Mass Shooter

see gun control, nra

announced in chatroom --> live video?

see new zealand

capt bak 819

posts weekly list paywall?

11 21 mass shooter update mostly so but 3 of 15 CA?!

there  were 15 separate mass shooting incidents in the US last week, where thirteen people were killed and 60 were injured. I document all mass shootings every Sunday, along with a recap of all the week's biggest events, so be sure to check it out: https://shero.substack.com/p/what-happene...

SHERO is on Substack – the place for independent writing

9 in one weekend?!

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/mass-shootings-in-us/

In Texas, authorities have identified the gunman who opened fire in the middle of a Sunday church service in White Settlement, Texas, outside Fort Worth. Authorities say Keith Thomas Kinnunen had a long criminal history that included arrests for assault, battery and theft.He was killed by armed parishioners, after fatally shooting two worshipers: 64-year-old Anton Wallace and 67-year-old Richard White. We’ll have more on the attacks at the West Freeway Church of Christ and at the rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York, after headlines.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/4chan/alleged-german-synagogue-shooter-referenced-chans-livestream-was-shared-4chan-nearly-300

sers on the anonymous message board site 4chan shared links to a livestream of a mass shooting at a German synagogue nearly 300 times after the shooter reportedly made references to the chans in his video and manifesto, according to a review by Media Matters.

On October 9, a gunman killed two people and wounded two others outside a synagogue in Halle, Germany. The alleged shooter uploaded video of the attack to the livestream platform Twitch, from where it was shared by multiple channels on the Telegram messaging app. White nationalists on Telegram applauded the shooting and video, during which the alleged shooter complained about feminism and declining birth rates and claimed, “The root of all these problems is the Jew.” (One white nationalist channel even urged its followers to target the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League after he condemned the shooting.)

During the livestream, the alleged shooter also called himself “Anon,” seemingly a reference to a term used by the anonymous users of 4chan and 8chan to describe themselves. According to The New York Times, the reported manifesto was written in English “to draw the attention of an audience wider than just other extremists in Germany,” and it also referenced a specific 8chan employee.

A Media Matters search of 4chan found nearly 300 links shared to variations of the livestream, including about a dozen links to a livestream on Twitch and the alleged shooter’s Twitch account, nearly 50 links to the livestream uploaded to video sharing website LiveLeak, more than 170 links to hosting service BitChute, a link to harassment message board site Kiwi Farms, and more than 60 links to an upload of the alleged shooter’s video on a site that describes itself as “the world's leading censorship-free gore site.”

Alongside sharing versions of the livestream countless times, some users on 4chan “/pol/”’s message board praised the alleged shooter, calling him a “fucking legend” and a “German crusader” whose shooting was “hot as fuck” and proof that “we are making progress” and “have the power to kill [in real life].” Some users were more critical because of what they considered to be a “very poor score” compared to the death toll of other recent white supremacist mass shootings, although some 4chan users still praised the alleged shooter for having his “heart … in the right place,” “tying the high score,” and “making me laugh.”

Some users noted that the alleged shooter mentioned “Anon,” calling him “one of us”and a “4channer no doubt.” Another user on “/pol/” asked, “Who of you guys went to the synagogue in Halle today?”

This is not the first mass shooting linked to the chans. Multiple white supremacist mass shooters have reportedly posted their manifestos on 8chan this year, causing the site to be knocked offline. And users on 4chan have continued to call for violence against minority groups.

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vehicles charlottesville, cda and now ICE jewish

Fox Business host Lou Dobbs: Man who plowed truck into ICE protesters was ‘well within his rights’

Igor Derysh / Salon

isil inspire self-radicalized uzbek

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_New_York_City_truck_attack

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https://www.cnn.com**/2018/04**/24/americas/toronto-van-investigation/index.html

no lnx pix vid

toronto (CNN)Toronto police have their suspect -- but they're still looking for a motive.

Alek Minassian, the man accused of plowing into pedestrians with a rented van on Monday, was charged Tuesday with 10 counts of first-degree murder.

The 25-year-old is also charged with 13 counts of attempted murder. Authorities said another count of attempted murder likely will be added.

Investigators are still trying to determine the motive behind the attack, which left 10 people dead and 14 hurt. One aspect they will look at is his social media posts and what a man who killed six people with a vehicle in 2014 meant to Minassian.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/revealed-leaked-memo-shows-the-republican-partys-vile-strategy-to-respond-to-mass-shootings-with-lies/

no lnx

Revealed: Leaked memo shows the Republican Party’s vile strategy to respond to mass shootings with lies

Written by Walter Einenkel / Daily Kos August 16, 2019

In the wake of the most recent mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, congressional Republicans have been circulating a “memo,” on how to discuss gun violence. The Tampa Bay Times obtained this memo and report that while not shocking to most people here, the depth of cynicism and craven hypocrisy on the part of Republicans knows no bottom. According to the Times, the memo discusses the general rhetorical tricks of handling questions about closing existing gun law loopholes instead of creating more robust gun laws. But it also discusses how to very specifically move the conversations away from white supremacy and the role that right-wing propaganda seems to be playing in most domestic terrorist scenarios like the recent El Paso shootings, where the gunman told authorities that he wanted to kill Mexicans.

If asked, the memo suggests that the first thing to do is to “steer the conversation away from white nationalism to an argument that implies both sides are to blame.” Subsequently, Republicans are directed to point out, falsely, that many of the mass shootings in recent years were carried out by “left-leaning” individuals. They specifically point to “El Paso shooter, the recent Colorado shooters, the Congressional baseball shooter, Congresswoman Giffords’ shooter and Antifa.” The El Paso mention is a classic right-wing typo, they meant the Dayton shooting—the right wing in our country does have a level of incompetence that one might call its brand.

Did you know that all of those shooters were “left leaning?” I bet you didn’t. Cause they weren’t. The man that shot Arizona’s Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and a dozen other people January of 2011, while registered as a Democrat, showed motives all over the map, referencing everyone from Hillary Clinton to Adolf Hitler, and according to people around him, a general obsession with Giffords herself. The Colorado shooters seem to have been motivated, more than anything, by anger overbullying and a perverse sense of revenge.

The most recent Dayton, Ohio, shooting has been the big news story for the right wing of this country because Donald Trump tweeted and told reporters that the shooter was a “fan” of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

CBS News

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@CBSNews

President Trump on Dayton shooter: "He was a fan of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, nothing to do with Trump. Nobody ever mentions that." https://cbsn.ws/2Ky1ZZO

Embedded video

However, while the Dayton shooter may have had left “leanings,” politically, he also had a very specific history of violent fantasy not at all connected to one political ideology or another. Either way, the fact remains that domestic white nationalist terrorism is still the biggest problem when it comes to mass shooting gun violence in our country. As FBI Director Christopher McKay told a Senate Judiciary Committee last month, the majority of 2019’s domestic terrorist arrests were “motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.” The need for the Republican Party to sit on their hands to protect their gun money, dovetails nicely with their need to appeal almost exclusively to white nationalists and the people who hate being called white nationalists, but espouse most of the same positions and beliefs of white nationalists.

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no lnx

AN

Trump and right-wing media are peddling an apocalyptic ideology of a civilizational conflict

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 6, 2019

It has been seventeen years since John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published their book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. One of the central themes of the book was to cite demographic data about the so-called “browning of America” and note that it was the left that was positioned to benefit from the fact that non-Hispanic whites would eventually become a minority in this country.

In the years since the book was published, a lot of liberals (including one of the authors) came to question the premise that “demography is destiny.” While those on the right have publicly panned the book’s analysis, there is a way in which it has become the foundation of what we are witnessing from Donald Trump and his enablers.

Two years ago, I wrote about the connection between the president and white supremacists, including this quote fromRichard Spencer.

“Trump, on a gut level, kind of senses that this is about demographics, ultimately. We’re moving into a new America.” He said, “I don’t think Trump is a white nationalist,” but he did believe that Trump reflected “an unconscious vision that white people have – that their grandchildren might be a hated minority in their own country. I think that scares us. They probably aren’t able to articulate it. I think it’s there. I think that, to a great degree, explains the Trump phenomenon.”

More than a year before Trump was elected, Spencer—a spokesperson for white supremacists—explained that the “Trump phenomenon” was based on the fear white people have about the changing demographics in this country.

As Courtney Hable explains, the El Paso gunman was inspired by “the white supremacist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory that white people are being systematically ‘replaced’ by people of color through mass immigration.” She goes on to document how Fox News has been pushing that narrative relentlessly.

The subtle shift in how this narrative is being presented is that personalities like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have re-framed the demographic changes away from being the inevitable destiny of this country so that they can blame it on immigration. The El Paso gunman caught on and described immigrants as “invaders” flooding into the United States.

Thomas Kaplan documents how that is exactly the language being employed by the Trump campaign on social media.

President Trump’s re-election campaign has harnessed Facebook advertising to push the idea of an “invasion” at the southern border, amplifying the fear-inducing language about immigrants that he has also voiced at campaign rallies and on Twitter.

Since January, Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign has posted more than 2,000 ads on Facebook that include the word “invasion” — part of a barrage of advertising focused on immigration, a dominant theme of his re-election messaging.

I would not normally read an article titled, “White Terrorism Shows ‘Stunning’ Parallels to Islamic State’s Rise” because it sounds exploitative. But Max Fisher, who has a reputation as a thoughtful and serious journalist—especially on matters related to terrorism and propaganda—is the author. Here is what he wrote.

Many scholars of terrorism see worrying similarities between the rise of the Islamic State and that of white nationalist terrorism, seen most recently in the carnage in El Paso, Tex.

“The parallels are stunning,” said Will McCants, a prominent expert in the field.

And they are growing more notable with each new attack.

Experts say that the similarities are far from a coincidence. White nationalist terrorism is following a progression eerily similar to that of jihadism under the leadership of the Islamic State, in ways that do much to explain why the attacks have suddenly grown so frequent and deadly.

In both, there is the apocalyptic ideology that predicts — and promises to hasten — a civilizational conflict that will consume the world. There is theatrical, indiscriminate violence that will supposedly bring about this final battle, but often does little more than grant the killer a brief flash of empowerment and win attention for the cause.

There are self-starter recruits who, gathering in social media’s dark corners, drive their own radicalization. And for these recruits, the official ideology may serve simply as an outlet for existing tendencies toward hatred and violence…

The feedback loop of radicalization and violence, once triggered, can take on a terrible momentum all its own, with each attack boosting the online radicalization and doomsday ideology that, in turn, drive more attacks.

The apocalyptic ideology of a civilizational conflict is being peddled by the president of the United States and his enablers in right-wing media via the great replacement conspiracy theory. The use of indiscriminate violence as a response travels around the underbelly of social media in places like 8chan.

Americans who don’t pay attention to right-wing media and have no exposure to radicalized social media forums have no idea this kind of thing is happening. They simply wake up one day to see that yet another mass shooting has taken place. When Democrats point the finger of blame at Trump and his enablers, it can appear as if it’s just another example of the politicization of tragedy.

That’s why it is important for people to learn about what’s going on. The use of the word “invasion” over 2,000 times on Facebook by the president’s re-election campaign is no accident. It is a calculated strategy to incite the kind of reaction we just witnessed in El Paso.

As Fisher notes:

It is nearly impossible to eradicate a movement animated by ideas and decentralized social networks. Nor is it easy to prevent attacks when the perpetrators’ ideology makes nearly any target as good as the next, and requires little more training or guidance than opening a web forum.

It will take time and a concerted effort to deal with those decentralized social networks that have developed. But it all begins by exposing the president as the man behind the curtain who is inflaming the situation.

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:{After talking about mental health, Fox & Friends hosts link mass shootings to video games and a lack of religion:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{:(style="box-sizing:border-box;display:flex;height:1.5em;margin-right:1em;width:1.5em"):}:08/05/19 8:26 AM EDT

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/police-probing-alleged-white-supremacist-views-of-el-paso-gunman-who-left-20-dead

no lnx

Police probing alleged white supremacist views of El Paso gunman who left 20 dead

Written by Julia Conley / Common Dreams August 4, 2019

Within 13 hours in two U.S. cities—El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio—at least 29 people were killed in mass shootings on Saturday and Sunday.

Police in Dayton, Ohio were gathering information on Sunday morning about a shooting that took place in the city’s downtown Oregon neighborhood at about 1:00am. Nine people were killed by a gunman who used what one eyewitness described as anassault rifle and wore body armor, and at least 16 were injured.

Just a few hours before the shooting in Washington, D.C., the hundreds of protesters representing the national gun control group Moms Demand Action marched from the White House to the Capitol to demand legislative action following Saturday morning’s shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.

@nicksuplina

Hundreds of @momsdemand and #StudentsDemandAction volunteers and survivors of gun violence spontaneously making their voices heard in DC. #NotOneMore #GSU19

A number of observers on social media expressed grief over the two shootings taking place within a day of one another.

G.E. Anderson

We live in a country where the mass shooting that took place yesterday in El Paso, Texas is not the top story because there was another mass shooting overnight in Dayton, Ohio. #MakeAmericaSaneAgain

@Will_Bunch

How many others did what I did? -- fell asleep with the latest news out of El Paso on the TV, slept fitfully for about 6 hours and woke up at 5 a.m. startled to see carnage in Dayton on the screen. In America, the nightmares come when you wake up

@tedlieu

Still grieving over the mass shooting in El Paso. My heart breaks again for the victims of another mass shooting in Dayton.

The policies of @realDonaldTrump & his enablers have not made us safer. Time to give others a chance. Vote out those who do nothing about gun violence. https://twitter.com/BNONews/status/1157903408201949185 …

BNO News

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@BNONews

UPDATE: Multiple fatalities, others seriously injured after gunman opens fire in Dayton, Ohio https://bnonews.com/index.php/2019/08/active-shooter-in-dayton-ohio/ …

Investigators on Sunday were examining an anti-immigration “manifesto” posted online by a 21-year-old gunman who opened fire in El Paso late Saturday morning, killing at least 20 people and injuring26.

“If reports are true, this senseless attack cannot be separated from the escalating politics of hate and fear,” said Ernest Coverson, head of Amnesty International USA’s gun control campaign. “This is simply unacceptable. Everyone has the human right to live in safety, whether they are going to the mall or walking down the street in their neighborhood.”

The shooter fired multiple rounds with an AK-47-style rifle, walking through the store and shooting shoppers aisle-by-aisle.

The manifesto was posted on the online forum 8chan less than 20 minutes before the first 911 callwas made about the shooting, according to the New York Times. The forum was the same one on which the gunman in the March mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand posted his own statement about his intent to kill Muslims and immigrants, shortly before he killed 51 people at two mosques.

The El Paso shooter expressed support for the Christchurch gunman and reportedly said his own goal was to stop the “Hispanic invasion of Texas”with the shooting in the largely Latino border city.

The man lived outside Dallas and made the nine-hour trip because he believed “the heavy Hispanic population in Texas will make us a Democrat stronghold,” according to the statement. He expressed support for the white supremacist theory of “the great replacement” which argues that so-called “elites” are attempting to replace white Europeans with immigrants from the Middle East and Africa.

“This is about hate,” Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), who represents El Paso, said in a statement. “The manifesto narrative is fueled by hate, and it is fueled by racism and bigotry and division.”

On social media, just as many have vehemently rejected the “thoughts and prayers” of politicians who accept thousands of dollars in campaign donations from the NRA and refuse to fight for broadly-popular gun control reforms, some critics directed ire at another perennial post-shooting sentiment, expressed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott hours after the El Paso shooting—that better mental healthcare is the answer to the United States’ epidemic of gun violence.

The causes of the shooting in El Paso, many said, were the shooter’s easy access to guns and the growth of the white supremacist viewpoints he allegedly subscribed to—as well as support for such views by President Donald Trump and other elected officials.

@shannonrwatts

BULLSHIT: The El Paso gunman drove NINE HOURS to the Texas border to kill brown people.

White supremacy is not a mental illness. It’s an ideology encouraged by the President and too many of our leaders, and it’s made deadly in the US via easy access to arsenals and ammunition. https://twitter.com/texastribune/status/1157801199225188352 …

Texas Tribune

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@TexasTribune

.@GregAbbott_TX says in #ElPaso: "Bottom line is mental health is a large contributor" to any type of violence. #ElPasoShooting https://bit.ly/2LYlfmk

Eugene Gu, MD

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@eugenegu

• 13h

Massive income inequality creates this whole generation of disgruntled white men who scapegoat immigrants and minorities for all their problems and then go on these brutal killing sprees with easy access to assault weapons. All of this predates Trump but he makes it much worse.

Eugene Gu, MD

That’s why this second mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio just hours after the one in El Paso, Texas is so extremely scary right now. White supremacy is an ideology not a mental illness. And unlike a mental illness, an ideology can be highly contagious

13 hrs after walmart [gilmore?]

Appearing on CNN’s “New Day” early Sunday morning, national security expert Juliette Kayyem lashed out at 8chan, the user-generated chatroom website, for being nothing more than a haven for white supremacists encouraging each other to commit atrocities.

Speaking with host Christi Paul, Kayyem got right to the point after it was pointed out that the El Paso shooter posted his racist manifesto on the board just before he went on his killing spree that left 20 dead.

“It’s legal because it is simply the sharing of ideas,” she said of the boards. “But what we are seeing with 8chan and others, it actually has become some sort of the announcement of my terror attack, as we saw it with El Paso, as well as a place that not just promotes this ideology but sort of eggs it on.”

“If you go on 8chan, that is essentially what it is doing, ‘do it, do it!’ this sort of peer pressure where these white supremacist ideologues are creating a safe haven,” she explained. Who knows who is going to go out and do a shooting? That’s the challenge here. Obviously, 8chan exists for this ideology. You don’t go on that platform but for this white supremacy.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/gilroy-shooter-who-killed-3-posted-about-white-supremacist-book-popular-with-neo-nazis/

no lnx

Gilroy Shooter who killed 3 posted about white supremacist book popular with Neo-Nazis

Santino William Legan w phone, selfie?]

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement July 30, 2019

The 19-year old believed to have slaughtered three people, including a 6-year old boy, at California’s Gilroy Garlic Festivalposted about a book popular with white supremacists minutes before opening fire with an assault-style rifle.[bot legally in nevada, mebbe we need a wall there? gavin?]

Santino William Legan (NCRM will not use his name again if possible) posted to his now-deleted Instagram account a photo of the festival, urging followers to read what The Daily Beast is describing as “a 19th-century, proto-fascist book.”

“The book, which is repeatedly recommended alongside works by Hitler and other fasicsts on forums like 8chan, is full of anti-Semitic, sexist and white supremacist ideology. The book glorifies ‘Aryan’ men, condemns inter-marriage between races and defends violence based on bogus eugenicist tropes.”

The suspected shooter is also believed to have shot to death a 13-year old girl, and a man in his 20’s.

“Why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white tw**s?” the suspect wrote in his Instagram post.

CNN explains a “‘mestizo’ is a person of mixed descent, usually white and Hispanic, or white and American Indian.” The book, which NCRM also will not name, was “published in the late 1800s” and “has been described as a white supremacist text that promotes anarchy, vilifies Christianity and calls Jesus the ‘true Prince of Evil.’ The natural order, according to the book, is a world at war in which the strong must vanquish the weak, and white men must rule over those of color.”

NBC News calls the book “a staple among neo-Nazis and white supremacists on extremist sites.”

gilroy shooter might is right  14 words press

https://archive.org/stream/MightIsRightByRagnarRedbeard/might-is-right-ragnar-redbeard_djvu.txt

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new 519

March For Our Lives, the gun violence prevention movement, called for an end to #GenerationLockdown following the latest school shooting.

Two suspects opened fire at the Denver-area STEM School Highlands Ranch Tuesday. Kendrick Castillo, 18, died. He was just days away from graduation. Eight others were injured.

It was the fourth school shooting in Colorado since the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999, the Denver Post reported.

March For Our Lives, which was formed in the wake of the Parkland, Florida mass shooting last year, demanded an end to such violent acts. The group said people must not to “grow numb” to the tragedies and urged political leadership tackle the gun violence epidemic.

The group made the calls in a Twitter thread that included video from local Denver7 News of young STEM students boarding a bus outside the school....

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post-poway. manifestos, spark a civil war [// propaganda of the deed?!]

14 words nz shooter also? also in turner diary (sparked by gun siezure??)

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-april-29-2019/

bring the war home author

white supr often well educated, pastors

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/right-wing-terrorists-tend-to-attack-groups-which-trump-views-as-the-enemy-of-course-he-wont-stop-them/

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https://www.democracynow.org/2019/4/29/headlines/trump_admin_disbanded_domestic_terror_unit_amid_rising_far_right_violence

latest white nationalist killing comes after the Department of Homeland Security disbanded its domestic terrorism unit last year, reassigning its analysts to other departments. DHS says the threat of “homegrown extremism” has been significantly reduced, but in a review of 50 murders committed by extremists in 2018, the Anti-Defamation League found 49 came at the hands of right-wing extremists, with white supremacists alone accounting for 39 of the murders.

Topics:

• Department of Homeland Security
• White Supremacy
• Racism
• Race in America
• Hate Groups

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mma

Saturday, there was another mass shooting at a synagogue. A man opened fire inside the Chabad synagogue in Powoy, CA, just outside of San Diego. NBC's Ben Collins and Andrew Blankstein reported that an open letter was posted on far-right forum 8chan in the shooters name, which also took credit for an unsolved arson of a nearby mosque. According to the San Diego County Sheriff, the alleged shooter is now being investigated for that arson as well.

Over at Bellingcat, Robert Evans took a deep dive into 8chan, which was also the place where the Christchurch mosque shooter posted his manifesto. Media Matters' Cristina López has previously written about how board users launch harassment campaigns using 8chan. 8chan is also the hub of the QAnon conspiracy theory which has swept pro-Trump media; a number of prominent right-wing figures have amplified that conspiracy theory. And board users absolutely love Sean Hannity.

Over at The New York Times, Charlie Warzel wrote about how these mass shootings have become a meme in the far-right internet: "The pattern is eerie: it starts with a crude genealogy of the shooter’s ethnic roots, then a self-aggrandizing Q. and A. with himself, followed by a litany of toxic in-jokes meant to confuse the media and those less savvy in far-right online culture. ... Like the Christchurch massacre, the Poway shooting is not only tailored for the internet but also sickeningly standardized. The digital footprint and manifestoes of these white nationalist terrorists follow a familiar template — one that each shooter fills in with their own hideous details. Indeed, it seems real-world murderous hate crimes have become a message board meme of sorts. And like any online meme, the creation cycle only seems to be accelerating, refining itself and, horrifyingly, increasing in frequency."

On Fox News, a guest was linking the rise of anti-Semitism to Trump's permissive rhetoric about the far right, specifically Trump's defense of white nationalists in Charlottesville who chanted "Jews will not replace us." (Trump even doubled down on that characterization on Friday in an interview with Mark Levin.) But as the guest described this, the show suddenly cut to commercial. The guest was invited back on later in the day, but the discussion moved quickly beyond Trump's rhetoric to an assertion that Trump could not possibly be personally anti-Semitic.

Fox News never stopped pushing the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that motivated the Tree of Life shooter. Glenn Beck was on Fox News earlier this month pushing it. And earlier this week, a Fox Nation guest fearmongered about George Soros infiltrating the census, harkening back to when a guest was banned from the network for complaining about the "Soros-occupied State Department."

https://theconversation.com/how-columbine-became-a-blueprint-for-school-shooters-115115

When 12 students and one teacher were killed in Littleton, Colorado 20 years ago, it not only became what at the time was the worst high school shooting in U.S. history. It also marked when American society was first handed a script for a new form of violence in schools.

We make that observation as researchers – a psychologist and a sociologist – who have been studying mass public shootings as part of a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Since the 1999 tragedy at Columbine High School, we identified six mass shootings and 40 active shooter incidents at elementary, middle or high schools in the United States. Mass shootings are defined by the FBI as an event in which four or more victims died by gunfire.

In 20 – ornearly half – of those 46 school shootings, the perpetrator purposely used Columbine as a model.

Columbine’s influence continues until this day. On April 17 – just three days ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Columbine shooting – authorities closed schools across Colorado due to a credible threat of a woman armed with a shotgun and who was “infatuated with Columbine.” The 18-year-old Florida woman was reportedly found dead in Colorado later in the day from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The ties that bind to Columbine

In our study of school shootings, we only looked at cases where a gun was fired on campus, following the practice of The Washington Post’s database on school shootings. Had we included foiled plots, the number would be significantly higher.

Several school shooters in our study were fascinated with Columbine and researched the massacre before their own. This includes the Parkland shooter, a 14-year-old who aspired to be “the youngest mass murderer,” and a 15-year-old who shot at his teacher after she refused to praise Marilyn Manson, the rock singer who was erroneously blamed for inspiring the Columbine killers.

The timing of the April 17 threat to Colorado schools is no coincidence. Prior perpetrators chose the anniversary of Columbine to commit their shootings, including one month and two years after. A different shooter talked of how he was going to “pull a Columbine.” Others discussed Columbine with classmates, even joked about it.

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter idolized the Columbine killers and curated a Tumblr account paying homage, alongside a graphic collage of Columbine victims. A North Carolina shooter was so obsessed with Columbine that he took a vacation there with his mother and fantasized about “finishing off” any wounded survivors.

Multiple shooters, including one 15-year-old in Oregon and another in Washington state, were inspired by a documentary about Columbine that included detailed recreations of what happened. One Wisconsin teenager held his classroom hostage after reading a bookabout Columbine.

Perpetrators also dressed in trench coats like the Columbine shooters, including those responsible for the 2018 Santa Fe shooting, where 10 people died, and a 2004 nonfatal shooting in New York. Indeed, the trench coat has appeared in subsequent school shootings because Columbine gave it meaning beyond any intrinsic use.

Why Columbine?

Columbine has spawned an entire subculture of “Columbiners” and copycats. A March 2019 shooting in Brazil that killed eight shows that Columbine’s influence is global. But Columbine was not the first school shooting, not even that year.Eleven months before the horror in Littleton unfolded, an expelled 15-year-old – also wearing a trench coat – killed two and injured 25 at a school in Springfield, Oregon. Why do we not now talk about the “Springfield effect”?

Partly because the perpetrator in Springfield was professionally diagnosed as psychotic, meaning his attack could be more easily explained away. He also acted alone, whereas having two shooters immediately intensified the intrigue around Columbine. But the main reason for Columbine’s longevity was that its perpetrators created manifestos and home movies of their preparations in hopes that their story would outlive them. Unfortunately, it has.

Before Columbine, there was no script for how school shooters should behave, dress and speak. Columbine created “common knowledge,” the foundation of coordination in the absence of a standardized playbook. Timing was everything. The massacre was one of the first to take place after the advent of 24-hour cable news and during the “the year of the net.” This was the dawn of the digital age of perfect remembering, where words and deeds live online forever. Columbine became the pilot for future episodes of fame-seeking violence.

Separating myth from reality

Our research has found that school shootings have nothing to do with jock envy, satanism, video games, or Keanu Reeves, and school shooters are not psychopathic masterminds. In fact, these soundbite explanations for aberrant behavior only blind us to the reality of school violence.

School shooters are almost always current students of their schools. They are students who are in crisis, students who have experienced trauma, and students who are actively suicidal prior to the shooting and expect to die in the act. Such children have always existed. But for 20 years they’ve had a new script to follow.

And we, the public, have contributed to the production and direction of this script. Again and again and again. Through our obsession with true crime and films, books, memes and entire websites devoted to Columbine. By releasing CCTV footage of the shooting to the public. By running our children through regular lockdowns and active shooter drills starting in preschool through 12th grade. By sending them to school through secure entrances with clear backpacks and bulletproof binders. Society and culture have reared a Columbine generation, modeling that this is just part of childhood in America.

Flipping the script

After serial killing peaked in the late 1980s, it’s hard to know which faded first – the serial killers themselves or the public obsession with them. The same fear and fascination that created the serial killer panic is what drives the Columbine effect. After 20 years, it’s time to rewrite the script being rehearsed with young people.

It starts with no names, no photos and no notoriety for mass shooters in media coverage – which is why we don’t indulge here. The next step is a paradigm shift from homeroom security to holistic violence prevention in schools – mental health, supportive environments, strong relationships and crisis intervention and deescalation. Teachers should feel as comfortable asking a student about suicide as they feel going into lockdown; empowered to spend as much time teaching empathy and resilience as they do now training to run, hide, fight.

The victims and survivors of school violence must not be forgotten, but to prevent another two decades of contagion and copycats, it requires a recognition that it is time to close the curtain on the spectacle of Columbine. "

...?

On Aug. 12, 2017, James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into protesters demonstrating against the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. (Ryan M. Kelly/Daily Progress/AP)

By Paul Duggan and

Justin Jouvenal March 27 at 6:38 PM

CHARLOTTESVILLE — An avowed neo-Nazi who killed one woman and injured 35 other people when he plowed his car into a group of counterprotesters at an infamous white-supremacist rally here pleaded guilty to hate crimes in federal court Wednesday.

James Alex Fields Jr., 21, of Ohio admitted guilt to 29 of 30 counts in a federal indictment as part of a deal with prosecutors, who agreed they would not seek the death penalty in a case that has come to symbolize the violent resurgence of white supremacism in the United States. Fields is set to be sentenced July 3.

Late last year, Fields was convicted in state court of first-degree murder and other charges for killing Heather D. Heyer, 32, and injuring dozens at the chaotic Unite the Right rally on Aug. 12, 2017. The jury in that case recommended a life sentence, and a state judge is scheduled to formally impose it in mid-July.

Admitting guilt to hate crimes marks a dramatic shift for Fields, whose attorneys argued during his trial in state court that he sped toward the crowd out of fear for his safety and confusion. They said he immediately regretted his actions.

On Wednesday, Fields, who has grown a bushy beard in the months since his state trial, entered a federal courtroom here in a gray-and-white-striped prisoner’s jumpsuit and handcuffs. He spoke only to answer a judge’s questions and displayed no emotion during the hour-long hearing.

Susan Bro, Heyer’s mother, said after the hearing she was satisfied with the result.

'He needs to be kept away from society': Charlottesville car attacker sentenced to life in prison

A jury sentenced James Alex Fields Jr., an avowed neo-Nazi who rammed his car into a group of counterprotesters at a white-supremacist rally, to life in prison. (Reuters)

“There’s no point in killing him. It would not bring back Heather,” Bro said.

“It’s a relief to think we don’t have to go through another trial. It was exhausting the first time. I can get on with my life, and the other victims can, too.”

Thomas T. Cullen, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said he was gratified that Fields finally admitted he was motivated by hate, calling the crime “an indelible mark on the city of Charlottesville, our state and our country.”

Fields pleaded guilty to one count of a hate crime that resulted in the death of Heyer and 28 counts of hate crimes that caused injuries and involved attempts to kill other people in the crowd. Each of the 29 counts carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. Attorney General William P. Barr approved the deal.

[Fields sentenced to life in prison in fatal Charlottesville car attack]

U.S. Attorney Thomas Cullen speaks to the media Wednesday after a plea agreement with Fields, who was charged with 30 counts stemming from the car attack in Charlottesville. (Steve Helber/AP)

The violence in 2017 and President Trump’s assertion afterward that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the Charlottesville rally sparked intense criticism and a fresh focus on the renewed forces of ethno-nationalism.

The events began on Aug. 11 when far-right groups mounted a torchlight march through the University of Virginia campus shouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans, including, “Jews will not replace us!”

Fields was already on his way to Charlottesville, arriving the next day for a white-supremacist rally that was nominally held to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

The event, involving hundreds of marchers, generated national media attention after rallygoers carrying Nazi flags and shouting racial epithets clashed violently with throngs of counterprotesters. Police eventually dispersed the groups.

:{

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A short time later, Fields was seen driving his gray Dodge Charger up to a group of counterprotesters on a narrow street. He slowly backed up and then accelerated down a hill directly into the group.

:{

}:

Harrowing video, which was played at Fields’s state trial, shows protesters tumbling and screaming as the car slams into them. Fields then reversed at a high speed, hitting and dragging others. Someone repeatedly yelled: “Oh, God! Oh, God!”

:{

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Heyer was killed, while others were seriously wounded. One woman who limped to the witness stand at Fields’s state trial testified she had five surgeries and was about to undergo a sixth. Another described a broken pelvis and a third how he pushed his fiancee out of the way before he was hit by the Dodge.

At the state trial, a mental health expert detailed Fields’s psychiatric disorders dating to early childhood.

:{

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He did not deny running into the crowd, but his attorneys argued that he acted to protect himself. Prosecutors forcefully countered that argument, and the jury at the six-day trial rejected the defense.

Jurors were shown a deleted Instagram post by Fields shared three months before that crash that featured a car running into a group of people. A caption read: “You Have the Right to Protest, But I’m Late for Work.”

A state prosecutor also showed a blown-up image of Fields in his car to counter the idea that he was frightened when he acted.

“This is not the face of someone who is scared,” a state prosecutor said at the time. “This is the face of anger, of hatred. It’s the face of malice.”

As part of the plea agreement in federal court, prosecutors said Fields admitted that before the rally, he had used social media to “express and promote white supremacist views” including admiration for the racial-purity doctrine of Adolf Hitler. They said he used those accounts to “espouse violence against African Americans, Jewish people, and members of other racial, ethnic and religious groups he perceived to be non-white.”

[From wary observer to justice warrior: How Heather Heyer’s death gave her mom a voice]

After Wednesday’s federal court hearing, Browas asked whether Heyer’s killing had raised the community’s consciousness about racial disparities.

“Sadly, it took a white girl dying before anyone paid attention to civil rights around here,” she told reporters. “I wish we had woken up sooner.’

But Bro did describe one moment of healing. When asked whether she had ever come in contact with Fields’s mother, Bro said she had seen her just once, at the state trial.

“She looked at me, and I looked at her,” Bro said. “I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ She said, ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

==

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/the-shooters-manifesto-was-designed-to-troll/585058/

no lnx twit

In the hours after the horrific mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, people desperately searched the internet for any sign of a motive or meaning behind the attack. Early Friday, a number of unverified social-media posts surfaced, along with a bizarre manifesto posted to 8chan, rich with irony and references to memes.

Together, the posts suggest that every aspect of the shootings was designed to gain maximum attention online, in part by baiting the media. The shooter live-streamed the attack itself on Facebook, and the video was quickly shared across YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. Before committing the act, he shouted, “Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie,” a reference to Felix Kjellberg, who runs YouTube’s most subscribed-to channel. The phrase itself is a meme started by PewDiePie’s fans, and its goal is to be reprinted.

Read: YouTube extremism and the long tail]

Kjellberg, who has previously found himself embroiled in controversy over alleged anti-Semitism, disavowed the shooting on Twitter Friday morning. “Just heard news of the devastating reports from New Zealand Christchurch. I feel absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person. My heart and thoughts go out to the victims, families and everyone affected by this tragedy,” he wrote. By forcing Kjellberg to acknowledge the attack, the shooter succeeded in further spreading the word about the crime to Kjellberg’s tens of millions of followers.

@loudmouthjulia

"Subscribe to PewDiePie" is a meme that encompasses a misled belief that it's a fight for the disenfranchised; those constantly being pushed down. It's David vs Goliath. It's used on boards like 8chan as a rallying cry. It doesn't belong to PDP anymore — but we need to examine it...

Significant portions of the manifesto appear to be an elaborate troll, written to prey on the mainstream media’s worst tendencies. As the journalist Robert Evans noted, “This manifesto is a trap … laid for journalists searching for the meaning behind this horrific crime. There is truth in there, and valuable clues to the shooter’s radicalization, but it is buried beneath a great deal of, for lack of a better word, ‘shitposting.’”

[The Tech White Power Used to Go Viral

OLGA KHAZAN]

Shitposting is a slang term used to describe the act of posting trollish and usually ironic content designed to derail a conversation or elicit a strong reaction from people who aren’t in on the joke. Certain aspects of the shooter’s manifesto fall into this category. He includes Navy Seal Copypasta, a meme that originated on 4chan. He claims that Spyro: Year of the Dragon, a video game, taught him ethno-nationalism and that Fortnite taught him to “floss on the corpses,” referring to a viral dance move from the game. These absurd references are meant to troll readers

Jasmin Mujanovic

?

@JasminMuj

Replying to @JasminMuj

One more thought: the shooter makes repeated references to the “remove Kebab” meme, which is based on a propaganda video produced by Serb nationalist forces during the Bosnian War & Bosnian Genocide in 90s. Meshes w/ Obilic references & clear Breivik influence.

...

The shooter also credits the far-right personality Candace Owens with helping to “push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness.” Though the shooter could be a genuine fan of Owens, who has been known to espouse right-leaning views on immigration and gun control, this reference might be meant to incite Owens’s critics to blame her.

That doesn’t mean the racism expressed throughout the 74-page manifesto isn’t genuine. But the complexities of the crime are still unfolding, and as the New York Times journalist Kevin Roose cautioned, “The NZ shooter’s apparent manifesto is thick with irony and meta-text and very easy to misinterpret.” Unfortunately, when journalists report on these horrific acts, the shooter’s hateful messages are sometimes amplified in the process. But the origins of that hate and the shooter’s public postings do need to be examined, even when taking them at face value is difficult.

Mass killers have long exploited the media environments they operate within. The Zodiac killer gained notoriety by persuading newspapers to publish his cryptic messages. In 2015, a shooter in Virginia killed people during a live television broadcast.

As the internet and social media have democratized access to information, much of it spreads without necessary context. As the Verge writer Elizabeth Lopatto noted in 2015, “Our interactions with these killers were mediated by huge media gatekeepers—their manifestos were left at their homes, or sent to newspapers and TV stations. If the manifestos appeared at all, they were quoted from, rather than released in full. This is no longer the case.”

Read: The dangerous spread of extremist manifestos]

While this system of gatekeeping itself was undoubtedly problematic, since many of the gatekeepers upheld norms and power structures built on privilege, technology has upended our media environment so quickly that many people are ill-equipped to handle the new information environment. We’ve seen the consequences of this play out in the rise of fake news, thriving misinformation campaigns, and bizarre viral hoaxes warped by trolls to capitalize on people’s worst fears.

Before people can even begin to grasp the nuances of today’s internet, they can be radicalized by it. Platforms such as YouTube and Facebook can send users barreling into fringe communities where extremist views are normalized and advanced. Because these communities have so successfully adopted irony as a cloaking device for promoting extremism, outsiders are left confused as to what is a real threat and what’s just trolling. The darker corners of the internet are so fragmented that even when they spawn a mass shooting, as in New Zealand, the shooter’s words can be nearly impossible to parse, even for those who are Extremely Online.i

==

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/10/28/analyzing-terrorists-social-media-manifesto-pittsburgh-synagogue-shooters-posts-gab

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| March 15, 2019 5:33 pm

• Taylor Lorenz @ The Atlantic: The Shooter’s Manifesto Was Designed to Troll.
• Josh Marshall @ Talking Points Memo: So I Read the Manifesto.
• Media Matters: Rush Limbaugh suggests New Zealand shootings might be a false flag attack committed by a leftist to smear conservatives.
• Joe Jervis: AUSTRALIA: Far-Right Senator Blames New Zealand For “Allowing Muslim Fanatics To Migrate In The First Place”.
• Aidan McLaughlin @ Mediaite: Trump Warns of ‘Invasion’ on U.S. Border After Condemning New Zealand Mosque Shooting.
• Anna Nemtsova @ The Daily Beast: Trump’s Breitbart Biker Threat Came From the Putin Playbook—Then Tweet Deleted After Mosque Massacre.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/new-zealand-is-not-the-first-here-are-some-of-the-most-horrific-white-terrorist-attacks-and-plots-of-the-trump-era/

At least 49 people have been killed in a terrorist attack that New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has described as one of the country’s “darkest days.” The targets were two mosques in the city of Christchurch, and according to New Zealand police, the suspects were greatly influenced by far-right white nationalists of the United States. One of the suspects, according to police, published a 74-page manifesto demonizing Muslims and immigrants—and American terrorist Dylann Roof, who slaughtered nine African-American churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, was cited as a role model in the document.

After Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana survived a shooting spree in June 2017, the right-wing media in the U.S. claimed that a wave of violence was coming from the left (never mind the fact that Sen. Bernie Sanders wholeheartedly condemned the attack and wished Scalise a speedy recovery). AM talk radio host Michael Savage even went so far as to that President Donald Trump’s critics needed to be “removed from the airwaves by the federal government for their constant drumbeat of hatred.” But the notion that terrorism is unique to either leftists or far-right Islamist groups like al-Qaeda, ISIS (Islamic State, Iraq and Syria) and Boko Haram is ludicrous—and the horrific attack in Christchurch follows a series of white nationalist, white supremacist or Christianist attacks or plots in the U.S.

Here are some of the most disturbing white terrorist attacks or alleged plots of the Trump era.

1. February 2019: U.S. Coast Guard officer faces weapons charges after alleged plot to assassinate Democrats and journalists

One of the most underreported stories of 2019, hands down, is a U.S. Coast Guard officer’s alleged plot to murder a long list of prominent Democrats. In February, a self-described white nationalist was arrested on weapons charges after federal law enforcement found more than 1000 rounds of ammunition in his apartment in Maryland—and according to investigators, he had a hit list that named House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Kamala Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats as potential targets. Some major media figures were on the list as well, including Van Jones and Don Lemon of CNN and MSNBC’s conservative Joe Scarborough (who is one of President Donald Trump’s most vocal critics on the right).

The Coast Guard officer’s alleged plot received a lot more coverage on MSNBC and CNN than it did on their cable news competitor, Fox News, which is not surprising: it didn’t fit into the right-wing narrative of Islamists having a monopoly on terrorism. But if the alleged terrorist had been connected to ISIS or the Taliban, Fox News would have given it nonstop coverage.

2. October 2018: Terrorist mail bomb campaign targets prominent Democrats

In October 2018, a series of mail bombs were sent to Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Sen. Cory Booker, investor George Soros and many other prominent Democrats—and the knee-jerk response of Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, John Cardillo and other far-right media figures was that the whole thing was a Democratic hoax or “false flag” operation. Republicans, Limbaugh insisted, simply don’t resort to such acts. But in fact, a 56-year-old Florida resident and avowed Trump supporter was arrested on October 26, 2018 for the attacks and was charged with interstate transportation of explosives and other federal crimes. The suspect lived in a van, where authorities found numerous pro-Trump stickers and anti-Democrat messages.

3. October 2018: 11 worshippers slaughtered in vicious attack on Pittsburgh synagogue

The terrorist shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue on October 27, 2018 was the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history. Eleven people were killed, and suspect Robert Bowers (a white supremacist) was charged with a long list of federal and state crimes. According to investigators, the suspect had been posting anti-Semitic messageson social media and blamed Jews for illegal immigration in the U.S. Bowers he had become a critic of President Trump, claiming that he was a “globalist, not a nationalist.” But he shared Trump’s obsession with the caravan of Central American refugees that was making its way north.

4. October 2018: older African-American couple killed in Kentucky

On October 24, 2018 in Kentucky, an older African-American couple, Maurice E. Stallard and Vickie Lee Jones, were randomly killed in a supermarket parking lot in Jeffersontown, Kentucky near Louisville simply for being black.  According to police, the suspect (who was charged with three federal hate crimes and had a history of making racist comments) tried to enter an African-American church before the attack on Stallard and Jones but, thankfully, didn’t get in.

5.August 2017: activist Heather Heyer murdered at Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia

On December 7, 2018, white nationalist James Alex Fields, Jr. was found guilty of killing activist Heather Heyer by running his car into a group of counterdemonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017. Heyer, who was 32, was among the activists who gathered in Charlottesville that day to protest against a large demonstration by white supremacists, white nationalists and Christianists that was billed as a Unite the Right rally. And the event had many of the familiar themes one finds among white terrorists: the U.S. is being invaded, and the invasion must be stopped.

The Washington Post has reported that the 74-page manifesto of one of the suspects in the Christchurch, New Zealand massacre is titled “The Great Manifesto”—a title the Post says “echoes the rallying cry of, among others, the torch-bearing protesters who marched in Charlottesville in 2017.”

coast guard mass shooter chris hayes

==

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mass shootings in Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana that left a combined 14 dead. Cydney Hargis found that cable news mostly ignored them. MSNBC in particular spent less than a minute on them combined.

mma 119

==

rww

During his recent appearance on Greg Hunter’s “USAWatchdog”, so-called “firefighter prophet” and radical conspiracy theorist Mark Taylor warned that former attorney general Eric Holder is delivering secret “mind control” codes to the public via his Twitter account.

Recently, Holder changed the banner image on his Twitter account to feature a photo of him standing beside John F. Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery, which both Taylor and Hunter are interpreting as Holder sending a message to President Trump.

“He changed his Twitter background to you see him standing there with his arms crossed in front of JFK’s grave site and he’s got his hands together with his two fingers, like he is giving a code,” Taylor said. “People aren’t stupid.”

“Do you think he’s giving the order to have the same thing happen to Donald Trump that happened to JFK?” asked Hunter.

“It’s not looking good, let’s put it that way,” responded Taylor. “It looks like there is something being given off in the spirit by what he is doing. These guys have code words, they have symbolism, they don’t have to come right out and say something to activate these people.”

Taylor went on to assert that people who have carried out mass shootings have often been under CIA “mind control” and that Holder is attempting to “activate” more of them to target Trump with his Twitter image.

“These guys are totally demonic when it comes to this stuff,” he said. “They’re using the mind control, they are using the activation codes to activate these guys.”

...

==

rww

Two neo-Nazis who filmed One America News Network personality Jack Posobiec while he roamed the streets of a Washington, D.C., to create propaganda for the Seth Rich conspiracy theory on behalf of Rebel Media are suspected to have schemed violence in relation to the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that left 11 murdered, court documents show.

Jeffrey Clark, who police arrested on November 9, was active on Gab, where he used his profile honoring white supremacist mass murderer Dylann Roofto connect with the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter. Prior to his arrest, he had attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he was photographed alongside the young man who killed counter-protester Heather Heyer. Clark’s relatives told the FBI that he sought to “expedite” a race war.

Clark’s brother, a fellow neo-Nazi named Edward, committed suicide after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting when it was revealed that Gab, a Twitter spin-off overrun with violent extremists, had provided the shooter’s profile information to law enforcement. Apparently concerned that he’d soon be receiving a visit from the FBI, he shot himself in a park.

The tie-ins don’t stop at Gab. The neo-Nazi Clark brothers were connected to a web of white nationalists who ushered in the “alt-right,” including Posobiec.

The brothers were photographed filming Posobiec while he worked on footage about the murder of former DNC staffer Seth Rich, which served as rich fodder for pro-Trump conspiracy theorists online in 2016. Posobiec also notably traveled to Comet Ping Pong, a Washington pizza restaurant and bar that was at the center of wild internet conspiracy theories about satanic pedophile rings, to “infiltrate” the scene. When a believer in the conspiracy theory took matters into his own hands and entered the restaurant with a firearm, Posobiec deleted evidence of his visit and began lying about his role in spreading the hoax.

In the images and reporting published by HuffPost, the Clark brothers are seen filming Posobiec. Jeffrey Clark reportedly told Laura Sennett of One People’s Project that “Posobiec absolutely was” aware of their neo-Nazi beliefs and had told his brother “that he was sympathetic to those beliefs.” HuffPost reports:

In May 2017, the Clark brothers teamed up with far-right “Pizzagate” propagandist Jack Posobiec, who was then the D.C. bureau chief for the far-right website Rebel Media, to shoot footage for a film Posobiec was working on about Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer whose murder near the Clarks’ home in Bloomingdale has spawned numerous far-right conspiracy theories.

Laura Sennett, an anti-fascist researcher who works with One People’s Project, spoke with Jeffrey Clark a few weeks after he and his brother were spotted in Bloomingdale with Posobiec, who by then had been fired from Rebel under mysterious circumstances after plagiarizing Jason Kessler, the white nationalist who organized the Unite the Right rally.

“[Clark] told me that Jack Posobiec hired him and his brother to follow him with a camera to take video of his investigation of Seth Rich,” Sennett told HuffPost. “Not sure if it was a documentary or a news story, but [Posobiec] was doing some kind of reporting for Rebel Media. I asked him if Posobiec was aware of his Nazi beliefs. He told me that Posobiec absolutely was and had told Jeff that he was sympathetic to those beliefs.”

TheClark brothers would stand Posobiec again at a rally he led alongside white nationalist Richard Spencer,of whom the brothers and Posobiec were both seeming fans. Alexander Reid Ross, the author of the book “Against the Fascist Creep,” tweeted that the Clark brothers had infiltrated a book talk he gave last year. According to Ross, a Daily Caller reporter was filming the incident. Later that night, Posobiec published the PDF of Ross’ book.

...

anomaly?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Congressional_baseball_shooting

alexandria

June 14, 2017, in Alexandria, Virginia, Republican member of Congress and House Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana was shot while practicing for the annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity, scheduled for the following day. Also shot were Crystal Griner, a U.S. Capitol Police officer assigned to protect Scalise; Zack Barth, a congressional aide; and Matt Mika, a Tyson Foods lobbyist.

A ten-minute shootout ensued between the shooter—James Hodgkinson of Belleville, Illinois, a left-wing activist^[9][10]—and officers from the Capitol and Alexandria Police. Officers shot Hodgkinson, who died from his wounds later that day at the George Washington University Hospital.^[7][11]

Scalise and Mika were taken to nearby hospitals, where they underwent surgery.^[12] Scalise is the first sitting member of Congress to have been shot since Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in 2011.^[13]

The Virginia Attorney General concluded it was “fueled by rage against Republican legislators,” and “an act of terrorism.”^[14]

Contents

• :{1:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Background:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{2:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Shooting:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{3:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Injuries:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{4:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Perpetrator:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{5:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Reactions:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{6:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Effect on the 2017 Congressional Baseball Game:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{7:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{See also:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{8:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{References:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{9:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{External links:(style="display:table-cell"):}:

Background

The shooting took place on June 14, 2017, at Eugene Simpson Stadium Park in Alexandria, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. There were 24 Republican congressmen who had gathered at the park to practice for the next day's Congressional Baseball Game for Charity, an annual, bipartisan event first held in 1909. Among those at the practice, aside from Scalise, were Senators Rand Paul and Jeff Flake, and Representatives Roger Williams (the team's coach), Chuck Fleischmann, Trent Kelly, Mo Brooks, Brad Wenstrup, Rodney Davis, Jeff Duncan, Jack Bergman, and Joe Barton (the team's manager).^{[7][15][16][17]}

Prior to the game, the Republicans had held practices at the same time and place each morning.^[18] The team began its practice around 6:30 a.m. EDT that day.^[18][19][20]

According to Representatives Ron DeSantis and Jimmy Duncan, they were approached before the shooting at the practice by a man who asked whether Republicans or Democrats were practicing on the field. Duncan reportedly replied that it was the Republican team. DeSantis later told reporters that both he and Duncan believe that the man was the perpetrator of the shooting, James Hodgkinson.^[21]

Three Capitol Police officers were present at the practice to protect Scalise,^[22] who, due to his House leadership position, has a full-time security detail assigned to protect him.^[23] They were posted behind the first-base dugout on that day.^[22][24]

Shooting

...The practice had been underway for about half an hour when James Hodgkinson began firing. According to the Capitol Police, he was armed with an SKS rifle and a 9mm Smith & Wesson handgun, both of which he had apparently purchased legally.^[1] It was unclear if Hodgkinson used the handgun during the shooting incident.^[25]

...

he attack drew a bipartisan response as many politicians immediately sent out notes expressing their anger over the shooting, recovery wishes for the injured and gratitude for the police. News of the shooting and injuries quickly reached the Democratic Congressional Baseball players, who were at their own practice at another location when the shooting occurred. They gathered together in the dugout to pray for the injured.^[63]

President Donald Trump addressed the nation saying, "We are deeply saddened by this tragedy. Our thoughts and prayers are with the members of Congress, their staffs, Capitol Police, first responders, and all others affected."^[64] President Trump and his wife Melania visited Scalise and Griner in the hospital. While at the hospital, the Trumps spoke with Scalise's family and with Griner and her wife.^[65] On July 27, 2017, Trump awarded the Medal of Valor to five of the officers who were injured in the shooting.^[66]

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R–WI) addressed the House of Representatives before their afternoon session and said, "An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us." Members of both parties rose in applause to his remarks.^[67]

Former Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D–AZ), who survived being shot in the head at a constituent event in 2011, sent a tweet that read "My heart is with my former colleagues, their families and staff, and the US Capitol Police—public servants and heroes today and every day."^[13]

Hours after the shooting, Senator Bernie Sanders responded on the Senate floor to news that Hodgkinson was a campaign volunteer for his 2016 presidential run:

I have just been informed that the alleged shooter at the Republican baseball practice is someone who apparently volunteered on my presidential campaign. I am sickened by this despicable act. Let me be as clear as I can be, violence of any kind is unacceptable in our society and I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms. Real change can only come about through nonviolent action, and anything else runs counter to our most deeply held American values.^[68]

Reactions to the shooting among political activists were split. Some liberals, like Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, called for stricter gun control laws, while some Republicans, like Chris Collins, blamed anti-Trump rhetoric.^[69] Other activists blamed growing national polarization^[70] for causing the shooting.^[71]

==

bad week runup to midterms, djt hysterical rhet on invasion caravan

aha anti semite [the original archetypal conspiracy theory: unseen evil force at fault for all, vs actual structural], anti- islam (sikh temple?)

Pennsylvania man accused of killing the 11 Jewish worshipers was indicted Wednesday on 44 counts, including murder and hate crimes. Robert Bowers has a history of posting anti-Semitic and xenophobic content. Just before the shooting rampage, Bowers wrote on a far-right social media site, ”HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” HIAS, formerly known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, is a nonprofit providing assistance to refugees.

Meanwhile, President Trump attacked the media again following massive protests in Pittsburgh during his visit to the Tree of Life synagogue Wednesday. Trump tweeted, “Melania and I were treated very nicely yesterday in Pittsburgh. The Office of the President was shown great respect on a very sad & solemn day. We were treated so warmly. Small protest was not seen by us, staged far away. The Fake News stories were just the opposite-Disgraceful!” Reports estimate several thousand protesters turned out to protest Trump’s visit. Many local leaders also publicly opposed the visit. On Wednesday night, protesters gathered at the University of Pittsburgh to rally against hate and gun violence.

==

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/11/1/headlines/racist_kentucky_shooter_indicted_for_murder

 Kentucky, the white man accused of shooting and killing two African-American customers at a grocery store last Wednesday was indicted on murder charges. Before the deadly shooting, Gregory Bush was captured on a surveillance camera trying to force open the doors of a predominantly black church, the First Baptist Church of Jeffersontown, before turning his attention to a nearby Kroger supermarket, where he opened fire and killed Maurice Stallard and Vickie Lee Jones. Bush has a history of making racist slurs and has a long rap sheet of misdemeanor charges, including domestic violence, menacing and making terroristic threats.

==

...The ordinary spectrum of hypocrisy is not broad enough to encompass Trump, who directed the fury of his unruly admirers at specific members of the press during his rallies, and denounced the profession as “dishonest,” and threatened to “open up” the nation’s libel laws, now adopting the pose of a protector of the First Amendment. At issue here is not freedom of speech but the freedom to treat other people, particularly vulnerable ones, badly; the freedom to whip up sentiment along the predictable fault lines and to do so without facing any consequence; the freedom to embolden forces that represent a tangible danger to people. While the digital cavalry of the alt-right rode to Yiannopoulos’s defense, there was almost nothing said, certainly not by Trump publicly, although he spoke to Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, by phone about the six Muslims killed in Quebec City by a gunman who shared many of the demagogic President’s views.

...

==

Following a mass shooting at a Madden video game tournament in Jacksonville, conservatives ran their usual disinformation campaign.

A Fox News guest speculated without evidence that the shooter had autism and that was responsible for the shooting: "This isn’t a gun control problem ... It’s mainly a video game control problem and access to good mental health treatment problem"

A Fox panel called for the regulation of video games and smartphones, with one Fox host arguing with a straight face that "When we think of other risks to children and their health, for example smoking, we actually take action and ban those things."

An NRATV host criticized a survivor of the shooting for supposedly not hearing gunshots over his headphones, saying if your headphones are “so loud you can’t hear what is going on around you, you are living in your own world. That can become deadly."

Anything to not blame America's lax gun laws.

==

https://www.alternet.org/propaganda-working-trump-voters-call-ms-13-serious-threat-us-thats-simply-not-true

When news broke of an active shooting at the Capital Gazette,my local newspaper inAnnapolis, Maryland, I**tweeted**editor Rick Hutzell to ask if he was safe, and how I could help. When police announced the arrest of 38-year-old Jarrod Ramos as the suspect in the mass shooting, I, like many others, delved into his Twitter accounts.

I was shocked when I realized that Ramos – whom a grand jury just indicted on 23 charges, including five counts of first-degree murder – had contacted me two years ago. He taunted me in response to the Capital’s March 2015 report about how I had helped law enforcement thwart a mass shooting threat made on Twitter against grade school kids and Jews in Kalispell, Montana, by a man named David J. Lenio.

What I learned about Ramos, as I followed his Twitter trail, reveals as strange a worldview as one could imagine informing a mass-murder scenario. There are at least two main influences evident in Ramos' tweets. One is a worldview taken from the theocratic wing of the alt-right, and the other comes from a violent anime subculture centered around a popular manga, anime and film series titled “Berserk.” Taken together, they provide a Rosetta Stone that allows us to translate the significance of two religious visions, in relation to each other, as they existed in Ramos' mind.  I believe these mutually informing visions allowed Ramos to cast himself as a vigilante hand of God. His theocratic worldview, combined with his immersion in the world of "Berserk," helps to solve the mystery of his cryptic, final tweet and illuminate his possible motive for mass murder.

For all of Ramos’ vividly imagined righteousness, this story begins with a woman-hating, angry man. That there is amisogynist root to Ramos’ rage-filled rampage is no surprise. Numerous male mass murderers have backgrounds of stalking and harassing women, especially online. Ramos’ beef with the Capital goes back to his ill-conceived defamation suit against the paper, its publisher and a columnist for reporting on his guilty plea for the online harassment of a woman he had known slightly in high school. In court documents he objected to the Capital’s report that, after he had not heard from the woman in months, he told her, “Fuck you, leave me alone.” Ramos told the judge that he felt it unfair that the reporter had not allowed him to offer an explanation. He complained to the judge, “That carries a clear implication that something is wrong inside my head, that I’m insane.”

Whether Ramos is sane is a matter for the court to determine. But there is an explanation for these hostile words – which he cribbed from the protagonist in "Berserk" – and it has to do with Ramos’ worldview, which needs to be more clearly understood.

The alt-right half of the Rosetta Stone

I believe Ramos contacted me initially because the Capital had reported on my connection to David Lenio, a white nationalist who had tweeted threats of a possible mass shooting, and also because I was researching and writing about ties between a local politician named Michael Peroutka and a right-wing group called the League of the South.

The League is a theocratic, secessionist organization whose leader, Michael Hill, had called for the formation of death squads targeting journalists, elected officials and other members of “the elite.” In his essay “A Bazooka in Every Pot,” Hill described such an assassination campaign as part of “fourth-generation warfare,” a style of decentralized conflict that blurs the lines between war and politics, combatants and civilians.

Hill wrote: “To oversimplify, the primary targets will not be enemy soldiers; instead, they will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elitewithout whom the engines of tyranny don’t run.”

That was not Hill’s only overt call to violence. He followed up with another essay calling for young men of “Christendom” to become “citizen-soldiers” to destroy the “galloping tyranny” of our time.

...

As for Peroutka, he is a neo-Confederate theocratwho thinks that the wrong side won the Civil War and that our real national anthem is “Dixie.” He is also a former board member of the League, which had endorsed his successful 2014 campaign for a seat on Maryland’s Anne Arundel County Council, running as a Republican. This is the same League that helped organize the infamous torch-lit Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer.

Over a period of nearly seven years, Peroutka is one of only two politicians whom Ramos tweeted about – the other being Donald Trump, who has repeatedly vilified journalists.

For example, Ramos wrote in his @EricHartleyFrnd Twitter bio (which he named in apparent mockery of a former Capital columnist whom Ramos had sued unsuccessfully for defamation), “Dear reader: I created this page to defend myself. Now I’m suing the shit out of half of AA County and making corpses of corrupt careers and corporate entities.”Jarrod Ramos is not affiliated with any political party, and there is no evidence that he was politically motivated or that he acted on anyone’s orders. On the other hand, as Salon’s Paul Rosenberg has reported, he was influenced by the rhetoric and ideology of the racist alt-right. And like Hill, Ramos showed bold belligerence toward managerial elites whom he viewed as enemies.

Justice and public safety require that we consider the context, including multiple influences and possible triggers, when a suspect faces mass murder charges. Therefore, it is fair and necessary to ask whether President Trump’s demagoguery against journalists could trigger some lone nut to murder them. As researcher Chip Berlet has written, sociologists call such aviolent response to coded rhetoric “scripted violence” – and “heroes know which villains to kill.” Followers thus don’t require specific orders, but gather a sense of validation and righteousness in carrying out a violent campaign of societal purification against people designated as corrupting influences.

This suspect had a simmering feud for seven years with the Capital, its former publisher and Eric Hartley, the former columnist whom he had sued unsuccessfully. Ramos created a website on which he posted documents and communications about his case, describing himself as an agent of “the Inquisition” and “a crusader” who answered to a “Higher Authority” than civil government and who meted out literal “carnage” to his foes.

Ramos wrote of his perceived enemies: "The authority that permits their power also stands poised to punish its abuse. Even kings must answer to God, and a modern day Inquisition is at hand. The potential judgement is no less severe; the carnage differs only in literal terms. As this search for Truth commences, a crusader they could not kill approaches."

His crusade targeted court officials as well as journalists, whom he considered dishonest. For example, Ramos tweeted a quote from German poet Paul Gerhardt: “When a man lies, he murders some part of the world.” Ramos concluded, “Time to slay some murderous shitbag esquires." In another tweet criticizing “inequity in the MD justice system,” he said: "Here's to Higher Authority hearing and #hurting."

To Ramos, defamation is a violation of common law but, more important, a violation of God’s law that is worthy of hellfire.

For example, he once tweeted: “Catholicism still says liars go to hell.”

He also tweeted, without attribution or citation, a quote from a 16th-century church court case: “Again, my unruly tongue, if it were not punished, it would not only set more of you on fire, but it would bolden others to do the like.” This quote is from a confession to defamation in Mitford v. Shaw, an ecclesiastical court case from 1569-70. Church courts in England had jurisdiction over cases of defamation when the plaintiff’s claim was not for money damages but for the correction of a sin. (Common law courts oversaw claims for money damages.) Church courts sentenced violators to do public penance, on pain of excommunication.

In the Mitford case, when the church court found Charles Shaw guilty of slander, he did penance by standing up in church, wearing linen apparel, and reading his confessional statement, which equates slander to murder, worthy of divine retribution.

Shaw stated, “I acknowledge thus to slander my Christian brother is an heinous offence, first towards God, who hath straightly forbidden it in his holy laws, accounting it to be a kind of murdering of my neighbor, and threatening to punish it with hellfire and the loss of the kingdom of heaven.”

Modern-day theocrats, such as Peroutka, would like to see ecclesiastical courts replace the American judicial system. At a 2016 Summer of Justice rally in Wichita, Kansas, which took place the same week as the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Peroutka called on his fellow Christian nationalists to “take dominion over these positions of civil authority” in order to “interpose” against laws that don’t square with their notion of God’s law.

Peroutka that the only valid laws are ones which adhere to this fundamentalist vision of the Constitution and the Bible. “What if the Congress did pass a law allowing abortion? And then what if a sitting president signed it and a sitting court validated it?” he asked. “Would it be the law? No, of course not.” Then he slung on his guitar and filmed the crowd for a for his new song, “Courts cannot make law.”

Near the end of the Summer of Justice, the anti-abortion group Operation Save America staged a kangaroo ” which declared that Supreme Court rulings on abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, marriage equality and the removal of government-sponsored prayer in schools were contrary to God’s law. Eight “judges” took turns reading “charges” against the Supreme Court and then declared their decisions “null and void.”

The judges included the Rev. Matt Trewhella, leader of the Milwaukee-based Missionaries to the Preborn, who had signed a statement in 1993 declaring that the murder of abortion providers was “justifiable homicide.” Convicted murderers Paul Hill and Michael Griffin later unsuccessfully used “justifiable homicide” defenses in their trials for killing abortion providers.

Ramos’ tweets make clear that in his theological view, journalists who had allegedly framed him and court officers who had supposedly lied about him were as guilty as murderers and would ultimately answer to God. He saw himself as an agent of divine retribution. He was not subtle about how he would punish the sin of defamation.

He tweeted: “Awaiting reprisal, death will be their acquisition.” This is a misquoted lyric from a thrash metal song by Slayer, “Raining Blood.” The actual line is: “Awaiting reprisal, death will be their acquittance.” The song ends with a vision of victims’ blood deluging a revenge-driven killer: “Raining blood from a lacerated sky, bleeding its horror, creating my structure. Now I shall reign in blood!”

“Ramos came to see himself as some kind of vigilante for righteousness, casting himself for example as a 'crusader' and gunning down innocent people in a newsroom," Political Research Associates analyst Frederick Clarkson told Salon. This vision was "not unlike the militaristic, millennial vision of Michael Hill,” he continued. “Last year [Hill] rallied what he calls the Southern Defense Force, which he envisions as not just a modern Confederate army but the ‘Army of the True Living God.’”

So it makes sense that Ramos, who has metaphorically casts himself as a Christian holy warrior, would identify with Peroutka, a dyed-in-the-wool theocrat who has argued that civil servants must disobey any laws believed to be contrary to God’s law. Ramos tweeted three times in defense of Peroutka, once to crow to Rema Rahman, a journalist at the Capital, about Peroutka’s 2014 election to the Anne Arundel County Council. He tweeted: “Peroutka won and you lost @remawriter. Get over it. You’re already going to Hell, so why not concern yourself with more relevant matters?”

He tweeted again to tell Rahman to “shut the fuck up” after she wrote a piece reporting that illegal robocalls might have helped put Peroutka’s campaign over the top. He said: “It's not your place, so shut the fuck up @capgaznews. Peroutka's columns don't get the pickled shit sued out of him.”

He also tweeted: “Why are they so obsessed about Peroutka @capgaznews?” He added the hashtag #CapDeathWatch.

Ramos, who nursed grievances against perceived injustices, and who had sued a newspaper for defamation, also identified with Donald Trump. In response to an opinion column in the Capital that questioned Trump’s qualifications for the presidency, he tweeted a warning: “Referring to @realDonaldTrump as ‘unqualified’ @capgaznews could end badly (again).” His tweet linked to a Wall Street Journal article about Trump's lawsuit against Univision, claiming breach of contract and defamation.

The next day, Ramos tweeted: “Fuck you, leave me alone,” and linked to a Maryland appellate court document upholding the dismissal of his defamation case against the Capital. It is reasonable to assume that this angry comment was directed at the journalists and newspaper who had bested him in court, and perhaps also at attorneys and judges.

The embittered suspect with a vendetta against a local newspaper the justice system had been simmering since 2011. What triggered him in 2018? I don’t know. But shortly before the massacre, two things happened that could have been factors.Three days before the shooting, Donald Trump had pointed out members of the news media at a big outdoor rally in South Carolina, demonizing them as “enemies of the people.” This is a phrase that demagogues throughout history, from the French Revolution to Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, have understood and used as an incitement to violence.A day later, Peroutka was defeated in his 2018 re-election bid, losing to a female candidate in the Republican primary.

The "Berserk" half of the Rosetta Stone

The other, seemingly unrelated element of Ramos' worldview is drawn from the world of anime, the source of his final, cryptic tweet, approximately three minutes before the shooting began. It was a peculiar expression he had used before: “Fuck you, leave me alone.” This world of manga and anime informed the suspect’s hero-versus-villain worldview and also the way he expressed it through language and religious symbolic imagery. While his tweets referenced mainstream sci-fi touchstones, such as "Star Wars" and "Star Trek," his primary influence was the universe of "Berserk," a blood-and-guts manga, anime and movie series that has also inspired several video games.

Ramos tweeted numerous references to "Berserk" characters, paraphrased quotes from them, and used symbolism drawn from the series. He described himself as playing a role in the world of "Berserk" and hinted that an understanding of its fictional world was key to understanding his “psyche.” Indeed, in a letter he wrote stating his intention of “killing every person present” in the Capital newsroom, he quoted from "Berserk." As mentioned above, he did so again in his final tweet before the shooting began.

Ramos tweeted to ask whether Eric Hartley, the former Capital columnist, was “Ordained to Be Murdered by the God Hand?” In "Berserk," the God Hand is a group of the five most powerful demons. The photo on Ramos' Twitter avatar was the face of Hartley, with a Berserk symbol pasted over it – a brand that marks victims for demonic sacrifice.

He tweeted, “Judge Nick doesn’t believe in the God Hand. I play a well-established part of that system by tweeting of it.” It appears that Ramos identified with the world of "Berserk" and saw himself as playing a part in it.

Ramos also marked former Capital Gazette publisher Thomas Marquardt -- whom he nicknamed "Evil Tom" -- with the demonic brand, in the banner image for the Twitter account @EricHartleyFrnd. To Ramos, the brand signified that it was "Open Season" to hunt and kill. He tweeted, "Another stooge @capgaznews says Evil Tom is going on his own terms? That mark on his head is called Brand of Sacrifice; or now, Open Season." He also tweeted a YouTube link to the song ” from the "Berserk" soundtrack.

He repeatedly referenced a vampire character from "Berserk," Nosferatu Zodd, and tweeted an image of Zodd. He tweeted: "If you think this man [wants to be] your friend, know this: when his ambition crumbles, death will come for you — a death you cannot escape." This is a paraphrased quote from Zodd, who said, “If you consider this man your true friend, and regard him as a brother, then know this. When this man's ambition crumbles, it is your destiny to face your death. A death you can never escape!”

Ramos also identified with "Berserk" characters on several other occasions. He tweeted, “I told you once. I will have my own kingdom. Nothing has changed.” This is a close paraphrase of a quote from the character Griffith, who said, “I told you once, I will get my own kingdom. Nothing has changed.”

He tweeted, “I'm Femto. I can also do whatever I want. I will have my own kingdom. I will choose the place you die," adding a link to a trailer for "Berserk." Griffith dies and is reborn as Femto, a member of the God Hand, who is undeterred by moral inhibitions. Femto becomes the spearheadof the God Hand’s schemes.

Ramos tweeted the anime cover art from "Berserk – The Golden Age Arc Movie Collection" on DVD, which features the protagonist Guts. He twice quoted Guts, a swordsman motivated by revenge whose left forearm is replaced by a prosthetic which can be fitted with a cannon. Guts kills many enemies, including his primary antagonist, Bishop Mozgus, who is a demon spawn with angelic wings. Before delivering the coup de grâce, Guts tells Mozgus, “If you meet your God, say this for me … Leave me the hell alone!”

The latter is one of the most popular quotes among "Berserk" fans. However, some translate the quote, or paraphrase it differently. For example: “If you meet your God, tell him to leave me the fuck alone!”

Or, as Ramos tweeted, some three minutes before the shooting: “Fuck you, leave me alone.” He then added another of his Twitter handles, @JudgeMoylanFrnd, which features the face of Charles Moylan, the judge who had dismissed his defamation case, marked with the brand of sacrifice.

Guts’ message for Mozgus to take to his god is a familiar trope in action movies, the sort of comment that a protagonist makes before dispatching a villain, such as “I’ll see you in Hell,” “See you on the other side,” or “Hasta la vista, baby.” However, this “Leave me alone” message is not meant for the people whom the protagonist is about to kill; it is for them to carry to their god.

In light of Ramos’ having previously tweeted this same language in anger at both the Capital and Maryland court officials, and that this closely tracks what Guts tells his primary antagonist before delivering the killing blow, Ramos was making clear his intent to kill. In the context of scripted violence, as when a politician uses his office to demonize journalists, individuals who view themselves as holy warriors or heroes motivated by a sense of grievance know which villains to kill.

Ramos, who represented himself in his defamation case against the Capital, insisted that he was sane and that he had not been merely fantasizing online about being a predator. He wrote on his website, "I’ve been learning law for a different kind of game. It’s no publicity stunt, nor clinical insanity, nor predatory Internet fantasy, but very dangerous indeed."

In the same document, he wrote, "Much like a life, what is the price of a name? Are these even two different questions?" Like the 16th-century English penitent who confessed to defamation in Mitford v. Shaw, calling it a kind of murder, Ramos equates the loss of his good name with the loss of a life. This is akin to the reasoning of those who kill abortion providers: If, according to their understanding of God’s law, abortion is murder, then those who provide abortions are subject to death. Likewise, if a theocrat believes defamation to be a kind of murder, then what is the penalty?

After years of build-up, Ramos became a self-righteous, avenging character he had invented for himself, and announced his intent to kill, writing to the newspaper’s former attorney and to Maryland court officials that he was on his way to the Capital newsroom “with the objective of killing every person present.” They received the letters after the massacre. In a letter to Judge Moylan, he wrote, “Welcome, Mr. Moylan, to your unexpected legacy: YOU should have died.” He signed off, “Friends forever, Jarrod W. Ramos.”

Here again, Ramos is quoting from Berserk.

Guts’ adoptive father Gambino blames him for the death of his wife. So he tries to kill Guts, while telling him, “You should have died.” In self-defense, Guts kills Gambino. But he feels guilty and conflicted about this deed. A recurring nightmare of an army of skeletons haunts him, their eyeless orbs glaring as they chant over and over, “You should have died.”

This message is not for the people whom the protagonist has killed, nor for the people he would have liked to kill. It is for Guts himself – a killer who felt justified but also conflicted and guilty even as he killed.

Ramos seems to be suggesting that, like the "Berserk" protagonist he referenced in his final tweet, he felt conflicted about killing. It appears that just prior to the mass murder, Ramos signaled his realization that, like Guts, he would feel guilty about it. This suggests that he knew right from wrong, and therefore supports the argument that, as Ramos himself has insisted, he was sane. While his final tweet indicates a rationale that he must defend himself from perceived oppression and injustice (“Leave me alone”), his letter to the judge indicates that he anticipates feeling haunted by the consciousness of guilt (“You should have died”).

Lessons learned

As our family members, friends and colleagues die in one mass shooting after another, we urge ourselves to understand what we could do differently as a society. Why did this suspect do what he did? Each time, we come away with at least as many questions as answers. I don’t claim to know the right questions, let alone the answers. We all have a lot of work to do. But I have learned a few things from my research into Jarrod Ramos’ world. One of them recalls Maya Angelou’s famous quote, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Ramos showed himself to the world before he acted. He collected a grab bag of grievances out of which he tried to forge a rationale, arguably a theology, that would give his revenge tale a transcendent meaning: It would be the story of his life. He revealed himself often; society chose not to see or was unable to, or at any rate did not take him seriously. He recognized this fact. After the mass murders, his letters reminded us all, “I told you so.”

Ramos' worldview is clearly derived from multiple, esoteric sources – sources he may not have accessed all by himself. This does not mean that he did not act alone; it does mean that he did not come to such sources as 16th-century ecclesiastical court records by himself. Someone pointed him in this direction. Ramos is probably not the only one who has been directed to such material in search of the will of God in the 21st Century and one’s role in God’s plan.

Ramos called himself “an arrogant auto-didact,” with reference to how he learned how to represent himself (however unsuccessfully) in court. There is a rich history on the far right of individuals -- including self-proclaimed “sovereign citizens” and theocrats advocating Higher Law -- who defend themselves by cobbling together supposed legal precedents, divine authority and ill-conceived justifications for illegal and sometimes violent acts.

There are also Christian nationalist think tanks, such as Michael Peroutka’s Institute on the Constitution,that peddle books and courses to self-taught advocates on how to “defend against those in opposition to God’s Word.” However out of the mainstream they may be, such people should be properly understood and taken seriously. They say what they mean; they mean what they say. When someone speaks out about meting out carnage in service to Higher Authority, let’s all pay attention.

Ignoring an injustice collector who views himself as the hand of God doesn’t work. Ignoring the women he harasses doesn’t work. Coddling him in the courts despite his overt law-breaking doesn’t work. Ignoring the multiple cultural influences that shape and validate his viewpoint doesn’t work.

When it comes to Jarrod Ramos in particular, however bizarre and convoluted his "Berserk"-influenced, alt-right worldview may seem, pay attention. There is much more we need to know about the profoundly anti-democratic origins of this man's violent history.

==

https://www.alternet.org/accused-annapolis-mass-shooter-left-trail-evidence-ties-him-alt-right

hen the identity of the apparent gunman in the massacre of five journalists in Annapolis, Maryland, was revealed, area resident John Hutson, a retired Navy admiral who is now a prominent consultant and writer, had a shock of recognition. The suspect, Jarrod Ramos, had contacted Hutson in March 2015, taunting him about his role in alerting law enforcement and thwarting a potential mass killer who threatened schoolchildren and Jews in far-away Montana.

That first individual in Montana, David Lenio, overflowed with hyperbolic threats, and Hutson’s efforts to stop him succeeded, as I reported at Salon, just after it happened. Ramos was more cryptic less overtly demonstrative—but in the end, far more deadlier. Both were somewhat enigmatic, angry loners, with an unmistakable affinity for the racist alt-right.

This article originally appeared in Salon.

“Jarrod Ramos was a lone nut who was not politically motivated, but he was politically influenced by the alt-right,” Hutson told Salon.  Researcher Fred Clarkson agrees. “Ramos and David Lenio seem to have been drawn into the orbit of far-right visions of anti-democratic violence, even as they seem to have ultimately acted on their own,” said Clarkson, a senior research analyst with Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank in Somerville, Massachusetts.

The only two politicians Ramos had tweeted about, according to Hutson, were Donald Trump and Michael Peroutka, a wealthy neo-Confederate funder turned Maryland county councilman. Hutson has written about Peroutka, as have I. Peroutka had major funding ties to former Alabama judge and U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore, as well to the League of the South, whose leader, Michael Hill, had written approvingly about plans to form paramilitary groups to fight a militarized “fourth generation” culture war, one of whose targets would be the media.

“To oversimplify, the primary targets will not be enemy soldiers;” Hill wrote, “instead, they will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elite without whom the engines of tyranny don’t run.”

Ramos first contacted Hutson through Twitter, the latter recalls, after "the Capital Gazette published a piece about how I had alerted the FBI about mass shooting threat suspect David Lenio,” Hutson said.

After Hutson tweeted about the story, Ramos tweeted a couple of disturbing responses, first asking “Were any school children intimidated?” then claiming that Lenio “had won”:

...

==

santa fe

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/hugh-hewitt-seriously-proposes-trench-coat-ban-stop-gun-violence-after-texas

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vox

Alek Minassian, the man who killed 10 people by driving a van down a busy street in Toronto on Monday, is a terrorist.

We know this because he told us so. On Tuesday afternoon, Facebook confirmed the authenticity of a post in his name, in which he pledged allegiance to something called the “Incel Rebellion.” This is not an organized militant group but rather an ideal developed by the so-called “incel” movement — an online community of men united by their inability to convince women to have sex with them. (“Incel” stands for “involuntarily celibate.”)

Some self-identified incels, as they call themselves, have developed an elaborate sociopolitical explanation for their sexual failures, one that centers on the idea that women are shallow, vicious, and only attracted to hyper-muscular men. They see this as a profound injustice against men like them, who suffer an inherent genetic disadvantage through no fault of their own. A small radical fringe believes that violence, especially against women, is an appropriate response — that an “Incel Rebellion” or “Beta [Male] Uprising” will eventually overturn the sexual status quo.

Minassian is not the first to turn these violent fantasies into reality. In 2014, a sexually frustrated man named Elliot Rodger killed six and wounded 14 in a shooting spree in Santa Barbara, California. He justified his actions in a lengthy and creepy manifesto sent to acquaintances and then widely shared online as retaliation against women as a group for refusing to provide him with the sex he is owed. This man has become a hero to many incels; the Toronto perpetrator praised him as the “Supreme Gentleman” (a term the California shooter coined for himself) in his Facebook post.

Only a tiny percentage of incels seem willing to turn to violence or terrorism, and the movement isn’t a threat on the level of an al-Qaeda or ISIS. But it’s a new kind of danger, a testament to the power of online communities to radicalize frustrated young men based on their most personal and painful grievances.

==

guaRDUK

Just seven weeks into 2018, there have been eight shootings at US schools that have resulted in injury or death.

Seventeen people have been confirmed dead in the latest shooting in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day.

Less than a month ago, a 15-year-old student opened fire at a high school in Kentucky, leaving two students dead and 18 injured. Other incidents have been grave, but on a smaller scale.

In early February, one student in Los Angeles was shot in the head, and another in the arm, when a gun concealed in a fellow student’s backpack went off.

...

==

https://everytownresearch.org/school-shootings/

In 2013, Everytown began tracking gunfire in schools and at college and universities — public reports that a firearm was discharged inside a school building or on school or campus grounds — and over the next three years identified 160 qualifying incidents, including fatal and nonfatal assaults, suicides, and unintentional shootings.

INTRODUCTION

In all, these incidents resulted in 59 deaths and 124 non-fatal gunshot injuries.

Regardless of the individuals involved in a shooting, or the circumstances that gave rise to it, gunfire in schools and at colleges and universities undermines the sense of security that all students should have in their learning environments. By tracking this data, Everytown hopes to begin a reasoned discussion about effective means to promote school safety.

Of shootings perpetrated by minors at primary and secondary schools and for which the source of the firearm was known, more than half of the kids obtained the gun at home — likely because an adult did not store it locked and unloaded.

Twenty-four shootings — nearly one in six — occurred after a confrontation or verbal argument intensified, because of the presence of a gun rather than in spite of it.

Incidents were classified as school shootings when a firearm was discharged inside a school building or on school or campus grounds, as documented by the press or confirmed through further inquiries with law enforcement. Incidents in which guns were brought into schools but not fired, or were fired off school grounds after having been possessed in schools, were not included.

THREE YEARS AND AT LEAST 160 SCHOOL SHOOTINGS

Everytown began tracking gunfire in schools and at colleges and universities because no one else was doing it. The U.S. Department of Education produces statistics annually on the number of students killed on-campus per year — approximately 15 homicides and 5 suicides annually. But they only track shootings at primary and secondary schools (not higher education institutions), do not distinguish between the weapons used, and omit shootings outside of regular school hours.1 To fill this gap, Everytown began documenting all incidents where a firearm was discharged on school property, relying on media reports and following up with local law enforcement and school officials when necessary.

Between 2013-15 Everytown identified 160 school shootings across 38 states. Nearly 53 percent of the identified shootings took place at K-12 schools, and 47 percent took place on college or university campuses.

In 95 incidents — over half — the perpetrator(s) intentionally injured or killed at least one other person with a gun. In eight of those incidents, the shooter then shot and killed him or herself; in 20 separate incidents, the shooter attempted or completed suicide without first attacking someone else. Twelve shootings were purely unintentional in nature, and in 33 other incidents, a gun was discharged but no one was injured.

The number of identified incidents was relatively stable over the three years with the exception of incidents in which a gun was fired on campus and no one was injured, which rose each year. It is possible that press coverage of those incidents became more comprehensive over the period of observation.

Regardless of the individuals involved in a shooting or the circumstances that gave rise to it, gunfire in schools undermines the sense of security that all students should have in their learning environments. There is evidence these shootings have long-term impacts on the school community as a whole: a recent analysis of school shootings found that those involving a homicide reduced student enrollment in the affected schools, and depressed students’ standardized test scores by nearly five percent.2

K-12 SCHOOL SHOOTINGS IN FOCUS

Between 2013 and 2015, an average of two school shootings took place at K-12 schools each month. Among shootings at K-12 schools in which the age of the shooter was known, 56 percent (39 of 70) were perpetrated by minors.

Many of the students who perpetrated these shootings had easy access to guns at home. In some cases investigators declined to comment on the source of the firearm because the incidents were under active investigation, but in the 24 incidents where the source of the firearm could be determined, 13 of the shooters (54 percent) used a gun they obtained from home.

This is consistent with an analysis of school-associated violent deaths between 1992-99 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found that 56 percent of students involved directly in a school-associated homicide or suicide used a firearm, and of those guns for which the source could be determined, 79 percent were obtained from the shooter’s home or that of a friend or relative.3

Unsecured firearms frequently make their ways to school. A recent press analysis found that nationwide, a child brought a gun onto school property almost daily during the academic school year.4 And a survey by the Department of Education found that, during the 2009-2010 school year, one in every thirty K-12 schools took serious disciplinary action against at least one student for use or possession of a firearm on school property.5

School shootings involving unsecured firearms brought from home included the following:

November 10, 2015 – Lecanto High School, Lecanto, Florida: During his morning English class, a 15-year-old boy walked to the front of the classroom, pulled out his father’s 9mm semi-automatic handgun, and shot himself in the head. He was taken to an area hospital in critical condition and survived.

August 25, 2015 – Hornsby Elementary School, Augusta, Georgia: An unidentified male third-grader brought his father’s gun to school, and while playing with the gun inside his desk, he unintentionally discharged the weapon and hit a female student sitting next to him, injuring her.

October 24, 2014 – Marysville Pilchuck High School, Marysville, Washington: Fifteen-year-old Jaylen Fryberg walked into the school cafeteria and shot five students, killing four, before fatally shooting himself. The gun used in the incident belonged to Fryberg’s father.

January 14, 2014 – Berrendo Middle School, Roswell, New Mexico: Mason Campbell, age 12, walked into his school gym and pulled out a 20-gauge shotgun that he’d taken from home. The boy opened fire on his fellow students, critically wounding an 11-year-old boy, seriously injuring a 13-year-old girl, and slightly wounding an adult staff member. A teacher persuaded the boy to put the gun down.

October 21, 2013 – Sparks Middle School, Sparks, Nevada: Shouting “Why are you laughing at me? Why are you doing this to me?” 12-year-old Jose Reyes fatally shot a teacher and wounded two other 12-year-old students with a 9mm semiautomatic Ruger handgun. His parents told investigators that the gun had been stored in an unlocked case on a shelf above the refrigerator.

January 10, 2013 – Taft Union High School, Taft, California: Sixteen-year-old Bryan Oliver walked into his science classroom with a 12-gauge Winchester shotgun that belonged to his brother, aimed at a 16-year-old classmate he said had bullied him, and fired a single shot that struck the boy in the chest, injuring him.

School Confrontations Lead to Shootings

Between 2013 and 2015, at least 14 shootings on college or university campuses — nearly a quarter of total documented incidents there — occurred after a confrontation or verbal argument intensified to gunfire. Among the shootings that occurred on college campuses after an altercation escalated:

October 9, 2015 – Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona: Following a fight outside of a dormitory shortly after midnight, 18-year-old freshman Steven Jones ran to his car, grabbed a handgun, and shot and killed freshman Colin Brough, and shot and injured three other students.

April 16, 2014 – Stillman College, Tuscaloosa, Alabama: After two students began arguing over a bet they had made over a video game, one pulled out a small caliber handgun and shot the other student twice in the torso. The victim was rushed to a hospital but did not die, and the other student turned himself in and was charged with attempted murder.

January 22, 2013 – Lone Star College, Houston, Texas: A confrontation that began when two young men bumped into each other in the doorway of an academic building ended when one fired at least 10 shots. Three people were wounded, including two students and a 55-year-old maintenance worker who was shot in the leg.

January 16, 2013 – Chicago State University, Chicago, Illinois: A fight broke out after a basketball game and spilled into the parking lot. In the confusion 17-year-old Tyrone Lawson was shot twice in the back, killing him. Two older men were later charged with the crime.

Last week, a Michigan man named Brandon Griesemer was arrested for threatening to kill CNN’s “fake news” anchors. In December of 2016, North Carolina resident Edgar Maddison Welch burst into a pizza restaurant near Washington with a rifle and fired off three rounds, in part because Jones and his staff had spent hours telling their followers the place was the center of a global child-sex ring.

Following Welch’s guilty plea last March, Jones begrudgingly and partially retracted his support for the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. His actions since, however, suggest he has no legitimate intention of cleaning up his act.

People have mocked the idea that Trump could become a dictator. What's clear is that many people he likes are telling him to become one.

Matthew Sheffield

AN

nb early report

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/florida-gunman-who-killed-17-previously-trained-white-nationalist-group-report

man charged in this week’s Florida school shooting allegedly trained with a white supremacist group.

A spokesman for the right-wing group Republic of Florida claimed accused gunman Nikolas Cruz had been “brought up” by another member of the organization and took part in at least one training exercise in the Tallahassee area, reported ADL.

Jordan Jereb, who is believed to be the militia group’s leader, confirmed the association after self-described ROF members claimed on the online 4chan forum that Cruz had been a member.

The anti-government paramilitary group, which is only a few years old, describes itself as a “white civil rights organization fighting for white identitarian politics” and promotes the creation of a “white ethnostate.”

Jereb told ADL that his group had not directed Cruz to commit the shooting at his former school, and he said the ROF did not support his actio

stalk student at hs?

==

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/mass-shooters-are-linked-narcissism-and-aggressive-behavior-according-psychology

Mass shootings are only getting more frequent—the Kentucky school shooting this week is the 17th shooting in 2018, an outrageous number considering we’re only one month into the year. As activists and legislators rightfully fight battles to enact common sense gun control laws, social scientists are still exploring the other “why” behind the frequency of these horrific tragedies. One recent article published in American Behavioral Scientist finds a compelling new link between mass shooters and narcissistic, aggressivebehavior.

Findings by Brad Bushman, a professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University, contrast with the widely perceived notion that mass killers tend to be timid types, suffering from self-loathing and poor self-image. “It is a myth that aggressive and violent people suffer from self-esteem," Bushman told PsyPost. "They are much more likely to have narcissistic tendencies,” he explained. “Narcissists think they are special people who deserve special treatment. When they don’t get the respect they think they deserve, they lash out at others in an aggressive manner.”

As Eric Dolan writes for PsyPost, “Mass shootings are often preceded by the perpetrator being subjected to a ‘humiliating loss of face,’ such being fired from work or rejected by a romantic partner.” That certainly fits the profile of many of the violent men last year who gunned down their ex-partners and their families and friends after a breakup. More widely, it makes sense considering so many shooters are also guilty of domestic violence.

Obviously, Bushman's research doesn't imply that all narcissists have violent tendencies. But, as Bushman writes in his study, “After doing research on aggression and violence for over 30 years I have come to the conclusion that the most harmful belief people can have is the belief that they are superior to others (e.g., their religion, race or ethnicity, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, political party or ideology, school, city, state, country, etc. is best). When people believe they are superior to others, they behave very badly.”

Psychologists agree that we are stuck in a cultural catch-22: we know that many mass shooters kill because they want attention, but constant combined coverage of shootings on 24-hour television news, written media and radio give copycat killers exactly the attention they are often seeking. PsyPost notes “that the prevalence of mass shootings has risen in relation to the mass media coverage of them.” Bushman agrees that the media assists in perpetuating violence in this way. “One should avoid mentioning the names of mass shooters or showing their photos,” he advised.

H/T: PsyPost

LV paddock high roller at casino thus slower response?!

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/documentary-reveals-coverup-and-corruption-las-vegas-police-department-stephen

==

James Jackson reportedly acknowledged the crime to the New York Daily News, saying he wanted to discourage white women from getting romantically involved with black men.

“I didn’t know he was elderly,” Jackson told the paper. He added that he would have rather killed “a young thug” or “a successful older black man with blonds ... people you see in Midtown. These younger guys that put white girls on the wrong path.”

Vance’s statement said a crime like this is a reminder that New York’s “remarkable diversity” can’t be taken for granted. “We must celebrate it, protect it, and refuse to let violence and hate undermine the progress we have made as a city, a state, and a nation.”

Jackson’s lawyer, Sanford Talkin, declined to comment Monday, according to Newsday. His next court date is scheduled for April 13.

==

https://www.ft.com/content/3b73068a-d1ed-11e6-b06b-680c49b4b4c0

https://www.c-span.org/video/?424764-2/age-anger

Age Anger | Video | C-SPAN.org

https://www.c-span.org/video/?424764-2/age-anger

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1.

:{Mar 2, 2017 - :{Age of Anger:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Pankaj Mishra examines the catalysts in society, past and present, that give rise to ... Series. :{Book TV:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. More information about ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

'Age Of Anger' Chronicles Rise Of Populist Backlash : NPR

www.npr.org/2017/02/15/.../age-of-anger-chronicles-rise-of-populist-backlash

Feb 15, 2017 - NPR's Kelly McEvers speaks with Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger, about the relationship between populist movements and governments ...

Missing: booktv

Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra, reviewed. - Slate

www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/.../age_of_anger_by_pankaj_mishra_reviewed.html

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1.

:{Jan 25, 2017 - :(style="cursor:pointer;display:block;padding:7px 18px;outline:0px;background-color:#ffffff;;word-wrap:break-word"):}:What America’s violent transition to modernity has in common with the rise of Islamic extremism. ... “Islam needs a Reformation,” went a popular but bizarrely ahistorical refrain in the mid-2000s. ... How soon we forget: This could be the motto of Pankaj Mishra’s new book, :{Age:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: of ...

Missing: booktv

...

 Mishra, a columnist at Bloomberg Viewand the New York Times Book Review, wants to remind Westerners of our own painful, violent transition to modernity and to emphasize that much of the turmoil in the developing world is a symptom of the same ordeal. Contrary to the assertions of those pundits who evoke “a worldwide clash of civilizations in which Islam is pitted against the West, and religion against reason,” we are witnessing—in the chaos, conflict, and alarming extremism around the globe—a replay of our own history.

It’s a history we’ve chosen to erase from our collective memory, replacing it with a delusional cover story about the “peaceful convergence” of Western nations on “a benevolent Enlightenment tradition of rationalism, humanism, and liberal democracy.” But in reality, Mishra points out, “the history of modernization is largely one of carnage and bedlam.”

...

The  observation that militant Islamic fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon is not new; the popular historian Karen Armstrong has repeatedly written, most memorably in 2000’sThe Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, that fundamentalism arises in reaction to a rapidly changing world. Without that vertiginous change, it wouldn’t occur.

But in Age of Anger,Mishra further points out theresemblance between jihadis and lone-wolf terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh (who described “science” as his religion) and Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen.The same roiling passions that drive such young men have also fueled, Mishra argues, the rise of nationalist demagogues in India, Turkey, and Thailand. Most tellingly, the whole lot harkens back, with often eerie similarities, to the revolutionaries and revanchists that harrowed Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This is a framework that pushes aside conventional, familiar divisions of left and right to focus on the profound sense of dislocation and alienation that spawned (and still spawns) movements ranging from fascism to anarchism to nihilism. All of these responses are animated by an upsurge in“ressentiment,” which Mishra defines as “an existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness.” No Westerner can read that description in 2017 and not think of the election of Donald Trump and a campaign that seemed defined far less by what the candidates advocated than by who voters hated most. Not only is the rest of the world undergoing a bone-rattling allergic reaction to modernity, but America continues to reel from it as well.

==

https://www.splcenter.org/20140401/white-homicide-worldwide

Stormfront, the leading white supremacist Web forum, has another distinction — murder capital of the Internet.

A typical murderer drawn to the racist forum Stormfront.org is a frustrated, unemployed, white adult male living with his mother or an estranged spouse or girlfriend. She is the sole provider in the household. Forensic psychologists call him a “wound collector.” Instead of building his resume, seeking employment or further education, he projects his grievances on society and searches the Internet for an excuse or an explanation unrelated to his behavior or the choices he has made in life.

His escalation follows a predictable trajectory. From right-wing antigovernment websites and conspiracy hatcheries, he migrates to militant hate sites that blame society’s ills on ethnicity and shifting demographics. He soon learns his race is endangered — a target of “white genocide.” After reading and lurking for a while, he needs to talk to someone about it, signing up as a registered user on a racist forum where he commiserates in an echo chamber of angry fellow failures where Jews, gays, minorities and multiculturalism are blamed for everything.

Assured of the supremacy of his race and frustrated by the inferiority of his achievements, he binges online for hours every day, self-medicating, slowly sipping a cocktail of rage. He gradually gains acceptance in this online birthing den of self-described “lone wolves,” but he gets no relief, no practical remedies, no suggestions to improve his circumstances. He just gets angrier.

And then he gets a gun.

The hatemaker: Don Black, the former Alabama Klan leader who founded and still runs Stormfront, provides an electronic home and breeding ground for racists who have murdered almost 100 people in the last five years. To this day, he remains fiercely unapologetic, even as he rakes in donations from his forum members.

It is a myth that racist killers hide in the shadows. Investigators find that most offenders openly advocated their ideology online, often obsessively posting on racist forums and blogs for hours every day. Over the past two decades, the largest hate site in the world, Stormfront.org, has been a magnet and breeding ground for the deadly and the deranged.

There is safety in the anonymity of the Web, and comfort in the endorsement others offer for extreme racist ideas, argues former FBI agent Joe Navarro, who coined the term “wound collector.” “Isolation permits the free expression of ideas, especially those which are extreme and which foster passionate hatred,” Navarro, who helped found the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Division, wrote in 2011 in Psychology Today. “In this cocoon of isolation the terrorist can indulge his ideology” without the restrictions of the routines of daily life.

Then there is a trajectory from idea to action.

Though on any given day, fewer than 1,800 registered members log on to Stormfront, and less than half of the site’s visitors even reside in the United States, a two-year study by the Intelligence Report shows that registered Stormfront users have been disproportionately responsible for some of the most lethal hate crimes and mass killings since the site was put up in 1995. In the past five years alone, Stormfront members have murdered close to 100 people. The Report’s research shows that Stormfront’s bias-related murder rate began to accelerate rapidly in early 2009, after Barack Obama became the nation’s first black president.

For domestic Islamic terrorists, the breeding ground for violence is often the Al Qaeda magazine Inspire and its affiliated websites. For the racist, it is Stormfront.

Making Excuses

Investigators find that most offenders openly advocated their ideology online for lengthy periods while sucking up the hatred around them. Yet Stormfront’s founder, former Alabama Klan leader Stephen Donald “Don” Black, shrugs off responsibility for what he has wrought.

The homicidal trend began just four years after the site went up. On Aug. 10, 1999, Buford O’Neil Furrow, a known user of Stormfront, left his parents’ home in Tacoma, Wash., and drove to Los Angeles, where he shot and wounded three children, a teenage girl and an elderly woman at a Jewish day care center. Furrow then shot and killed a Filipino-American postal worker.

Buford Furrow (AP Images/ Laura Rauch)

Eight months later, on April 28, 2000, just days after exchanging E-mails and a phone call with a woman he met on the Stormfront “Singles” page, Richard Scott Baumhammers shot and killed his next-door neighbor, a 63-year-old Jewish woman. Next, he drove to the victim’s synagogue, shot out the windows and painted two large red swastikas on the front of the building. And then Baumhammers went on a shooting rampage, specifically targeting minorities and murdering five people. A sixth victim would die of his injuries several months later.

When Baumhammers’ connection to Stormfront was pointed out in media reports, Black denied any responsibility. He claimed Baumhammers “had been previously diagnosed as something worse than schizophrenic.” But Black did note that attention to the killings had more than doubled the number of “hits” to his website.

Richard Baumhammers (AP Images / Keith Srakocic)

Furrow, 37, and Baumhammers, 34, were both unemployed and still living with their parents at the time of the killings. The next Stormfront user to commit murder was also living with his parents. This one was in the ninth grade.

On April 19, 2002, Ian Andrew Bishop, a 14-year-old so-called “Stormfront Youth” killed his brother by striking him repeatedly in the head with a claw hammer, allegedly because he thought 18-year-old Adam Bishop was gay. “He said his brother was a faggot,” said a 15-year-old witness. “He said he wanted to kill his parents, too.”

Bishop’s activity on Stormfront included downloading and distributing Third Reich images while promoting his racist views in the neighborhood. Described as a “racist bully with neo-Nazi views,” Bishop’s attorney cited his activities on Stormfront as evidence Ian was “troubled” and “drawn to the skinhead philosophy.”

Again, Black denied any responsibility in the Bishop case, claiming “Bishop killed his older brother because he thought his parents liked him better. But we’re ‘responsible’ for that too,” he added sarcastically, “since he was a ‘good kid’ before visiting SF.”

Ian Andrew Bishop (Tribune-Review / AP Images / Scott Spangler)

The Body Count Skyrockets

James “Yankee Jim” Leshkevich

The murders would keep on coming, their frequency accelerating. On Feb. 19, 2008, James “Yankee Jim” Leshkevich, who had posted more than 5,000 times to Stormfront in the preceding four years, beat and strangled his wife to death in the living room of the home they shared in West Hurley, N.Y. Then he hung himself.

Similarly, a little over two years later, on April 21, 2010, Curtis Boone Maynard shot and killed his ex-wife outside her Lake Jackson, Texas, home. He then shot his 16-year-old stepdaughter in the face, severely wounding her, before killing himself during a subsequent police chase. Maynard had posted almost 900 times on Stormfront before he was banned for publishing personal information about a black woman who had voted as a juror to acquit a black murder suspect.

In April 2009, a few months after Obama’s inauguration and less than four hours after logging on to his Stormfront account, Richard Andrew Poplawski ambushed, shot and killed three Pittsburgh, Pa., police officers, and wounded a fourth.

Richard Poplawski (AP Images/ Jason Minick)

Poplawski, 22, was unemployed and living with his mother when an early morning argument escalated between the two and resulted in her calling 911. Poplawski waited just behind the front door with his AK-47 assault rifle and shot and killed the first three police officers who responded. Another officer was injured before a SWAT team shot and wounded Poplawski and then took him into custody.

Fifteen weeks before the murders, Poplawski, who went by the name “Braced for Fate” on Stormfront, wrote that he kept his AK-47 “in a case within arms reach.” He’d been a registered Stormfront member for 20 months prior to the murders, but with a Web footprint going back to at least 2001. He started on pro-Second Amendment forums, moved to conspiracy pages and finally landed at Stormfront, where he had at least two user names, “Braced for Fate” and “p0p633.” An aspiring skinhead, Poplawski posted his “Iron Eagle” Nazi tattoo under his p0p633 user name in 2007, about 16 months before the killings.

The worst mass murder was still to come.

Anders Breivik

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik set off a truck bomb in front of a government building in downtown Oslo, Norway. The blast killed eight and injured hundreds more. Dressed as a police officer and armed with a Ruger Mini-14 assault rifle and a Glock pistol, Breivik then boarded a ferry to Utoya Island, where a Workers Youth League summer camp was being held. There, Breivik shot and killed 69 people, most of them teenagers.

When he was taken into custody by a SWAT team without incident, Breivik calmly told authorities that he blamed the government for allowing Norway to be “invaded” by Muslims.

At the time of the killings, Breivik had been a registered member on Stormfront for almost three years. Under the username “year2183,” Breivik introduced himself in October 2008. In one post he wrote, “Feminism, corrupt treacherous politicians, a corrupt treacherous media, pro-immigration Jewry and a corrupt academia is the hole in the ‘dike,’ while Muslims are the water flooding in.” After a rant about Islamic enemies, Breivik was warmly welcomed by close Black confidant Freeland Roy Dunscombe, or “TruckRoy”: “glad to have you here.”

Hours before he began his terror campaign, Breivik E-mailed a copy of his racist manifesto to two other influential Stormfront members, Billy Joe Roper (see related story, p. XX) and Timothy Gallaher Murdock, who runs the racist WhiteRabbitRadio.net. In his manifesto, Breivik claimed he was banned from Stormfront, though a search shows no suspension. Breivik later admitted he was not removed as a registered member.

“I was never kicked out of Stormfront,” he said last September. “Instead, I attacked them in the compendium in order to protect them … [as] an army of leftist journalists otherwise would strike hard.”

Breivik’s large purchases of chemicals before the attack had been reported to the authorities, who took no heed because he claimed he was a farmer. If they had looked at Breivik’s posts on Stormfront, they might have felt differently. His racist vitriol and posts suggesting overthrowing his government almost certainly violated Norway’s laws against hate speech. Following the pattern for so-called “lone wolves,” he had broadcast his violent intentions ahead of time on Stormfront.

A year later, in August 2012, after Breivik was convicted and sentenced to 21 years in prison, a Stormfront thread announced the sentence and included a photograph of Breivik defiantly raising his fist in the air. Some posters lauded Breivik as a “hero” and a “P.O.W.”

Black provided his own commentary on Breivik. “Unfortunately, I happened upon this thread this morning, just before our radio show. This makes me want to pull the plug on this place and never look back,” Black wrote, before laying out a stark assessment of those on his site: “We attract too many sociopaths.”

Monetizing Murder

Although Stormfront posters eventually grew critical of Breivik’s actions, the public interest the attack generated on the site resulted in the highest number of registered users ever on the forum. In the 24 hours after the killings, 4,481 members were online, a record that stands to this day. Alexa, which monitors Web traffic, shows that Stormfront visits spiked globally on the day of the Oslo attacks. This means money to Black, whose banner ads pay him by the click.

A year after the Oslo terrorist attacks, in mid-summer 2012, more media came Black’s way from two more mass killings and a bizarre mutilation murder attributable to registered members.

J.T. Ready (Corbis / Natalie Keyssar)

On May 2, 2012, less than six hours after logging in and posting on Stormfront, Jason Todd Ready shot and killed four people, including an infant, before killing himself. Ready, 39, was unemployed and living with his estranged girlfriend, Lisa Mederos. He shot and killed her, her daughter Amber and her 15-month-old granddaughter, Lily. Ready then shot and killed Amber’s 24-year-old fiancée, Jim Hiott, before turning his gun on himself. Ready had made 678 posts on Stormfront in the two years prior to his death, often raising funds for his armed anti-immigrant militia group, U.S. Border Guard.

Luca Rocco Magnotta (FEREX / AP Images / Rex Features)

Also in May, Black was taking media heat over a Canadian murder suspect known as Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, who had posted on Stormfront under two usernames in the 12 months prior to the torture and dismemberment killing of a Chinese immigrant. In September 2011, eight months before the murder, Magnotta complained: “It was unfare [sic] that every country in the world was able to have their heritage protected, blacks get their own countries, chinese [sic] get their own countries ... if white people want their own countries then we are denied that right.” Magnotta, whose real name is Eric Clinton Kirk Newman, also followed Black on Twitter.

Wade Michael Page (Contributed)

Three months after the Magnotta murder, on Aug. 5, 2012, Wade Michael Page shot and killed six people at a Sikh temple, including an 84-year-old woman, and wounded four others before killing himself during a shootout with police. Page, a longtime racist skinhead, had been a registered user on Stormfront, under various user names, for more than 10 years.

Motivational Culpability

A haggard-looking Don Black appeared on a CBS News affiliate’s newscast three days after the Sikh Temple killings. While attempting to minimize Page’s activities on Stormfront, Black said Page’s actions were “counterproductive” but then added, “We think the Sikhs should be back in Punjab.”

As Alexa Internet Inc. shows, though Stormfront’s online popularity had been in a gradual decline over the previous two years, the August 2012 Sikh temple killings resulted in one of the highest and most significant spikes of the year for the online forum (there also was a notable and rapid decline following the Sikh temple killings). And Stormfront appears to have benefited financially from the publicity that summer. Monthly donations to the site rose from $6,545 in August 2012, to $8,028 in September to $10,032 in October of that year.

A strong argument could be made that Stormfront is, in effect, monetizing murder. And Black’s personal history undermines the argument that he had no reasonable way to know how his website and the hatred he hawks was attracting and motivating a new breed of unstable, sociopathic killers. That ugly reality has been a recurring theme in Don Black’s life for almost half a century.

A Lifetime of Hate

In many respects, Don Black resembles the prototypical killers that seem to be drawn to Stormfront. Black, 60, is a frustrated, unemployed white adult male living with an ideologically estranged wife, Chloe Hardin Black, who has publicly denounced the racist movement. She is the sole provider in the household.

Black spends hours every day online, utterly convinced of the supremacy of his race while expressing frustration with the inferiority of his outcomes. He occasionally complains about the sociopaths Stormfront seems to attract or laments that his only son, Derek, recently publicly denounced white supremacy.

A young Don Black (seen here in Klan robe) has known most key racist leaders in his life, including David Duke (in tie); Jerry Ray, the brother of Martin Luther King assassin James Earl Ray; and Joseph Paul Franklin, a racist serial killer who was executed last year. (The Tennessean / Jimmy Ellis)

Black’s 46-plus years of involvement with the racist movement started at the age of 15, when, like the fratricidal Ian Andrew Bishop, he began distributing racist fliers around his high school. That he was involved with a subculture of sociopaths would become quite obvious, given who Black met while on his very first “movement” road trip at the age of 16.

In the summer of 1969, Black traveled to a World Union of National Socialists meeting in Arlington, Va., in the back seat of a beat-up Chevy Chevelle, sitting next to a 19-year-old James Clayton Vaughn for more than 12 hours. Neo-Nazi and soon-to-be Klan leader David Duke was driving. As Black recollects, Vaughn was the very first person he met in the “white nationalist” movement to which he would devote his life.

Joseph Paul Franklin (AP Images/ Al Behrman)

Vaughn, who would change his name to Joseph Paul Franklin, later became probably the most prolific racist serial killer in U.S. history, targeting interracial couples and killing as many as 20 people in several states between 1977 and 1980 (he was convicted of eight murders). Franklin was executed last year.

Black’s exposure to the worst of the racist movement continued the following year. He spent his 17th birthday in the hospital with a bullet wound in his chest after being caught trying to steal the mailing list of the racist National States Rights Party. The shooter, Jerry Ray, was the brother of Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray. Jerry Ray was prosecuted for attempted murder but acquitted after claiming self-defense. Black pleaded guilty and received one year of probation.

Jerry Ray

By 1975, Black was a rising leader in the Alabama wing of David Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a position he kept for the next 12 years. But his ambitions went beyond the robe and hood. On April 27, 1981, Black was arrested with nine other white supremacists as they prepared to board a yacht to invade the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica, oust its black-run government, and transform it into a “white state.”

Black’s resulting three-year federal prison sentence was time well spent taking classes in computer programming. He eventually set up a dial-up bulletin board service for the radical right and, in March 1995, that service evolved into Stormfront.org, the Web’s first and best-known hate site. Black saw clearly that with this new technology, white supremacists might finally bypass the mainstream media and political apparatus he felt had long restricted the racists’ message.

“The potential of the Net for organizations and movements such as ours is enormous,” Black told a reporter in 1996. “We’re reaching tens of thousands of people who never before had access to our point of view.”

He was right.

In January 2002, Stormfront had a mere 5,000 members. But only a year later, membership had more than doubled to 11,000; and a year after that, in early 2004, it had reached 23,000. By this year, membership had hit about 286,000 registered users, though most were inactive. These numbers didn’t include the many people who simply read Stormfront postings without actually joining up (becoming a member allows one to post messages and also to view personal information.) Stormfront also became home to other hate sites that shared its servers and advertised their wares.

After a life basically monetizing ethnic hatred and death, Don Black, who walks with a cane from a 2008 stroke, has become increasingly philosophical. On the Stormfront page eulogizing serial killer Franklin, he wrote: “I may be the only person here who actually knew Franklin. I’ve been contemplating how my life would have been different had he remained the only ‘White Nationalist’ I’d ever met. I’d have quit in disgust. I had just turned sixteen, and maybe I could have then led a ‘normal’ life.”

With nearly 100 bias-related homicides attributable to registered members of his site since 2009, a great many “normal lives” are no longer being led.

Still, Black remains defiant. The theme song for his daily radio program on the Rense Radio Network is a remake of Johnny Cash’s “I Won’t Back Down.”

His wife, his son, and those who cared for the victims of racist killers connected to Stormfront probably wish he would.

==

A Kansas man was charged Feb. 23 with shooting to death an Indian man and wounding a second Indian man and an American in a bar. Federal authorities are investigating the incident as a possible hate crime. (Reuters)

Authorities in Kansas filed first-degree murder charges against a man accused of opening fire in a bar there, killing one Indian man, injuring two other people and causing fears about bigotry to reverberate across the globe.

According to witness accounts, the gunman reportedly told two of the people who were shot — both Indian men who work for Garmin, the technology firm —to “get out of my country” before opening fire and had also used racial slurs during the Wednesday evening shooting.

Multiple law enforcement agents launched an investigation into the deadly shooting inside Austin’s Bar and Grill in Olathe, a city about 20 miles southwest of Kansas City. Even as authorities said they had not yet identified a motive for the attack, relatives of the Indian men said they feared the shooting was connected to a climate of fear and xenophobia in America.

The father of one of the people injured pointed to the election of President Trump, who has routinely described a threat posed to Americans from people outside the country’s borders, and pleaded with parents in India “not to send their children to the United States.”

The White House responded by calling the link to Trump’s rhetoric absurd, according to Reuters.

==

AP

...he man, Adam Purinton, 51, of Olathe, made his first appearance in court Monday via video link. He has been charged with first-degree murder and first-degree attempted murder. According to witnesses, Purinton yelled "get out of my country" at two 32-year-old Indian men, Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani, before he opened fire at Austin's Bar and Grill in the Kansas City suburb on Wednesday evening.

Kuchibhotla was killed and Madasani injured. The two had come to the U.S. from India to study, and they worked as engineers at GPS-maker Garmin. A third patron, Ian Grillot, 24, was wounded when he tried to intervene.

After the shooting, Purinton, who is white, drove 70 miles east to an Applebee's restaurant in Clinton, Missouri, where he made the shocking admission to the bartender.

In the 911 call, the bartender told the dispatcher a man had come into the bar and said he'd done something "really bad" and was on the run from the police.

"He asked if he could stay with me and my husband, and he wouldn't tell me what he did. I kept asking him, and he said that he would tell me if I agreed to let him stay with me," the bartender said. "Well, I finally got him to tell me and he said, like, that he shot and killed two Iranian people in Olathe...."

Authorities have declined to discuss a possible motive for the attack or to say if they were investigating it as a hate crime. But the incident has raised concern about the treatment of immigrants, who feel targeted by President Donald Trump's promises to ban certain travelers, build a wall along the Mexico border and put "America first."

During Monday's hearing, Johnson County District Judge Charles Droege appointed public defender Michael McCulloch to represent Purinton. McCulloch declined to comment on the case.

Purinton is jailed on $2 million bond and his next court appearance is set for March. 9.

Andy Berthelsen, a neighbor of Purinton's for the past 15 years, told The Associated Press that Purinton had been in rapid decline since the death of his father about 18 months ago. The two had exceptionally close, Berthelsen said.

Always a drinker, Purinton became "a drunken mess" after his father's death and bounced from one menial job to the next. Berthelsen said he's never heard him make a racist remark or talk politics. He said he doesn't believe the shooting stemmed from hatred, and that it likely resulted from Purinton's physical and mental deterioration.

"This is someone who's gone downhill very quickly," Berthelsen said.

The University of Kansas Health System released a video Sunday of an interview with Grillot, of Grandview, Missouri, who is recovering after a bullet went through his right hand and into his chest.

Grillot said he had to do something because there were families and children in the bar when the gunfire erupted. Grillot, said he is grateful that the attack is bringing the community together and that it is "awesome honestly to be able to give people a hope that not everybody hates everybody."...

==

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/police-search-man-shot-sikh-seattle-suburb-45912961

...Authorities said a gunman approached the Sikh man, 39, and shot him in the arm as he worked on his car in his driveway in Kent, city of about 125,000 people some 20 miles south of Seattle. The FBI will help investigate the shooting, authorities said.

Kent Police Chief Ken Thomas said his department is investigating the shooting as a hate crime. He said that no arrests have been made yet but that he did not believe anyone was in imminent danger.

"This is a top priority investigation, and we are doing everything possible to identify and arrest the suspect," Thomas said in an email, adding that residents should "be vigilant" but not let the shooting hurt their quality of life.

The FBI's Seattle office said in a statement Sunday that it is "committed to investigating crimes that are potentially hate motivated," The Seattle Times reported.

The shooting comes after an Indian man was killed and another wounded in a recent shooting at a Kansas bar that federal agencies are investigating as a hate crime after witnesses say the suspect yelled, "Get out of my country."

Friday night's shooting was on the minds of many who gathered at a Sikh temple in Renton on Sunday morning. Women in colorful saris and headscarves and men wearing turbans sat on the floor on opposite sides inside the worship space.

As they entered and left the services, many expressed fear that one of their own was targeted and said they're scared to go to stores and other public places. Some said they have noticed an uptick in name-calling and other racist incidents in recent months. Still others expressed hurt and disbelief at the lack of understanding and ignorance.

"Sikhism teaches about equality and peace," said Sandeep Singh, 24. "It's sad to see that's what it has come to," he said of the violence. "This is our country. This is everyone's country."

...

==

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/aurora-shooting-survivors-paying-cinemarks-legal-bill

==

may not count as mass shooter but Beck or Limbaugh encouraged shooing of abortion doctors/ government official shot at front door fatally my soverignty militia wacko?

Beck

ch 17: violence  Poplawski has posted video w/ gb/rp fema on stormfront

clock ticking and someone will do something stupid [shoot ppl} but then rolls back into death panels 247

advoc killing pelosi, rangel and m moore; has claimed on air obama admin trying to kill hi/ gb 248  july 09 thugocracy 249

greg guisti threatened pelosi if she voted for health care 249 fox watcher

gb calledpelosi" really dangerous ppl" like commie, socialist and eco terrorist 250  pelosi and BO have thought about picking up a gun b/c maybe tired of evolution and want revo 250  some of ppl around BO have "engaged in bomb-throwing" [of a bathroom?]

summer of 09 town halls: "there is a coup going on,  There is a stealing of America...through the guise of an election but they lie to us the entire time...grab power in every way they can, and God help us in an emergency" 252  pretended to pour gas on guest

suggest secession mult times; TX  moat of fire civil war  demos putting a gun to Am head: pass bill or die

cass s and john holdren: Between health-care and the envir those two men, in the wrong conditions, will be responsible for many, many death" 254..."they are taking you to be slaughtered"

follow the Pols to Safeway, look them in whites of their eyes"  a pt coming where all (peaceful?) options exhausted

anti-God forces are aligning themselves  all over the world and here at home" 255  "bullets in our backs by our politicians" 255  one nut like tim mcv could ruin all

every time want to spk shut down by pol correct, tho accused of starving kids and racists 256

Tides fdn hardest topic to explain (took 4 nights and black bd)  

ch 16 912  new book The Plan had rally on mall on anniv of i have a dream speech" appropriate' as he will finish the job; will have confs around the country and assemble team of advisors // skousen  Bus labl GB show and rally for Am, on armed forces radio jessica lynch family appeared ; bachmann his radio guest; he offered to raise $ for her 233  april 15 09 TP at Alamo w/ ted nugent  actor dressed at paine read; gb word thy would not dare pearl harbor, WTC pentagon, pass biggest bill in hist

dc rally claimed univ said 1.7 mil

linc mem rally Special Ops Wounded Warrior' gb said bene, but they actually on hook for costs 243  Palin guest to honor troops

ch 15 race; rev wright "black liberation theology' vj black nationalists (white are poisoning blk ppl)

david horowitz: blacks are human shield of democ party , slavery, segregation, of race preferences " 227-8

ch 14 coughlin : sovereignty

Brooks says race baiting of gb and rl = fr C, taking over gop. C small town priest from MI avg 10 mil (up to 40) 208  fr c used a variety of techniques sentinet, anger, patriot religious 210 teary eyed said FDR cd be dictator if wants to 210 opposed world ct, part of L of Nations hinted at apocalyptic civil war

ch 13; 32 czars: u of Penn/ factcheck.org 9 conformed by senate, 8 not appt by pres, 7 in jobs created by prev admins  (b2 had 35)

numerous historical facts wrong (TJ create marines to deal w/ Islamic pirates (actually Adams for French pirates)

gb claimed BO gave 2b$ loan Brazil oil co; urban legend debunked by factcheck 9 mos before: actually US Export-Imp bank, elf funded, prelim commit approved by B2 ppt board; loan was to buy US oil gear; soros had reduced his stake 193-4 but picked up by Indiana sen Dan Burton 194

your PC can be grabbed by feds if you log into clash for clunkers 196

lied about view ladies on amtrak, denied he was invest reporter or reporter, but a commentator, so no fact checking 197

union supporters are for one world gov 198   acorn wrote health care bill, apollo wrote stim seiu wrote immig law and consults on afghan mil strategy 200  smart grid"could take critical information out of your house" 202

at fox, co split on gb damage to corp rep; ailes sometimes crits "negative tone"  202

ch 12 fema concentration camps (part of one world conspiracy;177  Ron Paul said guest FEMA very powerful and overrule local authorities in emergency 179 ollie said by newspaper  miami herald to have secret plan, and nixon has plan to round up blacks in case of martial law (panthers?) 11 m21 in "assembly ctrs or relocation camps " 181 ollie plan 86'd and denied '88 xfile movie revived

Monckton cop15: "a treaty will be signed that will, for the first time, create a world government with powers to intervene directly in the economy and in the environmental affairs of individual nations" cm 183  annex 1 Para 38  John Bolton said he wd not sign such a doc

WND:  may 18 2010 gb on fox and friends touted one world; 4 days later praise from Henry lamb (sovereignty Int'l) on WND 184 cites World Res Inst and UN Conf on Hu Settlements;  James Meigs for Pop Mech 6 april Who blgs FEMA conc camp; video by militia claimed gas chambers and advocated "march on Washington and start executing senators" 185  "atrocities going on in camp? yes  next day "reveal" was it was North Korea; when krigman called him on it, gb shucked and jived w/ "can't debunk" claim 186 but then returned to touting totalitarianism 187

ch 10 scalps: van jones named adviser to CEQ july 23 09 gb tried to prove BO wants race reparations; vj spent 6 mos in jail, came out a commie, he found the eco-movement and decided green is the new red 139  5 days later  gb said BO had a deep hatred of white ppl

aug 24 vj is "czar #1" ~ oil co's, a "community organizer" [oh no] Color of change group (co fdr vj, but he'd since left) called for advertiser boycott of gb; in 9 mos vj name used 435x long after he quit p 140. gb said after r king riots, j radical for 10 yrs, founding STORM into mao, arrested at wto

gb req dirt on vj and got video saying only Nat Am belong here, and gop asshoes; i can be too, gotta get uppity 144  apology, also recant? petition truther

next days resigned "smear campaign , lies, distortions to distract and divide" l145 in historic fight, can't ask colleagues to defend; vj gloating for a year

green collar economy book espouses capitalism 142-3  after j quit, gb hitlist ("do not link before burning to disc" [?]: cass sunstein, mark lloyd and carol browner 148  john holdren of harvard kennedy school  dir WH office of sci and techn policy 150  30 yo book espoused male contraception 1977 ecoscience textbook tho gb said forced abortions and chems in water 151  the book actually said some gov might resort to such methods if smarter and milder meas not undertaken 1st, and opposed invol pgm 151

2 gop sen put holds on sust nom, but approved 57-40 155

; claimed dubiously that Const could allow compuls abortion in emergency . gb then extended distortion. gb gave up and went after harv law prof sunstein (also on type by WND, //vj)  he actually said opposite on animal rights that gb said "most dang man in Am" 155

browner hardcore socialist nat rev guest 156  part of Commiss for Sust World (so was BP PM's) but afil w/ Socialist Int'l

acorn "weasels' trying to start brothels w/ 13 yo 168

lloyd marxist trying to silence free sp, un Am 156-7 FCC

anita dunn attacked gb, so she was proved a commie by hs speech (she contrasted mao to mo teresa)

NEA Yosi Sergant (breitbart posted vid of him asking artists to make msg promoting volunteerism (health care , ed , environ

then maurice strong

ch 9:  woodrow wilson spawn of satan: WW jaile 2-3 K ppl for speaking out (vs WWI?], actually 100, including E Debs; "czars" go back to WW

conspiracy: seui, acorn, apollo initiative , soros van j, valerie jarrett all inspired by richard cloward and frances piven [who?]weather ugd

ch 8 hitler: gore not rounding up jews, but same tactic 120 goal now is globalization carbon tax, UN running the world, in 30's goal was get rid of jews and have global gov't 120

==

http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/hate-groups/bf/

UK brexit:

2015 was an extraordinary year of over-exposure in the media and yet, as with the year before, the party reaped few rewards. In part, this is down to the temperamental nature of its leadership and an inability to commit to serious political work.

Neither Golding nor Fransen seem clear or in agreement on where the party is heading. Having outshone both the competition in the British National Party (BNP) and the English Defence League (EDL) neither is certain which direction the group should take. The decision to not fight the General Election as a political party but to instead to offer their uniformed services to UKIP was both a financial and face-saving decision.

==

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Isla_Vista_killings

6 kia UCSB

dad 2nd unit hunger games

Earlier incidents

In July 2011, Rodger followed a couple he was jealous of out of a Starbucks in Goleta and threw coffee on them.^[16]:p.87 In a later incident, he splashed his latte on two girls sitting at a bus stop in Isla Vista for not paying attention to him.^[16]:p.100 In July 2012, Rodger purchased a Super Soaker, filled it with orange juice, and used it to spray a group playing kickball at Girsh Park.^{[16]:pp.106–107[78]}

Referring to an incident that occurred on July 20, 2013,^[78] Rodger "wrote that he tried to shove girls at a party over a ten-foot ledge after being mocked but failed," and instead other boys pushed him over it. He said that he "felt a snap in [his] ankle, followed by a stinging pain" and "tried to get away from there as fast as [he] could". Realizing that he left his sunglasses at the party, Rodger returned to retrieve them but the "same people he had tangled with before began mocking him and calling him names, then dragged him into the driveway to beat him up". One of Rodger's neighbors said that "he saw Rodger come home, crying" and said that Rodger claimed that he was going to kill the men involved, and "kill myself".^[74] Rodger told investigating officers that he had been assaulted, but they determined that he might have been the aggressor.^[20][78][79] He wrote in his manifesto that the incident was the final trigger for his planning of the attack.^[78]

On January 15, 2014, Rodger accused his roommate Cheng Yuan Hong of stealing his candles; he performed a citizen's arrest and called 9-1-1. Hong was charged with petty theft and pleaded guilty to the charge.^[80][81] Hong was one of Rodger's stabbing victims.^[6]

On April 30, 2014, about three weeks before the attack,^[36] Rodger's parents contacted police after becoming alarmed by his behavior and YouTube videos. He wrote in his manifesto that he had already planned the killings and purchased his guns by that time. The officers who interviewed him at his apartment would have found the weapons if they had conducted a search of his bedroom.^{[16]:p.134[26][82]} Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown later said that the deputies "determined he did not meet the criteria for an involuntary hold" and that Rodger told them "it was a misunderstanding" with his parents.^[69]

Manifesto and online posts

Rodger's 107,000-word manifesto was titled "My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger".^[83] He e-mailed this manifesto to 34 individuals,^[9]:p.7 including his therapist,^[2][39] his parents, and some of his other family members,^[84] former schoolteachers, and childhood friends.^[85] In the manifesto, Rodger claimed he originally sought to carry out his attack on Halloween of 2013, but reconsidered because "[t]here would be too many cops walking around during an event like Halloween, and cops are the only ones who could hinder my plans".^[16]:p.110

In his last YouTube video, titled "Elliot Rodger's Retribution", he complained of being rejected by women while envying sexually active men, and described details of his upcoming attack,^[38] laying out his motives and plans.^[34] In the wake of the killings, the video was deleted from Rodger's account, but copies were repeatedly re-posted by other users.^[24][86] In the video, he says:

Well, this is my last video, it all has to come to this. Tomorrow is the day of retribution, the day in which I will have my revenge against humanity, against all of you. For the last eight years of my life, ever since I hit puberty, I've been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires all because girls have never been attracted to me. Girls gave their affection, and sex and love to other men but never to me.^[87]

I'm 22 years old and I'm still a virgin. I've never even kissed a girl. I've been through college for two and a half years, more than that actually, and I'm still a virgin. It has been very torturous. College is the time when everyone experiences those things such as sex and fun and pleasure. Within those years, I've had to rot in loneliness. It's not fair. You girls have never been attracted to me. I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It's an injustice, a crime, because... I don't know what you don't see in me. I'm the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman.^[87]

He wrote in "My Twisted World" that being of mixed race made him "different from the normal fully white kids".^[19][74] On one online forum, he said that he opposed interracial dating and made several racist posts regarding African American, Hispanic, South Asian and East Asian peoples, stating that seeing men of these ethnic groups socializing with white women "makes you want to quit life".^{[16]:p.87[74][88]} In one online post, Rodger wrote:

Full Asian men are disgustingly ugly and white girls would never go for you. You're just butthurt that you were born as an Asian piece of shit, so you lash out by linking these fake pictures. You even admit that you wish you were half white. You'll never be half-white and you'll never fulfill your dream of marrying a white woman. I suggest you jump off a bridge.^[88]

In his manifesto, Rodger wrote:

How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from Britisharistocracy. He is descended from slaves.^[16]:p.84

In the manifesto, he outlined some of his plans:

On the day before theDay of Retribution, I will start the First Phase of my vengeance: Silently killing as many people as I can around Isla Vista by luring them into my apartment through some form of trickery.^[89]

The manifesto specifically mentions a "War on Women," as the second phase of his plan, for "starving him of sex", in which he describes:^[75]

The Second Phase will take place on the Day of Retribution itself, just before the climactic massacre. ... My War on Women. ... I will attack the very girls who represent everything I hate in the female gender: The hottest sorority of UCSB.^[90]

In Rodger's self-proclaimed ideal world, he imagined that he would "quarantine all [women] in concentration camps. At these camps, the vast majority of the female population will be deliberately starved to death. That would be an efficient and fitting way to kill them all off... I would have an enormous tower built just for myself... and gleefully watch them all die."^[16]:p.136

In the manifesto, he also said that he planned to kill his half-brother and stepmother, but wasn't mentally prepared to kill his father.^[82]

==

ref trigger warn

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/us/warning-the-literary-canon-could-make-students-squirm.html?_r=1

no links

ANTA BARBARA, Calif. — Should students about to read “The Great Gatsby” be forewarned about “a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence,” as one Rutgers student proposed? Would any book that addresses racism — like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or “Things Fall Apart” — have to be preceded by a note of caution? Do sexual images from Greek mythology need to come with a viewer-beware label?

Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans.

The warnings, which have their ideological roots in feminist thought, have gained the most traction at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where the student government formally called for them. But there have been similar requests from students at Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, George Washington University and other schools.

The debate has left many academics fuming, saying that professors should be trusted to use common sense and that being provocative is part of their mandate. Trigger warnings, they say, suggest a certain fragility of mind that higher learning is meant to challenge, not embrace. The warnings have been widely debated in intellectual circles and largely criticized in opinion magazines, newspaper editorials and academic email lists.

“Any kind of blanket trigger policy is inimical to academic freedom,” said Lisa Hajjar, a sociology professor at the university here, who often uses graphic depictions of torture in her courses about war. “Any student can request some sort of individual accommodation, but to say we need some kind of one-size-fits-all approach is totally wrong. The presumption there is that students should not be forced to deal with something that makes them uncomfortable is absurd or even dangerous.”

Bailey Loverin, a sophomore at Santa Barbara, said the idea for campuswide trigger warnings came to her in February after a professor showed a graphic film depicting rape. She said that she herself had been a victim of sexual abuse, and that although she had not felt threatened by the film, she had approached the professor to suggest that students should have been warned.

A sophomore at the university, Bailey Loverin, and others have formally called for “trigger warnings” on class syllabuses that would flag potentially traumatic subject matter. Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Ms. Loverin draws a distinction between alerting students to material that might truly tap into memories of trauma — such as war and torture, since many students at Santa Barbara are veterans — and slapping warning labels on famous literary works, as other advocates of trigger warnings have proposed.

Continue reading the main story

RECENT COMMENTS

DL May 20, 2014

So, in addition to teaching students to think, exposing them to course content, providing a secure environment, shielding their psyches from...

Kate May 20, 2014

So many people keep complaining that kids these days need to learn to live in the "real world" by reading stories about it. Lots of them are...

Miss Ley May 20, 2014

Referring to what Mr. Blecher has to say of the possible onset of 'Literary Harassment' cases by students whose emotional welfare is harmed...

“We’re not talking about someone turning away from something they don’t want to see,” Ms. Loverin said in a recent interview. “People suddenly feel a very real threat to their safety — even if it is perceived. They are stuck in a classroom where they can’t get out, or if they do try to leave, it is suddenly going to be very public.”

The most vociferous criticism has focused on trigger warnings for materials that have an established place on syllabuses across the country. Among the suggestions for books that would benefit from trigger warnings are Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” (contains anti-Semitism) and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” (addresses suicide).

“Frankly it seems this is sort of an inevitable movement toward people increasingly expecting physical comfort and intellectual comfort in their lives,” said Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit group that advocates free speech. “It is only going to get harder to teach people that there is a real important and serious value to being offended. Part of that is talking about deadly serious and uncomfortable subjects.”

The term “trigger warning” has its genesis on the Internet. Feminist blogs and forums have used the term for more than a decade to signal that readers, particularly victims of sexual abuse, might want to avoid certain articles or pictures online.

On college campuses, proponents say similar language should be used in class syllabuses or before lectures. The issue arose at Wellesley College this year after the school installed a lifelike statue of a man in his underwear, and hundreds of students signed a petition to have it removed. Writing in The Huffington Post, one Wellesley student called it a “potentially triggering sculpture,” and petition signers cited “concerns that it has triggered memories of sexual assault amongst some students.”

Here at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in March there was a confrontation when a group of anti-abortion protesters held up graphic pictures of aborted fetuses and a pregnant professor of feminist studies tried to destroy the posters, saying they triggered a sense of fear in her. After she was arrested on vandalism, battery and robbery charges, more than 1,000 students signed a petition of support for her, saying the university should impose greater restrictions on potentially trigger-inducing content. (So far, the faculty senate has promised to address the concerns raised by the petition and the student government but has not made any policy changes.)

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An excerpt from a draft guide on "trigger warnings" from Oberlin College in Ohio.

At Oberlin College in Ohio, a draft guide was circulated that would have asked professors to put trigger warnings in their syllabuses. The guide said they should flag anything that might “disrupt a student’s learning” and “cause trauma,” including anything that would suggest the inferiority of anyone who is transgender (a form of discrimination known as cissexism) or who uses a wheelchair (or ableism).

“Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression,” the guide said. “Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.” For example, it said, while “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe — a novel set in colonial-era Nigeria — is a “triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read,” it could “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more.”

After several professors complained, the draft was removed from a campus website, pending a more thorough review by a faculty-and-student task force. Professors and campus administrators are expected to meet with students next fall to come up with a more comprehensive guide.

Meredith Raimondo, Oberlin’s associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said the guide was meant to provide suggestions, not to dictate to professors. An associate professor of comparative American studies and a co-chairwoman of the task force, Ms. Raimondo said providing students with warnings would simply be “responsible pedagogical practice.”

“I quite object to the argument of ‘Kids today need to toughen up,’ ” she said. “That absolutely misses the reality that we’re dealing with. We have students coming to us with serious issues, and we need to deal with that respectfully and seriously.”

But Marc Blecher, a professor of politics and East Asian studies at Oberlin and a major critic of trigger warnings at Oberlin, said such a policy would have a chilling effect on faculty members, particularly those without the job security of tenure....

The term “trigger warning” has its genesis on the Internet. Feminist blogs and forums have used the term for more than a decade to signal that readers, particularly victims of sexual abuse, might want to avoid certain articles or pictures online.

On college campuses, proponents say similar language should be used in class syllabuses or before lectures. The issue arose at Wellesley College this year after the school installed a lifelike statue of a man in his underwear, and hundreds of students signed a petition to have it removed. Writing in The Huffington Post, one Wellesley student called it a “potentially triggering sculpture,” and petition signers cited “concerns that it has triggered memories of sexual assault amongst some students.”

Here at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in March there was a confrontation when a group of anti-abortion protesters held up graphic pictures of aborted fetuses and a pregnant professor of feminist studies tried to destroy the posters, saying they triggered a sense of fear in her. After she was arrested on vandalism, battery and robbery charges, more than 1,000 students signed a petition of support for her, saying the university should impose greater restrictions on potentially trigger-inducing content. (So far, the faculty senate has promised to address the concerns raised by the petition and the student government but has not made any policy changes.)

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wapo op ed

massacre Elliot Rodger perpetrated on and around the University of California, Santa Barbara last Friday night, in which he killed six people, wounded 13 others and then killed himself, is horrible both for what makes it unique and what makes it familiar. Young men kill their fellow citizens and students with unnerving regularity in the United States. But Rodger left behind a detailed and clear-headed autobiography detailing his intense rage at women, the men with whom they chose to have sex and relationships and his own lack of sexual and romantic experience.

It may seem odd to link a mass killing and what seems like a rehashing of old debates about campus culture, freedom of expression and intense political sensitivity. But these two very different events at UCSB speak to different aspects of a deeply broken culture.The intense parsing of Rodger’s manifesto and discussions of the internet subcultures he had contact with make it easy to forget that he was only the second person to put University of California at Santa Barbara in headlines this year. The school became the subject of national debate when students there asked that UCSB professors be required to provide detailed explanations on their syllabuses of which potentially traumatic material their pupils might encounter during the semester.

UCSB students are hardly alone in requesting trigger warnings. But the university became a particularly prominent example after a second incident, in which Mireille Miller-Young, an associate professor in UCSB’s feminist studies department, allegedly clashed with pro-life protesters on campus. Miller-Young, who was pregnant at the time, said that seeing the protesthad prompted the sort of traumatic response UCSB students hoped to avoid in the classroom with the help of trigger warnings.

It is easy to mock college students who seek trigger warnings on their syllabuses, or a professor who uses the idea of “triggering” to excuse behavior that is unbefitting someone who responsible for educating  and uplifting young people. Over the past couple of months, as this debate has played out in any number of national publications, my thinking on trigger warnings has shifted somewhat. I still have no intention of using them in my work, and I would not support their use in classroom settings. I have come to see requests for trigger warnings, though, as an important sign of despair, an indicator that something is broken in the environment from which the requests come.

Online, trigger warnings act as an acknowledgement that much of the wilderness of the internet is untamable. If the conversations that take place in many comments sections and fora cannot be restored to civility, trigger warnings are an attempt to carve hamlets out of these dark forests, providing places where weary pioneers can at least be forewarned of the terms of discussion.

On college campuses, it seems no mistake that calls for trigger warnings have sprung up at the same time that the country is trying to reckon with the failures of many colleges and universities to create safe environments for their students. In late April, the Obama administration released a major report on sexual assault at college campuses and the way institutions of higher learning respond to allegations that one student has attacked another. The Education Department has cited some schools, including Tufts University, for failing to protect their students’ civil rights.

If campuses are dangerous, unpredictable places, students’ attempts to make their classrooms an environment where they know what to expect may be less an expression of over-sensitivity than a white flag of surrender. Calls for trigger warnings may be less a sign that political correctness has taken over the academy than a sign that colleges and universities are failing to live up to their basic obligations to keep their students safe.

Elliot Rodger was not a student at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He had been enrolled in and dropped out of Santa Barbara City College. But he planned to attack, as he put it in a detailed autobiography he e-mailed to his parents and therapist, “the very girls who represent everything I hate in the female gender: the hottest sorority of UCSB.”

Rodger, by his own accounting, never made actual advances to any woman. As a result, he never experienced any rejection of romantic overtures. But he hated women anyway. His plan for a slaughter at a sorority house was actually a diminution of his vision of a world where women were starved to death en masse, freeing men of sexual desire. Rodger would compromise further. When the women of Alpha Phi did not answer the door when Rodger knocked on it, he killed women who simply had the misfortune to be near the sorority house.

Rodger is not the first man to commit mass murder at or near UCSB. In 2001, David Attias, then a freshman at the university, killed four people with his car. Like Rodger, he cited romantic disappointment as a motivation for his murders. Unlike Rodger, Attias lived and was sentenced to 60 years in a mental health facility. In 2012, he was awarded a conditional release, though his incarceration included a number of incidents that suggested Attias continued to have issues with sexual boundaries and sexual entitlement.

Rodger and Attias’ crimes alone might be enough to make UCSB students feel uneasy about the school environment and what malevolence might lurk in the hearts of their peers. But it is not only grandiose killers like these two young men who influence the environment at UCSB and nearby Isla Vista.

As Nick Welch reported in the Santa Barbara Independent this weekend, the mainstream sexual and social culture from which Rodger felt excluded poses its own dangers.

“This year’s much-berated Deltopia celebration [which Rodger considered, then rejected, as a target], for example, erupted into an out-of-control riot six weeks ago,” Welch wrote. “Just two weeks before Deltopia, Sheriff’s deputies and the Isla Vista Foot Patrol found themselves forced to quell a Saturday-night mini-riot. In both instances, law enforcement officials have blamed outsiders for instigating the violence. . . . The laissez-faire attitude of the community at large toward Isla Vista bacchanalian extravagance was at least temporarily shocked earlier this year by a pair of uncommonly violent gang rapes. And while UCSB has yet to attain the notoriety of other universities tainted by allegations of consequence-free sexual assaults, the problem clearly exists here. Already, it has drawn the attention of Janet Napolitano, the new head of the UC system.”

Elliot Rodger may have been unique in his lethality, but the unusual scope of his violence does not mean that his ideas were alien to the college ecosystem in which he stewed, killed and committed suicide.

My colleague Ann Hornaday argued this weekend that Rodger’s resentments may have been fueled in part by a culture that promulgates the idea that an ideal college experience “should be full of ‘sex and fun and pleasure.'” She might have added that people who pursue that dream of a four-year rager with more success that Rodger can still do great harm to themselves and others.

In the days to come, we will revisit conversations about gun violence prevention, mental health care and the intersections of these policy issues. A wide-ranging discussion about everything from the consequences women face for turning down romantic advances to structural bias in any number of industries, organized under the hashtag #YesAllWomen, is underway on Twitter.

My hope is that, as we fumble forward, we can acknowledge that the sexual culture by which Elliot Rodger felt personally affronted does a far graver disservice to many other people. Neither Rodger nor anyone else has a right to sex or female attention and affection. But we all deserve an environment in which we can pursue sex and love with respect for others and without fear of violence or shame for ourselves.

empirical but not obviously helpful?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4318286/

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salon, not empirical

get really really tired of hearing the phrase “mental illness” thrown around as a way to avoid saying other terms like “toxic masculinity,” “white supremacy,” “misogyny” or “racism.”

We barely know anything about the suspectin the Charleston, South Carolina, atrocity. We certainly don’t have testimony from a mental health professional responsible for his care that he suffered from any specific mental illness, or that he suffered from a mental illness at all.

We do have statistics showing that the vast majority of people who commit acts of violence do not have a diagnosis of mental illness and, conversely, people who have mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.

We know that the stigma of people who suffer from mental illness as scary, dangerous potential murderers hurts people every single day — it costs people relationships and jobs, it scares people away from seeking help who need it, it brings shame and fear down on the heads of people who already have it bad enough.

But the media insists on trotting out “mental illness” and blaring out that phrase nonstop in the wake of any mass killing. I had to grit my teeth every time I personally debated someone defaulting to the mindless mantra of “The real issue is mental illness” over the Isla Vista shootings.

“The real issue is mental illness” is a goddamn cop-out. I almost never hear it from actual mental health professionals, or advocates working in the mental health sphere, or anyone who actually has any kind of informed opinion on mental health or serious policy proposals for how to improve our treatment of the mentally ill in this country.

What I hear from people who bleat on about “The real issue is mental illness,” when pressed for specific suggestions on how to deal with said “real issue,” is terrifying nonsense designed to throw the mentally ill under the bus. Elliot Rodger’s parents should’ve been able to force risperidone down his throat. Seung-Hui Cho should’ve been forcibly institutionalized. Anyone with a mental illness diagnosis should surrender *all*of their constitutional rights, right now, rather than at all compromise the right to bear arms of self-declared sane people.

What’s interesting is to watch who the mentally ill people are being thrown under the bus to defend. In the wake of Sandy Hook, the NRA tells us that creating a national registry of firearms owners would be giving the government dangerously unchecked tyrannical power, but a national registry of the mentally ill would not — even though a “sane” person holding a gun is intrinsically more dangerous than a “crazy” person, no matter how crazy, without a gun.

We’ve successfully created a world so topsy-turvy that seeking medical help for depression or anxiety is apparently stronger evidence of violent tendencies than going out and purchasing a weapon whose only purpose is committing acts of violence. We’ve got a narrative going where doing the former is something we’re OK with stigmatizing but not the latter. God bless America.

What’s also interesting is the way “The real issue is mental illness” is deployed against mass murderers the way it’s deployed in general — as a way to discredit their own words. When you call someone “mentally ill” in this culture it’s a way to admonish people not to listen to them, to ignore anything they say about their own actions and motivations, to give yourself the authority to say you know them better than they know themselves.

This is cruel, ignorant bullshit when it’s used to discredit people who are the victims of crimes. It is, in fact, one major factor behind the fact that the mentally ill are far more likely to be the targets of violence than the perpetrators–every predator loves a victim who won’t be allowed to speak in their own defense.

But it’s also bullshit when used to discredit the perpetrators of crimes. Mass murderers frequently aren’t particularly shy about the motives behind what they do — the nature of the crime they commit is attention-seeking, is an attempt to get news coverage for their cause, to use one local atrocity to create fear within an entire population. (According to the dictionary, by the way, this is called “terrorism,” but we only ever seem to use that word for the actions of a certain kind — by which I mean a certain color — of mass killer.)

Elliot Rodger told us why he did what he did, at great length, in detail and with citations to the “redpill” websites from which he got his deranged ideology. It isn’t, at the end of the day, rocket science — he killed women because he resented them for not sleeping with him, and he killed men because he resented them for having the success he felt he was denied.

Yes, whatever mental illness he may have had contributed to the way his beliefs were at odds with reality. But it didn’t cause his beliefs to spring like magic from inside his brain with no connection to the outside world.

That’s as deliberately obtuse as reading the Facebook rants of a man who rambled on at great length about how much he hated religion and in particular hated Islam and deciding that the explanation for his murdering a Muslim family is that he must’ve just “gone crazy” over a parking dispute.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/05/27/inside-the-manosphere-that-inspired-santa-barbara-shooter-elliot-rodger/

red pill websites:

Elliot Rodger will forever be known as the 22-year-old who murdered six people in Santa Barbara on May 23. But Rodger’s extensive digital footprint, as well as his stomach-turning YouTube send-off and 137-page manifesto, suggest that he may have identified himself differently: as an “incel,” or involuntary virgin; as an aspirational, if frustrated, pick-up artist; and as an adherent of theso-called “manosphere” — that corner of the Internet where boys will be boys, girls will be objects, and critics will be “feminists,” “misandrists” or “enemies.”

If you’re not familiar with these terms, you’re not alone: The manosphere and its various components tend to only make mainstream news over tragedies (like this one) and controversies (like one “activist’s” opposition to date-rape seminars on college campuses). But to thousands of men across the Internet — including, apparently, Rodger — they’re home.

Rodger has personally been linked to an account on the pick-up site PUAhate.com, where he advocated an overthrow of “this oppressive feminist system” and envisioned “a world where WOMEN FEAR YOU.” On YouTube, he followed a number of accounts that claimed to teach pick-up artistry — a skill that’s equal parts pseudoscience, manipulation and objectification. In his last YouTube video, in which he chillingly announces the start of his killing spree, Rodger even cops some classic pick-up lingo: “You will finally see that I am, in truth, the superior one. The true alpha male.” (Emphasis mine.)

Let’s be clear: None of this suggests that (a) the manosphere is somehow to blame for Rodger’s killing spree, (b) that other factors like mental health or gun laws are less critical, or (c) that every would-be “pick-up artist,” or PUA, is one rejection away from mass murder. Making those kinds of sweeping conclusions would be, as critics have pointed out, really irresponsible and dumb.

That said, Rodger’s misogynistic rhetoric seems undeniably influenced by the manosphere, and his manifesto has kicked off a loud debate about how modern society treats women, online and off. If there was ever a time to take a closer look at online misogyny, it’s now.

Alas, even from a distance, it doesn’t look too pretty.

Mapping the manosphere

When people talk about the “manosphere,” they’re basically talking about a vast, diverse network of blogs and forums that take a certain antagonistic stance toward women and dating. Not all branches of the manosphere are overtly appalling; not all of them are even run by men. That said, their core philosophy basically boils down to this: (1) feminism has overrun/corrupted modern culture, in violation of nature/biology/inherent gender differences, and (2) men can best seduce women (slash, save society in general) by embracing a super-dominant, uber-masculine gender role, forcing ladies to fall into step behind them.

This philosophy plays out differently in different places. Hundreds of Web sites are dedicated to teaching “game” to hapless daters. But often, if not always, “game” involves reducing women to sexual targets, rating their attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10, and deploying techniques like “negging” to get a girl to notice you. (“Negging” = insulting a woman to throw off her confidence. For instance: “Your hair is hideous. Is that a wig?”)

The blog Chateau Heartiste, one of the forerunners in the manosphere/PUA scene, even publishes quizzes for men and women to determine their “dating market value.” The questions for men include, “What is your occupation?” and “Have people besides your family called you funny?” The questions for women include, “How long are your legs in relation to your height?” (Long: +1 point; average: 0 points; short: -1 point.)

It’s rude, of course. And it’s a painfully cynical way to interpret interpersonal relationships. But taken to extremes, that belief in retro gender roles has fueled a whole system of sites that denigrate women and advocate for a socio-cultural regression that puts ladies back in the kitchen and bedroom. Sometimes these sites brand themselves as dating sites; others proudly fly the “Men’s Rights” flag, in solidarity with a movement that essentially claims guys have it rough, too. (Important note: MRA sometimes, though not always, describes a push to reform divorce, visitation and alimony laws — clearly separate issues from what we’re addressing here.)

In either case, the “manosphere” is frequently enough to make any progressive lady — or guy! — choke back bile. The Southern Poverty Law Center,which identifies hate groups, even went so far as to publish a report on it in 2012. (“Although some of the sites make an attempt at civility and try to back their arguments with facts,” the report read, “they are almost all thick with misogynistic attacks that can be astounding for the guttural hatred they express.”) The very next year, the comically named Return of Kings — which has, among other things, talked up eating disorders and hitting women — topped our list of the most-hated sites on the Web.

Manosphere doctrine, in a nutshell

To most people, it’s probably not difficult to see why the manosphere offends. At the most basic level, much of that community advocates for inequality between men and women, a problem called out by the SPLC report. In the U.S., at least, that’s not generally a value that the mainstream rallies around.

The manosphere doesn’t just preach inequality between men and women, however. I’ve spent more than a year observing several large sites within this community, and its ideology regarding the “right” kinds of men and women is pretty inflexible, too. Gay, lesbian or transgendered people are, needless to say, completely out. “Masculine” women (i.e. women with short hair, women with high-powered jobs, women with outspoken opinions) also earn the manosphere’s derision. But the community reserves a special kind of disdain for “effeminate” or “beta” men — men who either do not have “game” or who are still taking what believers call the “blue pill.”

Per the blog Red Pill Room — where, needless to say, betas aren’t welcome — the blue pill is like a metaphor for the mainstream mindset:

The subconscious pattern of behaviors, often informed by feminism, feminists  and mainstream society, that encourages men to forego traditionally and truly masculine behavior and attitudes in favor of those in which capitulation to female whimsy.

In other words, red-pilled men are alphas who have seen the light and seized the sex/power/glory owed to them by their biology. Blue-pilled guys are the hapless, sexless dummies still treating women as equals and asking them out in conventional, non-pushy ways.

This distinction, while it sounds ridiculous, is actually pretty critical to understanding Rodger and his place in the manosphere … such as it was. While Rodger evidently followed a number of pick-up sites and YouTube channels, his most notable postings were on a site called PUAhate — a forum for malcontents complaining that the “game” didn’t work. There, and on other forums, Rodger identified as an “incel, or “involuntary celibate” — a virgin who couldn’t get girls, even after taking “the red pill.” On the manosphere totem pole, there’s nothing quite so pathetic. Besides women, anyway.

The manosphere reacts to Rodger

And so, while some of Rodger’s companions on PUAhate have praised his gruesome spree — Josh Glasstetter at SPLC points out that he was almost seen as some kind of “incel revolutionary” — the rest of the manosphere has worked hard to distance themselves from him.

“Rodger pings some operational gaydars,” mocks Heartiste.

“A lot of loneyy beta males will identify with him,” Roosh followed up. (Notice that he calls Rodger a beta, despite Rodger’s videotaped insistence that he was “an alpha male.”)

Intersect newsletter

The corner of the Internet and interesting.

Rodger blames women. Women blame misogyny. Misogynists blame feminists. This is a fascinating, weird cycle — and it actually repeats after most national tragedies  in which a man kills a woman or women. In 2009, when George Sodini killed three women at an L.A. Fitness outside of Pittsburgh, Heartiste was quick to postulate that, had Sodini “learned game,” he never would have developed negative feelings toward women or become violent.

Meanwhile, a guest blogger on Return of Kings theorized in December that 18-year-old Karl Halverson Pierson killed a girl at his school because he was “sexually frustrated.” Another post on the site, published about the same time, blamed a “lack of game” for brutal murders everywhere from Baltimore to Southern California.

But Return of Kings’ latest post really takes the cake. “No one would have died if PUAHate killer Elliot Rodger learned game,” promises the ever-aggrandizing Roosh V, who then goes on to promise that “if Rodger came to me, he would have received actionable and effective advice.” (A sampling of recent advice from the site, presented without comment: “all women are nymphomaniacs who crave rough sex”; “if your girlfriend insists on a big wedding, dump her.”)

A moment of awakening for the manosphere, this incident is not. And in some ways, that should be just as disturbing as Rodger’s videotaped rant.