On Tuesday, Representative Patrick McHenry called Elizabeth Warren a liar. Twice. As Obama’s advisor for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Warren has grown accustomed to conservative ire. But this grew personal. First, while chairing a House subcommittee hearing, the North Carolina Republican accused Warren of misleading testimony. Then, after she testified, she asked to be excused for another meeting, which she claimed to have previously discussed with the congressman’s staff. McHenry snapped, “You’re making this up.” As Warren’s mouth fell agape, Democrat Elijah Cummings jumped to her defense: “Mr. Chairman … I’m trying to be cordial here, but you just accused the lady of lying.”
McHenry, whatever his motive, could not have prepared for what was coming next. Within hours, hundreds of Warren supporters took to the congressman’s Facebook “fan” page to chide his bad manners. “You kiss your mother with that mouth? Apologize to Elizabeth Warren,” wrote one. Others called him “classless,” “undignified,” and accused him of blatant sexism: “What a pathetic display of pig-headed machismo.” By Wednesday afternoon, just twenty-four hours later, the negative comments numbered into the thousands, with diatribes from Warren defenders unspooling every five to ten seconds like clockwork. A nascent Facebook group—Citizens Against Patrick McHenry—sprung up to maintain the momentum: “We’re starting to get noticed. More posts, people, more posts.” The insults ranged from the political—“Hiding behind your Republican Agenda is not good enough”—to the petty: “You’re ugly and your mama dresses you funny.”
It seems safe to say that, under normal circumstances, government officials—those culled from the ranks of dull bureaucrats, policy wonks, and lawyers—rarely inspire this kind of fealty, much less passion. And on paper, at least, Elizabeth Warren appears to fit this uninspiring mold: She’s a lawyer, an academic, and one from Harvard to boot. Yet Warren commands a legion of loyalists apparently willing to rush, at a moment’s notice, to her defense. The whole episode was strange enough for me to decide to find out more about her devotees and ask a basic question: Just who are these people, this de-facto Elizabeth Warren Fan Club, and why would they go to such great lengths?
The first thing that surprised me about the Warren Facebook gurus was that they were by no means the same Internet-savvy millennials that pioneered Obama’s web support in 2008. (Even before getting them on the phone, their profile pictures, as well as the peculiar yet charming reticence of their insults, gave them away.) But my cursory phone survey lent further evidence to the fact that Warren fan clubbers are overwhelmingly 40-plus, boasting a fair number of retirees in their 60s. As Cena Buchannon, a 63-year-old retiree from Dayton, Ohio, told me, “I’m a recent joiner, I guess, of Facebook, and I’m still not quite sure how I do some of these things.”
One of the big technical dilemmas confronting Warren loyalists was the fact that they were forced to become a “fan” of Congressman McHenry’s Facebook page before being granted access to pillory him. This aroused the fear of artificially inflating his Facebook fan base. Thankfully, helpful fellow Warrenites were there to lend a hand with instructional posts like this one: “Quick Tip: If you hit ‘Like’ so you can post on the wall, there's an unlike button at the bottom left page for when you’re finished!” On Wednesday, the congressman had 3,963 likes; by Friday it had spiked to 5,491. Warren’s defenders apparently weren’t getting the message. But whatever their shortcomings in Internet aptitude, they more made up for them with clever taunts: “Wow, you’re getting a lot of ‘likes’ Representative! Pity they aren’t broken down by irony.”
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