The person behind the popular Ricky Vaughn Twitter account that is aggressively pro-President Donald Trump has been unmasked, according to HuffPost.
The account, which currently tweets under @RapinBill has nearly 28,000 followers and frequently retweeted accounts known to be run by Russian actors who interfered in the 2016 election on social media, is run by Douglass Mackey, a 28-year-old man from Manhattan, the news outlet reported.
Mackey originally tweeted under @Ricky_Vaughn99 before being suspended in October 2016.
Ricky Vaughn “was one of the first alt-right users to fully seize the potential in strategic, mainstream social media use,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
The identity of the Ricky Vaughn account seems to have been uncovered after Paul Nehlen, a congressional candidate who has been criticized for posting anti-Semitic content online, posted his real name amid an argument among the so-called “alt-right,” a loose collection of right-wing organizations that harbor white supremacists.
The SPLC described the spat this way:
The alleged dox appears to have grown out of a running spat between white supremacist Christopher Cantwell and infamous neo-Nazi troll Andrew “weev” Auernheimer. Weev has accused Cantwell of being a federal informant and Cantwell has responded by accusing weev of colluding with @Ricky_Vaughn99 to deliberately split the far-right movement between “vanguardists,” i.e. those who advocate for militant street action, and “mainstreamers,” embodied by Vaughn.
HuffPost found that Mackey is from Vermont and has lived in New York City since around 2011.
Christopher Cantwell, the white nationalist figure who was at the center of a VICE documentary about the rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, said Ricky Vaughn was “a dishonest, malicious, subversive figure who intentionally acts against the interests of race and nation,” in a blog post about his identity being revealed.
You can read all of HuffPost’s report about Ricky Vaughn here.
