
Is there even a difference?
The piece continues at length, but I think that Rosenthal's speculation on motivation has some merit.Last Monday evening, a troubling image made its way across Twitter. It showed student activists at Columbia University in New York City protesting a speech by Mike Cernovich, a pro-Trump journalist and author who was to give a speech on campus to a Republican group that evening. The sign showed several people hoisting a banner. “No White Supremacy,” it said. “No Mike Cernovich.”
Between those two message was another: “No Pedo Bashing.” At the bottom of the banner was plainly visible the rainbow-colored logo of the North American Man/Boy Love Association, also known as NAMBLA.
Cernovich’s supporters quickly lit up the Internet with a combination of derision and outrage: Liberal activists and social justice warriors had presumably become so unhinged, they were now defending sexual deviants. NAMBLA was leading the resistance to the Trump administration, which was all you needed to know about resistance, right?
Well, not quite. A report emerged on Gothamist the following morning: “Mike Cernovich Stole My Photo, Lied About It On Twitter, And Sold Trump Jr. On Yet Another Fake Conspiracy,” said the headline of the article, written by freelance journalist Jake Offenhartz. Offenhartz described how he’d seen right-wing counter-protesters unfurl the banner. “What they wanted was for people to share photos of the stunt online, which I did, noting in a tweet that the banner was planted by the Alt Right,” he wrote. He tweeted a picture of the banner, making clear that the pro-pedophilia banner was a ruse.
Offenhartz discovered that Cernovich’s supporters deliberately posted the photo without its context — that is, suggesting that leftist protesters were, in fact, marching in support of pedophilia. Offenhartz complained to Cernovich, and Cernovich removed the photo from his Twitter account. But that led to a fresh spurious complaint: that Twitter had censored the image.
That tweet by InfoWars writer and prominent conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson was “liked” by the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. — and tens of thousands of other people.
The episode is part of a troubling new trend among social media users, conspiracy theorists and some journalists on the far right: Leveling false accusations of pedophilia against Democrats and liberals, in hopes of smearing them. The charge has frequently been made by Cernovich, conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who recently started a pro-Trump super PAC, and InfoWars founder Alex Jones, the most prominent conspiracy theorist in the nation and an energetic supporter of the president.
Lawrence Rosenthal, who heads the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, speculates that “fever dream projections” regarding pedophilia may have to do with concerns about the widespread erosion of traditional family patterns, the kind Republicans frequently discussed in the “culture war” years of the 1990s and early 2000s.
Like many people I spoke to for this piece, Rosenthal struggled to understand the right’s fixation on pedophilia. Cautioning that this was mere speculation, he said that some on the right have resorted to the pedophilia charge because lesser “charges” — homosexuality, interracial marriage, one-parent households — no longer have the power they once did. “What are you gonna do to make them seem worse? I offer you pedophilia,” he said.
The most notorious pedophilia-related smear recently promulgated by the right is Pizzagate, a lurid conspiracy theory alleging that Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John D. Podesta had operated a child sex trafficking ring out of the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, D.C., pizzeria popular with families. Cernovich was one of the early proponents of this conspiracy theory.
Probably the same reason evangelicals are obsessed with homosexuality...L'Emmerdeur wrote:Despite the auto-play video at the link, this is an interesting article.
'Why Is the Alt-Right Obsessed With Pedophilia?'
That was embarrassing to watch. I can't believe no one punched him during it.L'Emmerdeur wrote:A British journalist has a brief conversation with Richard 'Hail Trump!' Spencer.
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