I Fooled the Internet with a Petition to Allow Guns at the Republican Convention
This week, an anonymous internet person calling himself the “Hyper Rationalist” launched a Change.org petition calling for guns to be allowed at the GOP convention this July. It went viral, gathering more than 50,000 signatures and launching a bevy of incredulous news articles. Some people assumed it was a joke, or supported it jokingly, but others took it seriously enough that Donald Trump said he would consider it, and the Secret Service had to clarify that no guns would be allowed at the event.
It was, it turns out, a piece of satire from a self-described liberal, but you can’t blame people if they weren’t sure whether they should laugh—in 2016, it’s increasingly difficult to sort out satire from fact.
.. The goal was to write something earnestly in the words of somebody on the pro-gun side of the debate. Not the furthest right person on that side, not the most easily caricatured—I imagined someone who could easily get a guest spot on Fox News. I tried to use that sort of language, for the most part, with little tweaks, like the capitalization of “HUSSEIN” in “Barack Hussein Obama,” as clues for people who might be in on the joke. I wrote what I think Republicans should have written without me, in order to not be in contradiction of their own stated principles about guns.
.. My sense was that the vast majority of support was from people who knew that it was satire. But I don’t know. That’s very unscientific; I’m not going to comb through 50,000 comments and try to figure that out. I don’t necessarily think it took off because Republicans supported it—but I think it’s absurd that most Republicans were silent on it.