Did right-wing media troll and all-around terrible person Mike Cernovich just do the exact thing he’s been accusing financier George Soros of doing for months? Did Cernovich literally pay protesters to attend an event?
Right-wingers have been harping on the “paid protester” non-issue since the start of the 2016 campaign season. Donald Trump regularly accused those who protested against him of being “paid protesters,” with no evidence to back up his wild claims. Yet he was the one who literally paid actors to show up at Trump Tower to cheer him on the day he announced he was running for president.
Trump’s supporters, if anything, have been even more eager to label their opponents as “paid protesters” and “shills,” often accusing financier George Soros by name as being the secret Mr. Moneybags behind it all. During the 2016 campaign, Trump superfan Cernovich was quick to cry foul any time anyone took to the streets (or to Twitter) to say anything bad about Trump — or about Cernovich himself — with absolutely no evidence beyond his own imagination.
https://twitter.com/cernovich/status/756299752401211393
https://twitter.com/cernovich/status/755807480542879744
Now there’s been something of a plot twist. Yesterday, Cernovich tweeted this:
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/857632929035411457
Naturally, more than a few of Cernovich’s non-fans were quick to point out the, er, irony here.
So you're literally paying for people to protest?
— The Sigma Oaf (@RicChciuk) April 27, 2017
Paid protesting is a rough business, eh?
— sthippie 🏆🏆🛡🛡 (@sthipp) April 27, 2017
https://twitter.com/seeeeeeeean/status/857775278633996292
But few on the left have seriously accused Cernovich of hiring paid protesters. That’s because they know there is a difference between literally paying people to attend rallies — as Trump’s people did for his announcement event — and paying money to help people get to rallies, which is what Cernovich seems to have done.
Lots of political organizations help to subsidize or outright provide transportation to people who would otherwise be unable to attend events. There’s nothing wrong with this, just as there’s nothing wrong with letting an out-of-town guest crash on your couch so they can attend a protest.
So, no, to answer the question in my somewhat clickbaity headline, Cernovich isn’t the George Soros of the far-right. Nor, I should add, is George Soros the George Soros of the left.
But given Cernovich’s massive hypocrisy on this issue, I can’t say I really object to rubbing his nose in this just a little bit.
/pol/ says that the OK thing is a concerted effort to troll everyone into thinking that it meant WP and to make folks think there’s Nazis everywhere or some such bullshit. Top Kek.
I don’t care about that; they’re all assholes. FFS, my husband used to ump softball games behind the plate and that’s how he would flash the ball count to the other players and umps in the field. Take something innocuous and make it ugly…that’s what these shitheads do.
IMO, the Pepe thing grew out of Trump’s propensity to do that, and it grew out of that. I noticed Trump doing that shit long before Pepe was co-opted. It was an affectation that always annoyed me.
Shrug.
@AsAboveSoBelow, Male Gaze Harvester:
Whereas I’ve never heard about it, which isn’t an argument against it in and of itself, but whose secret sign would it be? Isn’t like people are generally afraid to throw the horns if they’re in the mood to go “Hail Satan!”
Also, given it’s origin it’s likely that it standing for “WP” is what the Swedish calls an ‘afterconstruction’ (Google Translate keep 403-ing on me when I ask it to translate ‘efterkonstruktion’; my brain has decided that I know no word more similar than “afterthought”, which is close enough to be extremely wrong; and I’m terribly put out by this, so if you could find me an actual word in English which carries it’s actual meaning (provided one exists), or could authoritatively tell me that no equivalent word exists, I would be grateful). The Pepe picture supplied by dreemr shows how it has the same mirroring problem as what became internationally known though Smash Mouth as “the shape of an L on her forehead” (didn’t help that the first time I heard it as “the shape of an elk on her forehead”, although that did explain the narrator’s confusion).
@PeeVee the (Timber-Rattling Booger Slut, But Noice) Sarcastic:
I mean, comparing /pol/ to Al-Qaeda or Daesh isn’t generally hard, but the whole thing of taking responsibility for something they had no part in is where they’re practically identical (although the things they take responsibility for are different).
Do I think that it’s some international sign of neo-fascism? Nah, if for no other reason that neo-fascist secrecy is like a broken sieve, so it’d be well known among certain people (and “certain people” in this case comprises 30-40% of the population of western Europe) before popular media caught wind of it. Do I think that mostly American internet neo-fascists are the type of people who would appropriate an innocuous sign as their own? Well, there’s a history there.
@Feline
Is it possible that what you’re describing with “efterkonstruktion” is the ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc’ fallacy which states that because event Y followed event X, therefore event X was somehow related to or was the causative agent of event Y? I.e. this is the fallacious assumption that correlation implies causation. This amounts to a “reconstruction after the fact” in the mind of the person committing the fallacy.
Feline,
Yeah, I don’t put a whole lot of stock in anything /pol/ claims; I am just of the opinion that Occam’s Razor applies to this particular gesture…that it was taken from Trump’s affectation.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/the-trump-internet-keeps-making-fake-hate-symbols-and?utm_term=.qw7aPb3Xx#.phJ96x4rJ
No, I’m familiar with that fallacy. No, it’s more like the false etymology of “fuck” being “Fornicating Under Consent of King”, so not it’s not an assumption of causation by a previous correlated event, but an explanatory excursion using assumptions temporally and/or factually unaffiliated with the event in question.
My brain just this moment threw up “just-so-story” on the entirety of my pre-frontal cortex, which isn’t exactly it either, but it does gather a whole lot of the disdain inherent in the word. This might be a fika-problem, wherein the translation is nothing less that an outsider’s description of the word presented in an encyclopaedic manner. Although I feel that it shouldn’t be.
Or were you thinking about this specific instance? Because then (in my overly grandiose opinion) there’s no actual hoc there.
What I’m saying is this:
What we’re seeing here is that there’s a convergent behaviour of shitty people (also noted by their non-shitty observers), and once they notice this, an ‘explanation’ (or possibly several) emerges. Then said ‘explanation’ is put forth, and an entire theoretical framework can be built around this ‘explanation’. Which is where the “construction” in “afterconstruction” comes from. But we’re talking about explanations constructed after the fact, but not necessarily constructed from whole cloth.
But thank you. This disagreement is my (Mine? Should it be mine? It should, shouldn’t it? Or should it? Gods below, I’m losing my ability to English!) own and it may be that e.g. IP disagrees with me about the connotations of Swedish words. But I had to have a long, hard think as to whether I was talking about about post hoc, ergo propter hoc, and having thinks is always good.
You might be thinking of backformation and retroformation.
And backronyms
Kind of sounds like retrofitting (used metaphorically).
Orion, backformation and retroformation – what’s the difference? (I know back-formation, but not retroformation – is that another word for the same thing?)
Even if /pol/ was the source of this nonsense, it poses an interesting question: what is the actual difference between nazis co-opting an innocuous symbol and nazis pretending to co-opt an innocuous symbol so they can make fun of people who believed them? Aside from the nazis feeling more smug about the latter, I don’t really see one.
A back-formation (I’m pretty sure retro-formation would be a synonym?) needs to have removed affixes, so it’s not that. I think we’re just talking about false etymology; I’m not sure there’s a better, single term (like “backronym”) in english.
@PsychoDan: there isn’t one, IMHO.
That son of a bitch. That goddamned posturing, incompetent buffoon of a shitstain.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/01/politics/trump-michelle-obama-girls-education/