See, earlier: "They'll Think You're Signaling"! Dog-Whistles From Goldwater To Reagan To Palin
The Trump campaign has tweeted something with a red, white, and blue lion logo, and the mindreaders of the left are convinced that this represents a secret signal.
That's partly because we once tweeted something with a similar logo in 2016. We don't really know who originated it.
The people convinced of this apparently include former fact-checking site Snopes.com, but here are three almost real websites, with huge budgets and professional staffs who believe this:
The Amanda Marcotte thing for Salon starts like this:
Oh boy, it's time for another round of Let's Pretend the President Isn't Air-Kissing White Nationalists. This time, the instigating incident is the discovery that a fan video tweeted by Donald Trump featured a logo — a lion's face built out of red stripes and blue stars — that was apparently, um, "borrowed" from a white supremacist group so unhinged that it managed to get banned from Twitter, a site that is always reluctant to boot fascists.
Mediaite has a detailed account of the internet sleuths, including Brooke Binknowski of Snopes, who pieced together the apparent source of this lion logo. It has been used by the white supremacist site VDare, which also happens to be the same site whose articles the Department of Justice recently forwarded to immigration court employees, launching a minor scandal. The logo has been traced back to a pro-Trump fascist group called the "Lion Guard."
The group's name, and apparent ethos comes from a quote from Benito Mussolini that Trump approvingly tweeted in 2016: "It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep."
Back then, Trump claimed it was an accident born of ignorance that he approvingly quoted Mussolini, just as the DOJ claims it was an unfortunate accident that it mailed out links to white supremacist sites. That's the strategy in play: Wink at the fascists, and whenever you get called out on it, play innocent. [More]
Amanda Marcotte is the woman who had to be fired by John Edwards in 2004, because she wrote unspeakably vile things on her feminist blog. When I say "unspeakably vile," it's mostly stuff that I can't quote or even hint at, but Dan Riehl had a round-up here, with links archived, and so did Michelle Malkin at the time.
Here's what the Catholic League's Bill Donohue was able to quote:
“Writing on the Pandagon blogsite, December 26, 2006, Amanda Marcotte wrote that ‘the Catholic church is not about to let something like compassion for girls get in the way of using the state as an instrument to force women to bear more tithing Catholics.’ On October 9, 2006, she said that ‘the Pope’s gotta tell women who give birth to stillborns that their babies are cast into Satan’s maw.’ On the same day she wrote that ‘it’s going to be bad PR for the church, so you can sort of see why the Pope is dragging ass.’ And on June 14, 2006, she offered the following Q&A: ‘What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit,’ to which she replied, ‘You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.’
Most of what she and the others at Pandagon wrote was much worse than that. But because she hates whites, Catholics, other Christians, and of course Republicans, her crazy hate is acceptable.
Neither Trump nor VDARE.com is signalling anything with this lion symbol. The lion thing is a normal symbol of strength and manliness, used by everyone from the British Empire and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to C. S. Lewis and the Detroit Lions football team.
In 2012, when Peter Brimelow spoke at a CPAC panel, Dave Weigel referred to him as "lion-maned VDare.com founder Peter Brimelow."
This refers to the fact that even when he's appearing in public, Peter generally needs a haircut.
But of course, that was when Al Sharpton, of all people, was being given a show on television to complain about white people having opinions in public.
And if you're having Al Sharpton and Amanda Marcotte speaking for you, don't say you're against hate.
