Riot Squad: Right-Wing Video Journalists Help Smear BLM – The Intercept

Written by Robert Mackey. Video by Robert Mackey and Travis Mannon.

The sound of glass breaking, on Inauguration Day in Portland, Oregon, was music to the ears of Julio Rosas, a young video journalist.

Thats because Rosas, who works for the right-wing website Townhall, specializes in shooting viral video of mayhem at left-wing protests. On this day, black-clad, anti-capitalist protesterswere attacking a Democratic Party office, and Rosas managed to record them from close range without being spotted.

Within minutes of the vandalism, by a handful of activists who broke off from a small #J20 march, Rosas posted his video on Twitter, where it racked up over1 million views.

With his tweet, Rosas had also beaten his friend and rival, Jorge Ventura of the conservative Daily Caller, by six minutes.

Ventura, who went undercover to infiltrate the protest movement in Portland last summer, got less dramatic footage of this incident, but his 15-second clip, which showed that there were more people photographing the destruction in Portland than taking part in it, was still seen by more than 100,000 people.

When Rosas joined Laura Ingraham on Fox News that night, giving national attention to what would have been, before the era of viral video, just a local news story, Ventura held the camera for the live shot.

We know that because a third member of the conservative protest paparazzi that descended on Portland that day, Newsmax contributor James Klg, gave viewers of his video blog a behind-the-scenes look at how the viral video-to-Fox News pipeline works.

On the air, Ingraham attributed the destruction to antifa thugs, using the right-wing shorthand that lumps everyone with left-of-center politics into one undifferentiated mass. Rosas, who was standing in front of a Circle-A a symbol for anarchism, not anti-fascism that had been spray-painted beside the ruined front door of the Democratic Party office, made no effort to correct her.

The antifa groups here, they do not like Biden just as much they dont like Trump, he said. They just hate America in general. (In fact, Rose City Antifa, the Portland group that helped revive the Nazi-era concept of anti-fascism in the United States, released a statement making clear that this attack on the Democratic office was not the work of anti-fascists but rather of anarchists and anti-capitalists. While many of the people involved may consider themselves antifascists in ideology, the activists said, we narrowly define antifascism as actions taken to oppose the insurgent right-wing.)

As a reporter focused on protest movements, Ive been studying video of chaotic events at demonstrations for more than a decade, since I live-blogged Irans disputed election and then covered the Arab Spring and Occupy protests, from the United States to Brazil. And one thing Ive learned is that, whether a clip was posted online by a witness in Cairo or Kenosha, it always helps to know who shot the video, and why.

Over the past year, as I researched viral clips of contested incidents at protests against racist policing and far-right movements, I found that I was coming across the names of the same handful of videographers again and again. At protests in Minneapolis, Dallas, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Louisville, Philadelphia, and Kenosha, Wisconsin, I discovered that many of the most viral clips were shot by a handful of field reporters for right-wing sites or freelancers with conservative politics.

Rosas and Ventura are not household names, but its important to understand their reporting, because they are members of an informal club of right-wing video journalists who roam from city to city, feeding the conservative medias hunger for images of destruction and violence on the margins of left-wing protests.

In the year since George Floyds murder by Derek Chauvin was documented in horrifying detail on the cellphone of a 17-year-old witness, Darnella Frazier, right-wing news outlets and politicians have been desperate to draw attention away from those unbearable images by focusing instead on viral videos of unrest at racial justice protests. Thats been a boon for the careers of conservative video journalists like Rosas, Ventura, and a half-dozen of their friends, who jokingly call themselves the #RiotSquad in Instagram selfies and podcast banter.

The impact of their work is hard to overstate. Even as they remain relatively unknown, this tight-knit group has produced many of the most viral videos of Black Lives Matter protests over the past year. And those images have helped create the false impression, relentlessly driven home by Fox News and Republican politicians, that the nationwide wave of protests that erupted after George Floyd was killed was nothing but an excuse for mindless rioting.

Last July, Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, screened video of violence at protests in Portland, Ore., to justify federal intervention in the city.

Photo: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Thats not to say that rioting never happens; it clearly does. And even if you believe that a riot is the language of the unheard, it is undeniable that looting and arson did scar some communities where anger over racist policing spiraled out of control.

But the broader picture is that Black Lives Matter protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful.

Conservatives like to mock anyone who says that, usually by pointing to isolated images of chaos, like those recorded by the Riot Squad, or by cherry-picking misleading data. Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, recently cited data showing that more than 500 racial justice protests turned violent in the United States last year. But Johnson failed to let readers of his Wall Street Journal opinion piece know that the same researchers from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Projectcounted nearly 10,000 more Black Lives Matter protests that were entirely peaceful. According to the researchers, there was no looting, arson, or violence of any kind at 94 percent of the protests associated with Black Lives Matter. And in many casesin which there was violence, it was inflicted on protesters, either by the police or right-wing vigilantes.

A screenshot of data on 2020 protests in the United States from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.

Thats the wide-angle view of reality missed by conservatives obsessively viewing close-up images of violence, like those shot by the Riot Squad and played on a loop on Fox News and other outlets even further to the right.

Since the George Floyd protests, conservative media outlets including Fox News (particularly Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity), One America News, Glenn Becks BlazeTV, and right-wing YouTubers have been covering Black Lives Matter and other left-wing protests daily, specifically highlighting instances of violence, fighting, and property damage, media scholar Joan Donovan observed in the MIT Technology Review last summer. This coverage has come to dominate the right-wing narrative in a new way, flipping the script to suggest that Black protesters demonstrating because they fear police violence are themselves a threat to white people.

By using riot porn to incite fear in white people, Donovan added, the right-wing media ecosystem converts the real pain experienced by Black Americans into fodder for deranged, paranoid fantasies that white vigilantes must take up the functions of the police.

To understand how this works and how a group of just eight young journalists have had such an outsize impact on what millions of Americans know about the protests against police violence and systemic racism its useful to take acloser look at some of the most-watched clips posted online in the past year.

The first and most obvious way that some of the Riot Squad journalists distort reality is through selective, misleading edits of the footage they shoot.

At a protest in Dallas five days after George Floyd was killed, a core member of the Riot Squad, Elijah Schaffer of Becks BlazeTV, posted a brief clip that showed the brutal beating of a white man by a group of mainly Black protesters.

The graphic, disturbing footage was viewed more than 35 million times on Twitter.

What Schaffer knew, but concealed from viewers of his edited clip, was that the man he described as an innocent victim of the mob had, moments earlier, threatened protesters with a machete.

Video recorded by another witness showed that the protesters responded by hurling stones at the man, who then shrieked and charged at them, swinging the blade wildly and cutting one of them, before the others disarmed him and took bloody revenge.

Yoel Measho, a filmmaker who took part in the protest, posted that video of the mans wild charge on Snapchat, along with a second clipof a protester displaying the machete as protest medics gave the man first aid. (Measho later shared both clips with The Intercept.)

After the other videos began to circulate, Schaffer made the rest of his footage available to broadcasters, which showed that he had recorded but edited out the mans aggressive behavior.

A Dallas police spokesperson told me the day after the incident that the man had indeed confronted protesters with the machete before being assaulted. The owners of the nearby bar the man reportedly set out to defend confirmed in a phone interview that the business was not looted by the protesters or anyone else. (On a conservative podcast the following month, a man who said he was the victim of the beating confirmed that he did initiate the conflict by confronting the protesters with a carbon steel machete shaped like an old Roman gladius, which he had mentioned on Twitter before the incident.)

Among those misled by Schaffers edit was then-President Donald Trump, who boosted it on Twitter and then echoed false claims that the man had died, as federal agents were unleashed on peaceful protesters outside the White House.

Innocent people have been savagely beaten, Trump told reporters, like the young man in Dallas, Texas, who was left dying in the street. (On the night of the attack, Schaffer had passed on the false rumor that the man had died.)

In the months that followed, Schaffers misleading clip was used again and again to smear Black Lives Matter. Johnson showed the video at a meeting of the Senate Homeland Security Committee he chaired last summer, presenting it as evidence of what he called the reality that protests against racist policing unleash anarchy. The clip was also included in a video prepared by Kyle Rittenhouses legal team, and then screened by Trumps lawyers at his impeachment trial, as part of a misleading montage of protest violence, much of it recorded by Riot Squad videographers, which they falsely accused Democratic officials of having encouraged.

But footage of the same clash recorded by Ventura showed that DAlmeida had edited his clip to hide the fact that the Trump supporter had started the fight, by first violently shoving one anti-Trump protester to the ground and then pushing and threatening to punch several others.

When DAlmeida later posted more of his own footage of the incident, it became clear that he had also recorded the start of the confrontation but chose to edit that out to make the white man look like an innocent victim of the Black protester.

Like the beating in Dallas that Elijah Schaffer witnessed, the punch that felled the Trump supporter in front of DAlmeida was obviously a vicious blow. But through selective, misleading editing, DAlmeida contributed in the same way to the sense of innocent victimhood and white resentment nurtured day and night by conservative media outlets and right-wing politicians like Trump.

Three months earlier, DAlmeida had posted a meme on Instagram mocking the mainstream media for supposedly distorting protest coverage. The meme, which uses two panels from a comic strip by the right-wing Colombian cartoonist Jhon Alexander Guerra, shows a TV news reporter telling a cameraperson not to film while a protester is throwing a rock at a police officer. When the police officer then chases the protester with his nightstick raised, the reporter tells the cameraperson to start shooting, because now its news.

A screenshot of a meme adopted from panels by the right-wing, anti-feminist Colombian cartoonist Jhon Alexander Guerra, which was shared by Kalen DAlmeida on Instagram last August.

It was no accident that Rosas and Ventura chose to spend Inauguration Day this year in Portland. The liberal citys strong anti-fascist protest culture, in a metro area surrounded by ultraconservative exurbs, hasfor yearsprovided right-wing video journalists with a steady stream of skirmishes to record and exaggerate.

In July, for instance, Ventura and the Riot Squads Drew Hernandez, a right-wing YouTuber, both recorded an angry confrontation between Portland police officers and a Black, female protester who objected to being shoved forcefully by three officers.

God damn it! Im disabled, I cant walk any faster! the woman could be heard saying in the viral clip Hernandez recorded.

Go! one officer replied.

I hope someone kills your whole fucking family, the enraged woman responded. I hope they kill you too. I hope someone burns down your whole precinct with all yall inside. Cant wait to see it.

Hernandezs clip was immediately boosted on Twitter by Ngo and even screened for the White House press corps by press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, in a montage of Portland unrest intended to justify federal intervention in the city. (The montage also included video shot by Ventura and his boss, Richie McGinniss.)

The White House, however, edited the Hernandez clip for McEnanys presentation, removing the start of the confrontation to conceal from reporters that the protesters comments were in reaction to having been roughly treated.

The following month, DAlmeida recorded a shocking act of violence on a Portland street, five blocks from the main protest site.

Typically dressed in black to blend in, DAlmeida describes himself on Instagram as an Undercover Expos Artist, making no secret that his aim in filming protests against police brutality is to capture footage that can be used to discredit anti-fascists or Black Lives Matter activists.

While he began that effort in Seattle, DAlmeida finally hit the jackpot in August, when he recorded, on both his cellphone and body camera,graphic video of a white man being kicked in the face and knocked out by a Black man who provided security at Portland protests.

Hernandez and Ventura were also on hand to capture gruesome video of the aftermath, as the injured man, who was accused by his attacker of trying to run people down with his truck, lay unconscious and bleeding.

The video of the victim shared by Hernandez, with a caption attributing the violence to BLM militants, went even more viral.

The incident got so much attention on Fox News that the culprit, Marquise Love, who was later jailed for the assault, became a symbol ofBlack Lives Matterfor many of the networks viewers.

That this brutal attack had not taken place during a protest, but after one, and at another location, where a long series of confusing, overlapping arguments among people drinking and smoking outside a nearby 7-Eleven escalated to violence was not something DAlmeida tried to explain to viewers of his video.

Hernandez later tried to connect the attack to the protests by claiming that the victim, Adam Haner, had been assaulted for coming to the defense of a trans woman who was assaulted by Black Lives Matter protesters. In fact, a careful review of raw footage posted online later by Hernandez shows that the incident started after Love, the self-appointed security guard, left the site of a protest and encountered Haner drinking beer outside the 7-Eleven. The two men eventually took opposite sides in a nasty personal dispute there that had nothing to do with politics or the demonstrations.

What Hernandez left out of the narrative he shared with Fox News is that his footage shows that the dispute between Love and the trans woman at the 7-Eleven only escalated afterthat person took out a baton and threatened the security guard with it.

Last August, all eight Riot Squad videographers converged on Kenosha, Wisconsin, to cover protests that gave way to arson and destruction following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

The unrest also prompted members of a libertarian militia to take to the streets.

Almost everything we know about how one member of that militia, Kyle Rittenhouse, ended up killing two men in Kenosha that week comes from the Riot Squad reporters, who were there to document violence by anti-police protesters but instead recorded video of a pro-police vigilante shooting demonstrators.

On the second night of protests in Kenosha, Ventura and Schaffer, who was disguised in a Black Lives Matter shirt, came across protesters arguing with a libertarian militia guarding a gas station.

Both recorded a tense political debate between a young, Black protester and a heavily armed militia leader wearing a tactical vest with an embroidered patch showing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and the slogan Cowabunga It Is, a reference to a Reddit meme.

That attempted murder of that citizen was wrong, the white militiamember said of the shooting of Blake. And Im all for protests, but you cant be destroying your neighbors houses and businesses, he added.

This shit, the fucking value of property, has nothing to do with the value of life, theprotester shouted at him. If you value this shit more than you value people, youre not with us! Fuck you! Youre not with us!

In his Periscope livestream from the same location, Schaffer gushed over the vigilantes.

What do you think about vigilantism where the police are not able to protect businesses, so citizens are coming in, and theyre protecting businesses themselves? Schaffer asked a bystander.

I feel a hundred percent, the man replied.

Im with it too. Im jiving with it, Schaffer agreed. I like that shit. That shits tight. Hell, yeah. These people are like God, right here. Theyre protectors.

Two blocks away, Ventura and Schaffer joined Rosas in front of a burning office furniture store, which provided the perfect backdrop for all three to record dispatches from the scene.

In his stand-up report, Rosas credited the armed citizens for stopping the ransacking of a car dealership and threw in a dig at the MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi, who had been accused by conservatives of downplaying arson while reporting from Minneapolis on the first George Floyd protests.

Whats up everybody, so right now were still here in Kenosha, Rosas said. Riots are still going on right now where the curfew is still technically in effect, but as you can see, a lot of the people are still out and about. Obviously a burning building behind me, or, as Ali Velshi would say, not an unruly protest.

When it was Schaffers turn to use the same burning building as a backdrop, he let viewers in on the secret that he was just pretending to sympathize with the protesters in order to expose them.

My names Elijah Schaffer, reporting for BlazeTV, undercover, here in Kenosha, he signed off. Thank you again so much for watching. Have a great rest of the night and may God bless the United States of America.

Within days, that stand-up was featured in a BlazeTV commercial for Schaffers show. Americas streets have become a war zone, a narrator intoned in the ad, and Elijah Schaffer is right in the middle of it. The ad copy promised that Schaffer would bring subscribers what the mainstream media wont show you: endless images of fire and property damage, along with the young conservatives thought-provoking perspective.

As he reported on racial justice protests last summer, Schaffers commentary on the movement against police brutality became increasingly unhinged. Ultimately, Schaffer tweeted in September, I believe BLM, if left unchecked, would eventually produce genocidal outcomes.

The next night, Schaffer and the Daily Callers head of video, Richie McGinniss, both interviewed a 17-year-old who had joined the militia: Rittenhouse.

As that night wore on, protesters eventually tired of being policed by vigilantes and let the militia know. As tensions between the two groups escalated, video shot by Rosas and the Daily Callers Shelby Talcott showed the three men Rittenhouse would shoot that night Gaige Grosskreutz, Joseph Rosenbaum, and Anthony Huber in the middle of the heated dispute.

After Schaffer interviewed Rittenhouse, he went to a nearby car dealershipthat was being vandalized. Moments later, Rittenhouse ran into that car lot, pursued by Rosenbaum, a protester enraged by the teenage vigilantes presence.

Video recorded by a protest livestreamer showed that McGinniss, who was following Rittenhouse when the chase began, was running just behind Rosenbaum with his iPhone pointed at the two men when Rittenhouse turned and fired four shots, striking the protester from point-blank range.

Because McGinniss was just a few feet behind Rosenbaum when Rittenhouse opened fire and appeared to be filming, the fact that he released no video of the shooting that night led some observers to wonder if he, or the Daily Caller, might have decided to suppress or delete footage that could be used to convict the young right-wing vigilante.

Hernandez captured the shooting from across the lot and then continued filming as he moved in closer.

While McGinniss ripped off his Black Lives Matter T-shirt and tried to stop Rosenbaums bleeding with it, Rittenhouse ran past Hernandez, calling a friend instead of 911.

Close-up images of the scramble to save Rosenbaum, recorded by Hernandez and Schaffer, showed that McGinnisss cellphone, which was in his left hand as he administered first aid with his right, was in record mode at the time.

The phones engaged red record button, the presence of a white shutter button on the screens lower right, and the red block around the time code at the top are three signs that an iPhone is recording, andall are visible on McGinnisss phone in the video recorded by Schaffer and Hernandez.

A screenshot from Drew Hernandezs video of Richie McGinniss holding his cellphone in his left hand while trying to give first aid to Joseph Rosenbaum, less than a minute after he was shot by Kyle Rittenhouse.

A screenshot of Drew Hernandezs video appears to show the red time code numbers at the top of Richie McGinnisss cellphone as he gives first aid to Joseph Rosenbaum.

That fueled speculation that McGinniss might have withheld incriminating visual evidence to shield Rittenhouse, who quickly became a hero to many of the Daily Callers far-right readers and was defended by the sites founder, Tucker Carlson.

McGinniss, however, told The Intercept that while he thought he had recorded video of the shooting, he discovered later that he had accidentally hit the wrong button on his iPhone and it did not start recording until after the shots were fired.

As Rittenhouse ran from the lot, Talcott filmed protesters shouting that he had shot someone. Moments later,Rittenhousetripped and fell in front of Rosas, who recorded the teen vigilante shooting at the men who tried to disarm him.

Rosas, who is in the Marine Reserves, quickly took cover, but another young video journalist, Brendan Gutenschwager, ran past him and got the clearest images of Rittenhouse shooting Huber, who died of his wounds, and Grosskreutz, who was badly injured but survived.

As Rittenhouse rose to his feet, with Huber sprawled on the street in front of him and Grosskreutz retreating, Gutenschwager could be seen just behind the gunman, filming from the sidewalk.

After shooting Anthony Huber, foreground, and Gaige Grosskreutz, left, Kyle Rittenhouse kneeled in the street in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 25, 2020, as Brendan Gutenschwager, right, recorded the scene on video from the sidewalk behind him.

Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Within 10 minutes of the first shooting, Hernandez and Schaffer both posted their video of the fatally wounded Rosenbaum on Twitter, along with captions that maligned the victim. Hernandez described Rosenbaum as a rioter, while Schaffer made the false claim that the man had been shot while looting a car shop.

On his BlazeTV show later that week, Schaffer continued to attack the victims, falselyaccusing them of committing crimes and praising the right-wing vigilante for killing them.

I really dont have sympathy for them. I just do not. They were rioters, they were vandalizing the place. And, do crimes, get rekt, thats what I have to say, Schaffer told his viewers. I think them attacking Kyle Rittenhouse, with a skateboard, a pistol, and trying to jump him is what makes them deserve to be shot. I think Kyles been memed into history.

Kyle is a hero in my eyes, Schaffer added. Next time commies come up on a patriot like that, watch out.

Gutenschwager is the only Riot Squad videographer who is not either employed by a conservative news site or openly right-wing. But before he started filming protests, Gutenschwager traveled the country as something of a Donald Trump groupie, attending at least 24 Trump rallies before the 2018 midterms and describing them as exhilarating on his video blog.

Gutenschwagers footage of left-wing protesters behaving badly has earned him invitations from Ingraham to appear on Fox News, but he promises fans of his Twitter feed who provide financial support that they can rely on him to report the unbiased truth from the ground. He also sells his footage through the news agency Storyful, which is owned by Rupert Murdochs News Corp., but licenses video from social media video to broadcasters across the political spectrum.

Even so, Gutenschwagers video of mayhem at left-wing protests is frequently used by right-wing outlets and meme creators to smear demonstrators.

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Riot Squad: Right-Wing Video Journalists Help Smear BLM - The Intercept