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Does anyone actually\u00a0believe a 34-year-old northern California housewife was abducted for by two mysterious Hispanic women, held for 22 days with no ransom demand, then released by the side of a road 150 miles from where she was taken, bound, branded, and beaten?<\/p>\n
This Sacramento Bee article<\/a>\u00a0drips with skepticism, citing disbelieving cops and even a racist blog post\u00a0written by the abducted woman nine years ago. And I love the headline: “Sherri Papini\u2019s husband says she went through \u2018true hell\u2019 and calls online gossip \u2018sub human behavior.\u2019”<\/p>\n If you Google “Sherri Papini” you’ll find dozens of news stories about her abduction and return, nearly every headline\u00a0featuring a variation of “according to her husband.” Why am I thinking of Balloon Boy<\/a>? Perhaps because I think it’s possible\u00a0both husband and wife are working together to perpetrate\u00a0a hoax, just as Balloon Boy’s father and other family members worked together on an earlier, even more sensational hoax. Why? To get on TV and be briefly famous? Hey, that’s what motivated Balloon Boy’s family, but at least\u00a0they\u00a0didn’t try to stir up ethnic hatred by blaming it on anonymous Hispanics.<\/p>\n You don’t even have to read between the lines to know the police are furious with the husband for going public with stories about his wife’s post-abduction injuries. Clearly, they were patiently waiting for her to break and tell them what really happened, and now the couple will dig in to defend their story. How long will they stick with it? Long enough to get on TV, I bet. Nancy Grace must be salivating in anticipation.<\/p>\n I can’t resist quoting from Sherri Papini’s blog post, “Being aware and having pride<\/a>,” written in 2007 under her maiden name, Sherri Graeff:<\/p>\n I got excellent grades, 3.9 – 4.2, but grew more and more resentful of school and conditions around me. I used to come home in tears, because I was getting suspended from school all the time for defending myself against the Latinos. The chief problem was that I was drug-free, white and proud of my blood and heritage. This really irked a group of Latino girls, which would constantly rag and attack me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Another thing I’m skeptical about is the ongoing Dakota Access Pipeline protest outside the Standing Rock Native American Reservation in North Dakota. My instinct is to believe protesters\u2014who almost always have a legitimate beef with authority\u2014but I’ve noticed that most of what I read is one-sided in the protesters’ favor, and one-sided coverage is rarely\u00a0accurate.<\/p>\n The Daily Caller is a libertarian\/conservative site, but this article on the pipeline protests<\/a> is worth a read. I\u00a0don’t doubt it’s slanted, but parts of it ring true. Between 1995 and 1997, during my last USAF tour of duty, I was involved in military training range and land use planning in Nevada and Utah. A big part of the job was working with the public. That experience tells me the Army Corps of Engineers, as the article states, did in fact make good faith attempts to meet with tribal leaders and accommodate tribal concerns.<\/p>\n Also, too, this:<\/p>\n The #NoDAPL (the Twitter hashtag for the pipeline protests) stuff I see on social media\u00a0has become creepily doctrinaire, as you’ll see in the screenshot above, where protesters\u2014virtually marching in lockstep\u2014now call themselves “water protectors.” This sort of glassy-eyed conformity always sets off the old\u00a0master caution light.* It\u00a0reminds me of when Marxists moved\u00a0in on our student protest movements in\u00a0the 1960s and 70s, trying to impose discipline and the party line.<\/p>\n All of which is to say if you’ve wondered why I haven’t taken sides on the Dakota Access Pipeline, this is why. Healthy skepticism for now, even though my heart goes out to the protesters.<\/p>\n Fake news, another topic du jour<\/em>, is nothing new. I sincerely doubt it’s any worse now than it was twelve years ago, when New York Times reporter Ron Suskind repeated a conversation<\/a>\u00a0with an unnamed George W. Bush aide (now said to have been Karl Rove):<\/p>\n The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality\u2014judiciously, as you will\u2014we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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