It’s a now-familiar pattern: Someone reaches national prominence, and all of a sudden problematic old social-media posts magically “resurface” to knock them off their pedestal. Kevin Hart, Kyler Murray, Israel Broussard, and even random noncelebrities with a few too many Instagram followers. The trope is so predictable, it’s got its own memetic slang: milkshake duck.
Last week, it became Nick Sandmann’s turn. The MAGA-hat wearing Covington Catholic High School student unwittingly found himself the subject of national controversy after a viral video showed him smiling while a Native American activist, Nathan Phillips, banged a drum in his face. By now, no serious person still believes that Sandmann accosted and harassed Phillips, as multiple videos show the activist approaching Sandmann and other Covington students, who were themselves already being harassed by a group of Black Hebrew Israelites. (What’s more, it’s since been revealed that Phillips, who helped peddle the original, false version of events, has a record of embellishing his service record as a U.S. Marine.)
Of course, being 2019, none of that really matters to those brave, firefighting journalists committed to trolling Twitter and YouTube for any past thoughtcrimes that might “resurface” and generate clicks.
“Old video surfaces of Covington Catholic students in black paint,” rang a New York Post headline last week.
A few things.
First, the video depicts a few students who have painted their entire bodies black for a “blackout” home basketball game. Sometimes, these “Covington Crazies” would even paint themselves blue! Second, the video in question was posted to Covington’s YouTube page in 2012 — meaning that the actual students in the video are now adults, not the same students in the March for Life video; Sandmann and his classmates would have been about seven years old at the time.
But perhaps most importantly, this video didn’t “surface.” Nor did tweets from Broussard, Murray, Hart, and countless others. Tweets, like videos, lack both agency and buoyancy. They’re not some Bloody Mary-esque spirit, supernaturally bound to appear whenever a posters’ name is repeated enough times.
No, the old Covington video was found, intentionally, by someone looking for something, anything, damaging to Sandmann or his school. In this case, it was a Twitter user from Vancouver. Worse, it was magnified by a professional journalist who purposely chose to cover it as if it were newsworthy.
Hiding these decisions behind the “resurfaced” euphemism is more than just lazy. It’s a subversive, mendacious maneuver that allows both Internet trolls and click-obsessed journalists to foment targeted online shamings and bear none of the consequences.
“This wasn’t an accident,” Hart said earlier this month about the dug-up tweets that led to the comedian withdrawing from hosting the Oscars. “This was an attack to end me … to destroy me.”
Unable to point to explicit wrongdoing, those still looking to brand a 16-year-old as an avatar for white supremacy have now seized on the “surfaced” video to paint Sandmann as guilty by association. The “blackface” video “underline[s] race issues” at Covington, wrote HuffPost’s Andy Campbell, as though the yearsold actions of different students somehow implicate Sandmann.
The episode indicates that anyone reaching a certain level of public recognition now has even more to fear from the online mob. You’re not just answerable for your own Bad Tweets, but any and all that can be “resurfaced” and connected to you.
I suppose it was only a matter of time before the laziest trope in journalism went from bad to worse.
