Fact Check: Does a video circulating among right wingers show something that might be politically damaging to the left?
A popular video circulating among right wing twitter users claims to show someone the left supports acting in a manner the general public might not approve of. However, we have uncovered several falsehoods and problematic themes within the video:
1. The video is deceptively edited. Although the video is a single cut of a 5 minute long incident, the people who released the clip deliberately choose to not include footage of the person in the incident several days before the incident occurred when they were doing things unrelated to the incident. Without this additional context, it’s difficult to really know what happened to lead up to this particular incident that appears to show someone who the left supports acting inappropriately. For all we know, the person in the video may have had good reasons to do the horrifying things shown in the video.
2. The incident didn’t actually happen. Although the video appears to show something politically damaging to the left, an expert who makes a living saying things we agree with told us this is a common misconception. According to their research, incidents such as the one in the video don’t happen, but if such incidents do happen they are generally good and should be ignored/supported.
3. The person who posted the incident is someone who may have politics that aren’t aligned to corporate friendly neoliberal values. People who believe in dangerous ideas like free speech, informed consent and personal property are generally known to be pathological liars and psychopaths, this almost always means things they post to the internet are not true.
4. There is no caption in the post providing an additional explanation for why the bone chilling content of the video is not actually politically damaging for the left. Instead there was no caption or editorial of any kind. It was just an uncut video of something politically damaging to the left, which is suspicious, because nothing politically damaging to the left ever happens.
5. Other things have happened in the past that were also bad, setting a legal precedence that the disturbing things shown in the video are now good. Bad people did bad things hundreds of years we ago, experts say we should focus on that instead of this.
6. Not showing open support for the incident is a threat to democracy and should be treated as such. Any threat to corporate think tank created neoliberal values must be purged so that we can achieve diversity.
We find the claim that the content of the video is politically damaging to the left to be mostly false.