Paul Horner, a 38-year-old satirist, was found dead last week after a short, comet-like career of creating fake news, some of which may have greatly contributed to President Donald Trump's 2016 election victory. Local authorities who found him in bed suspect a drug overdose as the cause of death, not suggesting any foul play. CBS News reports..
He – or someone using his fake signature “Jimmy Rustling” – still posting abcnews.com.co as recently as September 15th.
Horner had many qualities, but apologizing was not one of them. He's cool told the Washington Post Donald Trump was elected last year because of him and his widely circulated and fabricated articles.
Throughout his work, he has supported conservative conspiracy theories, including the idea that anti-Trump protesters paid to attend candidate rallies and that Barack Obama was secretly a radical Muslim. Facebook was his platform for disseminating information, but Horner's articles were shared, and sometimes even used as primary sources, by Fox News, Donald Trump Jr. and Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
Horner and many others saw Trump's rise as a change in America's DNA, a complete disregard for the facts. “People are definitely dumber,” Horner told the Post in November 2016. “My websites were constantly being viewed by Trump supporters.” He said with noticeable enthusiasm, “They never fact-check anything!”
Something of a sociopathic troll and a genuine political danger, Horner positioned himself as a covert agent for the alt-right, essentially rewriting their lies on websites that looked like images of reliable news sources, or even outright stole them. But when he was caught, Horner shrugged, called it “satire”, claimed that he was actually exposing the dishonesty of the Tory right, and repeated it, making thousands in profit. Meanwhile, mainstream media has rebranded his toxicity as edginess, and his work represents the new media paradigm that social media helped usher in.
But, as Salon says Matthew Sheffield writes: “It is important to understand, however, that the huge number of far-right conspiracy websites that have proliferated in recent years belong to a long tradition of conservative fake news.” It's not that Horner and his ilk were “rebels” or anything new. Like Trump's attacks on the mainstream media, this cabal honed in on a deep-rooted and long-held distrust of news sources. They didn't give birth to anything they hadn't seen before.
Indeed, Kurt Andersen wrote an entire book documenting the era of fake news. which he claimed took 500 years to create. The truth is that the way of thinking that Horner personified was even older than that.
Whether you're a founder like Breitbart or, like Horner, an exploiter of Breitbart's audience, there's money to be made in the fake news business. Horner himself told the Post that he made about $10,000 a month producing the kind of “journalism” that the right wanted to see and believed in regardless of the actual facts (which is how Fox News made its billions).
Like any death, especially the death of a clearly troubled person struggling with addiction, it is a tragedy. But Horner's life and work do not provide insight into the transformation of modern media, nor do they make him a pioneer of alternative journalism. No, from a man who openly said in same interview that he hated Trump and yet seemed proud of his role in the candidate's victory.
Horner's career in fake news was about two things: attention and money. His journey simply shows the sacrifices of humanity and decency some will make to get it.
