According to a recent article in the Washington Post, if you don’t believe Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the very picture of physical health, you’re a nutjob, a wingnut, and an internet conspiracy theorist.
The piece by Eli Rosenberg and Abby Ohlheiser cites WaPo veteran Robert Barnes as being amazed that anyone, ANYONE!, would doubt that RBG is anything other than hale and hearty.
“A falsehood has been spreading in dark corners of the Internet that Ginsburg is dead,” write Rosenberg and Ohlheiser. The article then goes on to take shots are fringe “right wing Internet culture,” the sort of fringe culture that dares to raises doubts about official narratives put forth in the MSM.
The article even attempts to pin on the egregious fake news reports from a few weeks back – fake news reported on CNN and in WaPo itself about how MAGA hat wearing students from Covington Catholic High School were supposedly responsible for harassing a Native American Vietnam Veteran at the Indigenous People’s March in Washington D.C. – on independent journalists on Twitter.
Yes, we’re to believe that the mighty WaPo was taken in by “Two anonymous Twitter accounts,” that it was just following these anonymous accounts’ lead when it wrote about the “racist” actions of the high school students, and that it is in no way responsible for pushing a false narrative by publishing stories with headlines such as this: ” ‘Opposed to the dignity of the human person’: Kentucky Catholic dioceses condemns teens who taunted vet at March for Life.” If that’s true, then WaPo’s an even more pathetic joke of a newspaper than I thought.
But perhaps there’s a method to WaPo’s lame attempt to lay the blame on Twitter for their editorial mistake, they, along with a number of other news organizations and individuals, have been served a legal hold notice by the lawyer representing the students in anticipation of a possible lawsuit.
But what’s really odd about this piece from WaPo is its complete lack of evidence that RBG is, in fact, alive. There are no recent photos of her out in public. There are no videos. There are no quotes of any recent public statement from the judge.
The only “proof” offered to readers is Robert Barnes’ report that he saw RBG at a public performance, where, conveniently, we are told that “Photos were not allowed.”
Once you strip out the article’s rant on independent internet journalists, what you have is a very obvious appeal to authority. The fallacious argument runs thus, You have to believe that RBG is alive and well, because veteran WaPo reporter and editor Robert Barnes said so.
For my part, I don’t pretend to know the status of RBG’s physical health. It may be that she’s hale and hearty. Perhaps she’s alive but is seriously impaired, physically, mentally or both. It may be that she’s shuffled off this mortal coil.
The disappearance of Ruth Bader Ginsburg from the public eye is no small matter. Americans have a right to know whether government officials, elected or appointed, are capable of carrying out the duties of their office. Raising questions about Ginsburg’s physical fitness for office is not conspiracy theory, it’s a matter of national security.
If she’s healthy enough to serve as a judge, this is easy enough to prove. Let her make a public appearance and remove all doubt. If her health prevents her from sitting on the bench to hear arguments, the American people need to know this. Further, if this is the case, judge Ginsburg has an obligation to resign her post and allow the Senate to confirm a new judge in her place.
If judge Ginsburg is dead, then those who are hiding this fact are committing one of the greatest frauds in American political history and need themselves to be held accountable.
But whatever the case may be, WaPo’s readers, and Americans generally, deserve better than condescending reports about the health of a Supreme Court justice that tell them in so many words, just shut up and believe us already.
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