Orlando held a fight in its city-owned arena. Then came the Nazi salutes.: A kickboxer known to his online followers as “GypsyCrusader” served time in federal prison after prosecutors said he pushed a “race-based civil war.” Organizers booked him to fight a Jewish opponent. - "[the neo-Nazi] Miller’s opponent, Azoulay [who is Jewish], sells online courses about attaining 'limitless wealth' and has posted videos supporting the Tate brothers, who built a massive social media empire championing hyper-masculinity and now face sex-trafficking and rape charges."
The Growing Lawlessness in California’s Forests: Two frog biologists were kidnapped in the woods. More bizarre situations may come. - "A sense of lawlessness seems to be growing on the public lands in the region. People on Howe's staff have returned to find their cars stripped at trailheads-no wheels, no batteries, gas siphoned. They've encountered mountain roads blockaded by hostile civilians. Michael Kauffmann, an ecologist and the executive director of the Bigfoot Trail Alliance, told me that he's recently instituted more training for his researchers and trail crews on safety measures and defusing confrontations. More than anything, Kauffmann has noticed a greater disregard for the rules-more graffiti, a lot more garbage, and less appreciation for these lands as places to care for rather than to joyride over with guns and four-wheelers. One person who regularly hikes in the area around Gumboot Lake told me that he'd felt safer during 'close encounters with bears and lions' than with some of the armed and unfriendly people around."
The Netherlands Will Never Be Rid of Louisiana Crawfish: What will it take for the Dutch to eat them? - "The crayfish invasion started decades ago, but in recent years, the red swamp crayfish (also known as the Louisiana crawfish) has become a particular pest, Pim Lemmers, an ecologist at Radboud University who has dedicated his career to researching crayfish, told me. In the 1980s, it was brought to the Netherlands as food, and people naively released the animals into the environment. The waterways in the Netherlands are very interconnected and became a "crayfish highway" of sorts, Ivo Roessink, an aquatic ecotoxicologist at Wageningen University & Research, told me. But crayfish can walk and breathe on land, too, and have been spotted in parks, along bike lanes, and at Schiphol airport, where the birds use the runway to crush them."
The Hasan Piker Question: Many Democrats would like him to go away. - "But it was El-Sayed who first made Piker central to his campaign by bringing him out on the trail, partying poolside with him at an influencer event, and celebrating with him during his Election Night rally. In his thousands of hours of streaming, Piker has produced a dense catalog of comments spanning the spectrum from stupid to incredibly offensive, including several iterations of the phrase 'I hate America' and, perhaps most memorably, that 'America deserved 9/11.' (He quickly attempted to walk it back.) Piker also flaunts his authoritarian sympathies, calling Mao Zedong 'one of the great leaders of this world' and counting the collapse of the Soviet Union among the 'catastrophes' of the 20th century. Last week, he warned that 'eventually someone is going to come around and take action' against American Jews who are 'singularly invested in Israel.'"
The MAGA Right Is Only Pretending to Be Censored: The conspiracy theory that persists even though no evidence supports it - "The failure to produce evidence is not for lack of trying. During the Biden administration, MAGA allies and politicians filed multiple lawsuits with the goal of exposing alleged censorship. None has done so. One of them, brought by the Missouri attorney general, made it all the way to the Supreme Court before justices asked for underlying evidence that the government had censored anyone. The answer was no. Another, brought against the Stanford research project by America First Legal - Stephen Miller's team - failed in July, when a judge found the suit had no standing, no jurisdiction, and, after a discovery process requested by the plaintiffs, no evidence. There was no proof, in other words, that the Stanford research had resulted in anyone being censored. Other cases against the Biden administration were simply settled by President Trump's Department of Justice without finding any evidence of 'censorship' either.
...
"Belatedly, even some part of the Trump administration appears to have quietly concluded that all of this has gone too far and that maybe, in fact, it would be useful for the U.S. government to understand how hostile governments seek to manipulate the internet. In May, the State Department put out a tender for software developers who could help analyze 'foreign adversarial propaganda' and thus replicate the work once done by the Global Engagement Center. In August, a State Department contractor also posted a job opening for research analysts who can, among other things, "evaluate how foreign governments, state-sponsored organizations, terrorist groups, and other malign actors use social media and digital communications to influence public opinion and targeted audiences."
"As DiResta wrote this week, 'they're hiring people to do the very job they just spent 16 months claiming was a conspiracy.' So much time, energy, and money was wasted pursuing a fiction. Now more time, energy, and money will need to be spent to clean up the damage."
