endwalker !

UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting (4 December 2024)

Hello, I’m Farah. Since the war started on October 7th, my family and I have faced severe hardships. We first sought safety in Gaza but had to move to Khan Yunis on October 13th, where we lived in a cramped UNRWA shelter for three months with inadequate food, water, and sanitation. Despite being in a UNRWA facility, we endured bombings and a siege, leading to our evacuation.

Now in Al-Zawaida, we continue to suffer from constant explosions, lack of medical care, and high transportation costs. We're also dealing with poor air quality due to makeshift fuel solutions and health problems from cooking with firewood.

Please support us survive

please keep sharing fundraisers. please. while we remain safe in our communities and homes and so many other places, constant fear and danger and genocide continues to strike in gaza.

donate to Siraj's campaign to rebuild his home, which he needs to reach 75k by tomorrow, MONDAY SEPTEMBER 9TH

donate to Amal and her family's campaign, in which she is caring for over 20 family members and her own baby, Maryam

(And yes, before someone says anything, people of color can be and often are agents of white supremacy too. I got cussed out by an antiblack Indian person (as in from India) on anon and on a whole post about that topic.)

Full text of her breakdown:

I've been reading various reporting on this Thomas Crooks of Bethel, PA, and I have to point out something that's not adding up.

Okay, so he's 20, and there are voter registration records showing him to have been a registered Republican. But wait -- news sources like the NY Times and Reuters are also reporting that he made a $15 donation to the Progressive Turnout Project via ActBlue in 2021. But did he really? Consider the following:

- He would have been just 17 at the time. How many 17-year-olds have credit cards? You can pay ActBlue by PayPal or Venmo, too, but you have to be 18 for the former, and a parent would have to have set up a Venmo teen account for the latter. It's certainly possible that his parents did set that up, and that's something that needs investigation.

- The FEC record of that donation says it was from a Thomas Crooks in Pittsburgh, PA. The shooter was from Bethel, PA. Is Bethel close to Pittsburgh? NOPE. It's east of Harrisburg. That's *237 miles away* via Route 76.

- Okay, but maybe he lived there at the time of the donation? Sure doesn't look that way to me. The articles also report that he was a graduate of Bethel High School. Not only that, a quick check online (I used Anywho dot com) shows that there is a 52-year-old Thomas Crooks living in Pittsburgh, as well as two other men with the same first/last names living in nearby suburbs. It seems way more likely that it was that guy who made the donation than some 17-year-old living over 200 miles away.

What's really shameful about this is that it's so easy to do a basic fact check to see whether the shooter and the ActBlue donor were one and the same. I was trivially able to look this up via a free directory website. If I were home, I could have used my laptop to verify this via my LexisNexis account that I use for work. In my job as a prospect researcher, I frequently have to disambiguate multiple people with the same names. With L-N, I could have seen not just their current addresses, but their previous addresses as well. I find it hard to believe that there's no one at NYT or Reuters with access to L-N or something like it. This is *basic level research*, folks. And it seems like these top-level news organizations didn't even do that.