The American far right, ladies and gentlemen: a gif showed Emma Gonzalez tearing apart a gun-range target. Right-wing extremists altered it to show the Parkland activist tearing up the United States Constitution—and the fake went viral.
The animation bounced around conservative Twitter before it received a signal boost Saturday from actor Adam Baldwin.
He tweeted to a quarter of a million followers with a hashtag reading “#Vorwärts!” — the German word for “forward” and an apparent reference to the Hitler Youth, whose march song included the word.
Gab, the Twitter-like social network that is a popular refuge for the alt-right, tweeted the animation on Saturday to more than 100,000 followers, then hours later asserted it was “satire.” It racked up more than 1,200 retweets. The still images, looking more sophisticated than the glitchy animation, went further, appearing to be taken as legitimate by some conservative-minded Twitter users.
The right is desperate to attack the Parkland teens, whose authenticity, moral authority, razor-sharp messaging and unswerving focus have dramatically shifted the public discussion on guns. Gonzalez isn’t the only one of the teens to come under attack—David Hogg has been repeatedly dragged online and elsewhere, with Donald Trump Jr. signing on to one of the attacks, and the school walkouts earlier in the month were attacked on Fox News as “political human shields.”
Because the American far right is disgusting and morally bankrupt.