Jim Hoft Finally Officially Designated As The Dumbest Man On The Internet With Reed Irvine Award

If you have never heard of the group "Accuracy in the Media" (AIM), do not feel ashamed. AIM can be easily lost in the fetid open sewer that is the conservative movement's various political groups/tax shelters. However, once a year this organization decides to rise from above the primordial soup of right wing insanity to engage in a blatant act of trolling against the forces of progressivism and the entire concept of veracity by giving some jackass an award for "outstanding achievements in investigative journalism." This year that jackass is Jim Hoft, the man universally known as the "dumbest man on the internet." It is certainly a huge honor for Hoft, and outside of fellow St. Louis resident/moranJosh "Randy" Sullivan we could not think of a more deserving designee.

AIM was started by a Reed Irvine, a man who once denied that the El Mozote Massacre took place based purely on Reed's own perception that the person reporting the deaths of over 800 civilians was a filthy communist. Irvine died in 2004 after a career highlighted by his role in promoting the conservative masturbatory narrative regarding the Vince Foster conspiracy and his general existence as a complete embarrassment to any idealized notion about the benefits of a free press. Given this splendid reputation, it makes sense that the award in his name is finally being bestowed upon the Imo's Pizza of internet punditry, Jim Hoft.

Hoft has made a name for himself in the Obama era by personifying the mindset of Real America's insane flubby cousin who lives in the midwest and forces everyone to attend his painfully awful Thanksgiving dinner every year (WE DO NOT SERVE ANY GAY ASS GREEN VEGETABLES IN THIS HOUSE BOY). His blog is the embodiment of the sort of pervasive midwestern form of passive aggressive cultural fascism. It boasts the expected pathological hatred of anything Obama, but Hoft's work can be distinguished through his flailing attempts to exist as something more than just another angry blogger carrying the translucent white man's burden. Hoft knows that his blog is the sole source of news about the scary brown world out there for all of America's racist uncles (who need information to drunkenly yell at relatives during family gatherings) and boy does he deliver.

If you are the sort of person who occasionally takes a gander at the right wing portion of the internet and wonders how exactly it evolved into a place where obviously unstable folks are celebrated as demi-gods, Hoft is probably going to be your patient zero for most of the crazy shit that passes as facts over yonder. Hoft is now one of the main players in this never-ending and throughly depressing LARP of doom where any mundane news story can immediately be fashioned into PROOF of a wider conspiracy to destroy the underpinnings of exurban America. As one can imagine, he is universally incorrect in whatever assertions he draws from his RSS feed, so as a result the world is frequently treated to an ever-increasing number of blatantly stupid stories that Hoft flushes out of his laptop and out into the wider world.

Hoft's long list of lunacy since 2008 has kept Charles Johnson over at Little Green Footballs busy, and has probably justified at least the hiring of a few interns over at Media Matters. A VERY short roll call of Hoft's greatest hits include:

• Claiming that Obama celebrated the death of journalist Daniel Pearl .

•  Publishing a story derived from a satirical website stating that a high school had rescinded its invitation to the President due to his "forged" birth certificate.

• Deciding that the Times Square bomber was a registered Democrat .

• Spreading some bullshit survivalist fantasy about the Department of Homeland Security buying thousands of tanks (he earned a Drudge link for that effort).

• Calling Desmond Tutu a "Jew Hater" .

• Decrying a logo shaped like an atom at an international summit on nuclear issues as a sign of MOOSLEM CONSPIRACY .

• Describing the nice folks from the Westboro Baptist Church as a "left wing cult" .

• Deciding that Obama was photoshopped into the situation room when Bin Laden was killed because...?

Jim Hoft has bravely defied not just truth or logic but probability as well (even the National Enquirer was right about something eventually) in his splendid career of embarrassing the city of St. Louis and the movement he represents. In a world of close to seven billion people, where the internet is exponentially becoming a greater part of people's everyday lives, it is Hoft who deftly gazes upon the information around him and manages to shamelessly shit his pants publicly on a daily basis. If one man truly embodies the spirit of Reed Irvine by proudly disseminating ideologically driven ignorance for the purpose of making this world a somehow worse place, it is Jim Hoft, the Stupidest Man on the Internet™.

[ Accuracy in the Media / Media Matters / LGF ]