[Saeko]

Then you agree with my argument, and your only comment is to point out that people who make this argument are also fallible, which is not a contradiction of the argument.

No, I'm saying that the argument is complete bullshit and cannot be honestly applied to neither Muslims nor Covington kids.

Now, about the whole Muslim thing, let me ask one question:

Do you think the situation of Muslims in the USA is the same as white, well off, Christian, conservative, young men, from a perspective of economic and social power?

No.

[Pants-of-dog]

No, I'm saying that the argument is complete bullshit and cannot be honestly applied to neither Muslims nor Covington kids.

Then you need to explain why it is BS.

Mere hypocrisy on my (or anyone else’s) part is not a rebuttal.

No.

Then why should our analyses of these two groups be the same?

[Saeko]

Nobody wants to beat them up.

Yeah, except all the people who do.

But either way, the left has thrown such a massive collective temper tantrum over nothing, that Covington is now a critical cultural turning point. They will have to learn a harsh lesson about uncritically swallowing media bullshit when Trump is re-elected in 2020 because of this fiasco.

[Saeko]

Then you need to explain why it is BS.

Mere hypocrisy on my (or anyone else’s) part is not a rebuttal.

I think I already did explain why it is BS, multiple times, and in several posts addressed specifically to you.

Then why should our analyses of these two groups be the same?

Because they are all human beings deserving of the same rights and the same basic human decency.

[Pants-of-dog]

I think I already did explain why it is BS, multiple times, and in several posts addressed specifically to you.

No, not to me.

Would you like to repeat it?

Here is my argument again: these boys are minimally tolerant of racism if the racist supports their views on women’s rights.

They accept Trump’s racism because Trump agrees with their sexism.

Because they are all human beings deserving of the same rights and the same basic human decency.

If Muslims in the US had the same rights and opportunities as rich, white male, conservative youth, and people treated Muslims with the same decency as they treat these kids, that would be a giant step forwards for human rights in the USA.

But that is not the case, and moral platitudes about equality do not explain why we should ignore history and modern politics when comparing these two groups.

[Hindsite]

Why not deal with arguments that are made rather than sounding absurd, like above. People like you and Saeko can't even respond to arguments made properly.

Maybe that is because you have not made any proper arguments.

Wearing a MAGA hat suggests you're a racist or okay with racists. Why are you so offended by the label?

Wearing a MAGA hat does not have anything to do with race. it has to do with patriotism. People are naturally offended by false labels. If I called you a rapist or a fag, would you be offended? If not, then those labels must be true for you.

[Saeko]

No, not to me.

Would you like to repeat it?

Here is my argument again: these boys are minimally tolerant of racism if the racist supports their views on women’s rights.

They accept Trump’s racism because Trump agrees with their sexism.

It just doesn't logically follow. It's a complete non-sequitur. Also, there is no evidence that they agree with Trump's sexism.

If Muslims in the US had the same rights and opportunities as rich, white male, conservative youth, and people treated Muslims with the same decency as they treat these kids, that would be a giant step forwards for human rights in the USA.

But that is not the case, and moral platitudes about equality do not explain why we should ignore history and modern politics when comparing these two groups.

If historical factors are relevant, and I agree that they are, that still does not justify treating rich, white, male, conservative youth any worse than one would treat Muslims.

[Hindsite]

It just doesn't logically follow. It's a complete non-sequitur. Also, there is no evidence that they agree with Trump's sexism.

Pants-of-dog doesn't understand logic.

[Pants-of-dog]

It just doesn't logically follow. It's a complete non-sequitur. Also, there is no evidence that they agree with Trump's sexism.

Since they were wearing MAGA hats, they obviously support Trump. Trump made openly bigoted comments. Thus, they support Trumo because of, or in spite of, his bigotry.

Thus, they are either racist or they are tolerant and accepting of racism.

If historical factors are relevant, and I agree that they are, that still does not justify treating rich, white, male, conservative youth any worse than one would treat Muslims.

Since these boys are treated far better than Muslims, no one needs to justify treating them worse.

[Saeko]

Since they were wearing MAGA hats, they obviously support Trump. Trump made openly bigoted comments. Thus, they support Trumo because of, or in spite of, his bigotry.

Thus, they are either racist or they are tolerant and accepting of racism.

Again, a non-sequitur. If they support Trump in spite of his bigotry but are not racist themselves, then they are neither racist nor tolerant of racism.

Since these boys are treated far better than Muslims, no one needs to justify treating them worse.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

[blackjack21]

Since they were wearing MAGA hats, they obviously support Trump. Trump made openly bigoted comments. Thus, they support Trumo because of, or in spite of, his bigotry.

Thus, they are either racist or they are tolerant and accepting of racism.

Maybe they don't agree with your perception of Trump's remarks as racist, and instead see Trump as the most supportive president of the pro-life movement. In fact, many people see Trump as the most pro-life president ever and having done more to address pro-life groups than any president that claimed to be pro-life.

You have to remember, not all humans draw the exact same conclusions as you do.

[noemon]

They were, dare I say it, crucified by the media and by thousands of people on twitter.

If a Muslim group were doing all these things you ascribe to them such as publicly displaying their homophobia while wearing hats or clothes or pickets that were complementing their homophobia and "kill the infidel" statement, you would be calling for their crucifixion, too. In fact you would be blaming Islam instead of the group itself or their parents just like you are doing right now with Islam even for the slightest of reasons such as wearing a type of clothing that people have been used to wearing from their upbringing. You are also mistakenly trying to equate a traditional dress with a MAGA hat which is not traditional garb but merely a political placard for fans of a particular political persona. If these Muslims were wearing a hat that supported a particular Muslim leader who was being openly sexist, homophobic, racist, then you would be rationally accusing these Muslims of holding the same beliefs as the leader they are advertising in public. And noone would prevent you or try to defend these particular Muslims as you are trying to defend these kids right now.

But if I had come on here and made an analogy to Catholics wearing crosses being homophobic, I seriously doubt anyone would have disagreed with me on that point at all.

Actually I would have, and others would have.

Going by analogy here, imagine if a group of Muslims in traditional dress had gone to protest a drawing of Mohammed or something, and then a bunch of people on the internet starting saying that the simple fact that they were wearing traditional clothes was itself undeniable proof of homophobia and that because of this these Muslims deserved to be beaten and slaughtered.

I think you are feigning ignorance and have a very bad memory. Muslims merely protesting for their existence to be acknowledged such as the Palestinians are being killed every day without making any display of homophobia and people in here attempt to justify their deaths and you support these people in here. I do not see anyone in this forum trying to justify the deaths of these kids. When you talk about hypocrisy you should start by looking at the mirror first.

We should treat the Covington kids with the same level of human decency we would treat these hypothetical Muslims.

Indeed we should, as you should start treating political Muslim groups with the same level of decency that you demand these kids deserve. And the tradition of Islam with the same decency that you believe the tradition of Western civilisation deserves.

[Red_Army]

People get owned by twitter mobs on the reg. All these kids are likely scumbags because they attended an all-boys private catholic school, but the witch hunt is dumb. Who gives a shit? I guess I'm keeping it going by posting here, but nobody cares about this story anymore.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

Seriously, what the fuck???

You guys can't possibly tell me you aren't suffering from EXTREME levels of cognitive dissonance here.

Yes, they are. And there are a lot of people out there who experience the same.

-----------------------------------

This was an atrocious display of media bias at best and deliberate misreporting at worst. The NYT even wrote up a sympathetic piece about the black lunatic sect.

Hebrew Israelites See Divine Intervention in Lincoln Memorial Confrontation

They are sidewalk ministers who use confrontation as their gospel.

Hebrew Israelites practice a theology that says God’s chosen ones — black, Hispanic and Native American people — have strayed and need to be led back to righteousness.

So they post up on street corners in big cities, usually in predominantly black communities, wearing flashy garb — purple shirts or black robes, for instance. They shout, use blunt and sometimes offensive language, and gamely engage in arguments aimed at drawing listeners near.

[...]

Here's what these "ministers" said:

You can judge for yourself. Here is video footage of the full incident, from the perspective of the black nationalists. Phillips enters the picture around the 1:12 mark, but if you skip to that part, you miss an hour of the Black Hebrew Israelites hurling obscenities at the students. They call them crackers, faggots, and pedophiles. At the 1:20 mark (which comes after the Phillips incident) they call one of the few black students the n-word and tell him that his friends are going to murder him and steal his organs. At the 1:25 mark, they complain that "you give faggots rights," which prompted booing from the students. Throughout the video they threaten the kids with violence, and attempt to goad them into attacking first. The students resisted these taunts admirably: They laughed at the hecklers, and they perform a few of their school's sports cheers.

[noemon]

You guys can't possibly tell me you aren't suffering from EXTREME levels of cognitive dissonance here.

Yes, they are. And there are a lot of people out there who experience the same.

Indeed, like you and Saeko for example:

I think you are feigning ignorance and have a very bad memory. Muslims merely protesting for their existence to be acknowledged such as the Palestinians are being killed every day without making any display of homophobia and people in here attempt to justify their deaths and you support these people in here. I do not see anyone in this forum trying to justify the deaths of these kids. When you talk about hypocrisy you should start by looking at the mirror first.

[Red_Army]

It is pretty hilarious watching people feel bad for these dipshits. If sympathy is limited I can't imagine wasting it on these idiots.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

It is pretty hilarious watching people feel bad for these dipshits. If sympathy is limited I can't imagine wasting it on these idiots.

You don't need to have sympathy with them to see that something is wrong with the media circus. It was actually remarkable watching what appear to be otherwise normal, well adjusted people getting worked up about and even justifying violence against teenagers based on nothing more than a hat and/or a facial expression. If you haven't seen how this went down, you probably can't appreciate how incredibly strongly people, including many journalists at your most prestigious media outlets, felt about these boys and how they were the epitome of the evil currently happening in America. It's at least somewhat worrisome if the centre of society is infected with a MAGA moral panic.

---------------------------------------------------

The Atlantic has quite a good summary of what happened.

The Media Botched the Covington Catholic Story
And the damage to their credibility will be lasting.

On Friday, January 18, a group of white teenage boys wearing maga hats mobbed an elderly Native American man on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, chanting “Make America great again,” menacing him, and taunting him in racially motivated ways. It is the kind of thing that happens every day—possibly every hour—in Donald Trump’s America. But this time there was proof: a video. Was it problematic that it offered no evidence that these things had happened? No. What mattered was that it had happened, and that there was video to prove it. The fact of there being a video became stronger than the video itself.

The video shows a man playing a tribal drum standing directly in front of a boy with clear skin and lips reddened from the cold; the boy is wearing a maga hat, and he is smiling at the man in a way that is implacable and inscrutable. The boys around him are cutting up—dancing to the drumbeat, making faces at one another and at various iPhones, and eventually beginning to tire of whatever it is that’s going on. Soon enough, the whole of the video’s meaning seems to come down to the smiling boy and the drumming man. They are locked into something, but what is it?

Twenty seconds pass, then 30—and still the boy is smiling in that peculiar way. What has brought them to this strange, charged moment? From the short clip alone, it is impossible to tell. Because the point of the viral video was that it was proof of racist bullying yet showed no evidence of it, the boy quickly became the subject of rage and disgust. “I’d be ashamed and appalled if he was my son,” the actress Debra Messing tweeted.

A second video also made the rounds. Shot shortly after the event, it consisted of an interview with the drummer, Nathan Phillips. There was something powerful about it, something that seemed almost familiar. It seemed to tell us an old story, one that’s been tugging at us for years. It was a battered Rodney King stepping up to the microphones in the middle of the Los Angeles riots, asking, “Can we all get along? Can we get along?” It was the beautiful hippie boy putting flowers in the rifle barrels of military policemen at the March on the Pentagon.

In the golden hour at the Lincoln Memorial, the lights illuminating the vault, Phillips stands framed against the light of the setting sun, wiping tears from his eyes as he describes what has happened—with the boys, with the country, with land itself. His voice soft, unsteady, he begins:

As I was singing, I heard them saying, ‘Build that wall, build that wall.’ This is indigenous land; we’re not supposed to have walls here. We never did … We never had a wall. We never had a prison. We always took care of our elders. We took care of our children … We taught them right from wrong. I wish I could see … the [young men] could put that energy into making this country really great … helping those that are hungry.

It was moving, and it was an explanation of the terrible thing that had just happened—“I heard them saying, ‘Build that wall.’ ” It was an ode to a nation’s lost soul. It was also the first in a series of interviews in which Phillips would prove himself adept—far more so than the news media—at incorporating any new information about what had actually happened into his version of events. His version was all-encompassing, and he was treated with such patronizing gentleness by the news media that he was never directly confronted with his conflicting accounts.

When the country learned that Phillips was—in addition to being, as we were endlessly reminded, a “Native elder”—a veteran of the Vietnam War, the sense of anger about what had happened to him assumed new dimensions. That he had defended our country only to be treated so poorly by these maga-hatted monsters blasted the level of the boys’ malevolence into outer space.

The journalist Kara Swisher found a way to link the horror to an earlier news event, tweeting:

And to all you aggrieved folks who thought this Gillette ad was too much bad-men-shaming, after we just saw it come to life with those awful kids and their fetid smirking harassing that elderly man on the Mall: Go fuck yourselves.

You know the left has really changed in this country when you find its denizens glorifying America’s role in the Vietnam War and lionizing the social attitudes of the corporate monolith Procter & Gamble.

Celebrities tweeted furiously, desperate to insert themselves into the situation in a flattering light. They adopted several approaches: old-guy concern about the state of our communities (“Where are their parents, where are their teachers, where are their pastors?”: Joe Scarborough); dramatic professions of personal anguish meant to recenter the locus of harm from Phillips to the tweeter (“This is Trump’s America. And it brought me to tears. What are we teaching our young people? Why is this ok? How is this ok? Please help me understand. Because right now I feel like my heart is living outside of my body”: Alyssa Milano); and the inevitable excesses of the temperamentally overexcited: (“#CovingtonCatholic high school seems like a hate factory to me”: Howard Dean).

By Saturday, the story had become so hot, and the appetite for it so deep, that some news outlets felt compelled to do some actual reporting. This was when the weekend began to take a long, bad turn for respected news outlets and righteous celebrities. Journalists began to discover that the viral video was not, in fact, the Zapruder film of 2019, and that there were other videos—lots and lots of them—that showed the event from multiple perspectives and that explained more clearly what had happened. At first the journalists and their editors tried to patch the revelations onto the existing story, in hopes that the whole thing would somehow hold together. CNN, apparently by now aware that the event had taken place within a complicating larger picture, tried to use the new information to support its own biased interpretation, sorrowfully reporting that early in the afternoon the boys had clashed with “four African American young men preaching about the Bible and oppression.”

But the wild, uncontrollable internet kept pumping videos into the ether that allowed people to see for themselves what had happened.

The New York Times, sober guardian of the exact and the nonsensational, had cannonballed into the delicious story on Saturday, titling its first piece “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous Peoples March.”*

But the next day it ran a second story, with the headline “Fuller Picture Emerges of Viral Video of Native American Man and Catholic Students.”

How had the boys been demilitarized from wearers of “Make America Great Again” hats to “Catholic students” in less than 24 hours?

O, for a muse of fire.

It turned out that the “four African American young men preaching about the Bible and oppression” had made a video, almost two hours in length, and while it does not fully exonerate the boys, it releases them from most of the serious charges.

The full video reveals that there was indeed a Native American gathering at the Lincoln Memorial, that it took place shortly before the events of the viral video, and that during it the indigenous people had been the subject of a hideous tirade of racist insults and fantasies. But the white students weren’t the people hurling this garbage at them—the young “African American men preaching about the Bible and oppression” were doing it. For they were Black Hebrew Israelites, a tiny sect of people who believe they are the direct descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel, and whose beliefs on a variety of social issues make Mike Pence look like Ram Dass.

The full video reveals that these kids had wandered into a Tom Wolfe novel and had no idea how to get out of it.

Julie Irwin Zimmerman: I failed the Covington Catholic test

It seems that the Black Hebrew Israelites had come to the Lincoln Memorial with the express intention of verbally confronting the Native Americans, some of whom had already begun to gather as the video begins, many of them in Native dress. The Black Hebrew Israelites’ leader begins shouting at them: “Before you started worshipping totem poles, you was worshipping the true and living God. Before you became an idol worshipper, you was worshipping the true and living God. This is the reason why this land was taken away from you! Because you worship everything except the most high. You worship every creation except the Creator—and that’s what we are here to tell you to do.”

A young man in Native dress approaches them and gestures toward the group gathering for its event. But the Black Hebrew Israelites mix things up by throwing some dead-white-male jargon at him—they are there because of “freedom of the speech ” and “freedom of religion” and all that. The young man backs away. “You have to come away from your religious philosophy,” one Black Hebrew Israelite yells after him.

A few more people in Native costume gather, clearly stunned by his tirade. “You’re not supposed to worship eagles, buffalos, rams, all types of animals,” he calls out to them.

A Native woman approaches the group and begins to challenge its ideology, which prompts the pastor’s coreligionists to thumb their Bibles for relevant passages from Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. He asks the woman why she’s angry, and when she tells him that she’s isn’t angry, he responds, “You’re not angry? You’re not angry? I’m making you angry.” The two start yelling at each other, and the speaker calls out to his associates for Isaiah 58:1.

Another woman comes up to him yelling, “The Bible says a lot of shit. The Bible says a lot of shit. The Bible says a lot of shit.”

Black Hebrew Israelites believe, among other things, that they are indigenous people. The preacher tells a woman that “you’re not an Indian. Indian means ‘savage.’ ”

Men begin to gather with concerned looks on their face. “Indian does not mean ‘savage,’ ” one of them says reasonably. “I don’t know where you got that from.” At this point, most of the Native Americans who have surrounded—“mobbed”?—the preacher have realized what the boys will prove too young and too unsophisticated to understand: that the “four young African American men preaching about the Bible and oppression” are the kind of people you sometimes encounter in big cities, and the best thing to do is steer a wide berth. Most of them leave, exchanging amused glances at one another. But one of the women stays put, and she begins making excellent points, some of which stump the Black Hebrew Israelites.

It was heating up to be an intersectional showdown for the ages, with the Black Hebrew Israelites going head to head with the Native Americans. But when the Native woman talks about the importance of peace, the preacher finally locates a unifying theme, one more powerful than anything to be found in Proverbs, Isaiah, or Ecclesiastes.

He tells her there won’t be any food stamps coming to reservations or the projects because of the shutdown, and then gesturing to his left, he says, “It’s because of these … bastards over there, wearing ‘Make America Great Again’ hats.”

The camera turns to capture five white teenage boys, one of whom is wearing a maga hat. They are standing at a respectful distance, with their hands in their pockets, listening to this exchange with expressions of curiosity. They are there to meet their bus home.

“Why you not angry at them?” the Black Hebrew Israelite asks the Native American woman angrily.

“That’s right,” says one of his coreligionists, “little corny-ass Billy Bob.”

The boys don’t respond to this provocation, although one of them smiles at being called a corny-ass Billy Bob. They seem interested in what is going on, in the way that it’s interesting to listen to Hyde Park speakers.

The Native woman isn’t interested in attacking the white boys. She keeps up her argument with the Black Hebrew Israelites, and her line of reasoning is so powerful that it throws the preacher off track.

“She trying to be distracting,” one of the men says. “She trying to stop the flow.”

“You’re out of order,” the preacher tells the woman. “Where’s your husband? Let me speak to him.”

By now the gathering of Covington Catholic boys watching the scene has grown to 10 or 12, some of them in maga hats. They are about 15 feet away, and while the conflict is surely beyond their range of experience, it also includes biblical explication, something with which they are familiar.

“Don’t stand to the side and mock,” the speaker orders the boys, who do not appear to be mocking him. “Bring y’all cracker ass up here and make a statement.” The boys turn away and begin walking back to the larger group.

“You little dirty-ass crackers. Your day coming. Your day coming … ’cause your little dusty asses wouldn’t walk down a street in a black neighborhood, and go walk up on nobody playing no games like that,” he calls after them, but they take no notice. “Yeah, ’cause I will stick my foot in your little ass.”

By now the Native American ceremony has begun, and the attendees have linked arms and begun dancing. “They just don’t know who they are,” one of the Black Hebrew Israelites says remorsefully to another. Earlier he had called them “Uncle Tomahawks.”

The boys have given up on him. They have joined the larger group, and together they all begin doing some school-spirit cheers; they hum the stadium-staple opening bars of “Seven Nation Army” and jump up and down, dancing to it. Later they would say that their chaperones had allowed them to sing school-spirit songs instead of engaging with the slurs hurled by the Black Hebrew Israelites.

And then you hear the sound of drumming, and Phillips appears with several other drummers, all of them headed to the large group of boys. “Here come Gad!” says the Black Hebrew Israelite excitedly. His religion teaches that Native Americans are one of the 12 tribes of Israel, Gad. Apparently he thinks that his relentless attack on the Native Americans has led some of them to confront the white people. “Here come Gad!” he says again, but he is soon disappointed. “Gad not playing! He came to the rescue!” he says in disgust.

The drummers head to the boys, and keep playing. The boys, who had been jumping to “Seven Nation Army,” start jumping in time to the drumming. Phillips takes a step toward the group, and then—as it parts to admit him—he walks into it. Here the Black Hebrew Israelites’ footage is of no help, as Phillips has moved into the crowd.

Now we may look at the viral video—or, as a CNN chyron called it, the “heartbreaking viral video”—as well as the many others that have since emerged, none of which has so far revealed the boys to be chanting anything about a wall or about making America great again. Phillips keeps walking into the group, they make room for him, and then—the smiling boy. One of the videos shows him doing something unusual. At one point he turns away from Phillips, stops smiling, and locks eyes with another kid, shaking his head, seeming to say the word no. This is consistent with the long, harrowing statement that the smiling boy would release at the end of the weekend, in which he offered an explanation for his actions that is consistent with the video footage that has so far emerged, and revealed what happened to him in the 48 hours after Americans set to work doxing him and threatening his family with violence. As of this writing, it seems that the smiling boy, Nick Sandmann, is the one person who tried to be respectful of Phillips and who encouraged the other boys to do the same. And for this, he has been by far the most harshly treated of any of the people involved in the afternoon’s mess at the Lincoln Memorial.

I recommend that you watch the whole of the Black Hebrew Israelites’ video, which includes a long, interesting passage, in which the Covington Catholic boys engage in a mostly thoughtful conversation with the Black Hebrew Israelite preacher. Throughout the conversation, they disrespect him only once—to boo him when he says something vile about gays and lesbians. (Also interesting is the section at the very end of the video, in which—after the boys have left—the Black Hebrew Israelites are approached by some police officers. The preacher had previously spent time castigating police and “the penal code,” so I thought this would be a lively exchange, but the Israelites treat the cops with tremendous courtesy and gratitude, and when they leave the pastor describes them as “angels.” So let that be a lesson about the inadvisability of thinking you can predict how an exchange with a Black Hebrew Israelite will end up.)

I have watched every bit of video I can find of the event, although more keep appearing. I have found several things that various of the boys did and said that are ugly, or rude, or racist. Some boys did a tomahawk chop when Phillips walked into their group. There is a short video of a group that seems to be from the high school verbally harassing two young women as the women walk past it. In terms of the school itself, Covington Catholic High School apparently has a game-day tradition of students painting their skin black for “black-out days,” but any attempt by the school to cast this as innocent fun is undercut by a photograph of a white kid in black body paint leering at a black player on an opposing team.

I would not be surprised if more videos of this kind turn up, or if more troubling information about the school emerges, but it will by then be irrelevant, as the elite media have botched the story so completely that they have lost the authority to report on it. By Tuesday, The New York Times was busy absorbing the fact that Phillips was not, apparently, a Vietnam veteran, as it had originally reported, and it issued a correction saying that it had contacted the Pentagon for his military record, suggesting that it no longer trusts him as a source of reliable information.

How could the elite media—The New York Times, let’s say—have protected themselves from this event, which has served to reinforce millions of Americans’ belief that traditional journalistic outlets are purveyors of “fake news”? They might have hewed to a concept that once went by the quaint term “journalistic ethics.” Among other things, journalistic ethics held that if you didn’t have the reporting to support a story, and if that story had the potential to hurt its subjects, and if those subjects were private citizens, and if they were moreover minors, you didn’t run the story. You kept reporting it; you let yourself get scooped; and you accepted that speed is not the highest value. Otherwise, you were the trash press.

At 8:30 yesterday morning, as I was typing this essay, The New York Times emailed me. The subject line was “Ethics Reminders for Freelance Journalists.” (I have occasionally published essays and reviews in the Times). It informed me, inter alia, that the Times expected all of its journalists, both freelance and staff, “to protect the integrity and credibility of Times journalism.” This meant, in part, safeguarding the Times’ “reputation for fairness and impartiality.”

I am prompted to issue my own ethics reminders for The New York Times. Here they are: You were partly responsible for the election of Trump because you are the most influential newspaper in the country, and you are not fair or impartial. Millions of Americans believe you hate them and that you will casually harm them. Two years ago, they fought back against you, and they won. If Trump wins again, you will once again have played a small but important role in that victory.

[Pants-of-dog]

Again, a non-sequitur. If they support Trump in spite of his bigotry but are not racist themselves, then they are neither racist nor tolerant of racism.

If you support a racist person despite their racism, you are tolerating and accepting their racism.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

I never said they did.

Instead, I pointed out that these boys are being treated far better than Muslims are being treated.

[skinster]

So once again you make another vague accusation of Islamophobia but fail to actually cite any specific examples of such. Islam may not be directly relevant to the news story but it is relevant to my argument about the events of the news story, and that's all the relevance I need. You guys can keep dodging the analogy all you want, but it just proves my point.

It's not a vague accusation of Islamophobia since you've admitted that you have a problem with Muslims and obvious also since you brought that group into a thread that has nothing to do with them. Own that shit, Saeko. I mean, why act coy now? You're usually quite edgy aren't you, has that diminished some now that Rei ain't here?

Maybe that is because you have not made any proper arguments.

Ugh, you addressed it in the next post.

Wearing a MAGA hat does not have anything to do with race. it has to do with patriotism.

No, it's not just about patriotism unless you can prove to me all Trump's supporters voted for him because they're patriotic Americans.

If Trump on his campaign trail said "ban the Jews from America and Christians are child-rapists" where everyone was wearing these dumb hats, would you still be wearing one?

[Red_Army]

@Kaiserschmarrn this happens literally every day about everything. You only noticed it this time because you're right wing. People get enraged and upset on the internet every second of the day because everyone is a dipshit now. The internet has broken all of our brains.