Jon Chichwak

Jon Chichwak was a North Carolina State student and traitorous supporter of UNC-Chapel Hill who ran for the office of Student Senate President in 2007 against T. Greg Doucette, known on the Wolfweb as TGD. The campaign was controversial for a number of reasons, including questionable intervention by school authorities in the early phases followed by rapid escalation of negative campaigning and vandalism.

After an unpopular decision on the part of various school authorities to block the candidacy of the well-liked and experienced Sara Yasin only a few days before elections were to take place. Doucette stepped up to run in her place, but faced a candidate who was by now as entrenched as one could be when running for an obscure position in a marginally useful and generally ignored student government. Doucette pointed out his disadvantage to fellow TWWer and occasional poker buddy GrumpyGOP, at which point the campaign quickly degenerated into what Grumpy referred to as "a blitzkrieg of character attacks designed to destroy the life's hopes and dreams" of Chichwak.

An anonymous source supplied GrumpyGOP with two incriminating screenshots from Chichwak's facebook page the day before he decided to run for Student Senate President. One was his previous profile picture, which displayed him prominently wearing a Carolina blue UNC hat. The other was an announcement that he had left the group, "I only went to NC State because I didn't get into UNC."

This evidence of treason was immediately presented to the wolfweb, not previously known for interest in student government (indeed, prior campaign efforts on the site had been met with the cry of, "NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON GIVES A SHIT ABOUT STUDENT GOVERNMENT. NOT ONE PERSON") or for its ability to unify almost completely behind a single cause. The rare exception to this latter trend had been those situations that called for the destruction of a perceived enemy, a role that Chichwak fit perfectly. The community mobilized surprisingly quickly and with great energy. User evan revised the crude poster designed by GumpyGOP, creating a much more professional-looking flier that could be posted around campus. He also enlarged this poster and took funds to create two sandwich boards to display the facebook images (and anti-Chichwak campaign message) in the Brickyard. Ambrosia1231 offered her skills as a photographer, recording the reactions to these larger signs.

The response from the Chichwak camp was immediate. Fliers were torn down all over campus, only to be replaced in the early morning hours by GrumpyGOP, chembob, and others. Jessie Jeppson, a student who would later become adored as a user on the wolfweb because she is a human female in the upper 50% of attractiveness, was initially vilified after Ambrosia photographed her stealing one of the (expensive) sandwich board signs and walking off with it. The resulting turmoil ultimately resulted in her temporarily losing her job at the Technician and attempting futilely to apologize to the TWW community.

The Technician also ran an article on the campaign, interviewing all of the principal actors and deriding the negative tone to the campaign.

Ultimately, despite a real campaign period of only three days, Jon Chichwak went from being the only name on the ballot to suffering a crushing defeat. Doucette was elected with approximately 70% of the vote. Aside from the scale of the victory and the controversy leading up to it, the incident is notable for the relative lack of dissenting opinions (even from trolls) on TWW.