Free Republic

FULL TITLE: Los Angeles DJ Calls For Covington Catholic School to be Burned Down – With Kids Locked Inside – TWITTER SAYS HE DIDN’T VIOLATE RULES ================================================================== Michael Buchanan, who goes by the stage name ‘House Shoes,’ is a Detroit-born hip hop producer and DJ working and living in Los Angeles who made a series of terrorist threats from his bluecheck, verified Twitter account over the weekend. Mr. Buchanan, 45, took to his Twitter account this weekend and called for the Covington Catholic children to be burned alive: “LOCK THE KIDS IN THE SCHOOL AND BURN THAT BITCH TO THE...

It appears that most of the teenagers in this video are from a Catholic high school near Covington, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. They mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ. “Bullying” is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here. For some of us, the gospel stories of Jesus’s passion and death are so familiar we no longer hear them. The evangelists are terse in their descriptions of the humiliations heaped on Jesus in the final hours before his...

Here's a rule of thumb I came up with a few years back, and maybe you've noticed it too: By the time I learn enough about a huge news story to realize I don't care, it turns out to be bull$#!+ anyway. The press latches onto something, focuses on it like a laser, and then it turns out to be nothing. This keeps happening, again and again. And over the weekend, it happened twice in as many days. First, BuzzFeed gave us the impeachment-justifying scoop of the century that, er... wasn't. The bombshell was a bust. Then, for some reason,...

Next time there’s a viral story, I’ll wait for more facts to emerge. ... If the Covington Catholic incident was a test, it’s one I failed—along with most others. Will we learn from it, or will we continue to roam social media, looking for the next outrage fix? Next time a story like this surfaces, I’ll try to sit it out until more facts have emerged. I’ll remind myself that the truth is sometimes unknowable, and I’ll stick to discussing the news with people I know in real life, instead of with strangers whom I’ve never met. I’ll get my...

In the hours and days since those first snapshots of the encounter made the rounds, however, it has become crystal clear that the original narrative was hugely misleading. Additional videos from different angles began to emerge, proving that the students did not swarm or try to block the drum-toting man; rather, he proactively approached them. We also learned that a small group of African-American men were hurling racial and homophobic insults at the boys, singling out the small number of non-white students in the group for especially grotesque abuse (including creepily telling a black student that his classmates would harvest...

One aspect of the Covington controversy has received very little coverage, let alone condemnation: the outright racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism of the (very small) black-nationalist group confronting the teenagers. If you watch the nearly two-hour YouTube video, filmed by a man who seems to be a member of the Black Israelites, you will see the black men, all adult, hurling insult after insult at the students, for well over an hour. It seems accidental that the students and the black nationalists are at the same spot on the mall — the former waiting for their buses back to Kentucky and...