Doxxing

For a few days, an unemployed, African American forklift driver became the Democrats' public enemy #1. His crime: he allegedly created a doctored video of Nancy Pelosi, making her look ridiculous and drunk.

Ridiculing Democrats has become a crime against political correctness. When that Dem is a woman and a leader, it's a ideological crime. So the Dem's trained hamsters in the media, in this case, the Daily Beast, flew into action, and doxxed the private citizen for his alleged connection to a tasteless video. Rich Lowry comments:

Journalists usually imagine themselves holding the powerful to ­account but now they are happy to punch down — and congratulate themselves on punching down — if their targets are politically uncongenial.

The man whose identity was revealed by The Daily Beast is an unemployed African American fork-lift operator who, according to the site, lives in the Bronx (though that’s ­another detail he disputes) and runs a couple of very minor [conservative] Facebook pages. He had done it anonymously, one assumes, to avoid any professional and personal fallout, which The Daily Beast has now ­exposed him to.

The video in question, doctored to make it sound like Pelosi was drunk when talking about Trump at a progressive conference, dominated a news cycle a couple of weeks ago. In other words, it was a big deal for about six hours, and then disappeared like most everything else in our disposable news culture.

It got several million views and was, stupidly, shared by Rudy Giuliani on Twitter. The video was certainly a testament to the debased quality of online discourse, but it was also quickly identified as a fake, because it was pretty obviously a fake.

None of this justifies outing the man allegedly responsible for it. In a better world, anonymous political commentators could be identified without fear of social media mobs attempting to ruin their lives ...

The Left is so obsessed with the idea that Russia, after its desultory ­social media campaign in 2016, pulls the strings of our democracy that it assumes every noxious piece of content on the internet might have been cooked up in a Russian troll farm.

Even if it’s relevant that someone in New York rather than St. Petersburg produced the video, that didn’t require naming the man — let alone citing an Instagram post of his using an abusive term to refer to a woman who allegedly kicked him on the subway, detailing his employment history, talking to his ex-girlfriend or delving into his guilty plea to a domestic violence charge and an outstanding warrant for his arrest on a probation violation; the man, again, disputes many of these details.

There's a subtext to all of this. Left-wing media doesn't really care about the man or the video. What they want to do is discourage others from ridiculing the champions of their political party. There can be only one narrative, and it must be theirs. Opponents will be publicly outed, opening them to attacks by the Twitter mob (or worse). It's important to note that this media behavior doesn't occur when tasteless videos are made that attack prominent members of the GOP. Not surprisingly, the doxxing occurs in one direction only.

The trained hamsters keep telling us their job is "to speak truth to power."

In reality, they're propagandists who apply their power to suppress any speech they don't like.