The toxic Democrat-Media Complex is reaching new lows

This week in crazy.

Reza Aslan on Twitter commenting on the photo of the elder Native American harassing the smiling Catholic boy: suggesting the boy should be punched

For the 1984 élite now hate means love

A group of young teenagers from a Kentucky Catholic high school went to Washington for the annual March for Life. Which is both commendable from the point of view of decent human beings and a grave sin as seen from the Left.

 

After the March, waiting for their bus, they began to sing a few songs from their school repertoire. Most of them were wearing a MAGA hat, which these days means asking for trouble.
They were recognizable as Christians and Right wing, therefore apparently became a magnet for all sorts of crazies wandering the area.

On one side there was a tiny group of loony black racists, called the Black Hebrews (?) who ranted against homosexuality and white people, insisting that Trump is secretly homosexual (one of the few things nobody expected our favorite orange man to be accused of).

 

On the other side a few activists, apparently there to protest in favor of Native Americansdecided to confront the Catholic boys. Some were American Indians or Indios, some were whites; there was also a black guy with Rasta hair filming the scene with a prosumer phone stabilizer+lights kit.

They were the ones deciding to get in contact with the group of the school boys, who didn’t react in any meaningful way.
The apparent leader, later identified as Nathan Phillips, got very close to one of the boys and began to chant and beat his ceremonial (?) drum as close as he could to his chosen opponent’s face

This is the scene depicted in the opening image.

Notice that his drumstick was flung wildly a few inches from the student’s nose; from that distance the drum noise should also have become very annoying.

This is one of the most aggressive moves conceivable among those not involving physical contact.
It’s unexpected, intimidating, confusing and distressing.

The boys were clearly unprepared; mostly they just tried to go with the flow, cheer and dance; they’re also heard multiple times asking what’s happening.
The young, random designated victim opted to stay put, doing nothing, in silence. At one point he tried to smile, but you can tell he was very nervous.

At least one of the Nativists began to verbally attack the boys, asserting that whites should return to Europe (!).

Eventually they moved on.

A very inconsequential episode, you’d say.
Consider for example: around the world about 11 Christians are killed every day, receiving minimal media coverage, and yet we’re here dissecting an incident where essentially nothing happened to a group of boys that fit on a bus and a group of SJWs who could fit in a van.

 

Problem is, this was inconsequential only before the Left -or as Andrew Breitbart put it, the Democrat-Media Complex- intervened.

Twitterstorms ensued, savaging the boys for their alleged disrespect of Native Americans!

Their crime? Some of them may have said or chanted something unsavory (allegedly, including “build the wall”, which is just a reasonable position to hold on a current political issue.)
Imagination runs wild in these occasions. The important part: framing the enemy.

A teenager (how old could he be? 15? 16?) is singled out as a villain.

 

Vicious mobs.

In the opening image the self-righteous Twitter hate-fest kingpin, suggesting that the boy should be punched in the face, is none other than Reza Aslan, i.e. a professional Muslim Apologist, one of the most successful peddlers of an Imaginary Islam, armed with perfectly legit credentials and perfectly fake arguments.
(If you’re wandering what Islam has to do with this story, remember leftists hunt in packs. They’ll return the favor when he’ll need support in favor of Islam from people who know nothing about it.)

Assorted pundits and professional agitators chimed in with their verbal violence.

There you go. A boy is crucified in the US social media for the crime of smiling.
His smile is reinterpreted through the hallucinated filter of the Left as a symbol of the patriarchy, a sign of derision, what have you.

 

The media initially failed to report what actually happened. Optics are all that matter. The usual leftist narrative should prevail.

Even when it turned out that the boys weren’t the ones attacking or even confronting the “Natives”, people insisted that they must have done something wrong.
For instance, well… once confronted they didn’t leave the scene.
Right, because when you’re a minor in a group waiting for a bus and some loons come and tease you, you’re supposed to walk away from the pickup point, roaming the streets of an unknown town instead; the loons in tow, now delighted by the effectiveness of their stunt…

Others tried to suggest that, well… they should have shown more respect for the elderly. Of course. Look.

 

This is powerful.

Manipulation 101: defining the first impression in the minds of the public. Once a villain is declared, people will fill in the gaps and try and attack him, even coming up with preposterous excuses. No amount of explanations or corrections could undo the damage.

The initial target will remain tainted for life. Leftists are even proud of this fact:

Horrible human beings hope to destroy a minor’s life for no valid reason. That’s why I wrote about “new lows” in the title.
Hallucinations meet cruelty, the whole stinking package is branded “Progress, justice, inclusiveness and empathy”.

 

From the link I just posted above: Rod Dreher (one of the best Catholic writers of our times) sets the record straight (scolding the Hollywood vermin Michael Green) but admits he was among those who initially joined the hate-fest by retweeting a condemnation of the boys, without knowing the facts.
This is quite significant because it highlights the effectiveness of Social Justice Warriors in defining the narrative: the herd effect is amplified even by their adversaries!

In fact conservatives see themselves as social pariahs, hence their need to show their bona fide by rushing to the opportunity to condemn any alleged Right Wing offender.
Dreher’s piece is in fact full of caveats: he’s still open to the possibility that new testimonies could put the blame on the teenagers again.
Non-leftists are now scared of one thing above everything else: risking to be caught not condemning fellow non-leftists that were officially shamed into annihilation by the mob. You need to participate in the Two Minutes of Hate, or else.
Even if the victims are young teenagers. Innocent young teenagers.

 

The sniveling cowards representing the boys’ school and their Diocese (plus their town’s mayor for good measure) were quick to condemn the students, promising further disciplinary action after an investigation: some pupils could face expulsion.
Heck, even the Vatican Press Room was questioned by journalists and rushed to assert that a strong condemnation had already being delivered by the Diocese!

 

Dreher points out that the Native American elder, Nathan Phillips, was already known as someone who seems to enjoy fishing for confrontations where he could play the race card. They had a guy filming the whole stunt (In fact two, it seems: the Rasta man and a Native with a handheld camera). That’s how you “organize”. Saul Alinsky style.

If you use your traditions (in this case a tribal chant) and your body presence as a blunt instrument to bully others, any form of reaction could be misconstrued by the media on your side as proof positive of “racism”. Amazingly even no reaction now counts. A smile will do. They only need to cling to something that could become the center of a narrative.

 

Dreher aptly points out the obvious:

the white Catholic boys in their MAGA hats appearing to intimidate a Native American elder serves as a useful club with which to beat the entire March For Life, as well as conservative Christianity in general.
[…] the media and others in the left-wing mob will flat-out lie about their political opponents, in an attempt to destroy them personally and professionally. That unnamed boy in the iconic image, staring with the rictus grin at Nathan Phillips, is now an Enemy Of The People, even though there is no evidence at all that he did anything wrong. Truth doesn’t matter; truth is what serves the Cause.

 

 

Let’s call a spade a spade.

What they did was despicable and inexcusable.
They were picking a fight with minors.

First of all from how they behaved, including the in-your-face use of the drum, the curse words and slogans against whites, they were a mob of anti-white racists until proven otherwise.
I’m sorry, that’s quite obvious from the perspective of a foreigner. Anyone could be a racist, not just whites.
If you happen to be in a crowd where people attack the white race, either you distance yourself in some way or you’re content with that socially acceptable form of racism. This is extremely toxic. No excuses.
I never think about myself in terms of being white, I believe no one should pledge allegiance to one’s race, let alone attack others in the name of their race. Sounds too much?

Secondly, it would be appropriate, FOR A CIVILIZED SOCIETY, that Mr.Phillips publicly apologizes to the boy he wronged.

 

The fact that the polar opposite happened is a testament to the insanity of our society. This should stop.

 

Media deception.

See how NBC twisted the story, pretending that it was the schoolboys surrounding the activists, and the specific boy in the photo who “taunted” the elderly man by smiling and getting close to his face… Lupus et Agnus, really.
They reported only Phillips’ point of view: according to the elderly agitator, he doesn’t know if the boy should be expelled from school, but the trip’s chaperones should be fired. Imagine being in their shoes.
This is crybullying. This is the 21st century.

 

The whole NBC piece is a case study in fake news.
Even the small details are finely chiseled to convey a one-dimensional interpretation: the problematic elderly man is said to stand in the rain while giving his interview, as to imply a sort of stoic heroism, while in reality he was experiencing the crowning achievement of his entire life… who wouldn’t massively enjoy the feeling of light rain dripping down your hair in such an occasion?

The journalists even managed to reference the episode of Trump making fun of Elizabeth Warren for her pretending to be Native American. As if it were relevant to the story.
Her shameless exploitation of her made-up minority status went on for decades, obtaining special privileges at the expense of real Native Americans. Had she been on the Republican side her career would have been destroyed long ago, for much less. Amazingly she is even a Presidential Candidate now.

See how confirmation bias works? Now somehow there’s two episodes (!) confirming (!) that somehow Conservatives hate Native Americans: there’s the smile while being taunted by a louring Native, plus there’s the joke against the white woman usurping the Native status!

When news bulletins amass a large number of talking points and fabricated incidents, most people get gaslighted into accepting the ideas being pushed, regardless of their merit. Too much data to process. Quantity trumps quality.

 

In the imaginary world of the media allies, this Phillips guy manages to pretend he was the one trying to defuse the situation, allegedly due to the racial tensions he observed between blacks and whites. Fantastic. He was a uniter!
What I saw from the footage were 4 blacks acting crazy, attacking the boys who weren’t reacting in any particular way, other than shouting “Whoa!” after the crudest anti-homosexual slurs. Not a fight between blacks and whites.
More importantly (before that, in the video) we saw Phillips choosing to confront the white teenagers, and only them, in a way clearly meant to increase tension. Now he’s taking credit for doing the opposite? Gimme a break.

Watching the sequence with the drum taunting the boy from up close was making me uneasy: it seemed to last forever. And I’m not him. And I now know that nothing happened after those minutes of tension, this student instead had no clue as to what was coming next.

 

I’m sorry, I won’t let them get away with this nonsense.

If you want a window in the twisted mind of Nathan Phillips, look no further than his words as reported by NBC, maddeningly useful in reinforcing many leftist readers biases:

They were brought up to believe I’m less than human.

This guy (beyond appearing sick… if I had to guess, I’d say from some drug addiction) is a typical leftist in the sense that he lives in a different universe full of prejudices; one where anyone who disagrees with him is certainly full of prejudices.

He’s genuinely not capable of imagining that those Catholic school boys were raised as genuinely well-mannered, well-meaning kids, even excessively preoccupied with avoiding any racial stereotype or discrimination. They’re probably among the least racist people he’ll ever encounter. Still boys though: unruly, crass and silly.
Yet he just saw that they were white and politically on the opposite side, therefore assumed they were evil and tried to provoke them.

Amazingly in today’s mediasphere they are the racists and he is the victim.

 

Update

♦ Mark Steyn chimes in with his remarkable sagacity, scolding the various Conservative jellyfish types, including his ex-colleagues at National Review, who couldn’t wait for the facts but needed to join the great thundering herd:

the respectable right cannot even bring itself to forgo the pleasure of getting played for saps. Every time.

 

♦ Meanwhile leftists were doing their best to try and find something against the Covington School students.
They managed to come up with photos from a 2012 school basketball event, therefore involving COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PEOPLE, where some students from the same school were painted in “blackface”. Turns out the entire student body on the stands supporting the team was dressed in black, a couple or so of them went the extra mile painting their upper waist and face in black. At the time the politically correct hysteria hadn’t reached the current levels, therefore that kind of stunt was still possible without people assuming you were a racist. It’s not clear if those few specific students from 6 years ago who painted their faces that way may have had fun with the idea of testing the boundaries of racism, if anything. Nothing proves that was the case, while the color-themed event seems innocent enough. It must be stressed though that their choice was at the very least ill-advised and insensitive. Which means their teachers and coaches should have suggested otherwise.

Still, we’re talking about leftists trying to find a way to keep the failing narrative in place through a crude form of guilt-by-association.

That’s their typical modus operandi. Don’t treat people like individuals. They must be seen as part of a group, sharing their collective guilt or victim status.

 

Update 2 – Women’s March vs. March For Life, again.

I didn’t expect to spend more time covering this, but some details deserve to be reported.

♦ Phillips pretended to be a Vietnam veteran but he never went to Vietnam. Various networks interviewed him (without daring to question his version of the events) and he used the opportunity to spew a bunch of bold faced lies, pretending the blacks were a sort of “prey” and the harassers were the kids.

♦ The nice teenager at the center of the storm came out giving his version of the story, basically confirming what I said. As also reported by others, though, no disrespectful chants or “build the wall” cries were ever uttered by the group; their upbeat and uncontroversial school songs were used to try and cover the hateful insults shouted by the black racists.

There were various incidents of doxing, death threats and harassment of some of the kids, their parents and their businesses. So shameful.

The Washington Post, describing how events unfolded and forced them to partially retract their story, in full damage control mode, managed to twist this bizarre turn of events as if the lesson to be learned was that the real victims were the media, unjustly maligned by the Trump supporters.

 

♦ Someone ran the numbers: the US media gave 15x times more coverage to the Women’s March than to the March for Life, two events held in Washington DC on January 19 and 18 respectively.
If you’re wandering how come this time there was no fanfare about the anti-Trump rally attendance, the reason is obvious: the size of the angry feminists mob was dwarfed by the number of young, joyful pro-lifers.

See what I had to say when the Women’s March was a massive post-election event, in 2017, and the media were happily contrasting the two events.
This time a timid 60000 figure was thrown around for the anti-family protesters, most reports used close-up photos meant to hide the limited size of the crowd. I’d say based on that and a grainy MSNBC time-lapse they must have been 20 thousand, 30000 tops.
On the contrary the March for Life was remarkable. A reasonable estimate I made based on the time-lapse video puts attendance around 100-120 thousand, wildly diverging claims from the opposite sides notwithstanding.

Now you may appreciate the different treatment received in 2017: numbers matter only when they should matter.

But they weren’t just content with the biased coverage of the two events.
Journalists tried to play down the controversial aspects of the Women’s March, including blatant antisemitism.
At the same time they were fishing for opportunities to cast the pro-lifers in a bad light.
A March For Life must receive bad press at all costs.
That’s why they were primed for an overreaction and jumped on the Covington boys. They craved for something like that: a story about conservatives acting racist. Facts being an afterthought.

 

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