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Fake News- Kansas Nazi Edition
So while taking a break from grading to look at my Google News Feed, these headlines caught my eye:
My initial reaction was “Oh, my goodness. That guy’s a legit white supremacist over there. This is the kind of story that makes it tougher for us to argue against those who want smear our society as racist and stir panic among minorities and the Left about white supremacy on the rise.”
Fortunately, I followed my usual policy of going beyond the headline and reading the actual details of any news story whose headline makes claims about some horrible thing somebody said.
Here’s the actual story of what this official said, quoted from the CBS News article:
However, Leavenworth County Administrator Mark Loughry released a statement, saying the comments had to do with the fact that both Klemp and the woman [who is black] he was addressing have gaps in their front teeth.
“On several occasions over the past year Mr. Klemp has made reference that those with a gap in their front teeth are members of the master race,” Loughry said. “At Tuesday’s meeting he stated that he and the lady presenting to the Board were both members of the master race due to the gap in their teeth.”
Loughry added: “The use of the term ‘Master Race,’ as ill-advised as it may be, was not a reference to Nazis or used in a racist manner in this instance.”
So not only was Mr. Klemp’s comment clearly a joke, not only was his joke basing the concept of “master race” not on skin color but on orthodonty, but he included a black woman as a member of his “master race,” which makes it absolutely clear he is NOT claiming that whites are the “master race” as the CBS headline states.
You can argue whether Mr. Kemp’s joke was in good taste or not. But you cannot argue that he was actually making white supremacist claims.
This is the kind of crap makes my blood boil. Neither of the two headlines posted on Google News provide any indication that the man was joking, and the CBS headline is demonstrably dishonest and slanderous to the man. The details reported within the CBS article debunks its own headline!
If news organizations want to huff and puff and be up in arms about Trump criticizing them and make the argument that Trump is somehow threatening free speech by revoking the White House press pass privileges of a sanctimonious grand-standing jerk, maybe they need to do a better job of policing themselves and stop slandering individuals like Mr. Kemp on the national stage with deceptive, inflammatory, and (in the case of the CBS headline) blatantly false headlines like this.
Journalist, heal thyself!
Published in General
And here I thought the catch was going to be that the official was a PC Gamer…
Me too!
Seeing as I also am a PC Gamer
I listened to NPR morning edition on Sunday, and they had a similar misrepresentation of white supremacy and Nazi behaviors. They had me shouting at the radio. Their lead up was that there was a dramatic rise in anti-Semitism in the USA, and as examples, offered the Wisconsin boys high school pre-prom picture all giving what appeared to be a Nazi salute, and the man screaming “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump” at the Baltimore Fiddler performance. Both of these incidents have been well documented as having nothing to do with white supremacists or anti-Semitism. The photographer instructed the boys to all wave “goodbye” to their parents who were sending their kids to the prom, and the drunk in Baltimore was a rabid Trump hater. Neither incident was remotely associated to Nazism, or white supremacists.
But with this false set-up, they then went to a high school somewhere in Eastern PA and talked to a counselor who breathlessly and in horror claimed they had seen a rise in bathroom stall hate graffiti, aimed at an assortment of groups, including allegedly LGBTQETC, blacks, and Jews. They then alluded to the current political atmosphere at the top (Trump bashing anyone) as the cause. They talked how they are bringing in speakers to share personal experiences to mitigate the hate in our society, but it doesn’t seem to help with the divisiveness from our current leadership. (more Trump bashing…)
Bathroom stall graffiti is the new horror and bane of society and proof of the evil inherent in having Trump as President. This pervasive bias, and misreporting, insidiously instills a hatred of all things Trump. It is my belief that this constant stream of incitement is what leads to violence in our society.
That would be lame duck Gov. Colyer with an (R) BTW. The 2022 race is on.
At least in regards to this incident, I think the truth behind what happened is a little less clear-cut. According to the photographer and several students (including the one in the photo who did not raise his arm) the photographer just asked them to raise their hands. However, at least one student who did not raise his hand did say that he thought several of his classmates deliberately did the Seig Heil salute as a joke.
Looking at the photo myself there are a lot of boys in there doing what appears to be the salute, which I think does look a little different from a typical “Wave goodbye” gesture. But there’s also several boys doing what looks like a normal hand-wave.
Looking at articles there’s also some fuss being made out of the fact that a student in the front-row is making an “Ok” sign with his hand, a sign which is now sometimes used by alt-right trolls and white supremacists. However, as a middle school teacher I have witnessed multiple students (including, I think, non-white ones) playing a game where they make the “ok” sign below their waist and trick people into looking at the sign, so I think it could just as easily be a reference to that.
Anyways, in the case of the photo, I think some of those boys may very well have deliberately doing the Nazi salute. However, I don’t think this is indicative of anything more than the fact that middle-school-to-college-age boys are stupid and love to troll by doing all sorts of offensive things just for the heck of it. The thing I find most disturbing about this particular story is that the local police decided to help investigate it. Um, why in the world is this incident a police matter?
What I do agree with you is that I think the media is being irresponsible in taking every sort of murky possibly-racist incident and promoting the worst-case-scenario interpretation of each of them as national news stories, and aggregating them into one panic-inducing narrative about Trump and his supporters resurrecting Nazism in America.
So how do you get from “gap-toothed” to “whites”? Is it laziness or intentional lying?
You know, in Haiti a gap between your front teeth is very sexy! Regardless of race.
And in Medieval England if Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is at all indicative.
Freddy Mercury didn’t do too badly with them either (btw, the movie Bohemian Rhapsody is pretty damn good).
This is part of my point, poorly expressed. The MSM is inundating us with accusations of racism in every action. They hear dog-whistles that indicate every person of non-color is racist. We are told that we are unaware of our racism because it is so part of our culture that it is simply part of our nature. If you are white and non-woke, you are a racist or a white nationalist, or Nazi. So we look at boys doing something goofy, without a hint of Nazi belief in their intent, and declare it has an abhorrent evil intent that deserves police action.
I am willing to think that some of those boys might have deliberately given a stiff arm Nazi style salute, thinking it was funny, while at the same time, believing that not a single one of them had any anti-Semitism thoughts in their young brains.
Indeed. It is a thing in the US for young people to get photographed flipping the bird (only slightly less common than a peace sign in Japan). They are clearly not trying to start a fight with anyone who sees the picture as they post these on the internet.
I can neither confirm nor deny that my trivia team and I do this every week to our quizmaster, nor that he actually saved a year’s worth of photos and made us each a calendar. That my wife has never seen.
This is a mockery joke.
During the campaign, some idiot tried to claim that “OK” hand sign is a secret sign for the KKK.
As a joke, one of the alt-righters started using it at his waistline. The prevalence of it among the youth is a sign of the race-baiters jumping the shark.
No one actually thinks it’s a white supremacist hand sign. And whatever few exist who DO get trolled by their peer group for being brainwashed nincompoops.