🤔 Y'all pretend to be worried about "disinformation" in journalism and social media...
But you just accept a Washington Post report describing a violent, racist, traitor leaking government secrets (about an ongoing war!) to a chatroom full of racist kids and young men he's radicalizing, as a "charismatic gun enthusiast?" Y'all are deeply unserious people.
You don't care about disinformation at all, as long as the disinfo is in the usual US direction: downplaying racism that hurts Black folk.
@outeast @mekkaokereke Thank you so much for letting me read that. I read it to the end. People will honestly sell their soul for internet clout. Wow. They really will.
I wonder if he realizes that people might have *died* because he wanted to impress his online community.
@softicecreamlesley @mekkaokereke
The recently publicized leak of classified documents that showed up on various Discord servers has been basically traced back to its origin. The original leaker was in the military, ran a Discord server full of christofascism (the WaPo separately identifies the racism, antisemitism, gun nuttery, conspiracy theorism, and religiosity, but fails to name the ideology those add up to)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/12/discord-leaked-documents/
@softicecreamlesley @mekkaokereke
Oh good grief it gets worse. in this one they're "irreverent misfits" who also happen to have named their forum for a homophobic meme, and the other aspects of christofascism just straight go unmentioned.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/12/discord-documents-oxide-wow-mao/
@mekkaokereke it’s clearly a racist group from the article. Is that incompatible with charismatic gun enthusiasts?
I get, now that you pointed it out, they didn’t outline the racist part, which is important and not acceptable. Thanks.
@JohnLMacFarlane @mekkaokereke
More that they just dance around calling it a group of "video game enthusiasts" or "young Christian men" or "gun enthusiasts", in at least one article describing deeply, violently, racist posts - but don't actually just name it for what it obviously was, a christofascist radicalization group.
@queenofnewyork @sophieschmieg @mekkaokereke
It sounds to me like they are the sort of mutual propaganda reinforcement bubble from which terrorists emerge in a few years (or perhaps from which the more extreme members are recruited into the next stage of radicalization), but have not actually done or formed plans to do any terrorism.
Mostly *at this stage* they sound like nasty bigoted and extremely stupid edge lords, made dangerous on account of the US's gun obsession.
@queenofnewyork @sophieschmieg @mekkaokereke
I think you're quite right - if they were brown skinned Muslims, they'd all be brought in as terrorists, which would be as much of an over reaction as the WaPo ridiculously characterizing them as "devout Christians who like guns" is an under reaction.
The accurate view of them, somewhere in the middle between those two extremes, is quite scary enough.
@queenofnewyork @sophieschmieg @mekkaokereke
I mean, by all means call folks like them terrorists as a shorthand for their propensity to spawn people who do actually go on to plan or commit terrorism, maybe after having moved on to more extreme groups some years earlier.
As long as we're not calling for them to all be rounded up on trumped up charges. Equality is supposed to mean everyone gets the decent treatment white people get, not everyone gets treated like shit the way minorities are.
@dragonfrog @queenofnewyork @sophieschmieg
Terrorism, maybe no. Illegal yes.
They shared and leaked classified information about an ongoing war. There are folks in federal prison and Gitmo for doing less.
@mekkaokereke @queenofnewyork @sophieschmieg
Way illegal, absolutely. A good point that their danger to the national interest on the global stage is from the crimes they committed.
At least, for those of them who are inside the US. I don't know how that works for those of them who are outside the US - if I, a Canadian living in Canada, were to come into possession of US classified information, what penalties would I risk if I mishandled it? No idea and not likely to come up in my life.
@mekkaokereke @queenofnewyork @sophieschmieg
Meanwhile their danger on an individual level to people in personal contact with them comes from their being presumably quite legally armed and obsessed with using those weapons on people in "self defence" even if not in actual terrorism.
@sophieschmieg @queenofnewyork @mekkaokereke At this point, any time you have 'gun enthusiast' and 'gamer' in the same place, you can pretty much count on 'racist', 'sexist', and 'fascist' being there as well.
The irony is that if you don't pay for the article, you never get to the paragraphs about racism... you just get the charismatic introduction.
@mekkaokereke "He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds at a target."
Ah yes, very charming chap, that young boy. Well done Washington Post.
But seriously, the same author has written both of these lines, which are only not a contradiction if you tacitly agree with the racist
English is not my first language, so I wonder what "racial slurs" is supposed to mean. I guess it's basically "racist slurs"? Is there an actual difference or does the author simply try to avoid the word "racist"?
@mekkaokereke
Right there with you, Mekka.
This stuff is so fucking infuriating
@mekkaokereke This article is bizarre to me because it reads like a psychological horror story in which the author is using the story about the leak as a framing device/foil for the actual story.
Different situation but I'm reminded of a recent situation in Australia where a paper published a puff piece about a jam shop hiring 11 year olds to help make the jam because their jam was soooo popular and then after backlash had to follow up with "breaking news: child labor is bad actually"
@mekkaokereke and the euphemism is even bizarrely wrong as well. Charismatic? He had to berate his users for not engaging with the stuff he was leaking. Characters with + charisma don't have to beg for engagement.
Reads like a ChatGPT response to the prompt "describe this guy as if he were not a horrible person".
@mekkaokereke That's pretty horrible. The video description of the source of the leaks - "He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds" makes it pretty clear what kind of people we're talking about.
I wouldn't be surprised if the verbiage was selected by US intel folks reviewing the article to encourage folks to cooperate instead of threatening capital treason charges.
But media and feds soft pedaling right wing extremism is hardly new either.
@jonathanpeterson Agreed! They should be labeled what they are, a white #RepublicanTerrorist gun-humper and #ChristoFascist who managed to infiltrate the National Guard to work against the United States.
Admittedly, a bit long for a headline, so #Republican #Traitor will do.
@mekkaokereke There is a nice word in German for this: Qualitätsjournalismus.
It originally described the literal sense, ie. "(high) quality journalistic work" - but was overused by .. less well-meaning .. souls that its meaning got twisted into the opposite, eg. with most of German publishers suing Google News etc.
Some people still use it in the original way, but to most of us, it has a ironical, sarcastic undertone and meaning now.
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