{"id":121450,"date":"2018-04-05T09:15:06","date_gmt":"2018-04-05T17:15:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=121450"},"modified":"2018-04-05T09:15:06","modified_gmt":"2018-04-05T17:15:06","slug":"who-is-ricky-vaughn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=121450","title":{"rendered":"Who Is Ricky Vaughn?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Luke O’Brien writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\nThere was no mistaking Ricky Vaughn\u2019s influence. He had tens of thousands of followers, and his talent for blending far-right propaganda with conservative messages on Twitter made him a key disseminator of extremist views to Republican voters and a central figure in the \u201calt-right\u201d white supremacist movement that attached itself to Trump\u2019s coattails. The MIT Media Lab named him to its list of top 150 influencers on the election, based on news appearances and social media impact. He finished ahead of NBC News, Drudge Report and Stephen Colbert. Mainstream conservatives didn\u2019t know they were retweeting an avowed racist and anti-Semite, but they liked what Ricky Vaughn had to say.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe did this thing that people connected to organized white nationalism have not been able to do \u2015 walk both sides of the extremist line in the sand,\u201d said Keegan Hankes, a data intelligence expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center…<\/p>\n

On Monday, white nationalist Republican candidate Paul Nehlen, who is running against House Speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin, grew upset about criticism directed at him \u2015 and seemingly not disavowed by Ricky Vaughn \u2015 as the alt-right fragments under the weight of infighting, lawsuits and anti-fascist opposition. Two main camps have emerged: the real-world extremists who want to continue holding rallies and mixing it up in the streets, and the \u201coptics cucks\u201d who think the best approach to the mainstream is to keep pushing alt-right ideas through better propaganda. Ricky Vaughn is in the latter camp. And he hasn\u2019t been shy about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m dividing the movement between effective people and dumb losers,\u201d he wrote on Gab, a social media platform overrun by white supremacists.<\/p>\n

Amid all this infighting, an angry Nehlen dropped Ricky Vaughn\u2019s real name:<\/p>\n

Douglass Mackey…<\/p>\n

Mackey is from Waterbury, Vermont, a small town of around 5,000 people in the middle of the state. His father, Scott, a lobbyist who focuses on tax policy affecting wireless communications and the digital economy, was a former legislative aide to the late U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords (R-Vt.). When contacted by email, Scott told HuffPost that \u201cthis is a very difficult time for our family and I don\u2019t have any comment.\u201d<\/p>\n

His mother, Kathleen, whom HuffPost reached by phone, also declined to speak about her son. \u201cI don\u2019t have anything to say at this time,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Mackey\u2019s education is easier to trace. He went to Harwood Union High School, then nearby Middlebury College, where he competed on the track and field team for one season, running mainly the 800-meter distance. He graduated in 2011 with an economics degree.<\/p>\n

After college, he moved to Brooklyn, New York, and took a job as an economist at John Dunham & Associates, an economic consulting firm that uses data to help clients \u201crespond to threats and opportunities in the policy arena.\u201d When reached by phone on Wednesday, the president of the company, John Dunham, confirmed that Mackey had been an employee there from April 2012 to July 2016, when he was terminated for reasons that Dunham could not reveal under New York labor laws. (A month earlier, the @RapinBill Twitter account was registered.)<\/p>\n

Mackey appears to have moved that year into a two-bedroom apartment on Lexington Avenue in the Carnegie Hill neighborhood on Manhattan\u2019s Upper East Side. That was certainly his residence by the time he voted, as a Republican, in the 2016 election, according to New York voter registration information.<\/p>\n

By then, his apparent alter ego Ricky Vaughn had become a mighty pusher of propaganda, teaming up with other far-right operatives, such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, to spread racist lies and dangerous conspiracy theories. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Luke O’Brien writes: There was no mistaking Ricky Vaughn\u2019s influence. He had tens of thousands of followers, and his talent for blending far-right propaganda with conservative messages on Twitter made him a key disseminator of extremist views to Republican voters … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42720],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alt-right"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=121450"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":121451,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121450\/revisions\/121451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=121450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=121450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=121450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}