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Through A Tweet, Darkly
I understand lynching now.
The way the Covington boys were treated brought me a moment of clarity. The fundament for this understanding came not from the left (I know what to expect from them) but from the right. Watching in near real-time as thinkers, writers and pundits that I may not agree with but used to respect go off like Roman candles at the mere hint of a whiff of the notion that white teenage males wearing MAGA hats were everything bad in this world was a wake-up call. Those poseur “conservatives” are every bit as intellectually brutish, morally smug, and ideologically craven as those leftists that I despise so.
First, if you went off on a hair trigger after seeing a sliced and diced snippet of film taken at a political event and published by the mainstream media and assumed the very worst about people ostensibly on your side, then you are stupid. You aren’t bright enough to have gleaned the least clue as to the left’s hate-mongering, smear-hungry, hysterics-reliant playbook. Congratulations, you got played. It did not even occur to you that the March for Life would bring leftist provocateurs out of the woodwork to ply their sinister and dishonest trade. Really? Not even a little bit?
You are also stupid because, despite all your proclamations and protestations about being reasoned, balanced, phlegmatic thinkers, you cannot resist turning your opponents into two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. That’s what muttonheads do. Despite your smarts, you cannot see your opponents as three-dimensional moral agents. You cannot take a digital moment to ponder “why would they do that? Did they do that? What are the odds this happened as stated?” Sad.
Your provided aid and succor to those that would take your liberty, your property, and your legacy because you don’t like MAGA hats.
If you were willing to cast every aspersion upon a bunch of kids and throw in with the rabid digital mob that wanted to dox, punch and kill these kids, then I beg you to take some time for introspection. If you could do that digitally, then you could, in the flickering light of the torches, help body surf the rope over the crowd to string up that uppity black boy that allegedly looked inappropriately at a white girl. Honest truth.
C’mon. Wake up.
I wouldn’t presume to ask you to study critical thinking, reason, and rhetoric. You had to have had all those classes, even if you didn’t internalize them. I would admonish you to get off of Twitter. It’s hurting you. It’s hurting the way you think, the way you process information, and the way you weigh variables. I don’t know if it’s the thrill of being part of a digital mob, the instantaneous feedback, or them there dopamine hits all the egg-heads talk about, but it brings out your worst self.
If you are addicted to dopamine, c’mon down; I’ll teach you how to generate it unilaterally, internally. Because you aspire to be a conservative, I’ll give you a rate.
Published in General
But I am sure they would, very smugly, say, “Well at least we deleted ours”
The “conservative” punditry were so focused on Orange Man Bad that they targeted the innocent for destruction. This wasn’t collateral damage, they intended to destroy these young men. Because Orange Man Bad.
Mongo I don’t think you are helping anything or anybody. Christ said to the fallen woman after he saved her, “Go sin no more.” You aren’t giving a way to forgive anyone and have them improve their work and their character. This mutual suicide/homicide of condemnation and blame leads to nihilism.
I’m the depressive agnostic loner and you are the happy Catholic family man. Something is seriously wrong when you outdo my misanthropy.
I’ll only add that the generally circumspect Mark Steyn said on Tucker about all this: (quote) This is evil! And actually if this is the cure for racism or sexism or transphobia or islamophobia the cure is worse than the disease. Powerful people like Bill Kristol and Kathy Griffin and Alyssa Milano being willing to destroy nobodies simply through this social media frenzy is actually evil.
(Which I can’t stand. It’s now officially become cliché.)
No one’s ever accused Trump of having shame.
Barricades from *within* was my reference here. Freedom of thought – among us – even when one disagrees strongly – has to be respected. Otherwise, we’re just clones wearing differently-colored hats/sporting different bumper-stickers…A sorry pass we’ve come to. Feel free to censure me if I don’t choose either side in this internecine skirmish.
Thanks for the chance to clarify…I’m out.
Listen to the most recent Commentary podcast (January 22) called, “The ‘If True’ Podcast.” Beginning around the 12 minute mark, John Podhoretz analyzes the “smirk” from the standpoint of photojournalism and digital media and why it’s impossible to learn anything about anyone from the perspective of a single moment frozen in time. Journalists, particularly photojournalists, know this, which is why they’ll snap a series of images from the same incident. Publishing and subsequently editorializing about that one shot is inherently fraudulent.
This is work the individual has to do himself. Starting with asking himself why he is inclined to believe young men of his own political and religious persuasion could behave so despicably as to pick on an old Native American veteran? Why? Was it the MAGA hat? I think so.
This incident would be forgivable if 1) a conscientious effort was made to help the boys restore their shattered lives and 2) the attitude which allows the perps to accept the loathsome premises of the Left about white Christian males (in MAGA hats) was examined and changed.
Henry, Christ also opened a can of whoopass on the money lenders in the temple. I’m not saying that there is no room for forgiveness, nor am I saying that those who wantonly jumped the gun on those kids are beyond redemption.
I am saying that I’ve lost a lot of respect for a lot of people over the last three years–people that I considered not too long ago to be virtual mentors. However, I’m frustrated at the cognitive dissonance between what I read of these people pre-Trump and what I’m seeing now.
Obdurate refusal to budge on a personal bugbear named Trump is one thing. Being part of the howling mob that wants to have these boys strung up (expelled, beaten, futures ruined, killed) is quite another. This evolution was disgusting.
Sorry that my outstripping you in misanthropy brings you angst. I have no illusions about the depths of vileness to which my fellow man can stoop. Too, I have never had my joy and faith more uplifted than when I see a person act nobly, courageously, and with grace.
(My own enthusiasm for it is not ginormous.)
Ah, well, I am once again at loggerheads with Podhoretz. He knows journalism, purportedly. I know applying and mitigating extreme stressors. I posit that watching the video to either side of that still shot bolsters my supposition.
In this case, one led directly to the other.
It is past time for the “conservative” punditry to knock it the eff off.
I am betting JPod chose not to take that step (viewing the minutes before and after the still shot). Yet he opines about it anyway.
That smile? Even before the extended footage I thought that this kid was thinking three things. I’m interested in what he’s doing and his culture; I don’t think I should back up in retreat [or recoil in disapproval]; and if I engage, I’m showing respect. He was a good kid in a strange situation. Shows leadership, I think. I do believe that I later read he was actually trying to diffuse things.
They (our vaunted Conservative, Inc. Media) will never wake up because they prefer to be doze comfortably in their DC and NY bubbles. They have much more in common with the the MSM, academia and politicos than they will will have with us and they prefer it that way.
Our Conservative Media hasn’t shown any desire to listen to people on the ground for the past 3 (or 20+) years. How many more pompous, self-righteous lectures on character before people realize that they view us as people of low moral fiber, as rank MAGA hat -wearing rank populists who will never understand the Deep Thoughts of Conservatism, Inc.
The conservative media and many Republicans, not Trump, are the emperors without clothes.
I encourage you to read this thread by John Hayward (Doc Zero, former HotGas contributor); it contains many spot-on insights.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1087723214724386823.html
I apologize for grammar, sentence structure, etc. This is fruitless battle and drains me of emotional energy. I need all of this and more to care for my husband so I think after this, I’m out.
While the MAGA hats were undoubtedly the main trigger, I bet white guilt played a role in their reaction as well. I mean, what if the exact same thing happened but with a white hippie drum circle guy instead of a Native American? Would there be outrage?
I was a bomber pilot for a long time. Did the war thing most of my career.
Now I do Ops Research and when I get the chance, Operational Design/Planning/Assessment.
In my current career I adopted a maxim that has served me well for the last decade.
“All models are wrong. Some models are useful.” It means that no model can correctly depict reality, yet some models might yield useful information.
The model for many in our conservative punditry seems to be “Orange Man Bad”. This leads them to target anyone who might support the Orange Man. This led them to target these young men, call them evil and a disgrace to their religion, and by so doing these pundits acted in concert with those who are truly evil.
Thus, “Orange Man Bad” is not a useful model.
I think we should be a little slow to besmirch the conservative credentials of people who, on most issues, are squarely in our camp. The too-common tendency to put “scare quotes” around conservative when referring to people who are in fact solidly conservative on most matters of policy and culture is self-destructive. Good conservatives can be huge Trump fans; good conservatives can find the man repulsive. Good conservatives can make excuses for his conduct; good conservatives can be tiresome in their condemnation of the man.
There aren’t so many of us that we should allow ourselves to become Balkanized, and so rendered ineffective.
All fair and decent points. But for some odd reason, I think the NeverTrumpers will realize that they jumped the gun on this and do some introspection. I might be wrong, but conservatism is usually based on rethinking systems and ideas that sounded good when you first hear them but didn’t quite work. Thomas Sowell took a class by Milton Friedman and was still a Marxist. Then he took a government job and was slapped by reality. We need to be open to redemption. After all, Paul persecuted Christians and then became one of the biggest evangelicals of all time.
This thread reads like an orgy of the anti-anti-Trumps. My first reaction when I heard of this incident was that it was too cute, the paradigm was just too exact – another Duke Lacross or UVA frat house or Tawana Brawley situation, and that turned out to be the right call. The fact that some of my anti-Trump brethren accepted the MSM narrative because the utes were wearing MAGA hats is unfortunate, but not totally unreasonable. There are punks out there that call themselves “The Proud Boys” or somesuch and do go looking for trouble. They are probably outnumbered 50 to 1 by Antifa and related nitwits, but they are still there.
This is America for the next two years. I still believe in a nation of almost a third of a billion people we could find a less divisive, more worthy, less glaringly unfit – in short, a better man to be the country’s chief executive. I don’t want to live like this for six years,
Yes, and we need to pull more into the fold, which is hard to do if newcomers need to worry about getting hit by internecine gun fire.
However, look at the OP. If we want to hold our own against–let alone defeat–the left, certain demographics of the conservative movement need to pull their heads out. The situation itself was a setup, top to bottom. Chief Dances With Liberals saw an opportunity, exploited it, and alerted the media.
And lots of people on “our side” (those air quotes are for you, Henry) fell for it, turned the keys on the OutrageMobile, stomped on the gas, and hit the nitrous button. From a conservative commentary POV, it was like amateur night at the Apollo.
How much credibility and legitimacy would a Trump Skeptic media maven have earned by doing an hour’s worth of digging and coming out on the front end with a repudiation of the story? Instead, they went all in with the mainstream media.
These cats need to up their game.
The smile/smirk lasted a long time, after a while it became forced. I know this: whenever I see a photo of Hillary or AOC or Trump or Musk or anyone atop a written article, I know that picture was chosen out of hundreds to portray a sentiment that supports the article and draw clicks — it is not the expression that was on person’s face at the moment it happened but they want you to intuitively draw that conclusion — Oh, look how he is despondent at the new evidence of a GOP divide! and all that. This is one of the reasons I hate older rational websites going to the comic-book formatting. When Drudge starts doing it, I stop viewing Drudge. PJ media did it. NR did it. Lots of others. It is Fahrenheit 451 on a touch screen.
And on a related topic, I’ve been looking up all the guys who were involved in the CIA op against Trump both before and after the Rep. nomination, and then at all the guys pleading guilty to Process Crimes against the FBI (confirming Steyn’s “the process is the punishment”) and the wikipedia photos of folks like Papadopoulos and Veselnitskaya are clearly deliberately chosen for their unflattering, miserable guilty-looking poses and facial expressions. If anyone ever thought wikipedia was neutral or not left leaning propaganda they have erased the possibility of that belief.
A picture is also worth a thousand lies.
They have, indeed, internalized the left’s hierarchy of identity groups.
There are no words for how much I hope you are right.
Which is the forked cause of much of my frustration. First that the conservatives of NT have not modeled that rethinking and contemplation, then that we get no credit from them for having done so in reaching our own conclusions.
Which brings up the truly sad point. Forget pro-/anti-T bias for a moment: what is going on in the world of “journalism” (quotes back atcha!), including opinion “journalism?”
I don’t think competent reporting can occur at Tweet speed.
Wait, there’s an orgy??
Concur. And reporters oughta know that.
They try for competence, but they fail. Or they don’t try, and fail anyway.
Arms and legs sticking out everywhere. Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive (ourselves about Trump.)
Sure. Everyone got an invitation.
What? You didn’t get an invitation?
Huh. Go figure.