of decline and social mobility is collapsing, too. In 1977, the average 30-year-old was almost a sure bet to be earning more money than his parents were making at the same age—he had an 86 percent chance. Today, his odds are just about even-money—51 percent.

Like I said, go read Eberstadt’s sensational piece. This is the America of 2017. Donald Trump isn’t Reagan. And morning isn’t coming.

Enough of the sunny stuff for this week. There’s a new Substandard podcast coming tomorrow! We spend most of the episode talking about King Kong and Godzilla and the new “Monsterverse.” I promise, it’s better than it sounds. You’ll go . . . ape . . . for the Substandard.

Listen on Thursday morning and subscribe to us on iTunes or Google Play.

Best,

JVL