Something about this story seems suspicious. You know that feeling you get when a news story hits all the right notes and confirms everything you thought to be true about the evil of the other side?
It is also surprisingly light on key details in a few areas:
> Treviño-Wright said since the lawsuit she has faced personal threats and on one occasion, assault, by the extremist Virginia Republican congressional candidate Kimberly Lowe who visited the butterfly center last month and demanded to see “‘illegals crossing on rafts”.
What was "the assault"? It doesn't give details.
>In an audio recording of the visit, Lowe is heard claiming baselessly that Treviño-Wright was “OK with children being sex-trafficked, raped and murdered”.
This is a rhetorical trick being misinterpreted as some baseless claim. The implication is that if you oppose The Wall, you are enabling all these things and are therfore complicit. Have you ever encountered hyperbole and pearl clutching before?
In any event, I don't want to go down the road of delving into this old news story. I guess my point is that there is probably much more to this than it seems, and, isn't a good justification for policing misinformation as strongly as some people want.
> This is a rhetorical trick being misinterpreted as some baseless claim.
That part of the story is comparatively easy to check - the audio is available if you follow the link in the article. The relevant section is at about 1:10 minutes. The quote is “I’m sorry you’re ok with children being raped.”
That’s not a rhetorical trick.
It’s an attempt to smear a person or organization by slinging dirt that has no grounding in reality. Dealing with this kinds of baseless lines of reasoning is part of the problem.
I maintain that it is still a rhetorical trick. "If you oppose X, you must be okay with Y" is very common. Underhanded and unfair, but it happens all the time.
>You know that feeling you get when a news story hits all the right notes and confirms everything you thought to be true about the evil of the other side?
Honestly your first line kinda describes your theory here...
I don't have much reason to think that story is fake, but if a few sentences are enough for you to just write it off I'm not sure it matters what I say. There are other stories on that issue.
I'm not claiming the story is fake, or that none of what was reported actually transpired. But rather, I sense that the reporters are ideologically motivated and what they have presented here is not "the whole truth", to haphazardly borrow a term.
One of the reasons why I say this is because there absolutely was a coordinated effort to stymie the construction of the border wall and one of the proposed tactics was to use the EPA and threatened species as a foil to prevent it's construction. Cards Against Humanity employed a similar strategy: "It was revealed that the creators had purchased vacant land along the wall and "retained a law firm specializing in eminent domain to make it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for the wall to get built." So in that sense, this isn't some unique stochastic attack on the noble butterfly center. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cards_Against_Humanity)
But going back to my sense that something isn't quite right, the laundry list of associations is what stood out: Bringing up QAnon, bringing up Pizzagate, bringing up Steve Bannon, and bringing up anti-maskers. If I was a propagandist, I would end up writing a story just like this. Especially because you can report that wonderful institutions like National Butterfly Center and The Children’s Museum of Denver are victims of all of the above groups. Again, not to dismiss the story entirely, but it seems to hit all the right notes.
>"I think then it fulfills the role I intended, as actual consequences of misinformation."
How so? I am skeptical, but what actual negative consequences have resulted from this?
>"That seems like dangerous amounts of cover for any topic where bringing them up is automatically discounted."
Do you likewise feel the urge discount any story that brings up Antifa? I do. It is because in the minds of most partisans they loom larger than their real life impact. While QAnons and Antifa are completely different, they are utilized as boogeymen by ideologically motivated reporters. Still, the mention of these two groups only serve to raise my skepticism level rather than make me outright deny everything around their mention.
> You know that feeling you get when a news story hits all the right notes and confirms everything you thought to be true about the evil of the other side?
Funny how that keeps happening! I keep getting news stories that confirm my per-existing biases that the world is mean and we need internet moderators to make it all better again.
It is also surprisingly light on key details in a few areas:
> Treviño-Wright said since the lawsuit she has faced personal threats and on one occasion, assault, by the extremist Virginia Republican congressional candidate Kimberly Lowe who visited the butterfly center last month and demanded to see “‘illegals crossing on rafts”.
What was "the assault"? It doesn't give details.
>In an audio recording of the visit, Lowe is heard claiming baselessly that Treviño-Wright was “OK with children being sex-trafficked, raped and murdered”.
This is a rhetorical trick being misinterpreted as some baseless claim. The implication is that if you oppose The Wall, you are enabling all these things and are therfore complicit. Have you ever encountered hyperbole and pearl clutching before?
In any event, I don't want to go down the road of delving into this old news story. I guess my point is that there is probably much more to this than it seems, and, isn't a good justification for policing misinformation as strongly as some people want.