By David Futrelle
Given how many of today’s alt-right Nazis and Nazi-equivalents grew up on 4chan, the internet’s Troll Central, it’s hardly surprising that they lie about almost everything. What is perhaps a little more surprising is how bad at it they are. Most of their deceptive propaganda is so obviously phony that in many cases the only people they are fooling are each other.
Case in point: In the wake of two violent alt-right rallies in Charlottesville, during which antifascist activist Heather Heyer was brutally murdered by a Trump-loving, Pepe-posting white supremacist, alt-rightists have been doing their best to try to smear Antifa counterprotesters as the real perpetrators of violence in Charlottesville.
They’ve done so in part by flooding the internet with mislabeled photos of other demonstrations, with one of the most widely distributed photos featuring an Antifa graphic crudely photoshopped onto the back of a Greek protester beating a cop.
Lefty Twitterer @2dAmMuslim took apart some of these claims in a recent thread. Let’s just look at his screenshots of the, er, discussion, which started off with a right-winger posting not one, not two, but four different bullshit pics, all of which have been widely distributed by right-wingers in recent days, intended to “prove” that Antifas were the true thugs in Charlottesville.
“Libertas” responded to this rebuttal by … blocking @2ndAmMuslim.
Alt-rightists have also been distributing what they claim is a secret Antifa manual allegedly discovered somewhere on the campus of The Evergreen State College. Its fakeness is so readily apparent — just read the thing — that it could only be convincing to dedicated Fox News viewers and especially gullible channers who don’t actually know anything about actual Antifa beliefs.
My favorite bits come at the end, when whoever wrote this thing basically stopped trying to be even slightly convincing.
But it isn’t just channers who find themselves duped by these crude fakes. Independent Journal Review “journalist” Benny Johnson — who was famously fired from Buzzfeed for plagiarism — recently reported on an obviously phony Antifa Twitter account as if it were the Twitter account of a real organization. The problem with his article was evident just from its headline: “Boston Antifa Thanks Hillary Clinton, Democrats for Their Support as They Burn American Flag.”
Anyone who knows anything about Antifas know that they aren’t exactly big Hillary Clinton fans. It’s a bit like reporting that a group of Boston Red Sox fans was heaping praise on the New York Yankees. See Angry White Men and NYmag for more on this particular debacle.
After Johnson was informed by half the internet that the group was fake, he or his editors added an “Alleged” to the front of his headline.
But this is probably my favorite bit of alt-right bullshit from recent days. Here an enterprising propagandist reuses a picture from a Cleveland rally in order to “prove” that some of the white supremacists protesting in Boston last weekend were black women. Not so fast, ironically-named “TruthInGovernment.”
https://twitter.com/BrettSVergara/status/899003964364120065
H/T — Thanks to Twitter’s Leon Tchotchke (@played_straight) for convincing me to do this post.
@kupo: trust me, I know. I’ve been reading the comments along with the archived posts most of the time, so I’ve seen the kind of people that pop up now and again; and, of course, I’m not foolish enough to assume that the lack of visible activity on their part means their absence. I’m not eager to have my life get torn asunder again any time soon, although at this point, I don’t think there’s much that my parents don’t know about me, courtesy the fine folks who doxxed me last time.
I had been posting on the forum for years, and had been quite open about my promiscuity, travails with gender identity/expression, political opinions, and so forth, all of which, of course, the person(s) were sure to detail minutely and corroborate with screenshots and images of me presenting as a woman. It sure is fun being a (trans) woman with opinions on the internet, am I right?
Things are better now, though. I’m not in a state of catatonic depression anymore, I wasn’t summarily disinherited or disowned or whatever, I’m re-transitioning after losing almost three goddamn years…I’m probably sounding bitter (and oversharing, which I apologize for). But compared to the state I was before, this is heaven.
@Axecalibur: the abbreviation is perfectly fine.
@Rhuu-thanks for the puppy.
Everyone else: thanks for the welcomes. Much appreciated.
I accidentally posted this comment in another thread, but I meant to post it here – sorry ’bout that!:
This faked-up flyer was posted at altright.com months ago, and apparently shared through PEGIDA Canada before that.
I only bothered to image-search for its origins when I witnessed an acquaintance or two who were apparently willing to take the flyer as genuine after having it shared with them after Charlottesville. My acquaintances agreed on the tells of fakery once I pointed some tells out to them, but what if no one had pointed any out?
I wanna note a couple examples of this propaganda I’ve seen myself:
Fox news with that flag stealing business, and then another instance where a guy who supposedly wasn’t a nazi, but for some reason didn’t just say, “I am again racism,” when confronted got punched in Boston. Both instances have been completely decontextualized and recontextualized to fit the narrative that antifa is just out here attacking innocent people for no reason.
Not a single video showing this showed the actual reasons for either attack. Fox News’s video cut away right before it and silenced the audio so we don’t know whether or not the old woman did or said anything antagonistic. The video of the guy getting punched also starts directly before the punch and doest have context for why they were questioning this man in the first place.
These reports also leave out who these people were and what they were there for. Somehow average citizens have been able to find the identities of countless “alt-right” protestors and perpetrators of assault, but major news networks with all the money and resources in the world can’t put some goddamn context to who is being punched at rallies and why?
They see a person in all black and a face mask and say, “There goes antifa again, buncha violent extremists.” But they literally CANNOT identify these people to make that sort of factual claim.