Art by Jim Cooke

Today The Daily Beast published an article titled “Anarchists for Donald Trump—Let the Empire Burn” in which the freelance journalist Christopher Ketcham explains the logic of certain progressive voters, including himself, who intend to vote for the presumptive Republican nominee in November. A sampling:

What’s needed now in American politics is consternation, confusion, dissension, disorder, chaos — and crisis, with possible resolution — and a Trump presidency is the best chance for this true progress. This is a politics of arson. I’d rather see the empire burn to the ground under Trump, opening up at least the possibility of radical change, than cruise on autopilot under Clinton.

To support his case, Ketcham refers to and quotes an unnamed editor of an unnamed “major progressive website” who secretly supports Trump:

Trump arsonist-progressives are mostly embarrassed to go on the record. An editor of a major progressive website tells me in an email that if I outed him/her as a Trump supporter, “We’d probably lose the last funders that we have!!!” That editor continued: “Absolutely, Trump by a mile. To the extent that voting for president matters at all, it is merely to give a certain secret pleasure to the voter in the privacy of the booth. I’ll get mine by casting a transgressionary ballot [sic] for the vile Trump, the greatest repudiation of the 25-year-long horrorshow of Clintonism I can imagine.”

We’ll table a discussion of this editor’s “transgressionary” voting logic for another time, but we’re curious: Who exactly is this person? “Editor,” “major,” “progressive,” and probably even “website” are not the most strictly defined terms. They could be used to describe an editor at Salon (or Counterpunch, or Raw Story, or Daily Kos), or a moderator at the Democratic Underground forum. Or Alex Pareene, editor-in-chief of Gawker! You never know.

Let us know your theories below. And if you happen to know who this editor is, get in touch.