Last night, according to various media accounts, Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis confronted three mask-wearing men at the protests who seemed to be acting shady. After a brief altercation, one or more of the men pulled out a gun and shot at BLM protesters, wounding five of them.
Police took two men — one white, one Hispanic — into custody in connection with the shooting, later releasing the Hispanic man. Two other white men, both in their twenties, turned themselves in to police this afternoon.
While we still don’t know all the details of the shooting, there’s some pretty compelling circumstantial evidence suggesting that the masked men (and perhaps a masked woman as well) were 4channers who had been lurking around the demonstrations for days.
Raw Story is claiming that
White supremacists have discussed various strategies online for sparking confrontation at the demonstration, which they described as a “chimpout.” …
They agreed to wear camouflage clothing and display a four of clubs to identify each other, and the white supremacist agitators argued over whether they should carry guns or wear Guy Fawkes masks.
Much of their language will sound familiar to you all. Raw Story continues:
The white supremacist mocked “social justice warriors” and other anti-racist whites, who they described in psychosexual terms.
“Best to act as much like a beta white as much as you can,” one the racists said.
Meanwhile, a video posted online shows two masked men in camo gear apparently on their way to disrupt the BLM protests; they refer to blacks as “dindus” (short for “dindu nuffin”), a racist slur popular amongst 4channers and white supremacists. (The video was apparently shot several days before last night’s shooting.)
While we don’t know for sure that 4channers — or the two men in the video above — were involved in the shooting, some 4channers are convinced of the connection.
In a 4chan /pol/ thread earlier today quoted by Gawker, one anon puts the responsibility on members of 4chan’s famously racist /pol/ board, as well as another 4chan board devoted to guns:
4chan in the news again. A bunch of /pol/lacks+/k/ommandos in Guy Fawkes masks just shot up a Black Lives Matter protest. Apparently the BLM protestors tried to assault them, the Anon’s ran off and when the BLM protestors chased after them the /k/ommandos shot them.
5 BLM supporters confirmed in the hospital.
Media hasn’t mentioned 4chan by name yet but these guys were on /pol/ a few days ago telling everyone how they were trolling BLM by attending their protests and open carrying.
Other 4hanners claim that the 4channers who talked about disrupting the protests were not the same people who were involved in the shootings yesterday.
If the connection to 4chan is as real as it seems on the surface to be, it’s yet another reminder that online talk can have potentially deadly real world consequences — even when the online talkers claim to be “trolling.”
The alleged planning emails quoted by Raw Story, with their references to “SJW faggots” and “beta white cuck[s],” are steeped in the language, and the aggrieved entitlement, not only of 4chan but of the broader manosphere; it’s the same sort of language used by readers of the cuck-obsessed white supremacist “pickup artist” Heartiste and more than a few GamerGate trolls.
Online hate is not somehow magically separate from the real world; it’s part of it. If the shootings last night were connected to 4chan, and it seems likely they were, they also show that the line between hateful “trolling” and “real” hate is exceedingly thin if not nonexistent. The shootings last night are what happens when “trolls” carry guns.
@EJ
Guess i should get to deciding who i want to vote for then.
A friend try to pull the card “not all 4channer !”.
He seem to have an hard time to understand that the comparison with muslims don’t work, because /pol/ isn’t exactly disowned by most 4channers.
@spacelawn:
I wish your generation the very finest of luck, then. May you never tire of fighting for what’s right, may your cause not be clouded by self-interest, and may you never know defeat.
Feels like I just turned 30 a few weeks ago, and now I’m almost 31. Does 31 count as late 30s? :/
Also, in my country it’s now legal for adults to have sex with people who were born in 2000. Ewwww.
1994 here. My generation seems to be okay, despite the bitching of the older generations.
Apologizing for what I think is a gendered insult for whining before somebody else tells me to. I wasn’t thinking.
@dhag85:
I’m 31 now and will be turning 32 soon. It’s a splendid age to be, I think. I do not miss my 20s.
The kindergarten class needs to quiet down for a nap and let old farts like me — born 1947 — control the conversation as is our well-earned right.
(Earned? We survived the 60s and the 70s, what more do you want?)
Born in 1968. That means I lived through the Cold War when we all thought we’d be wiped out at any minute (and that post apocalypse would be more “Threads” than “Mad Max”). That actually was an existential threat, unlike terrorism.
Speaking of which, also experienced “The Troubles” so just got used to bombings. Lived in London for a lot of that so was quite close to a few. By the time of 7/7 being on the train in front of one that blew up was barely something that registered.
Was at school when corporal punishment was in vogue. Our school had a simple system. If you were bad you got the cane, if you were good you got a Kit Kat. I know many might find that a bad thing but we did all turn out to be reasonably well behaved people. Maybe it’s an operant conditioning thing.
In summary though it does mean that, whatever may be going on in the world today, by comparison it’s all pretty idilyc. I suspect that’s where my laid back attitude comes from.
@EJ
I also don’t miss my 20s in the slightest, but I sometimes wish I had been more active in those days. I feel like I’m way behind on everything. I wasted so much time playing Pokémon. :p
Time you enjoyed is time well wasted :p
Which is basically how I live my live.
I was born in 1987, so my childhood was coloured by the Soviet Union collapse, which resulted in a major depression as no one wanted to buy the crappy products Finland produced anymore. The Soviets buying our exports was a sort of a good will dealie up until then.
All of a sudden everyone knew someone who had lost everything and the overall atmosphere was very dark. And for some reason when I think about the 90’s it was filled with sex workers. Another thing everyone knew was at least one house used by prostitutes.
It was also the time when a lot of immigrants came here and I went to a school in an area that was particularly popular by foreigners, so “multiculturalism” ha always seemed such a stupid thing to worry about.
The same themes of fear are still around: Where does the next meal come from and when will the evil foreigners murder my entire family?
It’s difficult to ascribe a single vector to the effect the internet has had on racism and the like.
For one thing, it’s harder to keep someone who wants to learn something from doing so. This has led to the undermining of more insular branches of religion, and has also fed directly into battling homophobia, because it made it easier for LGBT youth to find out the truth about their status, rather than the lies they were fed by ignorant elders.
OTOH, it also makes it easier for extremists of any sort to congregate, and from there to form an actual echo-chamber. While the ‘establishment media’ of the 70s, when there were pretty much three networks and a few local channels to choose from, obviously had muting effect on marginalized communities, it’s now possible for truly fringe groups to organize and whip each other into a frenzy about how right they are.
Consider: In the pre-internet era, if you had a point of view that was only shared by one percent of one percent of the population, it was quite likely that you would never actually meet someone who agreed with you. This had a moderating effect–even if it didn’t persuade you that your belief was wrong, per se, you still were forced to confront the fact that it was a fringe view, one that you would probably never see accepted by the mainstream.
Now, however, the U.S. and Canada have a total population of about 350 million people. That same one percent of one percent translates into about 35,000 people who think that the moon landing was faked, or that shooting an abortion doctor is justified, or whatever. Nearly 90% of those people have internet access, and people with fringe views are usually more motivated than most to seek out corroborating views.
So you end up with an internet community of around 25K+ (literally a small city), all of whom bolster one another with both emotional support and an ever-escalating assurance that they are correct. And suddenly, instead of feeling like you’re part of a bizarre fringe, you think, “Hey, almost everyone I talk to online agrees with me! We must be onto something!”
And finally, there’s the backlash element to all of this. The world is changing, and I believe that for the most part it’s changing for the better (the way it usually has throughout human history). And reactionaries hate that, and thus become more active during times of change. So now that small city of conservative fringe believers is telling one another “Hey, maybe we need to start getting more aggressive.” And some of them are, out of a combination of fear and ignrance.
@WWTH – I’m saving that picture.
35 here.
I’m the same age as Star Lord and Harry Potter, so I’ve got that going for me.
@Alan and the other old darts re: NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION: I was juuuust old enough that I and my young classmates had serious discussions (“serious” for precocious 1st-3rd graders) about if and how we’d survive given a nuclear exchange between us and the USSR.
That we were outside of DC may have had something to do with the preoccupation.
“The initial blast wouldn’t get us, but we’d die from fallout.”
“What I they hit Fort Belvior or the Pentagon? Or Quantico?”
“Probably the same for the first two. We might be lucky enough for it to be quick if they dropped a big one on Quantico.”
We also had little to no grasp on the concept of Perestroika.
re: violence, extremism, and the Internet:
Freemage wrote almost exactly what I was thinking.
That’s a fantastic analysis, freemage.
Dude, no.
If they were, all 3 would have pulled out guns instead.
Looks like one of the guys in that video is definitely one of those arrested…
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027380569
@mildlymagnificent
1947, huh?
Can you come to my house and lecture my mother on some things that she won’t listen to me about? Maybe she’ll listen to you, since I’m too “young and naive” to know that white people shouldn’t use the n-word and such.
I was born in 89. Still working on this adulthood thing, with mixed results.
I can’t quite process the fact that Black people risk being shot when they attend demonstrations focused, in part, on the principle that their lives are just as precious as the lives of anyone else.
1979 — younger than Star Wars, older than Empire. A Carter baby now taking care of Obama babies.
I missed the tail end of the Cold War. I didn’t get the nuclear tensions when I read Watchmen in the early 90s, but I saw it all over when I re-read it when the movie came out.
My childhood is Masters of the Universe, Transformers, Pound Puppies, GI Joe; my adolescence, Game Boy and Drizzt Do’Urden. When 9/11 happened, my fears were for the loss of freedoms and civil rights, and not of dusky men throwing bombs.
Huh. I refreshed the page, and all the comments disappeared. The banner under the post says there’s 70 comments, right next to the permalink, but none of them are showing up. Weird.
I was born in 1990.
And I can’t quite process it either. It’s like they don’t realize they’re only proving the protester’s point.
GamerGate/4chan/MRAs are terrorists and they are getting out of hand now. I have some stuff on them I am debating whether so send to the police or not.
White supremacists are truly the scum of the earth.