Purges, Nazis, & Guns: What a Way to Celebrate Thanksgiving Weekend
You’d think that Thanksgiving week would offer a respite from right wing shenanigans. However, the nation’s MAGA types didn’t feel like celebrating or limiting themselves to be obnoxious at family dinners.
Extremist types on social media spent the day circulating a list of 5,000 Twitter addresses and calling for their new best friend, Elon Musk, to purge them all since they were Antifa. The list was poorly researched and included random groups unfortunate enough to be followed by somebody else swept up in the cut and paste process.
From VPSReports (which covers right wing demonstrations):
Let the purge begin,” they said. That was what was written on the post sharing the infamous “Antifa” list being circulated online by neo-Nazis and fascist groups. It seems to have originated from a small right-wing Telegram account with less than a thousand followers. It was amplified by The Western Chauvinist, a hardcore Nazi community (for context: they spent this morning complaining that Adolf Hitler didn’t use enough poison gas against Jewish people). Naturally, as an anti-fascist journalist, my Twitter profile is in their “list” of targets to be purged.
After sharing the “antifa” list with their thousands of rabid fans, the Western Chauvinist re-shared a post from another neo-Nazi which boasted about a bot automated to make mass false reports against every profile in the list— a clear and direct abuse of the Twitter report system. The goal here is to purge anyone from Twitter who is against fascism and white supremacy. As you can see, the bot can move faster than any human being can.
Names were being purged, but it was more like a jukebox event. Right wing activists would call out a name to Elon Musk and shortly thereafter those accounts would be suspended for unspecified reasons.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk has announced an amnesty of sorts for accounts previously banned for breaking the platform’s rules, and it’s likely we’ll see a gang of deplorables returning to social media this coming week. Some high-profile types are already back in the game, along with Trump.
From the Washington Post:
On that day, he also unilaterally reinstated at least 11 high-profile far-right Twitter accounts, including Jordan Peterson, a professor who was banned from Twitter for misgendering a trans person, and the Babylon Bee, a conservative media company. He also restored Project Veritas, a site that was frequently accused of misrepresenting events it commented on and banned “for repeated violations of Twitter’s private information policy,” and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s personal account, which had been banned since January for violating the platform’s covid-19 misinformation policies and pushing violent and extreme rhetoric.
Green posted a photo Thursday showing herself and other right wing figures who have had their accounts recently reinstated at a dinner table with Musk. “Happy Thanksgiving!” she wrote.
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Current President Joe Biden and wife shared a video of Thanksgiving dinner to personnel at Marine Corps Station Cherry Point in North Carolina. Former President Barack Obama shared two photos of himself serving food at a homeless shelter.
Ex-president Donald Trump had dinner on Tuesday with rapper Ye and avowedly anti-Semite Nick Fuentes, so Thanksgiving meant having his minions come up with scripts seeking to soften the resulting bad publicity.
On Thursday, he sent forty five messages out on his teeny social media platform, all of which concerned his anger with the world and none using the words “Happy” or “Thanksgiving.”
From the New York Times:
In a post later Friday on his social media website, Truth Social, Mr. Trump said that Mr. West “unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about.” He said the dinner took place “with many members present on the back patio. The dinner was quick and uneventful. Then they left for the airport.”
Early Friday evening, Mr. Trump made a third attempt at defending himself, saying that Mr. West had sought business advice from him, “expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on ‘Tucker Carlson.’ Why wouldn’t I agree to meet? I also, I didn’t know Nick Fuentes.”
Even taking at face value Mr. Trump’s protestation that he knew nothing of Mr. Fuentes, the apparent ease with which Mr. Fuentes arrived at the home of a former president who is under multiple investigations — including one related to keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago long after he left office — underscores the undisciplined, uncontrolled nature of Mr. Trump’s post-presidency just 10 days into his third campaign for the White House.
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The weekend also includes an article from the New York Times about the annoying habit of various right wing groups of bringing guns to public protests.
In June, armed demonstrations around the United States amounted to nearly one a day. A group led by a former Republican state legislator protested a gay pride event in a public park in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Men with guns interrupted a Juneteenth festival in Franklin, Tenn., handing out fliers claiming that white people were being replaced. Among the others were rallies in support of gun rights in Delaware and abortion rights in Georgia.
Whether at the local library, in a park or on Main Street, most of these incidents happen where Republicans have fought to expand the ability to bear arms in public, a movement bolstered by a recent Supreme Court ruling on the right to carry firearms outside the home. The loosening of limits has occurred as violent political rhetoric rises and the police in some places fear bloodshed among an armed populace on a hair trigger.
Needless to say, the point of these armed excursions isn’t to celebrate the Second Amendment; it’s to enforce their interpretation of the First Amendment, which they apparently believe doesn’t include various groups with a different point of view.
A New York Times analysis of more than 700 armed demonstrations found that, at about 77 percent of them, people openly carrying guns represented right-wing views, such as opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and abortion access, hostility to racial justice rallies and support for former President Donald J. Trump’s lie of winning the 2020 election.
Anti-government militias and right-wing culture warriors like the Proud Boys attended a majority of the protests, the data showed. Violence broke out at more than 100 events and often involved fisticuffs with opposing groups, including left-wing activists such as antifa.
Republican politicians are generally more tolerant of openly armed supporters than are Democrats, who are more likely to be on the opposing side of people with guns, the records suggest. In July, for example, men wearing sidearms confronted Beto O’Rourke, then the Democratic candidate for Texas governor, at a campaign stop in Whitesboro and warned that he was “not welcome in this town.”
FYI, the protests where people other than right wingers were involved almost exclusively represented incidents where participants felt the need to respond to the image of guns being displayed by counter demonstrators.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com