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[–]wristaction 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

By this time in the coverage of Waukesha, the media were doing the "we may never know the motive" bit and it was left up to independent journalists to discover and publish Brooks' social media posts. That week, the Sunday shows focused on Covid and how it was expected to affect Black Friday sales.

Of course we're seeing a very different sort of thing today. Today, as of two hours ago, they've leaped forward to using yesterday's shooting in Buffallo as a lever to portray the grief and outrage many felt in the wake of the Waukesha Christmas Parade attack as a "white supremacist conspiracy theory" which incited the shooter.

"A Black driver killed white people at a holiday parade last year—and the right-wing freakout about it may have factored into the rampage in Buffalo."

https://archive.ph/f7oLt

The live-streaming service Twitch confirmed that the white gunman who shot 13 people at Tops Friendly Markets—11 of them Black—posted footage of the violence. A screenshot from that video showed white writing along the black barrel guard.

It appears that one line was the misspelled name of Virginia Sorenson, a member of the “Dancing Grannies” parade troupe who was killed in the city of Waukesha, Wisconsin’s annual Christmas parade. Though less clear, the line below may be the name of another parade victim.

... Sorenson, 79, was killed with five others when 39-year-old Darrell Brooks allegedly barreled through the parade in an SUV. Brooks is Black and had a history of violence, and evidence released by prosecutors after the attack suggested he sought to inflict maximum carnage.

As The Daily Beast previously reported, far-right actors homed in on posts attributed to Brooks in which he shared antisemitic content, expressed rage toward white people and police, and support for Black Lives Matter. (A Facebook account linked to him had also expressed a lack of surprise at the not-guilty verdict for Kyle Rittenhouse, the white, self-styled vigilante teen charged with murder at a racial-justice protest in Kenosha.) They used the posts to suggest the attack on mostly white parade-goers was the targeted work of a Black extremist.

Police in Waukesha quickly dismissed the possibility that it was a planned terror attack, and there has been no evidence that the suspect in that disaster—who was apparently fleeing a domestic disturbance—intentionally targeted any ethnic group that night.

[–]Fonched 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

From what I've heard, many claim that Brooks was not directly a part of any BLM group (https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-big-time-right-wing-trolls-andy-ngo-and-tim-pool-tied-waukesha-killings-to-black-lives-matter).

Another thing, many are claiming that the media is sanitizing the perp as a "mentallly ill, lone wolf" compared to those of other races. Is there any truth to this?

[–]wristaction 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

"Member of a group" is a red herring. The Buffalo shooter is not a member of any group either.

I've been watching the media portrayal of the Buffalo shooter all day. I haven't seen a single instance of a media portrayal of the perpetrator as anything other than a conscious and purposeful terrorist. And, for lack of any possible claim to group membership, they present the entire range of political viewpoint to the right of the Democrat party as the "group" responsible for inciting the incident, including in their presentation corporate media opinion hosts and serving politicians.

What did happen with Darrell Brooks is that he was initially framed at the periphery of the story as a passive passenger of the vehicle which "crashed". Then he was portrayed as having mistakenly fled into the parade route from an initial "domestic incident" which was discovered to not have existed. Then he was portrayed as having mental health issues based on nothing more than a standard psych eval he was made to take as a condition of probation for a prior crime. Now, it appears that his lawyers are pleading that he was suffering from Reefer Madness.

[–]Fonched 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Correct and I don't know what the Daily Beast author would require for it to have any racial motivation. Sadly there was little to no one else stating facts on the contrary to the article.

Yes, Trump and Tucker Carlson are being blamed for the shooting the most of all. Some are tying this directly to the Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal. There was one AP story that labeled him as an "18-year old teenager" versus Michael Brown as an "18-year old man", though it was soon corrected. Other than that I would have no idea where they would describe the perp as having a "troubled past" kind of thing unless they were drawing from past examples.