He insisted, however, that his attraction to Rhodesian nostalgia was not racist. “I’m sure you’re aware these days being a conservative heterosexual white male is rather unpopular in the eyes of many,” and that “this is the demographic that caused Rhodesia to thrive as well as it did for as long as it did.” In an email to The Times, Smith wrote that he felt persecuted and that he has found Rhodesian themes compelling. With more than 1,700 comments in just the last three months, the discussion quickly devolved into a stream of racial and ethnic slurs against African-Americans and Jews, calling for them to be shoved into gas chambers and ovens.
#Facebook cover photo gun meme Patch#
Roof, who was sentenced to death last year, had penned an online manifesto, which appeared on a website called The Last Rhodesian, with photographs of himself wearing a jacket with a patch of the green-and-white Rhodesian flag.Ĭomments on it included calls for Rhodesia to return, claims that the West betrayed Rhodesia and outright hostility to the idea of black-majority rule. A few said their affinity for Rhodesia derived from the government’s supposed anticommunist stance.īut outside observers of this Rhodesia revival cite a far more disturbing inspiration for it: Dylann Roof, the American white supremacist who killed nine black parishioners in a Charleston, S.C. In conversations and email exchanges with The New York Times, some prominent social-media figures and companies selling Rhodesia-themed merchandise denied trafficking in white-power messages, or said they had done so unwittingly. However, Eastwood did not say or write this quote in the meme about guns, God, discipline, prayer, and justice.Nostalgia for Rhodesia has since grown into a subtle and profitable form of racist messaging, with its own line of terminology, hashtags and merchandise, peddled to military-history fans and firearms enthusiasts by a stew of far-right provocateurs. In sum, the famous Hollywood actor might have put on display his support for the Republican Party in the past, such as when he spoke to an empty chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention, a moment he later came to regret. It's unclear why two men from the 1999 film "The Boondock Saints" were seen smoking in the bottom-right corner of the meme. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes the Three Percenters as “a loosely organized movement of gun owners” who believe that that gun safety laws should be opposed “with force if necessary.” The meme also depicted the Roman numeral III over a “Punisher” skull logo - a common reference to the anti-government Three Percenter militia movement. Media Matters wrote that, in sharing the meme, Blackwell appeared to "blame gun violence on a lack of prayer in school and lack of discipline at home." The story also explained the Punisher skull logo that was visible in the post: The shooter in the Dayton incident was gunned down by police, bringing the total number of dead for both shootings to 33 people. 4, in a popular nightlife area in Dayton, Ohio, which resulted in the deaths of nine people. The other occurred in the early hours of Aug. Twenty-three people were killed, and the gunman was arrested. One of the incidents took place in a shopping center El Paso, Texas on Aug. Media Matters reported that it had been posted in the aftermath of two mass shootings that happened hours apart. The quote itself, sans attribution, had been in circulation for at least three years when Blackwell posted the meme featuring Eastwood's picture. 4, 2019, by Ken Blackwell, a former Ohio Republican politician and current member of the board for the National Rifle Association.īlackwell did not explicitly claim that the guns quote came from Eastwood, which makes this entire ordeal a solid example of how a meme with a celebrity's picture can later be shared by someone else as if the person actually said the quoted words.
The meme appeared to have been originally posted on Aug. At the time, one of the more recent and prominent shares came from a Facebook user with nearly 10,000 followers.ĭespite all of the shares, Eastwood did not say "the problem is not guns," nor did he utter the rest of the words in the quote about God, discipline, prayer, and justice. It was shared nearly 500,000 times anyway.īy October 2021, the meme had been shared more than 464,000 times.
0 kommentar(er)
