A Twitter user is drawing attention to a talent website and the many profiles of people on it who have since become public rightwing figures, suggesting it’s no coincidence.
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The deeper into the right-wing movement you go, the more accusations you encounter of people getting paid to promote Democratic causes. The most popular one is the claim that George Soros pays everyone who shows up to march for causes like Black Lives Matter and protesting former President Trump (false), but if you go deep enough, you’ll also find rightwing extremists who believe the parents of school shooting victims are crisis actors (false!), among other actual victims of tragedies that don’t fit a narrative that conservatives like.
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But Nicole Elan believes the political side making the accusations may actually be the ones hiring these crisis actors, and sometimes creating entire careers for them.
Elan has been posting about this for a while, as have others, but she recently created a Twitter thread to connect some recognizable right-wing figures with their pasts as aspiring actors.
All the people she lists have old profiles on ExploreTalent, a large internet database of “talent” that is generally considered a scam casting site, not taken seriously by Hollywood.
The rightwingers who have old profiles on the site, suggesting that they at one point attempted to have some sort of acting, modeling, or hosting career, range from more prominent figures such as Candace Owens (“who ‘flipped’ from the Left & became the Right’s token darling,” Elan writes) and Lauren Boebert (“no political experience”) to people who suddenly popped up for their 15 minutes of fame during a convenient time, including Rudy Giuliani’s infamous and chaotic “star witness,” Melissa Carone.
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This is far from the first time the connection between failed entertainment careers and right-wing figures has come up. Even Ben Shapiro is famously a failed screenwriter, while Trump’s desperation to fit in with the “Hollywood elite” he blasts in public is well known.
But the debate continues over whether the conclusion to be drawn is that the contempt people have for Hollywood after failing, combined with their own narcissism and need for attention, leads them to become public figures for the right, or whether they were sought out from places like ExploreTalent and hired by the same people accusing the left of doing just that.
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So many times my friends and I (teachers, nurses, social workers etc.) have had “paid protesters” screamed at us while marching for BLM etc. QAnon which accused innocent people of child abuse grew out of child-porn hub 4chan. They are masters of projection!
— Pepper – Intolerant of the Intolerable
(@PepperDCorazon) August 3, 2021
Of course, another conspiracy is just another conspiracy theory for the time being — coming from the other side of the political aisle doesn’t change that.
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However, it is worth noting that rightwing darlings Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman repeatedly hired actors and staged FBI raids and press conferences in attempts to discredit figures that they felt impeded the political future they wanted in the United States, including Robert Mueller, Kamala Harris, and Anthony Fauci.
But even if none of the would-be entertainers from ExploreTalent were ever paid “crisis actors” for the right, the attention-seeking pattern and sudden need to demonize everyone in Hollywood tracing back to their own failures says plenty about their intent and credibility all on its own.
*First Published: August 4, 2021, 8:06 am
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