Deleted scenes
The latest in a periodic rundown of stuff I never got around to writing about:
The Covington Catholic controversy, when the internet declared war on a high school student based on misleading, out of context photos and videos, was bad enough. But until I read this Cincinnati1 Magazine piece, I didn’t realize that the Twitter hive mind initially targeted a student who wasn’t even there:
Saturday, January 19, 2019, started out like any other winter day in the tristate—gray and rainy with temperatures hovering just above freezing—but it was never going to be a normal day for Michael Hodge.
“Normal” to that point in Michael’s life looked something like this: 18 years living in the same suburban home with his family in northern Kentucky, eight years at St. Joseph School in Crescent Springs, and three and a half years so far at Covington Catholic, the all-boys high school where he was now a senior. Interspersed throughout all that were practices for track and field; meetings and events for his church youth group, CovCath’s Culture Club (a cultural and culinary diversity group), and the Drug Free Club of America; volunteer ski trips with Special Olympics kids; cooking family meals with his dad, John, president of a Northern Kentucky construction company; cooking and serving meals at the Ronald McDonald House and the Mary Rose Mission, a soup kitchen in Florence; and a future at Cincinnati State’s Midwest Culinary Institute, where he’d applied and been accepted.
Either way, in the Hodge household that Saturday, “normal” was supposed to be a happy sort of chaos in preparation for Michael’s brother’s wedding that evening, where Michael and his other brother, Andrew, would be groomsmen. His mom, Pamela, an attorney with a downtown Cincinnati law firm, was getting ready to head to the hair salon. The men of the house were watching pregame coverage for the Auburn–UK basketball game while assembling their tuxedos. And Michael was just learning that a social media storm with his name on it had been brewing overnight. Five hundred miles away, in Washington, D.C., a boy wearing a Make America Great Again hat had been filmed standing face-to-face with an American Indian man named Nathan Phillips after the March for Life the day before.
In the hasty, emotion-driven, and oftentimes inexplicable world of social media, this three minute, 44-second–long video clip would somehow captivate the imaginations of viewers worldwide. Within hours, the clip would go viral on social media and the boy in it would be labeled “appalling,” “disgusting,” “disturbing,” “entitled,” “worthless,” “disgraceful,” “disrespectful,” “ignorant,” “a punk,” “punchable,” a “rapist,” a “little s*** [who’s] been told he’s important and wonderful,” and “a vile racist.” That hat-wearing boy’s social media accounts would overflow with hate-filled messages from people he’d never met. He and his schoolmates would receive death threats. And, for days afterwards, a raging social media mob would identify him, wrongly, as Michael Hodge, instead of Nicholas Sandmann, a CovCath junior Hodge didn’t know.
[…]
Determined not to let the incident ruin the wedding, the Hodges pressed on. But while they prepared for the ceremony at St. Henry’s in Elsmere and the steady January rain outside morphed into a torrential downpour, people on both traditional and social media nationwide went berserk.
Some labeled Michael a “piece of shit.” Some tagged Cincinnati State in posts, demanding the school “publicly retract” his acceptance. Others called for users to doxx everyone involved (i.e., release their personal information—addresses, phone numbers, bank accounts, etc.—on social media, presumably so people could harass and even physically confront them). At one point, #MichaelHodge was the number one trending hashtag on Twitter worldwide.
Hodge and his family came out the other side stronger than ever, even using his notoriety to raise money for a local charity. I found this to be the most striking paragraph in the story:
For days, Pamela continued receiving voicemails and e-mails, “ninety-nine percent of them hateful, harassing, just using horribly crude, nasty language, and some of them threatening violence against me or Michael or both of us personally. After I listened to two of them, I was sobbing.” (All told, she’d receive 100 such messages.) When John and Pamela asked Michael to go through his social media messages to see if there were any threats in those, he said he couldn’t. When they asked why, he said, “I have like 10,000 just [on] Instagram alone.” The fact that much of this happened after Sandmann had clearly been identified as the boy in the video and had spoken publicly about it on national television “was astonishing to me,” says Pamela.
The threats continued even after the actual kid in the video (who himself didn’t actually do anything wrong, but that’s another story) was identified. The mob had found its victim and absolutely refused to let the facts get in its way.
But it’s not “cancel culture,” it’s accountability culture, right?
I suppose I’ll give Neville Roy Singham some credit. When he became fabulously wealthy in the tech sector, he never forgot his roots as a young Maoist.
That’s why he uses his riches to run interference for the CCP genocide in Xinjiang:
A monthslong investigation by New Lines can reveal that over the past five years almost $65 million has filtered through various entities connected with people who have defended the Chinese government and downplayed or denied documented human rights violations committed by Beijing against the Uyghur and Turkic Muslim minorities.
This funding has moved through a complex series of mostly tax-deductible investment funds and charities, all linked by virtue of their governance structures to one man: the 67-year-old American tech magnate Neville Roy Singham.
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