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« on: January 23, 2019, 04:47:40 PM » |
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The Patriot Post - Alexander's Column 1-23-2019
From The Federalist Patriot
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The Patriot Post® · The Leftmedia's 'Hate' Narrative Lynch Mob
By Mark Alexander · Jan. 23, 2019
https://patriotpost.us/alexander/60732-the-leftmedias-hate-narrative-lynch-mob
“If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?” —John Adams (1775)
Last weekend, after reading initial reports that a group of Catholic school teenagers wearing MAGA hats1 had a confrontation with a man described as an esteemed “Native American elder,” I gave it an eye roll. Considering the source of those reports, the usual Leftmedia provocateurs2 — CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post — I figured it was, like most of what they regurgitate, 10% substance and 90% fragrance.
After all, one day before this incident, mainstream media outlets had swallowed an uncorroborated BuzzFeed report3 hook, line, and sinker, despite the absolutely rotten reputation of the source. And they continued to saturate their cable and Internet consumers with the assertion that Trump had asked his then-personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie — until Robert Mueller had his spokesperson issue a rare statement refuting most of the BuzzFeed report. Just another page in the annals of the MSM’s fake-news history book4.
Surely these outlets wouldn’t drop one fake news story that burned them badly only to pick up another. But they did. With so much egg still fresh on their faces, their “journalistic vision” was likely even more obscured.
Sure enough, in less time than it takes to say “Dan Rather,” the same mass media that had flooded its outlets with the BuzzFake narrative seized on the “mob of white racist MAGA boys taunts noble native warrior5” hate narrative and buried its consumers in a fresh load of bovine chips.
The reason for rushing to judgement was obvious — it played right into the “white privilege” hate narrative6 too many Americans have been reflexively conditioned to believe. In other words, it had all the essential fixings of a great media ad revenue generator.
These kids were from a Catholic school, so the Left hates them7 almost as much as they hate Catholic Supreme Court nominees8. (Times sure have changed since the Democrats embraced the Kennedy clan.) The students were white teenage boys, whom the Left hates9. They are from the South, which the Left hates. They were in town for the March for Life10, which, to the Left, completes a sort of Trifecta of Hate.
Some of them were wearing Make America Great Again hats supporting Donald Trump11, whom the Left hates. Those hats symbolize the Trump administration’s extraordinary record of domestic and foreign policy achievements12, which the Left hates.
Thus, the narrative on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial was a great fit for the Democrat Party’s13 singular political platform and agenda: “Hate Trump14!” It also dovetailed perfectly with the Demo race-bait hate narrative15. (Last week I wrote about the contrast between that hate narrative and the harmony narrative promoted by Martin Luther King16.)
Of course, the “mob of white MAGA boys” hate narrative propagated by all the Leftmedia outlets was a lie — an abject and incontestable lie. Unfortunately for these teens, there was no special prosecutor standing in the gap to set the record straight. There was only a rapidly growing social-media lynch mob ready to hang them for their crimes against humanity.
So let’s review the making of this mass-media-generated public hysteria.
There were more than 100,000 people in DC last Friday for the March for Life. Many were high-school and college students. The adult leaders of the Covington, Kentucky, Catholic High School had instructed the boys to meet at the Lincoln Memorial at the conclusion of the march. The boys gathered there and waited for their buses, which had been delayed by road closures.
Waiting for their bus, they were confronted by a group of radical black supremacists17, members of a hate group that calls itself the Black Hebrew Israelites. For an hour before Omaha “tribal elder” Nathan Phillips stepped into the fray, the undisputed video evidence18 clearly shows the hateful black nationalists relentlessly hurling repulsive epithets at the boys and singling out two black Catholic students to torment. “Y'all dirty-ass little crackers, your day is coming,” they threatened.
The white Catholic students did not interact with the black agitators and instead surrounded their black classmates to protect them. (I had a run-in with this crew in Baltimore last year, and their hateful racist rhetoric was the real “hate” story here.)
As this confrontation unfolded, a group of Native Americans participating in the Indigenous People’s March, Phillips among them, then approached the boys, some shouting, “White people, go back to Europe! This is not your land!”
Phillips, himself a separatist radical protester19 with a history of fake confrontation claims20, walked toward the boys banging his drum. He singled out one student, 15-year-old Nick Sandmann, and got within inches of the boy’s face, chanting loudly at him and banging his tom-tom drum.
Phillips claimed, “They were in the process of attacking these four black [Hebrew Israelites]. These young men were beastly and these old black individuals was [sic] their prey, and I stood in between them and so they needed their pounds of flesh and they were looking at me for that. … Here this young guy doesn’t even see me as a human being.”
So Phillips insists he was coming to the defense of the black supremacists, who had been screaming insults at the teenagers for an hour. Ironically, he also claimed the group of Catholic teenagers “looked like a lynch mob,” which is precisely what Phillips’s lies created.
Sandmann, whose account is clearly backed up by video recordings, was confused and shaken by the aggression of now a second group of agitators, so he stood still smiling at Phillips.
Covington Catholic High School chaperone Jill Hamlin summed up the incident: “We were all just gathered on the steps. We had obviously heard the horrific insults that were thrown at our children by the black Hebrew Israelites. … I don’t know why Nathan Phillips chose Nick Sandmann. I think he would have targeted anyone but maybe it was because Nick Sandmann had the courage to look this man in the face and he tried to diffuse the situation by not reacting, by standing there respectfully.”
Phillips eventually walked away, and the confrontation would have ended there, except members of the Phillips party sent Leftmedia outlets photos and short video clips of the event, giving an entirely different narrative — one they could turn into a national story. Virtually every MSM outlet reported that this group of white kids was mercilessly mocking and harassing a Native American tribal elder.
Phillips was quick to respond to the MSM feeding frenzy with his “narrative” — and he fed these outlets just what they wanted to hear. He told MSNBC that the boys were an “ugly mob.” He told CNN21 and other outlets, “This young feller put himself in front of me and would not move. … I heard them saying, ‘Build that wall. Build that wall.’ … What I was witnessing was just hate.”
But not one second of the video evidence22 supports any of Phillips’s spurious claims.
That notwithstanding, and having willfully ignored the journalistic obligation to corroborate Phillips’s remarks, The New York Times alleged that the boys had “mobbed” him. Soon, WaPo, CNN, ABC, NBC, and their co-conspirators were running with that Fake News narrative.
Within hours of the initial reports, the Covington Catholic High School and its Kentucky diocese shamefully issued a joint apology to elder Phillips23, noting, “This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person.”
It was the joint apology that gave me pause to reconsider my initial reaction, thinking the reports might be correct. And then National Review joined the condemnation, prompted, I’m sure, by the official apology.
NR published a scathing rebuke, “The Covington Students Might as Well Have Just Spit on the Cross24,” in which its deputy managing editor, Nicholas Frankovich, declared, “They mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ.” He continued, “‘Bullying’ is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here.”
But once questions about the prevailing Leftmedia narrative began to surface, NR removed the article and social-media condemnations from other NR principals. Then the publication replaced it with pieces entitled “Nathan Phillips Lied. The Media Bought It22” and “Upholding a Narrative Backfires on the Mainstream Media25.”
To NR’s credit, both the editorial board26 and Frankovich27 published apologies. The editorial board noted: “In this business all we can do is own up to mistakes when they happen. We apologize to our readers and especially to the Covington students, who didn’t need us piling on.”
Furthermore, NR’s Molly Powell later called out the black supremacist28 who assailed the Catholic boys: “If you watch the nearly two-hour YouTube video … you will see the black men, all adult, hurling insult after insult at the students, for well over an hour.” |
