COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE | APRIL 23, 2021

Jeffrey Augustine: Anatomy of an Internet Bigot

Just as criminologists have developed profiles of common traits for individuals like serial killers, mass murderers, terrorists, and the like, a profile should be established for ranting, raving bigots who infest the internet fringe.

Since I’ve encountered them all my life in one form or another, I can conduct a rapid analysis and list their traits off the top of my head:

Importance
Incompetence
Impotence

Man walking down stairs — Internet bigot Jeffrey Augustine

Importance:

These men and women have a desperate need to assert their inflated sense of self-importance. They are, first and foremost, legends in their own minds. They do nothing wrong. They think nothing wrong. They say nothing wrong. It’s everyone else who does those things. If they don’t like someone, then that someone is bad. That’s all the thought that goes into it and that’s all there is to it.

It keeps things very simple.

Incompetence:

You’ll never see one of these individuals creating anything themselves. They’re incapable. Where you find creative, innovative and productive people too busy to meddle in and sit in judgment on the lives of others, bigots have nothing to do except meddle and judge. Where you find them held out as “authorities” you will also inevitably find they do little good (if any) in their fields of supposed expertise.

Impotence:

The things internet bigots choose as targets of their bigotry are nearly always immutable fixtures about which they can, in reality, do nothing. Racists, religious bigots, sexists, etc. are all fighting something that is here and here to stay. Like twisted Don Quixotes trying to stab windmills to death, it’s an exercise in absurd futility that makes complete sense to them.

Poster Child:

Now I’ll offer you the “poster child,” the archetype internet bigot, Jeffrey Augustine. A man after Miguel de Cervantes’ heart.

Book — Jeffrey Augustine’s book, in which he describes his “massive download from Infinity”

Asserting his importance to the world, Augustine implies his elevation to the status of a prophet. While driving through the mountains one day, he inadvertently slammed shut the entire subject of astrophysics by receiving a “massive download from Infinity.” To wit, Infinity (now a proper noun) told him how our universe was made prior to the Big Bang. You see, Augustine learned that Mr. Infinity poops out “bubble universes,” the universe we’re sitting in right now being just one of Infinity’s many generous droppings. All the theoretical physicists and astrophysicists out there can now turn in their books and go get a job at Walmart. Augustine just put a bow on the whole thing.

Having been handed the secret to all existence from Infinity, Augustine has embarked on his career as an internet superhero, his prophet’s staff pointing left and right, blessing that which Jeffrey Augustine likes and damning that which Jeffrey Augustine doesn’t like.

Recently a young woman from the Midwest, after watching another anti-Scientology troll’s hysterical parroting of the same tired, discredited tales that have been recirculated for 50 plus years, came into a Church of Scientology to sign up for a course. With classic midwestern practicality, she explained that if this particular anti-Scientology bigot was saying it’s all that bad, there must be something to it.

From the racists who lost their fight against civil rights half a century ago to the fanatical, bigoted thought conformists of today, hate and fear always spark curiosity and interest. It’s unavoidable. When someone gets tired of being told what to think and cracks open an actual Scientology book to get to the truth of the matter, it’s all over.

So there is your portrait of a ranting, raving, raging internet bigot.

While tending their gardens of hate, these self-important, incompetent, impotent fools step on their own rakes and smack themselves in the face.

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