Statesman Serves, Preposterous Podcast | Winners & Losers in Today’s Green Room

Many Texans were outraged when an interim report on the mass shooting in Uvalde was released only in English, despite the local population being majority Hispanic, and all the more so when government officials said it could take up to two weeks to provide a translation into Spanish. The Austin American-Statesman has now published a complete translation of the report.

A Texas House investigative committee released a 77-page interim report on their findings on the mass shooting, showing there’d been “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making,” in the massive yet profoundly inadequate law enforcement response on that tragic day. The importance to the families of understanding what transpired cannot be overstated.

The community of Uvalde has been more than 80% Hispanic for decades, and Spanish is the primary language for many of the families whose loved ones were killed or injured in the shooting. The lack of a Spanish version of the report — coupled with the apparent two weeks it would take to create one — has been loudly condemned, especially considering the wide availability of Spanish-English translators in Texas.

So a group of bilingual reporters and editors at the Statesman collaborated on the translation, the paper’s Ethics and Standards Executive Editor, Manny Garcia explained on Wednesday (in an article that was, of course, also published in Spanish).

“We view this as a public service for the Uvalde families and the greater community, where most residents are Latino and many are more comfortable reading in Spanish,” wrote Garcia. The editor noted the translation team had taken “special care to ensure the translation was culturally competent and sensitive to word usage by Mexican and Central American communities.”

There is no question this was a great service, and it was journalism at its core. They got the vital news to the people who needed it most in a timely and accessible manner.

Podcaster Lance Wallnau shared some, uh, interesting thoughts on the Proud Boys and January 6 during a recent livestream, when he said they were at the Capitol essentially to provide community services.

Wallnau, an author and host of The Lance Wallnau Show, posted an update to his podcast’s Facebook page that got picked up on Twitter and took off.

“The Proud Boys. I don’t know — I’ll have to check this group out, cause I’m assuming they’re a bad group, but how do you? They never talk about Antifa. They talk about — any time, they’re always attacking somebody, I think we ought to take a second or third look at who they are cause they might not be bad,” he said.

“They had an FBI agent embedded in the Proud Boys who delivered a 60-page report that is available to the January 6th committee, exonerating the Proud Boys from any involvement with January 6th,” Wallnau claimed. “In fact, they actually deescalated part of the conflict with police and their orders were to clean up the garbage and get out of the Capitol.”

“In other words, clean up the mess, any debris that’s there, glass, paper, you know, garbage cans turned over,” he continued. “They had a meeting ahead of time, they said we won’t under no circumstances, have any weapons nor violence in the protest. They were there to protect Trump supporters from Antifa.”

“That’s why I’m giving them a thumbs up and a cautious survey right now because the FBI has the record, but the FBI has not submitted this record,” he concluded, “This is the kind of crap that is going on in American government.”

A thumbs up to the instigators and a thumbs down to the investigators. That’s a take alright.

There’s a notion online that if you can’t find fame seek infamy. But in this case, the podcaster going viral seems more aptly described by the axiom, “there’s a fool born every minute.”

… And a coup to take him.