5 Famous Pro- And Anti-Trump Personalities With Shady Pasts

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5 Famous Pro- And Anti-Trump Personalities With Shady Pasts

In the last couple of years, our screens have filled up with innumerable names and faces claiming to be able to make sense of the bizarro political situation we're in. Some are opposed to the current presidential administration, while others are helping to run it. But sometimes these pundits have pasts much more interesting and/or shadier than anything they're reporting. Take a look at how ...

Laura Ingraham Outed A Gay College Student Support Group

If you're not sure where you know Laura Ingraham from, here's a refresher: It might be from when she started a fight with a school shooting survivor, or when she likened child detention centers to "summer camps," or maybe when she called for the creation of a white ethnostate on her Fox News show The Ingraham Angle. So, nothing good. Below: The Ingraham Angle.

But her history of terribleness goes back longer than you might think, extending into the 1980s and her time at Dartmouth College as editor in chief of The Dartmouth Review. In 1984, a reporter acting on Ingraham's orders infiltrated and recorded a meeting of the college's Gay Student Association (GSA), a group where gay students could discuss discrimination and activism, as well as experience what it's like to go ten minutes without being called a slur.

That last part apparently didn't sit right with Ingraham, who called the GSA "cheerleaders for latent campus sodomites," so she published a transcript including the students' names, back in a time and place when it was more socially acceptable to be a communist spy than openly gay. Students who were out of the closet got death threats and "had their dorm doors urinated under," and thanks to Ingraham, that number increased significantly.

She expressed remorse for her actions in 1997, and for the fact that her stunts "undermined our political point" (the worst part, obvs). That's the power of hindsight. We can't wait for her editorial in 2030 about how the whole "celebrating baby jails" thing might have been a bit much.

Popular Twitter Lawyer Seth Abramson Isn't A Practicing Attorney

If you've spent any time on Twitter, you'll know the name Seth Abramson -- if not for the rash-like frenzy with which he posts, then for his chief schtick of writing excruciating fanfiction for the #resistance in the form of 100-plus-tweet threads about how the Trump administration is a mere Robert Mueller sneeze away from crumbling into dust. His success rate with such legal forecasts isn't great, and that's a little weird, because he describes himself as a "professor attorney." You'd think someone with that experience would have a batting average better than a roomful of monkeys with typewriters, so what gives?

Well, as The Daily Beast notes, Abramson likes to qualify his tweetgasms with the phrase "as an attorney," but ... that's a little outdated. He hasn't practiced law in over a decade (his bar membership is currently inactive), and even then, his experience amounts to working as a public defender, not in the realm of federal law. That seems kind of relevant when you're tweeting about how some small legal detail means the entire government is totally going down this time, you guys.

He's not technically lying; he's just being misleading with his language and not correcting anyone who mistakenly believes he's qualified in anything above bird law. Heaven forfend, that might dissuade people from donating to his PayPal or buying his book of copy-pasted tweets. Not a joke!

PROOF of COLLUSION How Trump Betrayed America ....... Seth Abramson
Simon Schuster
If you're gonna pay actual money for a book of printed-out tweets, it should at least be the cream of the crop.

And hey, speaking of resistance grifters ...

The Krassenstein Bros.

Like Abramson, Brian and Ed Krassenstein have eked out a pretty good living from prophesying the imminent downfall of the Trump administration based on nothing but pure conjecture. But whereas Abramson puts a modicum of effort into his grift, the Krassensteins spend their days writing HYPERBOLIC tweets about BANAL news STORIES in this SUPER annoying PERFORMATIVE style, misunderstanding legal precedents in a way that we thought was impossible (did you know invoking the fifth means you're guilty???), and writing Barnum rar-rar-rar statements that end with pleas to RETWEET! (You know, to build awareness ... of Donald Trump. Whom you might otherwise be unaware of.)

It's weird that these two have such a visible hard-on for the feds breaking down the doors to Mar-a-Lago when you consider that in 2016, the feds were breaking down the doors to Mar-a-Krassenstein to seize computers and financial records for a network of websites they ran. Said websites promoted high-yield investment programs (described by the SEC as "often frauds") used by online scammers to ... scam people online. According to the government, "reasonable cause to believe that the Krassensteins would have known that these funds were criminally derived," and that the two "conspired to commit wire fraud." The K-Bros. were never charged, but that doesn't mean they got away entirely, since the feds seized the half a million dollars they estimated the pair made from being the go-between for an untold number of Nigerian princes.

It's hard to say what the brothers will do for work after Trump leaves office, but might we suggest that they get back to basics and shilling for Justin Bieber? It seems like our parents are less likely to lose their retirement funds that way.

Stephen Miller Was A Hilariously Awful Child

Stephen Miller is the Slender-Man-looking goon behind some of the Trump administration's worst policies, in the "voiding human rights" sense of the word, from the travel ban to locking kids in cages and leaving them to rot (still going on, btw) to the current efforts to screw with legal immigrants.

Messing with foreign people has always been this guy's "thing." While attending Santa Monica High School, Miller earned a reputation for being racist and xenophobic to many of his fellow students. Other media outlets attribute this trait to him rebelling against the majority liberal-leaning student body, but we're more comfortable attributing it to him being an anal fissure of a human being. Throughout high school, he continually targeted Hispanic students whom he overhead speaking Spanish in the corridors, telling at least one that he should go "somewhere else." Most people assumed he meant Mexico. Who knew he was talking about concentration camps?

At one point, Miller got so angry at other languages existing that he wrote into a local conservative outlet to call his Hispanic schoolmates dumb -- a tantrum which led to him getting a side gig at a conservative radio station, lecturing listeners about the dangers of multiculturalism and political correctness that he'd witnessed during his long, extensive, well-lived life as a goddamn high school student.

There was also the time that he jumped, completely unprompted, into the midst of a girl's track meet in order to school them with his clearly superior physique. It's not recorded how many girls were wowed by his performance, but we're going with "minus three."

John Bolton Chaired An Anti-Muslim Fake News Site

John Bolton is the current national security advisor to President Trump, a position which entails -- judging by his career history -- standing in the background of diplomatic meetings and hoping that things go horribly wrong.

5 Famous Pro- And Anti-Trump Personalities With Shady Pasts
Jesco Denzel /Bundesregierung via Getty Images
If you're still not sure who we're talking about, it's the guy with the mustache.

Between 2013 and 2018, Bolton was so desperate for someone, anyone, to get their war on that he chaired the Gatestone Institute, a nonprofit specializing in whipping up hate against Muslims with the most straw-grasping, conspiracy-spewing, clickbaity headlines humanly possible and intentionally trying to create a larger narrative that the "jihadist takeover" is real and here.

Accordingly, when you dig into their stories, most of them are pure bunk. A story about Germany "confiscating" homes so that migrants could use them was based on a single apartment in Hamburg going into a temporary trusteeship. A story about 400+ mosques turning London into "Londonistan" not only used shoddy statistics, but also deliberately omitted the fact that 700+ churches opened in the same time frame. A story titled "European Union Orders British Press NOT to Report When Terrorist Suspects are Muslims" is based on an incorrect reading of a report (not produced by the EU) detailing how incidences of violence against Muslims increase when "the media stress the Muslim background of perpetrators of terrorist acts." The report recommends that news outlets downplay, not omit, the religious angle in order to stop people like John Bolton from acting out Death Wish on everyday Muslims. Like this human turd did:

The nicest thing you can say about Gatestone is that they're responsible for an upsurge in fact-checking jobs at places like Snopes and the ACLU, but we're not sure that's a net positive for humanity overall.

Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook, and has a newsletter about depressing history that you should definitely subscribe to.

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