4chan “/pol/” users have shared the site for Trump Force 47 hundreds of times
Far-right media figures have also been involved with Trump Force 47 — Trump’s “official army” of volunteers' training efforts
Written by Alex Kaplan
Published
Users of a far-right 4chan forum have shared the website for former President Donald Trump’s grassroots canvassing effort, Trump Force 47, hundreds of times, a Media Matters review has found.
4chan’s far-right “politically incorrect” message board, commonly known as “/pol/,” is a hotbed for white nationalist and racist content and harassment campaigns. The board played a major role in spreading the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, and it was the birthplace of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee launched Trump Force 47 in May to engage “tens of thousands of new volunteers across the country to participate in a neighbor-to-neighbor organizing program hyper-focused on mobilizing highly-targeted voters.” Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign describes it as the “official army of volunteer neighborhood organizers working together to defeat Kamala Harris and the far-left liberal democrats.” Volunteers, including in swing states, can seemingly be involved with neighborhood canvassing, poll watching, and other grassroots activities.
Users on 4chan’s /pol/ message board have been promoting the organizing effort. A Media Matters review found that since Trump Force 47 launched in May, the URL for the site of the effort has been shared on /pol/ more than 350 times.
These posts included messages pushing extremist rhetoric, which have been repeatedly shared. One included the lines “BAN THE TRANS,” “DEPORT THE HORDE!,” “AUDIT THE FRAUD,” “HANG THE RIGGERS,” and “IT’S OKAY TO BE WHITE” (a reference to a white nationalist campaign popularized on the forum).
Another one that was repeatedly shared urges fellow users to “MAKE A BIG IMPACT WITH A SMALL TIME COMMITMENT” and “JOIN TRUMP FORCE 47 TODAY!, claiming that a “small time commitment will have a big impact on the outcome of November’s elections.”
And another repeatedly shared message tells users to go to Trump Force 47’s website and “start here if you want to help in a grassroots fashion, but are unsure of where to start.”
Other posts have seemingly connected the effort to “train[ing] the whole electorate” and getting “everyone you know down to the ballot boxes, get them cameras, get them clip boards.”
Some included text like, “I’ll be at mar a largo for the victory party. I’m racking up those trumpforce47.com points,” comments about working with Trump Force 47 to “do a quick dox” and call Pennsylvania voters, and demands to “stop sitting on your ass” and “become Trump’s strongest soldier” and to “take our country back.”
Trump Force 47’s URL has also been shared in other far-right online spaces, like among QAnon figures and users on the far-right forum TheDonald.
Far-right media figures, including Roseanne Barr, Jack Posobiec, and Rogan O’Handley — who have promoted QAnon, pushed various conspiracy theories, and spread misinformation, respectively — have taken part in Trump Force 47 training events. Posobiec’s trainings were reportedly “touted as a way to ‘receive insider insights from Jack Posobiec on the campaign’s efforts.’”