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Following a white supremacist rally in August 2017 that left a woman dead when a neo-Nazi plowed his car into a group of counter-protestors, President Trump has blamed both sides for causing violence. Shortly afterwards, images of flyers calling for the murder of white children and purportedly distributed by antifa, a loosely organized group of anti-fascist protestors, were recirculated as evidence to back up that claim: This flyer was not created by antifa, nor was it distributed by the group in Charlottesville or anywhere else. This image has been circulating since at least April 2017. The earliest iteration we could find appeared on the web site ResistfromDay1.org, where it was posted with several similar images, all of which carried a resistfromday1.org watermark (that was subsequently removed before being shared on social media): There are several reasons to be sure that these flyers are fake: the supposed antifa organization named on the flyers does not exist; the flyer does not use language espoused by antifa groups; and the images have been posted along with a wide variety of claims about antifa groups in various cities. The New York City Antifa Twitter account said that the flyer was fake as a three dollar bill: We asked @NYCAntifa to elaborate and they explained in an email several reasons why these flyers were obviously fake. For one, they confirmed that there simply was no a group called the National Antifa Front. They also noted that antifa widely condemns the antisemitic language used in the flyer: Rose City Antifa also told us that the anti-Semitic language was a dead giveaway that these flyers were not created by an Antifa group: The message on the flyer is also not one that has ever been espoused by antifa groups. In fact, when a similar rumor circulated about another flyer promoting white genocide, the Emerald City antifa group in Seattle denounced the message and said that it read like an alt-right nightmare: These images have also been posted with several different claims about their alleged origins. ResistFromDay1 claimed that the photographs showed flyers that were plastered up and down 32nd St. in Brooklyn (none of the images actually show the flyers posted along the street). The web sites Conservative Headlines and Source News, on the other hand, said that the flyers were accidentally left behind in a garbage can: Jack Posbiec, an alt-right figure who espouses conspiracy theories, claimed that an antifa group had posted the flyers for Holocaust Memorial Day; Bikers for America, a group that says to want to restore American exceptionalism claimed in August 2017 that the flyers were found in Charlotesville, Virginia after the deadly rally. Each of these claims, despite their varying geographies, used the exact same images. Several users on the pro-Trump subreddit r/The_Donald and the 4Chan forum /pol/, where these images first received attention in early April 2017, also expressed skepticism about the authenticity of the flyers:
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