By David Futrelle
Three white supremacists have been charged with attempted murder after one of them fired at a group of antifascist counterprotesters after a speech by neo-Nazi celebrity Richard Spencer at the University of Florida in Gaineville yesterday.
The Miami Herald reports:
Just before 5:30 p.m., just as protesters outside Spencer’s speech at UF’s Phillips Center were wrapping up, Gainesville police said the trio started heckling some anti-Spencer protesters with Hitler chants, Nazi salutes and threats. At one point, cops said, convicted felon Tenbrink pulled out a gun and the brothers encouraged him to use it.
He fired a single shot that missed the group, police said, then sped off in a silver Jeep. An off-duty Alachua County Sheriff’s Office deputy spotted the car 20 miles out of town around 9 p.m. and arrested the group. The Fears brothers are held on million dollar bonds in the Alachua County jail. Tenbrink’s is $3 million.
Surprise, surprise: Two of the three were amongst the alleged “very fine people” marching with their fellow white supremacists in Charlottesville.
Tenbrink, 28, and William Fears, 30, were spotted at Charlottesville, the site of the largest white nationalist gathering in years that erupted in violence. Fears identifies himself on Twitter as “Charismatic leader of a White breeding cult” and tweeted “blood and soil,” the notorious Nazi slogan.
This is terrorism, plain and simple. It’s appalling the story isn’t getting more attention in the media.
Here are some tweets with more details on what happened.
3 white supremacists arrested in Florida for shooting at anti-racism protesters https://t.co/zn6bUBqFK3
— Vox (@voxdotcom) October 20, 2017
https://twitter.com/efoster_eric/status/921495556790325248
“Kill them”: Three men charged in shooting after Richard Spencer speech https://t.co/gqCXtWSmD3
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 20, 2017
And these three aren’t the only violent white supremacists who should be getting a lot more attention from the press — and the cops.
Who are the white supremacists assaulting people at rallies in Berkeley, Charlottesville and Huntington Beach? We found some of them: pic.twitter.com/fL5yzyI8Om
— ProPublica (@propublica) October 19, 2017
A Cali racist group—the Rise Above Movement_is full of violent felons. Law enforcement pays it little attention: https://t.co/8AFZS9HVsO
— ProPublica (@propublica) October 19, 2017
The ProPublica piece is a long one but I think a necessary read for anyone concerned with the rise of a violent fascist movement in US.
— 🏳️🌈Spacedad (@SuperSpacedad) October 20, 2017
My thoughts exactly.
Meanwhile, everyone in the White House continues to lie about Trump’s shockingly callous treatment of a grieving Gold Star mother and the congresswoman who has stood up for her.
Specifically, this entire John Kelly story is fiction. Not one bit of it actually happened. pic.twitter.com/eGSQU0S3wc
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) October 20, 2017
https://twitter.com/TVietor08/status/921452065338953729
Hey @realDonaldTrump I know how much you love calling out FAKE NEWS so here’s your daughter-in-law quoting a transcript that doesn't exist. https://t.co/TheR8FGrWY
— shauna (@goldengateblond) October 20, 2017
"He knew what he signed up for"
Kelly: I told him to say it
DJT: I didn't say it
LaraT: I saw the transcript
Sanders: There's no transcript— Jules Suzdaltsev (@jules_su) October 20, 2017
Don TrumpJr. has thrown himself into the fray though he apparently has trouble telling black women apart.
https://twitter.com/kibblesmith/status/921064156610088962
Rachel Maddow has a pretty convincing theory on why Trump doesn’t want to talk about Niger: that the 4 US soldiers died in part as a result of the Trump administration alienating the government of Chad, which pulled its troops out of Niger after Trump put the country (a longtime ally in the war on terror) on his alleged non-Muslim ban list for an extremely stupid reason.
Maddow connects the dots on how Trump adding Chad to his travel ban may have gotten soldiers killed in Niger https://t.co/PYk203GxVM
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) October 20, 2017
In a whole other arena of terrible, things are even worse in Puerto Rico than official reports acknowledge:
Real death toll in Puerto Rico is probably 450 — much higher than official count https://t.co/msCyhMDyyQ
— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) October 18, 2017
But our country still has its heroes. Along with Rep. Wilson and all those working diligently to save lives in Puerto Rico, there is this dude:
A man in an apartment on Connecticut Ave. mooned President Trump’s motorcade to the Embassy of Kuwait tonight, per the pool report pic.twitter.com/ifGC8ycXat
— Hunter Schwarz (@hunterschwarz) October 19, 2017
Here are some cute animals because we all need more of them this week. And every week these days, frankly.
everything is terrible so here’s a baby lion cub learning to roar pic.twitter.com/JZpZGj69FJ
— shauna (@goldengateblond) October 18, 2017
https://twitter.com/awwcuteness/status/921260735119970307
https://twitter.com/ItsMeowIRL/status/921245209526132742
My tortoiseshell kitty (still very much missed) used to love bread. She loved bread so much she would break into the cabinet and tear through the plastic wrapper to eat it, until we put a rubber band around the cabinet knobs to keep them closed.
My cat growing up, Whiskers didn’t like most people food. Except for tuna, of course. But he loved split pea soup. It was weird.
Dracarys loves pastries and cookies and things. She’s managed to open those plastic grocery store donut containers that snap shut, steal a donut hole and close the box back up. Also weird because cats can’t taste sweetness. Maybe it’s the fat that she likes? Although she also likes bread and tear through the plastic bag to take a hunk out of a loaf, so she seems to like carbs more than cats usually do. Meanwhile, the dog won’t steal food from a plate that you leave out right in front of her face even though she clearly wants to.
As I typed that, I heard the distinct sound of Dracy jumping off the kitchen counter after searching for food to steal. 🙂
And ninja’d by yet another tale of kitty carb thievery!
Used to have a cat – Nosy – who’d sit in front of the oven like it were a mouse hole when I were doing a roast. It didn’t matter what the meat was – he wanted the onions.
Only when I were cooking though, thinking back. Never did it for my partner or for the kids when they learned to cook.
@SFHC – I’d be fighting your cat. Loooooove Vegemite and Marmite both. 😛
My one cat becomes a salt-seeking missile whenever a certain brand of chips gets opened. He makes more of a nuisance of himself going after that than he does if there’s ice cream. The weird thing is that its just been the last year or so. Maybe his geriatric food doesn’t have as much salt in it as what he used to eat?
Btw our cats are 18 and in good health :). I hope you get at least as many years of love. (I do sometimes worry that one or both of them will pass on when I’m away for school, but that’s a whole other thing.)
I worry this too even though my cats young. I experienced bad luck with pets. I had one chinchilla before and he only lived for 3 years before he get sick and die and he die when I am away at sea which is bad. now I have two chinchilla but i still miss him.
My first cat was a very outdoor cat, she made it to 19. My second was also an outdoor cat, he died at 14. My current cat is also an outdoor cat (although right now hes curled up at the foot of the bed enjoying the blast of the heater!) and he’s a hale and hearty almost 13 year old.
Maybe living in small towns in the UK has made a difference, all three of them were/are able to roam miles without coming close to a busy road and also they are pretty much the apex predators of the UK too.
When I moved house with my current cat he refused point blank to leave the flat for six months and drove me up the wall and round the bend, kudos to anyone who can deal with a fully indoor cat all the time!
ETA: Things my cat likes to eat, cheesy poofs, chocolate cake, melted cheese, sausage rolls and peas.
Things he doesn’t like to eat, all cat food bar Go-Cat Crunchy and Tender.
Ah, strange things cats eat! Dear departed Catbeast (DDCB) loved those biscuits in a can, but not just any old biscuits; they had to be the ones from Trader Joe’s* not Pillsbury’s. We also had a cat when I was growing up who liked Fritos (and only Fritos) corn chips and Cheerios oat cereal.
Husbeast and I are nearly ready to pick up our other cat (which has been living with a friend since they found him eating chicken feed in their yard this Spring.) And? We may be getting two! Friend has eleven other cats and feels that New Cat needs a companion. Husbeast wanted to get another cat anyway and this would be a companion that he already knows and likes.
*Trader Joe’s has common grocery items that have way shorter ingredient lists than other grocery chains. I also really love their alfredo sauce in a jar and their whipping cream that has no stabilizers (why does whipping cream need stabilizers??) ETA You do sacrifice some shelf life, but I think it’s worth it.
My family had one cat that got to about 23. Calico, all black and red highlights, looked almost like copper when the sun shone on her. Sounded like a siamese when she ‘spoke’, which was pretty rare.
At one point, the vet jokingly said to take good care of her, because he got bragging rights for having the oldest ‘patient’ in the area.
@FishyGoat
I’m not a parent, nor am I all that good at persuasion. I’m kinda more the snarky speechifyer type so take this with a grain of salt, but I second the idea that the last thing you want to do is go all righteous-indignation “how dare you” parental lecture kinda thing. If I had to cast my mind back to my adolescence, I was still in the process of coming to grips with my own identity and while I certainly trusted my parents and relied on them for guidance, I certainly didn’t want them prodding the social circles I traveled. And while I was in the top percentile of my peers, teens of all kinds want to believe they’re smart and have a grip on the world, so it’s important to talk to them in adult terms and not condescend (which is tough when they’re on about “dank memes” and “Kekistan”).
In this fake news/Russian bot infested world, I keep going back to that one class in Grade 9 where we all went down to the library and learned about how to do searches on Altavista and Yahoo and this new “Google” thing and how to critically examine sources. The bottom line was “who’s saying it and how many others are corroborating it?” If it’s a story coming from a reputable source like a major circulation paper (keeping in mind to separate editorial columns from straightforward news articles), then you can probably trust it, but it’s best to see if other outlets are covering the story. Maybe they’re just reprinting a wire service like Reuters or AP. If it’s a local beat, are the other local papers covering it?
Being 14 years out of high school, I can’t speak to how these classes are going these days, but given how vulnerable people of all ages seem to be to just blindly sharing social-media driven news, it strikes me that whoever’s in charge of teaching people how to be media savvy wasn’t ready for the power of Facebook and Twitter. If your son’s reading something posted on 4chan from Breitbart “News” of all places, then my first question to him would be “Interesting… is anybody else reporting it?” It’s the kind of question that doesn’t judge, but at the same time demands some warrants for whatever claims there are. It’s the same thing I ask before I retweet something; which is usually from the Toronto Star or the Globe and Mail or Stateside the WaPo or NYT.
TL;DR — Rather than focus on content, which might become combative, focus on sources and journalistic consensus.
@Alan
*snap* *snap*
When you’re a cat you’re a cat all the way
From your first shredded couch to your last indoor spray…
I had a cat who used to devour cantaloupe if it was left out on the counter. He especially loved the rinds.
My current cat (indoor) just turned 8 and I asked the vet if I should be switching him to senior cat food. The vet scoffed and said “no, he’s not even middle aged yet”.
Now I want to do an all cat version of West Side Story.
(Would a musical about cats have a market?)
I don’t know why, but this made me giggle madly. I just love the way Valentin phrases things!
I wish I could have a cat or 5…I love them so. Alas, my hubs and my younger daughter are *severly* allergic to them, so I can’t. Sigh.
I see what you did there, you sly man. ?
I tried my cat Biff with senior cat food. He looked at me as if I was trying to poison him. We returned to Go-Cat crunchy and tender. Well, I tried.
I do worry a bit about him being on an all dry food diet. But he has a big dish of water by his food bowl which gets refilled everyday. Having done my usual neurotic googling about what’s best for him it seems dry food diets are fine as long as the cat drinks plenty which he does.
If he does start to need soft food to supplement his diet as he gets older I’ll probably feed him roast chicken, which is his favourite thing. He has not forgiven me for turning veggie a couple of years back so he can’t thieve my delicious cooked meats any more.
well, well, well… from the department of corruption comes news of a Whitefish, Montana energy company’s receipt of a $300million contract for restoring electricity to Puerto Rico…. Company had 2 employees the day the hurricane hit…. Most… check that, ALL of the work is subcontracted, at ummmmm, generous rates:
the fact that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is FROM WHITEFISH, MONTANA surely is unrelated….
@ All Thank you so much for the advice. I probably should have mentioned that he is 26 (but still living at home due to mental illness issues). Ooops. LOL!
My husband and my son had already had the conversation (as niehter are working at the moment) so things were more or less fine. I did check in with my son just to make sure was was doing ok emotionally, he says so but I think I’ll give him a few extra hugs (if he’s up to it).
Man, I really do need to work on that kneejerk reaction, though. 😛
http://www.animatedimages.org/data/media/373/animated-heart-image-0886.gif
@PeeVee My husband and daughter feel your pain. My daughter has moved out now so perhaps she’ll finally get a furbaby.
oops, I forgot to establish topicality regarding the Whitefish/Zinke corruption… surely, tho, in all the other trumpish outrage, we haven’t forgotten Zinke’s close ties to white supremacists…
ETA, the debater in me….
And, I can’t help but recall the outrage the Faux Noise stooges when they talked about Obama and Bill Ayers….
Bet they’ll be equally outraged over this
My cat in Italy, the enchanting Cosima, used to like a little bit of boiled asparagus once in a while. I wonder if it was because she had no access to grass, just an enormous terrace.
The great thing in Italy was that you could buy lights (basically chopped up lungs and other wobbly bits) very cheap and as fresh as dew. I used to cut it up with scissors into portions to freeze (vile texture!). She loved it and was always very sleek and healthy. She lived to be nearly 20.
@Redsilkphoenix Dan Rather’s FB ‘blog’ News and Guts only had video of the news conference with General Joseph Dunford.
https://www.facebook.com/newsandguts/
My cat is obsessed with mushrooms, to the point where he will beg for them if I’m chopping them up. He also once got into my shopping, dragged out a bag of mushrooms and took a bite out of each one, leaving the remainders shredded festively on the floor
I had a cat named Jake that would steal broccoli out of the steamer and loved popcorn.
@Fishy Goat -I am always working against my knee-jerk reactions when it comes to my son.
@varalys the dark – I have read many times that the reason canned cat food is promoted is mainly for the moisture content, so I think as long as they have access and are drinking water it should be fine.
Back in my super-hippie-chick days I used to male all my own cat and dog food! I don’t bother anymore. Darby gets canned food but that’s really only because I can afford it and I like to feel like he likes it (he doesn’t care, he’ll nibble on the dog’s food if his dish is empty).
@Violet I love that story!
@Fishy, my other daughter has two kitties, so when I go to her house, I get the kittehlove.
@Violet, the first cat I owned *loved* green olives. When we’d have relish trays on holidays, he’s be right there begging. I used to find the pits everywhere afterwards, (and by find, I mean stepping on them.)
Looks like someone got their hands on some nazi chat logs that suggests spencer might be hiring an actual terrorist cell to do “security” for him.
https://gritpost.com/nazi-group-richard-spencer-terror/
My first cat loved to eat … soap. She would jump into the tub after you showered and lick up the soapy residue. If there was a bar of soap anywhere, she would find it and lick it.
She lived to be 19 so it couldn’t have been too terrible on her health, but it was still bizarre and you couldn’t stop her from doing it.
Hey, David – It appears that the RWA obscure pundit types are starting to steal the MRA’s talking points:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2017/10/24/wingnuts-women-sexually-assaulting-men-dressing-provocatively/