Last night on Twitter, I observed what appeared to me, another orchestrated Dem spin mob smear operation, very similar to the Covington Catholic kids and that Native American protester/Vet, Nathan Phillips viral video attack smearing the Covington Catholic boys as racists. This time the video and photos circulating on Twitter were of a white cadet at the Army-Navy football game, making a hand sign of what used to be the “Okay” hand sign, but is now hyped as being a “white power symbol.”
The hand sign was captured on a news report, as the cadet was right behind the reporter. The interesting part of this is how this liberal social media mob attack progressed in a matter of hours from some anonymous Twitter accounts launching the photos and video narrative, to a full-blown news event, with major news organizations putting out stories about this cadet and West Point and Annapolis announcing they are investigating “the incident.”
All of this stemmed from some leftist activists spinning up a video and still photos of that cadet and framing it as a racist incident.
One of the big “amplifiers” (the term the info war expert crowd uses) BrooklynDad_Defiant, who has some big name followers among his 353,000+ following, like Cory Booker, Donna Brazile, Carolyn Maloney, Van Jones, and Ari Melber, racked up 12,500 retweets of his version of this cadet incident:
By late last night a DCExaminer reporter, Jerry Dunleavy tweeted:
And today several MSNBC mouthpieces were hyping this cadet story.
It only took a few hours for a liberal social media outrage spin effort to generate a media “scandal” and get officials at two service academies to bow down and launch investigations, all before anyone even talked to this poor cadet, who has now been publicly labeled a racist.
Why aren’t journalists investigating these partisan, orchestrated Twitter spin smear attacks?
libertybelle diaries 
“Why aren’t journalists investigating these partisan, orchestrated Twitter spin smear attacks?”
It’s of a piece to go alongside that NYT ‘1619’ narrative certain quarters are invested in. Goes right along with what those quarters’ intended goal of “ginning up the base.”
That they don’t recognize they’re now full team-mates in what they purported to be so outraged about viz, The Russians are intent on sowing discord! is, in a word, deplorable.
What a year, JK. And West Point completed the hand sign investigation – they were playing the circle game, not making white supremacy hand signs: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/army-navy-attendees-were-playing-game-not-making-white-power-n1105926
I wanted to write a blog post today, but it’s been a long day of this caregiver stuff and couldn’t concentrate on writing.
Charles Cooke at NRO wrote an article that sums up most of the mainstream media, not just CNN and much of what’s on FOX is just Trump TV, so we’re screwed with actual straight news reporting in America: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/12/31/cnn-is-not-a-news-network/
I saw the NRO piece yesterday (and posted to a thread over on Duff’s).
Something else I just happened upon and though aware neither of us are overly fond of FOX I’m thinking the Watters guy makes a fair point – “If [some scam] happens where the media gets hoaxed into thinking blue ties are racist what then?” In two, two minute videos:
https://dailycaller.com/2019/12/20/jesse-watters-juan-williams-west-point-cadets-racism/
This cadet hand sign bs was very similar to the Covington Catholic Twitter spin attack and many of the same blue checkmark liberal media/NeverTrump people leaped on this story and “amplified” it into an alleged white nationalist scandal. And just like in the Covington smear campaign, very few of the people who worked hard to “amplify” the smear, without any evidence, took any responsibility for the ensuing horror for that boy and his family – death threats, that school closed for several days too due to the threats. All over a deliberate spin smear campaign.
You’re right of course. Only thing I wish different is when it’s kids (children) “forced” … whether that deserves quotes – well you know – anyway where there’s kids who are the subject of this sort of stuff only adults ‘might be’ justifiably smeared.
Especially the “without any evidence” assignation of motive especially.
One would think “us adults” would know better.
I’m coming to think (and I suspect you already have) Twitter is a scourge on humanity. No redeeming features as far as I’m concerned.
JK, Humans probably haven’t evolved enough to handle the internet yet, but here we are.
I mentioned that Hoopla Digital, free audiobooks and ebooks through my local library, before and I’m loving it. I just listened to an audiobook, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, by Ori Brafman, which got me thinking about many of these online behaviors, including the spin networks, in a much different way. This author teamed up with Martin Dempsey to write a book, Radical Inclusion, which I just started reading the ebook (also free on my Hoopla) expanding on some of the ideas in the Starfish/Spider book. These leaderless organizations thrive in the online environment, but Brafman puts forth a lot of interesting history to explain his theories. Definitely a book that made me think differently about a lot of these online orgs, communities, and most of all networks of people.
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