Can This Notorious Troll Turn People Away From Extremism?

“My overall point,” Dick Masterson says, barely a minute into his conversation with Steven Bonnell, “is that I think you’re kind of a weaselly piece of shit.”

“Why do you think I’m weaselly?” Bonnell replies in his slight, entreating lisp.

It’s less than a year into Donald Trump’s presidency and Bonnell is hosting a debate on his Twitch stream with Masterson, a chippy, mustached “Rand Paul Republican” who helms a weekly podcast called The Dick Show. Bonnell, known online as Destiny, has recently made a career of tussling with right-wing figures for the entertainment of his followers, who total about 200,000 on YouTube and more than 500,000 on Twitch. He has already dispatched a number of opponents whose notoriety exceeds Masterson’s. But this debate—this utterly fruitless debate—is where Bonnell’s intervention into the politics of the internet sublimates into its ideal.

The disagreement at hand, ostensibly, is whether Trump is racist toward Mexican people, with Bonnell arguing in favor of the motion and Masterson against. For the most part, though, they bicker over the conventions of argumentation itself. Bonnell says that Masterson must cite evidence, not “feelings,” to support his claims; Masterson insists that Bonnell is a “condescending fuck” who uses “stupid arguing tricks.” These hopeless exchanges go on for 45 minutes, as fans flood the stream chat with Pepe the Frog memes and call Masterson names like “scrawny little bitch.” He is reduced to a mumbling state of rage. The two men end by trading insults: Bonnell is short, Masterson bald. “All right, that was about as cancerous as I thought it’d be,” Bonnell says as he logs off.

The vitriol is a typical hazard of the job Bonnell has given himself. Eight hours a day, seven days a week, he sits in the sunless office of his apartment in Los Angeles, playing games like Starcraft 2 or League of Legends and arguing with anyone who’s in the mood. His desk has the quality of a nerve center. Wires converge from around the room on a pair of monitors, a softbox light, a glaring LED panel, and a camera whose eye is positioned less than two feet from Bonnell’s pale, faintly perspiring forehead. On either side of his chair are an old Casio keyboard and a pearl white Fender Strat, recently purchased. He usually starts streaming around noon; within half an hour, he’s discussing the rights of trans people, or the theory of consequentialism, or the fate of American democracy.

Bonnell first waded into the online political discourse a few years ago, driven by a kind of intellectual fury. As he sees it, many of the web’s most influential gurus and luminaries are bewilderingly incapable of critical thought. Since 2016, Bonnell says, he has confronted more than a hundred figures from across the ideological spectrum, especially on the far right. His opponents have included self-proclaimed “skeptics” and “race realists,” a libertarian activist currently running for “Not-President of the United States,” an anonymous representative of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, and the Scottish provocateur Mark Meechan (aka Count Dankula), who was once arrested and fined by the Scottish government for posting a video of his girlfriend’s pug giving the Nazi salute. Bonnell has even debated his mother for her—by his lights untenable—support of Trump and the Republican Party. “Most people,” he says, “are two to three questions away from utter collapse.”

Bonnell’s contests are nothing like competitive forensics or the polite affairs at your local university. He made his bones in the more trollish quarters of the internet, where civility is a laughable and dead tradition. The humor—at the expense of disability, ethnicity, tragedy—is depraved. Everything is game. When Bonnell is intellectually stimulated or annoyed, which is most of the time, his rate of speech rises to that of a seasoned auctioneer. He has called his opponents “too fucking stupid to tell your ass from your fucking sister”; he has also advised them to “sterilize” themselves. So far, his boorish behavior has gotten him suspended four times from Twitch and banned three times from Twitter. But it’s been good for business: He recently moved to LA from Nebraska, where his 8-year-old son lives, in order to increase his exposure.

Source: Wired

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