Fake News

I’m sure most of you will have by now become aware of the furore over the Covington High School incident. It was without doubt an example of the left going into meltdown over a fake news story and an example of just how vile the mainstream media is in that it is prepared to go to press without doing any fact checking and the leftist twitter mob exposed themselves as evil, hideous people who were actively inciting violence against a minor. And has Twitter de-platformed these hatemongers? Oh, no, it hasn’t.

Anyway, far from issuing a grovelling apology for being nothing more than shit-stirrers, the Guardian hacks just double down.

The standoff between students and a Native American man reveals who gets compassion, and who doesn’t

Excuse me? This native American activist went up to this boy and beat a drum in his face. But that apparently makes the boy the racist aggressor because MAGA hat, apparently. Oh and the Vietnam vet thing – Phillips is sixty-four and the Vietnam war finished in 1973 – with combat ceasing in 1971. You do the maths, which seems to be beyond the cretins who write for the mainstream media.

By now, you’ve surely seen the video.

Yes we have and we can see that there is nothing to see here, but you are going to flog that horse, aren’t you?

On the steps outside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, a white teenager sporting the red cap accoutrements of the Trump campaign stands nose-to-nose with a bespectacled Native American elder singing and playing a hand drum. The teen is smirking – his expression, for me, oozes entitlement. Behind him an unruly crowd – all male, all white, many also wearing the conspicuous Maga apparel – is jeering the elder in a frenzy of Lord of the Flies privilege. (In another video, some of the boys can be seen cackling while war-whooping and making the tomahawk chop gesturepopularized by sports teams with Native American mascots like the Atlanta Braves.)

Against the rabble, the old man is steadfast. In the stare-down, he never breaks eye contact. He just keeps singing. Off-camera, you can hear one or two voices rising with his.

Just as you can hear one of the activists telling the boys to go home back to Europe because they are white – but we don’t want to dwell on that, do we? And we don’t want to dwell on the fact that the old man walked up to these boys, not the other way around. This narrative of the left has been debunked, yet still they try clinging to it. The teen – as he has pointed out, was confused and was trying not to escalate the situation, but again, don’t let that mar you little ill-informed, bigoted rant. The boys were chanting when Phillips came up to them and then joined in with his song – you can see this clearly in the video just as you can hear one or two of them expressing confusion. But, again, don’t let the facts stop you while you are on a roll.

You probably didn’t recognize the song the elder is singing against the fracas, but I did: it’s the anthem of the American Indian Movement. We used to gather around the drum to sing it after powwow dance practice every Thursday night at the Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland, California. Some say it was composed to honor the life of Raymond Yellow Thunder, an Oglala Lakota beaten to death by two white men in Gordon, Nebraska, in 1972. Our elders told us to carry forward the legacy of the men and women who sang it.

Yes? And? So?

When that clip first appeared on my Twitter feed, I could not click play. As an Indian, the fear of a face-to-face encounter with a sneering white superior is deeply engrained in my psychology.

Oh, for crying out loud. “Muh White supremacy” bollocks.

 I cannot watch that film and not think about the youth hockey opponent who knocked me down while yelling “Indian boy!” Or the man who accused my father and I of stealing our own car. Or the Raiders fans who yelled epithets at a group of Native dancers and me performing for a heritage month celebration at their home game. Or the dirty looks I get in many parts of this country as a brown man with a braid hanging down my back.

Except nothing happened here, did it? You are playing the victim card over a non-incident. Native American bangs drum in face of white youth and white youth does nothing. That’s it. Nothing to see here, but you and the left have worked yourself into a frenzy of hate and spite and some of you have incited violence because of your own bigotry and racism. That’s what we are seeing here.

I saw that thumbnail image and thought about the Indian agents who kidnapped and assaulted my grandmother and took her away to Catholic school. I thought about my relatives. I feared that men younger than I still believed us all to be inferior; that an elder who reminded me of uncles, cousins and so many other Native men I’ve met and loved could still be put in his place; that the songs we sing are, to the Maga youth, a laughingstock.

You saw a thumbnail image and jumped to conclusions based upon your own prejudices – and MAGA hat bad. Fuck off.

Many on the internet were moved as I was. But others were not. They saw, in the teens, their sons and their own adolescence. They feared that a social justice witch-hunt was afoot.

Because witch hunting is what SJWs do so well and Twitter is willing to enable them.

There were many ways to follow this story.

No there aren’t. It’s a non event.

They revealed less about what actually happened at the Lincoln Memorial on Friday and more about who has the power to tell the story and the biases underlying how that story is told. From opposite sides of the socioeconomic-political-cultural-racial divide, reporters and citizen journalists followed the facts in opposite directions.

Bullshit SJW word salad. It was a non event. The media and the SJWs jumped onto a bandwagon fulled by their own prejudice and hatred, not stopping for a nano second to do any fact checking and go caught out. Fuck you all and the horse you rode into town on. You are bullies and you bullied that boy for doing nothing other than exercising restraint in the face of harassment.

It is the job of the press and the discerning reader and viewer to compile and synthesize these messy facts and statements into a coherent narrative. And in that task a great deal of the press and a large portion of the discerning have failed.

It is the job of the press to publish the facts. That’s it. Nothing more. So yes, they failed and when Donald Trump refers to them as Fake News, he is correct.

But, as the days have passed, it seems that as soon as the story becomes more complicated – when a fuller picture emerges in all of its messy human detail – the Indigenous are no longer deserving of compassion. If it was Phillips who approached the Covington students, commentators suggest, then maybe the cacophony of laughter, war whoops, tomahawk chops and that smug grin was not what we saw: racism.

There was nothing complicated. There was nothing to see. But, yes, there was racism. The racism of the regressive left who have demonstrated that they are racist when it comes to white people and this little vignette has exposed you all for the nasty liars and racists that you are.

I hoped that this time their empathy was real, that the condemnation could withstand the obfuscation that is always the follow-up story: that the Native elder was the aggressor, that the black youth gunned down by the cops was actually a crook, that the hard-working immigrant is stealing your job. But it appears that a great deal of this nation – including its supposedly liberal Fourth Estate – is not ready to look at the nasty complexity of racism, power and privilege squarely in the face and tell the truth.

Well, yes, on that last statement, I can agree.

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Update. The Guardian really is doubling down on this one.

Conservatives have realized they can construct a parallel reality and have it accepted

No, you arsehole. You people constructed a hate campaign based on lies and have been caught out by reality.