Lol, Conservatives

An addendum to yesterday's post, Lol, Buzzfeed.

I said

Meanwhile, the leftists on Twitter are doing everything they can to ruin these kids lives, by revealing their identities which they'll then leverage to try to get them fired from their jobs or have their college admissions denied, in addition to just the normal public shaming with national media support.

Here's Kurt Eichenwald of Newseek, in a tweet that surprisingly hasn't been deleted. I hope you didn't think I was exaggerating about them instigating virtual lynch mobs!

This MAGA thug and his friends from @CovCathColonels in KY, should be identified and denied all work in perpetuity. Their bullying of a Native American veteran matches the taunting of Jesus. But thats not gays and abortion, so the school probably never taught them about that.

I've been hearing that the fake-right news outlets completely took the bait on the Covington Catholic hoax hate crime story. In researching for the first post, I browsed the the tweets and posts of the usual suspects: Ben Shapiro and the National Review. Generally, their commentary seemed to be critical of the media coverage of the event, depicting it as another ridiculous blunder by the liberal media. I did notice that most of the commentary was from late in the story development; specifically, after the full-length video clips had surfaced. There wasn't much in the way of initial reactions. I had to suspect that they had simply deleted their earlier tweets when the story shifted, but I had no evidence and left it alone.

As it turns out, they not only deleted tweets, but entire articles. [I found out thanks to this blog post at VDare, which itself linked Gateway Pundit - the second greatest political blog in all of Missouri.] Most glaring of which was a post from the National Review's official blog, outrageously titled The Covington Students Might as Well Have Just Spit on the Cross. (Retraction covered by Yahoo News here, with archive link here). This was not a post by an unaffiliated contributor, but a "deputy senior editor." The first paragraph suffices for review.

It appears that most of the teenagers in this video are from a Catholic high school near Covington, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. They mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ. “Bullying” is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here.

He compared the left-wing agitator to Jesus, and high school students wearing Trump hats to his crucifiers, and as "evil" children. That is maximum hyperbole. (We'll leave the question as to why the National Review would blame the Crucifixion on Romans and ignore the Jewish mobs who demanded it as an exercise to the reader.) Aren't you glad we have the self-styled leaders of the "modern conservative movement" to counter the biased liberal media? With friends like these...

Bill Kristol - a leading neocon, socialist, feminist, and liberal - took the predicable stance in a now deleted tweet.

If some kid wearing a McCain 2008 hat had been filmed behaving this way, John McCain would have already called Mr. Phillips to express regret. And he would have used the occasion to remind his supporters they should treat others with respect. Will Trump do anything like this?

He's absolutely correct. John McCain could always be depended on to grovel before the liberal establishment and denounce conservatives whenever necessary. Why would Kristol delete a tweet that just oozes truth? Does he hate the truth? He did keep up the tweet where he calls himself a liberal, so he must not be totally opposed to the notion. I've not seen any evidence that Ben Shapiro deleted tweets, but some commenters are insisting he was one of the first on the right to criticize the students and open the floodgates. Shapiro is a guy who gets a lot of followers by saying that the media uses racism as a political weapon, and then piles on to attack any conservative they accuse of racism. His outlet has compiled some tweets deleted by liberal commentators, but spares nominally conservative voices that did the same.

We don't expect anything else from the fake-right news, but what is alarming is the organizations that left these kids to the wolves. As reported from the Catholic News Service,

In response to the escalating fury and disgust on social media against these students, Covington High School and the Diocese of Covington issued a joint statement Jan. 19 saying they condemned the students' actions "toward Nathan Phillips specifically, and Native Americans in general."

The school officials turned on their own in a heartbeat. From Anchorage Daily News.

"We condemn the actions of the Covington Catholic high school students," a statement by the Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School read. "This behavior is opposed to the Church's teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person. The matter is being investigated and we will take appropriate action, up to and including expulsion. We know this incident also has tainted the entire witness of the March for Life and express our sincere apologies to all those who attended the March and those who support the pro-life movement."

They assumed guilt and were already considering the harshest possible penalty - expulsion. What is the point of them? The primary reason to send your kid to a Catholic school (which I have been planning to do with my own) is to shelter them from the lunacy of our government-run schools. There is no shelter from Catholics. That statement did not just come from the school, but was jointly issued from the diocese. It's not enough that we have a commie pope in Rome, now commie bishops in America? The Catholics are more beholden to the prevailing secular religion than giving shelter to their own flock from the raging forces of spiritual degeneracy.

Even the March for Life itself turned on the child victims. (Catholic News Service)

March for Life president Jeanne Mancini also issued a statement that day saying the encounter did not represent her organization or "the vast majority of the marchers" and that the students' behavior is not welcome at the march and never will be." The next day the March for Life said it in a tweet had deleted its original tweet about the students "given recent developments."

The problem with 80% of these so-called conservatives is that they are liberal by default. They instinctively side with the Cathedral, and usually the best you can hope for when they are embarrassingly contradicted is for them to quietly delete their tweets. As I said of the pseudo-conservatives in Media Rules for Conservatives, "all the left has to do is call someone a bigot or a racist and these cockroaches go scrambling to outdo each other in their virtue signaling."

For more on the subject, Rush Limbaugh has plenty to say, on this and all the fake news of the past week, and on the right's prevalence of "graceful losers." We have an even more significant problem looming, which is that our children aren't even safe from left-wing lynch mobs in Catholic schools or at anti-abortion events.