We Hunted The Mammoth
So you’ve probably heard the news: Conspiracy theorist and professional yeller Alex Jones has been ordered to pay $4.1 million in compensatory damages to a family who lost a child in the Sandy Hook school massacre, which Jones had been calling a “hoax.” Jones is likely going to have to pay a much greater amount in punitive damages.
On Monday, a woman with a handgun opened fire in the Dallas Love Field Airport; she was quickly shot in the leg by a cop and arrested.
This … thing … has been making the rounds on Reddit. Originally posted in r/confessions, it was quickly deleted, but lives on as a screenshot elsewhere on the site. An unusual query from some dude who should probably never be allowed to have sex, it really is the worst thing I’ve read this horrible week.
Every new bit of news out of Uvalde makes me angrier and more depressed.
Whenever news breaks about a new school shooter, an unhealthy alliance of trolls and true believers takes to social media to flood the zone with bullshit.
18 of the dead are reportedly children, some as young as second graders. It’s just fucking horrific.
Every time some angry man with a brain poisoned by 4chan and/or Fox News guns down multiple innocent victims, the conspiracy trolls come out, spreading misinformation and disinformation about the shooter in an attempt to wash the blood off of their own hands by convincing others that the shooter was no right-winger but rather a government plant or an Antifa agent.
As I read through the Buffalo shooter’s 180-page manifesto last night, I was struck again and again by a feeling of familiarity. Had I read something like this before?
As it turned out I had. Something exactly like it.
An 18-year-old white supremacist — “educated” on 4chan and inspired by the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand — drove several hours to a TOPS supermarket in Buffalo on Saturday and opened fire on customers and staff, some in the parking lot, some in the store. Ten are dead.
I‘ll start with the good news: a mass shooting yesterday near the Edmund Burke prep school in Washington DC left only one person dead — the shooter himself, who took his own life before police found their way to his fifth-floor apartment, which had been converted to something like a sniper’s nest for shooting at the streets below.
