Little Green Footballs

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This has nothing to do with a sport played by Little Green Men.
Before going on to murder children, Breivik cried in his manifesto about how betrayed he felt by Charles Johnson's sudden U-turn on Muslims
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Seeing this vile Holocaust revisionism at the highest levels of Israeli govt makes me glad I renounced the “anti-jihad” creeps years ago.
—Charles Johnson after seeing Netanyahu blame the "Mufti of JerusalemWikipedia" for the Holocaust[1]

Little Green Footballs (LGF) is a website that went from vehement, racist, hate-speech right-wing warblog in 2001 to vehement anti-right-wing blog in 2009[2] while retaining the same tactics of ridicule, personal rivalries, banning of dissenters, and calling opponents "evil." LGF is the creation of Charles Foster Johnson (1953–), one of the leading boosters of the Iraq War in the early days of the blogosphere. His own posts only bordered on hate speech,[note 1] as he popularized the canard of "Islamofascism", and LGF is cited often in Norwegian mass murder Anders Behring Breivik's anti-Muslim "manifesto". But Johnson fostered more open vileness in the LGF comments section: Muslims were "vermin," the activist that was killed by a bulldozer in Israel, Rachel Corrie,Wikipedia was renamed "St. Pancake" while Palestinians required "sterilization," and the beating of protesters was openly advocated while "targeted genocide" was a popular solution to America's problems.[3]

After helping establish many of the loony wingnuts (like the epically insane Pamela Geller) still running amok to this day, Johnson parted ways with the right-wing and attempted to retroactively cleanse LGF and his reputation by scrubbing his site of the most incriminating blog posts,[4] banning most active members, and denying his previous warmongering bloodlust with a kind of "what, little old me?" denial of responsibility.[citation needed] Or at least, Wikipedia carries allegations that Johnson has been surreptitiously editing comments by other users to push his point of view, but Wikipedia's usual standards of referencing are not used to justify these claims, unless one considers an archive of a below-the-line comment on Australia's Daily Telegraph website to be authoritative.[2] Will nobody in the lamestream media expose this scandal?

Johnson spent much of his time on LGF in Twitter wars with Glenn Greenwald, until Greenwald got smarter and began ignoring him. Ironically, in 2014, Johnson found a new #1 nemesis, who almost has the exact same name: Wingnut internet troll and Holocaust denier[5][6] Charles C. JohnsonWikipedia (1988–). LGF Johnson takes pains to point out that his doppelgänger-by-name Johnson "is not me." Sadly for LGF Charles, Charles C. has been permanently banned from Twitter, which may leave the former Charles with no options but to Twitter self-abuse.

Since dumping the neocon, things have been quieter, but as of 2020 it's not dead yet. In 2015 it launched a crowdfunding campaign which raised $11,237 of its $20,000 goal.[7]

Name[edit]

The origin of the name is unclear; even Wikipedia, which loves etymologies almost as much as obscure edit wars, can only quote Johnson: "I am at liberty to reveal that it has something to do with an incident in my youth that happened in Japan."[2]

External links[edit]

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

  1. "Seeing this vile Holocaust revisionism at the highest levels of Israeli govt makes me glad I renounced the “anti-jihad” creeps years ago.", Green Footballs, twitter, 2015, archived at archive.org
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 See the Wikipedia article on Little Green Footballs.
  3. Right-Wing Flame War!, Jonathan Dee, New York Times Magazine, Jan 24, 2010
  4. Comment, Charles Johnson, Little Green Footballs, Sep 13, 2010
  5. Adam C. Smith (February 5, 2018). "Matt Gaetz’s State of the Union guest admits he questioned Holocaust". Tampa Bay Times. "ChuckCJohnson: I do not and never have believed the six million figure. I think the Red Cross numbers of 250,000 dead in the camps from typhus are more realistic." (This Holocaust denial talking-point is refuted here).
  6. "Charles C. Johnson". Anti-Defamation League.
  7. Little Green Footballs Fundraiser, GoFundMe.com, launched May 6, 2015, accessed October 20, 2020