Your claim is fake news! The original headline was:
There was no “allegedly” in there. Incalculable* harm resulted.
*allegedly
No kidding, huh? 
He should revoke his Los Angeles privileges.
Huh? What?
What?
Believe it or not, this was in my mind as I was writing. I realize that whatever difficulties I may face with other people due to being an older folk, they do not include this kind of scenario.
More about my main point, however, below.
I’m not going to attempt to do that. It may be true that there is such a disproportion. My point is the same I have made a number of times in different posts: it is not helpful to make generalizations about groups of people and then apply them to individuals as if we can assume they are true.
If you wanted to posit a case about a neighbor not knowing who Ving Rhames is, the first part (elderly recluse not familiar with pop culture) would have been enough. You went beyond that to talk about a stereotype and then applied it, however speculatively, to that neighbor. This is how bigotry thrives and spreads, by the unthinking and meretricious use of stereotypes. Stereotypes are not helpful, because they can not lead us to any truth about any individual.
That is my thesis. I wish more people followed it. There would be a lot less fuel for this thread if they did.
You said my claim is fake news. How is it fake news to report that someone said something?
I’d like to avoid going through life being a closed-minded jackass, so I hope you can believe me when I say I’m trying to understand the specific nature of your complaint (and I don’t intend that as any kind of insult toward you or your writing). Are you saying that if I had written just this:
and omitted this:
you would have been OK with it?
As I quoted, the report didn’t just say “someone said something”. There’s no skepticism about the waiter’s claims in the original report. It reads as though the customer’s actions are established fact. Ok, that’s not exactly the same thing as “fake news” that’s just made up. But since this isn’t the first time allegations like this have been shown to be false, a little more caution might have been warranted.
Not the first time, but certainly the overwhelmingly majority of such “receipt bigotry” cases have turned out to be true. It not equivalent to the Nigerian scam in its ubiquity, so I don’t know why we should immediately assume we are being duped when one of these stories surfaces.
What would you have had someone do? Go to the restaurant and interrogate the waiter? They reported WHAT WAS BEING REPORTED. That is not fake news
Let us hope no one infringes your constitutional right to hang around the pit accusing others of having potty mouths. The harm to us all if you were banned would be incalculable.
There was no skepticism in the article, they reported the server’s claims as fact. By this reasoning, if a journalist finds someone who tells him that the moon landing was a hoax, the headline “Moon Landing Was A Hoax” is not fake news. Aren’t journalists supposed to either check that claims are true, or make clear that they are unconfirmed claims?
Such irrelevance.
Sad.
Evs.
Frankly, I believe your question is disingenuous. But if you wanted to be less offensive you could have left out both the generalization and the application to the individual, something that I think you are perfectly capable of figuring out for yourself.
<post doorhinged>
But, Ving Rhames!
A friend of mine heard that a house in his neighborhood was being purchased by a guy who is a registered sex offender. The neighbors were all raising a fuss. It turned out the offender guy had only made an offer on the house, and was eventually outbid.
I’m an old honky and I approve of this message.
I had no idea that Ving Rhames was so famous that he couldn’t help but be instantly recognized by anyone, cop or neighbor.
Well, I don’t know about the cop (he had other problems in how he approached the door IMO), but even in LA where it is probably more common, if I had an A-/B+ list celebrity living next door to me, I’d know who he was.
I didn’t recognize the name and I wouldn’t have recognized him unless he had a bandaid on the back of his head.