A tale of two stories: Seattle's brushes with hate
By Danny Westneat
Seattle Times staff columnist
In a certain world, one populated by a surprisingly large subset of the nation, Seattle now is a city of intolerant and violent leftists hellbent on stomping Trump supporters. Oh and we have green hair.
This is the view you got if you went down the rabbit hole of the right-wing Wurlitzer media machine this past week.
If you missed it — and that depends almost entirely on your Facebook algorithm — a 17-year-old from Illinois made national and international news here this past week when he walked around Capitol Hill wearing a Make America Great Again hat.
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A few years ago, I would have chalked all this up to fringe silliness. But times have changed. The main conservative sites that featured the story — the Daily Mail, Breitbart, Western Journal, The Epoch Times, Daily Caller and Infowars — now have among them more than 35 million followers on Facebook alone (a hundredfold more than The Seattle Times).
The MAGA-hat-wearing teen then used the incident to indict entire belief systems: “I want to expose the left for what they do,” he said. By Monday he was on Fox News national radio, concluding: “If someone wears an Obama hat … I don’t think they have to be scared of people giving them bad looks or assaulting them.”
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