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On 18 December 2017, an Amtrak passenger train derailed south of Seattle, Washington, killing several people. Shortly afterwards, conspiratorial web sites and Internet personalities began pointing to a now-deleted April 2017 post on the anarchist web site ItsGoingDown.org in which an anarchist group claimed to have poured concrete on train tracks 15 miles away from the accident scene to prevent the shipment of fracking materials. Sites such as the Gateway Pundit, InfoWars and Internet personality Mike Cernovich dug up the eight-month-old post, suggesting a link to the Amtrak derailment with statements like the following: Anti-fascists or antifa are a loose collective of leaderless groups mostly made up of anarchists or people with far-left political views. There's no credible information to support the claim that any of these groups were involved in the train derailment. Hours after the incident, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reported that when Train 501 left the tracks, it was going 80 miles per hour in a 30-mile-per-hour zone during its inaugural run on the new route between Seattle and Portland, Oregon. Investigators have found no evidence that vandalized tracks were the cause of the accident. In a phone interview, Cernovich pushed back against the criticism that he had spread unverified information to his hundreds of thousands of followers, telling us that he had made it clear that the theory was mere speculation: Cernovich acknowledged his large following gives his words a long reach: A source from It's Going Down who provided only the name James A. told us that Puget Sound Anarchists had sent in the April post after receiving it from another group. The group claimed to have poured cement on BNSF-owned tracks that lead out of the Port of Olympia, which is actually about 15 miles from the site of the Amtrak train derailment: None of It's Going Down, BNSF, or the Olympia Police Department would confirm or deny whether the sabotaging incident boasted of in April 2017 actually occurred. In an email, James A. told us that: A spokeswoman for BNSF referred us to Olympia police. Lt. Sam Costello wouldn't confirm whether police had any reports of such vandalism, saying: Port of Olympia spokeswoman Jennie Foglia-Jones said port workers were aware of the blog post when it was published but couldn't confirm whether any concrete was actually poured at that time. If it was, it wouldn't have been the first vandalism of its type. In August 2014, a Tacoma Rail train crashed into a concrete block that was placed on the track, resulting in a punctured fuel tank and massive spill. The collision financially crippled publicly-owned Tacoma Rail. No suspect was ever identified. It's true the port has been the target of anti-fracking activists angry that materials shipped from there on freight trains are used in natural gas exploration. But the train involved in the Monday morning derailment was a passenger train that doesn't appear to have anything to do with the port, which is miles away from the site of the accident. The amorphous antifa have gained notoriety in 2017 by physically fighting white supremacists at rallies in places like Berkeley and Charlottesville. Increasingly, the group has become the subject of rumors and false claims — it was falsely blamed for the 1 October 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas and falsely accused of plotting a violent uprising on 4 November 2017. No such uprising ever took place.
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