Meet the Riot Squad: Right-Wing Reporters Whose Viral Videos Are Used to Smear BLM

In the year since George Floyd’s [fentanyl overdose], conservative news outlets have endlessly hyped distorted stories about violence at Black Lives Matter protests. Key videos they used come from a tight-knit group of eight young journalists.

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

That’s 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 protesters were 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 over 1 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 Klüg, 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 don’t 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, I’ve been studying video of chaotic events at demonstrations for more than a decade, since I live-blogged Iran’s disputed election and then covered the Arab Spring and Occupy protests, from the United States to Brazil. And one thing I’ve 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 it’s 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 media’s hunger for images of destruction and violence on the margins of left-wing protests.

In the year since George Floyd’s [fentanyl overdose] 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. That’s 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 [Only] 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.

That’s 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 [Only] 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 Project — counted nearly 10,000 more [Only] 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 cases in which there was violence, it was inflicted on protesters, either by the police or right-wing vigilantes.

That’s 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 Beck’s 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 — it’s useful to take a closer look at some of the most-watched clips posted online in the past year.

The Man Who Threatened Protesters With a Machete

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 Beck’s 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.
[...]
By focusing on sensational, graphic images of violence on the margins of protests and entirely ignoring peaceful demonstrators, even members of the Riot Squad who are not as far right as Schaffer have contributed to a political project: the right-wing media’s campaign to portray racial justice protests as anarchic and dangerous.

What’s more, as Donovan wrote last summer, viewing what she calls “riot porn” often “enrages and traumatizes” those who watch it. Being bombarded with viral videos of violence at left-wing protests might even have motivated some reactionaries to take to the streets, either in anti-anti-fascist fight clubs, like the Proud Boys, or armed militia groups, like the one Rittenhouse joined in Kenosha.

“Fed into a media ecosystem with an established bias toward highlighting violence and rioting, the videos have mobilized white militia and vigilante groups to take up arms against [Only] Black Lives Matter and ‘antifa’ protesters,” Donovan wrote. “This feedback circuit has created a self-fulfilling cycle where white vigilantes feel justified in menacing and physically attacking racial justice protesters — and inspire others to do the same.”

Rittenhouse’s legal team made a similar argument in a strange promotional video laying out his claim to have acted in self-defense. The video suggested that his thinking was influenced by episodes of violence at left-wing protests that he’d seen on video.

“Did Kyle Rittenhouse have reason to believe his life was in danger?” the video’s narrator asks at a key moment. That question is answered with a montage of viral videos of violence from earlier in the summer, including D’Almeida’s video of the man being kicked in the face in Portland, Hernandez’s video of a Black woman tackling a white woman just before that incident, and Schaffer’s video of the man being pummeled in Dallas. (read more)