Let’s talk about how bullshit and lies get laundered in an environment where billionaires who are allied with fascism control all major media outlets. It’s a major concern to me that people have neither the ability nor inclination to look past even the most surface level of what they’re trying to comment on. In this case, Jonathan Ross, the guy who shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis.
I like to peek at conservative news outlets to see what kind of spin they’re putting on events, and to get an idea of what talking points they’re recycling. Today, I checked out the National Review because I was curious how they were gonna sanewash Trump’s statement that we’re gonna get Greenland whether they like it or not.
They have an article that’s just oh-so-smug about how the foolish progressives got it wrong about Ross being in no danger, and CBS is now reporting that he is recovering from internal bleeding due to injuries suffered when he killed Good. But I’ve seen the video and I smelled a rat. I mean, above and beyond the fact that CBS news is now an arm of the Trump regime under Bari Weiss, and has done nothing but fawn over Trump since the merger that installed her as editor in chief.
No way did Ross suffer those injuries, based on any of the videos I’ve seen. But yet in X/Twitter, on conservative blogospheres, all over, it’s The Unvarnished Truth: Jonathan Ross was severely injured by Renee Good’s attack on him with the car. CBS is reporting it!
So naturally, I went to the source: CBS.
Lo and behold, there was the article. Except, if you actually read the article, it doesn’t say this is the truth. It says this is what Department of Homeland Security officials have told CBS, which has in turn could not as yet be independently confirmed.
So in essence:
- ICE agent shoots and kills a woman.
- DHS says she was a domestic terrorist and wounded him.
- We see multiple videos of him being fine, not being struck by the car, and walking around just dandy.
- CBS is told by DHS that ICE agent is actually definitely recovering from wounds.
- The fascism adjacent social media sphere takes CBS’s report as third party confirmation and uses it to manufacture an alternative reality where he was wounded, when we cannot confirm that independently.
Consent is very easy to manufacture when no one is willing to do even a bare minimum of research and verification. It is important that we do not allow bullshit to pass on our watch without checking for it.