A certain group of right-wing conservatives, convinced that there has been a massive conspiracy involving everyone except them to cover-up the True Events of the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Libya, have taken to changing their names on Facebook to include the word ‘Benghazi.’
Screenshot via Facebook
The Benghazi attacks have been a flashpoint for conservatives over the past two years, the word itself—so exotic, with its ‘z’ and its ‘ngh’ and its ‘i’—having been transmogrified into a kind of synecdoche for the conservative movement’s entire spectrum of racial and economic anxieties.
Screenshot via Facebook
Screenshot via Facebook
What is most horrifying about this particular meme is the self-assuredness it reveals about these people that a single word can carry so much significance and meaning, that to inject this word “Benghazi” into the endless flow of conversation on the Internet is somehow radical or enlightened.
“Benghazi,” these people seem to be saying. “Think about it.” They nod to each other, sagely. “Never forget.”
Screenshot via Facebook
The Huffington Post found an early reference to this trend in the Facebook group, “Christian, Conservative, Patriot and Not Afraid.”
Most of the people in the comments who said that they’d changed their display names to include the word ‘Benghazi’ seem to have subsequently changed their names back. Probably this is because none of the eight separate investigations in the past two years into “Benghazi” have found any evidence of a cover-up. This was (re)confirmed most recently by the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee. “No one was deliberately misled, no military assets were withheld and no stand-down order (to U.S. forces) was given,” Representative Mike Thompson (D-CA) told the San Francisco Chronicle.
H/T Huffington Post | Photo via Will Thomas/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
