A local Ohio news outlet WHIO reported that Betts, who killed nine people in Dayton’s Oregon District, was seen carrying a gun and protesting at a Ku Klux Klan rally in May this year.
“Betts seems to have been made aware of the KKK rally by far-left Antifa doxxing account Antifash Gordon, as a screenshot provided by journalist Nick Monroe reveals,” Big League Politics reported.
The May 25 rally attracted about 500 to 600 Antifa counter-protesters at Courthouse Square. The counter-protest group was fenced off from the nine Klansman as Antifa activists were spotted openly carrying firearms.
Betts was filmed carrying a gun which appeared to be similar in style to the one used in Sunday’s shooting. He wore a bandanna covering part of his face and sunglasses as he spoke briefly with a reporter during the counter-protest.
In Sunday’s attack, Betts used a semi-automatic pistol that police say was modified to function as a rifle, with an attached drum magazine that could hold up to 100 .223-caliber rounds.
He may have been carrying up to 250 rounds of ammunition on his person, police say. They also found a shotgun in his car.
Homeland Security is now trying to bully “Gentleman Jim” Watkins by “requesting” that he appear before a panel after the 8chan owner said on Tuesday that the alleged manifesto said to have been posted by another mass shooter in El Paso, Texas “was not uploaded by the Walmart shooter” and “law enforcement was made aware of this before most people had even heard the horrific news”.
GeekWire had reported that 8chan was “connected” to the mass shooting in El Paso as a “far-right extremism website”. The alleged El Paso shooter is believed to have published a manifesto against immigration.
But according Watkins a “manifesto” linked to the El Paso shooter was not uploaded by the shooter onto the 8chan message board, suggesting in a YouTube video that the document had been loaded to his site by a different user.
He also suggested that the gunman, who killed 22 in the attack at a Walmart store, had posted the document to Instagram instead.
“First of all, the El Paso shooter posted on Instagram, not 8chan,” Watkins said in the video. “Later, someone uploaded the manifesto. However, that manifesto was not uploaded by the Walmart shooter. I don’t know if he wrote it or not, but it was not uploaded by the murderer; that is clear.”
His concluded: “That is clear, and law enforcement was made aware of this before most people had even heard the horrific news.”
A spokeswoman for Facebook would only say that Instagram was working with law enforcement and any additional questions should be addressed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But the FBI declined to comment.
Incidentally, many responses to the alleged “white supremacist” shooter’s posts are accusing him of being a CIA agent. They believe that the 21-year-old accused of carrying out the El Paso shooting did not author a racist, anti-Hispanic manifesto.
Former US President Barack Obama meanwhile called on Americans to “soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments” suggesting that President Trump was responsible for the shootings.
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 5, 2019
Trump on Monday had also condemned “racism, bigotry and white supremacy” during a televised address from the White House.
“Did George Bush ever condemn President Obama after Sandy Hook. President Obama had 32 mass shootings during his reign. Not many people said Obama is out of Control. Mass shootings were happening before the President even thought about running for Pres.” @kilmeade @foxandfriends
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 6, 2019
Mainstream journalists are complaining after some US news reported on what appeared to be the Dayton, Ohio, shooter’s now-suspended Twitter account, which contained far-left and pro-Antifa rhetoric.
The outlets which reported on the shooter’s Twitter account included Forbes, The Associated Press and Newsweek.
“It’s beyond irresponsible to use the Dayton shooter’s lefty Twitter to assign a political motive,” Brandy Zadrozny, an NBC News reporter, tweeted. “The far right would like to equate Dayton to El Paso. Don’t let them.”
Jeff Blehar, from National Review, said the Antifa Dayton killer had “political beliefs like everyone else”. He added that it was “logically incorrect” to compare the El Paso and Dayton shooters.
In a CATO survey on tolerance and free speech from 2017, it was revealed that Liberals were significantly more likely to find speech offensive. At least 80 percent of leftists thought that saying illegal immigrants should be deported was “hate speech”.
The same percentage of American leftists thought it was highly offensive to say Europe was being taken over by Islam.