Politico is owned by right-wing billionaire Axel Springer, who enforces various conservative ideological stances at his publications and who in 2020 asked his staff (slightly tongue in cheek) to pray for a Trump reelection.
It was clearly a miscalculation, but it's important to note that public opinion was in favor of the original, steeper head tax only a couple months ago [1]. I think proponents were all caught off guard by how quickly public opinion turned and by how much money businesses were willing to spend to fight what amounted to a pretty minor tax.
I've heard from a number of people who were there that the shooter was a Milo fan who was visibly intoxicated and picking fights all night. The man he shot was trying to break up a fight he started. Notice the victim wasn't wearing a mask, like the more aggressive antifa guys.
Police have not called it self defense, it's still under investigation. It's really astonishing the amount of misinformation going around about this. It always has to be a false-flag, I guess.
> Sounds like a good, fair point to me - if true (which I don't know).
"They love war when it's propagated by Assad or Putin," isn't a remotely fair or true assessment of those sites, which is why I called it sleazy. Criticism of a particular intervention (e.g. Vietnam, Iraq) doesn't make you loyal to the other side (e.g. communist, baathist). Implying such is a means of silencing dissent.
There is compelling evidence from serious sources that Russia spreads propaganda and misinformation, but that doesn't let PropOrNot off the hook, nor WaPo for giving them a platform.
It's a sleazy, amateurish operation. Look how they accuse sites critical of regime change in Syria as supporters of Assad (https://twitter.com/propornot/status/802095838965022720). "McCarthyite" may be hyperbolic, but smearing leftists or those critical of war and imperialism as loyal to our "enemies" is very much in the tradition of McCarthyism. It's ugly stuff, and it's depressing to see start to become mainstream again.