The chief corrections counsel for Alaskaโs attorney general is now the subject of an investigation by the stateโs department of law after researchers found he allegedly operated a secret right-wing Twitter account that he used to spread anti-Jewish propaganda, denounce the Black Lives Matter movement, whine about anti-whiteness and be bigoted AF toward trans people.
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As an alleged supporter of a Mormon extremist group known as the Deseret nationalists (if you read โwhiteโ in place of โMormonโ and โDeseret,โ youโre apparently not far off), the official is accused of hiding his hatred behind a pseudonym. Unfortunately for him, heโs apparently a dummy at creating online dummy accounts, because researchers found a mountain of evidence tracing the account to him.
Researchers for the Guardian identified attorney general assistant Matthias Cicotte as the man behind a Twitter account, which he allegedly ran under the name J Reuben Clark. Tweets sent from the accountโwhich had been deleted but were archived by researchersโinclude suggestions that Jewish people run the world and claimed that โthe malign influence of Jewish women and the decline of white men as problems in the contemporary world.โ
โReal history was taught in school, angry yentas didnโt rule, white men didnโt play the fool. Those were the good old days,โ the tweet read, which suggests โClarkโ was also joining the conservative white nonsense chorus line that says teaching Americaโs racist history is the real racism.
To be honest, while the Guardian characterized the tweets as โextreme,โ a lot of it was just garden-variety right-winger shit spewed from the non-lips of garden-variety Fox-News-ified MAGA enthusiasts.
From the Guardian:
In February this year, JReubenCIark wrote in reference to the Republican Jewish Committeeโs push for the expulsion of Marjorie Taylor Greene that he supported their efforts โto combat the conspiracy theory that Jews run everything by getting any member of Congress they donโt like expelled from Congressโ.
In a March tweet, JReubenCIark claimed that accusations of racism were โpurely a tool to control people on the rightโ, going on to ask โtry to think of example of an accusation of racism that helped the right, or Christians, or whites in the last 10 yearsโ.
On 15 June last year, he riffed on a catchphrase of the so-called Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, tweeting: โThe Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its Consequences Have Been a Disaster for the Human Race.โ
The account also repeated familiar white nationalist talking points about the relationships between race, crime and IQ. He tweeted: โIs it โwhite supremacyโ to note that some racial groups have higher IQs than others based on IQ tests? I believe that and I am only a Deseret supremacist.โ
Apparently, Deseret nationalistsโalso known as โDezNatsโ (Iโm sure theyโve joked about putting โdez natsโ in someoneโs mouth before, otherwise the missed opportunities are just sad)โrefer to a loose association of conservative Mormons, some of whom advocate the forming of a theocratic secessionist Mormon state and have proposed that it be a white ethnostate.
Anyway, tweets from the account also lamented the fact that โlots of Catholic Mexicans are coming to the US,โ and erroneously characterized BLM as a โcriminal enterprise that murders people and destroys property.โ
One series of tweets also declared that โpeople who encourage a kid to think heโs a different sex than what he is (including parents) go to jail for child abuseโ, and that โpeople who perform or abet sex change operations on kids get the death penalty.โ
Now, letโs talk about how Cicotte is apparently not a tech wiz who actually knows anything about creating a social media account that wonโt easily lead back to him.
More from the Guardian:
The moniker not only references a prominent 20th-century Mormon leader and attorney, but is the name of Brigham Young Universityโs law school, from which Cicotte graduated in 2008.
The account revealed a number of biographical details that match Cicotteโs, from the length of his marriage, to the identity of his criminal law professor, to his frequent moves, to the dates of his various stints in higher education, to his ownership of a Minivan, to the date of his house purchase.
There are other clues based on the course of his life or contemporaneous events. In August 2020, the accountโs owner remarked that he had been overweight but lost a significant amount of weight, which matches a long chronological sequence of photographs obtained from his wifeโs Facebook page.
The most compelling evidence comes from photographs posted by the account, presenting them as depictions of the interior of the ownerโs house. One reveals a distinctive patterning on the brickwork, and another a similarly distinctive pattern on wood paneling in a kitchen.
After evidence was presented to Alaskaโs deputy attorney general, Cori Mills, an investigation into the Cicotte was announced.
โThe department of law takes the allegations raised here seriously, and we uphold the dignity and respect of all individuals and ask that all of our employees do the same,โ Mills wrote. โHaving just learned about this late last week, we are gathering information and conducting a review. Since this involves personnel issues, we are very limited in our ability to comment further.โ
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