Another day, another attempt by right-wing forces doing deeply disturbing things in order to prove that the “other side” is doing what mountains of evidence say the right wing does on the daily. Last week, Snopes debunked a popular right-wing meme going around claiming to show Antifa (Anti-Fascist) members severely beating a man. That wasn’t true. At all. The BBC is reporting that fake Antifa social media accounts that have been created by right-wing nutjobs are peddling disturbing memes purporting to condone violence against women.
Researcher Eliot Higgins of website Bellingcat found evidence that the campaign is being orchestrated on internet messageboard 4Chan by far-right sympathisers.
One image shows the slogan "53% of white women voted for Trump, 53% of white women should look like this", above a photograph of a woman with a bruised and cut face and an anti-fascist symbol.
The woman pictured is actually British actress Anna Friel and the photograph was taken for a Women's Aid anti-domestic violence campaign in 2007.
Like their commandeer in chief, white supremacists and snowflakes on the “alt” right peddle in projection. When they tell you that you’re guilty of something, there is an almost 100 percent chance that they are actually the guilty party. Of course, right-wing dumb dumbs are falling into these honeypots hook, line and sinker.
Someone posing as a Boston antifa member (which again, doesn’t seem to exist in any publicly organized way) appeared on Fox News’ Watters’ World, baitingthe host into asking immensely dumb questions like “What about when an antifa member stabbed a police horse in the neck with a knife. Was the horse a racist Trump supporter?” The troll alluded to right-wingers posing as antifa during the interview, and Watters was none the wiser.
Earlier this summer, a similar fake Facebook account claiming to represent antifa in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania sent right-wingers—including alt-lite figure and former Navy urine analyzer Jack Posobiec—into a frenzy when it made reference to a (fake) rally planned for Gettysburg. Right-wing counter protestors showed up and found no one to protest. Somehow, one of those fooled into traveling to Gettysburg managed to literally shoot himself in the foot.
We all suffer from wish fulfillment at different points in our life, but wishing for death and violence and destruction says something about you. Something that you should go to a professional to talk over. Maybe a few times a week, for a few years.