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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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I want to pre-register a bet and get some opinions on this one. This death threat is absolutely fake, right? The grammar is ridiculous, and the word and phrasing choice is an absolute parody. Everything about it smells like an educated non-english person larping with zero understanding of what the natives actually sound like.

It reminds me of my college professor who smashed her car windows and wrote "brave dykes will never smash the patriarchy" on it to blame frat boys (which worked on the college, but fortunately not the police & insurance agency).

I expect we'll never hear about it if it turns out she wrote it. But I doubt even the met would grab some random local boy and use him as a scapegoat like my college tried In that incident.

There is the slight possibility of an extremely-smart neo-Nazi who wrote (on his own or with DAN) a death threat that deliberately looks faked - a death threat that looks fake would be ideal insofar as the target would be scared (knowing she didn't write it herself) but she'd be in danger of getting accused of fakery if she published it. (That said, if you're smart enough to do that, you might be smart enough to just straight-up kill her and get away with it instead of beating around the bush.)

There is also the possibility, as Amadan has noted, of somebody not National Action but also not Shola sending this - perhaps as a false-flag by Antifa or similar groups, who would plausibly use some of the vocabulary of the letter. In this case it is "fake" in the sense of National Action not planning to kill her, but "real" in the sense of "yeah, she is somewhat honestly scared".

But yeah, probably not sent by white nationalists and Occam's Razor points to her making it up. And if it's actually true that she's gone to Twitter but not to the police, that's evidence of specifically her faking it since going to the police would still make sense in both the more complicated scenarios.

(That said, if you're smart enough to do that, you might be smart enough to just straight-up kill her and get away with it instead of beating around the bush.)

But killing her doesn't really accomplish anything. People whose politics you oppose die all the time, and if she's murdered it would only fuel the narrative that there's violent extreme racism. On the other hand, if she's discredited, it makes it look like the entire activist movement is composed of grifters who are staging publicity stunts to generate sympathy for their cause. Especially since the movement is slow to deride one of its own even after the general public has—look at the people still supporting Jussie Smollett even after he became an object of ridicule in the mass media.