UPDATE: See update at the end of this post. It’s kind of funny.
By David Futrelle
On Monday, I published a post devoted to the proposition that Alt-rightists and their ideological kin lie about everything — usually badly. As if to prove my point, right-wing trolls from 4chan and Gab have launched a false flag “meme campaign” designed to smear AntiFa activists as supporters of domestic violence against women and children.
The campaign seems to have originated at 4chan — see the graphic at the top of this post — where it was quickly taken up by some of the resident anons. (Click for full-sized graphic; I’ve censored the graphic depictions of bruises.)
The idea quickly found its way to Gab — the famously “censorship-free” Twitter alternative, positively overflowing with Nazis and shitlords — where an alt-right Gabber called @Sperg quickly assembled a vast library of grotesque memes.
Here are a few of the tamer ones, lightly censored to obscure graphic depictions of bruises and other injuries — though they’re still pretty disturbing.
I’ve taken the liberty of writing FAKE on each in big red letters.
Many of the memes were so over-the-top that they could only fool the most gullible — like those advocating the beating of children and elderly women.
It wasn’t long before these memes began popping up on Twitter — some of them posted by alt-rightists and Trump fans, others posted by clearly fake AntiFa accounts. (Or at least clearly fake to you and me, not necessarily to your typical Trump fan.)
It seems incredible to think that anyone could be fooled by such obviously fake memes — particularly since the evidence that this is a false flag is being spread around the hashtag by leftists trying to correct the record. But smear campaigns like this work even if only a small number of those seeing the fake memes think they’re true; they further poison an already poisoned well.
Dirty tricks have always been a part of politics. But for many in and around the alt-right today, politics has become almost nothing but dirty tricks. We need to remember that these are people who lie as casually and compulsively as their hero Donald Trump — and call their hoaxes out every time we spot them.
UPDATE: Naturally, 4chan anons are mad that they’ve been found out, as Robyn Pennacchia details in a lovely post on Wonkette.
Well,..yeah. Haven’t been here for a while, saw what happened in Charlottesville and thought I would lurk to see how y’all are. This is a new low. Very unbelievable. Domestic violence doesn’t really fit the er, profile of the left eh? Bit of a generalisation, but shows that they think everyone else thinks like them. Fake news. Couldn’t resist being the first to comment. Ha!
Thankyou for the heads up david. I will be sure and call these shitlords out wherever I find them.
If they wanted to make this more believeable shouldn’t they have chosen white men instead of white women? Even more white men voted for Trump. But i guess their boners get hard at the thought of abused women. So it’s a win win for them they can abuse women and blame the left for it.
It’s disgusting.
AAHHHHHHHHH
God I fucking hate Nazis.
It’s surreal that that’s even a thing anyone has to fucking say. I think about this every single day. Every day, I think, “fucking Nazis, people who openly associate themselves with and endeavor model themselves after Nazis, for real, are playing an actual, significant, not hypothetical, veiled, or fictional, role in American politics in 2017.” They aren’t couching anything in euphemism. They are openly murderous, deceptive, and enthusiastically support the president. The president who actively courts their support at an absolute minimum. The president of the real United States of America. The ones between Canada and Mexico, in this reality. For real.
More on topic: this is exactly the kind of thing my brother would fall for. He’s the most skeptical guy in the world when it comes to there maybe being something to the theory that people who are born obscenely wealthy (as he and I both were, incidentally) have a couple advantages over those born penniless, but when he sets his eyes upon obviously fake “you won’t believe what those zany/evil/incompetent/stupid libruls are doing now” copypastas, he laps it up without exception. This kind of bullshit false flag campaign is disturbingly effective against the people it’s intended for.
Fucking Nazis.
Now that headline reads ‘Nazi trolls launch fake #PunchANazi campaign to smear Friendly Neighborhood Nazi Punchers as domestic abusers’ for me. Awkward.
But, in my defense, I believe the Nazi Punching should be done only after conclusively determining that they are, in fact, a Nazi or equivalent type of white supremacist.
@Angi
That’s a very good point. Aren’t us leftists supposed to be man-haters who’ll falsely imprison any man the moment a woman accuses him of rape and full of white knights and all that shit?
On top of that, almost all of those photos are of conventionally attractive white women and children with bruises. If one is actually trying to paint another demographic as being deserving of violence, one would generally try to portray them as ugly. I’m guessing they just did a search for domestic violence stock photos or posters, never mind that those are generally made with the intent of eliciting sympathy from the viewer.
There are words I could use, none of them would make it past the comments policy though.
@Amnesia Thanks.
All the lies and conspiracies the Nazis spin to give their worldview justification, it has to take so much time and energy. Only with the goal to hate and injure other people who are not like them. I can’t understand why people fall for their propaganda.
@Angi
The thing is, it takes a lot of time and energy on the part of the people spinning the webs of lies and attempting to fabricate reasonable enough-sounding “conspiracies” (for Nazis, at least), but for the people who eat this shit up, for the people whose world-view is getting validated, nothing is easier or more pleasurable than adding a shiny new “fact” about the (Jews/F****ts/SJWs/Tr*****s) and how they’re up to their old tricks and trying to get one over on the REAL Americans (or whatever). A And no matter what anyone tells them afterwards, there’s almost no chance that they’ll ever reevaluate any of it. This shit is a cancer.
They think that white supremacy and domestic violence are hilarious and suitable subjects for their wannabe manipulation because they are too unimaginative and willfully stupid to empathize with people that actually suffer from those things.
I love how in the 5-step instructions, they have “Righteous Indignation” presented with caps and scare quotes. Speaks absolute volumes.
As for:
Well, that’s just confusing, Mr Wannabe Shitlord! Did she (oh sorry, it) marry an antifa? Is that the man with morals? If so, why? How did he not realise? SO MANY QUESTIONS.
Here’s some Mei-Mei brain bleach if anyone needs it <3
@ molloy moran molone
May I just add to the welcomes; and especially express my admiration for your use of “travails” in your earlier post. It’s one of my favourite words.
Thanks for the welcome, Alan (is it okay for me to abbreviate your username?). A respectable vocabulary is but one benefit of almost never really sleeping properly and filling one’s time by reading. See also: requiring less eye makeup to achieve the look I usually want (because of constant dark circles), having all the time in the world to painstakingly assess my own personal flaws and all the mistakes I’ve ever made…the list goes on and on.
Travails is definitely a good word, but not one of my favorites. It’s pretty hard to narrow it down, but I quite like punctilious, harangue, and knout. Those, at least, are what came off the top of my head.
no words….
be safe, my friends
ETA:
a man with morals who hits others?? curious morals, those….
I have a theory about this upswing in Nazis and/or fascist sympathizers. It seems many of these types are young men.
Well, the Second World war ended 72 years ago. Almost all of the people who fought in this war, or even had clear memories of it, are dead. I imagine, for many of the alt-right types, this war is ancient history.
I’ll be 50 later this year. There was never any doubt in my mind, when I was young, that the Holocaust did indeed happen. Hell, a drugstore I used to patronize in high school was owned by a man in his 60s with a number tattooed on his forearm. I knew he didn’t get that tattoo during a particularly wild Spring Break!
I had a great uncle who was part of the D-Day landing. He never spoke of it. Too painful for him, I assume.
I never doubted that Nazis, and fascism, sucked.
Anyway, as the Second World War continues to fade into the past, I wonder how real it is to a neo-Nazi born in 1992.
@ molloy moran malone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULjCSK0oOlI
I didn’t know ‘knout’ so thank you. I’m now trying to imagine scenarios where I can use it. But I’ll probably have to knout my brains for that.
@Mish
I don’t know what’s going on at the bottom of those stairs, but, whatever it is, Mei Mei seems sympathetic but unamused. ‘Oh, honey… honey, no…’ ?
@ molloy moran malone
@molloy, moran, Malone
You’re probably right swallowing this shit up is easy you can give your own responsibility away and just blame group X for your problems.
(Aleast if you’re not part of group X)
Plus you don’t have to achive anything than to be born in the right body to belong to the “good” people.
Fuck Nazis and their dangerous ideology.
I didn’t know “knout”, so thank you. I’m now looking for opportunities to use it. I’ll knout my brains (or look for a dead horse)
edit:
@Angi: Exactly. And the fuckers behind this kind of shit know just what they’re doing, too. It matters to me whether a racist yahoo is genuinely mistaken (not enough to excuse them, of course, but still), but to intentionally misinform people to achieve political ends? Let alone the kinds of ends these goddamn NAZIS are obviously aiming for? Good lord, I hate people sometimes.
Al(an): If you ever get the opportunity and inclination, reading the book(s) my username refers to (Three Novels, by Samuel Beckett, consisting of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable), will provide a primo opportunity to experience a certain quantity of knouting. Each of the individual novels was published separately, but they’re all extremely closely linked thematically (and perhaps otherwise), and Beckett intended them to be parts of a whole.
I should warn you, over the course of the works, the narrative(s) sort of…degrade.
Both in the individual parts and throughout the whole. It’s a little difficult to explain. Also, any attempt to summarize the plot would be… well, inadequate doesn’t quite do it justice. Each story is from the perspective of a man who is somewhere along the way towards crumbling fully inwards, and the narrative(s) disintegrate similarly. They are, in case you hadn’t already guessed, suuuper capital-M Modernist, and, in my opinion, worthy of at LEAST as much praise and scholarship as Beckett’s more famous “Waiting for Godot”. It’s very important to me, this book. Read it when I myself was coming apart at the seams. Sorry for the unsolicited screed.
It is a truly great book, though.
@Dormousing_it
I think you’re very correct. There are certainly real militant white supremacists out there that have been around a long time, but I think for a lot of these younger men it’s just a form of escapism and play-pretend. Every time they face real world consequences they cry about it. They just want to live in a world where they can feel superior to others without actually doing any work.
The whole civil war monument/confederate flag thing didn’t start in the southern US until well after the civil war was over, too.
One of those fake Antifa accounts actually has the handle @AntiFarLeft. That’s just lazy!
@ dormousing_it
I have a rather poignant tale related to that. Obvious warnings apply.
Many years ago my girlfriend told me we’d been invited for tea by her “aunty and uncle” (they were old friends of her parents rather than blood relatives for reasons that will become clear).
That bit still sticks in my mind because of how she said “They’re both academics, so for once I don’t mind you rambling on like you do”. 🙂
But anyway we ended up in some rather swish tea room in Highgate. They were a really lovely couple. After tea and chatting, her aunt then asked how we’d met. We told her about “our eyes met across a crowded room” and all that. (We’d met through mutual friends but the crowded room bit did really happen.)
Then of course I asked “and how did you two meet?”
“Oh as children in a displaced persons camp. We were both the only survivors from our families so we just ended up together.” Then she gave a little smile and a shrug as her husband patted her arm. I can still visualise that with perfect clarity, like it’s burned into my mind, I can even remember the little cake stand thingy.
I’d never doubted the holocaust of course, but that did bring a personal dimension into the equation.
The whole thing does raise some sort of semi-reasonable point that all these punching nazis memes get somewhat less comfortable when you put them next to pretty white women instead of Spencer’s inherently punchworthy face.
Fuck them for abusing domestic violence awareness material for shit like that though.
@PreuxFox
Yeah, the Confederate monuments and the Confederate flags. I didn’t realize, until I was an adult, that most of the monuments to the Confederate “heroes” were erected well after the Civil War had ended. Many of them, put in place after the 1950s.
I’m a super-Yankee, born and educated in New England, never lived outside of the US northeast. ?