Did I just watch Dave Chappelle save America from itself in 65 minutes on Netflix? pic.twitter.com/FCXgk2j4hX
— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) August 29, 2019
Investigations into that question could determine whether the Angels and the family of one of their most popular players face off in legal proceedings that could take years and be worth tens of millions of dollars — or more.RTWT.
The Skaggs family and the Angels each have retained attorneys based in Texas, where Skaggs died July 1 on the first day of a team trip to play the Texas Rangers and Houston Astros. The prospects of a wrongful-death lawsuit appear significant, given that the family‘s assertion in a statement Friday that they had learned the “circumstances surrounding Tyler’s death … may involve an employee of the Los Angeles Angels.”
That statement prompted Major League Baseball to launch an investigation. Police in Southlake, Texas — where the Angels were staying that night — have been investigating since Skaggs’ death. The attorney hired by the Skaggs family, Rusty Hardin, intends to pursue his own probe.
“We’re going to want to know how it came about that those drugs were ingested,” Hardin told The Times, “and whether or not others are responsible for what happened.”
The prospects of success for any wrongful death suit could depend on whether attorneys can identify a party besides Skaggs that might be at least partially responsible for his death, said Julie Cantor, who teaches law at UCLA.
“You need to have a wrongful act,” said Cantor, speaking generally because she has not reviewed any records in the Skaggs case...
'Oh my gosh this is really bad': A lot of details in Joe Biden's war story just don't add up https://t.co/X1CrcceQaR
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) August 29, 2019
Except almost every detail in the story appears to be incorrect. Based on interviews with more than a dozen U.S. troops, their commanders and Biden campaign officials, it appears as though the former vice president has jumbled elements of at least three actual events into one story of bravery, compassion and regret that never happened.
iden visited Kunar province in 2008 as a U.S. senator, not as vice president. The service member who performed the celebrated rescue that Biden described was a 20-year-old Army specialist, not a much older Navy captain. And that soldier, Kyle J. White, never had a Silver Star, or any other medal, pinned on him by Biden. At a White House ceremony six years after Biden’s visit, White stood at attention as President Barack Obama placed a Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor, around his neck.
The upshot: In the space of three minutes, Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.
It’s attack of the 50 foot Lana Del Rey in the “Doin’ Time” video: https://t.co/jp63uydxvY #DOINTIME pic.twitter.com/tkG4mQP8s1
— Consequence of Sound (@consequence) August 29, 2019
The #AbolishICE mob is threatening our immigration enforcement agents & endangering us all. I'm taking #StandWithICE straight to sanctuary hellholes. Need patriots to join me. More to come==> https://t.co/aThvSvw6dG #openbordersinc #malkintour pic.twitter.com/MrO04IvcYI— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) August 28, 2019
New @inamoratawoman this week. pic.twitter.com/KdCozHgbGu
— Emily Ratajkowski (@emrata) August 18, 2019
This is what 30 looks like. Happy Birthday to me! Self love. Body positivity. Unapologetically me. #Not20Anymore pic.twitter.com/FbFVeKDEUv
— Bebe Rexha (@BebeRexha) August 30, 2019
Picture dedicated to the music executive who said I am too old to be sexy. pic.twitter.com/56WmE4d01e
— Bebe Rexha (@BebeRexha) August 12, 2019
The attacks are against those clearly wearing Jewish attire, so most Jews don’t see anything different about their daily commute, while their Orthodox neighbor has to go incognito for fear of being thrown in front of a train.
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) August 29, 2019
Leave you with this: Everybody knows. Everybody knows. Everyone. No one gets a pass: https://t.co/jNUzUxTNA6
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) August 29, 2019
I grew up in Virginia a little girl mad about the American Civil War. On weekends I begged my father to take me to all the battlefields: Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, Antietam. I was transfixed by the moral question the war addressed and the incredible change its end effected: a change we're still trying to make real...Leftists are truly deranged.
Azealia Banks is in Sweden and she is a MOOD.
— Annika H Rothstein (@truthandfiction) August 25, 2019
“This socialism shit is bogus” 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/EQJvM0yxMd
.@latimes' attack on @prageru indicates how crucial the platform is in this climate. Lib MSM bashes @DennisPrager for making case for God-based moral system but deems @Google restricting access to their videos unnewsworthy making no mention in the article. https://t.co/OYG2UE862E pic.twitter.com/XMF2EBnvHB
— Adam Milstein (@AdamMilstein) August 26, 2019
MY JAW DROPPED AT THIS LOOK!!!!!!!!! @halsey 😱😱😱
— Video Music Awards (@vmas) August 26, 2019
Find out if she wins TONIGHT at the #VMAs at 8p on @MTV ❤️ pic.twitter.com/ll0beJAQsP
.@halsey came to SERVE at the #VMAs this year! 🔥👏 pic.twitter.com/gsLYronWOo
— MTV (@MTV) August 26, 2019
Halsey is no sweet dream, but she's one hell of a sight. #VMAs pic.twitter.com/PKUyqLkDp9
— E! News (@enews) August 27, 2019
Seattle is in effect decriminalizing the use of hard drugs, @NickKristof writes. It is relying less on the criminal justice toolbox to deal with drug abuse and more on the public health toolbox. https://t.co/3YvnxDaxAM
— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) August 23, 2019
....having fun. I was smiling as I looked up and around. The MANY reporters with me were smiling also. They knew the TRUTH...And yet when I saw the reporting, CNN, MSNBC and other Fake News outlets covered it as serious news & me thinking of myself as the Messiah. No more trust!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 24, 2019
In March, social media blew up with photos of a group of partying students from Newport Beach and Costa Mesa giving the Sieg Heil salute to a bunch of red plastic cups arranged into a swastika. School officials immediately condemned the images, notifying parents across the district what had happened and what they planned to do.It was an "off campus" event. Seems like the First Amendment protects their speech, although that's no defense for it.
The same month, school officials in Garden Grove were alerted to a group of Pacifica High School students raising the Nazi salute while singing a Nazi marching song at an off-campus athletic event.
Pacifica High administrators kept their situation quiet — which worked until this week, when the months-old recorded Snapchat video exploded online after it was sent to the Daily Beast.
Since Monday, Garden Grove Unified School District officials have learned of other videos and multiple allegations of students engaged in hate speech. The district has opened an investigation.
The students’ motivation and identities are unclear. But the images in Newport and Garden Grove reflect both a rise in such incidents nationwide and a conflict more specific to Orange County: tension between a rapidly diversifying populace and racist elements deeply seated in its history.
In September, at a football game in predominantly white Aliso Viejo, the visitors from a predominantly Latino high school in Santa Ana were met with signs of “Build the Wall” and “We love White,” according to the Santa Ana principal.
And white supremacist groups like the Rise Above Movement are giving a new voice to the bigotry of the skinheads and peckerwood gangs that long haunted Huntington Beach, Anaheim and working-class parts of the county. The group attacked counter-protesters and journalists at a rally in support of President Trump at Bolsa Chica State Beach in 2017.
The eight-second video from Garden Grove shows about a dozen Pacifica High school boys standing in what appears to be a banquet room giving the stiff-armed salute used in Nazi Germany, as the song “Erika,” written by German composer Herms Niel during Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power, plays in the background. At least one of the boys appears to sing the lyrics. One boy gets up and leaves, and another quickly drops his arm and sits down.
The video, taken before the start of an athletics banquet in November 2018, was originally shared among a small group of students on Snapchat. High school administrators learned of the video four months later and addressed the situation internally with the students appearing in the video and their families, Garden Grove Unified spokeswoman Abby Broyles said. School district officials did not know about the video until it surfaced Monday.
The students involved were disciplined, but officials declined to discuss the consequences they faced...
Many African Americans in South Carolina support reparations.— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) August 18, 2019
But others say that what they want just as much is for the country to grasp the painful history they live with every day. https://t.co/mYWRRcLeCt
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Five years before the first shots of the Civil War rang out from the harbor here in 1861, alderman Thomas Ryan and a business partner opened Ryan’s Mart at No. 6 Chalmers St.Keep reading.
Their merchandise was slaves: African men, women and children who were prodded, picked over and auctioned off to the highest bidders.
The finest adult males could fetch up to $1,600 apiece —$49,000 in today’s dollars. The most able-bodied women could sell for $1,400.
Today, the former showroom in Charleston’s historic quarter, hidden on a narrow lane of row houses blazing with pink blossoms and palmetto trees, serves as the home of the Old Slave Mart Museum.
The museum and other historic sites in the American South lay bare a shameful chapter in the nation’s past, one that’s getting new attention in the debate over whether the government should pay financial reparations to an estimated 40 million descendants of slaves.
Many African Americans in this part of South Carolina support reparations. But they say what they want just as much is for the country to grasp the painful history they live with every day.
Their ancestors often were separated from their children on the auction block. Women were raped by their white owners. Slaves were beaten for waking up too late, not working hard enough or trying to escape. They were stripped of their African names and given the last names of their masters.
The hardship and humiliation didn’t end when the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865. Black Americans continue to endure racist violence, entrenched poverty and inequities in areas such as education, employment and the criminal justice system.
“What the reparations debate is about is not so much people wanting to get money,” said Daniel Littlefield, a historian from Columbia, S.C. “Black people feel they deserve some acknowledgment of ongoing wrong.”
The reparations debate comes at an especially tense time. Since 2016, there’s been a nationwide rise in racially motivated hate crimes. Videos of police killings of African Americans have become all too common. President Trump’s attacks aimed at black leaders and immigrants have kept people on edge...
“Is this some sort of joke?” a former Danish prime minister asked. It was not. President Trump canceled his meeting with the prime minister of Denmark because she was not interested in selling Greenland.https://t.co/EV6R1sNnC4— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 21, 2019
Greenland in 10 years. pic.twitter.com/akqWowauyu
— jon gabriel (@exjon) August 15, 2019
I promise not to do this to Greenland! pic.twitter.com/03DdyVU6HA
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 20, 2019
— jon gabriel (@exjon) August 20, 2019
The liberals get what they want, which is a humorless void where nothing happens, no one dares do anything or laugh about anything or behave in any way that doesn't suit their rigid way of leading a life. No thanks. So what's happening around the world? Populism is rising because people are fed up with the PC culture. They're fed up with snowflakery, they're fed up with people being offended by everything and they're gravitating towards forceful personalities who go: "This is all nonsense!"
Which, by the way, it is in most cases. So why are we surprised? I'm not surprised. It doesn't mean to say I agree with all of it, but it means I can understand it, and I understand why the liberals, my side, if you like, are getting it so horribly wrong. They just wanna tell people, not just how to lead their lives, but if you don't lead it the way I tell you to it's a kind of version of fascism. If you don't lead the life the way I'm telling you to then I'm going to ruin your life. I'm gonna scream abuse at you. I'm gonna get you fired from your job. I'm gonna get you hounded by your family and friends. I'm gonna make you the most disgusting human being in the world.
It's garbage time, all the time! MLB is seeing a historic spike in position players getting work on the mound. https://t.co/QYG7nQWT4A pic.twitter.com/mMIitzFZ5G
— USA TODAY Sports (@usatodaysports) August 21, 2019
Today In 1997: Wade Boggs uses his knuckleball to pitch a scoreless inning in a #Yankees 12-4 loss to the #Angels at Anaheim Stadium! #OTD #MLB #History pic.twitter.com/XndILRH90m
— Baseball by BSmile (@BSmile) August 20, 2019
Trump Accuses Jewish Democrats of ‘Great Disloyalty’ via @juliehdavis https://t.co/ugcTHz0gBa— Annie Karni (@anniekarni) August 21, 2019
I find it stunning that the left taking over the Democratic can libel the Jewish state, slander Israel's Jewish supporters in the US, use BDS to push American Jews out of public spaces and then attack @realDonaldTrump for calling them out.../— Caroline Glick (@CarolineGlick) August 21, 2019
We are watching the Corbynization of the Dem party. Rather than protest and take the party back, American Jews are laying down and letting it happen and then deliberately misinterpreting Trump's words to accuse him of the very Jew hatred they refuse to fight on the left.../— Caroline Glick (@CarolineGlick) August 21, 2019
Trump wasn't calling American Jews disloyal to America but to their interests as Jews. And he's right. American Jews have the right to the same freedoms as everyone else. BDS, that Tlaib, Omar, AOC, etc., are promoting aims to take those rights away.../— Caroline Glick (@CarolineGlick) August 21, 2019
Trump speaks uncarefully but you have to really want to misunderstand him to believe he was calling Democratic Jews disloyal. Which brings us back to the Jewish Dems who don't want to see BDS, Tlaib, Omar, JVP, IfNotNow, etc. for what they are.../— Caroline Glick (@CarolineGlick) August 21, 2019
Also at Memeorandum.By all means, stay in the Democrat party, but for heaven's sake, stop being doormats. Stop accepting the libels. Stand up for yourselves. BDS isn't about Israel. It's about you. Fight back.— Caroline Glick (@CarolineGlick) August 21, 2019
Bernie Sanders' famed $27 donors are split in 2020's sprawling Democratic field https://t.co/lZmUtzzYTR
— Seema (@LATSeema) August 21, 2019
Small-dollar donors made Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid one of the most successful insurgent campaigns in Democratic Party history, allowing him to be competitive with establishment favorite Hillary Clinton."Washed up."
But in the 2020 race, nearly 1.7 million, or more than 80%, of the donors who fueled his earlier run have stayed on the sidelines, according to a Times analysis of campaign finance disclosures through June 30.
The 2016 donors who are contributing this election cycle have given more than $32 million to the Democratic field. More than $16.2 million of that went to Sanders, making up about 45% of the money he has raised. But nearly as much went to his rivals, a sign of how split Democrats are as they try to figure out the best candidate to take on President Trump.
“Bernie’s washed up. I just think he’s too old,” Audrey Tieger, 68, said of the 77-year-old Sanders...
No universal healthcare.— NYT Magazine (@NYTmag) August 14, 2019
Highest rates of mass incarceration.
The brutality of capitalism.
An epidemic of sugar in our diets.
No aspect of modern American life has been untouched by slavery. These essays in our #1619project explain how https://t.co/Lq2z4ZKgqg (thread)
The New York Times surrenders to the left on race. https://t.co/YovTlDKyUq pic.twitter.com/hmb1FOZq6Y— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) August 20, 2019
This [project] turns historical scholarship into propaganda for a left-wing political movement.Also very good is Rich Lowry, at the New York Post, "The left's vile smear of America's founding."
Saying so doesn't at all imply that journalists should refrain from drawing on the work of historians. But it does mean that when they do draw on that work, they should do so with caution and a fair amount of historiographical sophistication, realizing that no single narrative of the past is the indisputably right one, and that new interpretations that break sharply from a past consensus often go too far. That's especially true when the new claims advance a radical political agenda.
And the 1619 Project is all about advancing a radical political agenda. The message it aims to convey is clear: The United States is and always has been, from its very origin, a racist country infected by a white supremacist ideology that has birthed and nurtured institutions and systems — from Congress to capitalism — that systematically disadvantage black Americans. Political actors of the present have a simple choice: They can either embrace (invariably left-liberal or socialist) policies that will begin the process of dismantling these pervasive forms of structural injustice — or they can oppose doing so and ensure that the injustices continue, with toxic racism remaining where it has been for the past four centuries, at the very center of American life. Those are the choices.
You're either part of the solution or part of the problem.
That line is a paraphrase of Eldridge Cleaver, an early leader of the Black Panthers, the revolutionary black nationalist organization founded in 1966, and it's fitting to refer to him here, since the publication of the 1619 Project represents the definitive triumph of left-wing activism over journalistic skepticism, circumspection, and restraint at The New York Times — and not just at the NYTM, since the newspaper has promised to publish more contributions to the 1619 Project in the coming days and weeks. As if the content of last Sunday's paper wasn't evidence enough of this development, the leaked transcript of a recent town-hall meeting at the Times gives us an added glimpse of how reporters and editors now think and talk about race. Here is a representative comment addressed to executive editor Dean Baquet:
Staffer: I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it's less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we're thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country. And I think particularly as we are launching a 1619 Project, I feel like that's going to open us up to even more criticism from people who are like, "OK, well you're saying this, and you're producing this big project about this. But are you guys actually considering this in your daily reporting?" [Slate]Racism is in everything. White supremacy is the foundation of all of the systems in the country. Those are fairly extreme, unmodulated statements. Did Baquet respond by pointing out that, while racism exists and needs to receive coverage in the paper, there are many other ways to talk about America and its history — by placing it in international context, by highlighting aspects of the American past that go beyond race, by raising issues of class and ethnicity and gender, by engaging with contrary intellectual, cultural, and economic currents, social trends, and ways of understanding?
The left’s vile smear of America’s founding https://t.co/6ipY4rFGV6 pic.twitter.com/P2ebM6FwGm— NY Post Opinion (@NYPostOpinion) August 20, 2019
That's one of the more obviously ahistorical claims in this piece, if you know anything at all about the history of British or American abolitionism or the origins of the American revolution. https://t.co/HariFOnJEk https://t.co/4q5sdTrZf1— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) August 19, 2019
I feel blessed 💕 pic.twitter.com/zO1LokyJe7— Kendra Sunderland (@KSLibraryGirl) August 20, 2019
Strong column by @cwarzel. Begs the question: would things improve if all journalists got off Twitter? https://t.co/qEptXGel4X— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) August 11, 2019
Imagine the dystopia that is a country divided in a hashtag battle accusing a former president and the current president of staging the suicide of a pedophile emperor to cover up their child molestation.#TrumpBodyCount#ClintonBodyCount— Cameron Kasky (@cameron_kasky) August 10, 2019
This creates big incentives to game trending. Either:— Renee DiResta (@noUpside) August 10, 2019
1) press will cover it & amplify
2) press will debunk & still amplify, while creating controversy
3) press will very occasionally ignore,then conspiracy press will cover to ask why 🤔
if you make it trend, you make it true.
Mr. Epstein’s apparent suicide is, in many ways, the post-truth nightmare scenario. The sordid story contains almost all the hallmarks of stereotypical conspiratorial fodder: child sex-trafficking, powerful global political leaders, shadowy private jet flights, billionaires whose wealth cannot be explained. As a tale of corruption, it is so deeply intertwined with our current cultural and political rot that it feels, at times, almost too on-the-nose. The Epstein saga provides ammunition for everyone, leading one researcher to refer to Saturday’s news as the “Disinformation World Cup.”
At the heart of Saturday’s fiasco is Twitter, which has come to largely program the political conversation and much of the press. Twitter is magnetic during massive breaking stories; news junkies flock to it for up-to-the-second information. But early on, there’s often a vast discrepancy between the attention that is directed at the platform and the available information about the developing story. That gap is filled by speculation and, via its worst users, rumor-mongering and conspiracy theories.
On Saturday, Twitter’s trending algorithms hoovered up the worst of this detritus, curating, ranking and then placing it in the trending module on the right side of its website. Despite being a highly arbitrary and mostly “worthless metric,” trending topics on Twitter are often interpreted as a vague signal of the importance of a given subject.
There’s a decent chance that President Trump was using Twitter’s trending module when he retweeted a conspiratorial tweet tying the Clintons to Epstein’s death. At the time of Mr. Trump’s retweet, “Clintons” was the third trending topic in the United States. The specific tweet amplified by the president to his more than 60 million followers was prominently featured in the “Clintons” trending topic. And as Ashley Feinberg at Slate pointed out in June, the president appears to have a history of using trending to find and interact with tweets.
On Saturday afternoon, computational propaganda researcher Renée DiResta noted that the media’s close relationship with Twitter creates an incentive for propagandists and partisans to artificially inflate given hashtags. Almost as soon as #ClintonBodyCount began trending on Saturday, journalists took note and began lamenting the spread of this conspiracy theory — effectively turning it into a news story, and further amplifying the trend. “Any wayward tweet … can be elevated to an opinion worth paying attention to,” Ms. DiResta wrote. “If you make it trend, you make it true.”
That our public conversation has been uploaded onto tech platforms governed by opaque algorithms adds even more fodder for the conspiratorial minded. Anti-Trump Twitter pundits with hundreds of thousands of followers blamed “Russian bots” for the Clinton trending topic. On the far-right, pro-Trump sites like the Gateway Pundit (with a long track record of amplifying conspiracy theories) suggested that Twitter was suppressing and censoring the Clinton hashtags.
Where does this leave us? Nowhere good.
Police said they were stunned by the cycle of events, which began at an apartment building in Garden Grove and then spread to businesses. https://t.co/2FuKcTET0g— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) August 8, 2019
How does one commit suicide while on suicide watch...or was it not suicide? https://t.co/7PX3iHG9Ri
— ColorMeRed 🇺🇸 📌 (@ColorMeRed) August 10, 2019
That is difficult to believe. Epstein already made one suicide attempt and everyone knows that pedos are not very popular with the prison population. How many inmates could implicate several Presidents as well as a Prince of England not to mention many other high powered names?
— ColorMeRed 🇺🇸 📌 (@ColorMeRed) August 10, 2019
My God, they’re already covering it up. Twitter has completely replaced the hashtag #ClintonBodyCount with #TrumpBodyCount on the trending newsfeed even though the numbers were higher.
— Mindy Robinson 🇺🇸 (@iheartmindy) August 10, 2019
The media bias is UNREAL at this point. pic.twitter.com/38QBO7HBIB
People close to Epstein fear he was murdered...as Epstein told authorities someone tried to kill him in a previous incident weeks earlier. He was described as being in good spirits in recent days... https://t.co/J9QNSo1N2v
— Carol Leonnig (@CarolLeonnig) August 10, 2019
Sweden views itself as a moral and progressive superpower, but an anti-immigration backlash has allowed right-wing populism to take hold. Aiding the rise in far-right, national sentiment: a global disinformation machine. https://t.co/YD1jn8oU3S
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 10, 2019
it took the conspiracy people no time to go overdrive on peddling that the clintons killed epstein pic.twitter.com/MhJKPFoJQm
— Ali Breland (@alibreland) August 10, 2019
“It’s quite a transition from being invisible to being visible in a lethal way. It’s something new to my community. We are used to the basic darkness of racism, not this.” https://t.co/Dap8EGaIWe— Patricia Mazzei (@PatriciaMazzei) August 7, 2019
For Latinos, the El Paso slaughter & its bigoted motive have marked a devastating new low in the Trump era. Stay tuned for coverage of the candidates later today. /4 https://t.co/wFv1f4IXO6— Michael Finnegan (@finneganLAT) August 5, 2019
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — The massacre at an El Paso Walmart store on Saturday hasn’t diminished Silvia Ivania’s desire to move to the United States — even if the killer of 22 people was apparently motivated by hatred of Latino immigrants.
“That’s something that can happen anywhere,” said Ivania, 37, a citizen of Honduras, speaking at the Good Samaritan migrant shelter in this border city across the Rio Grande from El Paso. “The violence in Honduras is a lot worse than in the United States.”
She and several other migrants interviewed Tuesday at the shelter — temporary home to about 100, mostly Central Americans, but including U.S.-bound Cubans, Africans and others — agreed that the mass killing would not dissuade them.
“If anything, I want to go to the United States even more than before,” said Danieska Del Toro, 34, from Havana. “They arrested the guy, right? Maybe he was crazy. In Cuba we have violence too, even if the regime says there is none.”
Along the nearby Rio Grande, which separates the U.S. and Mexico, scattered groups of migrants could be seen Tuesday scampering across the river — which, at the moment, has been reduced to a few scattered puddles amid a narrow ribbon of green, and easy to traverse on foot. Its shallow depths seem to mock signs warning people of the danger of drowning.
At midday, amid 100-degree-plus temperatures, about 20 people — some holding their children’s hands — surrendered to U.S. Border Patrol vans waiting on the other side. As is usually the case, the migrants didn’t attempt to evade U.S. immigration authorities, but sought them out.
Mexican National Guard troops posted on the south side said they urged border crossers not to proceed, but didn’t prevent their passage.
“That’s their decision; we just tell them of the risks,” said one Mexican National Guard officer, who declined to be named because she wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.
Sad to see so many San Antonians as 2019 maximum donors to Donald Trump — the owner of @BillMillerBarBQ, owner of the @HistoricPearl, realtor Phyllis Browning, etc.
— Joaquin Castro (@Castro4Congress) August 6, 2019
Their contributions are fueling a campaign of hate that labels Hispanic immigrants as ‘invaders.’ pic.twitter.com/YT85IBF19u
MSNBC's Willie Geist to Joaquin Castro after he doxxed @realDonaldTrump supporters:
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 7, 2019
"These people are undoubtedly are already being harassed ... they will be because you put their names in public."
Castro later responds: "I didn't create the graphic."
Give me a break Castro. pic.twitter.com/XgBw8fkevA
Julie Kelly today at American Greatness with What’s Really Behind the ‘White Supremacy’ Terrorism Scare https://t.co/AAGEOGmfii pic.twitter.com/73L20945u9
— American Greatness (@theamgreatness) August 6, 2019
The anti-Trump forces, now stripped of their Russian collusion ammunition, have invented another imaginary threat they hope to weaponize against the president: The public menace posed by “white supremacist” terrorism.
Much like the collusion conspiracy theory—which relied on random incidents, fictional villains, unconvincing evidence, and the Bad Orange Man in the White House—there is little substance to this purported danger.
Unironically, the whole ruse is being pushed by the same people who foisted the Russian collusion hoax on the American people for three years in the hopes of prompting President Trump’s impeachment and removal. The political agenda behind this manufactured white supremacy crisis is equally sinister because its specific purpose is to influence and undermine the 2020 elections.
The “white supremacy” canard is intended to further demonize Trump; falsely defame his supporters as white supremacists; and pressure nervous voters into defeating Trump and Republican candidates next year. The strategy is as cynical as it is pernicious...
I talked to the founder and former admin of 8chan this morning. He told me he wants the site to be shut down, after being involved in 3 mass shootings this year. https://t.co/tewgBEqYeF
— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) August 4, 2019
Fredrick Brennan was getting ready for church at his home in the Philippines when the news of a mass shooting in El Paso arrived. His response was immediate and instinctive.
“Whenever I hear about a mass shooting, I say, ‘All right, we have to research if there’s an 8chan connection,’” he said.
Mr. Brennan started the online message board 8chan in 2013, as a spinoff of 4chan, the better-known message board. In its early years, the site was known as an unmoderated free-for-all site populated by anonymous posters, where shocking and offensive humor reigned.
Now, 8chan is known as something else: a megaphone for mass shooters, and a recruiting platform for violent white nationalists. And Mr. Brennan, who stopped working with the site’s current owner last year, is calling for it to be taken offline before it leads to further violence.
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“Shut the site down,” Mr. Brennan said in an interview on Sunday. “It’s not doing the world any good. It’s a complete negative to everybody except the users that are there. And you know what? It’s a negative to them, too. They just don’t realize it.”
So far this year, three mass shootings — El Paso, the mosque killings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the synagogue shooting in Poway, Calif. — have been announced in advance on 8chan, often accompanied by racist writings that seem engineered to go viral on the internet.
Moments before the El Paso shooting on Saturday, a four-page message whose author identified himself as the suspected shooter appeared on 8chan’s politics board, known as /pol/. The person who posted the message encouraged his 8chan “brothers” to spread its contents far and wide.
Given its repeated involvement in mass shootings, 8chan has become a focal point for those seeking to disrupt the pathways of online extremism.
“8chan is almost like a bulletin board where the worst offenders go to share their terrible ideas,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League. “It’s become a sounding board where people share ideas, and where these kinds of ideologies are amplified and expanded on, and ultimately, people are radicalized as a result.”
8chan has been run out of the Philippines by Jim Watkins, a United States Army veteran, since 2015, when Mr. Brennan gave up control of the site.
The site remains nearly completely unmoderated, and its commitment to keeping up even the most violent speech has made it a venue for extremists to test out ideas, share violent literature and cheer on the perpetrators of mass killings. Users on 8chan frequently lionize mass shooters using jokey internet vernacular, referring to their body counts as “high scores” and creating memes praising the killers.
Mr. Brennan, who has a condition known as brittle-bone disease and uses a wheelchair, has tried to distance himself from 8chan and its current owners. In a March interview with The Wall Street Journal, he expressed his regrets over his role in the site’s creation, and warned that the violent culture that had taken root on 8chan’s boards could lead to more mass shootings.
After the El Paso shooting, he seemed resigned to the fact that it had.
“Another 8chan shooting?” he tweeted on Saturday. “Am I ever going to be able to move on with my life?”
Mr. Watkins, who runs 8chan along with his son, Ronald, has remained defiant in the face of criticism, and has resisted calls to moderate or shut down the site. On Sunday, a banner at the top of 8chan’s home page read, “Welcome to 8chan, the Darkest Reaches of the Internet.”
“I’ve tried to understand so many times why he keeps it going, and I just don’t get it,” Mr. Brennan said. “After Christchurch, after the Tree of Life shooting, and now after this shooting, they think this is all really funny.”
Mr. Watkins did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
In the early days of 8chan, Mr. Brennan defended the right of 8chan users to post anonymously, without censorship. And he dismissed incidents of harassment or violence by users of the site as the price of being an open forum...
Never let a crisis go to WASTE --> Neera Tanden TROUNCED for dancing on El Paso/Dayton graves to campaign for Dems https://t.co/DYa5JklEoB
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) August 4, 2019
Never let a crisis go to waste, eh Neera? Instead of an intelligent conversation about what’s driving these shootings, who’s responsible, and how to stop them, why not attack your ideological opponents to score points?
— Tryx™️🌪 (@Tryxt3rocks) August 4, 2019
You don’t care about lives, you only care about power.
‘Media and politicians DON’T get it’: Brian Cates’ thread on the gunman’s alleged ‘manifesto’ is a must read https://t.co/rSDkI6aykT— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) August 4, 2019
We’re now facing something new.— Brian Cates (@drawandstrike) August 4, 2019
Before, a person intensely motivated by politics would write a manifesto to explain their reasons for resorting to violence.
Shitposting trolls on the chans aren’t trying to affect real political change.
The manifesto is PART of the trolling.
The **Antifa** guy from three weeks ago, now THAT was an old style attempt at a mass murder.— Brian Cates (@drawandstrike) August 4, 2019
He left behind a rambling, disjointed manifesto enumerating political reasons for his attack on the ICE facility. https://t.co/ZDA16zeYhT
But something new has been added into the mix in the last year and we have to recognize it:— Brian Cates (@drawandstrike) August 4, 2019
Mass shootings done for **fun** as the ultimate troll where these shitposters write confusing manifestos and then sit back & watch the fun as both sides claim he belongs to the other.
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