Lia Thomas Allegedly Photographed in Cute Tank Top
Thomas, whose single win in an NCAA championship swim race has earned her the lifelong enmity of far-right nutjobs, may have worn a shirt with the “Antifa Supersoldier” meme.
by Evan Urquhart
Former college swimmer Lia Thomas continues to drive bizarre, bad faith coverage of the smallest details of her life. This time her alleged infraction is having been photographed wearing a tank top with “Antifa Supersoldier” in bubble letters. The photo was sourced to a tweet by an anonymous meme-account by the anti-woke sports blog Outkick. It seems to have recieved a large boost in visibility when it was also shared by Andy Ngo on Twitter later on Monday, who was then quote-tweeted by former fifth-place NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines, who called the shirt “disturbing.” Ngo’s tweet is used as the source for the photo in stories for the Daily Caller, the Blaze, RedState, and Newsweek.
Ngo, who presents himself as a journalist, is known primarily for his close relationship with the extreme right, including ties to violent neo-fascist groups. In the Tweet sharing the photo, he claimed, “Trans violent militancy is the current focus of #Antifa. They believe that critics of trans ideology should be silenced, maimed or murdered. Some call for sexual violence against females in particular, as revenge.” There is, of course, no basis for any of these claims. Nevertheless, they were repeated or embedded in most of the stories about Lia Thomas having worn a tank top which appeared in the right-wing press.
The phrase “Antifa Supersoldier” is a meme making fun of the idea (heavily promoted by Ngo and others) that Antifa is an organized violent group. It is, in fact, a loose collection of activists who oppose fascism in the U. S. Some members of this loose group have been involved in occasional street-fighting with far-right paramilitary gangs.
This is not the first time that the far right’s monitoring of Thomas’ purported private social media has become a news story in the right-wing press. In February similar hay was made about Thomas having supposedly liked some autogynophilia memes. The obsessive attempts to make a scandal out of every minor incident in Thomas’ life is best understood as an example of the lengths to which the right goes to crank out daily negative stories about the trans community, with an ultimate goal of driving trans people entirely out of public life.
The shirt in the photo looks cute as heck, and if it genuinely shows Thomas, as has been claimed by anonymous right-wing social media accounts, Assigned’s official editorial position on that is that it is completely rad.