Last week, journalists were played by an invented viral controversy. In this episode, Sandy and Nora talk about the racist and women-hating Covington Catholic School teensand why we need journalists to be better at understanding what goes viral, and why.
Here is the link that Sandy references in the episode: https://sandyandnora.com/episode-47-covington-maga-teens-buy-their-redemption/
Tim Wise on White Privilege and the Trump Covington High School MAGA Mob
https://soundcloud.com/xoxdawit-afeworkxox/tim-wise-on-white-privilege-and-the-trump-covington-high-school-maga-mob
The MAGA Boys Are Racist Brats
January 23, 2019
By Kelly Hayes, Truthout
“In the abstract, innocence is a rather simple idea. A blank slate, unmarked by sin. In the real world, innocence is a stranger concept. For some, it is wholly unattainable. For others, all it takes is a press release. For many Native people, the last few days have been exhausting. After elder Nathan Phillips’s now-famous encounter with a group of tomahawk-chopping, MAGA-hat-wearing Catholic school students made headlines, a surprisingly large number of non-Native people spoke in Phillips’s defense, decrying the behavior of the Covington Catholic High School students. The outpouring of support was striking to many Native people because, while Native people experience bigotry and abuse on a regular basis, we rarely see other Natives experience the kind of public support that Phillips was ever-so-briefly afforded.
We should have seen the revocation of that support coming a mile away.
Even though footage of the MAGA boys taunting Phillips has been viewed countless times, the existence of other footage, in which the boys were crudely insulted by a small group of Black Israelites, was seen as a game-changer. The group of Black Israelites, who, by all accounts, made despicable comments to both Native people and the Covington youth, were quickly cast as the true instigators, as though the boys’ mimicry and taunts of Phillips and his group were somehow justified by the acts of a completely different group of people. By the time Nick Sandmann, the young man who stared Phillips down while the elder sang and drummed, released a statement, many were eager to accept it as fact. The statement itself, which cast Sandmann and his classmates as level-headed angels being menaced by an elder with a small drum, was purported to be Sandmann’s own narration of events, but read like a press release from a PR firm.”
…more at link below
https://truthout.org/articles/the-maga-boys-are-racist-brats/