Wingnuts Freaked Over Trumpesque ‘Julius Caesar,’ But Applaud Violent CNN GIF (TWEETS/VIDEO)

By
Darrell Lucus
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While most people on both sides of the aisle recoiled in horror and disgust over Donald Trump tweeting himself literally pile-driving CNN to the ground, most of his diehard supporters stood up and applauded.


That’s not a surprise. After all, the 2016 campaign saw an alarming number of instances where journalists who wrote anything even remotely critical about Trump being trolled and threatened on Twitter. Additionally, this White House has waged all-out war on the media, going as far as to brand the media an enemy of the people.

What came as a surprise was who we saw joining in the right-wing applause over that tweet. Among them are some of the same people who screamed bloody murder over a version of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” featuring a title character bearing a striking resemblance to the Donald.

For those who don’t remember, New York’s Public Theater rolled out a modern interpretation of “Julius Caesar” in May, with Caesar clad in a reddish-blond wig and a navy suit with an American flag pin. His wife, Calpurnia, is portrayed as a well-dressed woman with a Central European accent. A number of right-wingers who obviously slept through English lit thought that the scene in which Caesar is stabbed to death was a tacit call for Trump to be murdered. Never mind that the play actually condemns political violence; the assassins are chased out of Rome soon afterward, and all of them are dead by the end of the play.

Nonetheless, following a firestorm of protest generated by the likes of Breitbart and Fox News, Bank of America pulled its support from the show, while Delta Air Lines cut all ties with the Public. Undaunted, the show premiered in full on June 12. It procceded without incident until the following Friday, when alt-right blogger Laura Loomer rushed the stage just as Caesar was being stabbed and demanded an end to “the normalization of political violence against the right.” As she was being hustled off stage, another alt-right luminary, Jack Posobiec, yelled that the Public was doing something that would make Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis proud.


In the days after she stormed the stage, Loomer tut-tutted on Twitter about the evils of the “normalization of violence.” So you would have thought that she would have been appalled at Trump firing off that tweet on Sunday morning, right? Wrong.

If that wasn’t enough, while she was seemingly applauding a tweet that can only be described as an attempt to normalize violence against the media, Loomer turned around and condemned those who blasted that tweet.

For instance, Ana Navarro rightly denounced that tweet as a tacit call for violence against journalists. Watch here.

But Loomer thought Navarro was the hypocrite.

And when CNN essentially told Trump to stop tweeting and get to work, Loomer turned on them.

Then again, it’s not that big of a leap for Loomer to go from jumping on stage in the name of stopping an assassination to applauding Trump literally bodyslamming CNN. After all, by definition, rushing a stage during a play is a violent act.

But Loomer wasn’t the only person who seems to think normalization of violence against the media is peachy. So does Mike Cernovich, who offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could interrupt the show–a challenge that Posobiec accepted, separately from Loomer. From where Cernovich is sitting, it was nothing more than a joke.

https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/881590025942573056

Looks like we know what Cernovich’s idea of humor is–and it’s downright scary. Later, Cernovich took to Periscope to argue that by calling out Trump for firing off this tweet, the media now looks like a bunch of priggish scolds.

https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/881657448683065344

So calling out a president for tweeting out a blatantly incendiary message is being petty? Got it.

And speaking of Posobiec, he thought that the tweet was actually saying the media was just as phony as a wrestling match.

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/881523892954771457

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/881529905447567360

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/881530564179890177

So riddle me this, Jack. If we missed the supposed symbolism behind Trump’s tweet, then how did you miss the symbolism of “Julius Caesar”–that political violence is actually a bad idea?

The response from Loomer, Cernovich, and Posobiec by itself  is enough to reveal how staggeringly hypocritical they are. But further proof has come in the last 24 hours. Late Sunday, Jared Yates Sexton, a freelance journalist who teaches writing and linguistics at Georgia Southern, revealed that Trump got that GIF from a Reddit user who is an open and unashamed neo-Nazi with a history of racist and sexist memes. Within hours of revealing this, Sexton was bombarded with graphic death threats. The response from the people supposedly concerned about the “normalization of political violence”? Crickets.

It should be noted that the entire furor over “Julius Caesar” was a classic case of right-wing astroturfing. The play had been in previews for almost two weeks before a producer for Salem Media, a religious right-aligned radio station group, appeared on one of Salem’s New York radio stations to express her alarm at supposedly seeing Trump being killed on stage.

Breitbart picked it up a few days later, prompting a firestorm of wingnut outrage on Twitter. Fox News followed suit a week later. It was only after the latter story that Donald Trump, Jr.–presumably speaking for his father–lashed out about a play that had been running within a stone’s throw of Trump Tower for two weeks at the time.


Until now, this was the most staggeringly hypocritical part of the “Julius Caesar” saga. Now we know that three of the loudest voices decrying the “normalization of political violence against the right” don’t see a problem with a GIF depicting violence against the media.

(screenshot courtesy Trump’s Twitter)

 

Darrell Lucus
Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook. Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello.

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