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chaletnz · 7 years ago

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The Trip Begins in Sofia

An afternoon flight allowed me ample time to prepare for my next European adventure. I took a leisurely breakfast with Alice at the hotel, ran all of my errands and even had time to pick up a chicken sandwich on my way to the airport. Although we waited for 30 minutes in the bus to the aircraft, all was smooth on the flight and I realised that it would only take 2 hours and not 3 because of the hour time difference. We arrived to rolling green hills, small clusters of houses and dry farmland that was probably grateful for less hot weather. The shuttle between terminals drove me around the airport right at sunset and I enjoyed some spectacular views of the air traffic control tower and large letters spelling Sofia in both English and Bulgarian. Inside Terminal 2 I changed 20 euros into local currency Bulgarian lev and then bought 2 tickets for the metro as my hostel had instructed. One for me and one for my bag! It was a much more advanced subway system than I'd anticipated - the scrolling sign inside and the announcements were in both Bulgarian and English (actually better than the Ubahn in Frankfurt which is only in German). After a journey of about 20-30 minutes I arrived at Serdika station which is right in the centre of Sofia and serves as the change station between the two metro lines, I walked upstairs to some deafening club music which was outside a bank of all places and desperately tried to navigate my way to the hostel. I walked down a dark main road and followed the directions to find my way into a little courtyard where I simply followed the sound of people speaking English and felt like I must be in the right place. I was checked in by Antonia who was super helpful and friendly despite my feeling uncomfortable with all of the socializing in large groups happening around me. I was shown to my room and then headed out for a quick Lidl trip to buy some water and a shower gel for the trip. Back in my room I planned out some activities for tomorrow and chatted to an American lady called Wendy who had also just arrived. It was actually a very comfortable bed and dorm room, unfortunately 2 of the roommates came in quite late and woke us up. And in the morning there was a mad scramble to get up and shower in the only shower between 15 people. It definitely made me think back to my leisurely mornings in the hotels! Once the scrambling was over I got ready and went to the free breakfast in the main hall, it was chaos with so many people fighting for cutlery and plates and two young Bulgarian ladies in aprons trying frantically to replenish the food. I took a waffle and grabbed the nearest free seat at a table with some hungover Germans. After my light breakfast I packed my day bag and headed off, first stop was the bank to exchange some cash. I walked down one of the central roads Alabin and found the huge court house with its two lion statues outside. A little bit further down I reached the 2 Giraffes espresso bar for my morning cappuccino. I had just enough time left to quickly find the street art I had spotted last night and then I met the walking tour guide Slavyan and the other participants at the court house. Around the corner opposite the St Nedelya church we began with a short history of Sofia - one of the oldest cities in Europe at around 6000 years old. The church was the site of a terrorist attack in 1925 that killed almost all Bulgarian political and influential leaders except for the king. A funeral was being held in the church whilst stacks of explosives lay below, by his own good fortune the king was running late and that is how he survived. Next we visited Serdica square where the St Sofia Monument stands. Slavyan told us about the "big misunderstanding" relating to this monument which was a millennium gift from the government of Sofia to its citizens. It was presented as a monument to St Sofia after whom the city was supposedly named but historians disagreed and said the city is not named after the Saint. The church was also not pleased at the depiction of a "Saint" with such an open dress. But the monument stayed put and that was that! We followed Slavyan to the Sveta Petka Orthodox Church. It was from the 14th century and nearby some ruins from the 4th century had been excavated, it seems that the Bulgarians loved to build their new buildings on top of old ones. Outside the mosque Slavyan pointed out the synagogue (the 4th largest in Europe) and told us about the Jewish population's interesting history. When Germany approached the Bulgarian border the Bulgarians were forced to ally as they did not have a strong army, however each time the trains came to take Jewish people to concentration camps the citizens worked together to save them. The king himself even stood on the train tracks and said they could only be taken over his dead body. We passed through the hot springs next and were invited to drink some water in hope to improve our cardiovascular system. Across the road we saw an old bath house that had been converted into the Sofia history museum and had beautiful gardens and a fountain laid out in front of the building. We passed by the Communist headquarters building where 700-1000 administrators would have worked but now it functions as an office for the socialist party which is the second or third political party in present day Bulgaria. Slavyan led us underground to the ancient city ruins of Serdica and showed us exactly where the east gate was located and in doing so we ended up taking a convenient underpass to cross the road and emerge outside the presidential office. Luckily we arrived just in time to see the guards marching for the changing of duty and we could all take a photo before Slavyan took a group photo of us. Next we passed through some archways to arrive in a courtyard where the St George church (also known as the rotunda church) is located. It was built in the 4th century and is one of the oldest buildings in the world at 1600 years old. In front of our next landmark; the National Art Gallery, formerly the royal palace, Slavyan directed us around to tell the story of the royal family in a bit of a performance so we understood how Bulgaria had initially "imported" its royal family but eventually ended up with a Bulgarian-born king. As we walked down the yellow brick road Slavyan told us about how the government had bought these expensive yellow bricks to look more European however once it rained for the first time and it was discovered that they were slippery and impractical, the government decided to lie and say the bricks were a gift for the royal wedding so that the citizens wouldn't know that so much money had been spent on the slippery bricks. We walked up to the Hagia Sofia which was the church responsible for the renaming of Sofia from its original name Serdica. And then we had reached our final destination, the one and only Aleksander Nevski Cathedral with its shiny golden domes. The grandest building in Sofia made with only the best materials, including a total of 22 tonnes worth of bells imported from Moscow. The largest and heaviest bell weighs 13 tonnes and it has been said that if you were to ring all of the bells together then the windows in the surrounding buildings would blow out! After the tour I went to take some photos of the cathedral and went inside to see how big it really was. Then I retraced my steps to get photos of everything we had visited on the tour. I felt hungry and luckily stumbled upon a supermarket to buy a milkshake and an oat bar for sustenance. Then I walked up to the central train station stopping only for a short break at the Lion Bridge. I bought my onward ticket to Skopje, Macedonia and luckily I checked the details in the agency because the woman had accidentally given me the morning bus rather than the afternoon one! My last big excursion for the day was a trip out to the NDK where I walked through the Bulgaria Square and into a quiet neighbourhood to find a speciality coffee shop called Dabov to enjoy a flat white. On the way back I watched the skaters for a while, especially the inline skaters as they were waxing all of the steps and getting in everyone's way. On my walk back I found a Bulgarian Apple Bandit cider in a supermarket which of course came back to the hostel with me to drink while writing my blog!

#Bulgaria #Sofia

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chestnutpost · 6 years ago

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Anyone Can Get Trolled — Even The New Yorker

This post was originally published on this site

On the evening of the midterm elections in November, The New Yorker published a short online profile of Jonah Rich, a “Trumphead” who claimed to have attended about 20 of President Donald Trump’s rallies. The 41-year-old Rich compared the rallies to the World Series or the Super Bowl. He said he’d met people who’d been to hundreds of them.

Rich had a familiar “Make America Great Again” backstory. In college, he’d been “indoctrinated” by “left-wing” professors, he said. Later, he’d been deprogrammed by Sean Hannity, Breitbart and Alex Jones. When the Trump train pulled up billowing nationalism, Rich jumped on board.

But that wasn’t why photographer Mark Peterson plucked him from the crowd at the Trump rally in Fort Myers, Florida, on Oct. 31 and posed him for a low-angle portrait. Rich stood out because of the sky-blue yarmulke on his head and his T-shirt, emblazoned with the Star of David and the words “Jews for Trump.”

Four days earlier, a gunman — allegedly a white nationalist — had murdered 11 people in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Rich was at the rally, he said, to show Jewish support for Trump, despite his misgivings that the president’s rhetoric was fueling bigotry.

“I sometimes have visions of potential confrontations with Proud Boys, or with white supremacists, or with some other Trump supporter who might not appreciate having Jews around,” Rich told New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz, “but it’s never happened. To be honest, everyone I meet at the rallies feels like family.”

Jonathan Lee Riches Jonathan Lee Riches poses as Jonah Rich at a Donald Trump rally in Fort Myers, Florida, on Oct. 31, 2018.

This was good material. Too good, it turned out. Within days, the Rich article had disappeared from The New Yorker’s site. (It’s preserved here.) Eventually, editors put up a note stating that “the interview subject had misrepresented himself, and the piece was removed.”

The hoax was nothing to mock. Journalists today operate in an information environment crawling with right-wing propagandists looking to dupe the media so they can cry “fake news.” Not even The New Yorker, with its vaunted fact-checking department, is immune.

And it wasn’t an ordinary shitposter who’d bamboozled the magazine. Like TMZ, Radar Online, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, SB Nation, BuzzFeed and other outlets, The New Yorker had been rolled by an OG troll. Jonathan Lee Riches was his name ― his given name ― but he had plenty of other monikers he’d created for lulz in the past: Johnny Sue-nami; the Crackpot Matlock Judicial Sasquatch; the “Patrick Ewing of Suing.” He was as warped as wet wood.

An underground menace long before Gamergate and the alt-right, Riches, who is not Jewish, hails from a time when trolling wasn’t the political blood sport it is today. It was wackier and funnier. More prankish, though still irredeemable.

(Want to know more? I interviewed Riches below.)

As a young adult, Riches got into phone phreaking, then phishing scams. He went to prison in 2003 for wire fraud. Behind bars, he became a world-class irritant by filing absurdist, frivolous pro se lawsuits. He filed thousands of them, against anyone and anything (e.g., the Kardashians and Kanye West, whom Riches accused of running a secret al Qaeda camp.) So prolific a litigant was Riches that he became a one-man burden on the federal court system, a troll tagging the docket forever. In 2010, federal prosecutors won an unprecedented and possibly unconstitutional nationwide injunction against him to prevent him from suing, claiming that if he weren’t stopped, the government would “suffer irreparable harm.”

I was just creating a clusterfuck. That was my entertainment when I was in prison. Jonathan Lee Riches

Riches immediately bypassed the injunction by slipping a batch of suits to a soon-to-be-released inmate to file on the outside. The prison cracked down hard. No paper in his cell. No stamps. Riches went on a hunger strike in protest. After 22 days, the warden had him force-fed through a tube. Imagine one of today’s millennial edgelords showing such commitment to disinfo.

Riches was different. He trolled harder, unafraid to use his name and face, often shunning a keyboard in favor of real-world trickery. All of which made him a more effective hoaxer.

In 2013, I wrote a story about Riches for Details magazine. He was out of prison just long enough for me to have lunch with him at the King of Prussia mall. A few weeks later, he was back behind bars after violating the terms of his probation by crossing state lines to visit the site of the Sandy Hook school massacre, where he pulled off one of his more reprehensible trolls.

At a makeshift memorial to the murdered children — whose corpses far-right propagandists like Alex Jones have tried to convert into money — Riches dropped to one knee to pray. When a reporter asked him who he was, he mournfully said he was the uncle of shooter Adam Lanza. Soon, Riches was in the middle of a media scrum giving interviews, an early example of a bad actor creating “fake news.”

New York Daily News Archive via Getty Images Riches pretends to be the uncle of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter Adam Lanza while visiting a memorial to the victims of the shooting.

Hartford Courant via Getty Images Riches, pretending to be the uncle of Adam Lanza, gives interviews to the media.

Riches and I stayed in touch sporadically over the years. I knew that when he next got out of prison, he’d enter a far uglier trolling landscape created by companies like Twitter and Facebook. On social media, racists and harassment crews roam freely, threatening lives, undermining democracies and radicalizing future Adam Lanzas. There’s nothing fun or funny about it.

As expected, Riches waded into the fray. He embraced the new weapons and gravitated, in particular, to Facebook, where he lures marks by creating fake pages connected to real events. Amid the media fracas over MAGA-hat clad boys from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky facing off with a Native American elder, Riches and other trolls created several Covington-related pages — including a fake page for Covington student Nicholas Sandmann that bashed the elder, Nathan Phillips. (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg continues to make lying like this on his platform alarmingly easy.)

Jonathan Lee Riches A fake Covington Catholic High School Facebook page set up by Riches.

But Riches’ real-world stunts continue to set him apart from the lumpentrolletariat. He attended the Bill Cosby trial in September 2016 and offered Cosby Jell-O every time the rapist entered court. He turned up in Florida with gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum as a Black Lives Matter demonstrator. A particularly successful ruse was posing as Muslim and attending political events. He did it at a Trump event in Manheim, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 1, 2016.

Jonathan Lee Riches Riches at a Donald Trump event in Manheim, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 1, 2016.

Three days later, he was front-row at a Hillary Clinton town hall in Haverford, Pennsylvania, representing “Muslims for Clinton.”

Bastiaan Slabbers/Alamy Riches, posing as Muslim, approaches Hillary Clinton in October 2016.

That appearance led to Riches being featured in the lead image of a Breitbart story attacking the Council on Islamic-American Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group that the political right has used as a bogeyman to whip up Islamophobia.

The photo is the very definition of fake news. It is still live on Breitbart over two years later.

Breitbart Riches appears in Breitbart as a fake Muslim for Clinton.

Riches may be a Zelig-like figure photobombing America for his own twisted enjoyment rather than for any clear ideological purpose, but his shamelessness, narcissism and lack of empathy place him squarely on the political right in the Trump era.

Jonathan Lee Riches Riches moves in on former President Bill Clinton.

CactusJackTexas Riches photobombs a Michael Flynn court hearing.

He has found himself standing shoulder-to-shoulder at events with people like Jack Posobiec, the Roger Stone protégé who spearheaded the near-deadly Pizzagate disinformation campaign and has collaborated with armed neo-Nazis yet still has a platform on Twitter from which to sow discord and lies.

In November, Riches released a book about his litigation exploits. One of his co-contributors also writes for white nationalist publications such as Counter-Currents and Arktos Media and last month appeared to endorse a political run by alt-right leader Richard Spencer.

What Riches has failed to grasp is that there’s little room left for the merry trolling of yore when truth is under assault in America. If your goal is to sandbag reality, you’re bedding down with grifters, foreign agents and an army of deplorables.

And Riches has no intention of stopping. This past weekend, he put on his “Jews for Trump” outfit to troll a benefit in Tampa where Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) was speaking. Outside the venue, he helped provoke a confrontation that led to a woman being taken away in handcuffs.

Nevertheless, Riches might still have few lessons to impart ― about gullibility and how a newsy character in outlandish attire (a living meme, essentially) can slip past journalism’s antiquated defense systems. At a time of peak truthiness, he is here, above all, to remind us that skepticism is mandatory.

Note: After being contacted by HuffPost, a spokesperson for The New Yorker provided a more detailed statement about the fake “Jonah Rich” story. We are publishing the statement in its entirety here:

On November 6th, The New Yorker published a piece on its Web site about a man who claimed to travel the country attending Donald Trump’s rallies. The article was done in an as-told-to style, meaning that the interview subject’s own words formed the basis of the story. Though the subject of the piece was not able to speak with the fact checker before deadline, the checker took steps to verify the subject’s account, including conducting an interview with a woman who claimed to be the subject’s mother and who confirmed his story. We learned on November 7th that both the subject of the piece and his purported mother had deliberately misrepresented themselves. Upon learning this, we unpublished the piece. The next day, November 8th, after further reviewing the matter, we added an editor’s note. Reporting an as-told-to story involves both trust and verification; in this case, our trust was misplaced and our system for verification intentionally manipulated.

It is generally unwise to give trolls attention. A troll willing to explain his motives and tactics, however, can be worth listening to, if for no other reason than to understand how bad actors operate in an era when they are empowered by social media companies that do so little to combat disinformation. To that end, we’re including the following Q&A with Riches, from November. The interview has been edited for clarity.

How long were you in prison for?

Ten years, got out, and then I went to Sandy Hook and left the state without permission, so I violated [probation]. I got three years for a violation.

I actually went up there like a conspiracy theorist to see what was going on. I just thought it was fascinating to go there. I actually got on my knees and prayed at the memorial. Then, I got up and some reporter was in my face. Then I just winged it.

I just said, “My name is Jonathan Lanza. I’m the shooter of the uncle and I’m here to give respect to the victims’ families.” Then, next thing I know, I get bombarded by media people. “You’re the uncle of the shooter. Oh, my god. Oh, my god.” They’re putting cameras and microphones up in my face. I gave like a press conference there. I drive home. Next thing I know, my phone’s blowing up and everybody’s telling me I’m on the news as the [shooter’s uncle].

After the Sandy Hook stunt, you were in prison for three years?

Yup. At that time, I’d stopped the lawsuits and I shifted towards the Pennsylvania “right to know” law, which is like the Freedom of Information Act but on the state level. I just kept submitting them and submitting them, like “I want to know Taylor Swift’s educational record.” Every department in Pennsylvania. “I want to know how many gallons of milk your milking department made in the month of …” Just stupid stuff.

I was just creating a clusterfuck. That was my entertainment when I was in prison.

You got out of prison the second time in May 2015, which was coincidental because not long after that, Trump declared his candidacy.

That’s where I got fascinated, because Mr. Trump comes and then he just is not politically correct. He’s just a candidate that I instantly paid attention to. I was looking at the online reactions to him and stuff and then I trolled off of other people’s reactions.

So Trump was your entry point to political trolling?

Political and online trolling, yes. And real life trolling. Once he got the nomination, then that’s when I started. Especially in Pennsylvania, because Pennsylvania was a hotbed state. So I was going to every single rally with anybody that was a high-profile political figure.

I went to a Hillary Clinton town hall meeting and they placed me right behind Hillary Clinton, as a Muslim for Clinton. I shook her hand and everything. Sometimes the campaigns put people behind a certain candidate if you fit a narrative, whatever, like that.

My next troll is I’m gonna start running for political office. Like mayor, city councilman, sheriff in different elections. Like mock campaigns.

Tell me where and when that New Yorker interview happened.

It was at the Fort Myers Trump rally. I was just standing in line as “Jews for Trump” and this photographer came up to me, liked my shirt, and started asking me some questions, wanted to take my picture. He was directing me. He was telling me exactly what to look at, the way I should position myself. Which was strange, cuz I never had anybody do that. So he took my picture and gets my information and says a reporter is going to get back to me.

And you were wearing a yarmulke the whole time?

Yarmulke, “Jews for Trump” shirt, Trump shoes, shoes that have “Trump” on it. And then I just told that guy my name is Jonah. I just took a Jewish name, I figured Jonah was Jewish. Jonah Rich, I was gonna say Rothschild, but I just said Jonah Rich.

You were posing as a Jew after a massacre in a synagogue. Do you think there’s anything wrong with that when so much anti-Semitism is swirling around, and you’re not Jewish, and people might interpret it as you making light of a tragedy?

My mind at that particular moment, for that particular rally, was, go down there “Jews for Trump” and show that Jews do support Trump.

But you’re not Jewish, right?

No, I’m not Jewish at all.

So you were creating disinformation that in the wake of an actual tragedy could be viewed, especially by people in the Jewish community, as very disrespectful.

I’m just thinking of myself in the moment. With different rallies, I try to go with different themes. So I had that “Jews for Trump” shirt and I had the yarmulke for a while, and it was just an opportunity to use it at that time. Just the luck that the tragedy happened, I’m like, “OK, I’m going to run with the ‘Jews for Trump,’ because of the tragedy.” I don’t think about the long-term consequences as far as disinformation or offending anyone.

But I understand after the fact that people could be offended. My belief system shows no disrespect whatsoever toward that tragedy.

What did you tell The New Yorker reporter when he contacted you a few days later?

We talked about my life and I just created a whole story that wasn’t even true: I come from a Jewish family. I’ve been ostracized from the community, or from my Jewish community, for supporting Trump.

The only thing that was real that I told him was maybe close to my name, Jonah Rich, Jonathan Riches, and my age. I’m from Philadelphia. Other than that, everything I told him was complete bullshit.

I was telling him I was going to rallies I’ve never even been to. I was Googling Trump rallies from 2017 to get the time and month right so I could spit it out to him. He did ask me on the phone, “OK, so who’s your parents?” I’m also looking up the white pages and I just find some family [in Philadelphia] linked to a guy named Jonah Rich in their 60s. I shot him off their names so it backed me up.

How long was the story up?

The next day, I put a Facebook post up that said, “Haha, look at this, I trolled them.” And then that evening it was gone.

[Trump] knows what he’s doing. I think he’s trolling the presidency, to be honest. For what reason? I think he’s just getting a kick out of this, man.

In terms of effective trolling, how important is it for you to do things in person?

It’s like testing my own boundaries, testing my own limits. My next troll is I’m gonna start running for political office. Like mayor, city councilman, sheriff in different elections. Like mock campaigns.

Getting out diversifies my craft, it gives me confidence to do these feats. And I like to try to test the limits.

Social media has made it much easier to troll, right?

I think the tools are available now that can be exploited and it’s easy to get that message spread. The disinformation that I want, I can put out there. The next mass shooting, before they identify the shooter, I can set up 10 Twitter accounts looking like news sites and then create whoever I want as the shooter, and then use the other news sites to retweet that. Vulnerable, gullible people will see that, they think it’s from a news site and then they will copy it and tweet it out.

Whenever there’s disasters, I also set up Facebook groups and then just thousands flock into the groups. I encourage everyone to basically fight each other. I don’t censor anything.

Is Facebook aware of the groups?

Facebook is aware. Every single tragedy that happened in this country since, I would say, 2015, I got a group set up in that topic. I can create fake Facebook accounts under people’s names so I can be anonymous. If a mass shooting happens, I’ll create a video real quick and put whoever I want to identify as the mass shooter, put some music, photo edit it real quick and then throw it up on BitChute because I know that will be the searched word.

People think of trolling in a negative way for good reason, but can trolling have a positive effect?

I think if someone trolls, I think they should expose their troll to bring awareness. When I troll something and troll events, I go on my Facebook page and talk about the troll. Kind of like informing everyone what I’ve done. One, to brag, but also to wake people up. It provokes thought. It plugs the loopholes.

What do you believe, underneath all this? Do you have any firm beliefs? What are your politics?

I’m just an atheist from a Christian family. I don’t practice any religion. I don’t hate anyone for their religion. I might pretend I [belong to] a religion but not to disrespect it.

What about your politics?

I made a choice: Whoever’s in power, that’s who I’m going to support. I just try to go with the flow. Obviously, I was in prison and I strongly believe in criminal justice reform.

Do you think Donald Trump is a troll?

I would consider him the king troll. He knows what he’s doing. He knows what to say to provoke attention. He’s a showman. I think he’s trolling the presidency, to be honest. For what reason? I think he’s just getting a kick out of this, man. This might be some sort of bigger thing. Maybe with Russia or something. Create division. Because there’s no unity in this country. It’s getting more and more divided.

I don’t know what the future’s gonna be like. I just think that 2019 is going to be a bloody political [mess], right before the election again. It’s gonna be tense, man. And it depends on what Trump trolls around and tries to excite everybody with. I just know whatever is going on, I’m gonna be trolling. Whatever breaking news, you can expect me to troll it.

RELATED COVERAGE

The post Anyone Can Get Trolled — Even The New Yorker appeared first on The Chestnut Post.

from The Chestnut Post https://thechestnutpost.com/news/anyone-can-get-trolled-even-the-new-yorker/

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