In a Tuesday piece on the pretty fucked up saga surrounding Republican Virginia Lt Governor nominee John Reid, Virginia Mercury columnist Bob Lewis writes that last week he received an unexpected and strage Facebook friend request he “immediately recognized as phony. It purported to be from a real-life friend I’ve known for more than a quarter of a century. It used his real name and photo, but it had only 16 friends, not his more than 2,000 online friends, including me. So I reported the sham account to Facebook and texted my friend, who knew about it and had already alerted Facebook. The fake ‘friendvite’ was one of many I reject and report every week.”
The piece came just as Reid accused smarmy vest guy douchebag Gov Glenn Youngkin’s political operation of having been behind what would seem to be a similar effort, per the Advocate, that a sketchy Tumblr account – bearing a similar handle to one that Reid used on other platforms – was chock full of gay porn, which Youngkin used as a pretext to personally call Reid and ask him to drop out of the race. Obviously this is some pretty amateurish shit, but so is much of Republican politics.