Trump’s Loudest Anti-Muslim Twitter Troll Is A Shady Vegan Married To An (Ousted) WWE Exec
@AmyMek anonymously spread hate online for years. She can’t hide anymore.
She was supposed to be a Russian bot. That seemed like the best explanation for @AmyMek. No normal person could be so prolific and prejudiced.
For five years, the mysterious Twitter account ― which has more than 200,000 followers, including Sean Hannity, Roseanne Barr and the personal account of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and has earned endorsements from Donald Trump and Michael Flynn ― has tirelessly spewed far-right propaganda and, above all, Islamophobia. Around 25 tweets a day, sometimes more, the majority of them designed to stoke hatred of Muslims.
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Even her Twitter bio, which features a grainy photo of a blond woman who claims to be a vegan, gun-loving psychotherapist and “fixer” fighting for the “wrongfully incarcerated,” felt janky. “[A]n ideological theme park map” is how Maureen Erwin, a political consultant who wrote about her search for @AmyMek last year, described it.
There is a real person, however, behind the bio. The headshot is real, if dated. And the Twitter handle, surprisingly, differs little from her actual name: Amy Jane Mekelburg.
Mekelburg, who declined multiple requests from HuffPost to comment, has managed to keep almost all of her personal information off the internet.
The 45-year-old resident of Fishkill, New York, grew up in a Jewish family in East Brunswick, New Jersey, a fairly affluent community not far south of New York City. Her father owns a wholesale business called Mekelburg Co. that sells magnets, keychains and assorted gimcrackery. Her brother runs a popular restaurant and craft beer bar in Brooklyn that also bears the family name.
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From the start, Mekelburg turned to racist far-right conspiracy and propaganda sites such as InfoWars and Gateway Pundit as sources. She bashed welfare and Obamacare and fast food workers striking for higher pay. She mocked liberals for supporting Trayvon Martin, the black teenager shot to death by George Zimmerman. She fearmongered about immigrant rape gangs and government gun grabs, often attaching hashtags such as #tcot (which stands for Top Conservatives On Twitter) and #PJNET (Patriot Journalist Network) that would soon be widely used by Kremlin-controlled troll accounts. Her main target was the “tyrant” Barack Obama, whom she branded an “illegal alien” and a “jihadist.” She tweeted that “Obama’s evil is limitless.”
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In 2014,
she also started using neo-Nazi terms like “cultural Marxism” and borrowing propaganda from white supremacists like Kenn Gividen, who runs a racist website and at one point was the presidential candidate for the white nationalist American Freedom Party. She encouraged her readers to follow
Jared Wyand, a white supremacist and anti-Semite who openly praises Adolf Hitler and denies the Holocaust happened.
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