I would argue that members of the Hitler Youth, which was mandatory for children from the age of 10, had significantly less of an ideological choice than these teenagers.
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if you’ve been raised to believe your race or class makes you better than people who don’t share yours then equal treatment seems like a slap in the face and, obviously, people of the “wrong” race or class ACTING as if they were equal is just a level of “uppity” that cannot be tolerated.
edited to note that i’m describing their relation to the world not expressing sympathy with their confusion about reality.
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I thought the post you were replying to was pretty clear, if concise, but if you want it straight up, the MAGA hat is the American swastika armband. It is worn as a symbol of intimidation and supremacist exclusion. It is not merely independent of, but in active opposition to presumed Christian values. Hiding behind religion in defense of an execrable political viewpoint, and pretending that to object to the politics is to give offense to the religion, is the true offense to the religion. It is disgusting and indefensible. Parents who send their children to a rally wearing fascist regalia don’t get a pass on the claim that their kids were persecuted at a “religious event.”
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I teach high-school and half of the students do that same dance based a video game called Fortnight. They jump up and down and do a tomahawk chop. I doubt any of my students would know what an actual tomahawk chop is. (I’m not in the US.) Not saying they were doing this dance but I would not be surprised.
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Not the same thing at all. The Fortnite dance involves pumping your fist back behind your head like you’re stabbing upwards, while jumping/kicking your leg in time. If these kids were trying to do a Fortnite dance, they were doing a seriously lousy job of it. And yes, kids in the US know what a tomahawk chop is – a bunch of colleges & sports teams had Native mascots until very recently and used ‘chop’ dances at their games.
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"What? You’re disappointed that a BoingBoing editor isn’t letting the preferred narrative stand when the facts contradict it?
That’s supposed to be the other side’s shtick."
Exactly. Let O’Reilly and Hannity use pretzel logic to protect their preferred narratives from facts and context. We dont need to copy their format.
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Smiling smirking douchebags in Cult45 hats mocking a native of the land that birthed them are not excused by homophobic clowns and slick PR spin.
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Fair enough. I don’t pay much attention to them when they do it. When I mentioned the not in US thing, I meant that my students are not in the US but all do this dance.
From his statement
The engagement ended when one of our teachers told me the busses had arrived and it was time to go. I obeyed my teacher and simply walked to the busses.
Yet he somehow didn’t have the wit to walk away beforehand. If his ‘narrative’ is accurate it certainly demands this question is asked: Why did you not walk away immediately you were allegedly confronted by the drummer, if your intent was, as you claim, to reduce tension and keep things calm? Why did you have to wait until the busses arrived / you were told by a teacher, to walk away?
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The main problem I have with this thread is that most people still seem to be very firmly locked into the narrative that there are only “two sides” in this whole altercation, when it should be pretty clear in at this point that mr Philips belonged to neither side. He came in from the outside, altruistically trying to defuse the whole situation.
Those who somehow want to conflate him with the group from Black Hebrew Israelites to fit the more polarized narrative are essentially in the same mindset as Nick Sandmanns mom.
This thread is the most extensive rundown of the timeline I’ve seen so far:
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Judge them by their character, not the color of their hats.
We’re most certainly judging them by their behavior.
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Yeah, warning bells should have gone off when the term ‘black Muslims’ was used when in fact the black folks filmed look nothing like Black Muslims.
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“The Black Hebrew Israelite speaker said:”
FIFY.
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I like cheese.
If you mock a Native American elder with racist chants, then it’s pretty damn clear that your “character” is severely lacking and you deserve to be judged harshly for it.
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Where have I seen that kids look before…
… well, lots of times but most recently…
Yes you are right. We shouldn’t prejudge these people. Those who wrap themselves in swastikas need to act like Nazis before we label them Nazis. Our president needs to say a very particular word before we label him racist. These children who went to a political event, wearing a symbol of hate and enacted a racist chant at a minority activist were just having fun. We can’t know where they stand, what they believe or what their motivations were until they explicitly tell us.
Looks have nothing to do with it. They’re members of a group that are simply not Muslims.
But “Black Muslims” are one of the great shibboleths of right wing fear and white supremecy. Like the Black Panthers, the mention tells you something about these people. Like I said it’d be dog whistle, except it ain’t subtle enough to be dog whistle.
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If you want an example of bad character, try this hypothetical:
On the holiday honouring MLK, whose politics were socialist, a Libertarian cynically twists one of his most famous quotations by replacing a characteristic that can’t be removed with a characteristic that can be taken on and off by choice. All to defend a bunch of right-wing populists campaigning to take away womens’ reproductive right (because “liberty”, I guess?).
The only thing that could lower one’s assessment of such a person’s character further was if he came back with “just joking!” to defend his lame attempted “gotcha!”
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