The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘We May Never Learn the Full Story’

Posted on | February 4, 2023 | 1 Comment

The late ‘Tortuguita’ (left); Atlanta riot on Jan. 21 (right)

No sooner do I finish one long rant about media bias than another egregious example comes to my attention. The phrase in the headline comes from the last paragraph of an obtuse article in The Nation about the Jan. 18 death of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, a/k/a “Tortuguita.” In case you missed it, “Tortuguita” was part of the Antifa mob who were camping on the site of a planned police training center in Atlanta. When a law-enforcement task force went to clear out these self-described “forest defenders,” Teran shot a Georgia state trooper and was killed by return gunfire. This isn’t one of those “gray areas” in the law — you shoot a cop, you’re likely to die in a hail of gunfire. At least that’s how it is (and has always been) in Georgia, but Teran wasn’t from Georgia. He wasn’t even American, but had come all the way from Venezuela and somehow got himself mixed up with this crew of Antifa terrorists who have spent the past several months making a nuisance of themselves. I’ve written three times about this story:

It is not necessary for me to debunk The Nation article, because John Sexton at Hot Air has given it rather a thorough fisking. John’s pet peeve is that so many in the media are trying to cast doubt on how “Tortuguita” got shot, despite the available evidence. My pet peeve, on the other hand, is the way this “forest” is depicted as some sort of pristine environmental treasure when, in fact, it’s just a bunch of scrub trees that grew up on the site (formerly the Atlanta Prison Farm) after it was abandoned a few decades ago. And of course, The Nation plays into this narrative, referring to the site as “the Weelaunee forest,” a name invented by the Antifa crew, and unknown to locals. Go research it yourself and I guarantee you won’t find the phrase “Weelaunee forest” in anything written before 2021. What they did was to find some old article that said the South River had been called “Weelaunee” by the Creek Indians who once lived in that area of Georgia, and for all I know, that’s true. But (a) it’s been called the South River for more than a century, and (b) the river is two miles from the site of the planned police training facility. Referring to this property as “the South River forest” is misleading enough; there is a creek, half a mile east of the site, which is a tributary of the South River, but so what? I grew up in Douglas County, Georgia, near a small stream that, like every other stream in the area, fed into Sweetwater Creek which, in turn, fed into the Chattahoochee River. But nobody called the woods in my neighborhood “the Chattahoochee forest.” Creating the name “Weelaunee forest” to describe the planned police training site in southern DeKalb County is a deliberate trick by Antifa, intended to create the (false) impression that this is some kind of sacred indigenous site. The word for this is bullshit. The descendants of the Creek Indians who once lived in this area have been residents of Oklahoma for the past 150-plus years, and couldn’t even plausibly make claim to build a casino on the Atlanta site (although if they did, no Antifa would protest).

Anyway, I’ve ranted enough about this topic for one day, but if you want to hear me rant some more, you can tune into The Other Podcast tonight at 7 p.m. ET, when I’m sure I’ll have plenty to rant about.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)



 

 

Category: Georgia

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One Response to “‘We May Never Learn the Full Story’”

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