Thread by @ThomasHCrown

Some things that have happened on Twitter lately have conspired to change my mind about two things I've long kept secret. I'm ripping away both masks at once.

My real name is Gabriel Diego de la Vega Thibodeaux.

And I fund the Federalist.

It's not easy for me to say these things. I've protected my identity and my covert hobby to protect me, my wife, my 11 kids, my employees, my shareholders, the cleaning staff who take care of our office suites, that nice guy who sells me coffee every morning, etc.

At first, I sneered at the self-abusers like @kfile who seemed obsessively taken with the funding of a right-of-center opinion site that doesn't hold itself out as a news source that publishes sex tapes or other important things.

What does he care? What do any of these people care? Then I realized: Our shameless support of a site that publishes some pro-Trump pieces amidst arch condescension of the great man is under their thin, thin skin.

And I felt bad. Although I left the Church as insufficiently tuned to the needs of Latinx-Cajun-Albino Americans, some Catholic guilt remained.

So I'm here to tell you everything about it, which will blow the lid off of everything you didn't know about the funding of right-wing sites.

As with so many other things, a chart clarifies matters a great deal.

That's the simplified chart, of course, and doesn't include the post-Colonel Pentaveret, who dropped out of the operation in 2015.

I'm going to tell you how all of this came to be, and remember: Everything you think you know is wrong, which must seem pretty normal to you by now.

Ben Domenech is just a figurehead. He's telegenic and quick-witted so he's great for TV and random photobombs.

Sean Davis? A man with the gift to make other people uncomfortable; a raconteur, a provocateur, a bunch of other things that end in -teur.

But he's not where all of this really goes.

No. This is the man who's at the center of this web of intrigue, the man who single-handedly drafted secret non-disclosure agreements even the editors and writers didn't know about, the man who has, with my funding, created a juggernaut that enjoys a lot of free cranial rent.

And you thought he was dead, didn't you.

Like I said: Get used to being even more wrong than your day-to-day life has anticipated to this point.

He's sitting next to me right now, sipping the a Beluga Gold double, laughing at all of you, because he knows he's untouchable.

In 2012, Abe -- or, his real name, Markos -- came to me and told me that the real problem with American politics was that there wasn't enough Russian interference in American politics dressed up as a broad politics-and-culture mag publishing diverse opinions on the day's topics.

I didn't understand a damned word of it because I was listening to Christian rock and a sermon from some street preacher while getting drunk off my a**, so I just handed him one of the wads of $100 bills I keep in my desk.

That's basically how secret, right-wing billionaires work. We learned from the Kochs (NOTE THEIR POSITION IN THE CHART) that you can't waste time testing efficacy, you just have to fund things you don't even understand or believe in because that's how it works.

He came back a few more times, I'm pretty sure just to grab a few Ks off of me, before I was sober enough to call security.

But no later than the sixth time and no more than $50,000 later, give or take, I finally asked him to explain how this helped with my plan to secretly fund a political site that would drive social media users and random journos nuts.

He informed me he had no idea what I was talking about, but offered to pour drinks while we discussed it.

So roughly $150,000 later, I not only understood his point, but I also had funded the creation of the Federalist.

But I couldn't be seen funding a site that spent a disproportionate amount of time on the virtues of Taylor Swift and lambasting Common Core. Too controversial.

I therefore pulled out my Rich People Rolodex, which all rich people have, and got my rich conservative friends, which all rich people are, to help me.

I need to note that no one knows how Lindsey Graham got involved. He just showed up at a meeting, waved around a check book and shouted in that South Carolina lisp of his, and disappeared. I'm assured he spent money on something, we just don't know what.

Anyway, we needed a scheme to hide the money from former BuzzFeed writers -- known for their investigative chops -- and British ex-pat writers who would quickly suss out my and Markos's secret identities if we didn't work. At all. Basically even in the slightest possible way.

I'm not going to lie to you: There was a lot of alcohol involved. Those Chick-

Those EAT MOAR CHIKIN guys can throw one Hell of a party.

I'm not sure who invited Umberto to the party, but that dude was LIT and he was sure that his friend Bergoglio, who was secretly of Italian descent, would want in.

Look back at the chart. It's brilliant, if I say so myself, and the two bottles of Moscato I've downed are singing from that hymnal, too.

The trick was to launder the money through knowing and unknowing organizations and people -- and if anyone from the Armenian American Museum tells you they're in the latter, tell them have photos of a guy whose name ends in -IAN passed out drunk on Umberto Eco.

We would then feed that money through dozens of routes to The Federalist -- or as we called it then, The Troll -- and never have it touch me again.

I'm not going to sugar-coat this: Mistakes may have been made.

I accidentally ended up with all of the money again, plus some extra that we think may have come from Lindsey but we're all kind of afraid to ask.

I mean, seriously, WTF. Gazprom at the very least is used to running money through other places to employ every former German politician it can find, you'd think they'd get this.

And no one's the same since the Colonel entered long-term cryogenic storage.

Anyway, the real joke on us was Trump. HE WOULDN'T EVEN PICK UP THE F******* PHONE WHEN WE INVITED HIM and suddenly we've gotta carry his sorry butt across the finish line.

Everyone's looking at Facebook videos and advertising as why Hillary Clinton's complete failure of a well-oiled book tour failed to capture the Presidency, but what they don't know is that almost all of our readers are from Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

Also Guam, which is just the funniest damned thing.

26 million people read the site every day, and they're all voters or potential voters in those three states (and Guam).

I can just go ahead and say it:

YOU'RE F****** WELCOME, DON.

We needed some patsies. Poor Tommy Steyer had to choke on so many idiotic left-wing platitudes, we actually had an FBI agent investigating Trump melted down to make a statue in his honor.

Breitbart had to take point, and so the Mercers built a pretty damned idiotic robot shaped like Steve Bannon to run that mess into the ground.

Steve's still in the closet behind me, surviving off IV fluids. I'll wave to him for you.

And obviously, having the Marshal of the Supreme Court investigating us in conjunction with Robert Mueller made for tough going for a little while there.

But that's all behind me. I'm going to dedicate my life to progressive causes, like battling artificial intelligence while determining if the world is actually a 3D computer simulation and making sure family-owned businesses have to sell to me because of the estate tax.

But tonight, Markos and I are going to have one last round of high-end Russian vodka, sent from Putin through the Cathy family, then the Mercers, then both Kochs, then the Armenian American Museum, and laugh at how we hid in plain sight.