HOW THE RIGHT-WING FEARMONGERING WORKS

The teenager arrested in today's school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, had a Facebook page that hinted at trouble, as BuzzFeed reports:

On [his] now-deleted Facbeook page, [Dimitrios] Pagourtzis had ... uploaded photos of a military green jacket with what appeared to be Nazi-related insignia.

It's not just Nazi regalia -- there's a hammer-and-sickle pin on the collar and various other menacing symbols. The coat is a duster -- reputedly the favored outerwear of the Columbine killers.

But that hammer-and-sickle pin was just too tempting for Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft. Did he call Pagourtzis a communist? Nahhh -- that's so twentieth century. Here's Hoft's post:

BREAKING: Santa Fe High School Killer Wore ANTIFA and Columbine Hammer-and-Sickle Pin

... Dimitrios Pagourtzis was wearing a jacket with the ANTIFA terrorist hammer-and-sickle emblem.



They sell these Antifa stars on Amazon.

Go to the Amazon page and you'll see that they're not called "Antifa stars" at all -- the words "Antifa" appears nowhere on the page.

But this is right-wing negative branding. This is Hoft tying Antifa to mass slaughter for a gullible, disturbingly large readership.

And not just Hoft -- Mike Cernovich is on the case, too:

Texas shooter shooter wore ANTIFA hammer-and-sickle gang logo https://t.co/IkVDdoHu49

— Mike Cernovich 🇺🇸 (@Cernovich) May 18, 2018

Nice how Cernovich gets "gang logo" in there as well -- the right's booga-booga "Antifa" is not just a murder cult, it's a gang, like ... um, MS-13.

Which brings me to my point. This is one of the right's favorite propaganda techniques: Link anything you possibly can to a group you've pre-demonized, and now you've expanded the fear that drives right-wing group solidarity, and you've also widened the pool of political enemies who are deemed so evil and vicious that they need to be expunged from society. This is essentially what the Trump administration and right-wing media have done with MS-13: They've made their fans believe that a massive percentage of immigrants are MS-13, to the point that every Hispanic immigrant is now suspected by the right of being linked to the gang.

Note that the Hoft/Cernovich "Antifa" trick (Bill Mitchell is in on it, too) is in addition to the fake Pagourtzis Facebook sites that sprang up after the shooting, at least one of which overtly portrayed him as an Antifa backer (though, absurdly, it also depicted him in a Hillary Clinton cap).

Almost immediately after the shooter in Santa Fe, Texas, was identified, someone set up a fake Facebook profile in his name, trying to portray him as a Hillary Clinton supporter, and linking him to antifa. pic.twitter.com/xtINTwMYzN

— Caroline O. (@RVAwonk) May 18, 2018

Little Green Footballs suspects Russian involvement in that fakery. It's not clear where Hoft and Cernovich got their inspiration.