The funniest aspect of the "Erica Marsh" story is how obvious it was that this supposed hot girl #Resistance tweeter was not a real person.

Drew Harwell of the Washington Post wrote over the holiday about the recently suspended Twitter account of the alleged "proud Democrat" who supposedly had worked for both President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama, even though there is absolutely no record of her, or that she's even a registered voter.

Her account was wildly popular, with "more than 130,000 followers for her hyper-liberal, often melodramatic opinions," Harwell wrote. Crucially, however, she wasn't familiar to the flesh-and-blood Democratic voters of the real world. Instead, she's "popular with conservatives, who promoted her as a perfect symbol of how overly theatrical and inane liberals can be."

It also helped that her photos, which experts told Harwell are likely faked, portrayed a conventionally attractive young blonde woman. As anyone who watches Fox News regularly can attest, "hot girl liberal" is a favorite hate object offered up to their aging and largely male audience. The anger at women who disagree with them combines with their sexual insecurities to create a white-hot "how dare that bitch" rage. It's like uncut cocaine straight to the MAGA brain. (One right-wing Redditor's reaction: "The fact that she's kind of hot makes me even more irritated with this.")

This is more disinformation meant to keep conservatives in a rage doom loop that detaches them from reality.

The real giveaway that this was a fake account, however, was the tweets themselves. They read as an over-the-top fantasy of what MAGA wishes liberals were like. For instance, the account tweeted last month that she wears "2 masks whenever I go out and support Ukraine." The account responded to the Supreme Court ending college affirmative action with, "No Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system." That one got more than 27 million views, mostly due to conservatives congratulating themselves over knowing liberals are the "real" racists. She also provided fuel for right-wing conspiracy theories by bragging about the supposed efforts to falsify votes for Democrats.

One gets the sense that the person behind the account was testing if conservatives have a limit to how much B.S. they'll swallow. This doesn't diminish the possibility that the person behind it is also a right-winger. Longtime observers of the right will note that they view each other with total contempt, which is why the GOP is stuffed full of grifters and con artists who are always hustling their fellow travelers. But, of course, there is no such thing as shame on the right. The obvious fakery of the "Erica Marsh" account did little to stifle the willingness of Republicans to exploit the hoax to stoke hatred of liberals. Even Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., hyped the phony affirmative action tweet.

Did Gaetz believe this to be a real tweet? Doubtful. He's a jerk, but he's not a dumb man. He's just using this fake account for his own engagement farming. Of course, it would be naive to think Gaetz's followers were duped, either. Like much disinformation on the right, this is less about people genuinely falling for false information, and more about conservatives collectively play-acting belief as a show of tribal loyalty. "Erica Marsh is real" goes along with "Biden stole the 2020 election" and "Obama faked his birth certificate" in the bucket of things they don't believe in the factual sense, but espouse as a marker of their MAGA identity.