What happens when a white, pregnant physician assistant who just left a 12-hour shift in a New York City hospital is accosted and has her Citi Bike hijacked by a group of troublemakers who are black? The woman is put on leave by her hospital.
That’s not a bad joke. It’s yet another real-life example that proves viral out-of-context videos, manufactured racial animosity, and Big Tech and corporate media’s willingness to amplify it pose a grave danger to society.
On May 12, five people surrounded a woman who had just paid for and mounted a bike rental.
“This is not your bike,” the group insisted between laughs.
Despite the woman’s repeated calls for “help,” onlookers can be seen standing idly by as the throng closed in around the pregnant lady. At one point, the woman grabbed the man’s phone and yelled for him to get off of her because “you’re hurting my fetus.” Instead, he kept his hands wrapped around her body and on the bike’s handlebars while his friends heckled her.
“I’m not touching you! You’re putting your stomach on my hand,” the man said.
The woman was reduced to tears, which the group claimed were “fake,” before eventually taking the advice of a man in scrubs and choosing a different rental to ride home.
It’s safe to say that in an upstanding, civilized society, this scenario never should have occurred, much less been publicized. But this is 2023 in America. Everyone is equipped with handheld cameras with widespread access to social media, and the radical belief that people should be punished for believing or acting outside of the preferred narrative is alive and well.
Ideally, the men at the bike station should have acted chivalrously and assisted the pregnant woman on her journey home, rather than hampering it. Instead, they turned the video over to the increasingly turbulent public square and chronic race hustlers who smeared the woman as a “Karen,” a “suspected white supremacist,” and a thief who tried to “weaponize her tears” and “endangered” black men in the process.
Corporate media outlets similarly framed their coverage of the event around the men being the victims, not the woman, who is six months pregnant.
“The roughly two-minute video starts with a white woman wearing hospital scrubs straddling a Citi Bike screaming for help even though she doesn’t appear to be in danger,” NBC News claimed in its segment titled “WATCH: New York hospital worker criticized after viral Citi Bike dispute.”
Receipts released less than one week after the incident prove the woman at the center of the chaotic clip was, in fact, the one who initially purchased the contested bike. Further context provided by the woman’s lawyer suggests she was completely blocked in by the men who deliberately hid the bike’s QR code to prevent her from leaving with it.
Unfortunately, the damage to this woman’s reputation was already done. In the eyes of the online jury, which failed to consult the woman as a witness, she was guilty of everything they alleged.
As a result, the woman and her husband were sentenced to a days-long deluge of profanity, racism, and hate which inevitably fueled NYC Health + Hospitals’ decision to dub the video “disturbing” and force the woman on leave “pending review.”
To clarify, this woman committed no crime during the commotion. In fact, police were never called to the scene. Yet, this expectant mom who spent the better part of her life “focused on helping others, irrespective of their background” is suffering punishment by her hospital and by the cruel world of Twitter trolls because the default assumption in these out-of-context videos is that she’s wrong just because she’s white.
From its beginnings on May 12, the case of the white pregnant woman and the black men who harassed her wasn’t a free and fair trial. It was rigged to make the victim into the perpetrator based on skin color, not facts. We saw a similar story play out with white men like Daniel Penny, we saw it with white kids like the Covington student, and now, we are seeing it with white, pregnant women like this hospital worker.
It’s no secret that race baiters wanted this woman to be the next Amy Cooper, the white woman who was publicly shamed and fired for calling the police on a black birdwatcher in 2020. Yet, even in that case, Cooper agreed that the mob went too far in its quest to destroy the white woman’s life.
“It’s a little bit of a frenzy, and I am uncomfortable with that,” he said.
Smears like the ones against the pregnant physician assistant are often painted as an effort to acquire justice. Yet, time and time again they prove that the pain that stems from a public smear campaign is the point.
For the people who put skin color above all, the degradation of an upstanding American citizen who cares for the sick and is growing a member of the next generation is a small price to pay.