Perhaps six weeks before, I had watched a group of white supremacists rush a Jewish lawmaker, back him up against a pillar, spit on him, scream "JEW" in his face, and punch an aide before I tracked them to Stormfront where they threatened to return with weapons.
My partner, another journalist, took the video in this story (not sure why it kept getting credited to San Diego CityBeat, as the only people who got footage was us and the Southwestern Sun.)
I was gravely concerned by the rhetoric and violence I had witnessed, and so sent this footage to every contact I had at every news network and begged them to air it and show the sort of violence taking shape in the San Diego Tea Party and likely elsewhere. They threatened us too
Meanwhile I monitored Stormfront, where I watched exultant people post images and their own accountings of the night with an increasing sense of urgency. My colleagues wrote back saying it was interesting but probably just a one-off and "something to watch"
It didn't stop them from trotting out my partner's footage (without attribution, naturally) after the Gabby Giffords mass shooting, when news organizations rent their figurative garments and asked, Was this anti-Semitic violence??? and Could anyone have prevented this???
The answer to both of those questions was always YES. I've worked in the intervening years to try to get people to understand that the rhetoric directly informed the violence which directly informed the rhetoric etc... but I don't think it was clear -- until this week.
Oh and "someone" identified and narced out all the shitstains bragging about it because of course they are all in that video and "someone" deeply enjoyed it when they all got arrested later lol. Fuck Nazis.
I remember the day of that mass shooting. I was in such despair. Had people seen what I had seen I think there would have been a lot more concern. It was a really, really ugly scene that night, hard to communicate even with that video.
Just to make it really, really clear: I'm not faulting anyone for what happened that day ten years ago. It was a hideous tragedy. But better coverage and understanding of the relationships between weaponized rhetoric and violence could have added extra layers of security.
Well I mean I'm not faulting anyone except for the mass shooter and the shitbags who encouraged and pushed weaponized rhetoric, who are all now backing away from it hard and fast now that their plausible deniability suddenly dried up this week. This is entirely on them.
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Were it not for the excellent people quietly running interference with what I have come to call "proactive measures" -- brigading and mass reporting groups fomenting violence, exposing bad actors, causing or widening rifts -- this would have been way worse slate.com/news-and-polit…
These were mostly just volunteers, people who saw the danger and are deeply concerned for our future. They infiltrated violent groups both online and in person, worked their way into trusted positions, and then exposed them all. They worked together to destroy Nazi solidarity.
They fucked them up but good. And that's something everybody can do if you want to fight radicalized, gibbering hatemongers who all feed off one another and off attention from the public at large. Proactive measures are where it's at. This is what war looks like now.
The militias who pissed on the floor of and smeared shit on the walls of the U.S. Capitol are planning to return to do worse on January 19-20. They're talking about it on all the usual sites. There you go, @FBI
A lot of them also think that the woman who was killed was a false flag because ???????????
Why the fuck would @nbcsandiego interview this disinformation purveyor? He's the one who started the "yellow vests" in La Mesa. He's an open eugenicist who pushes corrosive disinformation every chance he gets. What is wrong with you?
This man tried to doxx me because he didn't like what I had to say. He posted what he thought were personal details of my life, up to and including my address. He is no friend to journalism nor free speech. That his intel is garbage is irrelevant; the intent was there.
Yep. They've been hiding and nurturing their grievances in plain sight, and recruiting away with open signaling (like👌) as they gaslight the public (like arguing "it's the circle game" or "the number 3") and abetted by media credulity, normalization, and open denial.
Easy to call people like me crazy when we're talking about eugenics and seemingly meaningless strings of numbers (1488 etc.) because that is what the signaling and gaslighting is intended to do -- smear those raising alarm bells as biased or batshit. It's an old, old tactic.
It's been complicated by the enormous number of grifters who have already styled themselves experts on just this, who make sweeping pronouncements and claim insider knowledge where none exists, which is one of the reasons I work hard to cite all my sources and own my mistakes