-By Warner Todd Huston
The media spent all day Thursday knocking itself out to “report” that Parkland school shooter Nicholas Cruz was part of a “white supremacist” group. But it turns out that the media was punk’d and the whole claim was a hoax.
We all know that the left-wing, old media establishment is the first sector of Americam society to warn us all not to “jump to conclusions” over religion when a killer who is suspected of being a Muslim gets in the news. The media gravely warns us not to call him a Muslim terrorist until “all the facts are in.” But in the case of this Parkland, Florida, school killer the media took the word of one un-vetted “white supremacist” who made the unsubstantiated claim that teenaged killer Nicholas Cruz was part of a white separatist group without doing one bit of checking on the claim.
On Thursday morning, February 15, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) hastily published a story claiming that the leader of a Tallahassee-based group calling itself the Republic of Florida (ROF) had “admitted” that Parkland killer Nicholas Cruz was a member of his group.
This person, one Jordan Jereb, insisted that Cruz had been “training” with them and that an ROF member even bought Cruz a WWII-era bolt action rifle.
The ROF is a white supremacist/white separatist group that claims it is fighting for “white Identitarian politics.”
“Republic Of Florida is a white civil rights organization fighting for white Identitarian politics,” the group says on its website. “And the ultimate creation of a white ethnostate so we can be free from anti-white policies and have policies that reflect our values as white westerners. The ROF Militia is the armed forces of the Republic Of Florida.”
As soon as the ADL posted this tall tale, the media went wild to pick it up and proclaim it to be 100% fact.
Just to name a few, TIME magazine, the Associated Press, the Daily Beast, the Huffington Post, the Daily Telegraph, and the always unreliable Piers Morgan all jumped in with the claim that the killer was a “white supremacist” or was trained and belonged to a white supremacist group.
But as the day wore on, the whole “white supremacist” claim began to unravel on the left-wing media that so dearly wanted it to be true.
As the story circulated, police in Florida rushed to tamp down the claim saying that they have found no evidence at all that the killer had any ties whatever to any purported white supremacist groups.
According to the Tallahassee Democrat, police said there just aren’t any ties. “We are still doing some work but we have no known ties between the ROF, Jordan Jereb or the Broward shooter,” Leon County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Lt. Grady Jordan told the paper.
Even Huffington Post later came out with a piece contradicting its earlier claims that the killer was part of the ROF.
Then, the guy who claims to be the leader of the ROF himself, that Jordan Jereb fellow, began backtracking on his earlier claims. Jereb was soon saying he got “confused” and that the ROF has other members named Nicolas. Oh, and he was really tired when he talked to the ADL so he can’t be held responsible for what he said. Yeesh.
Even the ADL had to admit that this doofus is a “publicity seeker.”
Well, duh.
So, what happened here? Why did this story get all over the world before anyone bothered to check the facts? Well, because the media is fake news, granted. But more specifically, this story became Thursday afternoon’s top story because the liberal media wanted it to be true and because they wanted it to be true, no fact checking was necessary.
The liberal media’s preconceived notion was satisfied by just seeing the claim that Nicholas Cruz was a member of a white supremacist group. No due diligence was necessary because the media just wanted it to be true.
THIS is why you can’t trust the media even a tiny bit.
Finally, we must understand that not all the facts are known about this teenaged murderer. We may just find out that he has made comments that could be classified as racist or as supportive of white supremacy. We don’t yet have the first clue what his motives may have been to murder 17 people in cold blood. But we do know for a fact that he was never part of the ROF. It didn’t take much work to discover the truth about this. But the media didn’t spend even a second to do any real journalism.
Finally, the Associated Press waited a whole day to put out a retraction of its lie-filled story, and even then it hedged saying the guy who lied to them about the killer belonging to a white nationalist group “appears to have lied.” Uh, no, AP> HE LIED, he didn’t “appear to have lied.”
The retraction hardly matters, of course. The AP waited a full 24 hours when the truth was evident in mere hours after its original lie went live. But by waiting a whole day it allowed its readers to inculcate the lie while missing the quite correction.
That’s how the lying, left-wing media works.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, YoungConservatives.com, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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