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Prominent alt-right media personalities and websites framed a Michigan man that one labeled an anti-Trump druggie for Saturdays car attack on anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville, Va that killed one and injured 19 others.

Police said the suspect in the incident is 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr. from Maumee, Ohio. That is not the name of the man identified by the websites Gateway Pundit and GotNews earlier in the day.

REPORT: Driver in Virginia Car Attack Was Anti-Trump Protester, Gateway Pundit blared, plus the name of the Michigan man, whose name The Daily Beast is withholding. WOW! DUDE HIT THE WRONG CROWD, the subheadline read.

The report Gateway Pundit cited was a now-deleted tweet by a Twitter user named @Aristotle_Code, who goes by Michael and whose profile picture is of a sportscar. Michael has less than a thousand Twitter followers.

The post was deleted with no retraction.

BREAKING: #Charlottesville Car Terrorist Is Anti-Trump, Open Borders Druggie, reported GotNews, a website owned by far-right provocateur Chuck Johnson.

The post, which does not have a byline, cites a Facebook crawl of relatives of license plate searches of the Dodge Challenger that was used in the attack.

[Name redacted] likes taking drugs and getting stoned, a look at his social media shows. What he under the influence when he crashed into the crowd at Charlottesville? the post read.

That post has since been removed.

Still, readers flocked to the Facebook page of the Michigan man who was falsely accused of the homicide. Users finally began to slow the harassment on his page when he posted to Facebook several times while the suspect of the car attack was in custody.

The wrongly accused man has since set his Facebook page to private.

Users on 4chan also believed they had identified the cars owner by viral posts allegedly identifying the vehicles VIN number and license plate. They used that to claim the Michigan man was truly behind the attack.

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The publisher of the Federalist and CBS contributor Ben Domenech fueled speculation that 4chan was about to crack the case.

I told you last night it could get worse. Awful. Particularly if 4chan is accurate as to the identity of the driver, he wrote. They were not.

Daily Caller reporter Ian Miles-Cheong also pushed his readers to 4chans /pol/ message board.

What if I told you that /pol/ has mobilized to find out who the driver of the #Charlottesville car is, and it isn't who you think it is? he tweeted. I've been reviewing the evidence, the Ohio license plate, etc. The owner of the car is anti-Trump and made posts supporting communism.

Cheong, who has appeared on Fox News Hannity in the past month, wound up being incorrect.

/pol/ is now saying it might be some guy who might be alt-right guy now. Hah. Who knows with anything anymore. Just wait for the police, he later wrote.

This is not Gateway Pundits first time this calendar year accusing the wrong person of a terror attack. In January, Gateway Pundits Jim Hoft claimed CNN had lightened a picture of a man named Esteban Santiago, who had shot up a Fort Lauderdale airport.

Not only had CNN not even identified a suspect, let alone lightened a picture of one, Hofts post featured a picture of an entirely separate Esteban Santiago, who was not the same age or from the same state as the one who perpetrated the shooting.

The post was shared by the former Republican Congressman representing Fort Lauderdale, Allen West, before it was changed to say this may be a different Esteban Santiago hours later.

In 2014, GotNews founder Chuck Johnson wrongly identified the accuser in the famous University of Virginia rape story that was later separately retracted by Rolling Stone. (UVAs campus, coincidentally, is in Charlottesville).

Johnson made headlines earlier this week for setting up a fundraiser for James Damore, the author of the anti-diversity Google memo that went viral this week. Hes raised $43,000 on Johnsons WeSearchr site, which uses Make Journalism Great Again as its catchphrase.

See the rest here:
Alt-Right Media Framed Wrong Person in Car Attack, Labeled Him 'Anti-Trump Druggie' - Daily Beast

Top story: Call evil by its name

Good morning, Graham Russell here with the news to start your week.

A man who is accused of murder after driving into a crowd of anti-racism protesters in Charlottesville faces court on Monday as Donald Trump continues to draw criticism from all sides for failing to condemn white supremacists when a rally turned fatal.

Tensions ran high throughout the weekend after the death of rights activist Heather Heyer on Saturday, with the organiser of the extremist rally chased away as he tried to give a speech on Sunday.

But it was Trump who again became the focal point of anger. He denounced hatred and violence on many sides but stopped short of calling out white supremacists, whose attempt to hold the protest resulted in a state of emergency in Virginia.

Leading Republicans, a slew of Democrats and even Anthony Scaramucci lined up to urge Trump to be more specific. Republican senator Cory Gardner tweeted: Mr President, we must call evil by its name. These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism. The Guardian view: Trumps moral failure shames America.

Murder suspect James Fields who was earlier spotted at a neo-Nazi rally is accused of multiple charges relating to the car attack in which 19 others were injured.

Hammond being played? The chancellor has been accused of abandoning his previous position on a soft Brexit after putting on a display of unity with Liam Fox over departure from the EU customs framework. Richard Corbett, the deputy leader of Labour MEPs, said Philip Hammond had caved in, former Brexit minister David Jones said he had rowed back and Vince Cable said he had teamed up with one of the more extreme and ideological supporters of a hard Brexit.

Amid the political chaos, Britains retirees are wasting no time in heading for Spain, France and Portugal. Experts say it is extremely unlikely European countries would let older Britons make such a move so easily in future.

Falling through the cracks More than 100,000 children in England feared to be at risk of abuse or neglect receive help only when they are at crisis point, a new report has warned. The children were highlighted as needing help but did not meet the criteria for statutory support, said Action for Children. Responding to the report, Richard Watts from the Local Government Association said in many areas services were being pushed to breaking point.

Scaramucci speaks Trumps former communications director has used his first TV interview since his sacking to warn the president of subversive elements within the White House. In a move that will surely feed the presidents apparent love of conspiracy theories, Anthony Scaramucci said an enemy within was scuppering his agenda and urged him to bring in more loyalists. He also likened himself to Harvey Keitels character in Pulp Fiction.

Different medium, same abuse Almost half of girls are harassed or abused online, a survey has found, with the nature of the abuse echoing what they face in the real world. Childrens charity Plan International said its survey of 11- to 18-year-olds revealed girls were being told what to wear, how to look, to shut up about their opinions. The poll also showed that 40% of boys have received harassment online.

Vile high club Arrests for drunkenness on flights or at UK airports increased by 50% in the past year, with routes to Spain singled out as particularly troublesome. Cabin crew told the BBCs Panorama programme of the resulting sexual harassment, with passengers seeing them as barmaids in the sky.

Im going to be here for 24 hours and I wont be sleeping, says Glen Nagle enthusiastically. He is one of the space experts Nasa is relying on in Australia to capture what Nagle calls the last breath of data from spacecraft Cassini as it hurtles into Saturns atmosphere next month. The end of its 20-year voyage means all eyes will be on Tidbinbilla, a serene station outside Canberra enveloped by national parks and sheep where the hum of moving antennas and the occasional paging announcement are the only sounds.

Top-flight football is back and Manchester Uniteds performance in their 4-0 win over West Ham, in which Jos Mourinho paired Romelu Lukaku with Marcus Rashford, gave renewed hope to the club. Rafael Bentez has revealed that Jonjo Shelvey apologised after collecting an inevitable red card in Newcastles defeat to Tottenham in Sundays other Premier League game. Meanwhile, Diego Costa has accused Chelsea of treating him like a criminal and revealed he will not return to the club. In France, the worlds most expensive player, Neymar, scored on his Paris Saint-Germain debut while in Spain Cristiano Ronaldo scored a sensational goal and was then sent off for a combination of his provocative celebration and for diving as Real Madrid beat Barcelona.

Two more medals on Sunday a silver in the womens 4x400m and a bronze in the mens 4x400m meant Britain completed a sweep of relay honours and took their final tally in the world athletics championships to six, as Mo Farah accused sections of the media of trying to destroy his achievements on the track. And Englands defence of their Womens Rugby World Cup title continues to simmer in Dublin after try doubles from Emily Scarratt, Danielle Waterman and Lydia Thompson lit up a comfortable 56-13 victory over Italy.

The Japanese economy has recorded its longest period of expansion for more than a decade after figures revealed a sixth straight quarter of positive growth on Monday. It is the best run since 2006 and is good news for Shinzo Abes attempts to kickstart an economy dogged for years by deflation. It didnt do much for the Nikkei average in Tokyo, however, which was off 0.8% in contrast to positive showings in other markets in Asia. The FTSE100 is set to rise 0.3% this morning, according to futures trading.

The pound is flat at $1.30 and 1.10.

We have the usual variety of news angles to start the week. The Sun reports on Hunts 44k flush fund and claims the health secretary demanded a new toilet and shower in his office so he could freshen up after cycling to work.

The Guardian leads on the events in Charlottesville and Donald Trumps muted reaction to it.

The Telegraph has the Tory backbencher and definitely not future leader Jacob Rees-Mogg calling for stamp duty cuts.

The Mirror goes with TV celebrity Ant McPartlins hopes of saving his marriage after apparently being treated for addiction to painkillers.

The Times meanwhile claims Theresa May is under fire from Whitehall officials for trying to rush through Brexit decisions during a chaotic summer.

The Mails headline is War on heart deaths and says GPs are to offer check-ups for people at risk.

If you would like to receive the Guardian Morning Briefing by email every weekday at 7am, sign up here.

Read the rest here:
Monday briefing: Trump fights for his alt-right - The Guardian

White House Senior Adviser Steve Bannon and Donald Trump.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Donald Trump has done more than any political figure in the United States to propagate the beliefs and court the support of the white supremacist "alt-right" movement, whose adherents held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, where a white supremacist named James Fields Jr. killed a nonviolent protester named Heather Heyer with his car. Here's an attempt at a comprehensive list of the ways Trump has promoted and benefitted from the movement.

(Note on nomenclature: I'm using the term white supremacist in some cases where others might use white nationalist. The self-identification distinction between the two groups is that many white nationalists claim that they believe the United States should be a culturally and politically white-dominated society because it has historically been so, not because whites are intrinsically superior. An avowedly white U.S. "ethnostate," though, is still one in which whites would maintain supremacy over nonwhites, so I believe white supremacist applies broadly. Also, regardless of what they may claim, many self-identified white nationalists are quite obviously racially prejudiced against nonwhites.)

Birtherism. Trump began insisting in 2011 that Barack Obama may not have been born in the United States. He once said a "very credible source" had informed him that Obama's birth certificate was fraudulent and claimed to have sent investigators to Hawaii to research the matter. Trump has also suggestedObama may be a Muslim who is sympathetic to the goals of groups like ISIS. (Obama is an American-born Christian.)

Steve Bannon. The former chairman of Breitbart News helped run Trump's campaign and is a senior White House adviser. Bannon once proudly described Breitbart as "the platform for the alt-right," and under his leadership the site published an infamous article which celebrated the work of several white supremacists, including Richard Spencer, who was one of the leaders of the Charlottesville rally and who made headlines for using Nazi slogans and gestures at a Washington, D.C. celebration of Trump's inauguration. (Breitbart also famously posted some of its stories under the heading "Black Crime.") Bannon has repeatedly and publicly endorsed The Camp of the Saints, a novel popular in white-pride circles in which black Americans, "dirty Arabs," and feces-eating Hindu rapists (among others) destroy civilization. The book refers to black individuals as "niggers" and "rats." Bannon has also reportedly praised a far-right French writer named Charles Maurras who was sentenced to life in prison after World War II for collaboration with Nazi occupiers. And he's complained publicly that too many tech CEOs are Asian American. And he reportedly told his ex-wife that he didn't want their children attending schools with significant Jewish enrollment.

Milo Yiannopoulos. The Nazi-fetishizing former Breitbart staffer who co-wrote the white-supremacist article described above can thank Bannon, who has called his work "valuable," for launching his career. Trumps first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, called Yiannopoulos "brave" and said he was a "phenomenal individual" in November 2016. In February of this year, Trump himself tweeted a threat to revoke the University of California at Berkeley's federal funding because it canceled Yiannopoulos' appearance on campus. Yiannopoulos subsequently resigned from Breitbart during a furor over approving remarks he made in 2016 about pedophiliabut it appears that his career is still being funded by Robert Mercer, a right-wing billionaire whose daughter Rebekah served on Trump's transition team.

Alex Jones. Jones' site InfoWars advocates paranoid beliefs of all sorts, including but not limited to alt-right-adjacent theories about the "Jewish mafia" and "globalists," such as the Rothschilds, who manipulate world events to enrich themselves. Trump called Jones "amazing" during a 2015 interview, and the White House seemingly confirmed to the New York Times that Trump and Jones occasionally speak on the phone.

Sebastian Gorka. Ostensibly a counterterrorism adviser, Gorkas job appears to consist entirely of making grandiose and factually erroneous declarations during Fox News appearances, and he is reportedly a member of a far-right Hungarian group called Vitzi Rend that collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. (He denies it.)

Julie Kirchner. Previously the executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Kirchner was appointed to work at the federal Office of Citizenship and Immigration Services by the Trump administration in May. The Federation for American Immigration Reform's founder and its current president are both interested in eugenics and crank race science;both have complained that immigration undermines whites' dominance.

Social media outreach. Trump conducted an exclusive Q&A in July 2016 with a notorious Reddit forum called The_Donald. The first question he answered was submitted by Milo Yiannopoulos, and another user whose question he answered had previously referred to Black Lives Matter protests as "chimp outs." Other threads on The_Donald prior to Trump's Q&A had covered such subjects as "race mixing," Nazis' allegedly high IQs, and the "Jewish influence" in America. Top Trump aide Dan Scavino is essentially a White House liaison to internet extremists, while Donald Trump Jr. has retweeted prominent white supremacists and conducted an interview with a white-supremacist radio host who has said that interracial relationships constitute "white genocide." Trump Sr., for his part, famously retweeted a Twitter user named "WhiteGenocideTM" and posted an anti-Semitic Hillary Clinton meme image created by a Twitter user whose other work involved grotesque caricatures of black and Jewish individuals.

Saying and doing racist things constantly. During the 2016 campaign, Trump attacked a federal judge who had prosecuted drug traffickers in a previous job by calling him "Mexican" (he was born in Indiana) and suggesting that he was sympathetic to Mexican cartels; asserted that Mexican immigrants are disproportionately likely to commit rapes; defended the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII; retweeted a hoax graphic which wildly overstated the rates at which black Americans commit crimes against whites; claimed incorrectly that Oakland is one of the most dangerous cities in the world; suggested that bereaved miitary father Khizr Khan supports Islamic terrorism; reiterated his belief that the Central Park Five are guilty despite their having been legally exonerated; and approvingly repeated an apocryphal story about an American officer putting down an insurrection in the Phillippines by executing Muslims using bullets dipped in pigs' blood.

NBC News tracked down alleged Charlottesville killer James Fields Jr.'s mother on Sunday. She told the network that she hadn't known that her son was attending a white supremacist event. "I thought it had something to do with Trump," she said. Indeed.

Read more here:
Donald Trump's ties to alt-right white supremacists are extensive. - Slate Magazine (blog)

Images and footage from Seattle of riot-gear-equipped police standing between rallies of the white nationalist group Patriot Prayer and anti-fascist counter-protesters, carried live on MSNBC this afternoon, make clear the tensions that exploded in Charlottesville yesterday are carrying into the last stretch of the weekend.

A couple hours into the rallies, police have managed to keep the groups away from one another. A less eventful, more peaceful and smaller anti-Trump protest was being held in New Yorks midtown near Trump Tower.

The Portland-based, pro-Trump Patriot Prayer group had been planning its Seattle rally prior to yesterdays events and chose not to cancel. A counter-protest was organized by theGreater Seattle General Defense Committee, an anti-fascist group that posted a post-Charlottesville message on its website today: We may be entering a new stage of struggle. We are determined to meet the challenges ahead of us. We will beat back and defeat the fascists. We must defend each other. That means all of us.

Footage tweeted by a Seattle Times photographer (watch it below) showed the counter-protesters confronting a shielded line of police, chanting Let Us March and spraying the police with Silly String. The incident also was shown on MSNBC.

As of mid-afternoon Seattle time, neither CNN nor Fox News Channel had thrown live to Seattle.

Read the original:
MSNBC Goes Live To Tense Seattle Alt-Right Rally & Counter-Protests - Deadline

Instead, the man whose vicious attacks against Hillary Clinton, John McCain, federal judges, fellow Republican leaders and journalists helped define him both in and out of the White House simply blamed "many sides."

Trump stepped to the podium at his New Jersey golf resort and read a statement on the clashes, pinning the "egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. ... It has been going on for a long time in our country -- not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama," he said. "It has been going on for a long, long time. It has no place in America."

"We should call evil by its name," tweeted Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the most senior Republican in the Senate. "My brother didn't give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home."

"Very important for the nation to hear @POTUS describe events in #Charlottesville for what they are, a terror attack by #whitesupremacists," tweeted Sen. Marco Rubio, a competitor for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.

"Mr. President - we must call evil by its name. These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism," tweeted Sen. Cory Gardner, a Colorado Republican.

Scott Jennings, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, said Trump's speech was not his "best effort," and faulted the President for "failure to acknowledge the racism, failure to acknowledge the white supremacy, failure to acknowledge the people who are marching around with Nazi flags on American soil."

In his decades of public life, Trump has never been one to hold back his thoughts, and that has continued in the White House, where in his seven months as President it has become clear that he views conflicts as primarily black-and-white.

Trump's Twitter account has become synonymous for blunt burns, regularly using someone's name when he feels they slighted him or let him down. Trump, in just the last week, has used his Twitter account to call out Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell by name, charge Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal with crying "like a baby" and needle media outlets by name.

His campaign was defined by his direct attacks. He pointedly attacked Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim U.S. soldier killed in Iraq in 2004, for his speech at the Democratic National Committee that challenged his understanding of the Constitution, suggested federal Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel was unable to be impartial because of his Mexican heritage and said in a CNN interview that then-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly had "blood coming out of her wherever" after she questioned him at a debate.

Even before Trump was a presidential candidate, he was driven by a guiding principle imparted on him by Roy Cohn, his lawyer-turned-mentor: "If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard."

"What happens is they hit me and I hit them back harder," he told Fox News in 2016. "That's what we want to lead the country."

On Saturday at his Bedminster resort, Trump's bluntness gave way to vagueness as he failed to mention the impetus behind the violence that left at least one person dead in the streets of Charlottesville.

In doing so, Trump left it to anonymous White House officials to explain his remarks, leaving the door open to questions about his sincerity and why he won't talk about the racists at the heart of the protests.

"The President was condemning hatred, bigotry and violence from all sources and all sides," a White House official said. "There was violence between protesters and counter protesters today."

By being equivocal, Trump also failed to follow the same self-proclaimed rules he used to hammer other politicians.

Trump constantly slammed Obama and Clinton during his run for the presidency for failing to label terrorist attacks as such. He called out the two Democrats for failing to use the term "radical Islamic terrorism."

"These are radical Islamic terrorists and she won't even mention the word, and nor will President Obama," Trump said during an October 9 presidential debate. "Now, to solve a problem, you have to be able to state what the problem is or at least say the name."

Trump declined to do just that on Saturday, as video of white nationalists flooded TV screens across the country hours after a smaller group marched through Charlottesville at night holding tiki torches and chanted, "You will not replace us."

Instead, Trump called for "a swift restoration of law and order" and said the federal government was "ready, willing and able" to provide "whatever other assistance is needed." He saluted law enforcement for their response and said he spoke with Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, about the attack.

But the businessman-turned-president also touted his own economic achievements during his brief speech, mentioning employment numbers and recent companies that decided to relocate to the United States.

"We have so many incredible things happening in our country, so when I watch Charlottesville, to me it is very, very sad," he said.

The reality for Trump is that his presidency helped white nationalists gain national attention, with groups drafting off his insurgent candidacy by tying themselves to the President and everything he stood for.

"I don't want to energize the group, and I disavow the group," Trump told a group of Times reporters and columnists during a meeting at the newspaper's headquarters in New York.

He added: "It's not a group I want to energize, and if they are energized, I want to look into it and find out why."

But men like David Duke, possibly the most famous white nationalist, directly tied Saturday's protests to Trump.

"We are determined to take this country back. We're gonna fulfill the promises of Donald Trump," Duke said in an interview with The Indianapolis Star on Saturday in Charlottesville. "That's why we voted for Donald Trump because he said he's going to take our country back."

When Trump tweeted earlier on Saturday that everyone "must be united & condemn all that hate stands for," Duke grew angry, feeling that the man who help bring white nationalist to this point was slamming them. He urged Trump -- via Twitter -- to "take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists."

Though earlier in the day Trump billed Saturday's event as a press conference, the President declined to respond to shouted question that would have allowed him to directly take on white nationalists.

"Mr. President, do you want the support of these white nationalist groups who say they support you, Mr. President? Have you denounced them strongly enough," one reporter shouted.

"A car plowing into people, would you call that terrorism sir?" another asked.

Trump walked out of the room.

CNN's Jeff Zeleny and Athena Jones contributed to this report.

Read this article:
Trump -- once again -- fails to condemn the alt-right, white supremacists - CNN