Mall Fights

[Phoebe]

So when we went to a movie the other night at the mall there were several police cars parked outside in a row when we went in. I asked Ron if he thought that was strange and of course since he does not experience things like fear he was like, everything's fine, let's just go in! There were police walking around, apparently looking for something, and lots of teenagers milling around, and families with kids sitting at tables. It was the most bizarre thing, like a bunch of people were standing there looking around at each other as if waiting for something to happen that never happened. It's really impossible to sit and enjoy your meal with your kids while police officers are roaming around clearly looking for someone or something and you have no idea why. They're looking at all the groups of teenagers, who are sitting there looking back like, what is going on here? Eventually all the police leave.

I had no concept what to make of this until after the fact I realized that at the same time, at different places across the nation, there were supposedly disturbances in malls. Since none of these amounted to anything much, they got only a smattering of coverage in the mainstream media. I thought it was quite strange that all across the nation, at the same time on the same day, there would be some sort of incident of fighting in a mall, supposedly inspired by comments made on social media. So... many different groups of local kids who knew each other were having some kind of personal conflict, played out in a public mall, in several different places around the country at one time? Weird, huh? But what do you know... it turns out that the right-wing media is all over this story! They are very eager to let us know about all these terrible problems that the black teenagers of America were supposedly having in the malls! Apparently the fix is in, you see, and the mainstream media just isn't reporting on the threat of black teenagers because it's politically incorrect to do so.

Except I'm like, uh, what just happened at my local mall, then? There was no disturbance, no assault, nothing but pretty typical looking groups of teens and families having a bite to eat. And lots of police to check it out. Weird, huh?

[Ronster]

synopsis: Ron was right!

[Phoebe]

Truth.

Is any police officer or journalist going to investigate, I wonder, why all these "social media" conflicts happened at the same moment in multiple places, immediately picked up as a story by far-right media even though little actually happened irl to cause the stories? Where did the tweets insulting people and instigating the real life meetings go? Shouldn't they still be there or on other sites? Why would burner accounts, deleted accounts be involved, as if most teenagers are careful, self-censoring pre-planners when they mouth off to someone? I mean, what are the possible explanations? Infowars thinks the junior high girls were fighting about men's shoes. Young girls on Instagram known for trying to incite coordinated public violence across nation, due to shoes, I guess. But hey, if the neo-nazis think they memed Trump into office - and btw, they do think this - why wouldn't the junior high girls of America rise up together on social media one afternoon, for shoes?