So just a quick heads up. This episode talks about police violence. You're listening to Disinformed, a mini series from There are No Girls on the Internet. I'm Bridget Todd. So if I sound tired or emotional right now, it's because I am. I saw something happening online and I felt just called to respond. That's how I put it to my very patient producer, Tari, who agreed to scrap the episode she had all set to publish today so that I could. So here's what's going on in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota.
Dante Right, a twenty year old black man, was shot and killed by police during a traffic stop, and I don't know, this just really got to me. Right was initially stopped by police for having expired tags, and the stock got confrontational after police spotted an air freshener dangling from his rear view mirror, which is a traffic violation in the state. Now you might be thinking, why in the hell do you need police to have this kind of confrontation for something as simple and small as an
air freshener. I know it sounds ridiculous, but this same thing has happened to me multiple times. And if you're black, I probably don't need to tell you that these kinds of low level traffic stops can turn violent or deadly pretty quickly. According to Harvard School of Public Health, black people are more than three times likely as white people to be killed during a police encounter, and studies have also found that black drivers are far more likely to
be stopped by police than white drivers. So yeah, just driving around your own community as a black person can be a death sentence. When Dante, who you know, at twenty years old is still so young, was being pulled over, he initially called his mom for help, and something about that just really breaks my heart. In an emotional press conference following his death, Dante's mother, Katie Wright, shared her heartbreak and it's really hard to listen to and to
need everyone to know that he was my life. He's my son and I can never get that back. Does the most stake. The Brooklyn Center of Minnesota police chief said that Kim Porter, the police officer who killed Dante, meant to use her taser but grabbed her gun instead. But if you've ever held a taser and a gun, I've held both, you know they feel really different. So how does a police union president and a twenty six year veteran of the police force, like kim Porter, make
this kind of quote mistake. Dante's dad is not having it. Here's what he had to say on Good Morning America today. I cannot accept that I lost my son. He's never coming back. I can't accept that a mistake. That's not that doesn't even sound right. You know, this officer has been on the force for six plus, for twenty six years. I can't accept that now that officer kim Porter, she
resigned this afternoon. But to be clear, this is actually a pretty common thing that officers do when they expect to be fired, because it can be kind of a defensive move to prevent facing further discipline like losing your pension. And right now there is absolutely nothing stopping her from
joining a police force someplace else. And all of this is pretty hard to watch, especially when you consider that it's happening in Minnesota, just a few short miles away from Minneapolis, where the city is currently gripped by a trial for officer Derek Chavin for killing George Floyd, another unarmed black man whose death sparked a massive global racial justice movement this past summer. Y'all. It's just a lot,
this moment, the black death, all of it. And here's where it gets even worse for me, because we can't even have this moment without bad actors on social media
coming in to exploit our pain. This afternoon, when I logged into Twitter, I found a handful of big, influential, verified far right accounts comparing Dante Right, who was shot and killed for just driving his own car, and Ashley Babbitt, the white woman who you might remember was shot and killed by police while she was pushing her way into
the capital during the insurrection. On January six, popular conspiracy theory podcaster and convicted felon dnish to SUSA tweeted, why do we know the name of the cop who killed Dante Wright but not the name of the cop who killed Ashley Babbitt. These kinds of sentiments were echoed by many big far right accounts, so much so that Ashley Babbitt's name is currently trending on Twitter right now as
I record this. Instead of letting a community that's already been through so much more in this loss, bad actors are trying to seize on the conversation and use it to distort and downplay the insurrection. On January six, one person tweeted, Ashley Babbitt innocently entered an open capital as part of a legitimate protest, a capital purposely left mostly unprotected to entice them in. She was unarmed, as we're all protesters on that day, an unarmed insurrection. She was
shot dead for her opinion. Who killed her? I mean, there's just so much wrong with that statement. And as much as I see the worst of what humanity has to offer online from following the darkest corners of the Internet for this very podcast day in and day out, I have to say this just hurt. And this is what I mean when I say discourse on social media has reached a point where sometimes it seems impossible to have any kind of real dialogue, even about things that
are important or impactful. And it should also just go to show how brazen bad actors are on social media. Now. I don't believe that anyone deserves to be killed by the police, full stop. But to compare Ashley Babbitt, someone who was forcing her way into the capital through a broken window during a violent and deadly insurrection, and Dante Right, someone who was just driving his car, minding his own business is so deeply disingenuous that it's insulting. I am insulted.
We should all be insulted. And peep the way these bad actors are trying to use race to further stoked this division. They say, the officer who killed Ashley Babbitt is a black man, and we know the officer who killed Dante Right is a white woman. The Daily Wires Matt Walsh tweeted, if everything else was the same, but Ashley Babbitt was a liberal black woman and the cop who shot her was a white man, there will be murals painted in her honor across the country, and that
cop would be on trial for murder. It's so obvious what they're doing, and by now we should recognize this as a page right out of the bad actor playbook. These people sees on conversations that are already racially or politically charged and flatten them out and distort them until it seems impossible to have any kind of meaningful conversation at all. They want to divide us, They want outrage.
They zero in on our tensions and our pain points and poke at them until they throb I talk so much about disinformation, what it does to our discourse and our democracy. But this is its true cost. Even in tragedy, even in death, they exploit. Nothing is sacred, nothing. It's sick. It makes me sick. I'm tired, y'all, and I'm sure
y'all are too. I'm sick of having to defend our humanity again and again to people who are hell bent on using our pain, our lives, and our identities and our deaths to score cheap points and push false narratives that end up hurting us. All my friends that color of change or organizing Text enough to five five or check the link in the show description to get involved. If you enjoyed this podcast, please help us grow by subscribing. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or
just want to say hi. We'd love to hear from you at Hello at tangoi dot com. Disinformed is brought to you by There Are No Girls on the Internet. It's a production of I Heart Radio and Unbust Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tarry Harrison is our supervising producer and engineer. Michael Lamato is our contributing producer. I'm your host Bridget Todd. For more great podcasts, check out the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.