Writer Who Started "Trigs Crew" Phenomenon Out at Wonkette

Jack Stuef, the Wonkette writer behind the “Trig is retarded” piece which ended up costing Wonkette the entirety of its advertisers (Blogads remains because they have to: they co-own the turkey but can only get the Clintonista astroturf ads nowadays) is out.

Writes Stuef:

All Wonkette editors leave you eventually. Today, it is my turn. So this is my last post ever. What a ride, etc.! I’ve enjoyed making fun of politics for this dumb little blog. But now it is time to move on. I came to this site a 21-year-old kid.

[…]

I live in New York now, and I came here to get back into stand-up comedy and take a shot at writing for television, but I just haven’t had the time.

Yeah, that’s what it is … time.

But get ready, because there’s a shooting-star-the-more-you-know moment in here that actually may be a gem in the rough:

I still loved it though, even though I found myself routinely burned out on politics, something I apologize for, as it clearly came out in posts at times and was probably not very entertaining to read.

[…]

At times, especially when I’m tired and have to somehow hit eight posts when there’s no real news happening, I’ve broken some of my own. I don’t like to make easy jokes. But I have. Kind of often. A few times I’ve made fun of people who really didn’t deserve it, and when it was pointed out to me, I apologized. This sort of thing happens, even when you make a point of trying to stay true to yourself as much as you can, because you’re human.

A part of writing well means knowing from where to draw your inspiration. It’s something Stuef is still learning, but here he writes a more honest assessment of himself than any admission I’ve seen from any other progressive. There’s a certain quality in being a navel gazer and your work echoing a sense of self-reflectiveness: it stops you from becoming another plasticized voice in the digital wilderness. It shows a cognitive ability beyond the trained behavior of hacking through the noise with snark hoping an audience will mistake it for wit. I hope he grows in his writing and wish him luck.

Some words of wisdom during the falling action portion of the controversy, from Big J contributor Kurt Schlichter:

Sometimes, in the heat of politics, we forget our common humanity. That’s dangerous. This kind of raw hate, besides being disgraceful, is poisonous, and the notion that there are no limits in dealing with one’s political opponents leads, eventually, to mass graves. I know – I’ve walked through the ruins of a society that let its hate for the other side (or sides) burst its bounds in Kosovo. We need boundaries in our battles, boundaries of decency; Stuef crossed them.

We’re redemptive people and Steuf likely won’t pick on kids again, more so I hope, because the prospect of a child reading that about himself and internalizing it tugs at Steuf’s soul more than the thought of the child’s defenders yelling at him on Twitter.

Wonkette, on the other hand, is a lost cause, a website past its time. Changes are coming, they say. Interestingly enough, Steuf unintentionally summed it up. Oftentimes what makes something funny is the truth: