It’s ugly, and I blame the Republicans, especially the Tea Party and Trump fans, the latest incarnation of our nativist know-nothings. The Minneapolis Star Tribune has run a personal account of an encounter with one of those assholes.

It was my first Minnesota Vikings game and my first NFL game. I am not new to football, though. As an undergrad at Boston College, I went to many Eagles games, and I played junior varsity football. I knew what to expect on the field. I was excited, and, as I found my seat, I thought about bringing my family to a game in the new stadium.

What I didn’t expect was for a man to push aside other people and point his finger in my face, demanding to know if I was a refugee. He needed to make sure I wasn’t a refugee, he said. There was anger in his face and vehemence in his accusation.

I was stunned. He didn’t know anything about me. We were complete strangers. But somewhere in his mind, all he saw was a terrorist, based on nothing more than the color of my skin. He was white, and I wasn’t. He didn’t see anything else.

He didn’t know that I have lived in Minnesota for the past four years, that I was born and raised in New York and that the words “Never Forget” may mean more to me than to him. He didn’t know that when I went home and my children jumped on top of me and asked “How was the game?” that I’d be holding back tears as I told them about racism instead of touchdowns. He didn’t know that I am an attorney and the director of the Refugee and Immigrant Program at the Advocates for Human Rights.

Let’s not whitewash this any more. I used to think islamophobia was a silly concept, that thinking Islam was a wretched, stupid belief was entirely rational. But what I’m seeing over and over is that rejection of a false belief is largely a pretense for many of these people, and really they’re just looking for an excuse to rage against people of Middle Eastern descent.

But here’s an antidote: a British soldier who lost a leg in Iraq writes about Muslim people as complicated human beings. We need to prioritize those voices over those of resentful bigots at football games and Trump rallies.

Some of the idiots who have been harassing the Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis uploaded a video of their behavior. They posted a video of themselves waving a gun and engaging in racist banter. That’s so incredibly blatant — it mean either that they’re really stupid thugs, or that they have so much support that they think they can get away with it, or both. Most likely both.

Above are the dudes Black Lives Matter protesters say came to their Minneapolis police demonstration — and shot them. They identify themselves as “Saiga Marine” and “Blight Power Ranger.”

“We’re gonna go see what these dindus are up to,” they say, and you excuse yourself real quick to look up “dindu” on the Internet and find that it means an “innocent African American who din du nothin’,” haw haw haw, great one, 4chan assholes!

That’s right, it’s 4chan. They were planning the harassment in chatter on 4chan. Look, if you’re on 4chan at all, you’re too stupid to bear.

White supremacists have discussed various strategies online for sparking confrontation at the demonstration, which they described as a “chimpout.”

“Do you know if the BLM n*****s are planning to protest again tomorrow, and if so, at what time?” one white supremacist asked in an email chain.

They agreed to wear camouflage clothing and display a four of clubs to identify each other, and the white supremacist agitators argued over whether they should carry guns or wear Guy Fawkes masks.

The white supremacist mocked “social justice warriors” and other anti-racist whites, who they described in psychosexual terms.

“Best to act as much like a beta white cuck as much as you can,” one the racists said.

All the racist and MRA slang blurs together so well, don’t you think? I’m finding it increasingly difficult to tell those guys apart.

The connections between the dorky jerks in the video and the actual shooters are weak right now — there were shooters, and there were harassers who were flaunting their racism but maybe not shooting, and there are freakin’ hordes of pretentious nasty typers on 4chan who’d brag but never do anything. But in this case, the police have made arrests. I hope they’ve also seized computers and are busily connecting the dots.

Minneapolis police said Tuesday that they have arrested three men in connection with the shooting. Allen Lawrence “Lance” Scarsella III, 23, was arrested in Bloomington. Sources said Nathan Gustavsson, 21, of Hermantown, and Daniel Macey, 26, of Pine City, were taken into custody after they turned themselves in. All three suspects are white. Earlier Tuesday, police arrested a 32-year-old Hispanic man in south Minneapolis, but he was later released because, police said, he was not at the scene of the shooting.

Authorities are weighing whether to treat Monday’s shooting as a hate crime, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

If they are at all connected to the video or the email, then this was definitely a hate crime. Actually, even if they did it without gloating on the internet, going to a protest by black people, shouting racial slurs, and opening fire on the crowd ought to be considered a hate crime.

It opened my eyes. The ACLU has a lengthy breakdown of police discrimination in Minneapolis. But wait, I say, I am an enlightened white person, and I never see any of this!

I wonder why?

I’m also beginning to understand why right-wingers hate the ACLU so much. They keep documenting the unpleasant facts!

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Actually, you need to know a little more. Here’s an eyewitness account of what happened at the recent Minneapolis shooting.

I was at the ‪#‎4thprecinct‬ tonight when white supremacists shot 4 (maybe 5) protestors.
I sat in the hospital for a little while talking to the girlfriend of one of the men shot. He was where he was because he was trying to keep protestors calm in the face of those racists. He just turned 19. He was in surgery when I left (his family showed up).
It took 20 minutes for the ambulances to get there after the shots happened. I had to call 911 twice to get someone to pick up. When protestors screamed at the cops inside the precinct that people had been shot, the cops answered with “this is what you wanted” before shutting their doors. Four armed men got away after shooting up a crowd outside of a precinct.

“this is what you wanted”. Fuck you too, Minneapolis police.

People in Minneapolis have been protesting the murder of a black man, Jamar Clark, near the police where the shooter worked (but of course the killer was a police officer — that’s how these things work). And of course there have been white people counter-protesting, and some of them have been white supremacists, out-and-out racists, and just generally the kinds of terrible people who embarrass us all. And, unfortunately, some of them are strutting around with guns.

So last night, some of the armed racist assholes opened fire on the protest, and then fled, as cowards do.

Jie Wronski-Riley said angry protesters moved the counter-demonstrators away from the encampment at the police station. Wronski-Riley heard what sounded like firecrackers and thought, “surely they’re not shooting human beings.” Two young black men on either side of him were hit, one in the back and leg, the other in the arm.

At least two of the three men who had been taunting protesters were firing guns, said Wronski-Riley, who described the incident as “really chaotic, really fast.”

Minnesota is one of the more liberal states in this country, and that that can happen here, and be unsurprising, tells you how deep the racism goes. It doesn’t help that the Republican party brownshirts have been fostering an atmosphere of resentment and hatred on the national level, either.

It’s strange and sudden. The problems have been here all along, but now we’re seeing this pattern of unrest on campus…with both a good and bad side. The bad side is that racists are doing their thing, but the good side is that people are fighting back.

At Harvard this morning (ironically, in light of these comments here, where Harvard is presented as the shining beacon to which all minorities are drawn), it was discovered that someone in the night had strolled down a hallway lined with portraits of the tenured faculty, and put black tape slashes across certain faculty members faces: only and all of the minority faculty. That’s chilling. And that’s exactly the feeling that these cowardly bigots always try to instill, just like the KKK: be afraid to be here.

And now ‘White student union’ has formed to ‘organise against black terrorism’ at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

Amid ongoing racial tensions across US and Canadian campuses, a Facebook page entitled ‘Illini White Student Union’ (IWSU) surfaced – saying it sought to “organise against the terrorism we have been facing from Black Lives Matter activists on campus.”

…the IWSU told its members: “Feel free to send in pictures you take of any black protestors on the quad so we know who anti-whites are.”

Black terrorism is any group of black Americans daring to demand the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that is promised to everyone in the declaration of independence…which was written by the same bunch of guys who apparently thought a black person was only worth 3/5 of a white person, so maybe the white dudes are right, and the black students are expecting more than they should. No wonder the precious White Students are complaining!

But I’ve visited the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. It’s not exactly a center of seething hatred against white people…I think I met a scarce few black students there at all, so I’m not sure why the white students would feel so endangered.

The next several years promise to be interesting ones, with the Republican party in its death throes and the country’s demographics changing. I fear they’re going to get uglier before they get better, though.

Right now, the usual trolls are doing their best to lie about Skepticon: they’ve seized on that one incident in which Mark Schierbecker was unfortunately given a slot to speak as an excuse to rant about how Skepticon hates autistic people (nope), how Skepticon called him a racist (nope again — that was what his own publicist said), that they were abusing an “autistic kid” (no way — he came to Skepticon fresh off interviews on Breitbart and Fox News), and how evil SJWs are. I saw people calling in biased outsiders like Milo Yiannopoulos, Thunderf00t, and Sargon of Akkad to contribute to the propaganda, and I’m sure we’ll see more noise from them soon; it was also somehow magically tied to #gamergate and the standard anti-feminists.

I thought about writing a rebuttal, but decided the best thing to do was just present the views of a few black people who have a genuine interest in this matter.

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