“Unfollow. How a prized daughter of the Westboro Baptist Church came to question its beliefs,” a New Yorker article by Adrian Chen. The piece meticulously details how a combination of critical conversations with others on Twitter and changes within the church caused Megan Phelps-Roper, the granddaughter of Westboro founder Fred Phelps, lost faith. (Supplement this by listening to Sam Harris’s podcast conversation with Phelps-Roper.)
“36 Hours On The Fake Campaign Trail With Donald Trump,” a Buzzfeed article by McKay Coppins on the roots of Donald Trump’s flirtations with running for political office. Really gets to the heart of Trump’s insecurities and it’s not too farfetched to wonder if this piece didn’t push him to run for president in 2015.
“How the Haters and Losers Lost,” a Buzzfeed article by McKay Coppins that follows up on the fake campaign piece.
Donald Trump stood on a debate stage in downtown Detroit, surrounded by haters he was determined to dispatch: Liddle Marco to his right, Lyin’ Ted to his left, Megyn Kelly at the moderator’s table straight ahead, and — somewhere out there, in a darkened living room 1,500 miles away — me.
About 30 minutes into the debate, Kelly asked Trump to respond to a recent BuzzFeed News report about his position on immigration.
“First of all, BuzzFeed?” Trump said, waving an index finger in the air. “They were the ones that said under no circumstances will I run for president — and were they wrong.” My phone lit up with a frenzied flurry of tweets, texts, and emails, each one carrying variations of the same message: This is all your fault.
Trump was referring to a profile I’d written two years earlier in which I chronicled a couple of days spent inside the billionaire’s bubble and confidently concluded that his long-stated presidential aspirations were a sham. He had tweeted about me frequently in the weeks following its publication — often at odd hours, sometimes multiple times a day — denouncing me as a “dishonest slob” and “true garbage with no credibility.” Breitbart published an “EXCLUSIVE” with Trump and his employees claiming I’d boorishly harassed various women during my brief stay at his Palm Beach estate Mar-a-Lago. (“I don’t know how to say it — he was looking at me like I was yummy,” complained one hostess named “Bianka Pop.”) There were a lot of things about Trump’s wrathful, wounded reaction that seemed weird at the time, but in retrospect, the weirdest was that it never really ended; for two years, Trump continued to rant about how I’m a scumbag or a loser or “just another phony guy.”