Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
The Covington Lie offered the perfect occasion for the electronic mob to pounce—after temporarily licking its wounds following the BuzzFeed fake news hysteria. And it did so without shame or even much regret after the fact, as Jason Leopold, the BuzzFeed fabulist, ceded center stage to a kindred serial prevaricator, Nathan Phillips. The latter in his 15 minutes of fame did not make a major statement that was not contradicted by an earlier statement or by the facts.
The entire psychodrama boiled down not to what the facts on the ground showed, but rather who each party was perceived innately to be.
On the one side, the suspects were seen as rambunctious teenage kids (thus easy targets not especially schooled in the arts of rhetoric or repartee).
They were white (enough said) and smiling (indicative of their smirking privilege and lack of victim status).
