A coda for Ken Bone

In less than a week, Ken Bone experienced a meteoric rise from an unknown Midwestener to folk sensation and brand. There is always a downside to fame and for Ken Bone, his online history is coming back to haunt him.

The very thing that made him famous is now responsible for his demise.

I'm not going to get into the weeds on this. Basically, Ken made a number of unsavory and potentially illegal comments on Reddit some years ago. He returned to the online chat room on Thursday night for an "Ask Me Anything" forum and didn't change his screen-name. Not a real genius move. Interestingly, Ken's response sounds eerily like Donald Trump: “I’m not running for president,” he posted. “I can say whatever I want.”

Shout out to online media: Gizmodo broke the story and was credited for it in the New York Times. Other online sources also covered the story early: The Daily Beast and The Daily Dot. Traditional media jumped in as well. (If you want all the lurid details, stick with Gizmodo's comprehensive coverage.)

Here's a teaser - he talks about "going bareback."

There's some interesting commentary out there about Ken Bone's fall from grace.

Abby Ohlheiser of WaPo comments on the inevitability of the fall: "Ken Bone was a 'hero.' Now Ken Bone is 'bad.' It was his destiny as a human meme."

Carey O'Donnell on Paper writes that your digital past never goes away: "Ken Bone's Icky Internet Activity Was Dug Up, Of Course." 

And Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch sees Ken's rise as what is wrong in America today. It's an interesting argument, and an overt criticism of the media's coverage of the campaign:

But the media’s obsession with Ken Bone is a symptom of the disease that brought us Donald Trump as a major party candidate for president. As I write this column, a Ken Bone story is the most-read story on the Post-Dispatch website for more than two days running.

The problem is, hardly anybody’s talking about Syria. In a media landscape with fewer reporters than ever, not enough of them are writing about Russia’s unprecedented attempt to interfere in an American election. And almost nobody’s writing about climate change..That topic was at the core of Bone’s question to Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton...

This is the state of public policy in America. Ken Bone asked an important question at the heart of the climate change issue, but we’re not writing about the fact that Donald Trump believes global warming is a hoax invented by the Chinese....Instead, we’re talking about Ken Bone’s red sweater because the truth of our nation’s political duplicity is too hard to swallow.