Attorney Lin Wood made his name by representing Richard Jewell in his defamation cases against the media and the US government. If you knew who Wood was before last week, it's either because of that or because he also represented JonBenet Ramsey's parents and brother in their respective defamation cases. If that is all you ever knew him from, you probably assumed he was a relatively normal human person.
He is not.
These days, he is a QAnon weirdo who is primarily representing rightwing lunatics like Dr. Simone Gold of the "America's Frontline Doctors" videos; Patty and Mark McCloskey, the couple who got famous for brandishing guns at protesters walking by their St. Louis mansion; and Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two people and injured one during a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Earlier this week, Wood was blocked from attempting to raise money for Rittenhouse's defense on Twitter. Both Facebook and Twitter banned praise of Rittenhouse's actions last week (though that hasn't exactly worked out), and Discover has prohibited users from donating to his defense fund.
Today, Wood posted a very weird tweet claiming that in 1996 "Mark Zuckerberg & Facebook declared Richard Jewell to be a mass murderer," and that "efforts to raise money for Jewell's defense & family were banned on social media."
Is it proof of a parallel universe in which Facebook existed in 1996? It is not. Apparently it is Lin Wood's very stupid attempt at "allegory" or "satire," meant to draw a comparison between Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two people, and his former client, who killed zero people.
Yet it still resulted in many of his followers being very outraged over the way Mark Zuckerberg, who would have been 12 at the time, treated poor Richard Jewell in 1996.
Oh, the irony.
So that worked out just as expected. There is basically nothing these people will not believe. If you tell them "2+2=5 to you if you are a real patriot," they will go along with that.
Many of those who shared their outrage about Facebook's mistreatment of Jewell recommended that others watch Clint Eastwood's movie about him, which conveniently leaves out the part where the person actually responsible for the Olympic Park bombing was rightwing anti-abortion zealot Eric Rudolph, a man who shares many of their views — far more so than Richard Jewell ever did.
Even as an allegory, it doesn't quite hold up. The only things Jewell and Rittenhouse have in common is that they wanted to be cops and were represented by Lin Wood. The similarities end there. Rittenhouse's case is actually far more similar to Rudolph's. Rudolph claimed that he only bombed an abortion clinic in defense of the fetuses, and was both celebrated and protected by other rightwing assholes, as you can see by this comment section on a YouTube tribute to him. Cute, ain't it?
Also because they both actually killed people.
[Lin Wood]
