Archie Carter, a construction worker from Queens, is a self-described Marxist-Leninist. Not long ago, he joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), only to be repulsed by its overeducated, elitist members who cared more about “feminist procedures” and “fashionable intersectionality” than “real people” like him.
At least, this is what Archie claimed in an essay titled “DSA is Doomed,” published last week — and retracted soon after — by the commentary site Quillette. For the right-leaning pundits who deride today’s socialists as politically correct coastal posers, this narrative resonated. Archie Carter — a “real live worker (!)” as Sam Adler-Bell cheekily put it — had confirmed what they had long suspected.
There was just one problem. Archie Carter was neither real nor live, nevermind a worker. The essay was a hoax perpetrated by a 24-year-old “left populist” in Illinois, who later told me and other journalists that he intended to reveal the right-wing bias of Quillette, which brands itself as an unbiased, nonideological “platform for free thought.”
View the complete August 16 article by Aaron Freedman on The Washington Post website here.