Why are pundits continuously exploiting their political foes to prove a point? Do the actions of a select few individuals define the party as a whole?
First off, providing video content of a Democrat or Republican, acting a fool does not mean the whole party acts that way. This should be common sense, but unfortunately, it has to be explained to some. Secondly, when providing a piece of video content that is used to smear your political adversary, it might be wise to provide proper evidence.
Let’s take this past weekend. Republican pundit Ben Shapiro did his podcast during the March for Life protest. In his podcast, he made the following statement: “ no pro-life person would kill baby Hitler.” This then sparked “progressive activist” Jordan Uhl to exploit this piece of content to smear Shapiro as supporting Hitler, or something.
Besides the fact that the whole speech is aimed to promote life for all unborn babies, Ben Shapiro is an orthodox Jew and anyone with half a brain can conclude that he does not support Adolf Hitler. But, in today’s political climate individuals are clueless and post absurd content to amp up the likes and Re-tweets. The evidence is secondary to media figures who are more concerned with smearing those they oppose than actually delivering the truth.
Luckily for Jordans Uhl, his video went viral. With tens of thousands of likes and retweets of people who took the Jewish republicans words out of context. Mindless Twitter mobs conforming to the pundits who promote their ideologies.
Only 24 hours after the Ben Shapiro snippet went viral, a video of dozens of MAGA hat wearing high school kids allegedly harassed an elderly Native American gentleman by the name of Nathan Philips. At first glance, the video looks to be a despicable display of snotty nosed conservative white kids taunting Philips, while he plays the drum, but as more evidence emerges the situation doesn’t seem to present harassment.
Many media outlets chalked the boy’s actions up as racism or harassment. Could the boys’ motives of been racially motivated to laugh at the fragile brown skin man playing the drum? Perhaps, but that doesn’t appear to be the case when viewing the video content. It might be wise to gather all the information before making bold statements of racism and harassment. But rock solid evidence doesn’t seem to matter in today journalistic world because as long as those rude white high schoolers are wearing MAGA hats they are going to be exploited.
It only took the social media mob a couple hours to blow the whole situation out of context and use race and harassment as the focal point of the situation. Media Twitter folk excel at funneling their followers to feat their political adversaries. The evidence is not needed when you have the ability to smear.
Is this the type of “journalism” we want to participate in? Is smearing political foes more important than truth and exposing corruption? No. We can continue to hype over the smear tactics that make us feel good because we despise the ideology but I would rather see facts before I let emotions consume me. It’s bad enough we have millions of US citizens thirsting for clickbait smear content, instead of thirsting for truth.
