Infamous scribblers:
Virtue signalers on the warpath
by FR. GEORGE W. RUTLER
January 23, 2019
From October 22 to November 30, in 1878, a large fair was held in the Cathedral of Saint Patrick in New York City before its dedication. It took advantage of the magnificent open space before pews were installed to the distress of the architect, James Renwick, who objected that Protestant furniture had no place in a Catholic shrine. Renwick was a Protestant himself, but also an aesthetic purist and an Anglican, and no Puritan; however, Archbishop McCloskey needed money and, as with having a fundraising fair, renting pews out was a way to get it.
Six months earlier, and exactly one block north in her huge mansion on the same side of Fifth Avenue, Madame Restell had reclined in her bathtub and slit her throat. She left a fortune of over twelve million dollars in today’s money, after a career as the nation’s most notorious abortionist. Not unfamiliar with prison, her dismal career had been haunted by what we would now call investigative journalists in the employ of
The New York Times. Founded in 1851, the “Gray Lady” became the journal of the new Republican Party and helped with the demolition of the corrupt Tweed Ring.
Times change, even for The New York Times, which over more recent years has abandoned its foundational moral rectitude. Although not proud of its whitewashing of the Ukraine famine and Stalin’s show trials by the complicit reporter Walter Duranty, the newspaper has not yet renounced his Pulitzer Prize, nor has it demurred from the praise heaped on it by Fidel Castro when he visited their editorial office in a gesture of thanks for their support.
There was also that problem with Jayson Blair’s plagiarism, and the misrepresentation of the young men falsely accused of sexual violence at Duke University. The latter bears some resemblance to the recent incident in our nation’s capital when youths from Covington Catholic High School were accused of racist bullying. But
The New York Times has had the decency, along with some others, to regret the haste with which it moved to condemn the innocent.
Unlike Mark Twain who noted that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated, those who now say that journalism is dead may have a good case. Thus one should not expect much from those who report the activities of others and by so doing arrogate to themselves the importance of the actors. Despite the fact that he was a journalist himself, G.K. Chesterton said that writing badly is the definition of journalism.
- When hieroglyphics were the best, if static, medium of telling the news in the thirteenth century BC, Rameses the Great advertised himself as the victor of the Battle of Kadesh, although truth-tellers knew that he had lost.
- The city of Trent spread a “blood libel” against Jews in 1475 that led to a massacre, and not even Pope Sixtus IV could stop it, though he tried.
- In 1765, Samuel Adams, whose only worthy legacy is beer, falsely claimed in print that Thomas Hutchinson, a Loyalist, supported the Stamp Tax, with the result that the helpless man’s house was burned to the ground.
- In 1782, five months after Yorktown, Benjamin Franklin produced a hoax news release during his sojourn in Paris, claiming that King George had induced American Indians to commit atrocities, and he also forged the name of John Paul Jones to another libel.
- And, of course, Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake” (actually it was “brioche”), but those who wanted to believe it did so.
- George Washington had enough of journalists, and told Hamilton that he was quitting public life because of “a disinclination to be longer buffitted [sic] in the public prints [sic] by a set of infamous scribblers.”
There is no need to recount the details of the latest incident in our nation’s capital, when the high school boys were defamed by journalists with the accusation that they mocked an elderly Native American who was trying to calm a confrontation with a radical group of anti-white, anti-Semitic racists.
Videos proved that there was no truth to this, but a flurry of demagogic “virtue signaling” berated the boys without giving them a chance to testify.
- In the eyes of the secular media, the lads were at a portentous disadvantage, being white Catholic males, some of whom were wearing MAGA hats.
- The “Native American” was described as an elderly Vietnam War veteran. But few 64-year-olds today would qualify as geriatric. And in the last year that any US combat units were stationed in Vietnam — 1973 — he would have been 18 years old.
- Mr. Phillips, a professional “activist” for the Indigenous Peoples March, also claims to be a marine veteran, which may be the case, but to have been a Marine veteran in Vietnam when the last Marine combat divisions left in 1971, he would have been 16 years old. This information has been ignored in some quarters.
Journalists were supposed to expose hoaxes pretending to be facts, but now they prefer to call facts hoaxes. I speak without prejudice; having been born in New Jersey, I can also claim to be an Indigenous Person. Besides that, as a teenager, I was schooled in a college originally established for the education of what used to be called Indians.
This brings up a contiguous complaint. As soon as this incident was reported,
The Washington Post, in its role as the intemperate sibling of
The New York Times, ran an essay decrying
“the shameful exploitation of Native Americans by the Catholic Church.”
For secularists, any missionary venture must have been exploitative and destructive of native culture, even though Christian evangelists have thwarted infanticide, human sacrifice, the cremation of widows, polygamy, caste systems and, yes, slavery.
The article in the Post made no mention of
- The Jesuit Martyrs of North America who endured torture and death to bring the Gospel to dejected tribes and peace to internecine tribal slaughterers.
- Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, who was exiled by her own tribe, the Mohawks, for her love of Christ.
- Saint Junipero Serra who transformed the fortunes of the indigenous “gatherer” culture.
- Saint Katherine Drexel who donated her vast inheritance to establish fifty missions among the native peoples.
- The heroic Bishop Martin Marty who brought science and literacy to the Dakota territory, or
- Father Jean-Pierre DeSmet who fashioned the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, and so befriended Chief Tatanta Iytake (“Sitting Bull”) that the venerable chief, impeded from his own reception into the Church by having two wives, wore a crucifix to his dying day and saw to it that Buffalo Bill Cody was baptized the day before he died.
Defamation by journalists is unethical in the professional sphere and sinful in the economy of God, but to submit saints to detraction is blasphemous.
The scene of Pope Leo XIII applauding the Wild West Show of Buffalo Bill and Chief Sitting Bull on tour in Rome would probably confound journalists at
The Washington Post. Buffalo Bill and his entourage were wined and dined at the North American College there, an event that might have been inaccurately reported by CNN. But these are facts, and Catholics who do not know their history are accountable for letting it be maligned.
The incident with the Covington boys may be more significant than some transient scandal.
One remembers Senator Joseph McCarthy using the media to his advantage, and to this day
his foes will not admit that he did indeed expose some real threats to the nation. The young Robert Kennedy was his assistant attorney and McCarthy was godfather to Robert’s first daughter, Kathleen, although he died four years later and obviously had no catechetical influence.
But when his actions became extravagant, the Army attorney Joseph Welch asked, “Have you no sense of decency?” Therewith the whole deck of cards collapsed.
Perhaps the media are beyond a sense of shame now, wallowing as they are in destructive polemics, but fair-minded people may be moved by this Covington incident to recognize the indecency of political correctness. Such correctness is most demeaning when it cloaks itself in an affected moralism which agnostic subjectivism has otherwise displaced from social discourse.
Our Lord condemned “virtue signaling” in his parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in the Temple. “I thank you, Lord, that I am not like this sinner.”
There are Pharisees in every corridor of society, but they find a most comfortable berth in the Church. So it was that the very diocese of the Covington students, without interviewing them or asking for evidence outside the media, promptly threatened to punish them.
- There was no reference to the hateful racism and obscene references to priests chanted by the cultic Hebrew Israelites as they threatened those Catholic youths.
- Instead, bishops issued anodyne jargon about the “dignity of the human person” without respecting the dignity of their own spiritual sons.
The latest advertisement of the Gillette razor company portraying examples of “toxic masculinity” did not accuse any bishop, but only ecclesiastical bureaucrats would consider that a compliment.
Pope Francis, off-the-cuff and at a high altitude in an airplane, once asked, “Who am I to judge?” There might at last be some application of that malapropism to
shepherds who jump to judgment and throw their lambs to the wolves of the morally bankrupt media in a display of virtue signaling and in fear of being politically incorrect.
Our tribal warfare
By Robert Royal
JANUARY 23, 2019
We have already all heard enough – and more than enough – about the Covington Catholic boys involved in one of the morality plays that social media these days conjure up instantly, out of thin air.
White Catholic boys wearing MAGA hats, marching in Washington to end abortion, from a “prep” school in the South? They just had to be racists and smugly affirming “white privilege.” And don’t forget: denying women their 'reproductive rights'.
So what, in reality, began near the Lincoln Memorial as an attack on the boys by Black Hebrew activists calling them “faggots” and worse (it’s on the tape); followed by the encounter with an Indian activist that (again to judge by the full tape) shows no more than some confused interaction, pointing to absolutely nothing; we have, once again, full-blown tribal warfare in America.
Social media are largely now a sewer of outrage – your virtue signaling is greater the more it’s sensitive and offended, outraged and violent towards the other side.
- Worse, the mainstream media now also get into this shameful act. Outlets like the New York Times and CNN repeated the slurs about the boys – and then were forced to admit that further video “changed the context.”
- Serious media are supposed to get context and balance right before they enflame the kind of social divisions already only too evident now. None that I’ve seen has issued a retraction and apology.
The Times did run a very good column by David Brooks about the shameful way the “incident” has been publicized. He concludes that the Covington boys displayed the least objectionable behavior among the actors.
The result:
Commenters on his column have basically said, yeah, but it doesn’t matter because the basic point, white privilege vs. disrespect for an elderly Native American, is the Truth. Justice – the concrete guilt or innocence of specific individuals – is thus unimportant compared to “Truth.”
Our tribal warfare would be less distressing if Christians themselves refrained from this sort of stereotyping, but they don’t. I see it quite often when moderate liberals, whom I know personally, are accused of connections to radical groups and views, which I know they don’t share.
I myself, for example, have strongly criticized things that Pope Francis has done and said over the past five years. But it’s appalling to see how some people then go on to speak about him. A Christian has to be scrupulous about the truth, which is one of the names of God. One consequence of launching wild attacks is that, when there’s really something that calls for loud denunciation, critics are dismissed as cranks.
In this context, it’s worth saying something about another incident - at Notre Dame this week - that’s
distressing because the university is America’s most prestigious Catholic institution of higher learning and ought to know – and act – better when it gets involved with questions of truth and injustice.
The university recently decided to cover up murals on campus depicting Christopher Columbus, the Cross, and Native Americans. President Fr. John Jenkins offered a confusing rationale for the move.
- He clearly wanted to respond to Native American protests while at the same time “to preserve artistic works originally intended to celebrate immigrant Catholics who were marginalized at the time in society.
- But do so in a way that avoids unintentionally marginalizing others.” Especially since
Columbus represents “exploitation, expropriation of land, repression of vibrant cultures, enslavement, and new diseases causing epidemics that killed millions.”
He doesn’t. I actually wrote a book on the controversies surrounding Columbus in 1992, the 500th anniversary of his first voyage. There are things to criticize, though nothing like these broadbrush charges. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Bartolomè de Las Casas, O.P., the famed “Defender of the Indians”:
“Truly, I would not blame the admiral’s intentions, for I knew him well, and knew his intentions were good.” The Admiral, says Las Casas, simply did not know what to do in the unprecedented circumstances of the encounter of two worlds previously unknown to one another.
And there’s another side to this story, because slavery and human sacrifice were common in the areas the Spaniards first explored. As Carlos Fuentes, a Mexican novelist and no great friend to Christianity, put it:
“One can only imagine the astonishment of the hundreds and thousands of Indians who asked for baptism as they came to realize that they were being asked to adore a god who sacrificed himself for men instead of asking men to sacrifice themselves to gods.”
Still, I would not much defend those murals. They’re mediocre portrayals of a fantasy version of Columbus bringing the Faith to the New World. In purely historical terms, the cringing and humiliated Native Americans correspond to nothing.
My worry is that something larger is afoot.
- Because if Notre Dame is going down this path, it might just as well also cover up all the crucifixes and depictions of Christ on campus:
- Some might feel excluded and marginalized by them, in our current dispensation.
[Just like the reigning pope arbitrarily deciding when and if to grant an apostolic blessing - as all popes are expected to do - because he suddenly gets a bee in his zucchetta that tells him, "Don't - you will offend non-believers and non-Christians!"]
Jesus, after all, was a “homophobe” who warned, “For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law.” (Matthew 5:17) The Mosaic Law calls homosexual acts an “abomination.” It also says “male and female he created them,” clearly the source of that widespread mental illness “transphobia.”
A certain type of progressive, including Catholic progressives, would even regard thinking it is intolerant to “preach the Gospel to all nations” as Jesus mandated. [Today, it is Christ's supposed Vicar on earth who openly flouts Jesus's Great Mandate and tells the world: "You are good as you are, where you are, whatever faith you profess, or don't profess. I have no desire to convert you at all!" - effectively abolishing the Church's primary mission.]
A Catholic – anyone committed to truth – needs to come at such questions from a very different perspective, with the courage to stand up – in public and all our culture-shaping institutions – to stereotypes of all kinds, but especially in conflicts less concerned with seeking justice about wrongs in the past than marginalizing Christianity in the present.
It turns out it wasn't just the media - social and conventional - that ganged up unfairly and on the basis of fake news against the Covington boys. Phil Lawler berates some of the pro-life leaders who were in Washington last Friday for their unseemly rush to judgment...
A black eye for pro-life leadership
by Phil Lawler
January 21, 2019
It's time for the pro-life movement to grow up.
The disgraceful treatment of students from Covington Catholic – and by that I mean the pell-mell rush of pro-life "leaders" to condemn innocent young men – illustrates a potentially fatal flaw in the movement.
- For much too long, some of the most visible spokesmen for the pro-life movement have sought desperately to be seen as respectable, to be treated fairly by the mainstream media.
- It's never happened. It's never going to happen.
- And it's not a worthy goal.
The media pounced on an opportunity to treat a few teenagers from Kentucky as symbols of bigotry, on the slimmest of evidence. That was
unjust, but not unpredictable.
Now that the truth about the confrontation at the Lincoln Memorial has come out, the newspapers and network that vilified the Covington Catholic students are issuing perfunctory apologies. But the damage is done, and that damage is considerable.
Still worse, in my view, is the inexcusable haste with which many pro-life spokesmen leapt for the bait, joining the chorus of condemnation.
- Even before the fuller story came out, with videotape conclusively proving that the Covington Catholic students were victims rather than aggressors, the original footage provided no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing.
- Sensible reporters, and sensible commentators, should have said: "Let's look into this; let's get the whole story."
Why did so many people rush to judgment?
As it turns out, the behavior of the Covington Catholic students was blameless. They were intentionally provoked, and reacted with restraint and even courtesy.
Nick Sandmann, the teenager who suddenly became the focus of a nationwide hate campaign, has released an extraordinarily charitable statement about the incident.
Their school, their diocese, and the March for Life should be proud of these young men.
Instead, the adults who should have protected and even applauded these students turned on them.
Now some (and by no means all) of these adults are explaining that when they issued their first statements, they didn't have all the facts. Of course they didn't! That's precisely the point.
- They were ready to condemn without waiting for the facts.
- And now they ask us to accept their mistakes as innocent – to give them the benefit of the doubt, which they weren't willing to give to those teenage boys.
It was, again, a disgrace. But it's a disgrace that begs for an explanation.
- Why were pro-life leaders so anxious to join in the general condemnation?
- Did they really think that they could gain respectability by denouncing (what was described as) intolerance?
- Did they think the media would treat the matter fairly?
If so, then their naivete too is, at this late date, disgraceful.
"Sure, politics ain't bean-bag," said the memorable Mr. Dooley. The battle over abortion has been the roughest political fight of our era, and it would be almost criminally foolish to expect that our most militant adversaries, in this life-or-death battle, are motivated by goodwill.
- Seasoned veterans of this political battle, seeing the first short video clips of the confrontation at the Lincoln Memorial, should have wondered whether the event had been staged.
- Seasoned reporters, too, should have asked a few pointed questioned before running with the story.
But if it is foolish for pro-lifers to expect fair play, it is equally foolish to expect fair treatment from the mainstream media.
Any notion that America's largest media outlets are impartial on the abortion issue should have been dismissed after David Shaw of the
Los Angeles Times – not a pro-life partisan – issued his definitive study in 1990.
- The mainstream outlets ignore pro-life claims, while acting as megaphones for the claims of the abortion industry.
- The March for Life provides an annual demonstration of the problem. Each year, without fail, mainstream outlets that routinely provide front-page coverage for leftist demonstrations fail to notice the hundreds of thousands of pro-life marchers.
- If they do give a brief mention to the March, the media grotesquely understate the scope of the event. This year, for example, we were informed by one major outlet that there were "over 1,000" participants. (Which is true, I suppose; and by the same token there will be "dozens" of people in the stands at the Super Bowl.)
Also, if they do offer a few column-inches to the pro-life marchers, major newspapers regularly gave equal coverage to a handful of pro-abortion counter-demonstrators.
- As the tenor of our nation's political debate has become increasingly toxic, the counter-demonstrators have become more aggressive, more ambitious – and now, this year,
more successful in conning the "useful idiots" in the media.
What happened at the Lincoln Memorial was a classic demonstration of Alinsky tactics: a staged confrontation, an emotional appeal to the media, and then a scorched-earth campaign to demonize the opposition.
- For a few days it worked.
- And to their shame, many prominent pro-lifers succumbed to the propaganda and joined in the group-hate.
So a group of teenage boys who had done nothing wrong, who had been chosen as an opportunistic target, were subjected to public denunciation.
- Powerful adults said that they should be expelled from school, jailed, barred from future employment.
- They and their families received death threats.
- Ideologues did their best to ruin the lives of young men who had, at worst, shown a bit too much school spirit.
And you did get the message, didn't you?
At the March for Life next January, some leftist agitator could choose someone you know, stage another confrontation, and try to ruin another life. Next year it could be you, or your son or your daughter.
Let's just hope – no, let's do more; let's demand – that next year the prominent people who claim to be leaders of the pro-life movement won't join in the lynching.
So-called conservatives
betray Catholic students
by Timothy Gordon
January 23, 2019
Yes, secular media, you failed the "Covington Catholic test," especially at outfits like
The Atlantic (whose expression I lifted) and
The Washington Post.
Moronic, pseudo-literate situational analogies by such outfits to "Rorschach tests" and "morality plays" have belied the extent to which all of you on the Left wanted to "confirm your biases," as Tucker Carlson said this weekend. That is, you wanted it quite a bit.
The easily impressed and the easily fooled together consumed these wayward (and maudlin) analogies. They did so with the unconcealed hunger of the overfed lapdog, whose gustatory sensibilities are no more refined than its moral ones.
Mainstream strongholds and purveyors of fake news will advance their deuced assault on Catholic Christian American morality at every opportunity.
By itself, none of this concerns me.
- It is written in the stars that the mainstream strongholds and purveyors of fake news will advance their deuced assault on Catholic Christian American morality at every opportunity. These are simply the stakes of the game.
- News reporting from progressive journalists is not news at all, just as "dog bites man" is not news.
- It's all part of the dim phantasmagoria of American life in 2019. None of it is peachy.
Conversely, only "man bites dog" counts as veritable news; the equivalent to this in terms of the Covington Catholic debacle played out on Saturday and early Sunday, as so-called conservatives sounded off to the tune that Nick Sandmann — who was accosted by Nathan Phillips — had done something wrong. This is what concerns me.
Even at first blush, he did nothing wrong.
Gullible conservatives and even pliant orthodox Catholics jumped onto the lynch mob's bandwagon, condemning Sandmann's behavior in what is now known as "the first video."
- Then, more footage came out. The narrative seems to be that the second clip gives a different — even an opposite — aspect to the story.
- This is nonsense. Sandmann has been and always was the forbearing victim (and pro-life champion, I'll add).
It is now the duty of all people of good will promptly to expel these scourges and to defend their victims from invidious hatemongers who have infiltrated our country and our Church.
Nonetheless, on this errant basis, many "fairminded" conservatives have issued impotent, useless, guarded apologies to Mr. Sandmann — ones which neither explain what he's now supposed to do with a continent's worth of threats and hate mail, nor whatever supposedly he did wrong in that first video. The mob never bothers to ask.
An impotent apology is the best that can be made, one supposes, because just how does one apologize for having such pitifully impoverished instincts as not to furnish the benefit of the doubt to a pro-life youth who attends the March for Life on his weekend? We conservatives — and especially we conservative Catholics — eat our own; no shelter for the moderately heroic.
I'll say it. Flatly, only dupes think smirking calmly in the face of a belligerent old liar with a drum is some breach of decency — soft, cowardly dupes, I mean. Thus, the mantra about the "shameful" first video fails to exculpate conservatives who threw Sandmann and his friends under the bus: shamefulness requires a measure of shame, it would seem.
A measure of shame is now required in American life.
- At this juncture, racism has returned to our shores (just watch the new videos of the African Israelite scumbags who utter pure vileness — without public outcry);
- sexism has burned with effeminate fire and now, it scorches all it touches;
- hateful anti-Catholicism never left these shores.
It is now the duty of all people of good will promptly to expel these scourges and to defend their victims from invidious hatemongers who have infiltrated our country and our Church.
Thought crimes, media abuse and
those Catholic boys from Covington
by John Kass
January 23, 2019
What exactly triggered that hateful leftist social media mob — shamefully egged on by prominent American journalists — to unjustly attack the students at Kentucky’s Covington Catholic High School and denounce them as racists?
The school has been closed. Death threats and bullying continue. Students and family complain they’ve been doxed — their identities revealed so that the hateful mob can harass them some more.
So, what happened? Why were the students vilified?
- Was it simply for the sin of being white, Roman Catholic supporters of President Donald Trump, the boys having the gall to wear their “MAGA” hats at the March for Life?
- Or was it something else?
“This is a bad day for the news media,” said CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.
“The larger message that a lot of people are going to take from this story is that the news media are a bunch of leftist liars who are dying to get the president, and they’re willing to lie to do it.”
Toobin is clearly a prophet. He doesn’t think it’s true that the news media are a bunch of leftist liars.
But he clearly understands the meat and bones of the thing:
Americans think the media lies for political reasons and journalistic credibility flies away, cawing idiotically, like a murder of crows.
Unfortunately, the great prophet Toobin wasn’t talking about the Covington story.
Rather, he was talking about another story that came before the Covington story. And it, too, blew up in the media’s face:
that BuzzFeed story alleging that Trump had directed his smarmy fixer to lie to Congress.
Many in the Democratic Media Complex bought that BuzzFeed story, jumped on it, reported it breathlessly, used it as a platform to pump up their ratings and tease, deliciously, what they’ve been teasing for so long now: Trump’s imminent demise.
Democrats were ecstatic. If true, they said, Trump would be impeached. If true, they said, Trump was finished. If true, if true, if true.
Then something happened. It wasn’t true, according to special counsel Robert Mueller. His office office issued a statement refuting the BuzzFeed story. Mueller knocked it down. And so, sheepishly, with egg on their faces, many in that Democratic Media Complex were upset and chastened.
But nature and politics and cable news abhor a vacuum. And on the day of Mueller’s statement came the March for Life, with huge crowds of people, most of them religious, many of them Christian, marching in protest against abortion. The boys from the Covington school, in their “MAGA” hats, were among them.
Usually, media isn’t all that interested in the March for Life. Media mostly leans to the left and employs social justice warriors to protect abortion rights. But this year, with the anti-Trumpers deflated after the collapse of the BuzzFeed story, something happened to lift their spirits.
Those Covington High School students were waiting for their bus after the march, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, with their “MAGA” hats.
The boys were wrongfully and publicly accused of confronting Native American activist Nathan Phillips, because that was what was highlighted on a short video of the event that went viral.
But it turned out the aggressors were Phillips himself, pounding his drum and singing loudly within inches of a Covington boy’s face, and several Black Hebrew Israelite protesters shouting horrible racist insults at the boys.
Phillips’s credibility is becoming shakier by the day. I don’t want to call an old man a liar when he’s playing the hero, but he’s all over the map on his facts.
“There was that moment when I realized I've put myself between beast and prey," Phillips told reporters, rather dramatically. "These young men were beastly, and these old black individuals was their prey, and I stood in between them and so they needed their pounds of flesh and they were looking at me for that."
Prey? That’s ridiculous. I won’t repeat what the Black Hebrew Israelites said, but what they said was racist and cheap and stupid and ugly.
One of the students, Nick Sandmann, was unlucky enough to be confronted by Phillips. Sandmann was provoked, clearly, but he didn’t attack, he just smiled nervously.
But the way many reacted — including media — suggests they’ve never raised a child. If you’re a parent, think of your child in that situation, not being angry, not over-reacting, just standing, calmly, with a nervous smile that was derided as a hateful smirk of privilege.
CNN legal analyst Bakari Sellers wanted the boys to be punched. “He is deplorable,” Sellers tweeted. “Some ppl can also be punched in the face.” [What's 'ppl'? Forgive me, I cannot keep up with jargon and new acronyms - even if 'ppl' may be as old as the hills, for all I know!]
He deleted that tweet, but does that erase the fact? CNN’s Ana Navarro also deleted a tweet that likened Covington parents to paper towels in a toilet.
“Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?” asked former CNN personality Reza Aslan.
But it wasn’t just CNN and those on the left that peeled the skin of the boys from Covington.
The most depressing part of it all is that the center-right also jumped on them hard, lest they, too, be accused of supporting thought crimes.
The National Review put out a short piece online suggesting the boys had defiled their faith, as if they’d spat on the cross. To its credit, the National Review removed the article when it became clear that the boys had been the victims, rather than the aggressors.
[Before giving NR credit, did it at least issue an apology to the boys and to their readers for the article they removed and say very clearly that they are therefore 'unpublishing' the article???]
This is the new debilitating fear in America: being accused of thought crime and attacked by cyberbarbarians. You may be shamed and lose your career and have everything taken away.
Depending, of course, upon your politics.
There ought to be a mechanism that can prevent people from deleting erroneous, stupid or reckless material once they have posted it online.
In the conventional media, subsequent editions of newspapers or magazines may suppress any material that comes under the heading of 'Ooops, that was stupid, and I better not keep it on my record", but your stupidity stands on record in what was already printed. Likewise, in radio or television. You can't really unsay what has been recorded to have been said - and believe me, there will always be a record somewhere - but you can sort of redeem yourself, whether in print, radio or TV, by subsequently owning up to your error in the most gracious way you can without further violating the truth!
Some may say that there will always be a 'cache' of the original of any online material that is deleted after it is posted, but not being familiar with these niceties, do these 'caches' last forever, theoretically, or do they lapse after a certain time?
Something that has worked so far to expose nasty people who get second thoughts and are able to expunge their posted stupidities is for alert watchers to make a screen capture of the nasty or erroneous or reckless post and launch it by mass e-mail to as wide an interested audience as you can reach - the better to make a case, if need be, against whoever launched something into cyberspace that an come back at them like a boomerang... But then, who can really keep an eye on the hordes of social media adepts who are most likely to be guilty of heat-of-the-moment posts that they may later feel ashamed of, or sorry for, and in any case, would not want them to live on in cyberspace?
And this - in which Ross Douthat gets to debate his conscience...
The Covington Scissor
Welcome to another controversy algorithmically
designed to tear America apart
Jan. 22, 2019
In a short story published last October, “Sort by Controversial,” Scott Alexander imagines a Silicon Valley company that accidentally comes up with an algorithm to generate what it calls a “Scissor.”
The scissor is a statement, an idea or a scenario that’s somehow perfectly calibrated to tear people apart — not just by generating disagreement, but by generating total incredulity that somebody could possibly disagree with your interpretation of the controversy, followed by escalating fury and paranoia and polarization, until the debate seems like a completely existential, win-or-perish fight.
When you start arguing with someone over a Scissor statement, Alexander’s narrator explains,
“At first you just think they’re an imbecile.
- Then they call you an imbecile, and you want to defend yourself. - You notice all the little ways they’re lying to you and themselves and their audience every time they open their mouth to defend their imbecilic opinion.
- Then you notice how all the lies are connected, that in order to keep getting the little things like the Scissor statement wrong, they have to drag in everything else.
- Eventually even that doesn’t work; they’ve just got to make everybody hate you so that nobody will even listen to your argument no matter how obviously true it is.”
The twist in the short story comes with the narrator’s realization that several Scissors on the algorithm-generated list have happened already — the “ground zero mosque,” the N.F.L. and the national anthem, the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.
So maybe somebody (Putin? the C.I.A.?) made this breakthrough first, and weaponized it against American society. “Of the Scissor’s predicted top hundred most controversial statements, Kavanaugh was No. 58 and Kaepernick was No. 42. No. 86 was the ground zero mosque. No. 89 was that baker who wouldn’t make a cake for a gay wedding.”
[WHAT WAS #1???]
And now we have — well, let’s call it No. 40 on the Scissor list (meaning there’s worse, oh so much worse, to come), in the form of the videos of Catholic high school boys from Kentucky, in Washington to attend the March for Life, some of them wearing Make America Great Again hats, in some sort of confrontation with a chanting, drumming Native American activist who was intervening in another confrontation between the teenagers and a group of black nationalists.
To understand what makes this incident so brilliant in its divisiveness, you need to see the tapestry in full, how each constituent element (abortion, race, MAGA, white boys, Catholicism, Native American ritual) automatically confirms priors on both sides of our divide.
And you also need to see how the video itself, far from being a means to achieving consensus, is an amazing accelerant of controversy, because everyone who watches can pick up on a different detail and convince themselves that they’re seeing the whole tru —
Are you really doing this, Ross?
Excuse me?
Are you really trying to write one of your pretend-evenhanded, both-sides-do-it, “let’s all get together and learn something” columns about this incident?
Well, I’m — wait, who are you?
Who am I? I’m your conscience, the angel on your shoulder, the real thinking mind you’ve buried under layers of performative, let-me-flatter-liberal-readers piety.
You sound a little more devilish. Or like my raging id, to be honest.
You can call me that if it makes you feel better, Dr. Freud. But you and I both know that what happened on the mall and afterward doesn’t fit that cute little Scissor framework. We both know that any rational, unbiased human being who watched all the videos would see that the initial interpretation of the encounter, the one that inspired celebrities to fantasize about punching a teenager and respectable writers to churn out think pieces on the heavy, fraught-with-white-supremacy significance of a teenage smirk, was totally, completely wrong.
I agree that it was wrong, but the point of the Scissor concept …
No, let me finish. The kids didn’t mob the drumming activist, the kid with the “smirk” wasn’t really blocking the drummer’s path and seemed more nervous than anything, the people clearly flinging racist — and homophobic! — epithets were the black nationalists, not the teenagers, and the drummer told a bunch of different stories to national media about what happened. At best he misinterpreted what was going on, at worst he deliberately lied to make the kids sound like racist goons.
O.K., since you’re my … whatever you are, you know that I’m inclined to agree. But the whole point of the Scissor thing is that to escape it, you need to imagine how other people interpret the story. I can see that the kids were rowdy, too: A couple of them made tomahawk chops, and I’m sure some of them were being offensive in other ways. Also, it’s dumb to wear MAGA caps to a march against abortion; to lots of people they’re a symbol of white-identity politics and a justifiably unpopular president, and the adults from their Catholic school should …
Oh, O.K., so if a teenager wears a cap associated with the president of the United States he’s asking to have media figures fantasize about punching him, to be doxxed and harassed, to have adults from his school temporarily stampeded into talking about expelling him, even to have half of Catholic Twitter, priests included, briefly damning him as a racist? Blame the victim much, do we?
I’m not blaming the victim, I’m explaining why the path to media misinterpretation was greased by the kids’ own rowdy behavior and culture-war signaling …
Are you listening to yourself? The path is always greased when it’s our tribe. The “nonpartisan” media took what felt like years to discover that some of the Women’s March organizers had an anti-Semitism problem, but some teenagers get rowdy at the March for Life — while they’re being yelled at by black nationalists, for God’s sake — and it gets covered like Kristallnacht. Pro-life activists get video of Planned Parenthood suits talking about chopping up unborn babies for their parts, and we have to hear claims about how they’re “selectively edited” repeated in the press forever — but a clip of an anonymous teenager smiling while someone drums in his face is a five-alarm “fascism in America” fire!
You know I think the press has a serious problem with bias on anything related to religion and social issues. But a lot of the cultural right has spent the Trump era wallowing in conspiracy theories and race-baiting — it’s not entirely surprising that liberals are conditioned to expect that kind of stuff when MAGA hats show up. Have you watched any “Hannity” lately, or gone down other #MAGA rabbit holes?
I’m in your head, so you know I have. So fine — keep being NeverTrump, be anti-Hannity, be a scold against your own side sometimes, whatever. Just don’t give me the both-sides piety when something like this happens — and what, just a week after the freakout over Karen Pence teaching art at an evangelical school with a traditional-Christian code of sexual behavior? Can’t you see that our opponents won’t be happy till every conservative religious school gets shamed or shuttered? Can’t you see that the supposed gatekeepers at “mainstream” institutions are happy to play along?
Unlike some media figures on the right, and unlike our president, those gatekeepers also correct the record and walk things back when they get things wrong. And I like writing for people who disagree with me, which requires a little more charity than you seem capable of offering.
Except that they always get things wrong the same way. They’re always looking for some white preppy scapegoat. The Rolling Stone article about frat-boy rapists that turned out to be a hoax …
You know plenty of white preppies are bad people deserving media scrutiny, you’ve lived the same life I have.
… the Kavanaugh witch hunt …
I still don’t know what really happened with Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, and neither do you.
Cuck.
O.K., I think we’re done here.
Done? We’re just getting started. This was only the 40th worst Scissor, you said it yourself. Wait till we get to No. 20, or No. 5. You don’t agree with me yet, but you’ll get there. You’ll get there.
I don’t think so. I’m not as vulnerable as you think.
Oh, are you planning to delete your Twitter account?
What? No. I mean, I need it for my job …
[
dark laughter, echoing away into an abyss]