Trump Chicago Rally - Editing Shenanigans in YouTube Videos

I noticed some interesting things while reviewing raw footage of the Chicago Trump rally this weekend. To preemptively answer predictable accusations, I will preface this post with the following caveat: I am admittedly anti-Trump, I was specifically looking at this Trump rally and I cannot say that anything I'll be pointing out is unique to coverage of Trump.

What spurred me to take a closer look at the rally was a post I read in which it was alleged that "Sanders's brown shirts" were the only supporters of any candidate physically attacking anyone. Setting aside the fact that I knew this wasn't true from watching more than one protester being sucker punched while being escorted from a rally, I was curious about just how poorly behaved the anti-Trump protesters were being inside the venue of the cancelled Chicago rally.

I went looking for raw live feed footage of a reasonable long duration and immediately hit on this video uploaded by Fox affiliate, KTVU:



I watched the video, making note of a number of incidents of aggression beyond the ubiquitous close quarters shouting. As you might expect with a cameraman slowly panning back and forth across a crowd, looking for interesting interactions, more than half the time the video captured incidents that were already in progress. There were three incidents where enough of the interactions were captured that I felt that it was reasonable to have an opinion and one of those was comparatively minor (a half-assed tug of war over a cloth banner). Of the two remaining, the second occurred at about 12 minutes into the video. Quick aside here: At 11:58 you can see a man on the far left of the frame in a black leather (blazer-ish) jacket, gray shirt and black tie. Is that in fact a neo-Nazi? As for the actual incident here: Move ahead slightly and you'll see that a younger male who appears to be part of a group including this man is exchanging shouts with another man in a tan hat. From observing tan hat man at other points in the video, it's apparent that he's a protester. They move in and are screaming in one another's faces when the tan hat man takes a swing and appears to miss. This is obviously a protester "throwing the first punch" (even if it didn't land).

Now for the interesting part (my apologies for the wait, I'm slightly sleep deprived and rambling I'm sure). Go to 1:50 and take note of two young women in the bottom right corner of the frame. One is in jeans and a light top and the other is in black pants and a dark top. Both are waiving signs over their heads, the backs of which have been written on. They're enthusiastically jumping around with their signs but don't appear to be particularly to be looking for a fight. At 1:55 you can see another young woman with black hair in a blue Trump shirt take notice of the protesters. At 1:58 you can see her make her move as she moves in to grab the sign from the shorter of the two protesters. The protester turns immediately to confront her as the obvious aggressor retreats to her friends . Her cohort in a white Trump shirt kicks at the protester then the girl in the blue grabs the sign and rips it up. The second protester has by this time turned as well and attempts to swat the girl in blue with her sign. Fortunately after some postulating and back and forth, the protesters walk back. If you skip ahead to 2:54, you can see the triumphant girl in blue hanging on male's friends arm delighted as he screams *whatever* at the two protesters.

Again I apologize for all this build up (and my subpar writing) and thanks for bearing with me. While I was looking for other angles for an actual brawl that was taking place at about 11:10 in this video, I made a serendipitous discovery.

Here is a video posted by the YouTube user Populist Patriot:



The video is from the same camera. It's cropped a bit and encoded at much lower resolution but that's not what's most striking. It's about 1m 50s shorter. At 56s, this video jumps to what is 02:36 in the original video — completely removing all traces of the Trump supporter's unprovoked aggression.

YouTube channel Right Side Broadcasting use the same edited video with the missing time here and in another video, the same source video but in this case, they didn't bother removing a piece from the middle but instead chopped off the beginning so that it starts at what would have been about 3:04 in the original video — again simply excluding the inexpedient footage:



Similarly, Live Satellite News (whose video even has "raw" in the title) starts the video at the point where the taller protester is swatting with her sign. In this case (deliberately?) giving an impression that the two protesters were the instigators:



Same story with another video from Live Satellite News under a different title.

User Chippy Vidz has a slightly different edit in this video with the jump happening a couple seconds earlier but with the same result.

It's also conveniently left out of the Donald Trump Speeches & Events channel's (I don't believe the campaign runs this channel) video montage which does include some footage of these folks but as with others, only from the point after the incident is essentially over and the young man in the white shirt is shouting (look at about 3:58 in this video).

In just the sample above, there are over 600k views. I'm sure none of this comes as a huge surprise to many but it was something I noticed last night and I thought it was worth posting.

off to finish watching TWD

Cool

Theoretically there's no law against selectively editing video right? They're just trying to make america (look) great again

The divided state of America. oh well, at least one guy turned up dressed for the occasion with a bit of Head protection. One forward thinking mofo.

a reply to: theantediluvian

So you make a thread showing how we had paid protesters but just had to make one where you attack Trump and make convoluted arguments with no facts besides a single youtube video?

WOW such research. Such sleuth.

What a lazy mouth piece.

You made a wall of text that is trying to use yourself as a source for a convoluted argument you cant make heads or tales of.

What a lazy crap thread-