click to enlarge Chicken-Fried News: Bad actor
Ingvard Ashby

There was no indication of anything but a tragic accident, but as France’s Notre Dame cathedral burned last month, Videodrome sleazebag TV exec turned real-life right-wing Twitter tumor James Woods tweeted “Whether by design or accident, the great and glorious history of Christianity is being eradicated from the face of the new Europe. #Heartbreak.” To this obvious bit of faith-baiting, Oklahoma City standup comic and self-described “old-school internet troll” Zach Smith replied, “Shouldn’t you be on the set making a sequel to Vampires?” referencing the 1998 John Carpenter film in which Woods plays a vampire hunter employed by the Vatican. Smith’s tweet got four retweets and 49 likes. He went to bed.

“I woke up the next morning, and I had, like, 98 notifications on Twitter,” Smith said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, boy. Something happened.’”

What had happened was Woods replied.

“Yeah, I’m late,” the actor known to many younger readers as the voice of Hades in Disney’s Hercules tweeted back. “Your mom’s lip got caught in my zipper. #INSTABLOCK.”

The tweet pinned at the top of Smith’s page was about his mother’s ketoacidosis, a life-threatening condition that had put her in an intensive care unit. Woods, who really did block Smith to prevent any response, later tweeted that he’d read Smith’s feed and criticized him for having “no other recourse than insults” before the actor — who Amber Tamblyn alleged tried to pick her up when she was 16 and he was 53 — retweeted an image of Bernie Sanders next to Joseph Stalin and took a bigoted jab at Elizabeth Warren. Several of Woods’ followers meanwhile, tweeted at Smith to tell him to quit comedy or that his mom should have had an abortion.

“I said, ‘It might be too late, but I’ll check with her,’” Smith said. “I just tried to counter it all by being positive and jokey. There’s more to life than arguing with strangers on the internet. … I do regret what I did, but I do wish there was a sequel to Vampires starring James Woods. … But I also don’t want him to get work because he seems like a real prick.”

Smith reported gaining six followers. 

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