Shook Cops Seek To Shiv Shake Shack, Fake Take Makes Waves

Stop cop blame claims!

If there's a journal called Studies in Media Paranoia, it should dedicate a special issue to this week's fake tale of victimized cops. The basics are pretty straightforward:  Monday evening, two police unions claimed on Twitter that three NYPD cops had been served "intentionally poisoned" milkshakes at a Manhattan Shake Shack, and had been hospitalized as a result. Nope, nobody was ever poisoned, the cops are fine, and an NYPD investigationcleared the restaurant of any wrongdoing.

Nonetheless, the absolute certainty that "leftists" poisoned the cops has taken hold, and damned if it's ever going away. The little cops who cried wolf are now being touted as examples of why we must keep an eye out for monsters on Maple Street, because you can't be too careful with those sneaky paranoid antifa creeps being bused in everywhere.

The New York Times   reports the three officers were normally based in a precinct in the Bronx, but had been assigned to a detail in Manhattan during protests Monday. (They were away from home, in enemy territory.) An anonymous police source told the Times the officers ordered three milkshakes using a phone app, which we're fairly sure wouldn't have flashed "I AM A COP" on the screen.

When the officers arrived to pick up their order at the Shake Shack in the Fulton Center transit hub, the shakes — one cherry, one strawberry, one vanilla — were waiting on a counter, the official said.

The officers immediately noticed that the shakes "smelled a little bitter, tasted a little funny" and reported it to their superior, the official said. When they began to feel ill, they were taken to a nearby hospital.

By 10: 45, the police unions were on the case, albeit without any actual investigating. The Detectives' Endowment Association tweeting that "three of our fellow officers were intentionally poisoned by one or more workers at the Shake Shack," but that "Fortunately, they were not seriously harmed." The Police Benevolent Association echoed the story with a Very Concerned Statement saying that a "toxic substance, believed to be bleach or a similar cleaning agent, had been placed" in the milkshakes, no doubt about it.

That was all it took for the rightwing rage machine to get rolling, because look at those murderous leftists, they're even poisoning cops now. The Stupidest Man on the Internet, Jim Hoft, wrote at the Gateway Pundit, "The left is killing our police officers," although the officers were actually examined and released from Bellevue Hospital that evening, very much alive.

At 4 a.m. Tuesday, NYPD chief of detectives Rodney Harrison tweeted that a "thorough investigation" had "determined that there was no criminality by shake shack's employees," and a police source told CBS New York the icky taste may have resulted from "cleaning solution that wasn't properly removed from the shake machine." The Times  adds that surveillance video of the restaurant didn't show workers tampering with the shakes at all, either. Yesterday, Shake Shack tweeted that while lab tests are still pending, NYPD hasn't indicated to the company there was any contamination at all.

You might think that would be the end of it, but of course not: While the police unions removed their early tweets, both said it just goes to show officers need to stay "vigilant."

Folks on the Right are still grumbling that something nasty MUST HAVE happened in the shake shed. Gateway Pundit never updated its "The Left is killing our police" story, and closed a follow-up story on the NYPD's finding of no criminality by asking, "Who actually believes this??" Because obviously antifa (or maybe Big Shake) is forcing the police to cover it all up.

Even the Fox News story noting there's no evidence of contaminants in the shakes intoned , "The officers were expected to survive." Yep, seems likely!

But the paranoia is spreading, never mind that stories about food contamination are nearly always more folklore than threat. 

In the latest permutation, a viral Twitter video shows a Georgia cop getting very upset, convinced that a long wait and a screwed-up order at McDonalds' drive thru was proof that she was probably going to be poisoned:

The poor woman is sobbing because the McDonald's kid only brought out her coffee, not her food order, so she jumped to the logical conclusion: They were trying to kill her. (The inevitable Jim Hoft story explained she was "abused" by the restaurant employees, who apparently get everyone's orders right, and quickly, except for cops'.)

We really do feel bad that she's so paranoid. That's clearly the fault of The Left, which wants to kill all the cops, and has nothing to do with the rightwing noise machine that's constantly repeating false tales of fast-food employees trying to kill cops.

That's not only silly paranoia, it's a symptom of the increasing perception on the part of the police — reinforced not only by the media but by politicians and their own damn union leaders, that everyone outside the police force hates cops. Demonstrations calling for an end to overpolicing and brutality aren't really about saving Black lives, they're actually a call to kill cops.

And since anyone not wearing the uniform could be the hidden enemy, you have to crack old pacifists' skulls on the pavement, beat bicyclists into submission, and assume that the people on the other side of the door want to kill you. Approach every encounter as if the civilian has a bomb strapped to their chest, because they just might.

It's a war, after all, as Attorney General Bill Barr likes reminding police, and America no longer takes prisoners. And in the meantime, there's hardly any attention on the rightwing "boogaloo" adherent who killed two cops in the Bay Area.

[ NYT / CBS News / LAT / The Cut / Rolling Stone ]

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