perhaps we should treat twitter like Valhalla:

Every day, we take up our swords, strap on our swords, to engage in glorious, righteous battle to the death with our enemies. Then, we order doordash or Caviar, feast, rest, and do the same thing tomorrow.

@1: Your opinions are valid are are not threatened by additional information.

You knew LimpSausage couldn’t resist.

The whole thing where you decided that the tangentially-related behavior of the black bigots somehow excused the behavior of the white bigots in that video was pretty disgusting, SLOG.
A MAGA hat is a white supremacist statement, full stop.

@5: Nobody's defending anything. Describing what was used as an excuse is not a defense of that excuse. It is a fact from which each reader can derive their own conclusions. Again, your opinions are valid are not threatened by anyone else's interpretation of said facts.

@5 but is it even relevant since the photo is 7 years old and the current students were in no way involved?

@9: We can agree on the correct integration, but regardless of what is the correct interpretation is we can't stop others from interpreting the same event differently. That's why it's so helpful to have journalists like Katie to dig deeper and provide details on how others see the same situation.

interpretation

You know you’ve been in Seattle too long when you can remember Kelly O calling a fashion magazine spread blackface (the models were painted jet black like maniquin heads, which should have a far more damning comment on objectification) and then photos of her friends doing actual blackface came out. That was post-Facebook.

" they come to symbolize all the historical wrongdoings attributed to their kind."

because jeering at native Americans while wearing a MAGA hat during a catholic school outing to an anti-choice rally is not symbolic of the historical wrongdoings attributed to regressives?

That Twitter is toxic does not excuse these MAGA jerks' behavior. These Catholic kids (yes that matters, the toxic Catholic Church) are smart enough to know that their MAGA caps represent bigotry...and hatred...and racism, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia. And Katie, did you not see the video showing the Covington boys harassing women? That was earlier in the day, b4 the later confrontation. Spare us the corporate media redemption for Smirking Scarecrow & his entitled, hateful buddies — who were in Washington, on a Catholic-sponsored filed trip, to try to decide how women should control their own bodies.

@15 from the article: "By that time, however, another short video clip had gone viral as well. This one allegedly shows Covington boys yelling at a young woman and her friend walking by them at the rally in DC. “The Covington Catholic boys harrassed [sic] my friends and I before the incident with Nathan Phillips even happened,” the tweet reads. “I'm tired of reading things saying they were provoked by anyone else other than their own egos and ignorance.”

Haven’t we learned anything about sharing 8-second video clips by now?"

@16 You may not go to a lot of college football/basketball games but blackout & white out games are common.

Utah Utes colors are red and white but they had a black out game vs the huskies this year.

https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900032122/utes-get-lit-up-by-washington-in-blackout-game-21-7.html

@18

So Utah fans put black body paint all over themselves?

@19 google football blackout game and see for yourself.

@21

I did, actually. I just wanted to see how full of shit you are.

If people did blackface we would have heard about it, especially since it was a Husky game. Like @20 says, there probably is blackface in Utah, but it certainly wouldn't have been sanctioned, as you imply.

Here's what Utah says:

Stadium Blackout

Fans are encouraged to wear black attire to Saturday's game and black out Rice-Eccles Stadium.
Ute insignia attire for the 11th-annual blackout game can be purchased at UtahUtes.com or at any Redzone location.
The Utes will wear black uniforms and helmets.
Utah is 8-2 in Rice-Eccles Stadium blackouts, beating TCU (2008), Wyoming (2009), Oregon State (2011), Cal (2012), USC (2014 and 2016), Oregon State (2015) and UCLA (2017), while losing to TCU (2010) and UCLA (2013).

https://utahutes.com/news/2018/9/10/football-hosts-washington-in-annual-blackout-game.aspx

Don't "like"
Don't tweet
Don't post
At least I can
Fucking think

It's amazing to me that the stupid actions of teenage boys is somehow now international headline news.

You know, it's the MAGA hats that really did it. The kids could have been out helping elderly, black, lesbian, trans, immigrant grandmothers across the street, but because of their politics, they are automatically guilty.

Read conservative media (and comments) and you see the exact same phenomenon.

I'm not a fan of the BSAB narrative. In terms of politics and policy, while the Ds have done some crappy things sometimes, the actions of the Rs is clearly in a completely different territory.

The one exception to this is the "two minutes hate" (a very apropos use of the term) that the internet has given us.

Twenty years ago, ten years ago, even three years ago I would have said that, again, the conservative side was more responsible for this, with the reds pushing talk radio, Fox News, and the array of propaganda and conspiracy sites littering the internet. I always thought of blues as being more reasonable, more willing to talk things out with, more committed to the process of democracy.

Trump's changed that. Team blue has decided that the destructive tactics of the Republicans WORKS. And so now we have mimicry of these tactics, everything from a blue "Tea Party" to a blue Fox News to blue propaganda machines churning out countless irrelevant "news" stories like this one that-may-or-may-not-be-true-but-who-really-cares-anyways-because-they're-only-MAGAts-right in the hopes that it will "go viral" (a better word for the pathogenic nature of such "information" was never conceived) and gin up the base one more time in which case ActBlue is standing by ready to take your donation.

It's not just Twitter. The Internet has become a cancer. It's been that way since the Eternal September of 1993. Ideally, it would be restored to the mostly academic tool it was prior to then. But better it be shut down completely than it continue doing what it has been doing.

And of course, it's not just the Internet, that's just the deepest, most massive part of the cesspool. Cable TV is a disaster. Modern media generally is a disaster. These tools are far too powerful. We don't know how to handle them responsibly. We may never know how. In any case, they should be taken away unless and until we can.

1

No dickhead, it’s people like you who are the problem.

Well said @ 24

Occasionally I check in with Ijeoma Oluo to see if she's still a narcissistic, slandering race grifter using grade school intersectional outrage on Instagram and Twitter to sell illiterate books and preening appearances to tweenagers...and yep, she still is.

Volley, backatcha, fun, let's do this all day everyday until the world burns...

Twitter has never been much more than the modern version of passing notes in class. And the behaviors are the same.

Technology comes with an “off” switch. You can use it any time you want. Trust me on this.

To me, the bigger questions are what sort of school - even what sort of Catholic school - would 1) attend the “March For Life”, which is nothing but an assortment of anti-abortion nut jobs that is too extreme even for many Catholics and 2) let them wear those insane hats? I went through public school, and we were routinely policed on what we could wear at school events. The two forbidden shirts I remember said “eat a bever, save a tree” and “think acid, or is it acid that makes you think.” Those got you sent home.

And, most dammingly, where were the chaperones? Teenagers are fully capable of being monsters. That’s why chaperones are mandatory.

@24 yup. In a more sane world, this stupid video wouldn't be news. We've got a month-long government shutdown, a Brexit shitshow in the UK, and climate change issues, and that's just the tip of the iceberg (No pun intended).

But I don't blame the Internet as a whole. The Internet, for all its faults, has been a net positive for society because of the ways you can meet new people and gather information. It's social media that's the problem. It encourages the worst in us. It helped bring us a monster of a President who wants to dismantle institutions left and right, and it brought us a frothing-at-the-mouth Social Justice Left obsessed with tearing people down.

Any world without social media would be a better world IMHO.

@24: It is not the hats, it is their skin color. If the kids were black but wearing MAGA hats, no one would care. Well, Black Twitter would be calling them coons and Uncle Toms, but no one really cares about that.

Literally the only thing the one kid did "wrong" was be white. Imagine going to a school trip, waiting for the bus to pick you up and a bunch of crazy dudes start calling you white devils, and gay incest babies. So you and the other kids start singing your school fight songs in response, and some random guy then walks up to you and starts banging a drum right in your face. So you just stand there, doing nothing. Then the bus comes, and you all leave.

The next day, you're literally Hitler, the face of white supremacy, and powerful people in the media are tweeting about how you and your family should be killed. It's an insane situation.

What sort of dorks sing their school fight song in response to intimidation? Why didn't they just start saying the rosary? They're Catholic, after all.

These were shitty kids from a shitty school at a shitty event full of assholes, held for a shitty cause. (Have all the abortions you want. Abort early and abort often. When it doubt, cut it out).

Pardon my swearing, but sometimes curse words just get the message across.

Every article Herzog writes these day basically just repeats the same point. It’s a fair point, but there is only so much I can hear it before I say: “yeah, i get it. Callout culture is bad. Twitter sucks. Mob mentality and conformism aren’t helpful. Now can we please talk about something - anything - else for a change?”

Also, as banally predictable as the outrage cycle has gotten and as unimportant as this stupid confrontation was, the boys’ behavior isn’t worth defending and the reaction to it isn’t worth calling out. They’re at best a bunch of little entitled shits, and we should ignore them, just like we should ignore the clown whose hats they wore. Now that that’s settled, can we move on? Apparently not, because here I am reading and pointlessly commenting on a pointless article on a pointless non-event. Fuck us all.

I just laugh at this pointless shit. A non-story that's spun into being "something" for the sake of social outrage points.

Fuck, this is the type of shit that will give us Trump again in 2020 or something worse. Has Chucky made his drunken stoned out take on all of this shit?

32

What sort of dork pounds a drum in a kids face?

You seem to be upset that the kids sat and basically did nothing in response.

All the players in this episode are kinda crappy, but the left sure seems disappointed that the kids didn’t act out in a violent way. In a way, it kinda deflated the loony left’s balloon

35

Spot on

@32: I mean, I guess they could have responded violently or hurled back some racist and homophobic insults of their own, if that is what you would have preferred. It honestly is starting to seem like the fact that the kids did not respond in this way is what is making so many of the nutty and ranting liberal contingent angry.

But I don't know. It kind of seems like just singing a song or standing there nonviolently is the wiser and more mature course of action out of all of those things, even if it is a bit too dorky for you.

@32, And as you clutch your fake pearls maybe you should look in the mirror before you call any 16 year old kid pieces of shit. 16 year old kids are just that, kids and not pieces of shit.

Only garbage humans would stoop to calling them that.

cunty MAGA bootlicker

I mean, really, he is still wearing a maga hat...

@35, @39 spot on, as a white male I'm so grateful that social media wasn't around to catch all of the stupid shit i did and said in the 90s. This group think mass hysteria on the left over some bullshit argument by people that do not matter in the big picture of the united states is why Trump will get re-elected. Remember Trump was a big fuck you to the far left and this type of reaction is only going to make that middle finger a little more pronounced. Hate to break it to you but its ok if someone rocks a MAGA hat, they have the right. When the left looks at someone wearing a MAGA hat like the right wing nut jobs do a Sikh wearing a turban all it does in embolden the right and they will blindly look past the gop power/money grabs to stick it to the left. Also dumb kids painting themselves black for a sports game is not the same as blackface to pretend to be black, seriously think about the outrage over that and where it's coming from. We're fucked!

Still not as bad as a 49ers hat.

@39 pretty much anyone wearing a MAGA hat is a piece of shit lacking human decency and/or a complete moron

44

Triggered!

@22 Sorry I meant google "college football blackout game" and go to google images. A quick scan and I saw a few. I only chose the Utes because they played UW in a blackout game.

Hi Katie,
Correct. I am reminded of a comic strip from way back in the day, Pogo. The turtle is talking to another one and remarks "We have met the enemy and he is ourselves."

Twitter and other electronic media are the platforms. We must control them. Alas, Twitter et al controls some of us.

For the record, I don't have a Twitter account and don't intend to subscribe to it at all.

@49 Do you need a red armband with the swastika too? You'd look really dashing and it's only clothing, you know.

Failure to show sufficient enthusiasm in today's Two Minute Hate is grounds for becoming the subject of tomorrow's Two Minute Hate.

Oh dear, I got some of our trolls upset. If only their reading comprehension skills were better.....

I didn't suggest they respond with violence, I suggested that they say the Rosary, which is a Catholic thing. But I don't suppose it would occur to those shitty kids from that shitty school to actually do something in their faith.

(And yes, teenagers can be shitty. Having been one, I can tell you that. It's part of the grown process. Stop fetishizing them, Screaming Into The Night. People might think you're a pervert)

I watched all the bonus footage. This piece is just wrong. The outrage machine was right - these kids are little shits...and racist as fuck. Forget for a second that a MAGA hat is swastika-lite, their conduct was awful all the way through. Now the “Who me? I have a right to stand there” playing innocent bullshit from Sandmann is hyprocisy at its most banal. Trump is justifiably proud of His Youth.

I compared Herzog to Mudede the other day. I was wrong. She’s more like Mass - trying to be even-handed in an uneven situation just makes her wrong.

@54 only a troll would justify calling kids pieces of shit. Catalina, you are a truly horrible person

@56 - Get your facts straight. She called them “shitty kids,” not “pieces of shit.” I called them “little shits.” None of these statements is wrong.

Do kids get some leeway for youthful indiscretion? Sure, but this particular set of kids used all of it up and then just kept on sailing by. By the time Sandmann went on Today and acted like a grizzled Republican selling blatant slanted half truths to the public, he earned the right to be tried by the angry mob as an adult. (And sorry, Katie, the angry mob indicted him after an angry grand jury correctly ruled there was enough evidence to charge.)

Those kids had to have been raised in an incredibly toxic environment of entitlement to show up to DC and strut and flex and chant like they owned the place. If the kids aren’t “pieces of shit,” their parents definitely are.

Where Katie is right is - this isn’t a particualrly helpful debate. We will just pick sides and shout at each other for a while, which will only serve to define each of us as the us in us v. them.

@27:LOL Go back to Twitter. Oluo never mentioned Herzog by name, but sure, we can see that you're Team Katie and also preeeeeeetttttttty jealous of Oluo's achievements.
@46: Yes baby, we know you're triggered, (you are a famously sensitive plant) theris no need to make an announcement.

Screaming into the night dear, it’s Republicans that are horrible people. I’m not a republican. Nor do I fetishize teenagers.

I’ll say a rosary for you.

Whatever one may think of the substance of the article, at least Ms Herzog has shown herself worthy of a role in Whom's Not Dead. Ms Cute, take note.