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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29946 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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Either The Post Millennial is providing a skewed version of events, or a defense attorney just defeated Andy Ngo's civil case against two of his attackers through blatant juror intimidation. I tend to assume the media takes things out of context, especially openly partisan media, but it's hard for me to believe that a lawyer wearing an "I am Antifa" t-shirt every day in court, rather than formal attire, is anything other than a breach of protocol. Maybe the "I will remember all your faces" line was taken out of context, and she was just talking about her photographic memory. Maybe the Post Millennial was exaggerating when they said that the arguments were all ad hominem attacks. Or maybe this really is as bad as it seems.

Regardless, I'm surprised that the Motte isn't talking about the case.

I haven't followed this trial at all and although I'm very sympathetic to Ngo's circumstances in this case (I very briefly talked to him about how to uncover some of his assailants) I wouldn't trust his reporting at face value. He does some great work sometimes (see for example the Wi Spa incident) and for that I'm grateful that he exists, but he still has some bad habits.

From the Post Millennial article about the trial, we have this:

During closing statements, defense lawyer Michelle Burrows told the jurors that not only does she self-identify as both a progressive and an “anti-fascist,” she strongly declared, "I am Antifa" and insisted upon making herself an "I am Antifa" t-shirt, which she said she would wear after the trial. Despite Antifa's significant recorded history of violence, she told the jury that Antifa's unfavorable reputation is untrue and depicted the organized militant group as activists fighting for social justice and civil rights.

Hopefully we'll get a transcript to settle this, but if I had to guess the attorney probably just reiterated the facile talking point of "Do you like fascism? If not, then you must be anti-fascism, and therefore you are Antifa." And also, it doesn't say she wore an Antifa shirt in court, but made a comment about wearing it after the trial.

After announcing her retirement and that this would be her last trial, Burrows told the jurors that she "will remember each one of their faces."

This too seems anodyne to me, especially in the context that it would be her last trial. It's definitely possible that it was deployed as an intimidation tactic but I'd want to hear/see it in full.

Time to re-up my book review of Andy Ngo's book from two years ago. An example of Ngo's dodgy reporting:

I said before that Ngo never explicitly lies in his book. However, he does have a pattern of very bizarre framings and omissions which seem almost deliberately calculated to leave a false and misleading impression on an unsuspecting reader. There are a number of examples but I want to highlight the most egregious one, where I literally got up from my seat when I encountered it. Take this very short paragraph from pg 206-207:

Fletcher is a Portland activist who fought a mentally unstable man named Jeremy Christian on a moving train in 2017 because he believed he was a white supremacist. The incident resulted in the deaths of two other men when Christian began stabbing the people around him in a fit of rage. Fletcher was seriously injured and survived. Christian was convicted of the killings and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release or parole.

Now, you might already know which event this is describing. But assume you don't. What would be your impression of what transpired if you were tasked with summarizing it for someone else had you read only what I quoted? (For the record, the excerpt I copied is literally the only description of this event in the entire book, and I am not leaving out any context.)

If you asked me to rephrase, I would say something like "Fletcher instigated a physical altercation with a stranger on a train because he falsely believed the man to be a white supremacist. The man was mentally unstable and became so enraged and provoked by Fletcher's actions, that he stabbed two nearby uninvolved strangers. Implicitly, it appears that the deaths would not have occurred were it not for Fletcher's over-sensitive 'white supremacist radar'." Did you come up with something substantially different than my summary?

Now read the Wikipedia entry of what happened.

"Some bad habits" sounds like putting it very lightly, if this example of Ngo's reporting is indicative of a pattern.

Yeah, that's fair. It's probably indicative of how demoralized I am about journalism in general because the "bad habit" above is in line with the baseline at plenty of respected mainstream media establishments. I think I mostly wanted to make it clear that I've never seen Ngo actually lie about anything he reported, and how despite my criticism of his reporting practices and framing it's balanced against the fact that he's alone in willing to report on stories other journalists flat out refuse to touch.

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