Amy Siskind

'A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.’ So said Cordell Hull, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of state, long before the internet. Now we live in the virtual age. What’s true is barely relevant. No sooner has a man shot 10 people dead and been taken into custody than his suspected motives are shoved into the great culture-war grinder and splatted out of a million social media accounts. So we saw this week with the arrest of Ahmed Al Aliwi Alissa, who was presumed white as quickly as he was guilty after pictures of his arrest yesterday in Boulder, Colorado circulated online. Alissa made the mistake of looking a bit pale in the grainy images.

As several hundred climate change activists shut down DC streets and held up morning commutes on Monday morning, a fellow progressive activist, Amy Siskind, was blasting the mainstream media to her 370,000+ Twitter followers: '50 neo-Nazis go to Portland to encourage violence and the media will cover them endlessly for days,' claimed the former Wall Street executive. 'Thousands peacefully protest and march to the Capitol, nothing from the media.'Siskind wasn’t referring to the climate protest taking place that morning. The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, ABC, and CBS all covered the activists linking arms and punishing Washington commuters for their climate sins. She was referring, instead, to her own protest that took place Saturday.