Trump Boosts Video of Dallas Clash Edited to Cast Machete-Wielding Vigilante as Victim

The danger of relying on fragmentary video clips posted on social media by politically motivated witnesses to news events was on full display in Dallas on Saturday night. Two witnesses, a Black Lives Matter protester and a right-wing video blogger, both captured a shocking act of violence on camera. But while the protester’s raw footage, which gave a more complete picture of the incident, was not widely seen, the video blogger’s edited version, posted on Twitter with a misleading caption, was viewed more than 30 million times in 24 hours.

Among the Twitter users who unthinkingly swallowed the blogger’s misleading video — which was edited to remove footage of a white man who was beaten charging at black and white protesters with a machete before they pummeled him — was the president of the United States, who tweeted about the clip with an outraged call for “LONG TERM jail sentences” for the protesters.

The edited clip was the work of Elijah Schaffer, a freelance producer for Glenn Beck’s Blaze TV and a pro-Trump political activist who hosts a YouTube talk show dedicated to mocking left-wing protesters.

Just before 10 p.m. local time in Dallas on Saturday, Schaffer uploaded 24 seconds of video that showed a white man, face down on the street, being kicked, stomped on and beaten with rocks and a skateboard by a group of mainly black protesters. Before posting his video on Twitter, Schaffer edited out the first 18 seconds he had recorded, which showed what happened immediately before the beating began, and wrote a caption that gave the false impression that the man was a store owner who had been attacked by looters.

https://twitter.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/1266925493384736769

On his Instagram account, where the same edit has been viewed over 500,000 times, with a close-up of the man’s bloody head on the pavement as a thumbnail, Schaffer explicitly cast the protesters as the aggressors, writing: “It appears he attempted to defend a shop with a large sword. Looters ran at him, then he charged rioters.”

In a subsequent appearance on Blaze TV, Schaffer told the conservative commentator Steven Crowder that the victim of the attack was “a man who was defending his store,” and passed on a false rumor that he had died.

The tweet linking to Schaffer’s video that Donald Trump commented on echoed the false claim that the man who was beaten “was protecting his business,” and added a new one: that he had been “stomped and stoned by Antifa,” using the shorthand for anti-fascist activists who, in fact, played no role in the incident.

On Monday, Trump referred to the edited clip as evidence that “innocent people have been savagely beaten — like the young man in Dallas, Texas, who was left dying on the street.”

Trump tells the nation that "innocent people have been savagely beaten, like the young man in Dallas, Texas, who was left dying on the street." There's quite a bit missing from that version of the story. https://t.co/QMJ9RgMUZY pic.twitter.com/xHjORjL4XT

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) June 1, 2020

But Schaffer’s account of what prompted the fight and the man’s condition were both false, according to statements from the Dallas Police Department and a protester who also witnessed the incident and posted his own more complete but less viral video on Instagram.

Tamika Dameron, a Dallas police spokesperson, told The Intercept that the man who was beaten took to the streets of the Victory Park neighborhood on Saturday, “carrying a machete to allegedly protect his neighborhood from protesters. The victim confronted protesters while holding the machete and was subsequently assaulted by the protesters.”

Witnesses told police investigators that the attack began when the man “came to the protest wielding a large knife/machete at several protesters,”

The man, who has not been identified by the police, was treated at the scene by volunteer medics and brought to a hospital nearby where, Dameron said, “he remains in stable condition.”

In remarks on Monday, Trump echoed Schaffer’s misleading account of what happened, including the false claim that the man “was left dying on the street.”

The confrontation took place outside Hatchways, a co-working space and cafe at the intersection of High Market Street and Victory Park Lane, about about half a mile away from another street corner where officers were firing tear gas at kneeling protesters chanting “No Justice, No Peace.”

Large group of protesters chanting “No justice no peace” as they kneel in front of a line of Dallas police #DallasProtest pic.twitter.com/SIBUPUrtfA

— Dom DiFurio (@DomDiFurio) May 31, 2020

According to Yoel Measho, a college student and videographer who took part in the protest, after it splintered he was marching with a group that included a young skateboarder when they came upon the man with the machete. In a phone interview, Measho said that he started recording just after the man with the machete pulled it out and threatened the skateboarder, who was slightly ahead of the rest of the group.

Measho insisted that, although glass was broken at Hatchways at some point on Saturday night, there was “no violence or looting of any kind” when the man confronted the skateboarder.

The video Measho initially posted on Snapchat and Instagram — and later provided to The Intercept — showed what he described as the defensive action taken by the protesters after the man with the machete threatened the skateboarder. The images show protesters hurling rocks at the man, who started to retreat, but elected not to run away, and instead turned and ran back at the skateboarder, shrieking and raising the machete over his head as if about to swing or throw it.

Video posted on Twitter by another protester also showed the man screaming as he ran at the demonstrators with the machete held up.

Like Schaffer’s video, Measho’s recording then shows a group of nearly a dozen protesters, most of whom were black, brutally beating and kicking the man until he lay face down on the ground, bleeding from his head and unresponsive.

Measho said that what he hadn’t captured on camera was the man slashing the skateboarder’s hand with the machete before the group pounced on him. “The kid had a huge slash in his hand,” Measho wrote on Instagram, “under no circumstances does anyone deserve to get beat like this but this is his fault.”

“Do not believe the story of ‘looters attacked innocent white man,'” he added in the Instagram post he later removed after getting death threats, “the Twitter video was cropped to make protestors look bad.”

Breaking in Dallas: this man just tried to attack a crowd with a machete. Only one person was slightly cut on the hand. pic.twitter.com/ey6BVU4ZA9

— Austen Holland (@ecom_austen) May 31, 2020

The only sign of Antifa on the scene was an ironic one. As volunteer medics treated the man for his wounds in the aftermath of the incident, a white protester who held up the machete for the cameras was wearing a red t-shirt with the word “Catifa” on it, above a cartoon of a radical cat in a bandana. That scene was also captured on video by Measho, who shared it first in a Snapchat story, and later made a copy available to The Intercept.

Measho’s video, and a second clip recorded by another witness, shows the blade clearly, which appears to be a Cold Steel Gladius Machete, which comes with a sheath identical to the one the man who charged the protesters was wearing.

A screenshot of a Cold Steel machete that matches the one used in Dallas.

A spokeswoman for the company that owns Hatchways, and a neighboring saloon, Billy Can Can, said in a phone interview that the businesses were not looted, although windows and glass doors were smashed at both places, and elsewhere on the block, and “BLM” and “Fuck Trump” graffiti was sprayed on the exterior of the building.

https://twitter.com/JasonOHC_Dallas/status/1267107371626700801

Since video shot during the confrontation between the man with the machete and the protesters showed no damage to Hatchways at that time, it appears to have been inflicted later.

Schaffer, the Blaze TV producer and host, also had video of the man running at the protesters and shrieking while holding up the machete, which he made a conscious decision to not show in the tweet that went viral. We know that because he posted his raw footage, which suggests a more complex story than an innocent white man being attacked by black “rioters,” in another tweet later on Saturday night, directed at news producers.

This video, recorded by @ElijahSchaffer of Blaze TV in Dallas on Saturday, shows what he edited out of the viral clip he posted 90 minutes earlier: proof that the man who was beaten was a machete-wielding vigilante who was chasing a protester when attacked pic.twitter.com/Es40kob1aP

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) June 1, 2020

There is also evidence, in the video Schaffer shot, that the young black men who beat the white man with the machete, were not simply “rioters” as he claimed, but had attended the earlier protest against police brutality prompted by the killing of the Minneapolis security guard George Floyd.

One of the Dallas Morning News journalists who covered that protest earlier on Saturday night, Kevin Krause, shared a photograph of one protester holding up a sign reading “The Revolution Has Begun!”

Crowds are splintering #DallasProtests pic.twitter.com/TI0FDcJbhY

— Kevin Krause (@KevinRKrause) May 31, 2020

That same protester, holding his sign under his arm, can be seen 10 seconds into Schaffer’s viral clip, stepping in to stop the beating and saying “Stop! Stop!”

Even though Trump tweeted his video because he mistakenly thought that it showed a business owner who was attacked by Antifa, Schaffer was elated. “My coverage of the Dallas riots was just shared by the President of the United States,” he tweeted. “I started this journey 2 years ago. So many people discouraged me at first. Said I should quit while there was still time. Now my work is changing the conversation in America.”

As Todd Gillman of The Dallas Morning News reported, Trump made it clear in a call with governors on Monday that he had no idea that the man with the machete had run at the protesters, wounding one of them, before he was beaten. “You don’t have to have a brick hit you in the face and you don’t do anything about it. You are allowed to fight back,” Trump said, apparently unaware of evidence suggesting that it might have been the protesters who were fighting back.

Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson said that he had seen some video of the incident, according to WFAA, the local ABC affiliate. “It’s unacceptable for a beating to happen like that in my city,” he said. “The police are looking into that situation and that’s going to be addressed in our criminal justice system.”

Another police spokesperson, Melinda Gutierrez, told The Intercept after this report was initially published that the preliminary police investigation suggested that the man who was beaten had initiated the conflict. “According to witnesses, the individual came to the protest wielding a large knife/machete at several protesters,” Gutierrez wrote in an email. “An unknown protester was attempting fight off the individual by using his skateboard and was subsequently cut in the hand, but not before disarming the individual. At this time, the crowd of protesters began assaulting the individual.”

The Dallas Morning News reported that the police had arrested about 90 people on Saturday night suspected of vandalizing buildings or inciting a riot. The city imposed a 7 p.m. curfew on Sunday.

Last Updated: Monday, June 1, 4:30 p.m. PDT
This article was updated with an edited headline and to report two new comments from President Donald Trump on Monday about the violence caught on camera in Dallas on Saturday.