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(CNN) In a private Instagram group chat, confessed school shooter Nikolas Cruz repeatedly espoused racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic views and displayed an obsession with violence and guns.
Wednesday, 19-year-old Cruz opened fire at the school that expelled him, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Authorities say he killed 17 with his legally purchased AR-15.
CNN, investigating comments the shooter may have left on a now-deleted YouTube channel, was added to the private Instagram group by one of the active members in it. The responding group members, who appear to be younger than 18, have refused to confirm their identities to CNN on or off the record.
When asked for comment or whether they knew about the private chat group, the FBI directed CNN to the Broward County Sheriff's Office.
Most of the conversation in the group since Cruz joined around August 2017 is between six people -- including Cruz.
"I hate jews, ni**ers, immigrants"
Racism was a constant theme in the chat group, which was called "Murica (American flag emoji) (eagle emoji) great" -- a name it was given by Cruz.
The hatred he and others in the group espoused met little resistance from its active members. In one part of the group chat, Cruz wrote that he hated, "jews, ni**ers, immigrants."
He talked about killing Mexicans, keeping black people in chains and cutting their necks. The statements were not made in jest.
There are hundreds of racist messages, racist memes and racist Instagram videos posted in the group.
One member even joked about Cruz's particular venomousness, saying that although he hated black people, too, he didn't "to a point I wanna kill the (sic) like nick."
Cruz said he hated black people simply because they were black; Cruz hated Jews because he believed they wanted to destroy the world.
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POMPANO BEACH, FLA. — President Trump, as he often does while responding to natural disasters, mass shootings or unfolding crises, spent much of his time congratulating the responders instead of memorializing the victims of Wednesday’s school shooting during a visit here Friday.
Trump, in two quick stops at a hospital and sheriff’s office near the school where 17 were killed and scores were injured, praised the doctors, police officers, fire officials and others who responded quickly to the mass shooting in Parkland, casting their response as heroic and record-setting.
“Incredible job, and everybody is talking about it,” Trump said of the response, with dozens of officers flanking a large circular conference room table on the fifth floor of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office.
Trump said he saw victims at the hospital — he was not seen doing so — and even described one woman who suffered bullets to her lungs. That anecdote, though, quickly became about the officers, who responded within 20 minutes and saved her life.
“They were in really great shape,” he said of the families.
Between costly tax cuts and last week’s hefty spending bill, Congress is generating deficits that aren’t just large, they’re also unprecedented and potentially ominous. And even with some optimistic assumptions, President Trump’s latest budget proposal wouldn’t eliminate these deficits — in fact, the president is still angling to add a potentially costly infrastructure plan on top of current spending. But when the economy is this strong, deficits are usually small and shrinking, not ballooning back toward $1 trillion.
We are following a path that the country hasn’t traveled since World War II, with green economic pastures alongside rivers of red deficit ink. And that combination carries unique risks — not because the numbers are especially large (during the early years of the Obama administration, the deficit regularly exceeded $1 trillion) but because these deficits provide unneeded stimulus, which can overheat an economy already operating near full capacity. And in the process, they drain away funding that might be better reserved for fighting off the next recession.
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Perhaps the greater risk of rising deficits is that they make it harder for the U.S. to fight off the next recession, whenever it comes. Combating a recession generally requires a twofold approach: Rapid interest-rate cuts at the Federal Reserve to encourage borrowing and stimulus spending from Congress, both of which inject cashinto the economy. But the Fed is in a weak position now. It can’t cut rates by 4 or 5 percentage points, as it has in recent recessions, because interest rates aren’t that far above zero right now — and the Fed’s own projections suggest they won’t get much higher, even over the long run.
None of the defendants indicted Friday for their alleged influence operation against the U.S. political system is likely to ever see the inside of an American courtroom. None is in custody. None is likely to surrender to U.S. authorities. And Vladimir Putin will probably not race to extradite them.
Nevertheless, the grand jury’s charges against the 13 Russians and three organizations mark a significant moment in the investigation of L’Affaire Russe. President Trump has spent the year since his victory casting doubt on the very premise that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Yet here is the Justice Department on the record declaring that the Russia investigation isn’t, in fact, a witch hunt. It isn’t a hoax. It isn’t just a “phony Democrat excuse for losing the election,” as the president has tweeted. There really was, the Justice Department is saying, a Russian influence operation to interfere in the U.S. political system during the 2016 presidential election, and it really was at the expense of Hillary Clinton and in favor of Donald Trump.
The 37-page indictment — handed up by a federal grand jury in Washington — amounted to a detailed rebuttal of Mr. Trump, who has sowed doubts that Russia interfered in the election and dismissed questions about its meddling as “fake news.”
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IT WAS TRUE for Dylann Roof in Charleston. It was true about for any number of violent white men in Charlottesville. And it was true for Nikolas Cruz in Parkland, Florida.
Like these other young men who turned violent, lots of people who interacted with Cruz saw the day coming when he would do something drastic, maybe even one day shoot up a school.
He had long since been expelled from his high school. One student who had served with him in the Junior ROTC called him “a psycho.” Another student said he was a weapons enthusiast who tried to sell weapons at school. Yet another student said he had been banned from bringing a backpack to school as a student after bullet casings were found in it.
Classmates reported that he stalked someone in the school. Another student said he was physically abusive to his ex-girlfriend. His social media profiles were full of guns, ammo, bigotry, and threats. A teacher said he was a known threat. Neighbors knew something was up; Cruz talked constantly about killing animals.
Local law enforcement say they have not verified alleged ties to a white supremacist group, but it seems Cruz displayed a white supremacist ideology: A classmate said he talked about how white people were better than black and Latino people.
Last year, he had been reported to the FBI for making violent threats online, and it happened again this year. Someone warned the FBI about Cruz on January 5, 2018, according to the bureau, but the feds never investigated it. Local police reportedly came to his house 39 times over a period of seven years, although it’s not yet clear if the incidents all involved Cruz.
Yet none of this prevented Cruz from building what he openly admitted was an “arsenal” of weapons that he repeatedly said online that he hoped to use – even at a school.
Imagine if Nikolas Cruz was a young Muslim. Imagine he had, however fleetingly, been tied to a group of radical Muslims operating elsewhere in Florida — whether it was true or not, that just the suggestion had been made.
I can tell you this much: If Cruz was a young Muslim, this would’ve never been allowed to go this far. Do you really think the FBI would have failed to investigate a young Muslim with this history?
FOR SOME TIME, there has been a conflation of issues—the hacking and leaking of illegally obtained information versus propaganda and disinformation; cyber-security issues and the hacking of elections systems versus information operations and information warfare; paid advertising versus coercive messaging or psychological operations—when discussing “Russian meddling” in the 2016 US elections. The refrain has become: “There is no evidence that Russian efforts changed any votes.”
But the bombshell 37-page indictment issued Friday by Robert Mueller against Russia’s Internet Research Agency and its leadership and affiliates provides considerable detail on the Russian information warfare targeting the American public during the elections. And this information makes it increasingly difficult to say that the Kremlin's effort to impact the American mind did not succeed.
The indictment pulls the curtain back on four big questions that have swirled around the Russian influence operation, which, it turns out, began in 2014: What was the scope of the Russian effort? What kind of content did it rely on? Who or what was it targeting, and what did it aim to achieve? And finally, what impact did it have?
Most of the discussion of this to date has focused on ideas of political advertising and the reach of a handful of ads—and this discussion has been completely missed the point.
So let’s take these questions one at a time.
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4. What impact did it have?
We’re only at the beginning of having an answer to this question because we’ve only just begun to ask some of the right questions. But Mueller’s indictment shows that Russian accounts and agents accomplished more than just stoking divisions and tensions with sloppy propaganda memes. The messaging was more sophisticated, and some Americans took action. For example, the indictment recounts a number of instances where events and demonstrations were organized by Russians posing as Americans on social media. These accounts aimed to get people to do specific things. And it turns out—some people did.
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In the indictment, Trump campaign officials are referred to as “unwitting” participants in Russian information warfare. This gives the White House an out—and a chance to finally act against what the Kremlin did. But the evidence presented in the indictment makes it increasingly hard to say Russian efforts to influence the American mind were a failure.
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