When I wrote my response to Linda Tirado’s viral poverty porn essay, I skipped over the subject of her teeth. Every fabulist sprinkles a few grains of truth in her story and the teeth could have been the honest bits of Tirado’s tale for all I knew.
Yes, Linda’s online ramblings about her mouth had the usual warning signs — like the dentist who accused her of meth use — but I just didn’t want to go there. Now, however, Tirado has put out a 15-minute rambling YouTube monologue about her teeth, which the Huffington Post has gleefully reposted with a headline blaring: “Is this what you want? Author of viral poverty piece takes out teeth to prove her story.”
As tabloid headlines go, it’s absolutely brilliant, just like HuffPo’s earlier Linda Tirado heds — “Meet the woman who accidentally explained poverty to the nation” and “This is why poor people’s bad decisions make perfect sense.”
The Huffington Post, you see, has been exploiting Linda Tirado aka KillerMartinis from the get-go. Unlike the mainstream media, which has almost unanimously passed on her story, due to all the giant gaping holes, HuffPo has been all over it, credulously gobbling up everything Linda feeds it. Whether it’s for the page views or because HuffPo can’t admit it was wrong or both, this online news organization is ignoring all the warning signs about Linda Tirado.
Granted, something similar to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle affects all of us discussing the Linda Tirado situation. It’s not possible to engage without some degree of exploitation, but the Huffington Post and its reporter Ryan Grim can’t even bring themselves to acknowledge there might be something to admit.
HuffPo’s mission now, you see, is not just to continue exploiting Linda Tirado, but to savage her most vocal critics for the usual sins — hating, trolling and jealousy. Those critics are caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to the teeth. There’s just no way for them to get into the details of dental plates without looking bad even if they happen to be right.
And yes, despite that dentistry video — described to me in an email as “fascinating macabre theatre” — we have no idea how Linda Tirado’s teeth became so bad. Maybe, despite her history of telling tall tales, the teeth story she’s putting out there is actually true. But it’s also possible that she took her insurance money and spent it on killer stilettos and martinis, and that her dentist had a point about the meth.
Right now, we just don’t know. Except for HuffPo, which does. The teeth tale and everything else is exactly what Linda Tirado says it is for this leader of the online news industry. Linda’s fantastical story would likely still have cred if it weren’t for Angelica Leicht aka @Writer_Anna’s biting critique, which also went viral. Sometimes it takes a girl from the dildo beat to point out in public that the emperor has no clothes.
What @glsailor clearly doesn’t know is that when you write about sex toys for a living, you get to know the naked truth.
AnnBrocklehurst.com 
I am so over this. I am so angry.
I have health insurance and my bills are paid, but dental insurance is different than medical insurance and it doesn’t cover much of anything.
I am also missing two teeth. They are not visible, a back molar and a middle molar but I haven’t been to a dentist since I was 26 and I am 32. I only went when I was 16 because a wisdom tooth was abscessed. I spent most of my savings this year on staying home to write and going on a trip. It was a stupid decision, but I’m not going to go to the internet to fix it. It’s my job. Her missing teeth are from her own fuckery at 19 when she was a young, stupid kid–not a poor person stuck in an endless cycle of poverty.
Linda lives in the great gray area called the middle class and she suffers from a severe case of class identity. She obviously isn’t rich enough to visibly swing with the rich people, but she is obviously no where near poor enough to claim the narrative she wants so much to own. She has obviously tried to go to both ends–her posts about her house and turning her kids room into a forest–and now posts about how she just can’t get a break in life.
It is obvious from her “life story” and the way she speaks about herself that she probably suffers from the psychological issues of someone who didn’t reach the potential her mother told her she deserved. In her mind, she never lived up to who she should have been because she was held back by a dental problem that was her fault (let’s just ignore that she had jobs working to get people to VOTE for OTHER people where she worked directly with them, not just on the phone). Linda believes she deserves this money and the life she thinks writing her amazing book will give her.
I can’t even go into a male blogger calling the women who called her out jealous–which is such a disgusting cop out that men use when pitting women against each other. If any of you had a penis, he would then say you were all angry sexists who just want women to stay down.
The thing is, that if I was her–I’d be raging mad, producing at least one more credible witness to how I lived. Her source Ryan Clayton is an off his rocker ‘political pundit’ (about as much of one as Linda is ‘poor’). I’d be defending myself against everyone’s blogs who dared to call me a liar. Because I would have the proof I was right and they were just haters.
Linda is doing what liars do when they are caught and come up with the ‘proof’ right away. Meanwhile, people are using her as an example that all liberals lie and exaggerate and shape the truth to fit their agenda.
Anyone who questions this, according to HuffPo, are just angry conservatives.
I stand up to say I am a card carrying liberal and poverty advocate who votes with her uterus and I think Linda is an exaggerator and someone with the typical “I deserve this” mentality–which is evident in how she wasn’t ready to just settle at 30,000 dollars or even 50,000 dollars.
The greatest thing about this whole thing is that Linda Tirado will probably now go quietly into the night and she’ll get her teeth fixed and realize that she probably still won’t become the “celebrity” she was meant to be–because inside she’s a ridiculously ugly person who can’t even come out and say she is sorry for hanging off a narrative that isn’t hers.
Then when all of her money is wasted.. she won’t have her broken teeth to fall back on as “proof” for her station in life.
Her failure will just be hers then.
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Given that the teeth are not proof enough, what credible witness would you like to see come forward to make this right? Can you select the witness, because right now it sounds like her trying to prove her story is just her admitting to lies that everyone is convinced of but that nobody has proof for.
So, you want her to prove she didn’t lie, but nobody has to prove that she did lie?
But really, my favorite part of your response here is referring to the middle class as a great grey area that everyone wants to escape from, be it up or down. I would hate to be financially stable and comfortable. I would much rather be rich or destitute, both are way sexier.
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Ravenpaine, don’t underestimate the effect of simple complacency. My mother is well off and she wore a dental bridge for years, till she got around to finding time for permanent dental work. Often it’s laziness rather than a lack of access to resources that prevents such from being done. As Linda herself has admitted, she could have accessed all sorts of dental programs. Linda Tirado CHOSE not to pursue those, nor to allocate her family money – there on offer – to fixing her teeth. I agree with AB, that there is more to the story: e.g., the family perhaps asking Linda to fix her lifestyle in the most basic of ways before they would commit the funds to her mouth. The fact that Linda gravitates to M McGill for counsel and advice is pretty indicative.
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K.F. didn’t state that “everyone” wants to escape from the middle class. She stated that Linda wants to escape from middle class. Linda is broke from poor choices. She is not impoverished. She is middle class.
See, instead of taking responsibility, her coping mechanisms have kicked in to tell her it’s not her fault. If she just wasn’t in such poverty, she could really be somebody. It’s easier to blame big bad America for holding down a naturally gifted person such as Linda.
It’s painfully obvious that Linda feels like a worthless person because of her teeth, but she also seems powerless in taking steps out the front door to get help. She admits to help being out there, and at one time, when she was in super poverty, would have qualified for it. I’m sure it was painful for her to hear the dentist suspect her tooth decay was from meth and that could have played a factor in her decision to not seek further help.
It’s not that people need to hear from 2.5 witnesses to verify Linda’s past or current situation. It’s that when a person, such as Linda, is trying to convince people to see things in a different light, there has to be credibility behind the message. Like a show of either researching the subject or living the experience and so far, Linda has only showed that she thinks she has lived the experience of poverty. When people realized the essay was mostly written to the Jeze/Gawker crowd, they looked for credibility and it simply wasn’t to be found. Then, when some people said, wait I thought she was poor, Linda blamed them for their poor reading comprehension. She had the audacity to point out the failure of other people and their reading comprehension, but her own failures, she will blame on society. It’s sad that her issues are playing out so publicly, but she has had a lot of opportunities to right a wrong. All anyone hears from her is F you.
If you haven’t read the All Parenting article regarding Linda’s self imposed poverty label, it will clue you in as to why some people are so upset. Also, if you haven’t read about Patrick Conlogue helping Leo, a naturally gifted man living in poverty, I would give that a look too. Then maybe you could explain to Linda the difference of living in poverty and just being broke.
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ROTHMAN: “HuffPost’s Gut-Wrenching Poverty Editorial That Went Viral a Hoax”
http://www.mediaite.com/online/huffposts-gut-wrenching-poverty-editorial-that-went-viral-a-hoax/
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Have you discovered any damning evidence yet, or are you just finding more blogs that are rehashing the statements at hand and coming up with negative interpretations?
Editor’s Note: The rest of this comment and Ravenpaine have been blocked. He has shown no ability to interact with people constructively. What’s more his multiple comments are very long and put people off the comments section, inhibiting others’ ability to discuss the situation and critique my article if they so choose.
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HuffPo’s Tragic Poverty Story ‘Tragically Fictional’
http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/huffpos-tragic-poverty-story-tragically-fictional
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This is from CNN: “2013: The Web’s year of the hoax”
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/03/tech/web/web-hoaxes-2013/
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Best answer yet…
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/12/04/BuzzFeed-HuffPos-New-Business-Model-Drive-Traffic-with-Hoaxes
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“He has shown no ability to interact with people constructively.” How true. It was another agenda trying to be shoved down our throats. The right wants to tell me what to do with my body and then the left is telling me I didn’t stay in the cycle of poverty because I was simply lucky. Thank you for writing these articles, Ann. It gave me a voice. A voice that is often ignored by both the left and right.
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This is a list of all the benefits a spouse of the military (and children) can receive. Healthcare and dental care being two of them.
http://www.military.com/spouse/military-life/newbies-and-brides/checklist-for-new-military-spouses.html
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Indeed. Something that escaped the “fact checkers” is that one of the contributors to Linda’s temporary poverty situation was that there was an administrative error and her husband did without his pay for a while. No doubt it was BACKPAID, folks!!!
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TITLE: “Scamming in the Name of Poverty – Exposing Linda Tirado”
“As for Linda Tirado, I hope she learns how to represent herself honestly. What she did to an entire class of people is disgusting. She is not the voice of the poor in America. She is the voice of a scammer.”
http://www.bubblews.com/news/1752912-scamming-in-the-name-of-poverty-exposing-linda-tirado
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Any updates on Linda? I was just citing her story in a comment I made and was going through the blogs here once again.
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Her book’s coming out. It’s being glowingly reviewed. PLus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose…
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