Fake News Matters

So Colin Kaepernick is GK’s citizen of the year. That’s like naming Mrs. O’Leary’s cow citizen of the year – it makes sense only if you thought Chicago needed to be burned to the ground.

But there’s another connection as well. Kaepernick’s knee caper, explained here by the currently unemployed quarterback,

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color…there are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

is a protest against police brutality against black men. And it is based on widely circulated false news reports of incidents that occurred in Ferguson and Baltimore. So Colin Kaepernick became the darling of Black Lives Matter – itself the darling new civil rights movement of the left – based on fake news. The same way fake news  made Mrs. O’Leary and her cow the scapegoat in the Great Fire of Chicago.

Catherine O’Leary wasn’t found guilty of committing any crime, but the story spread by a dishonest journalist incriminated her for life. The next 24 years of her time on Earth were spent denying fault and dodging criticism. And while the reporter for The Chicago Republican admitted 2 years before her death that he’d made her and her milk cow the stuff of fiction for a buck, it was way too late. She died in 1895 of pneumonia, her spirit spent, her heart broken.  - Chicago Now

Fake News Matters.