Covington Outrage and the Enemies Within

Covington Outrage and the Enemies Within

Covington Outrage and the Enemies Within

I watched with interest the outrage over the video of the young men from Covington Catholic High School ostensibly “harassing” and taunting Native American protesters in Washington, DC a few days ago. I held my tongue, because I wanted to see if time would reveal something else – some context that the media refused to show. I was right to do so.

Apparently, there’s more to the story than first meets the eye. As my co-blogger Kim mentioned earlier, social media blew up with accusations of racism and lies flying back and forth – before the video was really examined and analyzed and before other videos showed a different story – a story that shows other actors in the mix, hurling abuse at these kids, probably because some of them were wearing MAGA hats, and a story that shows the student whom some have called a “smug, arrogant, self-entitled punk,” standing there in complete silence as an adult beats a drum in his face and sings.

If you want to learn more about why this story is manufactured outrage, I would urge you to watch this entire video (and I will warn some of  you scolds with sensitive ears that, yes, there’s some cursing here). The guy in the video is Dusty Smith, who apparently runs the “Humanist Society of Mississippi.” He admits to being a liberal and to hating Trump, and says he was more than happy initially to believe that these racist kids were simply reinforcing the liberal view that ORANGEMANBAD!

But that’s where liberal Dusty apparently experienced a bout of integrity and honor. He closely examined the video and determined that the claims and denigration of these kids was complete bullshit, meant to stoke the fires of outrage and give terrified white people an opportunity to show how woke and NOTRACIST they are by immediately condemning these kids.

The kids were chanting school cheers, and the Native American veteran was the one who approached them first, not the other way around.

Ooops!

I won’t spoil it for you any further. I urge you to listen to Dusty, who did his best to examine the video and do his research before venting his spleen.

Folks, here’s the thing.

Outrage is en vogue. Outrage is an easy way to show how “woke” and “sensitive to minority plight” white people are in order to stave off accusations of racism. Outrage brings in campaign money and attention to the cause du jour, whatever it may be.

Dusty Smith’s admitted initial reaction to the video was typical of the angry Internet warrior. HAH! THIS JUST SUPPORTS MY ARGUMENT THAT ALL TRUMP SUPPORTERS ARE HORRIBLE PEOPLE WHO TARGET AND HARASS MINORITIES!

Thankfully, Dusty Smith took a deep breath and looked deeper, and what he discovered is intentional attempts by some to mislead and foment indignation and acrimony, whip up emotions, and provoke outrage.

Anger whips up the angry mob, and when emotions run high, politicians win.

Worse yet, these days outrage leads to doxxing, loss of jobs and livelihoods, and outright violence.

Outrage precludes analysis of facts and objective reporting and claims innocent victims.

Outrage gives adults pretext to want to commit violence against children.

Outrage drives Internet mobs to ruin the lives of innocent people because they feel morally justified in destroying the enemy – those whom they view as less than human.

However, there are risks to crowdsourcing people’s identities from others on the internet, and University of Arkansas assistant professor Kyle Quinn found that out when he was mistakenly identified as one of the white nationalists at the [Charlottesville] rally.

[…]

After being wrongly identified, Quinn received countless threats online, with users calling him a racist and posting his home address and personal information online, according to the Times. Exposing people online in this way, known as “doxxing,” violates of Twitter’s terms of service.

Quinn and his wife were forced to stay at a colleague’s place over the weekend as a result of the threats.

This is what happens when people toss their logic aside and turn to their outrage as a source of “action.”

This is what we have become as a society – hordes of Internet mobs, seeking revenge at the expense of real justice, believing that their lackadaisical unwillingness to look past their biases and do actual research before embarking on campaigns to destroy people’s lives is somehow equivalent to real efforts to stand up to racism and prejudice.

Source: Pinterest under CC license

These people sit on the shoulders of giants – Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil – who staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, NC, refused to leave after being denied service, and were subsequently arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace – and claim their unhinged, hate-filled effort to destroy “the enemy” without facts, without reason, without objectivity, and without so much as an attempt to find an unbiased truth are equivalent to the struggle for civil rights.

And dog forbid you disagree with them for any reason! You must be a racist. You must be a less than human, piece of shit that needs to be immediately destroyed – your reputation ruined, your life threatened, your family frightened, and your livelihood destroyed. All because social justice zealots must show how woke they are by turning their outrage into action – no matter how unwarranted the outrage, and no matter how harmful the action.

Racism is about the most foul philosophy man has ever invented. It’s a disgusting form of collectivism that claims something you can’t control – the color of the skin or the shape of the eyes with which you were born – makes you inferior to others who were born with a different set of characteristics.

Racism is the repugnant philosophy of the KKK and the Nazis. No one could deny that. And to me – a minority woman who has experienced racism in all its morally noxious “glory” – it’s the worst thing you could call someone.

The outrage mob of today takes advantage of the putrescence that is racism and hurls that epithet at those it perceives to be their enemy, making it OK to abuse, dehumanize, and destroy the target of their ire.

In “Less Than Human: the Psychology of Cruelty” David Livingstone Smith – co-founder and director of the Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of New England – explores this phenomenon.

During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. In Less Than Human, David Livingstone Smith argues that it’s important to define and describe dehumanization, because it’s what opens the door for cruelty and genocide.

The repulsive racist is the new rat/cockroach. No one can disagree with that description.

But when you call any opponent – even if it’s just someone with whose political views you disagree – a racist, you’re dehumanizing them in the eyes of the world merely for expressing an opinion that’s different from yours (or in the case of manufactured outrage, not expressing it at all). It’s a dull arrow in the quiver of a dull mind, but in today’s environment of outrage it’s been disgustingly effective.

Why? Because racism is something against which we can all unite.

After all, who doesn’t hate a racist?

Outrage gives the indolent and cowardly a weapon with which to target their political enemies from the relative safety of their computer keyboards, and manufactured outrage, such as the Covington story, gives them convenient targets.

Outrage gives the media a weapon with which to foment yet more discontent and indignation to help denigrate the enemy (in this case, Trump, because ORANGEMANBAD and everything bad that happens – real or not – is his fault).

Outrage gives social media warriors an outlet to show just how badass, woke, and “courageous” they are as they target demean, and debase a bunch of kids without context.

Outrage forces us to focus on the “enemy” within – at our friends, our neighbors, our coworkers, and our family members – who may hold opposing political viewpoints or support political candidates whom we find less than palatable.

Outrage tears our nation apart from within.

The seemingly misplaced outrage against the Covington kids is just another example.

 

Featured image courtesy of Pixabay (Pixabay license; cropped)

Written by

Marta Hernandez is an immigrant, writer, editor, science fiction fan (especially military sci-fi), and a lover of freedom, her children, her husband and her pets. She loves to shoot, and range time is sacred, as is her hiking obsession, especially if we’re talking the European Alps. She is an avid caffeine and TWD addict, and wants to own otters, sloths, wallabies, koalas, and wombats when she grows up.

17 Comments
  • rbj1 says:

    Kudos to Dusty Smith for actually taking a second, unbiased look, and owning up to the truth.

  • Darleen Click says:

    The calls to ruin the lives of all those boys reminds me of the Duke Lacrosse debacle.

  • windbag says:

    This story and the calls for violence against these kids is sickening. All those brave SJWs going after kids from the safety of their smartphones. Made me think of this picture.

    https://i1.wp.com/thegrio.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/elizabeth-eckford.jpg?fit=650%2C366

  • GWB says:

    Anger whips up the angry mob
    And, if you pay attention, the Angry Mob is the gateway to Proletarian Revolt, or whatever the totalitarians want to call the suckers in their bid to overthrow the current gov’t.

    Racism is the repugnant philosophy of […] the Nazis.
    Well, technically it’s one of the repugnant philosophies.

    But when you call any opponent […] a racist, you’re dehumanizing them in the eyes of the world merely for expressing an opinion that’s different from yours
    Well, *I* call them that when they’re actually racist. Like Sharpton, most of the top Democrat politicians, Shaun King, etc.
    But, yeah, your point is valid.

    The internet and the ubiquity of video means it is incredibly easy to generate a mob nowadays. It’s a sad statement on the human condition* that we’re not better than that.
    (* And a definite rebuke to those who dream of Utopia once we all evolve into angels.)

  • Skillyboo says:

    What is more sickening is republicans, conservatives, school officials, pundits and, of course, leftists all fell for the lie and condemned the students without knowing the full story.

  • John C. says:

    I never saw the kid’s expression as a smirk, as so many have called it; it looked more like an uncomfortable smile, the sort that you have when you are trying to be on good behavior when a total stranger steps into your personal space, beating a drum, and won’t go away.

  • holly taringsworth says:

    I must disagree with you about racism as “the most foul philosophy ever invented”. A little anthropological detective work reveals that it is simply the last gasp of tribalism among the otherwise civilized. When anthropologists meet primitive tribes, almost invariably their name for their own group is “the people”. All other groups are considered as below the people, so it is OK to do whatever you like with them – kill them, eat them, enslave them…. the list goes on. As humans advanced, they came to identify with broader groups – those who spoke their language, those who were of the same country, those who were more or less like them… one of the last stops on this road was racism. In the light of modern science, which shows that humans have very little true variation between “races” and that skin pigmentation is a result of natural selection at work over a few thousand years (live near the equator – dark skin protects your folic acid needs; live near the poles – light skin helps with your vitamin D needs), racism seems ridiculous. But it is one response of the human need to identify us versus them. Ironically, anti-racism now fulfils the same need.

  • “But when you call any opponent – even if it’s just someone with whose political views you disagree – a racist, you’re dehumanizing them in the eyes of the world merely for expressing an opinion that’s different from yours (or in the case of manufactured outrage, not expressing it at all). It’s a dull arrow in the quiver of a dull mind, but in today’s environment of outrage it’s been disgustingly effective.”

    When you realize that the accusation of racism is nothing more than a rhetorical device to change the topic of any debate to that of the moral standing of the accused racist, well then, that is when you realize why the label is used to often, and so frequently, by the far left.

    The far left cannot win any policy debate on the merits of their position, therefore this rhetorical short circuit is used instead.

    The real remarkable thing is how long the far left has been doing it. The first example that comes to mind is the infamous Daisy ad created for the 1964 Presidential election. Pure, moral rhetoric, and it worked.

  • — Because racism is something against which we can all unite. After all, who doesn’t hate a racist? —

    Define “racism” and “racist,” and then we’ll talk.

    • Marta Hernandez says:

      That’s the point. No one defines it. Racism = bad. Period. And no one actually examines the issue.

      • Russ Wood says:

        Black writer Thomas Sowell: “The word ‘racism’ is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything – and demanding evidence makes you a ‘racist.”

  • GWB says:

    Keep in mind, for so many people, “racist” (along with “sexist”, “misogynist”, “-phobe”, and “hater”) is merely a curse word to fling at the heretics of the progressive religion. Most people don’t know the meaning. They’ve simply been taught that anything remotely bad must be because there’s a witch racist in town. Find the witch racist, and all the badness will stop.

    Sadly, all of the hullabaloo injures the ability to deal with REAL racism when it crops up.
    (Note how hard it is to deal with the handful of real morons in the actual white supremacy movement, now that the left smears all Trump supporters as “alt-right” and “white supremacists”.)

  • Marie says:

    Actually, the boy should be lauded, as he kept his temper and did not blow up at the pushy adult. His eyes were not smiling, so seeing the freeze frame originally of his ‘smug’ face made me think of that. I remember making many fake smiles at that age. I find it hard to understand how the people editing and spreading this smear of kids can justify this. They’re kids, and odds are whatever their beliefs are they would have shifted in ten years anyway. But by attacking them, they will never consider your cause now. And their families… and their friends, like the old Fabrage shampoo ad. Keep doing that long enough, and they will push moderates to the right. How likely will those most harmed by this mob and media want to cut anyone a break on racial issues now? After they were villified for no reason?

    “Ya Gotta be taught to Hate” (South Pacific) and they have schooled these kids alright. The mob will howl for you.

  • Bandit says:

    Proggies are on a nonstop H8 loop – it’s going to get worse – Hataz gonna H8

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