This is not an interview with Banksy

You may believe Paul Horner is the real name of anonymous graffiti artist Banksy. It is not.

You may also have heard that Horner is a Facebook executive, bent on introducing a monthly user fee. Or a hapless 15-year-old, sentenced to life in prison for “SWATing” a video game opponent. If you’ve read up on the “Big Lebowski” sequel, coming soon to a theater near you*, you may also believe he’s an up-and-coming actor, recently cast to play a big role in “The Big Lebowski 2.”

(*There is no “Big Lebowski 2.”)

In reality, of course, Horner is none of these things. The 35-year-old Arizonan, who recently convinced 4.8 million people that he was the elusive artistic mastermind Banksy, is a serial hoaxer and lead writer for National Report, the wildly successful fake-news site that the Intersect debunks with exhausting frequency. Horner has been alternately described as a media troll, a liar and a hack, but he sees his work in a different light: one part activism, one part fan fiction, and many parts subversive, absurdist comedy.

“Do you know who Bob Odenkirk is? Saul in ‘Breaking Bad’?” He asks on the phone from Phoenix, where he says been awake for 48 hours, posting (as Bansky) to his new legions of “fans.” “He is so funny. He just does the funniest sketch comedy — it’s really weird, and just ridiculous. I love that kind of humor … That’s what I want to do.”

In Horner’s universe not everyone gets the joke. This is, for instance, the fourth time that his so-called “satire” has convinced vast swaths of the Internet that he is Banksy, and that he/Banksy have been arrested. (As of Tuesday afternoon, more than 4.8 million people had read his latest breaking news post on the subject.) Horner has spent days fielding foreign interviews, including several from reporters who don’t entirely seem to understand that he’s not the real deal.

Meanwhile, Horner’s hoax-story on Facebook starting a monthly user fee was shared on Facebook more than 1.4 million times. And another piece he wrote, about a 15-year-old sentenced to 25 years in prison for calling a SWAT team on a fellow video gamer, was picked up by several legitimate news outlets, including the tech site Boing Boing.

Horner’s greatest coup, however, remains a fake story he wrote during the government shutdown roughly a year ago. In a ridiculous piece titled “Obama uses own money to open Muslim museum amid government shutdown,” Horner claimed President Obama paid out of pocket to keep a “federally funded” Muslim culture museum in Mississippi open. Despite the fact that no such museum exists, it was reported, as fact, on Fox News.

“Then there was a break, and they didn’t mention it again after,” Horner said, cracking himself up. “I guess they learned how to use Google during the commercials or something.”

Horner is fond of evoking this anecdote as proof of the justness of his cause. “Is National Report the fake news site, or Fox News?” he asks. “You decide.”