Has anybody made any suggestion what else the upside down red triangle could possibly be a reference to? It’s uncomfortable how well it fits his message.
"“The inverted red triangle is a symbol used by Antifa, so it was included in an ad about Antifa. We would note that Facebook still has an inverted red triangle emoji in use, which looks exactly the same, so it’s curious that they would target only this ad. The image is also not included in the Anti-Defamation League’s database of symbols of hate. But it is ironic that it took a Trump ad to force the media to implicitly concede that Antifa is a hate group.”
Some antifascists do use symbols. They've never been red triangles.
https://afanl.wordpress.com/2018/01/30/english-3-2-2018-anti...
https://society6.com/product/ancap-flag1525938_wallpaper?sku...
https://www.cafepress.com/+red_triangle_antifascist_antifasc...
https://www.redbubble.com/i/canvas-print/Antifascist-Red-Tri...
https://www.redbubble.com/i/postcard/Antifa-Triangle-by-Joes...
Mind you, I don't condone Trump using the logo as a mechanism to target a group.
The other link don't even feature an "upside down triangle" design, and is from Utrecht, which has a red triangle in its own flag. There's not really a connection.
> https://www.cafepress.com/+red_triangle_antifascist_antifasc...
Nobody actually involved with an Antifa group is selling Antifa-themed cafepress merchandise. The idea is laughable.
"MartStore", the vendor in question, sells a variety of politically themed merchandise, including "thin blue line" and "Trump 2020" designs. https://www.cafepress.com/profile/martstore
One of the redbubble links is not even indexed yet in my google search and the other is not a red triangle, but a flag in a triangle.
the first link is referencing this, the second is not triangle but red/black flags, the third one is laughable, don't know about the fourth one and the last one is the anarchist flag.
https://twitter.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1273646748364427264
It's a bullshit claim, but that's not /u/giarc's fault.
My question is in earnest to understand the context.
You think the White House Googled up "antifa logo" or "antifa image" or "antifa icon" and somehow wound up with an emoji that appears to be in use by a handful of Spanish speaking accounts instead of the antifa flag in widespread international use that comes up as virtually every result?
And that the Secretary General of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podemos_(Spanish_political_par..., the second largest party in Spain, is somehow using it to indicate his membership in antifa?
Imagine you're in charge of making campaign ads for the Trump. You google image search "antifa logo" and see a sea of stuff that looks like two flags in a circle. ...but instead you choose some obscure symbol that's not in the first page of results?? I mean that really strains credulity. Like, it's definitely possible, but Occam's razor is working hard against you.
Aside: am I the only one who thinks web links to twitter are hard to follow? Even the basics of who is saying what, about what, to whom? Usually I can't even tell what side of the argument someone is on when they are saying something, or whether an image or quote is something they are replying to or using as evidence to support their new claims.
The symbol does exist in a certain context of Antifa/ARA imagery, but if you use it in full context it just makes the Trump team look even worse, surprised the media hasn't picked up on this angle yet.
Perhaps this is like the tactics applied by Boris Johnson to distract search results. Now antifa is going to be all over the news for being an alleged terrorist group regardless of its validity.
Even now, I'd say the majority of the 'members' of this movement, as in the people that show up, are all sorts of people, generally left-wing but including what in the US would be called 'liberals'. Most of these are not explicitly members of AFA.
So I'd say 'co-opted' sort of doesn't fully cover the situation. But I'd also say you're not entirely wrong either.
But they obviously are a violent anarchist group causing violence, riots, mayhem (and terror?) for their political opponents, regardless of logo used.
This part isn’t news. This probably the most widely known fact known about ANTIFA worldwide, and has been for years. It’s literally their raison d'être.
Clearly they operate unlawfully. If they are a “terrorist” organisation though, that’s another debate.
Either way, if ANTIFA is your friend or ally, I would consider that a PR problem you’ll need to address sooner rather than later.
ANTIFA is not cool.
> Nothing to see here, just the President running paid ads about his plan to designate his political opposition as terrorists so he can arrest them, using the same exact symbol the Nazis forced their political prisoners to wear.
> For reference, this is the inverted red triangle that political prisoners were forced to wear at the Dachau concentration camp.
https://twitter.com/carterforva/status/1273583187990646784
> Dachau was advertized in the newspaper as a detention facility specifically for radical leftists. Which is the exact group the Trump ad references.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words
[2] https://twitter.com/mmfa/status/1273644108561686530?s=20
And this isn't even particularly obscure knowledge, it's something that a large number of mass murderers in recent years have made an extensive use of in their messaging: https://twitter.com/originalspin/status/1273653992514412544
[0] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2018/02/15/we-must-secure-border-an...
So people can produce that by accident, even when they're aware of the significance of 14 words. Condemning someone for a sentence with 14 words in it is likely to produce a huge number of false positives.
"Each assassin's name is composed of fifteen letters.[5]"
and my favorite: Booth ran from the theater and was caught in a warehouse; Oswald ran from a warehouse and was caught in a theater.[5]
Can his campaign never use a sentence with 14 words in a campaign ad?
Can they never use 14 words in the first sentence?
Where are your lines where you decide he's guilty, and why are they there? Or have you already decided that, and you're just hunting for additional confirmation?
1. the context is specifically vilifying a loose collective of anti-fascists using a symbol that was used by nazis to mark (among others) anti-fascists. 2. the source is a president who definitely exhibits fascist tendencies, and is very popular with white supremacists. 3. there's a history of weird borderline dog-whistling (see the Twitter thread linked to elsewhere. I think it makes a pretty good case.). 4. if the 'removed 88 ads' is correct, surely that's a very weird coincidence?
I'd say that if the 88 thing is false, I might believe the 14 words thing is a coincidence. But that doesn't change the fact that the red triangle or even the weird focus on antifa as being a terrorist organization is deeply worrying to me.
I am generally skeptical of conspiracy theories, but this one really does strike me as too coincidental to actually be a coincidence.
That said, I also wouldn't be surprised if it's more of a 'trolling' thing than Trump going 'mask off' or whatnot. I'm only arguing that I don't think it's a coincidence.
EDIT: I'll add that considering the popularity of Trump among white supremacists and trolls, it's quite possible that someone somewhere in the organization got to make an ad and decided to fill it up with incindiary dog-whistles. That scenario still makes me uncomfortable, as I really don't want 4chan anywhere near the most powerful country in the world, but it would make the whole thing less of a conspiracy theory. I truly believe Trump is too dumb to have any kind of consistent ideology, so it's possible.
I've been discounting the 88 thing. Would it have been 88 ads if Facebook hadn't stopped the ad campaign at exactly that time? Even if 88 ads was the full campaign, that seems to me to be a fairly difficult number for a random right-winger to be able to determine, and therefore like a poor channel to try to send a dogwhistle through. (It's hard for right-wingers to simultaneously be too stupid to understand why their position is wrong, and so clever that they can find all these insanely clever side-channels through which to send dogwhistles - though I guess the actual Nazis did pretty well at being technologically literate barbarians.) To me, it just feels like seeing morse code in the campfire smoke - that is, seeing a deliberate pattern in randomness.
I'll admit that the 14 words at the start of the DHS "We must secure the border" statement seem a lot more real to me - not just the word count, but it's also echoing the start of the actual words.
I'd be more likely to buy the "trolling" idea - that the attempt is to put the most innocent-looking-to-most-people thing possible out there to trigger the reaction, to make those reacting look like hysterical nutcases - except I'm not sure that Trump is smart enough or skilled enough to pull it off this well.
TL;DR: It feels too flimy to me to be a deliberate dogwhistle, but I'm not totally certain of that.