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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33253 thread views

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.

They say the sweetest sound to anyone's ears is one's own name. There really is no need to put it twice in different forms in a threatening letter to a "monkey". Aside from things others have noted: - "[Name] you are [insult] " already sounds african. - "appears on television frequently" self-promotion. - "what is that thing on your hair" I doubt they would comment on her hair right before threatening to spill her blood. - "dregs of multicultural society" blue-coded, implies multicultural society is good. - "your details have been circulated to other on the internet, violent nationalist activists." this looks like a fear she might have rather than the words of a death threat author, who is expected to be the 'violent nationalist activist'.

We've heard from the prosecution, who make pretty good points about the weird syntax and Africanisms that a white supremacist is unlikely to use. But, going beyond the content of the letter itself, I am led to believe that this isn't likely to be a hoax, at least not a hoax perpetrated by Shola herself. I thus present, the case for the defense.

1. This isn't the only threatening letter sent this week

Trans television presenter India Willoughby also received a threatening letter attributed to National Action. While the content of the letter itself was not published, she described it as "a cartoon drawing of a trans woman being hanged with a grotesque face, gouged out genitals, the wording 'you will never be a woman' written on the chest and a note instructing her to 'kill herself'". I haven't been able to find any evidence that links these two people other than that they both received letters, so it's unlikely that they're both in cahoots. And it seems unlikely that Shola would have written this note herself to make the hoax more believable since that increases the risk of being caught significantly. And it would be quite the coincidence if both people decided to run the same hoax at the same time, or if one of them decided to run a hoax while the other was the victim of a legitimate threat. It is possible that the Willoughby threat was a copycat hoax in response to the Shola threat, but Willoughby doesn't know whether the Shola threat is a hoax or real, and we have to assume that she thinks it's real and that creates similar implausibility issues. More on that below.

2. The letters were hand-delivered

If one is running a hoax, the only obvious advantage to claiming that the letters were hand-delivered rather than mailed is that it limits the scope of the investigation. If you mail the letter close to home then it may generate suspicion. If you mail the letter from elsewhere than it generates a lot of suspicion if it can be proved that you were in the area at the same time. Claiming it was hand-delivered cuts out the post office and allows a letter to materialize in your home without any obvious origin. But this isn't much of an advantage. Claiming the letter was hand-delivered may avoid this problem, but it creates a worse one—it means that the perpetrator was in a specific place during a specific time frame. If you leave the house at noon and the letter is there when you return at 4pm, then you just gave the police a pretty narrow window to check cameras, canvass the neighborhood, and figure out if anyone was at your door during that period. With mail, all you know is that the letter was mailed from a box within a specified geographic range during a specified time period, which is, at minimum, 24 hours. And even if you were to identify everyone who put mail in a public box during that specified time, it would take a ton of work and only generate a long list of people who did nothing more than put mail in a box and whom you'd probably need more evidence to investigate further, let alone the fact that it could have been mailed from a private address anyway making everyone in the postal district a possible suspect. OF course, this is a good reason for the actual perpetrators to have used the mail as well, but criminals generally aren't smart people. They don't think these things out like someone with multiple graduate degrees would. A hoax is by its nature a complex plot meant to achieve certain ends; people who intentionally perpetrate hoaxes generally do at least a modicum of thinking things through. People who send threatening letters are usually nuts and cranks who do it impulsively and without consideration of the possible consequences.

3. Threatening letters don't generate much sympathy

Whenever the Smollett thing comes up here, most of the discussion (rightly) focuses on how hare-brained and poorly planned the scheme was. What isn't discussed as much is how Smollett only went that far after he fabricated death threats that failed to generate the requisite amount of sympathy or media attention. Go big or go home. At least in America, it's almost become an accepted fact that public figures are going to receive death threats from assholes and losers. And even though stories were written about the incident in a number of British outlets, it doesn't seem to be getting a ton of traction. For example, the BBC reported on it less than 24 hours ago, but I only found that story because I was searching for it; simply browsing their website came up empty. I obviously can't be sure of this, but I imagine that if she were physically attacked the story would have had a higher profile.

4. There's no obvious motive

Most people would say that the motive is the same as in any other hate crime hoax, but I'd disagree. Most of these hoaxes are meant to push the narrative that hate is all around us, even in unsuspecting places. The Smollett case is a prime example of this. The alleged perpetrators were MAGA guys who assaulted a gay black man for being gay and being black after they happened to run into him on the street. No intentional targeting, nothing but a guy going about his business who runs into MAGA assholes. Who's the bad guy here? Trump supporters, obviously. There's also the obvious motive that Smollett wanted more money any couldn't get it because he wasn't a big enough celebrity yet and needed to raise his profile, but there's a reason he picked this avenue. We all know that Neo-Nazis and the KKK exist and presumably do terrible things, but the point of most of these hoaxes is to show that mainstream political parties and political rhetoric are responsible too. So why would Shola attribute the attack to a banned Neo-Nazi group that everyone already hates, including the British government? What purpose does that serve? To prove that a group that's known for being horrible and violent is, in fact, horrible and violent? If Shola wanted to use this to make a larger political point, I would expect a larger political point; try to show that these kinds of attacks are symptomatic of Tory politics, or royalism, or something else she's been railing against. Proving that Neo-Nazis are racists won't exactly surprise anybody.

I want to reiterate that this doesn't mean I'm convinced that this wasn't a hoax, or that the points below aren't well-taken. In fact, the British police are investigating this matter, but not at the request of any of the alleged victims, but because they read about it on Twitter. I don't know that this means anything, because the investigation was launched so quickly and because, as I alluded to earlier, it's been expected for so long that controversial public figures will receive death threats that the alleged victims can be forgiven for not doing anything immediately on the assumption that the police wouldn't take the matter seriously. But all this remains to be seen.

Trans television presenter India Willoughby also received a threatening letter attributed to National Action.

They didn't. If you read their tweet, they claim the letter was sent to their accountant. That is what inclines me to believe it wasn't real and is an attempt to jump on the bandwagon of "Me persecuted too!"

You tell me what online nutcase threatener of death and torture bothers sending their threats to the target's accountant rather than, you know, the target directly:

In response to Mos-Shogbamimu’s tweet, Willoughby wrote: ‘My accountant just called.

‘He’s received a letter today – hand delivered – no stamp. Threatening to kill me. Because I’m trans. Full of graphic detail about what they are going to do. Passed on to the police. This is what Brit media, the GC [gender-critical] movement and the gov have done.’

She continued: ‘[He] says it’s like a letter from a horror film. He’s obviously worried too, given how it was delivered.’

I bet sixty quatloos Willoughby cut'n'pasted it themself and slipped it through the letterbox in a Jussie Smollett move.

threats to the target's accountant rather than, you know, the target directly:

Well, firstly it's possible that the perpetrator was able to get the address of the accountant (which in fairness could plausibly be easier to find out) and not Willoughby's home address. In any case though, surely by the same logic that it's odd for someone sending threatening letters to an accountant, it also would be odd for Willoughby to claim she had a letter sent there rather than her home if it was a hoax. Why add in that odd detail, especially when a letter to one's home would presumably be more troubling?

I did see the part about the accountant earlier and was going to address it but it didn't seem terribly relevant. But since you brought it up, I don't think it's bandwagon jumping because she Tweeted about receiving her letter 10 minutes before Shola Tweeted about receiving hers. If anyone is jumping on a sympathy bandwagon, it's Shola, though it seems unlikely that she'd see the Tweet and then fabricate her own letter within the span of ten minutes. The reason an online nutcase might deliver the message to the accountant may be because the only address they could find was a business address, and the accountant is some kind of business manager. A few months ago I was trying to get an autographed picture of sportscaster Greg Gumbel to use as a fantasy league prize and online information told me that all inquiries should be sent to his agent. If Willoughby's accountant is handling her business affairs, it makes sense that a nutjob would end up there.

Priors say about 99% fake, because real life crazies very rarely go through enough effort to actually print out that stuff and bring it to someone's door. In the very rare case they do show up in person, it's usually to do the deed, not to threaten. I don't know who that is so evaluating "she wrote it" vs. "random leftist wrote it to draw attention and stir shit" is impossible. On raw priors I'd probably favor the latter. Almost certainly we'll never know who wrote it, yet it will be repeatedly used as if it was established that "right wing extremists" did.

Eh. Death threats is definitely something far-right and neo-nazi groups have a history of doing, and you can sort of see why. Even if in reality the threats are empty, they can be quite troubling to the victim without the perpetrator having to do much or put themselves at much risk.

Almost certainly we'll never know who wrote it, yet it will be repeatedly used as if it was established that "right wing extremists" did

No it won't. 99.9% of people have no idea this happened and never will. It hasn't just dropped out of the news cycle, it never entered it. It only seems to have appeared in a few online pieces (like the MailOnline which churns out quickly put together stories basically constantly), and while there is a short BBC article if you want to find it you have to navigate to the UK page, then go to local news, look up London, and even then it appears very far down alongside such top news as 'foam pool appears near HS2 works'.

Death threats is definitely something far-right and neo-nazi groups have a history of doing

Online? Sure. Personally nailing printed out threats to someone's door? I don't remember many such cases - and given that each of them gets a lot of publicity - if there would be a lot of it, I think I'd notice.

Oh I did mean in real life; there was a C4 Dispatches documentary about Combat 18 from a while ago and they frequently sent threats (usually phone messages but close enough, and in some cases it was written) quite similar to this.

Phone messages is online before there was online. Anybody can leave a phone message from their basement, it's very low effort. When I was very young and very stupid, we did some phone pranks. It's literally the easiest thing ever. Sending anonymous letters is more effort, but not by much (that's how they did it before everybody had telephones, I imagine). Printing this out and travelling to somebody's home to nail it at their door is significantly more effort.

Yeah but it's a bit different to online because it's harder to get hold of a random person's phone number (these were ordinary people, one was a holocaust survivor who gave a talk at a local school). And some were in person also.

Yeah but it's a bit different to online because it's harder to get hold of a random person's phone number

No, it really isn't.

It hasn't just dropped out of the news cycle, it never entered it.

Oh, not on the main circuit news. But in all those NGO reports, that the governments spend my tax dollars on producing. Virtually nobody scrutinizes their source data, but when they produce their results - like "256% growth of death threats from far-right against people of color!" - this will be on the main circuit news, and on the table of every politician (and every main circuit journalist would ask the politician about why they haven't fixed it yet). And unless you're willing to spend insane amount of time digging in - while, unlike the NGOs, not being paid by the tax money - you will have no ways to prove it's not the case. Even if you dig it up, what would you say? "I found one report that maybe aren't right wing extremists"? Who'd listen to you?

I'm not familiar with this National Action, so I looked them up. Everything about them is written with negative mood affiliation so it should be easy to find out how nasty these people are. The results I think are further evidence this is fake, aside from the insanity of a group like this identifying themselves in a threat, they've never done anything like this before. In fact, actual crimes committed by members are fit a easy to discern pattern. The majority of arrests of members of the National Action are for....being members of the National Action. Apparently the UK can forbid membership in groups like this with criminal penalties apart from actually committing crimes. I'm not British though so what do I know, maybe most folks in the UK like laws like this. IMO status offences enshrined in law are no better than the beliefs the proscribed groups are advancing. Its illegal to simply exist while claiming to be a member. The next biggest bucket of arrests are for words, either spoken or written. None of it is paper letters mailed to people or direct threats against specific individuals. Mostly its internet shit-posting in support of the actual crimes of non-members, like the murder of an MP. While they were 100% uninvolved in the murder there is a desperate need to connect them in the UK press. Also it appears that being a proscribed group puts you outside the protection of the UK's already insane libel/slander laws (nothing on Japan's though). The only actual crime that I would consider a real crime, in that it did demonstrable damage to a person or property, was an attempted murder by someone claiming to be a member after the fact. Some one was also arrested for possessing items with the intent of damaging property but was never charged for it. This simply isn't their MO at all. In addition, since the majority of their crimes are for saying or typing illegal words, there is a pretty good corpus of their work. None of it is written anything like this letter. They write like chavs speak, likely for an obvious reason.

Besides the fact that they're called National Action, I, and I suspect most other Brits, have no issues with organisations like this being proscribed because they aren't just racist and anti-semitic, they're outright calling for the murder of Jews and other minorities which crosses a pretty clear line.

From the Wikipedia article;

Renshaw had called for Jews to be "eradicated" as "nature's financial parasite and nature's social vermin", and had said that the UK had backed the wrong side in the Second World War, since the Nazis "were there to remove Jewry from Europe once and for all"

By 2014, he had written on his blog, "There are non-whites and Jews in my country who all need to be exterminated. As a teenager, Mein Kampf changed my life. I am not ashamed to say I love Hitler."[16][23] He has expressed admiration for Anders Breivik, the far-right terrorist, as "the hero Norway deserves"

On whether it's a hoax, I mean obviously I have no way of knowing but I don't see why it's implausible; the sort of basement-dweller who might join a organisation like this seems exactly the sort of person to write a poorly written screed such as this.

with some archaic or unusual word choices (as is common in former British colonies, most famously in India).

Such as?

"Cantonment" is one that also appears in African English dialects (e.g. Zimbabwe), "do the needful" is stereotypically Indian but originally from older UK English, "passed out" for graduating, "felicitated" for congratulated, things like that.

What does this have to do with the letter?

I may have mistaken his question for one regarding archaic/unusual word choices used in colonial English. In any case "You are a dreg of the multicultural society" and "We will be following you as you walk around your area" sound pretty bizarre. Of course, if I were writing a death threat to a foreigner, I would try to make it sound like the threat was written by a foreigner so that everyone online would think it was a hoax.

Agree they sound bizarre, but I'm not aware that those phrasings are dialectical (but I'm not really familiar with African dialects).

Those seem fairly normal? 'A dreg' is not as common as 'the dregs' but I don't think it especially unusual, same with the second example, maybe slightly stilted but nonetheless not remarkable.

In any case, what I don't get is why people think Dr Shola (who is an educated woman and can clearly write properly) would, if she were trying to create a hoax, deliberately write the letter with poor grammar.

The idea that a violent white supremacist actually knows what a Yoruba is seems both extremely spurious and a hilarious mistake to make.

While that's true your average /pol/ poster couldn't distinguish a Yoruba from a brand of tea. This is 100% false flag. Also notice the awkward use of "Cell" in the first line.

Honestly hardcore far-rightists often go deep into obscure ethnic trivia

Usually involving groups close to them and/or they have a long history of enmity with.

This sort of thing is exactly what I expect from a far-right...Nigerian.

IME in the West people almost never give a shit about specific ethnic groups like Yoruba unless they're standing in for countries.

EDIT: Except maybe HBD nerds who care about the Igbo IQ rates vs. other SSA ethnic groups. But they're not the ones who usually do things like this.

They may know the differences, but it's unlikely they'd emphasize it in a threat to a Yoruba person if they want both Igbo and Yoruba and everybody else from African descent out. It's like I would be pretending to be an antisemite and were writing a letter to threaten a Jew and said "you filthy left-handed Jew!". "Left-handed" here is weird because if I were a real antisemite then I'd hate both right-handed and left-handed and ambidextrous Jews. However, if I were a left-handed people's rights activist who for some reason decided to pretend to be an antisemite, then the issue of handedness would be fresh on my mind, and grasping for an appropriate insult, I might just reach for it. Thus, it is likely that the letter was written by somebody for whom this distinction is very important and fresh on their minds.

Spitting facts! I, for one, endorse the idea that Yoruba are meaningfully different from Igbo, though this would be fantastically beside the point when the target is defined by her politics. It is not inconceivable for this to be mentioned. In the immortal words of Hakan Rotwrmt (RIP, even the archive):

High-quality racism is extraordinarily hard work. You have to have working recall of at minimum eight or nine thousand distinct races, living and extinct, and run extensive simulations just to model the disgusting attributes of the most easily conceivable 2- &3-way crosses.

On the other hand, the screed, for all its uninspired vitriol, conspicuously doesn't insult her or her people's intelligence. It's overwhelmingly dirt, pure racial antagonism, and some envy: troublemaker, liar, grifter, filthy, ugly, nigger, gorilla, smelly, poopy-head, monkey, parasite, go away, give us back our space, our air, we want your nice house with nice garden (at least no mention of her nice TV). Honestly this is something I'd expect an upper-class black person with an inflated self-esteem and limited self-awareness to attribute to anti-black racists – mostly projecting one's naive tribal hatred. Assuming she wrote this, Dr. Adeshola (Twitter verified) cannot conceive of herself as not being clever, even when trying to put herself in the shoes of her mortal enemy. And indeed, she is an Author, Lawyer, Political & Women's Rights Activist, Founder. Not even a completely unhinged murderous racist would think to call her stupid! On this matter, I see that while white liberals have veeery specific pained reactions to the IQ discourse, most blacks act refreshingly casual, as if they do not distinguish it from generic poop-on-your-head invectives.

...Alternatively, she is quite aware of this and other rhetorical deficiencies, but wouldn't like to publish anything online that reminds people (to wit, those oversensitive white liberals) of hate-facts and, especially on occasion of the hoax being exposed, would get her in real hot water.

On the gripping hand, this is so bad it almost looks like a second order hoax. We'd accuse Shola of doing a Jussie Smolliay, then Bobbies apprehend real National Action London. In 2 years will be revealed as a honeypot with 15/20 undercover agents, but that won't be known far outside Steve Sailer's feed – unlike the boy-who-cried wolf moral lesson that we should believe victims and not assume hoaxes.

Or Jello Biafra.

Twitter autists aren’t the ones doing IRL white supremacist terrorism, they’re calling trans women ugly on the internet. IRL white supremacist attacks are mostly carried out by the same sorts of people who do other kinds of real life violence, who are fantastically unlikely to know their yorubas from their Hutus.

It's difficult to know. It could be genuine, it could be something she invented herself, it could be something a third party sent (either as false flag or they're just a troll) and is trying to pin on National Action - I had to look them up and they're a real group, but that doesn't mean this alleged "London Cell" is real or that this is really from them. We'll have to wait and see the result of the police investigation.

The 'Yoruba' gives it away as being a fake.

No european racist would care about that guy being a particular African tribe. Especially not someone writes at that level.

Meanwhile, in Africa, what tribe you are still matters a lot.

This totally reminds me of this analysis of the Pink Letter in A Song of Ice and Fire:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jwcuRwod0Xg

Basically this video is indicating that in the book, a wildling is trying to forge a letter from someone from South of the wall. They get lots of things wrong by just caring about things that no one south of the wall would care about, and using language that only wildlings use, like "black crows" and "king beyond the wall".

It would be bitterly funny if she didn't fake this letter, but some fellow African academic or other rival did in order to threaten her but push off the blame onto the white supremacists. I could see them caring about "that big-headed Yoruba bitch", as you say.

We might learn something eventually, because apparently all color laser printers leave their serial numbers in small yellow dots on each page, and a competent police investigation would thus find the serial number.

Do cops have a database of every serial number? How?

Possible they ask distributors to tell them, on account of color laser printers being used for counterfeiting.

If not, you can go around the workplace of the person who printed it out and check. This is the kind of thing you wouldn't really want to print somewhere where other people could see it, e.g. a print shop.

That is conditional on there being a competent police investigation.

This would be like if someone left me a letter at my doorstep, which claims to be from ISIS but they don't write much glorifying Islam and Allah and fighting in His name, but just me calling me an infidel and themselves a "violent Islamist group". Plenty of suspects in my neighbourhood, all of them annoying teenagers. I too have an interesting anecdote: a friend of mine approached an escort and requested a quote, but left once she gave him one he couldn't afford. A few hours later, he got a text message from a guy claiming to be from the Sinaloa Cartel. Apparently, they ran the escort service and he demanded that he pay them $1,500 for wasting their girl's time or he was gonna die. That he had 1 hour to look for the money. My friend played around melodramatically acting like he's been scraping rock bottom for several years now and lives with a family he now hates, so they're free to take him. He asked them to send a picture of the girl to make sure they actually had the right guy because he didn't want to waste their time, but never got a reply. He's been waiting for over a year.

Apparently, they ran the escort service and he demanded that he pay them $1,500 for wasting their girl's time or he was gonna die.

Lmaoo.

Does he live in Mexico ?

This is a pretty common scam. If you google "cartel escort scam" you'll instances of it happening in Canada, the US, and the UK.

It's also branched out into just targeting random people as general extortion.

Nope, Minnesota.

Ah yes, that well-known hotbed of South American criminal mobs 😁

Though if people are approaching 'escorts' on the street in Minnesota, maybe it is more of a hotbed of crime and villainy than the popular image suggests! Was it on the street or how did he go about it (you said "approached" which sounds like he walked up to her, but if he did it via text or something that would explain how the 'Sinaloa Cartel' got his phone number).

I mean, if the asking price of the negotiable affection was too rich for his blood, how did this criminal mastermind expect him to be able (or willing) to fork out $1,500?

IIRC he had made a request on their website, and they required him to leave them his number so they could tell him where to meet the girl on text. It was some masseuse place as a front, he had to take the back door for 'special services'. I find it interesting that they didn't give him the quote right then or indeed list the prices on their website. Unless he was after something comically specific which, knowing him, probably isn't off brand.

All things considered, he seems to have been lucky in the result, even if not the kind of lucky he was hoping to be.

Was it on the street or how did he go about it

Asking for a friend? :P

More that if you're in the gang of people pretending to be the Sinaloa Cartel in order to run a variant of the badger game, I'm more inclined to think that is Ye Olde Traditional Street Walker rather than someone taking bookings online and seeing clients in a hotel room.

Ah yes, that well-known hotbed of South American criminal mobs 😁

In fact, the cartels are pretty much everywhere in the US now, even in the boonies. I saw a documentary the other day about how they've even started infiltrating Native American reservations. Basically some cartel guy hooks up with a NA girlfriend, she brings him along to parties, and pretty soon they are running a drug trade on the rez.

I feel like this is a reference to something, so…evidence?

The evidence is the documentary I watched on YouTube. Are you accusing me of making up seeing such a documentary, or are you claiming the documentary made this up? Obviously I can't speak to the accuracy of the claims in the film (it was a guy interviewing people on a reservation, so I guess it's possible they were making it up).

I’m not accusing you of anything. I thought it was plausible that you were making a joke about the low, low standards of evidence when it comes to drawing a line. Like how people make jokes about Anchorman being a documentary. It doesn’t sound like that’s what you were actually going for, so yeah, I’m curious as to the documentary.

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.

Maybe it's a weird thing to hone in on but it seems a little strange they didn't bother to capitalise neither white nor European, the names of the groups they're willing to kill and die for, but did capitalise Yoruba. Not to mention the fact they even bothered to bring up her being Yoruba as though white nationalists would care in the slightest what variety of black person she is, as others have mentioned.

I mean virtually everyone in the replies just believes it's genuine without question so if it is a forgery I guess you don't have to try very hard to make it convincing to people, at least people that are already on your side and want to believe it's real, but it's still a really strange mistake to make.

Not to mention the fact they even bothered to bring up her being Yoruba as though white nationalists would care in the slightest what variety of black person she is, as others have mentioned.

This was the smoking gun for me, yeah. It has the distinct whiff of someone fishing for the upvotes / collective immune response of her ingroup ("defend me fellow Yoruba-sisters!") and having done so at the expense of the complete collapse of a credible impression of the outgroup.

I agree that it's fake. Aside from the things that others have already pointed out, she humblebrags about her 'nice big house' more than once. The use of 'nigger' reads as an Americanism to me, and overall it's just too long. I would imagine a real death threat would be shorter.

I'll be honest, I have almost no idea what a real death threat actually looks like.

99.9% of so-called death threats on the internet fall into one of two categories; faked or implausible. Neither of them can be said to be real to my mind. Someone from 5000 miles away in Bumfuck, Alabama saying "i'll kill u bitch" is not a real death threat as far as I'm concerned. Reacting to it as if it is would be giving it a gravitas that it does not deserve.

99.9% of so-called death threats on the internet fall into one of two categories; faked or implausible. Neither of them can be said to be real to my mind.

I actually feel like at least 90% of so-called death threats on the internet aren't even death threats. The vast majority of the times I see someone claim that they received death threats, the actual text says something like "You should die," or "I wish you would die," in more flowery language and palpable details. These aren't death threats, merely death wishes. A threat would be some sort of actual intent to carry out the wish.

Won’t someone rid me of this turbulent priest?

I dunno, if you get specific enough, at some point I think it should count. In the same way as “lol jk….unless?” Is still incitement. The turbulent priest probably doesn’t cross this line, since it wasn’t directed at the victim, but about him.

But throw enough vitriol at someone, and odds are some of it ends up looking like specific, actionable plans and demands. Those are threats even if the author never says “I”

But throw enough vitriol at someone, and odds are some of it ends up looking like specific, actionable plans and demands.

Some of it certainly does, I agree. In my experience, again, a vast majority of it doesn't.

I'll be honest, I have almost no idea what a real death threat actually looks like.

99.9% of so-called death threats on the internet fall into one of two categories; faked or implausible.

Easy. Imagine mail arriving on your real name private address you never ever used to shitpost on the internets, originating from proxy server in Belize, that contains pics of your house and family taken through telescopic sight and polite request to cease meddling with stuff you shouldn't meddle with.

Is there a story behind this?

Not sure, but I've received a directionally similar warning.

Over what content? Do you think the warning was issued by the authorities of a certain large Eurasian state?

Not at all. Just a sneering comment on an anonymous board that proved convincingly that «they» have tied all my behind-seven-proxies identities together and see my real identity as well, and if I know what's good, I'll shut the fuck up. A pretty sobering moment.

More comments

On the subject of things that are very likely fake, I have this: https://twitter.com/AartiTikoo/status/1549108570813112320

This is not really how CIA top brass would talk about their mass-murder/sabotage attacks, even in the 1990s. Yet it got considerable twitter traction in the Indian community.

In the same way, there's no way a white-supremacist would capitalize Yoruba but not european.

It's so over-the-top obviously fake that I actually give it a 10% chance it's an actual troll who sent her that, and whether she believes it's for real or not, obviously she's going to run with it.

But yeah, 90% chance it's her or someone she put up to this. "Yoruba" is a tell - actual white nationalists don't care if you're Yoruba or Igbo or Tsutsi or whatever. Nor would they switch between "Shola" and the more formal "Adeshola." The syntax is characteristic of African English speakers.

Interestingly, India Willoughby (a trans woman whose main occupation seems to be jousting with JK Rowling on Twitter) claims to have also received one. What a coincidence, two leftist Twitter grifters both get threatening letters spelling out in explicit detail that Very Bad People want to kill them because they are black and trans, respectively.

I definitely don't believe the India Willoughby one. That's someone who is trying to make a splash of publicity for themselves, first by trying to pick on Rowling, and now "oh noes a neo-Nazi group is death-threating me". There is the faint possibility the Shola one could be real, but when it comes to the trans activist "Rowling is a trans genocider and anti-Semite" bunch, I don't believe them if they say grass is green.

Also, how the hell is a hate group going to know who her accountant is, and if they can find that out, why bother sending the letter to him instead of the fake woman?

That's exactly the weird doubt I had. Maybe there really is some weirdly autistic chav who goes around ranting about "fucking yorubans, with their nice houses and slightly narrower than west-african-average cranial maxilla and posh Ufẹ̀ accent. I hate them even more than the fucking Kposo!"

"OCCIDENTAL HAPLOGROUP B4 IS DONE GIVING ORDERS AROUND HERE. THE INFLUENCE OF THE "HAM SANDWICH RACE" IS WANING."

Some of the far-right accounts I've seen on Twitter have joked that online racists are the kind of people who would end up learning obscure details about ethnicities in Nigeria and so on. "Racists learn about different peoples to hate them more effectively." Of course that would be more like 4chan autist types and less like people who would send misspelled threat letters, unless - as indicated in another post in this thread - it's a double false flag.

Currently news about ethnic relations in Nigeria have gotten a momentary boost in Finland due to this strange story, but that's a whole another issue.

Sure, but far right twitter autists are mostly not the ones actually sending death threats.

Pahoittelut. Hakemaasi sivua ei löydy

Fixed, I somehow added an extra 9 to the link.

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).

Your story reminds me in turn of Charlie Rogers, a lesbian woman who was ruled to have carved slurs and a cross onto her own body to stage a homophobic hate crime:

https://www.cnn.com/2012/08/21/justice/nebraska-hate-crime/index.html

And relevant to your original question, here's a linguistic analysis that was done before the ruling, which predicted that she was lying:

http://statement-analysis.blogspot.ca/2013/03/charlie-rogers-awaits-sentencing.html

Granted, it's analysis of her speech, not the alleged speech of her alleged attackers.

I'm not certain how reputable the analysis source is, and if it's in line with similar analyses of this nature. But I did find it interesting that it draws attention to the lack of "I" statements, and the like.

Man, Smollett really didn’t commit, did he?

Obviously. And it's her or (less likely) some other black person. The dead giveaway is "Yoruba". Actual racists may care if you're half-black, quarter-black, full-black, or whether you come from Africa or India or Australia. They don't give a damn about your petty inter-African ethnic struggles. Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, they don't care.

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