Tuesday, June 02, 2020

White Supremacists Pose as Antifa Online, Call for Violence

If one were to believe Donald Trump and William Barr - who increasingly reminds me of Herman Goering - all of the violence over the last number of nights is due to fa left activists and Antifa.  The reality, as with all things with Trump, is quite different and behind the scenes are white supremacists - Trumps core base - who want to spark a race war, something Trump would likely welcome as an excuse for ordering military troops to fire on citizens who oppose his regime and the endemic police brutality directed towards minorities, particularly blacks. As CNN is reporting some white supremacists are posing as Antifa and aiding in creating the pretense that violence is flowing only from the left.  Sadly, there exists a mix of white supremacists, so-called militias, and, of extreme right "Christians" who want to take the nation back to a pre-desegregation 1950 and who would embrace a dictator if it assisted in achieving that goal.  Here are highlights from CNN:
A Twitter account that tweeted a call to violence and claimed to be representing the position of "Antifa" was in fact created by a known white supremacist group, Twitter said Monday. The company removed the account.
"This account violated our platform manipulation and spam policy, specifically the creation of fake accounts," a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement. "We took action after the account sent a Tweet inciting violence and broke the Twitter Rules." Although the account only had a few hundred followers, it is an example of white supremacists seeking to inflame tensions in the United States by posing as left-wing activists online.
 The revelation of the account comes as President Donald Trump increasingly blames left-wing activists for violence occurring at protests across America.
On Sunday, Trump tweeted he would designate Antifa a terrorist organization, despite the US government having no existing legal authority to do so. Antifa, short for anti-fascists, describes a broad, loosely-organized group of people whose political beliefs lean toward the left — often the far-left — but do not conform with the Democratic Party platform.
The fake account, @ANTIFA_US, tweeted Sunday, "ALERT Tonight's the night, Comrades Tonight we say "F**k The City" and we move into the residential areas... the white hoods.... and we take what's ours #BlacklivesMaters #F**kAmerica."
 Twitter said that the account was in fact linked to Identity Evropa, a white power fraternity.
Though Twitter referred to the group as Identity Evropa when discussing the account's removal, the Anti Defamation League (ADL) states that the group dissolved and reformed under the name the American Identitarian Movement, which it also calls a white supremacist group.
 Twitter said it had shut down other fake accounts linked to Identity Evropa, too. The phenomenon of people on the right creating fake Antifa accounts predates the current wave of protests. The takedown Monday is not the first time a fake Antifa account linked to white supremacists has been suspended by Twitter, the spokesperson confirmed.

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