Wednesday, September 25, 2024

WHY YOUR RIGHT-WING RELATIVES THINK FANI WILLIS'S BLUETOOTH NAME IS A RACIST REFERENCE TO SEX

Last weekend, I went to the Elon Musk hellsite to find reactions to CNN's bombshell story about Mark Robinson. I found this whataboutist tweet from a self-styled "Political Commentator and Content Creator" with more than 50,000 followers, including Roger Stone:


Fani Willis, of course, is the prosecutor in Donald Trump's Georgia felony case. It seemed implausible -- to put it mildly -- that her Bluetooth name is "Gorilla Grip Pussy Pal." (The phrase is a sex reference, but Gorilla Grip is a company that makes rug grippers and other housewares.) However, the clip looked real. What was going on?

I learned that the clip is real, but it's not from the evidentiary hearing that led to the resignation of one of Willis's special prosecutors, ex-boyfriend Nathan Wade. It's actually from the trial of Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the armorer on the set of the Alec Baldwin film Rust, who was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter after Baldwin inadvertently shot a cinematographer using a prop gun loaded with a real bullet. On February 23, 2024, a liveblog of Gutierrez-Reed's trial published by Britain's Independent reported:
The prosecution has called Jason Hawks, the owner of Hawks Consulting, which specialises in helping attorneys extract digital information from cell phones and other devices.

The prosecution asked Mr Hawsk to read text messages pulled from a phone allegedly belonging to Gutierrez-Reed.

The name on the phone was reportedly “Gorilla Grip P**** Pal.”
Five days later, on February 28, Gateway Pundit published this:


I found the headline in this Bitchute video. You can still find links to the post on X/Twitter...


But the original post is gone. It doesn't even show up in archives.

Nevertheless, the false story spread. Here's a tweet posted not long after the Gateway Pundit story went live:



A radio talker from Tucson was spreading the story a few hours later. The next day, a Trumpist congressman was alluding to it, and one of the people in his replies was already in on the joke:


A few days later, Willis was linked to the Gutierrez-Reed clip in TikTok videos posted by comedians Marvin Hunter, who has nearly a quarter million followers, and Steve Brown, who has more than 60,000.

And now this lie is everywhere -- Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Telegram -- and most of the Google results for the phrase refer to Willis, not Gutierrez-Reed.

I'm sure I've missed a few steps in the journey from fake news to meme, but this is obviously a disgusting, racist pile of deliberate disinformation. And your right-wing relatives believe it -- believe that a Black woman would use the word "Gorilla" when IDing her phone for Bluetooth, and would name the device in a sexual way. But of course they'd believe it, right?
Posted by Steve M. at 3:56 PM

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)