NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: Media outlets keep promoting ‘forest defenders’ and ignoring that they shot a police officer.

I really believed that once the facts of this story came out it would be over. There was some room for questioning the story of what happened in the forest south of Atlanta initially. Police told one story and protesters told another.

According to police, they entered the forest to clear out protesters who are trespassing and preventing construction of an approved project. They found one man under a tent. They asked him to come out and instead he fired a gun and hit a Georgia State Trooper in the abdomen. The trooper was taken to a hospital for emergency surgery. The protester who fired the shot was killed by police.

The alternative story pushed by protesters and their supporters is that the victim had been unarmed and “murdered” by police. The trooper who was shot? They strongly suggested he might have been hit by friendly fire.

Since then the official police version of events has been confirmed by evidence and the protesters’ version has fallen apart. First, police released a photo of the gun found at the scene. Later they revealed the gun had been matched to the bullet removed from the trooper’s body. And in what should have been the final straw for the protesters’ version of events, police revealed that Manuel Esteban Paez Teran aka Tortuguita had purchased the gun in question in September 2020. It was his gun and with that the police version of events is conclusively found to be the real one.

And yet, progressive news sites continue to promote the forest defenders as if none of that mattered. It’s a surreal thing to witness.

Not after the media’s coverage of the Ferguson riots in 2014 and 2015 and the “fiery but mostly peaceful” protestors of 2020.