‘Fact checking’ journalists spread misinformation about Wi Spa

Disinformation “specialist” Brandy Zadrozny hosted an episode of On the Media in August the place she and her company mentioned the occasions that occurred at LA’s Wi Spa in June. She spoke to Lois Beckett, of The Guardian, and their reporting centered on the problem of what they known as “fake news.”

But the information wasn’t faux, it was actual, and the one who was on the core of this information story was not an harmless trans lady trying to take pleasure in spa actions, however a serial intercourse offender.

The occasions unfolded after a June incident the place a lady was within the girls’s space of the Wi Spa when she stated she encountered a organic male who had an uncovered penis. She reported this to spa employees, who advised her that the particular person had a proper to be within the girls’s space as a result of that particular person was a trans lady.

Outlets together with Slate stated the incident and accompanying video was a “transphobic hoax,” and a story emerged that those that had considerations about organic males accessing girls’s solely areas have been all perpetuating a hoax.

When the video was made public, through the lady’s instagram, involved mother and father and ladies’s rights activists took to the streets exterior the LA spa location to protest. This was counter-protested by Antifa, and it turned violent.

Beckett was at that protest, and stated it was “very chaotic and very intense.” In recounting the occasion, she stated “people [were] screaming at me like throwing water at me, throwing a water bottle at me, and eventually someone shoved me to the ground.”

“Real world violence that stems from, you know, so-called fake news isn’t that common,” Zadrozny stated. “Does it feel like this story is an exception, a precursor of what’s to come?” She requested Beckett.

In asking, Zadrozny assumed totally that it’s “fake” {that a} organic male uncovered himself deliberately within the girls’s space of the Wi Spa. But that is precisely what occurred, and the person is presently going through fees.

Darren Agee Merager was charged with indecent publicity. Merager is a trans lady who’s a tier-one registered intercourse offender in California with two prior convictions of indecent publicity stemming from incidents in 2002 and 2003. Merager additionally faces six felony counts of indecent publicity over a separate locker room incident in December 2018.

“I think the thing we’re all afraid of is it’s a precursor of things to come,” Beckett replied to Zadrozny’s query, earlier than equating the violence perpetrated on the Wi Spa in opposition to folks attempting to guard kids to those that attended the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.

After itemizing protests and violence in Kenosha, Wisc., and Portland, Ore., she stated “…it did culminate in the attack on the Capitol. Local fights are a training ground for what goes national. And I think I thought that the fear from the FBI’s investigation of the Capitol rioters and all of these arrests would have a longer effect at making people, specifically the Proud Boys, a little bit more nervous about coming out to fight and attack people in public.”

“They were supposed to go back into their holes, I was told,” Zadrozny quipped.

“Yeah, I mean, it’s July, it’s August,” Beckett stated. “Like here they are in the streets of Los Angeles being publicly violent again and without consequence. We know where that leads.”

For Zadrozny, the mother and father and ladies’s rights advocates who protested exterior the Wi Spa in LA to guard girls and ladies have been “emboldened” by Trump. She additionally believes that folks who stick up for his or her youngsters in opposition to vital race concept indoctrination are mere mouthpieces for Trump-allied political teams.

For Zadrozny, who additionally reported that the shortage of white supremacists at white supremacist rallies this spring was proof of widespread white supremacy, “the Wi Spa protests and then the side protests that you saw from anti-vaxxers that were also at the Wi Spa protests just sort of cemented the idea that we are nowhere near out of the woods.”

But the Wi Spa protests have been about permitting a registered intercourse offender entry to nude girls and ladies. Zadrozny might not have been conscious of this on the time, however no correction has but been made to the story by On the Media.