I would­n’t be so quick with the ‘neo-nazi’ label and jar­gon this ear­ly into the stage­craft of WHATEVER 3 let­ter agency may be run­ning a psy ops PR event.
The Repub­lic of Flori­da mili­tia may be well be just anoth­er asset,a lim­it­ed mod­i­fied hang­out to use the term.

We should revis­it the mur­ders com­mit­ted by “18-year-old Devon Arthurs, one of Atomwaffen’s found­ing mem­bers, was charged in state court in Tam­pa, Flori­da, with mur­der­ing two of his room­mates, Andrew Oneschuk, 18, and Jere­my Him­mel­man, 22. Both vic­tims were Atom­waf­fen loy­al­ists.” This was cov­ered in FTR # 995 and the orga­ni­za­ton Atom­waf­fen was cov­ered in FTR #667.

https://www.propublica.org/article/california-murder-suspect-atomwaffen-division-extremist-hate-group

This Jan­u­ary 26, 2018 arti­cle in ProP­ub­li­ca, by Ali Win­ston, involved a seri­ous event that sur­pris­ing­ly got min­i­mal press cov­er­age in terms of its impli­ca­tions. The arti­cle stat­ed.

“When law enforce­ment searched the apart­ment in Tam­pa, Flori­da, where Arthurs and the oth­ers lived, they found firearms, a framed pho­to­graph of Okla­homa City bomber Tim­o­thy McVeigh, rifles, ammu­ni­tion, and a cool­er full of a high­ly volatile explo­sive called HMTD. Inves­ti­ga­tors also dis­cov­ered radioac­tive mate­r­i­al in the home.” There are a cou­ple of points in this para­graph worth not­ing. First, Arthurs had pho­to­graph of Nazi Tim­o­thy McVeigh who con­spired to blow up the Okla­homa City Fed­er­al Build­ing is a clue to this under­ground Nazi orga­ni­za­tion. The sec­ond is that they found “high­ly volatile explo­sives” and radioac­tive mate­ri­als” in his home. Was he plan­ning on mak­ing a dirty bomb? It rais­es as seri­ous ques­tion as to how many oth­er naz­i’s have sim­i­lar mate­r­i­al and plans.

“The bomb-mak­ing mate­r­i­al belonged to a fourth room­mate, Atom­waf­fen leader Bran­don Rus­sell, a Flori­da Nation­al Guards­man. Arthurs told author­i­ties that Rus­sell had been plan­ning to blow up a nuclear pow­er plant near Mia­mi. Ear­li­er this month Rus­sell plead­ed guilty in fed­er­al dis­trict court in Tam­pa to ille­gal pos­ses­sion of ​​explo­sives and was sen­tenced to five years in fed­er­al prison.” Note that th​is netw​ork w​as​ plot­ting to do seri­ous dam­age by blow­ing up a nuclear facility​, but got essen­tial­ly no cov­er­age in the press.

The arti­cle also men­tions that “The mur­ders alleged­ly occurred after Arthurs trad­ed Nazism for rad­i­cal Islam.”. Keep in mind the fact that the Nazis employed rad­i­cal islam­ics in units such as the Han­jar Divi­sion of the Waf­fen SS. Also, was he going to make a dirty bomb and have it blamed on islamists to cre­ate a zena­pho­bic atmos­phere and jus­ti­fy the reduc­tion of civ­il lib­er­ties?

“The orga­ni­za­tion, which cel­e­brates Hitler and Charles Man­son, has been tied to four oth­er mur­ders and an elab­o­rate bomb plot over the past eight months.” Note that Charles Man­son had a swasti­ka tat­tooed on his fore­head, hoped to start a race war in the US, and his peo­ple killed Sharon Tate who was pre­vi­ous­ly told by Robert Kennedy that he was going to open up the inves­ti­ga­tion into the Kennedy Assas­i­na­tion pri­or to his own assas­si­na­tion.

Here’s an illus­tra­tive exam­ple of how the ‘Alt-Right’ cul­ture of hoax­es and trolling might get used to obscure the role the far-right plays in domes­tic ter­ror attacks and actu­al­ly encour­age them: So it appears that the sto­ry about Niko­las Cruz being a mem­ber of the Repub­lic of Flori­da (ROF) neo-Nazi ‘mili­tia’, includ­ing the “three for­mer class­mates” who con­firmed that he was fre­quent­ly seen march­ing with the ROF, was actu­al­ly a hoax being per­pe­trat­ed by far-right trolls on the 4Chan mes­sage board. Yes, there are actu­al threads on 4Chan where mem­bers talk about how they are in con­tact with report­ed and dis­cus­sions on what an oppor­tu­ni­ty it is to troll the media. Threads that any­one can poten­tial­ly read. So it was a a hoax that was seem­ing­ly designed to be quick­ly found and iden­ti­fied as a hoax.

And a hoax that relied on the leader of the ROP, Jor­dan Jereb, first telling mul­ti­ple reporters that, yes, Cruz was part of his group, only to walk it back by say­ing he was mis­in­formed and con­fused.

Addi­tion­al­ly, the ABC News report that men­tioned the “3 for­mer class­mates” who cor­rob­o­rat­ed that Cruz was fre­quent­ly seen march­ing with the ROF has been tak­en down (an archived ver­sion is avail­able here).

And as we’re going to see below, CNN is also inves­ti­gat­ing mes­sages that may have been cre­at­ed by Cruz on a now-delet­ed pri­vate Youtube account. The mes­sages were post­ed in a pri­vate Insta­gram group where Cruz talks exten­sive­ly about his neo-Nazi views. So it’s pos­si­ble Youtube con­tains a record of Cruz espous­ing neo-Nazi ideals but it’s also pos­si­ble this is anoth­er lay­er of the hoax.

So almost imme­di­ate­ly after the attack we have a very pub­lic hoax pulled off by the ‘Alt-Right’ that appears to be designed to dis­cred­it the idea that Cruz was a fel­low neo-Nazi. And only now, after the media has wide­ly report­ed that Cruz’s ties to neo-Nazis is a big hoax, do we get the reports about pri­vate mes­sages that con­firm that, yes, Cruz real­ly was a mur­der­ous neo-Nazi. But those pri­vate mes­sages could, them­selves, be an ongo­ing exam­ple of this hoax. And it’s large­ly up to Youtube to con­firm or refute it. It’s a big exam­ple of how a cul­ture of trolling and hoax­es is vital to the neo-Nazi under­ground grow­ing pub­lic pres­ence.

First, here’s a piece detail­ing the schem­ing on 4Chan about hoax­ing news orga­ni­za­tions about Cruz’s ties to the ROF. The pub­lic schem­ing on 4Chan:

Politi­co

How white nation­al­ists fooled the media about Flori­da shoot­er
ABC, AP and oth­ers ran with false infor­ma­tion on shooter’s ties to extrem­ist groups.

By SHAWN MUSGRAVE
02/16/2018 03:13 PM EST
Updat­ed 02/16/2018 06:27 PM EST

Fol­low­ing mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tions by a white nation­al­ist leader and coor­di­nat­ed efforts by inter­net trolls, numer­ous researchers and media out­lets spread a seem­ing­ly false claim that the man charged with killing more than a dozen peo­ple at a Flori­da high school belonged to an extrem­ist group.

Law enforce­ment agen­cies say they have no evi­dence so far to sup­port this claim, and the rumor appears to have been per­pe­trat­ed by white nation­al­ist trolls them­selves.

On Thurs­day after­noon, the Anti-Defama­tion League report­ed that a white suprema­cist group claimed ties with Niko­las Cruz, who con­fessed to the shoot­ing spree that killed at least 17 peo­ple, includ­ing many high-school stu­dents, at Mar­jo­ry Stone­man Dou­glas High School in Park­land, Flori­da.

“A spokesper­son for the white suprema­cist group Repub­lic of Flori­da (ROF) told the Anti-Defama­tion League on Thurs­day, Feb­ru­ary 15, that Niko­las Cruz [....] was asso­ci­at­ed with his group,” the ADL report­ed. The ADL quot­ed a man named Jor­dan Jereb, who runs the small group, which is based in Tal­la­has­see.

“Jereb added that ROF had not ordered or want­ed Cruz to do any­thing like the school shoot­ing,” the ADL wrote in a blog post that was quick­ly picked up by ABC News and The Asso­ci­at­ed Press, and lat­er per­co­lat­ed through dozens of oth­er media out­lets. Even The Dai­ly Stormer, a neo-Nazi web­site, picked up the claim.

Some out­lets report­ed they had their own con­ver­sa­tions with Jereb or class­mates of Cruz who alleged­ly cor­rob­o­rat­ed the asso­ci­a­tion of Cruz with ROF.

But a few hours lat­er, after law enforce­ment agen­cies said they had no evi­dence link­ing Cruz to ROF, Jereb said his iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of Cruz was a “mis­un­der­stand­ing” and that he, too, had been the sub­ject of a “prank.” On online forums and Twit­ter, trolls and white nation­al­ists gloat­ed at the dis­in­for­ma­tion they had sowed.

“All of our evi­dence seems to point to the ADL get­ting this wrong,” said Joan Dono­van, a researcher who tracks online mis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns for Data & Soci­ety, a think tank in New York City.

The ADL sub­se­quent­ly revised its report, as did many news out­lets.

...

At a news con­fer­ence on Thurs­day, Broward Coun­ty Sher­iff Scott Israel told reporters that such a con­nec­tion was “not con­firmed at this time,” but that law enforce­ment was con­tin­u­ing to inves­ti­gate. The sher­if­f’s office in Leon Coun­ty, which con­tains Tal­la­has­see, lat­er told the Tal­la­has­see Demo­c­rat that it had found “no known ties between the ROF, Jor­dan Jereb or the Broward shoot­er.”

Dono­van called this an instance of “source hack­ing,” a tac­tic by which fringe groups coor­di­nate to feed false infor­ma­tion to author­i­ta­tive sources such as ADL researchers. These experts, in turn, dis­sem­i­nate the infor­ma­tion to reporters, and it reach­es thou­sands of read­ers before it can be debunked.

“It’s a very effec­tive way of get­ting duped,” Dono­van said.

The ADL traced its orig­i­nal tip to posts on 4chan, where researchers found “self-described ROF mem­bers” claim­ing that Cruz was a broth­er-in-arms. But many of those posts seem to have been writ­ten specif­i­cal­ly to deceive reporters and researchers.

On Wednes­day, an anony­mous 4chan user post­ed about receiv­ing a mes­sage on Insta­gram from an ABC News reporter after mak­ing a joke sug­gest­ing he knew Cruz.

“Prime trolling oppor­tu­ni­ty,” anoth­er user replied.

“You have to take advan­tage of this,” a third chimed in.

He asked for proof of the reporter’s iden­ti­ty, accord­ing to post­ed screen­shots from their cor­re­spon­dence. The reporter pro­vid­ed an offi­cial email address and sent a pho­to of an ABC iden­ti­fi­ca­tion badge.

Some on the 4chan thread joked about send­ing back obscene pho­tos, but oth­ers gave con­crete tips for trick­ing the reporter: “Keep talk­ing to her so she gains your trust”; “Keep this going be real­is­tic ... say you have known him for years you met him on a Lib­er­al Face­book page years ago and you have kept in touch”; “Say you are scared to tell her in case you get blamed, it will get her excit­ed you know some­thing big.”

This par­tic­u­lar 4chan user seems to have sent the reporter a racist car­toon and was quick­ly blocked. Many on the forum ripped into him for miss­ing a “a gold­en oppor­tu­ni­ty.”

“You could have told her the shoot­er took ‘an unusu­al inter­est in islam late­ly,’” one user wrote.

But the trolls now had a shared objec­tive: dis­sem­i­nate dis­in­for­ma­tion about Cruz. It’s unclear when exact­ly they set­tled on a nar­ra­tive that includ­ed Jereb and ROF.

In posts to a neo-Nazi Web forum called The Right Stuff, a user called “Jor­dan Fash” said the idea orig­i­nat­ed in a group chat on Dis­cord, an app for gamers that is pop­u­lar with white nation­al­ists and the alt-right. (“Fash” is com­mon inter­net short­hand for “fas­cist.”)

Accord­ing to Jor­dan Fash, an ABC News reporter reached out to one of the group’s mem­bers on Insta­gram. The group passed around her num­ber and told her Cruz was asso­ci­at­ed with Jereb. Group mem­bers com­mu­ni­cat­ed with at least two ABC News reporters in a coor­di­nat­ed effort.

Their cor­re­spon­dence was not post­ed online in its entire­ty. In some of the post­ed exchanges, the reporters asked trolls to sub­stan­ti­ate their sto­ries.

“Not to sug­gest that you aren’t being truth­ful, but it would be very help­ful if you could let me know how you know that,” one of the ABC News reporters wrote to one per­son via Insta­gram, accord­ing to screen­shots post­ed to 4chan on Thurs­day.

“It was com­mon knowl­edge he did ral­lies with ROF, I fre­quent­ly saw him con­vers­ing with Jor­dan Jereb in per­son,” the per­son, whom the reporter addressed as “Ethan,” respond­ed. Jor­dan Fash post­ed some of the same screen­shots to The Right Stuff.

“I was there. These are screen caps tak­en from when this shirt start­ed. 99% of it was done on the phone,” Jor­dan Fash wrote.

In posts to Gab, a social-net­work­ing site used by many in the alt-right, ear­ly Fri­day morn­ing, one user said the Dis­cord group “spent around 18 hours orches­trat­ing, con­tact­ing ABC, being inter­viewed by reporters, etc.”

Mem­bers swapped links to arti­cles that iden­ti­fied Cruz as a mem­ber of ROF, cel­e­brat­ing each sto­ry and keep­ing a tal­ly of media inter­view attempts.

“ABC mes­saged me. Asked to use my name in this arti­cle,” wrote one user.

“This is spread­ing like wild­fire,” wrote anoth­er user, “Rene­gade,” after some­one in the chat shared a link to the ADL blog post.

“All it takes is a sin­gle arti­cle,” the first user wrote back. “And every­one else picks up the sto­ry.”

ABC News report­ed that its reporters spoke with three “for­mer school­mates” of Cruz, but did not indi­cate whether these com­mu­ni­ca­tions were over social media. A spokesper­son for ABC News declined to com­ment on how its reporters vet­ted the iden­ti­ties of these pur­port­ed acquain­tances.

For its part, an AP spokesper­son said, “AP spoke with the leader of Repub­lic of Flori­da, who said Cruz was a mem­ber of his group and had par­tic­i­pat­ed in exer­cis­es in Tal­la­has­see. In the course of con­tin­ued report­ing, police and oth­er groups were not able to con­firm Cruz’s asso­ci­a­tion with the white nation­al­ist mili­tia, and that is what is reflect­ed on the wire.”

Oth­ers in the Dis­cord chat said they were con­tact­ed by a reporter from The New York Times.

At some point, the trolls start­ed a “con­fes­sion­al” 4chan thread ded­i­cat­ed to con­vinc­ing read­ers that Cruz had been a mem­ber of ROF. The ADL con­firmed this 4chan post was the one that led to their blog post.

“After see­ing that 4chan post, we called Jereb and he told us what he told us,” said an ADL spokesper­son.

“I’ve kept qui­et for long enough,” reads the first anony­mous mes­sage on the 4chan thread. “I’ve decid­ed that its time the world know the truth about ROF.”

“Niko­las Cruz was a rev­o­lu­tion­ary mem­ber of the Repub­lic of Flori­da, who preached twist­ed and dark things like ter­ror­ism and attack­ing inno­cent peo­ple.”

The anony­mous user claimed to be a for­mer ROF mem­ber and post­ed a pho­to titled “Me and nick.jpg,” which depict­ed two men pos­ing with the ROF flag.

Anoth­er post­ed a blur­ry pho­to of ROF mem­bers that was seem­ing­ly tak­en from a blog ded­i­cat­ed to coun­ter­ing extrem­ism in Tal­la­has­see.

On the Dis­cord chat, a user called Curb­stomp sug­gest­ed shar­ing gener­ic pho­tos of ROF and claim­ing they depict­ed Cruz.

“I have an idea. ... We can just take a pic of masked ROF mem­bers and claim one of them is Cruz,” Curb­stomp wrote.

Mem­bers of the Dis­cord chat swapped poten­tial pho­tos.

Oth­ers joined the cho­rus on 4chan, inter­spers­ing jokes with pur­port­ed con­fir­ma­tions.

“I can con­firm this guy was try­ing to enact a race war and got kicked out of ROF,” wrote anoth­er poster.

It’s unclear how direct­ly involved Jereb was in the decep­tion effort. Jor­dan Fash wrote on The Right Stuff that Jereb some­times “hangs around” in their Dis­cord chats.

The post­ed screen­shots show a Dis­cord user called “The Florid­i­an” who seems to claim mem­ber­ship in ROF and who recounts calls with the ADL and reporters.

“Its fun­ny the ADL guy said ‘I just want to warn you your group is going to be under scruti­ny,’ ” The Florid­i­an wrote.

“Also ABC called back they are hav­ing trou­ble ver­i­fy­ing Niko­las envolve­ment,” The Florid­i­an also wrote. ABC News report­ed speak­ing with Jereb direct­ly, as did the AP, The Dai­ly Beast, and oth­er out­lets.

“ROF now has a high­er kill ratio than Atom­waf­fen,” The Florid­i­an laughed in recount­ing the calls, refer­ring to a small neo-Nazi group in Flori­da that is report­ed­ly linked to sev­er­al mur­ders.

The Florid­i­an also claimed to have been con­tact­ed by “the feds.”

“I told the feds I have noth­ing to do with Cruz,” The Florid­i­an wrote. “I told them it was a prank and that I was also con­fused.”

Jereb lat­er seemed to deflect respon­si­bil­i­ty, call­ing it all a “legit mis­un­der­stand­ing” because ROF has mul­ti­ple peo­ple named Nicholas.

“You real­ize I was­n’t in on the prank? You real­ize I thought the infor­ma­tion I was being giv­en was legit?” he wrote on Gab, sug­gest­ing that his fel­low white nation­al­ists owed him an apol­o­gy.

Jereb did not respond to a phone mes­sage or an email.

As the sto­ry spread even fur­ther, one Dis­cord user post­ed a tweet from the AP: “BREAKING: Leader of white nation­al­ist group has con­firmed sus­pect in Flori­da school shoot­ing was mem­ber of his orga­ni­za­tion.” It had been retweet­ed more than 35,000 times at that point.

The group crowed at such a quan­tifi­able achieve­ment.

“Those 35 thou­sand peo­ple aren’t going to change their minds,” wrote one mem­ber, mock­ing those who would read the press cov­er­age he and his friends con­coct­ed.

“They’re lem­mings. ... They will go to the grave con­vinced that the shoot­er was a white nation­al­ist.”

By Thurs­day evening, 4chan users were cel­e­brat­ing their efforts, post­ing screen­shots of their com­mu­ni­ca­tions with reporters and faux posts pre­tend­ing to be ROF mem­bers.

“[T]hey are so hun­gry for a sto­ry that they’ll just believe any­thing as long as its cor­rob­o­rat­ed by a few peo­ple and seems legit,” wrote the cre­ator of one 4chan thread.

Dono­van, the dis­in­for­ma­tion researcher, said reporters need to be more vig­i­lant against these kinds of cam­paigns, which are going to get only more com­mon and more sophis­ti­cat­ed.

“We have to start think­ing of these white nation­al­ist groups as what some of them describe them­selves — ‘media mili­tias,’” said Dono­van. “They think of media as adver­sar­i­al ter­ri­to­ry.”

———-

“How white nation­al­ists fooled the media about Flori­da shoot­er” by SHAWN MUSGRAVE; Politi­co; 02/16/2018

“Dono­van called this an instance of “source hack­ing,” a tac­tic by which fringe groups coor­di­nate to feed false infor­ma­tion to author­i­ta­tive sources such as ADL researchers. These experts, in turn, dis­sem­i­nate the infor­ma­tion to reporters, and it reach­es thou­sands of read­ers before it can be debunked.”

“Source hack­ing”. That’s the term for what the ‘Alt-Right’ neo-Nazis were employ­ing. And note how the only way for “source hack­ing” to actu­al­ly work is for it to be iden­ti­fied as a hoax. And these fig­ures cer­tain­ly made sure it was iden­ti­fied as a hoax. Rapid­ly iden­ti­fied as a hoax. The first “tips” that Cruz was asso­ci­at­ed with the ROF orig­i­nat­ed on 4Chan, which is also where much of the pub­lic dis­cus­sion about it being a hoax took place:

...
The ADL traced its orig­i­nal tip to posts on 4chan, where researchers found “self-described ROF mem­bers” claim­ing that Cruz was a broth­er-in-arms. But many of those posts seem to have been writ­ten specif­i­cal­ly to deceive reporters and researchers.

On Wednes­day, an anony­mous 4chan user post­ed about receiv­ing a mes­sage on Insta­gram from an ABC News reporter after mak­ing a joke sug­gest­ing he knew Cruz.

“Prime trolling oppor­tu­ni­ty,” anoth­er user replied.

“You have to take advan­tage of this,” a third chimed in.
...

“On Wednes­day, an anony­mous 4chan user post­ed about receiv­ing a mes­sage on Insta­gram from an ABC News reporter after mak­ing a joke sug­gest­ing he knew Cruz.”

So a 4Chan user posts on 4Chan about receiv­ing a mes­sage on Insta­gram from an ABC News reporter about ‘mak­ing a joke sug­gest­ing he knew Cruz.’ Note that, in doing so, this anony­mous 4Chan use is appear­ing to pub­licly refute the idea that he knew Cruz and keep in mind that, in the arti­cle we’re going to look at below, it was an Insta­gram pri­vate mes­sage board where Cruz dis­cuss­es his neo-Nazi views. So you real­ly have to won­der if this 4Chan user is one of the mem­bers of that pri­vate Insta­gram group.

And after post­ing about get­ting con­tact­ed by the reporter, the 4Chan peo­ple talk about how to hoax jour­nal­ists. A hoax that, again, is clear­ly designed to be rapid­ly iden­ti­fied as a hoax. Although the ini­tial hoax sug­ges­tions appear to be to sug­gest that Cruz was a lib­er­al or con­vert­ed to Islam:

...
He asked for proof of the reporter’s iden­ti­ty, accord­ing to post­ed screen­shots from their cor­re­spon­dence. The reporter pro­vid­ed an offi­cial email address and sent a pho­to of an ABC iden­ti­fi­ca­tion badge.

Some on the 4chan thread joked about send­ing back obscene pho­tos, but oth­ers gave con­crete tips for trick­ing the reporter: “Keep talk­ing to her so she gains your trust”; “Keep this going be real­is­tic ... say you have known him for years you met him on a Lib­er­al Face­book page years ago and you have kept in touch”; “Say you are scared to tell her in case you get blamed, it will get her excit­ed you know some­thing big.”

This par­tic­u­lar 4chan user seems to have sent the reporter a racist car­toon and was quick­ly blocked. Many on the forum ripped into him for miss­ing a “a gold­en oppor­tu­ni­ty.”

“You could have told her the shoot­er took ‘an unusu­al inter­est in islam late­ly,’” one user wrote.

But the trolls now had a shared objec­tive: dis­sem­i­nate dis­in­for­ma­tion about Cruz. It’s unclear when exact­ly they set­tled on a nar­ra­tive that includ­ed Jereb and ROF.
...

But the dis­cus­sion of this hoax­ing cam­paign were lim­it­ed to 4Chan. There were also dis­cus­sions on the neo-Nazi online forum The Right Stuff, where a user, “Jor­dan Fash,” claims the whole idea of cre­at­ing this hoax orig­i­nat­ed on a group chat on an app called Dis­cord that’s pop­u­lar with neo-Nazis. And this same user claims an ABC News reporter reached out to a mem­ber of that chat group over Insta­gram (the same sto­ry that the 4Chan user claimed above). And it was this same user who then claims they told the reporter that Cruz was fre­quent­ly seen with the ROF:

...

In posts to a neo-Nazi Web forum called The Right Stuff, a user called “Jor­dan Fash” said the idea orig­i­nat­ed in a group chat on Dis­cord, an app for gamers that is pop­u­lar with white nation­al­ists and the alt-right. (“Fash” is com­mon inter­net short­hand for “fas­cist.”)

Accord­ing to Jor­dan Fash, an ABC News reporter reached out to one of the group’s mem­bers on Insta­gram. The group passed around her num­ber and told her Cruz was asso­ci­at­ed with Jereb. Group mem­bers com­mu­ni­cat­ed with at least two ABC News reporters in a coor­di­nat­ed effort.

Their cor­re­spon­dence was not post­ed online in its entire­ty. In some of the post­ed exchanges, the reporters asked trolls to sub­stan­ti­ate their sto­ries.

“Not to sug­gest that you aren’t being truth­ful, but it would be very help­ful if you could let me know how you know that,” one of the ABC News reporters wrote to one per­son via Insta­gram, accord­ing to screen­shots post­ed to 4chan on Thurs­day.

“It was com­mon knowl­edge he did ral­lies with ROF, I fre­quent­ly saw him con­vers­ing with Jor­dan Jereb in per­son,” the per­son, whom the reporter addressed as “Ethan,” respond­ed. Jor­dan Fash post­ed some of the same screen­shots to The Right Stuff.

“I was there. These are screen caps tak­en from when this shirt start­ed. 99% of it was done on the phone,” Jor­dan Fash wrote.
...

And there were sim­i­lar claims on Gab, a social-net­work­ing site pop­u­lar with neo-Nazis:

...
In posts to Gab, a social-net­work­ing site used by many in the alt-right, ear­ly Fri­day morn­ing, one user said the Dis­cord group “spent around 18 hours orches­trat­ing, con­tact­ing ABC, being inter­viewed by reporters, etc.”

Mem­bers swapped links to arti­cles that iden­ti­fied Cruz as a mem­ber of ROF, cel­e­brat­ing each sto­ry and keep­ing a tal­ly of media inter­view attempts.

“ABC mes­saged me. Asked to use my name in this arti­cle,” wrote one user.

“This is spread­ing like wild­fire,” wrote anoth­er user, “Rene­gade,” after some­one in the chat shared a link to the ADL blog post.

“All it takes is a sin­gle arti­cle,” the first user wrote back. “And every­one else picks up the sto­ry.”

ABC News report­ed that its reporters spoke with three “for­mer school­mates” of Cruz, but did not indi­cate whether these com­mu­ni­ca­tions were over social media. A spokesper­son for ABC News declined to com­ment on how its reporters vet­ted the iden­ti­ties of these pur­port­ed acquain­tances.
...

So that all appears to be the core ele­ments of the pub­licly avail­able dis­cus­sions by the ‘Alt-Right’ neo-Nazis that they were car­ry­ing out this hoax. And, again, as we’ll see below, it’s a ‘Cruz is a neo-Nazi’ hoax that appears to be actu­al­ly backed up by Cruz’s own posts on a pri­vate Youtube account. But those mes­sages from Cruz were post­ed on a pri­vate Insta­gram mes­sage board.

And let’s not for­get the role ROF leader Jor­dan Jereb played in this, first claim­ing that, yes, Cruz was a mem­ber, and then back­track­ing and act­ing like he was a vic­tim of this same hoax. And not how “Jor­dan Fash” actu­al­ly claims Jereb “hangs around” on their Dis­cord chats...the same place this hoax appar­ent­ly orig­i­nat­ed. And “Jor­dan Fash” even post­ed screen­shot on “The Right Stuff” of a Dis­cord mem­ber called “The Florid­i­an” dis­cussing his inter­ac­tions with an ABC News reporter:

...
It’s unclear how direct­ly involved Jereb was in the decep­tion effort. Jor­dan Fash wrote on The Right Stuff that Jereb some­times “hangs around” in their Dis­cord chats.

The post­ed screen­shots show a Dis­cord user called “The Florid­i­an” who seems to claim mem­ber­ship in ROF and who recounts calls with the ADL and reporters.

“Its fun­ny the ADL guy said ‘I just want to warn you your group is going to be under scruti­ny,’ ” The Florid­i­an wrote.

“Also ABC called back they are hav­ing trou­ble ver­i­fy­ing Niko­las envolve­ment,” The Florid­i­an also wrote. ABC News report­ed speak­ing with Jereb direct­ly, as did the AP, The Dai­ly Beast, and oth­er out­lets.

“ROF now has a high­er kill ratio than Atom­waf­fen,” The Florid­i­an laughed in recount­ing the calls, refer­ring to a small neo-Nazi group in Flori­da that is report­ed­ly linked to sev­er­al mur­ders.

The Florid­i­an also claimed to have been con­tact­ed by “the feds.”

“I told the feds I have noth­ing to do with Cruz,” The Florid­i­an wrote. “I told them it was a prank and that I was also con­fused.”

Jereb lat­er seemed to deflect respon­si­bil­i­ty, call­ing it all a “legit mis­un­der­stand­ing” because ROF has mul­ti­ple peo­ple named Nicholas.

“You real­ize I was­n’t in on the prank? You real­ize I thought the infor­ma­tion I was being giv­en was legit?” he wrote on Gab, sug­gest­ing that his fel­low white nation­al­ists owed him an apol­o­gy.
...

““I told the feds I have noth­ing to do with Cruz,” The Florid­i­an wrote. “I told them it was a prank and that I was also con­fused.””

So it would appear that “The Florid­i­an” is indeed Jereb post­ing to the Dis­cord group chat where all this orig­i­nat­ed. Unless, of course, the screen­shots of “The Florid­i­an” that “Jor­dan Fash” post­ed to “The Right Stuff” neo-Nazi forum were them­selves hoax­es. But it sure does­n’t seem out­landish that “The Florid­i­an” is indeed Jereb.

So it would appear that Jor­dan Jereb, leader of the ROF, was coor­di­nat­ing with the rest of the neo-Nazis were were cook­ing up this hoax over a Dis­cord group chat. And the evi­dence of this is the evi­dence post­ed by “Jor­dan Fash” on “The Right Stuff,” online forum. So the whole world can see it, which is, again, part of how this entire hoax oper­a­tion has a prob­lem with get­ting iden­ti­fied as a hoax oper­a­tion.

So there is clear­ly a big gas light­ing ele­ment to all this. But as we’re going to see, it’s a gas light­ing ele­ment that pos­si­bly obscures the fact that Cruz does actu­al­ly appear to hold neo-Nazi views. Views he may have expressed on a pri­vate Youtube account that were post­ed to a pri­vate Insta­gram group that CNN just report­ed on. Recall that the 4Chan user who ini­tial­ly post­ed about get­ting con­tact­ed by an ABC News report­ed was con­tact­ed over Insta­gram after ‘jok­ing’ over Insta­gram about know­ing Cruz. And “Jor­dan Fash” also wrote that one of the mem­bers of the Dis­cord group chat was also con­tact­ed by an ABC News reporter over Insta­gram.

So were the peo­ple who were behind the pub­lic ‘hoax’ also mem­bers of this pri­vate Insta­gram group where Cruz express­es his neo-Nazi views? And are these posts on the Insta­gram account of these Youtube chats real or fake? Keep in mind that they report­ed­ly go back to August 2017 and the group large­ly involves six peo­ple. So if it’s a hoax, it’s poten­tial­ly a more elab­o­rate one than the above ‘hoax’ because months of chats would would have be rapid­ly gen­er­at­ed to show to jour­nal­ists:

CNN

Exclu­sive: Group chat mes­sages show school shoot­er obsessed with race, vio­lence and guns

By Paul P. Mur­phy, CNN
Updat­ed 0304 GMT (1104 HKT) Feb­ru­ary 17, 2018

(CNN)In a pri­vate Insta­gram group chat, con­fessed school shoot­er Niko­las Cruz repeat­ed­ly espoused racist, homo­pho­bic and anti-Semit­ic views and dis­played an obses­sion with vio­lence and guns.

Wednes­day, 19-year-old Cruz opened fire at the school that expelled him, Mar­jo­ry Stone­man Dou­glas High School in Park­land, Flori­da. Author­i­ties say he killed 17 with his legal­ly pur­chased AR-15.

CNN, inves­ti­gat­ing com­ments the shoot­er may have left on a now-delet­ed YouTube chan­nel, was added to the pri­vate Insta­gram group by one of the active mem­bers in it. The respond­ing group mem­bers, who appear to be younger than 18, have refused to con­firm their iden­ti­ties to CNN on or off the record.

When asked for com­ment or whether they knew about the pri­vate chat group, the FBI direct­ed CNN to the Broward Coun­ty Sher­if­f’s Office.

Most of the con­ver­sa­tion in the group since Cruz joined around August 2017 is between six peo­ple — includ­ing Cruz.

“I hate jews, ni**ers, immi­grants”

Racism was a con­stant theme in the chat group, which was called “Muri­ca (Amer­i­can flag emo­ji) (eagle emo­ji) great” — a name it was giv­en by Cruz.

The hatred he and oth­ers in the group espoused met lit­tle resis­tance from its active mem­bers. In one part of the group chat, Cruz wrote that he hat­ed, “jews, ni**ers, immi­grants.”

He talked about killing Mex­i­cans, keep­ing black peo­ple in chains and cut­ting their necks. The state­ments were not made in jest.

There are hun­dreds of racist mes­sages, racist memes and racist Insta­gram videos post­ed in the group.

One mem­ber even joked about Cruz’s par­tic­u­lar ven­omous­ness, say­ing that although he hat­ed black peo­ple, too, he did­n’t “to a point I wan­na kill the (sic) like nick.”

Cruz said he hat­ed black peo­ple sim­ply because they were black; Cruz hat­ed Jews because he believed they want­ed to destroy the world.

After one mem­ber expressed hatred for gay peo­ple, Cruz agreed, say­ing, “Shoot them in the back of head.”

White women drew Cruz’s hatred as well, specif­i­cal­ly those in inter­ra­cial rela­tion­ships, whom he referred to repeat­ed­ly as trai­tors.

There are no indi­ca­tions in the group chat that any mem­ber, includ­ing Cruz, is or was part of a white nation­al­ist or white suprema­cist group.

Cruz used pay­check for body armor

Cruz pur­chased an AR-15 rifle in Flori­da approx­i­mate­ly a year ago, legal­ly. A law enforce­ment source told CNN’s Evan Perez that Cruz pur­chased at least five guns in the past year.

In a pub­lic post on his Insta­gram page, Cruz showed what he called an “arse­nal” on a bed — sev­en guns and body armor. Anoth­er post on the page is a view down the bar­rel of a gun with a holo­graph­ic sight out a win­dow onto the street.

His AR-15 and oth­er guns were a fre­quent top­ic of con­ver­sa­tion in the group chat.

They even cri­tiqued Cruz’s rifle grip. He post­ed a short video of him­self shoot­ing a rifle out­side a win­dow at night. The video cuts out short­ly after the round is fired.

They dis­cussed which guns they liked bet­ter: M16s or AKs.

At one point, one mem­ber told Cruz, “Nick get this for your AR.” He direct­ed Nick to a web­site offer­ing an after-mar­ket acces­so­ry that would turn his AR-15 into a ful­ly auto­mat­ic weapon.

A law enforce­ment source speak­ing to CNN’s Evan Perez said that the gun used in the school shoot­ing was not auto­mat­ic, and there’s no indi­ca­tion he bought the acces­so­ry, or a sim­i­lar type of acces­so­ry.

When it was pay­day, Cruz let the group know where the mon­ey was going to be spent.

“Guys I got paid 330. I am buy­ing body armor,” he wrote.

Cruz did pur­chase the body armor, accord­ing to receipts he post­ed in the chat — with a $30 dis­count and free ship­ping.

Then he asked the group whether it was legal to wear body armor to school.

“School shoot­ers,” he replied, when some­one asked why he want­ed to know.

“I think I am going to kill peo­ple”

The bio on one of his Insta­gram accounts read, “anni­hi­la­tor.”

At one point in the chat, he wrote, “I think I am going to kill peo­ple.” After a mem­ber told him not to say things like that, he said he was just play­ing.

Dur­ing one of the anti-Semit­ic rants in the chat, Cruz spoke of his birth moth­er, say­ing, “My real mom was a Jew. I am glad I nev­er met her.”

Roger and Lyn­da Cruz adopt­ed Cruz when he was a child. Roger died in 2004, and Lyn­da died last fall after an ill­ness.

In his first mes­sage to the chat group, Cruz bragged about writ­ing a let­ter to Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump — and receiv­ing a response. CNN reached out to the White House for com­ment about any cor­re­spon­dence to and from Cruz but has not heard back.

...

In two instances, Cruz also dis­cussed killing small ani­mals.

He post­ed a pho­to on his Insta­gram account of a dis­em­bow­eled frog, say­ing he had killed it because one had killed his dog. In the Insta­gram chat, he describes killing a num­ber of birds with his gun.

Some mem­bers of the chat were wor­ried he might have killed endan­gered ani­mals.

“He seemed nice but also had some men­tal issues,” one mem­ber told CNN. “All (I know) is that he likes guns and real­ly hates lib­er­als.”

———-

“Exclu­sive: Group chat mes­sages show school shoot­er obsessed with race, vio­lence and guns” by Paul P. Mur­phy, CNN; 02/17/2018

“CNN, inves­ti­gat­ing com­ments the shoot­er may have left on a now-delet­ed YouTube chan­nel, was added to the pri­vate Insta­gram group by one of the active mem­bers in it. The respond­ing group mem­bers, who appear to be younger than 18, have refused to con­firm their iden­ti­ties to CNN on or off the record.”

So it’s an ongo­ing CNN inves­ti­ga­tion and, at this point, the FBI is nei­ther con­firm­ing nor deny­ing that it knows about this pri­vate chat group:

...
When asked for com­ment or whether they knew about the pri­vate chat group, the FBI direct­ed CNN to the Broward Coun­ty Sher­if­f’s Office.
...

And what­ev­er CNN is look­ing at is appar­ent­ly a con­ver­sa­tion, going back to August 2017, of six peo­ple includ­ing Cruz. And it sounds like Cruz was very open about his neo-Nazi views:

...
Most of the con­ver­sa­tion in the group since Cruz joined around August 2017 is between six peo­ple — includ­ing Cruz.

“I hate jews, ni**ers, immi­grants”

Racism was a con­stant theme in the chat group, which was called “Muri­ca (Amer­i­can flag emo­ji) (eagle emo­ji) great” — a name it was giv­en by Cruz.

The hatred he and oth­ers in the group espoused met lit­tle resis­tance from its active mem­bers. In one part of the group chat, Cruz wrote that he hat­ed, “jews, ni**ers, immi­grants.”

He talked about killing Mex­i­cans, keep­ing black peo­ple in chains and cut­ting their necks. The state­ments were not made in jest.

There are hun­dreds of racist mes­sages, racist memes and racist Insta­gram videos post­ed in the group.

One mem­ber even joked about Cruz’s par­tic­u­lar ven­omous­ness, say­ing that although he hat­ed black peo­ple, too, he did­n’t “to a point I wan­na kill the (sic) like nick.”

Cruz said he hat­ed black peo­ple sim­ply because they were black; Cruz hat­ed Jews because he believed they want­ed to destroy the world.

After one mem­ber expressed hatred for gay peo­ple, Cruz agreed, say­ing, “Shoot them in the back of head.”

White women drew Cruz’s hatred as well, specif­i­cal­ly those in inter­ra­cial rela­tion­ships, whom he referred to repeat­ed­ly as trai­tors.
...

“There are no indi­ca­tions in the group chat that any mem­ber, includ­ing Cruz, is or was part of a white nation­al­ist or white suprema­cist group.”

LOL, there are no indi­ca­tions that Cruz, or any oth­er mem­ber of the chat, was part of a white nation­al­ist or white suprema­cist group. Except, of course, if that chat room real­ly exist­ed, it does more or less com­prise a “white nation­al­ist or white suprema­cist group.” Just not one that was for­mal­ly labeled as such.

And note how Cruz’s acqui­si­tion of guns and body armor was appar­ent­ly a fre­quent top­ic of the Youtube group. So this seems like pret­ty crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion that can ver­i­fy whether or not it’s a real once the time frame for Cruz obtain­ing these items is estab­lished. And he even post­ed receipts of the body armor pur­chase to the group:

...
Cruz used pay­check for body armor

Cruz pur­chased an AR-15 rifle in Flori­da approx­i­mate­ly a year ago, legal­ly. A law enforce­ment source told CNN’s Evan Perez that Cruz pur­chased at least five guns in the past year.

In a pub­lic post on his Insta­gram page, Cruz showed what he called an “arse­nal” on a bed — sev­en guns and body armor. Anoth­er post on the page is a view down the bar­rel of a gun with a holo­graph­ic sight out a win­dow onto the street.

His AR-15 and oth­er guns were a fre­quent top­ic of con­ver­sa­tion in the group chat.

They even cri­tiqued Cruz’s rifle grip. He post­ed a short video of him­self shoot­ing a rifle out­side a win­dow at night. The video cuts out short­ly after the round is fired.

They dis­cussed which guns they liked bet­ter: M16s or AKs.

At one point, one mem­ber told Cruz, “Nick get this for your AR.” He direct­ed Nick to a web­site offer­ing an after-mar­ket acces­so­ry that would turn his AR-15 into a ful­ly auto­mat­ic weapon.

A law enforce­ment source speak­ing to CNN’s Evan Perez said that the gun used in the school shoot­ing was not auto­mat­ic, and there’s no indi­ca­tion he bought the acces­so­ry, or a sim­i­lar type of acces­so­ry.

When it was pay­day, Cruz let the group know where the mon­ey was going to be spent.

“Guys I got paid 330. I am buy­ing body armor,” he wrote.

Cruz did pur­chase the body armor, accord­ing to receipts he post­ed in the chat — with a $30 dis­count and free ship­ping.

Then he asked the group whether it was legal to wear body armor to school.

“School shoot­ers,” he replied, when some­one asked why he want­ed to know.
...

“Cruz did pur­chase the body armor, accord­ing to receipts he post­ed in the chat — with a $30 dis­count and free ship­ping.”

And then there’s Cruz’s alleged posts about how he was glad he nev­er met his bio­log­i­cal moth­er because she was Jew­ish:

...
Dur­ing one of the anti-Semit­ic rants in the chat, Cruz spoke of his birth moth­er, say­ing, “My real mom was a Jew. I am glad I nev­er met her.”
...

So is it true that Cruz knew his bio­log­i­cal moth­er was Jew­ish? That seems like the kind of thing that can help estab­lish the verac­i­ty of this.

But note the most bizarre part of all this: the first mes­sage Cruz alleged­ly post­ed to the group was that he wrote to Pres­i­dent Trump and Trump respond­ed:

...
In his first mes­sage to the chat group, Cruz bragged about writ­ing a let­ter to Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump — and receiv­ing a response. CNN reached out to the White House for com­ment about any cor­re­spon­dence to and from Cruz but has not heard back.
...

So that adds a whole new poten­tial polit­i­cal dimen­sion to this. If that’s true, there’s going to be mas­sive resis­tance from the right-wing about acknowl­edg­ing any of this true. But it also would be exact­ly the kind of fun-fact that trolling hoax­ers would to ped­dle to the media, only to be lat­er iden­ti­fied as a hoax.

So let’s hope CNN man­ages to estab­lished whether or not this alleged Youtube chat log is true soon­er or lat­er. Between the receipt for the body armor and oth­er pieces of infor­ma­tion that would hard to strangers to hoax it seems like there should be plen­ty of evi­dence one way or anoth­er. Although it’s also pos­si­ble that the chat logs are real, but with false infor­ma­tion added to dis­cred­it it.

It’s all a big reminder of the real­i­ty that while the far-right’s embrace of trolling may be designed to con­fuse audi­ences about what it real and what is not, one of the com­mon themes of that fog of con­fu­sion is obscur­ing from the pub­lic the fact that when neo-Nazis wage hoax cam­paigns that is actu­al­ly exam­ple of how Nazis ‘drop the mask’. Because, for Nazis, the Big Lie is both the means and the ends.

@Pterrafractyl & “JOHN COKOS”–

Digest­ing this sug­gests that what is being done is to claim Cruz’s links were a hoax, in order to obscure his real Nazi views.

“Lone-wolf” means just that. “Lead­er­less resis­tance” means just that.

ANY group affil­i­a­tion must be down­played, if not out­right denied.

Attempts at walk­ing back Jare­b’s com­ments should­n’t be giv­en too much cred­i­bil­i­ty, in my opin­ion.

Also: note that law enforce­ment has “found” no traces of Nazi/White Suprema­cist man­i­fes­ta­tion in Cruz.

What is not men­tioned is whether they even looked for any, or are actu­al­ly cov­er­ing this up.

Both FBI and Flori­da author­i­ties let Cruz slide after ear­li­er alarms were sound­ed.

As far as “Nazi” and fed­er­al agen­cies being mutu­al­ly exclu­sive as you, “JOHN COKOS” have claimed, that dog won’t hunt, as they say.

Var­i­ous Nazi, Klan, White Suprema­cist groups are used as foot sol­diers in var­i­ous oper­a­tions, as dis­cussed in, among oth­er pro­grams, FTR #971. https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-971-nazis-in-new-orleans/

This is not an either/or dynam­ic. Far right groups are quick to try to blame every­thing on “da gum­mint,” INSTEAD of Nazis, etc.

They shy away from the well doc­u­ment­ed fact that the two are con­nect­ed, though by no means coter­mi­nous.

Best,

Dave Emory

@Dave: I should add a cor­rec­tion about the CNN report on the pri­vate Insta­gram chat group. I had mis­read the report as indi­cat­ing that it was a pri­vate Youtube account where the chats took place and those chats got added to a sep­a­rate pri­vate Insta­gram chat group. Upon reread that arti­cle it looks like all of these con­ver­sa­tions actu­al­ly took place on that pri­vate Insta­gram account, which CNN came across when inves­ti­gat­ing a now-delet­ed Youtube account that Cruz post­ed on. And that makes it far less like­ly that these pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions where Cruz was express­ing all these neo-Nazi views were some­how doc­tored and part of hoax. There’s no way these indi­vid­u­als could insert fake mes­sages into a Insta­gram’s sys­tems.

Also, if you read the report it includes pho­tos of Cruz pos­ing in body armor that CNN appears to have obtained from that chat group. So that CNN report looks very like­ly to be real.

And that all makes the fact that Cruz claimed to write to Pres­i­dent Trump and get a response all the more plau­si­ble. Here’s the part of that CNN arti­cle I mis­in­ter­pret­ed, along with part about Cruz’s first post on the group being about hear­ing back from Trump:

CNN

Exclu­sive: Group chat mes­sages show school shoot­er obsessed with race, vio­lence and guns

By Paul P. Mur­phy, CNN
Updat­ed 5:51 PM ET, Sat Feb­ru­ary 17, 2018

(CNN)In a pri­vate Insta­gram group chat, con­fessed school shoot­er Niko­las Cruz repeat­ed­ly espoused racist, homo­pho­bic and anti-Semit­ic views and dis­played an obses­sion with vio­lence and guns.

Wednes­day, 19-year-old Cruz opened fire at the school that expelled him, Mar­jo­ry Stone­man Dou­glas High School in Park­land, Flori­da. Author­i­ties say he killed 17 with his legal­ly pur­chased AR-15.

CNN, inves­ti­gat­ing com­ments the shoot­er may have left on a now-delet­ed YouTube chan­nel, was added to the pri­vate Insta­gram group by one of the active mem­bers in it. The respond­ing group mem­bers, who appear to be younger than 18, have refused to con­firm their iden­ti­ties to CNN on or off the record.

...

In his first mes­sage to the chat group, Cruz bragged about writ­ing a let­ter to Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump — and receiv­ing a response. CNN reached out to the White House for com­ment about any cor­re­spon­dence to and from Cruz but has not heard back.
...
———-

“Exclu­sive: Group chat mes­sages show school shoot­er obsessed with race, vio­lence and guns” by Paul P. Mur­phy; CNN; 02/17/2018

“CNN, inves­ti­gat­ing com­ments the shoot­er may have left on a now-delet­ed YouTube chan­nel, was added to the pri­vate Insta­gram group by one of the active mem­bers in it. The respond­ing group mem­bers, who appear to be younger than 18, have refused to con­firm their iden­ti­ties to CNN on or off the record.”

Again, the pri­vate chats the CNN is report­ing on are the actu­al chats entered into Insta­gram’s sys­tem, which is not some­thing that could be spoofed after the fact.

It’s also worth recall­ing that Jor­dan Jereb report­ed­ly post­ed on Gap, the Alt-Right’s social mes­sag­ing app of choice, about using the Repub­lic of Flori­da to cre­ate “lone wolf activists”. And “cre­at­ing lone wolf activists” clear­ly implies dis­as­so­ci­at­ing his group from those “lone wolves”. And Jereb appears have been involved with the “Dis­cord” chat group where the ‘hoax’ cam­paign was con­coct­ed. So that behav­ior would also be con­sis­tent with “cre­at­ing lone wolves”.

Mr. Emory,

Even if Jare­b’s com­ments were indeed false (and I agree that attempts at walk­ing back should not nec­es­sar­i­ly be giv­en cred­i­bil­i­ty), sep­a­rate evi­dence from social media post­ings has revealed obvi­ous white suprema­cist ide­ol­o­gy.

From the New York Post by Sara Dorn From Feb­ru­ary 17, 2018 | 2:13pm:

‘In the months before con­fessed mass mur­der­er Niko­las Cruz killed 17 peo­ple in a Flori­da high school, he rant­ed about minori­ties, allud­ed to his mur­der­ous inten­tions, and boast­ed about writ­ing to Pres­i­dent Trump in pri­vate social media mes­sages, accord­ing to a report.

The deranged 19-year-old told mem­bers of a a [B]six-member Insta­gram group called “Muri­ca great” that he want­ed to kill Mex­i­cans, keep black peo­ple in chains and cut their necks,[/b] accord­ing to the vile mes­sages obtained by CNN.

Cruz said he [b]hated black peo­ple sim­ply because they were black, and Jews because he said they want­ed to destroy the world.[/b]

And he [b]hated homo­sex­u­als and white women who dat­ed minorities.[/b]

[b]“Shoot them in the back of head,” he said about gay people.[/b]

[b]He brand­ed white women in inter­ra­cial rela­tion­ships “trai­tors,” [/b]according to the out­let.

Some racist mem­bers said Cruz’s hatred was even too much for them.

One mem­ber said he also hat­ed black peo­ple, but not [b]“to a point I wan­na kill the [sic] like nick.”[/b]

Cruz even bragged to the group, which he report­ed­ly joined in August 2017, that he wrote to Pres­i­dent Trump — and claimed he received a response.

And he also showed off the guns he bought in Flori­da over the past year with the group.

“I think I am going to kill peo­ple,” Cruz, told mem­bers, but claimed he was kid­ding when anoth­er group mem­ber called him out.

A mem­ber of the group chat told the out­let that Cruz, “seemed nice but also had some men­tal issues.”

“All [I know] is that he likes guns and real­ly hates lib­er­als,” the per­son said.’

Respect to your life­time of impor­tant work.

- Richard

The orig­i­nal CNN exclu­sive goes into more detail here:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/16/us/exclusive-school-shooter-instagram-group/index.html

CNN appar­ent­ly recov­ered “hun­dreds” of mes­sages reflect­ing obvi­ous­ly white suprema­cist ide­ol­o­gy.

Again, much respect to your life­time of impor­tant work.

– Richard

Here’s a look at how the ‘Alt-Right’ dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign start­ed on 4Chan — where 4Chan users claimed to be a class­mates of Niko­las Cruz and claimed that he was seen march­ing with the Repub­lic of Flori­da neo-Nazi mili­tia, pre­emp­tive­ly dis­cred­it­ing the sub­se­quent rev­e­la­tions that Cruz did in fact appear to have a neo-Nazi world­view — isn’t lim­it­ed to 4Chan. The much larg­er far-right media land­scape appears to be col­lec­tive­ly push­ing a whole new dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign designed to smear the sur­viv­ing high school stu­dents who have emerged as nation­al fig­ures in the gun law reform debate:

A num­ber of right-wing pun­dits, and even some Repub­li­can par­ty fig­ures (includ­ing Don­ald Trump Jr.), have latched onto the ‘cri­sis actor’ meme. That’s the idea that was heav­i­ly pro­mot­ed by fig­ures like Alex Jones fol­low­ing the Sandy Hook attack that assert­ed that there was no mass killing and it was all an elab­o­rate hoax per­pe­trat­ed by the gov­ern­ment to whip up pub­lic sup­port for gun con­trol leg­is­la­tion. In oth­er words, it’s the idea that the vic­tims of these mass shoot­ings aren’t actu­al­ly vic­tims but instead mali­cious pro­fes­sion­al deceivers work­ing for the gov­ern­ment.

It the same meme that was pushed after the mass shoot­ing in Vegas and now it’s being pushed after the attack in Flori­da. Although there isn’t one vari­ant of the meme. Some are sug­gest­ing there was no attack at all and it was all a hoax. Oth­ers are sug­gest­ing that the stu­dents who respond­ed to the shoot­ing by pub­licly and force­ful­ly sham­ing the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ciate, Pres­i­dent Trump, and oth­er politi­cians who won’t sup­port strong gun con­trol laws are either pro­fes­sion­al actors and/or being coached by Democ­rats or George Soros.

And these memes are already gone wild­ly viral. So viral that one of them, a video sug­gest­ing stu­dent David Hogg is an actor, was #1 on YouTube’s trend­ing videos:

Buz­zFeed

Nope, The Flori­da School Shoot­ing Sur­vivors Demand­ing Gun Con­trol Are Not Cri­sis Actors

Right-wing web­sites are fuel­ing a now-viral con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that Flori­da high school stu­dents demand­ing gun con­trol are actors push­ing a lib­er­al agen­da. The the­o­ry was even pro­mot­ed by the aide of a Flori­da law­mak­er.

Bri­an­na Sacks
Buz­zFeed News Reporter

Orig­i­nal­ly post­ed on Feb­ru­ary 21, 2018, at 1:15 a.m.
Updat­ed on Feb­ru­ary 21, 2018, at 11:39 a.m.

In the days since a gun­man opened fire on their class­mates on Valen­tine’s Day, killing 17 peo­ple just as school was about to end for the day, a group of out­raged teenage sur­vivors have been vocal­ly demand­ing stricter gun laws. In response to their activism, right-wing out­lets have con­trived and pushed false reports that the stu­dents are actors cap­i­tal­iz­ing on the tragedy to push a lib­er­al agen­da on gun con­trol.

These fake claims have now gone viral. Hun­dreds of videos, arti­cles, and posts claim­ing to unmask these fake stu­dents have swept across social media, gain­ing thou­sands of views, shares, and retweets. The con­tent picks apart the stu­dents’ per­for­mances in media inter­views as they talked about the friends they lost in the shoot­ing at Mar­jo­ry Stone­man Dou­glas High School and their anger that the tragedy hap­pened at anoth­er US school.

As of Tues­day night, 108,135 peo­ple were talk­ing about “cri­sis actors” on Face­book. One video had been watched more than 41,000 times and shared by about 2,300 users. Before it was removed, anoth­er Face­book post call­ing Stone­man Dou­glas senior David Hogg an actor was shared more than 110,000 times. Yet anoth­er clip post­ed on Twit­ter got more than 6,000 retweets.

TheGatewayPundit.com, a right-wing news web­site, also post­ed a sto­ry that not­ed Hog­g’s father is a retired FBI agent — a fact the site dubbed a “red flag” — and con­clud­ed, with­out evi­dence, that the teen had been coached to push anti-Trump talk­ing points.

[see youtube video assert­ing that David Hogg is a cri­sis actor]

On YouTube, there have been 399 videos men­tion­ing “cri­sis actors Flori­da” uploaded in the past week, with thou­sands of peo­ple watch­ing clips with titles like “Flori­da School Shoot­ing Fake Shoot­ing And Hoax, Cri­sis Actress smil­ing,” which had 3,800 views by the end of the day Tues­day. One video, sug­gest­ing that Hogg was an actor, was the No. 1 trend­ing video on YouTube as of Wednes­day, but lat­er appeared to have been removed from YouTube’s trend­ing sec­tion. In a state­ment to Buz­zFeed News, YouTube said that it’s sys­tem “mis­clas­si­fied” the video because it “con­tained footage from an author­i­ta­tive news source.”

“The video should nev­er have appeared in Trend­ing,” YouTube said, adding that they had removed the video from Trend­ing and YouTube for “vio­lat­ing our poli­cies.”

“We are work­ing to improve our sys­tems mov­ing for­ward,” the state­ment said.

How­ev­er, YouTube did not address ques­tions on why its search results for “David Hogg” list sev­er­al videos call­ing Hogg an actor and accus­ing him of “bab­bling” rehearsed lines on tele­vi­sion inter­views.

Promi­nent Trump sup­port­ers on Twit­ter, includ­ing for­mer Mil­wau­kee sher­iff David Clarke and con­ser­v­a­tive author Dinesh D’Souza, have also been ped­dling the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that the stu­dents’ push for gun reform is an orches­trat­ed polit­i­cal effort by the left-wing.

Clarke tweet­ed, with­out evi­dence, that lib­er­al bil­lion­aire phil­an­thropist George Soros was back­ing the teens’ activism and demand for gun reform.

The well ORGANIZED effort by Flori­da school stu­dents demand­ing gun con­trol has GEORGE SOROS’ FINGERPRINTS all over it. It is sim­i­lar to how he hijacked and exploit­ed black people’s emo­tion regard­ing police use of force inci­dents into the COP HATING Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment. pic.twitter.com/XDZ3bcwF6F— David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) Feb­ru­ary 20, 2018

D’Souza called one of the sur­vivors of the shoot­ing “deranged” and sug­gest­ed that she had been “coached” to prop­a­gate anti-Trump views on tele­vi­sion. He also said that the stu­dents’ grief over los­ing their peers was “polit­i­cal­ly orches­trat­ed,” “pho­ny,” and “inau­then­tic.” D’Souza apol­o­gized for the “insen­si­tive” tweet Wednes­day that was still up on his page.

Buz­zFeed News reached out to Twit­ter to ask if D’Souza will con­tin­ue to remain a ver­i­fied user.

This woman seems coached and also a bit deranged. Trump’s should ignore these media-man­u­fac­tured the­atrics https://t.co/ewRNRqnlEi— Dinesh D’Souza (@DineshDSouza) Feb­ru­ary 20, 2018

Gen­uine grief I can empathize with. But grief orga­nized for the cameras—politically orches­trat­ed grief—strikes me as pho­ny & inau­then­tic— Dinesh D’Souza (@DineshDSouza) Feb­ru­ary 21, 2018

Right-wing talk show host Alex Jones pub­lished sev­er­al videos on his InfoWars YouTube chan­nel also accus­ing Hogg of for­get­ting his lines dur­ing a TV inter­view. One video has now been watched more than 9,200 times and has sparked dozens of copy­cat takes. Anoth­er video claim­ing that the Flori­da school shoot­ing was a “giant false flag” has 170,000 views. The chan­nel has more than 2 mil­lion sub­scribers.

In response to an inquiry about videos, a spokesper­son for YouTube referred Buz­zFeed News to the com­pa­ny’s harass­ment pol­i­cy.

“We rec­og­nize the chal­leng­ing issues pre­sent­ed by hoax videos and the pain they can cause the fam­i­lies who have suf­fered these incred­i­bly trag­ic loss­es,” the spokesper­son said. “That is why last sum­mer we updat­ed the appli­ca­tion of our harass­ment pol­i­cy to include hoax videos that tar­get the vic­tims of these tragedies. Any video flagged to us that vio­lates this pol­i­cy is reviewed and then removed.”
[see viral pics claim Hogg is a cri­sis actor]
A spokesper­son for Face­book said that the com­pa­ny was “aware” of the posts relat­ed to the Flori­da shoot­ing con­spir­a­cies, but said that the com­pa­ny does­n’t “have poli­cies in place that require peo­ple to tell the truth.”

“Peo­ple often make unver­i­fied claims about peo­ple and events (‘the min­is­ter is cor­rupt!’ ‘I found a roach in my soup at that restau­rant!’), and deter­min­ing what’s true and false (ver­sus what’s opin­ion, hoax, hyper­bole, etc.) isn’t some­thing we can do reli­ably in spe­cif­ic cas­es or at scale,” the spokesper­son said, not­ing that there are “valid con­cerns about a pri­vate com­pa­ny being an arbiter of truth.”

Face­book has tak­en steps to com­bat fake news on its plat­form, the spokesper­son added, and has tak­en steps to address the issue.

“When poten­tial­ly false con­tent has been flagged to us, we send it to our third par­ty fact check­ers,” he said. “If the fact check­ing orga­ni­za­tions iden­ti­fy a sto­ry as fake, we will sug­gest relat­ed arti­cles in News Feed to show peo­ple dif­fer­ent points of view, includ­ing infor­ma­tion from fact check­ers. Sto­ries that have been dis­put­ed may also appear low­er in News Feed.”

Mean­while, the fringe con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries have seeped into offi­cial chan­nels. An aide to a Flori­da state law­mak­er was fired Tues­day after push­ing the cri­sis actor the­o­ry. Flori­da state Rep. Shawn Har­ri­son said on Twit­ter that he decid­ed to fire his dis­trict sec­re­tary, Ben­jamin Kel­ly, for mak­ing “an insen­si­tive and inap­pro­pri­ate alle­ga­tion about Park­land stu­dents.” The Repub­li­can also stressed that he did not share Kel­ly’s views.

Tonight Mr. Kel­ly was ter­mi­nat­ed from his posi­tion as my Dis­trict Sec­re­tary. I am appalled at and strong­ly denounce his com­ments about the Park­land stu­dents. I am again sor­ry for any pain this has caused the griev­ing fam­i­lies of this tragedy.— Shawn Har­ri­son (@Shawnfor63) Feb­ru­ary 21, 2018

Ear­li­er Tues­day, Kel­ly sent an email to a Tam­pa Bay Times reporter in response to a sto­ry detail­ing how online con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists have attacked stu­dent sur­vivors of the Flori­da school shoot­ing.

“Both kids in the pic­ture are not stu­dents here but actors that trav­el to var­i­ous cri­sis when they hap­pen,” Kel­ly wrote, accord­ing to the paper’s Wash­ing­ton bureau chief, Alex Leary.

Here’s the email. I asked for more infor­ma­tion to back up the claim and was sent anoth­er email that linked to a YouTube con­spir­a­cy video. pic.twitter.com/VRSVOcjj3E— Alex Leary (@learyreports) Feb­ru­ary 20, 2018

When asked to back up his claim, Leary said, Kel­ly sent a link to a YouTube video ped­dling a grow­ing con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that Hogg was actu­al­ly an actor because he appeared in a news report last sum­mer in Cal­i­for­nia.

Kel­ly, who delet­ed his Twit­ter account Tues­day evening, also liked tweets claim­ing that the Stone­man Dou­glas stu­dents are fak­ing their out­rage, and had shared oth­er con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and dis­crim­i­na­to­ry lan­guage.

In a state­ment post­ed on Twit­ter before he took down the account, Kel­ly apol­o­gized for email­ing the reporter but defend­ed the the­o­ry about the shoot­ing sur­vivors, say­ing that he was fired when he “tried to inform a reporter of infor­ma­tion relat­ing to his sto­ry regard­ing a school shoot­ing.”
[see screen­shots of Ben­jamin Kel­ly’s Twit­ter thread apol­o­giz­ing for push­ing the Youtube video claim­ing Hogg is a cri­sis actor]

Mean­while, a for­mer Geor­gia Repub­li­can law­mak­er keeps insist­ing that Democ­rats are using the Stone­man Dou­glas stu­dents as pup­pets to force US politi­cians to put new lim­its on gun own­er­ship. And Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s eldest son, Don­ald Trump Jr., liked two tweets prop­a­gat­ing the false the­o­ries about the teen school shoot­ing sur­vivors.

Far-right inter­net per­son­al­i­ties and social media accounts have also pounced on an August 2017 CBS video that Hogg appeared in as evi­dence to bol­ster their claim that the teenag­er is actu­al­ly an actor who trav­els to tragedies to pro­mote a lib­er­al agen­da. In the video, Hogg is inter­viewed about viral footage he had cap­tured of a con­fronta­tion between his friend and a Redon­do Beach life­guard in Redon­do Beach and post­ed to YouTube.

On Face­book, a video titled, “Cri­sis Actors from LA to Park­land” gar­nered 38,000 views in about 10 hours. On Twit­ter, a pro-Trump user named @ChristiChat, who has more than 260,000 fol­low­ers, repeat­ed­ly pushed the false claim that Hogg is an actor. One of her videos was retweet­ed at least 6,200 times.

Hogg had tweet­ed last sum­mer about vis­it­ing Cal­i­for­nia, and also shared the CBS video he appeared in. “Only after a week in LA I’ve made a youtube video with over half a mil­lion views and got on the news,” he said on Aug. 8.

Oth­er far-right fig­ures have seized on Emma González — anoth­er Stone­man Dou­glas stu­dent, whose speech at a ral­ly for gun con­trol went viral Sat­ur­day — and have pushed false the­o­ries that she “was coached” and that Democ­rats are using her as a pawn to pro­mote their agen­da.

Stu­dents, school offi­cials, and Flori­da law­mak­ers have pushed back against the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries. Broward Coun­ty Schools Super­in­ten­dent Robert Run­cie slammed the rumors that the teens were “cri­sis actors,” telling the Tam­pa Bay Times that they “are absolute­ly stu­dents at Stone­man Dou­glas.”

“They’ve been there,” Run­cie said. “I can ver­i­fy that.”

In a tweet, US Sen. Mar­co Rubio called those who fab­ri­cat­ed the the­o­ry “a dis­gust­ing group of idiots with no sense of decen­cy.”

Claim­ing some of the stu­dents on tv after #Park­land are actors is the work of a dis­gust­ing group of idiots with no sense of decen­cy— Mar­co Rubio (@marcorubio) Feb­ru­ary 20, 2018

In response to Kel­ly’s com­ments to the Tam­pa Bay Times, Flori­da House Speak­er Richard Cor­co­ran said he was “shocked and angry to read the appalling email about the brave stu­dents” and explained that he was the one who ter­mi­nat­ed the aide.

The con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries real­ly gained steam Tues­day, as a group of the teen sur­vivors turned activists trav­eled to Tal­la­has­see to meet with law­mak­ers in Flori­da’s state capi­tol about gun con­trol. The teens’ nascent move­ment, dubbed Nev­er Again MSD, has already amassed more than $1 mil­lion in dona­tions from celebri­ties like George Clooney and Oprah.

Incensed by the rumors about them, the stu­dents fired back on social media, empha­siz­ing that they are in fact kids “who feared for our lives while some­one shot up our school.”

We are KIDS — not actors. We are KIDS that have grown up in Park­land all of our lives. We are KIDS who feared for our lives while some­one shot up our school. We are KIDS work­ing to pre­vent this from hap­pen­ing again. WE ARE KIDS.— Jaclyn Corin (@JaclynCorin) Feb­ru­ary 20, 2018

“I want to go to school for musi­cal the­atre,” Stone­man Dou­glas senior Diego Pfeif­fer told CNN Tues­day. “I would love to be an actor. No joke. But the peo­ple who are no longer here, they are not act­ing. They are dead.”

“To have oth­er peo­ple tell me that my grief is not real, that I am just act­ing it out — I would love to be that good of an actor but I’m not,” Pfeif­fer con­tin­ued. “This is real.”

...

———-

“Nope, The Flori­da School Shoot­ing Sur­vivors Demand­ing Gun Con­trol Are Not Cri­sis Actors” by Bri­an­na Sacks; Buz­zFeed; 02/21/2018

“These fake claims have now gone viral. Hun­dreds of videos, arti­cles, and posts claim­ing to unmask these fake stu­dents have swept across social media, gain­ing thou­sands of views, shares, and retweets. The con­tent picks apart the stu­dents’ per­for­mances in media inter­views as they talked about the friends they lost in the shoot­ing at Mar­jo­ry Stone­man Dou­glas High School and their anger that the tragedy hap­pened at anoth­er US school.”

This is how wild­ly suc­cess­ful the ‘cri­sis actors’ meme has been on the right-wing. When there’s a mass shoot­ing nowa­days all it takes is a few Alex Jones videos and it’s almost guar­an­teed to go viral:

...
Right-wing talk show host Alex Jones pub­lished sev­er­al videos on his InfoWars YouTube chan­nel also accus­ing Hogg of for­get­ting his lines dur­ing a TV inter­view. One video has now been watched more than 9,200 times and has sparked dozens of copy­cat takes. Anoth­er video claim­ing that the Flori­da school shoot­ing was a “giant false flag” has 170,000 views. The chan­nel has more than 2 mil­lion sub­scribers.
...

But and did­n’t take long at all for the meme to start get­ting pushed from sites that strad­dle the line between far-right con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and main­stream GOP ‘news’. Sites like the noto­ri­ous­ly shady TheGatewayPundit.com:

...
As of Tues­day night, 108,135 peo­ple were talk­ing about “cri­sis actors” on Face­book. One video had been watched more than 41,000 times and shared by about 2,300 users. Before it was removed, anoth­er Face­book post call­ing Stone­man Dou­glas senior David Hogg an actor was shared more than 110,000 times. Yet anoth­er clip post­ed on Twit­ter got more than 6,000 retweets.

TheGatewayPundit.com, a right-wing news web­site, also post­ed a sto­ry that not­ed Hog­g’s father is a retired FBI agent — a fact the site dubbed a “red flag” — and con­clud­ed, with­out evi­dence, that the teen had been coached to push anti-Trump talk­ing points.

[see youtube video assert­ing that David Hogg is a cri­sis actor]
...

And of the 399 videos men­tion­ing “cri­sis actors Flori­da” uploaded in the past week, one of them man­aged to become the top trend­ing video on YouTube:

...
On YouTube, there have been 399 videos men­tion­ing “cri­sis actors Flori­da” uploaded in the past week, with thou­sands of peo­ple watch­ing clips with titles like “Flori­da School Shoot­ing Fake Shoot­ing And Hoax, Cri­sis Actress smil­ing,” which had 3,800 views by the end of the day Tues­day. One video, sug­gest­ing that Hogg was an actor, was the No. 1 trend­ing video on YouTube as of Wednes­day, but lat­er appeared to have been removed from YouTube’s trend­ing sec­tion. In a state­ment to Buz­zFeed News, YouTube said that it’s sys­tem “mis­clas­si­fied” the video because it “con­tained footage from an author­i­ta­tive news source.”
...

And that top trend­ing sta­tus was undoubt­ed­ly fueled, in part, by the array of right-wing fig­ures who joined in on the meme. Fig­ures like the far-right sher­iff David Clarke and Dinesh D’Souza:

...
Promi­nent Trump sup­port­ers on Twit­ter, includ­ing for­mer Mil­wau­kee sher­iff David Clarke and con­ser­v­a­tive author Dinesh D’Souza, have also been ped­dling the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that the stu­dents’ push for gun reform is an orches­trat­ed polit­i­cal effort by the left-wing.

Clarke tweet­ed, with­out evi­dence, that lib­er­al bil­lion­aire phil­an­thropist George Soros was back­ing the teens’ activism and demand for gun reform.

The well ORGANIZED effort by Flori­da school stu­dents demand­ing gun con­trol has GEORGE SOROS’ FINGERPRINTS all over it. It is sim­i­lar to how he hijacked and exploit­ed black people’s emo­tion regard­ing police use of force inci­dents into the COP HATING Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment. pic.twitter.com/XDZ3bcwF6F— David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) Feb­ru­ary 20, 2018

D’Souza called one of the sur­vivors of the shoot­ing “deranged” and sug­gest­ed that she had been “coached” to prop­a­gate anti-Trump views on tele­vi­sion. He also said that the stu­dents’ grief over los­ing their peers was “polit­i­cal­ly orches­trat­ed,” “pho­ny,” and “inau­then­tic.” D’Souza apol­o­gized for the “insen­si­tive” tweet Wednes­day that was still up on his page.

Buz­zFeed News reached out to Twit­ter to ask if D’Souza will con­tin­ue to remain a ver­i­fied user.

This woman seems coached and also a bit deranged. Trump’s should ignore these media-man­u­fac­tured the­atrics https://t.co/ewRNRqnlEi— Dinesh D’Souza (@DineshDSouza) Feb­ru­ary 20, 2018

Gen­uine grief I can empathize with. But grief orga­nized for the cameras—politically orches­trat­ed grief—strikes me as pho­ny & inau­then­tic— Dinesh D’Souza (@DineshDSouza) Feb­ru­ary 21, 2018

...

Then an aide o a Flori­da state law­mak­er start­ed push­ing these memes are Twit­ter. And when he was fired, he apol­o­gized while still back­ing up the ‘cri­sis actor’ the­o­ry:

...
Mean­while, the fringe con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries have seeped into offi­cial chan­nels. An aide to a Flori­da state law­mak­er was fired Tues­day after push­ing the cri­sis actor the­o­ry. Flori­da state Rep. Shawn Har­ri­son said on Twit­ter that he decid­ed to fire his dis­trict sec­re­tary, Ben­jamin Kel­ly, for mak­ing “an insen­si­tive and inap­pro­pri­ate alle­ga­tion about Park­land stu­dents.” The Repub­li­can also stressed that he did not share Kel­ly’s views.

Tonight Mr. Kel­ly was ter­mi­nat­ed from his posi­tion as my Dis­trict Sec­re­tary. I am appalled at and strong­ly denounce his com­ments about the Park­land stu­dents. I am again sor­ry for any pain this has caused the griev­ing fam­i­lies of this tragedy.— Shawn Har­ri­son (@Shawnfor63) Feb­ru­ary 21, 2018

Ear­li­er Tues­day, Kel­ly sent an email to a Tam­pa Bay Times reporter in response to a sto­ry detail­ing how online con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists have attacked stu­dent sur­vivors of the Flori­da school shoot­ing.

“Both kids in the pic­ture are not stu­dents here but actors that trav­el to var­i­ous cri­sis when they hap­pen,” Kel­ly wrote, accord­ing to the paper’s Wash­ing­ton bureau chief, Alex Leary.

Here’s the email. I asked for more infor­ma­tion to back up the claim and was sent anoth­er email that linked to a YouTube con­spir­a­cy video. pic.twitter.com/VRSVOcjj3E— Alex Leary (@learyreports) Feb­ru­ary 20, 2018

When asked to back up his claim, Leary said, Kel­ly sent a link to a YouTube video ped­dling a grow­ing con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that Hogg was actu­al­ly an actor because he appeared in a news report last sum­mer in Cal­i­for­nia.

Kel­ly, who delet­ed his Twit­ter account Tues­day evening, also liked tweets claim­ing that the Stone­man Dou­glas stu­dents are fak­ing their out­rage, and had shared oth­er con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and dis­crim­i­na­to­ry lan­guage.

In a state­ment post­ed on Twit­ter before he took down the account, Kel­ly apol­o­gized for email­ing the reporter but defend­ed the the­o­ry about the shoot­ing sur­vivors, say­ing that he was fired when he “tried to inform a reporter of infor­ma­tion relat­ing to his sto­ry regard­ing a school shoot­ing.”
[see screen­shots of Ben­jamin Kel­ly’s Twit­ter thread apol­o­giz­ing for push­ing the Youtube video claim­ing Hogg is a cri­sis actor]
...

And even Don­ald Trump Jr. got in on the ‘cri­sis actors’ action:

...
Mean­while, a for­mer Geor­gia Repub­li­can law­mak­er keeps insist­ing that Democ­rats are using the Stone­man Dou­glas stu­dents as pup­pets to force US politi­cians to put new lim­its on gun own­er­ship. And Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s eldest son, Don­ald Trump Jr., liked two tweets prop­a­gat­ing the false the­o­ries about the teen school shoot­ing sur­vivors.
...

Because of course he did. Also note that the Geor­gia Repub­li­can law­mak­er who keeps insist­ing that Democ­rats are using the stu­dents as polit­i­cal pup­pets is Jack Kingston, a CNN com­men­ta­tor. So he’s insist­ing this stuff to the CNN audi­ences.

So it looks like the ‘cri­sis actor’ meme is already pret­ty much a per­ma­nent fea­ture of the con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can right-wing land­scape. When there’s a mas­sive shoot­ing it’s actu­al­ly all an elab­o­rate hoax designed to give gun own­ers are bad name. And just the lat­est elab­o­rate hoax in a long string of elab­o­rate hoax­es.

And don’t for­get that the ‘cri­sis actors’ meme is mere­ly one ele­ment of a much, much larg­er right-wing meme. The meme that every­thing is a hoax and a lie except for what you hear on places like InfoWars and Fox News and right-wing talk-radio. ONLY trust Alex Jones and Fox News. Every­one else is lying to in order to even­tu­al­ly sub­ju­gate you. That’s the meta-meme at work here. The Big Lie wants to assure you that every­one else is lying to you.

And in oth­er news...

Here’s some addi­tion­al evi­dence that, whether or not Niko­las Cruz was for­mal­ly net­work­ing with the Repub­lic of Flori­da or oth­er neo-Nazi groups, he indeed a neo-Nazi in spir­it: First, it turns out that Cruz had swastikas etched onto his ammu­ni­tion mag­a­zines used dur­ing the attack:

CBS News

Shoot­ing sus­pect Niko­las Cruz had swastikas on ammu­ni­tion mag­a­zines

Feb­ru­ary 27, 2018, 6:49 PM
Last Updat­ed Feb 27, 2018 7:09 PM EST

Flori­da school shoot­ing sus­pect Niko­las Cruz had swastikas ammu­ni­tion mag­a­zines he brought into Mar­jo­ry Stone­man Dou­glas High School on Feb. 14, a fed­er­al law enforce­ment source with direct knowl­edge of the inves­ti­ga­tion told CBS News on Tues­day. Cruz has been charged with 17 counts of pre­med­i­tat­ed mur­der.

Cruz had 180 rounds of ammu­ni­tion left, a source con­firmed to CBS News.

Sources told CBS News that Cruz broke a third-floor win­dow, pos­si­bly to fire upon peo­ple from above. Sources say he tried to cre­ate a “sniper’s nest” by shoot­ing out the win­dow, fir­ing 16 rounds into the glass, CBS News cor­re­spon­dent Manuel Bojorquez reports. But the hur­ri­cane-proof glass appeared to have stopped it from shat­ter­ing, Bojorquez reports.

Inves­ti­ga­tors believe the sus­pect tried to reload, but after chang­ing mag­a­zine clips, his gun may have jammed, Bojorquez adds. Cruz then alleged­ly put down his weapon and left the build­ing, blend­ing in with oth­er stu­dents.

Police said Cruz told them he had “brought addi­tion­al loaded mag­a­zines to the school cam­pus and kept them hid­den in a back­pack until he got on cam­pus to begin his assault.”

Cruz is accused of open­ing fire at the high school in Park­land, Flori­da, on Valen­tine’s Day, killing 17 peo­ple and wound­ing 15 oth­ers. On Feb. 15, inves­ti­ga­tors said Cruz told them that as stu­dents began to flee, he decid­ed to dis­card his AR-15 rifle and a vest he was wear­ing so he could blend in with the crowd. Police recov­ered the rifle and the vest.

It’s still unclear why the sus­pect stopped shoot­ing.

Since the mas­sacre, dis­turb­ing details of Cruz’s past have come to light. While the motive remains unclear, a YouTube com­men­ta­tor with his name post­ed on a video: “I’m going to be a pro­fes­sion­al school shoot­er.”

Cruz was trans­ferred to a school with pro­grams for emo­tion­al­ly and dis­abled stu­dents when he was in eighth grade but want­ed to be main­streamed back into his home school, Broward Coun­ty School Super­in­ten­dent Robert Run­cie said Tues­day.

The Flori­da Depart­ment of Chil­dren and Fam­i­lies inves­ti­gat­ed Cruz in 2016, and police records show deputies went to his home more than three dozen times. Start­ing in Jan­u­ary 2016, Cruz was allowed to spend half his day at the alter­na­tive school and half at Stone­man Dou­glas to ease him into the less-struc­tured envi­ron­ment.

In August 2016, he start­ed back at Stone­man Dou­glas, but “the sit­u­a­tion had dete­ri­o­rat­ed” by Novem­ber, Run­cie said. That’s when Cruz, who had turned 18 in Sep­tem­ber 2016, refused the men­tal health ser­vices offered by the school. Run­cie said Cruz had the sup­port of his moth­er.

He remained at the school until Feb­ru­ary 2017, when school offi­cials final­ly decid­ed to remove him after unspec­i­fied behav­ior issues. He was told his only option was an alter­na­tive school.

...

Jor­dan Jereb, the leader of white nation­al­ist group Repub­lic of Flori­da, had ini­tial­ly claimed Cruz was a mem­ber of his group but lat­er walked back the claim and local law enforce­ment said there was no proof that Cruz and Jereb ever met.

———-

“Shoot­ing sus­pect Niko­las Cruz had swastikas on ammu­ni­tion mag­a­zines”; CBS News; 02/27/2018

“Flori­da school shoot­ing sus­pect Niko­las Cruz had swastikas ammu­ni­tion mag­a­zines he brought into Mar­jo­ry Stone­man Dou­glas High School on Feb. 14, a fed­er­al law enforce­ment source with direct knowl­edge of the inves­ti­ga­tion told CBS News on Tues­day. Cruz has been charged with 17 counts of pre­med­i­tat­ed mur­der.”

So it appears that Cruz clear­ly want­ed to send a “I’m a Nazi!” mes­sage as part of this attack.

We also learn that a gun jam may have been the thing that stopped the attack from being far more lethal:

...
Sources told CBS News that Cruz broke a third-floor win­dow, pos­si­bly to fire upon peo­ple from above. Sources say he tried to cre­ate a “sniper’s nest” by shoot­ing out the win­dow, fir­ing 16 rounds into the glass, CBS News cor­re­spon­dent Manuel Bojorquez reports. But the hur­ri­cane-proof glass appeared to have stopped it from shat­ter­ing, Bojorquez reports.

Inves­ti­ga­tors believe the sus­pect tried to reload, but after chang­ing mag­a­zine clips, his gun may have jammed, Bojorquez adds. Cruz then alleged­ly put down his weapon and left the build­ing, blend­ing in with oth­er stu­dents.
...

That might answer the ques­tion as to why this guy did­n’t kill him­self like so many of these kinds of spree shoot­ers: he could­n’t after his only gun jammed.

And regard­ing the alleged hoax­ing about Cruz’s ties to the Repub­lic of Flori­da, it’s worth recall­ing that this hoax­ing start­ed with posts on 4Chan short­ly after the attack when next to noth­ing was known about Cruz. So is it just a coin­ci­dence that a ‘hoax’ about Cruz being tied to local neo-Nazis hap­pened before we learn that this guy was indeed a Nazi who left Nazi call signs on his attack? Because if Cruz was net­work­ing with Nazis and made his inten­tions clear to those neo-Nazis that he was going to stage a school attack, that rapid ‘hoax­ing’ over a 4Chan would make tac­ti­cal sense from a dis­in­for­ma­tion stand­point: the neo-Nazis have it both ways. They get their Nazi attack, while seem­ing­ly dis­cred­it­ing groups like the ADL.

And here’s an arti­cle that makes it clear that Cruz had, at a min­i­mum, an affin­i­ty for Nazis going back to at least 2016: It turns out Cruz and his sit­u­a­tion with his adop­tive mom was inves­ti­gat­ed by the Flori­da Depart­ment of Chil­dren & Fam­i­lies in Sep­tem­ber of 2016 after the depart­ment got a tip that Cruz was cut­ting his arms and post­ing pic­tures on Snapchat and that he expressed inten­tions to buy a gun. And dur­ing that inves­ti­ga­tion it was learned by Cruz drew a Nazi sym­bol on his back­pack:

Mia­mi Her­ald

Shoot­er cut him­self and drew a Nazi sym­bol on his book bag, but DCF found him to be sta­ble

By Car­ol Marbin Miller

Feb­ru­ary 17, 2018 08:39 AM
Updat­ed Feb­ru­ary 18, 2018 08:32 AM

Niko­las Cruz had just bro­ken up with his girl­friend, who had been cheat­ing on him, and he’d got­ten into a fight with anoth­er boy. He’d drawn a “Nazi sym­bol” on his book bag. And Broward men­tal health author­i­ties were wor­ried that his chron­ic depres­sion was wors­en­ing.

It was Sept. 28, 2016, and Cruz — who since has admit­ted to per­pe­trat­ing one of the worst school shoot­ings in U.S. his­to­ry, Wednesday’s mas­sacre at Mar­jo­ry Stone­man Dou­glas High — took to his arms with a knife.

“Mr. Cruz was on Snapchat cut­ting both of his arms,” the Flori­da Depart­ment of Chil­dren & Fam­i­lies’ abuse hot­line was told at 1:48 p.m. “Mr. Cruz has fresh cuts on both his arms. Mr. Cruz stat­ed he plans to go out and buy a gun.”

In the report, Cruz, then 18, was list­ed as an “alleged vic­tim” of med­ical neglect and inad­e­quate super­vi­sion; his moth­er, 68-year-old Lyn­da Cruz, the “alleged per­pe­tra­tor.”

DCF’s inves­ti­ga­tion was com­plet­ed that Nov. 12. The agency con­clud­ed that Cruz had not been mis­treat­ed by his moth­er, that he was receiv­ing ade­quate care from a coun­selor at Hen­der­son Men­tal Health, and was attend­ing school.

“Hen­der­son came out and assessed the [vic­tim and] found him to be sta­ble enough not to be hos­pi­tal­ized,” the report said. More detailed chrono­log­i­cal notes of the inves­ti­ga­tion show the case end­ed with a nota­tion that “no ser­vices are rec­om­mend­ed.”

The inves­ti­ga­tion appears to have lacked rig­or: An excep­tion­al stu­dent edu­ca­tion spe­cial­ist who worked with Cruz repeat­ed­ly declined to return phone calls from DCF’s adult pro­tec­tive ser­vices inves­ti­ga­tor. The school’s resource offi­cer, a deputy, “refused to share any infor­ma­tion” at all, except to con­firm that a mobile cri­sis unit had been out to the school to assess Cruz. Cruz him­self also wouldn’t coop­er­ate, say­ing that “he talked about the sit­u­a­tion enough.”

If Cruz had, in fact, been cut­ting him­self that day, the inves­ti­ga­tor appears to have made lit­tle effort to con­firm the alle­ga­tion: The inves­ti­ga­tor, the report said, “was not able to see any scars or cuts on the [victim’s] arms because he was wear­ing long sleeves.”

Hen­der­son report­ed to DCF that Cruz “was not at risk to harm him­self or oth­ers.”

Cruz’s coun­selor told DCF that the teen was report­ed to have “an emo­tion­al behav­ioral dis­abil­i­ty.” Dis­ci­pli­nary reports obtained by the Mia­mi Her­ald con­firm his edu­ca­tion­al dif­fi­cul­ties. At West­glades Mid­dle School in 2013, he’d been cit­ed numer­ous times for dis­rupt­ing class, unruly behav­ior, insult­ing or pro­fane lan­guage, pro­fan­i­ty toward staff, dis­obe­di­ence and oth­er rules vio­la­tions, the records show. The behav­iors con­tin­ued at Mar­jo­ry Stone­man Dou­glas, which he attend­ed in 2016 and 2017 before being trans­ferred.

Cruz also had been diag­nosed with autism, a neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­or­der that often leads to social awk­ward­ness and iso­la­tion, and atten­tion deficit-hyper­ac­tiv­i­ty dis­or­der, or ADHD.

The three-page report detail­ing Cruz’s encounter with DCF in Sep­tem­ber 2016 was the sub­ject of a peti­tion filed by the agency Fri­day ask­ing a Broward Cir­cuit judge to make its his­to­ry with the fam­i­ly pub­lic. That peti­tion has not yet been ruled on.

Fol­low­ing the mas­sacre, DCF wrote in the peti­tion, much of Cruz’s con­fi­den­tial his­to­ry has been emerg­ing, includ­ing: that he had been adopt­ed, that he had a lengthy his­to­ry of men­tal ill­ness, and that DCF had inves­ti­gat­ed his safe­ty. Some of the infor­ma­tion in the “pub­lic domain,” DCF wrote, was inac­cu­rate.

“Upon learn­ing that we were in pos­ses­sion of records involv­ing [Cruz] as an adult, DCF imme­di­ate­ly start­ed the process to ask a court to allow the release of all records in the spir­it of full trans­paren­cy,” a DCF spokes­woman, Jes­si­ca Sims, said in a short state­ment. “A hear­ing is set for Mon­day in Broward Cir­cuit Court for a judge to review our peti­tion for release.”

Michael Alessan­dri, a clin­i­cal pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mia­mi, cau­tioned that Cruz’s diag­no­sis of autism should not be viewed as a cause of the attack at Stone­man Dou­glas High.

“It is a ter­ri­ble, ter­ri­ble tragedy,” said Alessan­dri, who is the exec­u­tive direc­tor of UM’s Cen­ter for Autism and Relat­ed Dis­abil­i­ties. “I can assure you that autism is not what pulled the trig­ger for this young man,” he added. “This is unques­tion­ably an issue of men­tal ill­ness. Autism is not that. It is a social com­mu­ni­ca­tion dis­or­der, not a vio­lent dis­or­der.”

Cruz, now 19, has been charged with 17 counts of first-degree mur­der in con­nec­tion with Wednesday’s mas­sacre at Stone­man Dou­glas.

He arrived at the school in an Uber, wear­ing a dark hat and car­ry­ing a black bag that con­tained an AR-15 semi­au­to­mat­ic rifle that he had brought one year ear­li­er from a Sun­rise “tac­ti­cal sup­ply” store. He walked the inte­ri­or, fir­ing at stu­dents and teach­ers. Then he left on foot, blend­ing in with pan­icked stu­dents, stopped at a Wal­mart, where he bought a drink and vis­it­ed a McDonald’s. Spot­ted by a deputy after leav­ing the Wal­mart, he was detained and cuffed.

His lawyers say Cruz plans to plead guilty if pros­e­cu­tors will avoid seek­ing the death penal­ty.

“We are try­ing to save this child’s life,” said Gor­don Weekes, the Broward Pub­lic Defender’s Office’s chief assis­tant. “We have put on the table that we are inclined to resolve this case and spare the com­mu­ni­ty hav­ing to relive this issue over again in court.” Weekes said he is hop­ing pros­e­cu­tors will for­go a request that Cruz be exe­cut­ed.

The Broward State Attorney’s Office issued a state­ment Sat­ur­day say­ing “the death penal­ty was designed for” cas­es such as Cruz’s, but that the office had not made a deci­sion on whether to seek it.

Defend­ers also have asked Hen­der­son Men­tal Health, which appears to have had a long his­to­ry with Cruz, for its records of his treat­ment. What lit­tle the lawyers know, Weekes said, comes from DCF’s 2016 report, which sug­gests author­i­ties had sig­nif­i­cant con­tact with Cruz in the months or years pre­ced­ing the ram­page.

“There are checks and bal­ances in place to iden­ti­fy indi­vid­u­als in cri­sis, to get them help, and to pro­tect them and pro­tect oth­ers,” Weekes said. “They did not do that.”

“Every sin­gle bell had been rung with this child,” Weekes said, “and noth­ing had been done.”

DCF’s only con­tact with Cruz specif­i­cal­ly involv­ing neglect alle­ga­tions appears to have been trig­gered by a fight between Cruz and his moth­er, who now is deceased. DCF had been told ini­tial­ly that Cruz and his mom fought over an ID card the teen need­ed to buy some kind of game. The details are unclear, but DCF was told that Cruz then took to Snapchat and began “cut­ting both of his arms.”

The inves­ti­ga­tion that fol­lowed revealed trou­bling signs: Cruz “stat­ed he plans to go out and buy a gun.” Ear­li­er, he had placed “hate signs” on his book bag, and wrote “I hate n—–s,” using the racial slur. He had a his­to­ry of depres­sion.

Some time in the past, the report said, Hen­der­son had been sum­moned for Cruz to be invol­un­tar­i­ly com­mit­ted, “but he denies every­thing,” the report added.

An assess­ment of Cruz’s men­tal health deter­mined that his depres­sion and oth­er issues “impair his abil­i­ty to cope with the demands of every­day life with­out the use of med­ica­tion.” Though Cruz was phys­i­cal­ly capa­ble of see­ing to his own wel­fare, the report said, he “at times lacks the moti­va­tion” to do so.

Cruz declined to dis­cuss the alle­ga­tions with DCF, and his coun­selor from Hen­der­son “stat­ed that there are no issues with the [victim’s] med­ica­tion and he has been com­pli­ant with tak­ing his med­ica­tions and keeps all of his appoint­ments.”

Lyn­da Cruz told inves­ti­ga­tors that the fight with her son was over the boy’s recent breakup, not an ID card, and that the romance had end­ed when she and the girl’s moth­er declared “it was unhealthy for every­one.” Lyn­da Cruz told inves­ti­ga­tors her son start­ed cut­ting him­self only after he’d bro­ken up.

Lyn­da Cruz denied her son was a racist, and said he wouldn’t know­ing­ly draw racist or Nazi sym­bols on his belong­ings. Cruz, she said, claimed he didn’t know what the sym­bols were.

Henderson’s mobile cri­sis unit already had inter­viewed Cruz at his school, the report said. Cruz had dis­closed to a coun­selor “that he was feel­ing depressed and start­ed cut­ting him­self.” The coun­selor “stat­ed that she was con­cerned about the [vic­tim talk­ing] about want­i­ng to pur­chase a gun and feel­ing depressed.”

Nev­er­the­less, the assess­ment team “deter­mined that he was not at risk to harm him­self or oth­ers.” The team “found him to be sta­ble enough not to be hos­pi­tal­ized,” the report said.

Cruz’s “cri­sis clin­i­cian” had the teen sign a “safe­ty con­tract,” though the report does not spec­i­fy what the con­tract required, oth­er than to say that Cruz would con­tin­ue with coun­sel­ing and remain in school.

The Mia­mi Her­ald con­firmed that, over the fol­low­ing year and a half, Cruz man­aged to acquire not only the AR-15, but five oth­er firearms.

Weekes said the report is a recita­tion of missed oppor­tu­ni­ties.

...

———–

“Shoot­er cut him­self and drew a Nazi sym­bol on his book bag, but DCF found him to be sta­ble” by Car­ol Marbin Miller; Mia­mi Her­ald; 02/17/2018

““Mr. Cruz was on Snapchat cut­ting both of his arms,” the Flori­da Depart­ment of Chil­dren & Fam­i­lies’ abuse hot­line was told at 1:48 p.m. “Mr. Cruz has fresh cuts on both his arms. Mr. Cruz stat­ed he plans to go out and buy a gun.””

So an alert of a Snapchat post of Cruz cut­ting his arms and noti­fi­ca­tion of his intent to buy a gun is sent to the Flori­da Depart­ment of Chil­dren & Fam­i­lies, and inves­ti­ga­tors learn that Cruz also has a Nazi sym­bol on his back­pack:

...
DCF’s only con­tact with Cruz specif­i­cal­ly involv­ing neglect alle­ga­tions appears to have been trig­gered by a fight between Cruz and his moth­er, who now is deceased. DCF had been told ini­tial­ly that Cruz and his mom fought over an ID card the teen need­ed to buy some kind of game. The details are unclear, but DCF was told that Cruz then took to Snapchat and began “cut­ting both of his arms.”

The inves­ti­ga­tion that fol­lowed revealed trou­bling signs: Cruz “stat­ed he plans to go out and buy a gun.” Ear­li­er, he had placed “hate signs” on his book bag, and wrote “I hate n—–s,” using the racial slur. He had a his­to­ry of depres­sion.
...

His adop­tive moth­er, how­ev­er, refut­ed the idea that he was a racist or that he was even know what the sym­bols were:

...
Lyn­da Cruz told inves­ti­ga­tors that the fight with her son was over the boy’s recent breakup, not an ID card, and that the romance had end­ed when she and the girl’s moth­er declared “it was unhealthy for every­one.” Lyn­da Cruz told inves­ti­ga­tors her son start­ed cut­ting him­self only after he’d bro­ken up.

Lyn­da Cruz denied her son was a racist, and said he wouldn’t know­ing­ly draw racist or Nazi sym­bols on his belong­ings. Cruz, she said, claimed he didn’t know what the sym­bols were.
...

So it sounds like his now-deceased mom was large­ly in denial or just unaware of her son’s dark side.

And now here’s an arti­cle that describes how Cruz was exhibit­ing signs of far-right ideas for years, at least since mid­dle-school. Signs like putting swastikas on a test and calls for Pres­i­dent Oba­ma to be burned alive and eat­en:

The Wash­ing­ton Post

Teach­ers say Flori­da suspect’s prob­lems start­ed in mid­dle school, and the sys­tem tried to help him

By Tim Craig, Emma Brown, Sarah Larimer and Mori­ah Balin­git
Feb­ru­ary 18, 2018

PARKLAND, Fla. — The real prob­lems start­ed at least as ear­ly as mid­dle school and quick­ly inten­si­fied. There were the vocal out­bursts, dis­turb­ing draw­ings of stick fig­ures with guns, con­stant dis­ci­pli­nary issues. There were threat­en­ing state­ments writ­ten on his home­work and scrap paper, includ­ing a ref­er­ence to killing Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma, say­ing he should be “burned alive and eat­en.”

Some teach­ers banned Niko­las Cruz from their class­rooms at West­glades Mid­dle School because of his errat­ic behav­ior. One teacher said he was barred from bring­ing a back­pack to the school and that secu­ri­ty per­son­nel had to search him to ensure he didn’t have weapons. Teach­ers were very con­cerned about him and were work­ing to get him help.

“Look­ing in his eyes, he just looked like there was a prob­lem,” said a teacher who worked with Cruz in sixth grade and spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty because of the sen­si­tiv­i­ty of the top­ic. “His behav­ior in class wasn’t con­stant­ly wrong, but every once in a while, it was. He would just spew some­thing out of his mouth that was inap­pro­pri­ate.”

Sev­er­al teach­ers who knew Cruz in mid­dle school said in inter­views that he was an increas­ing behav­ioral chal­lenge for the school sys­tem and appeared to be on a trou­ble­some path. In the years before he would alleged­ly car­ry out one of the worst mass shoot­ings at a school in U.S. his­to­ry, Cruz faced a long string of esca­lat­ing dis­ci­pli­nary mea­sures through­out his aca­d­e­m­ic career for insub­or­di­na­tion, pro­fan­i­ty, dis­rup­tion, fight­ing and assault.

“I can say I was so uncom­fort­able around him, I did not want to be alone with him in my class­room,” said one for­mer teacher, who also spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty because of the sen­si­tiv­i­ty of the top­ic. “That is how dis­rup­tive his behav­ior was.”

In one school year, when Cruz was in mid­dle school, he racked up numer­ous infrac­tions — includ­ing for a fight dur­ing the sec­ond week of school and con­tin­u­ing with a pat­tern of unruly behav­ior, insults and pro­fan­i­ty, accord­ing to dis­ci­pli­nary records obtained by WPLG-Local 10, an ABC tele­vi­sion affil­i­ate in Mia­mi that shared the records with The Wash­ing­ton Post.

Teach­ers said that by eighth grade he was lash­ing out phys­i­cal­ly — ran­dom­ly bump­ing oth­er stu­dents in the hall­ways, appear­ing to want to pick con­fronta­tions and fights, and at times break­ing into pro­fan­i­ty-laced tirades with­out any appar­ent trig­ger.

“Some­thing would just upset him and he would just do it and come to class and act out,” one teacher said. His home­work scrawls got more trou­ble­some, includ­ing repeat­ed tirades against Amer­i­can soci­ety, the com­ment about Oba­ma and oth­er writ­ings teach­ers found alarm­ing. He put a swasti­ka on a test. He wrote about his intense inter­est in, and sup­port for, guns.

...

———–

“Teach­ers say Flori­da suspect’s prob­lems start­ed in mid­dle school, and the sys­tem tried to help him” by Tim Craig, Emma Brown, Sarah Larimer and Mori­ah Balin­git; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 02/18/2018

““Some­thing would just upset him and he would just do it and come to class and act out,” one teacher said. His home­work scrawls got more trou­ble­some, includ­ing repeat­ed tirades against Amer­i­can soci­ety, the com­ment about Oba­ma and oth­er writ­ings teach­ers found alarm­ing. He put a swasti­ka on a test. He wrote about his intense inter­est in, and sup­port for, guns.”

Repeat­ed tirades against Amer­i­can soci­ety and swastikas on a test. Sure sounds like a Nazi! Along with the ref­er­ences to burn­ing alive and eat­ing Pres­i­dent Oba­ma:

...
The real prob­lems start­ed at least as ear­ly as mid­dle school and quick­ly inten­si­fied. There were the vocal out­bursts, dis­turb­ing draw­ings of stick fig­ures with guns, con­stant dis­ci­pli­nary issues. There were threat­en­ing state­ments writ­ten on his home­work and scrap paper, includ­ing a ref­er­ence to killing Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma, say­ing he should be “burned alive and eat­en.”
...

So we have a grow­ing pile of evi­dence that Cruz did­n’t just sud­den­ly adopt a neo-Nazi world­view. He’s been stew­ing in these juices for years. And yes, he clear­ly had some addi­tion­al men­tal health issues, but so do a lot a peo­ple who don’t go on a shoot­ing spree. And that’s why it’s grow­ing increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to to the avoid the ques­tion of whether or not this was, in real­i­ty, anoth­er neo-Nazi domes­tic ter­ror attack:

The Dai­ly Beast

Niko­las Cruz Was a Racist. Does That Make His Attack Ter­ror­ism?

Dean Obei­dal­lah
03.01.18 5:14 AM ET

On Tues­day, we learned a new, bone-chill­ing fact about the Park­land, Flori­da high school gun­man Niko­las Cruz that should’ve made nation­al head­lines but didn’t. That new devel­op­ment was that Cruz had etched swastikas on the ammu­ni­tion mag­a­zines he car­ried on the day he com­mit­ted his bru­tal mas­sacre that took 17 lives.

When I first heard of this devel­op­ment, my jaw dropped for two rea­sons. First, does any­one actu­al­ly believe if Cruz had etched the words “Allah Akbar” on his gun mag­a­zines we wouldn’t have heard about that for near­ly two weeks after the attack? No way. I can assure you that infor­ma­tion would’ve been made pub­lic, inten­tion­al­ly or by way of a leak. And then Don­ald Trump would almost cer­tain­ly have pounced–without wait­ing for addi­tion­al evidence–to label this an Islam­ic ter­ror attack and try to use it to fur­ther his own polit­i­cal agen­da.

But what also was shock­ing is that despite this new piece of evi­dence, togeth­er with Cruz’s known his­to­ry of hate direct­ed at peo­ple of col­or and Jews, we aren’t see­ing a fuller dis­cus­sion in the media about whether this shoot­ing was inspired by Cruz’s appar­ent white suprema­cist ide­ol­o­gy.

As CNN had report­ed with­in days of the Feb­ru­ary 14 attack, Cruz had in the past spewed vile com­ments in a pri­vate Insta­gram cha­t­room where he shared his hatred of “jews, ni**ers, immi­grants.” Cruz also wrote about killing Mex­i­cans and hat­ing black peo­ple sim­ply because of their skin col­or and he slammed Jews because in his twist­ed view they want­ed to destroy the world.

And Cruz’s white suprema­cist views also made their way from the online world to the real world. One of Cruz’s class­mates report­ed­ly told a social work­er that Cruz had drawn a swasti­ka on his book back next to the words “I hate ni***rs.” He also shared with oth­er stu­dents his “hat­ing on” Islam and slam­ming all Mus­lims as “ter­ror­ists and bombers.” And Cruz was also seen wear­ing a Trump MAGA hat when he was enrolled in school well before the attack.

While ini­tial reports that Cruz was actu­al­ly a mem­ber of a white suprema­cist group proved to be unfound­ed, there’s no dis­put­ing Cruz’s doc­u­ment­ed his­to­ry of spew­ing despi­ca­ble views that line up with the white nation­al­ist ide­ol­o­gy. But still, giv­en all that we’ve now learned, the ques­tion I have is: How much more evi­dence do we need before we dis­cuss in earnest whether Cruz’s white suprema­cist views played a role in this attack?!

True, there’s no evi­dence that Cruz tar­get­ed any spe­cif­ic group of peo­ple dur­ing his ram­page. But then again, ISIS-inspired ter­ror­ists who have com­mit­ted acts of ter­ror on U.S. soil, such as the man who inten­tion­al­ly drove a truck on a New York City pedes­tri­an walk­way in 2017 that killed eight, didn’t tar­get any spe­cif­ic race or reli­gion. He and oth­ers like him com­mit­ted acts of ter­ror in fur­ther­ance of their sick, per­vert­ed ideology—to spread ter­ror.

And the swastikas on Cruz’s gun mag­a­zines take on a greater sig­nif­i­cance when you exam­ine the shoot­ing itself. Of the 17 peo­ple Cruz killed, at least five were Jew­ish. (Some reports note it could be six.) Even more dis­turb­ing is that Cruz had report­ed­ly shot bul­lets into a Holo­caust his­to­ry class that killed two of those stu­dents. Did Cruz inten­tion­al­ly tar­get that class since he had for­mer­ly been a stu­dent at the school? We don’t know but giv­en Cruz’s his­to­ry this is cer­tain­ly a fair ques­tion. And since he’s that rare mass-shoot­er who’s still alive, I pre­sume he’ll be asked.

In fact, the ques­tion of whether Cruz’s gun mas­sacre was an anti-Semit­ic attack inspired by a white suprema­cist ide­ol­o­gy was raised in an op-ed in the lib­er­al Israeli news­pa­per Ha’aretz even before we learned about the swastikas on Cruz’s gun mag­a­zines. There, the writer not­ed that Cruz had expressed views “that Jews were part of a con­spir­a­cy to unseat white peo­ple from pow­er and destroy the world.” In response to that arti­cle, the writer was sub­ject­ed to an avalanche of vile anti-Semit­ic barbs.

Giv­en these new­ly revealed swastikas, it’s long over­due that we have that con­ver­sa­tion about whether Cruz was more than a trou­bled youth. And to be clear, Cruz was trou­bled. He had been repeat­ed­ly dis­ci­plined at school for dis­turb­ing behav­ior and for a peri­od of time was placed in a spe­cial school for kids with emo­tion­al and behav­ior issues. On social media, he even wrote about his dream of becom­ing a “pro­fes­sion­al school shoot­er.” But when he was eval­u­at­ed in 2016 by a men­tal health pro­fes­sion­al, he was deter­mined to be sta­ble and not in need of being invol­un­tar­i­ly com­mit­ted to a men­tal health insti­tu­tion.

So why does it mat­ter if we raise the ques­tion of whether Cruz’s attack was inspired by his appar­ent white suprema­cist ide­ol­o­gy? For two rea­sons.

First and fore­most, it may save lives. We have seen a spike in the time of Trump of white suprema­cist vio­lence and activ­i­ties. As the Anti-Defama­tion League recent­ly doc­u­ment­ed, there were 34 extrem­ist-relat­ed deaths on U.S. soil in 2017. A major­i­ty of those, 18, were caused by white suprema­cists, while nine were caused by Islam­ic extrem­ists.

...

Sec­ond­ly, we need to end the media’s hypocrisy on this issue. If Cruz had been Mus­lim, we know from recent his­to­ry that the media would’ve labeled this a ter­ror­ist attack with­out the in-depth analy­sis into the terrorist’s men­tal health. But if the killer is white, the media and many in our nation pre­fer to believe the per­son is men­tal­ly ill and try to avoid label­ing him a ter­ror­ist. Just look at the case of Dylann Roof, who lit­er­al­ly stat­ed he had exe­cut­ed nine African Amer­i­cans because he want­ed to start a “race war,” yet few in the media referred to him as a ter­ror­ist..

In time we may learn the exact rea­son why Cruz com­mit­ted his ram­page. Per­haps it was tru­ly the act of a clin­i­cal­ly insane indi­vid­ual? Or maybe it was inspired by his white suprema­cist ide­ol­o­gy? But giv­en the evi­dence we have about Cruz togeth­er with the recent spike in white suprema­cist attacks on U.S. soil, it’s time we dis­cuss whether Cruz’s ram­page was a white suprema­cist ter­ror­ist attack. That’s the only way we can counter this grow­ing threat.

———–

“Niko­las Cruz Was a Racist. Does That Make His Attack Ter­ror­ism?” by Dean Obei­dal­lah; The Dai­ly Beast; 03/01/2018

“But what also was shock­ing is that despite this new piece of evi­dence, togeth­er with Cruz’s known his­to­ry of hate direct­ed at peo­ple of col­or and Jews, we aren’t see­ing a fuller dis­cus­sion in the media about whether this shoot­ing was inspired by Cruz’s appar­ent white suprema­cist ide­ol­o­gy.”

Yep, it’s pret­ty remark­able how wild­ly effec­tive the neo-Nazi ‘hoax’ real­ly was. The “Repub­lic of Flori­da” con­nec­tion gets exposed as an inten­tion­al hoax, a hoax that appeared to involved the leader of the Repub­lic of Flori­da, and then the media almost entire­ly ignores all the sub­se­quent sto­ries that have come out demon­strat­ing that Cruz was, at a min­i­mum, a neo-Nazi true believ­er.

And the sud­den drop­ping of the neo-Nazi con­nec­tion to this shoot­ing has man­aged to obscure one of the most impor­tant ques­tions sur­round­ing this attack: was this a Dylann Roof-style neo-Nazi attack?

...
While ini­tial reports that Cruz was actu­al­ly a mem­ber of a white suprema­cist group proved to be unfound­ed, there’s no dis­put­ing Cruz’s doc­u­ment­ed his­to­ry of spew­ing despi­ca­ble views that line up with the white nation­al­ist ide­ol­o­gy. But still, giv­en all that we’ve now learned, the ques­tion I have is: How much more evi­dence do we need before we dis­cuss in earnest whether Cruz’s white suprema­cist views played a role in this attack?!

...

So why does it mat­ter if we raise the ques­tion of whether Cruz’s attack was inspired by his appar­ent white suprema­cist ide­ol­o­gy? For two rea­sons.

First and fore­most, it may save lives. We have seen a spike in the time of Trump of white suprema­cist vio­lence and activ­i­ties. As the Anti-Defama­tion League recent­ly doc­u­ment­ed, there were 34 extrem­ist-relat­ed deaths on U.S. soil in 2017. A major­i­ty of those, 18, were caused by white suprema­cists, while nine were caused by Islam­ic extrem­ists.

...

Sec­ond­ly, we need to end the media’s hypocrisy on this issue. If Cruz had been Mus­lim, we know from recent his­to­ry that the media would’ve labeled this a ter­ror­ist attack with­out the in-depth analy­sis into the terrorist’s men­tal health. But if the killer is white, the media and many in our nation pre­fer to believe the per­son is men­tal­ly ill and try to avoid label­ing him a ter­ror­ist. Just look at the case of Dylann Roof, who lit­er­al­ly stat­ed he had exe­cut­ed nine African Amer­i­cans because he want­ed to start a “race war,” yet few in the media referred to him as a ter­ror­ist.

In time we may learn the exact rea­son why Cruz com­mit­ted his ram­page. Per­haps it was tru­ly the act of a clin­i­cal­ly insane indi­vid­ual? Or maybe it was inspired by his white suprema­cist ide­ol­o­gy? But giv­en the evi­dence we have about Cruz togeth­er with the recent spike in white suprema­cist attacks on U.S. soil, it’s time we dis­cuss whether Cruz’s ram­page was a white suprema­cist ter­ror­ist attack. That’s the only way we can counter this grow­ing threat.

So was this a neo-Nazi ter­ror attack sim­i­lar to what Dyl­lan Roof was try­ing to accom­plish? Well, as the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, the school he attacked is almost 40 per­cent Jew­ish. It’s hard to imag­ine Cruz was­n’t well aware of this. And yet this angle of the attack is almost nev­er men­tioned:

Haaretz

Opin­ion I Called the Dou­glas High Shoot­ing a Cred­i­bly anti-Semit­ic Attack. The Response? An anti-Semit­ic Del­uge
Niko­las Cruz had a well-doc­u­ment­ed hatred of Jews; the school he shot up had a 40% Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion. But to some on the left, who right­ly point out the big­otry behind oth­er mass shoot­ings, the idea he tar­get­ed Jews fuels a vicious push­back

Natal­ie Lif­son Feb 21, 2018 4:42 PM

On Feb­ru­ary 14th 2018, 19-year-old Niko­las Cruz took an Uber to Mar­jo­ry Stone­man Dou­glas High School, the insti­tu­tion from which he had been expelled a year ear­li­er, and began shoot­ing. 17 stu­dents and teach­ers were killed and anoth­er 14 injured.

The atroc­i­ty has spurred intense debate over per­ti­nent issues such as gun reform, men­tal health care, and the effec­tive­ness of social ser­vices.

But what still isn’t being dis­cussed is that Dou­glas High School is more than 40% Jew­ish, that Cruz believed that Jews were part of a con­spir­a­cy to unseat white peo­ple from pow­er and destroy the world, and that the shoot­ing could cred­i­bly be termed an anti-Semit­ic hate crime.

But there seems to be some­thing threat­en­ing, or at least deeply uncom­fort­able, for many peo­ple about this con­tention. From per­son­al expe­ri­ence, the response, at least on social media, is a del­uge of vicious anti-Semi­tism.

Per­son­al accounts of stu­dents who attend­ed high school with Cruz have pegged him as an anti-Semi­te who believed that white peo­ple were the mas­ter race.

Accord­ing to one indi­vid­ual who knew him and con­tact­ed me but was con­cerned about going pub­lic, he was active­ly hos­tile towards Jews, black peo­ple, and Mus­lims in par­tic­u­lar through­out high school and had threat­ened them in the past. In fact, that source claims that sev­er­al of the vio­lent inci­dents he was expelled for were attacks against Jews. Six vic­tims of his mas­sacre were Jew­ish.

One exam­ple of his bla­tant anti-Semi­tism was record­ed in Insta­gram chats with like-mind­ed white suprema­cist friends. Dur­ing one of the rants in the chat, Cruz spoke of his birth moth­er, say­ing, “My real mom was a Jew. I am glad I nev­er met her.”

Accord­ing to the Flori­da Depart­ment of Chil­dren and Fam­i­lies, who inves­ti­gat­ed Cruz in 2016 after he post­ed graph­ic, vio­lent, and dis­turb­ing images on Snapchat, Cruz had, at one point, dec­o­rat­ed his back­pack with swastikas.

While town records state that only 1.6% of Park­land is Jew­ish, mem­bers of the Park­land Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty were quick to point out that the list­ed demo­graph­ics only take into account reli­gious Jews. Accord­ing to Jews who live in Park­land, the major­i­ty of the Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion is sec­u­lar, or eth­ni­cal­ly and cul­tur­al­ly Jew­ish but not reli­gious­ly, and would not have self-iden­ti­fied as such in the cen­sus.

The shoot­ing has shak­en the local Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty. Accord­ing to a local rab­bi, Park­land “is a small com­mu­ni­ty where near­ly half the pop­u­la­tion is Jew­ish, so every­one has been touched by what hap­pened.”

At one point in the cov­er­age, it was sug­gest­ed that Cruz was part of a white suprema­cist orga­ni­za­tion, the Repub­lic of Flori­da Mili­tia whose head claimed to have trained Cruz in the art of gun vio­lence with the explic­it pur­pose of tar­get­ing peo­ple of col­or and Jews in the event that they rise up against white peo­ple, but also denied any knowl­edge of or involve­ment in the shoot­ing. “We’re not a big fan of Jews,” Jerub spec­u­lat­ed on Cruz’s motives. “I think there were a lot of Jews at the school that might have been mess­ing with him.”

How­ev­er, soon after claim­ing Cruz as a mem­ber of ROF, Jerub back­tracked, stat­ing his claims that he trained Cruz with ROF were a “mis­un­der­stand­ing” pro­pelled by the “lying Jew media.” That last com­ment was far less wide­ly quot­ed in the media.

While there is room to ques­tion Cruz’s exact moti­va­tions — from men­tal ill­ness to anger over his expul­sion — I find it trou­bling that such a vis­i­ble con­nec­tion to anti-Semi­tism is being over­looked as irrel­e­vant enough to entire­ly exclude it from many major news arti­cles.

If a known hater of minori­ties bla­tant­ly and fre­quent­ly spoke about abhor­rence for any oth­er minor­i­ty and then shot up a school — even one he used to attend — that con­sist­ed most­ly of mem­bers of that eth­nic group, peo­ple (who care about social jus­tice) would at least be dis­cussing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that it was a hate crime.

We’re not hav­ing that dis­cus­sion and not tak­ing Cruz’s anti-Semi­tism seri­ous­ly because com­mon anti-Semit­ic tropes paint Jews as pow­er­ful and priv­i­leged, which leaves room for peo­ple to ignore the fact that the long his­to­ry of prej­u­dice against us con­tin­ues to this day.

...

———–

“Opin­ion I Called the Dou­glas High Shoot­ing a Cred­i­bly anti-Semit­ic Attack. The Response? An anti-Semit­ic Del­uge” by Natal­ie Lif­son; Haaretz; 02/21/2018

“But what still isn’t being dis­cussed is that Dou­glas High School is more than 40% Jew­ish, that Cruz believed that Jews were part of a con­spir­a­cy to unseat white peo­ple from pow­er and destroy the world, and that the shoot­ing could cred­i­bly be termed an anti-Semit­ic hate crime.”

Cruz clear­ly hates a wide vari­ety of minori­ties. But it’s hard to ignore that he shot up a school that was over 40 per­cent Jew­ish. And yet that fact is actu­al­ly be large­ly ignored. Was the ‘hoax’ that effec­tive?

And note that the indi­vid­ual who anony­mous­ly con­tact­ed the above author and described how Cruz was expelled for vio­lent attacks against Jews could very well be one of those 4Chan trolls. That was their m.o.: con­tact the press, but ask to not reveal their iden­ti­ties, and then make claims about how he real­ly was a neo-Nazi:

...
Accord­ing to one indi­vid­ual who knew him and con­tact­ed me but was con­cerned about going pub­lic, he was active­ly hos­tile towards Jews, black peo­ple, and Mus­lims in par­tic­u­lar through­out high school and had threat­ened them in the past. In fact, that source claims that sev­er­al of the vio­lent inci­dents he was expelled for were attacks against Jews. Six vic­tims of his mas­sacre were Jew­ish.
...

So unless we get fur­ther con­fir­ma­tion that Cruz real­ly was expelled for attacks against Jews we should prob­a­bly assume that this was dis­in­for­ma­tion from anoth­er hoax­er. Which would once again be ‘dis­in­for­ma­tion’ that just hap­pens to align with the real­i­ty of Cruz that we’ve learned through lat­er reports.

Sim­i­lar­ly note who else saw a poten­tial anti-Semit­ic angle very ear­ly on: Jor­dan Jereb of the Repub­lic of Flori­da. And when Jereb back­tracked from his claims he blamed it all on the “Jew­ish media”:

...
At one point in the cov­er­age, it was sug­gest­ed that Cruz was part of a white suprema­cist orga­ni­za­tion, the Repub­lic of Flori­da Mili­tia whose head claimed to have trained Cruz in the art of gun vio­lence with the explic­it pur­pose of tar­get­ing peo­ple of col­or and Jews in the event that they rise up against white peo­ple, but also denied any knowl­edge of or involve­ment in the shoot­ing. “We’re not a big fan of Jews,” Jerub spec­u­lat­ed on Cruz’s motives. “I think there were a lot of Jews at the school that might have been mess­ing with him.”

How­ev­er, soon after claim­ing Cruz as a mem­ber of ROF, Jerub back­tracked, stat­ing his claims that he trained Cruz with ROF were a “mis­un­der­stand­ing” pro­pelled by the “lying Jew media.” That last com­ment was far less wide­ly quot­ed in the media.
...

Jor­dan Jereb and a bunch of trolls of 4Chan alleged­ly per­pe­trate a hoax on the world very soon after this attack, first claim­ing that Cruz was active with the Repub­lic of Flori­da only to have that retract­ed and exposed as a hoax a day lat­er. Thus estab­lish­ing very ear­ly on that this attack was­n’t a neo-Nazi attack. And yet, as we’re dis­cov­er­ing, just about every­thing those ‘hoax­ers’ were ‘hoax­ing’ about turned out to be true.

So it looks like ‘hoax hoax­es’ should be expect­ed in the future. After all, giv­en the wild suc­cess of what appears to be a hoaxed hoax in this case it’s hard to imag­ine neo-Nazis aren’t going to try to repeat it. And that’s one more big rea­son we have to hope inves­ti­ga­tors take seri­ous­ly the pos­si­bil­i­ty that this attack involved a pre­med­i­tat­ed ‘hoax hoax’: You gen­er­al­ly want to avoid ‘feed­ing the trolls.’ But in this case ‘feed­ing the trolls’ might actu­al­ly get some­one killed. Maybe even a lot of peo­ple killed. And help the killer’s neo-Nazi troll accom­plices get away with it.