Breitbart and Fox News Save [A] Christmas [Carol]!

3) We know that Breitbart ran a story on the cancellation of A Christmas Carol, blaming the family, with a nativity picture in a church. pic.twitter.com/NsxrkSMO2Y

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) December 23, 2016

A few days ago, would-be theocrat Todd Starnes, a Fox News Christianist pundit, published and performed an inflammatory segment about a school district canceling A Christmas Carol due to complaints from local families over its reference to God. He picked it up from local news alleging the family was responsible, something the principal has denied. Although Starnes noted that the principal blamed time away from curriculum (thus allowing a dig at Common Core too) late in the article, he led with "Parents told local reporters the play was canceled because two parents complained about a line in the Charles Dickens holiday classic."

Breitbart picked up the story and intensified the violence by putting up a picture of a Nativity Play in a church for a story about A Christmas Carol. Their article further projects this story as an attack on Christianity by two intolerant parents and a wimpy school official.

Neither the Fox News nor Breitbart story identifies the parents or speculates as to their religion. Both, however, clearly intended to target their two parents, while remaining within the realm of legally defensible journalism. The art accompanying the Breitbart story is particularly offensive.

The local online paper, Lancaster Online, ran a story about the family - who turn out to be a Jewish couple - "fleeing" town after reading comments in Breitbart demanding they be identified. Here's the key direct quote:

The Jewish student’s parents say some of the reactions to the stories frightened them.

After seeing reader comments like “It would be nice if we had the addresses of those concerned citizens and, I bet, this info is known to people living in the area” on the Breitbart story, the parents pulled their child out of school and headed out of the area for a bit.

“There’s no way we’re going to take a chance after the pizza incident,” they said, referencing the man who fired an assault rifle in a Washington D.C area pizzeria after reading a fake-news story that said Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of there.

UPDATE: See below for Lancaster Online's response to the ADL's statement.

That quote flew wildly around the internet. It was a direct quote from a reporter on the ground, which is pretty much what journalists take as truth. Then later, the Anti-Defamation League issued this statement, calling the allegations of a family fleeing untrue and damaging.

“News reports alleging that a Jewish family has ‘fled’ Lancaster County are untrue and damaging,” said Nancy Baron-Baer, ADL Regional Director. “We spoke with the family, who explained that they went on a previously-planned vacation for the holidays. Stories like this can sow fear in the Jewish community and beyond, and it is important to stop the spread of misinformation.

It is striking that the ADL does not reference the Fox or Breitbart stories. The statement comes across as angry at the idea that Jews might flee, while ignoring the inciting incidents. Moreover, there is a clear conflict between the direct quotes from the family and the indirect quotes here.

So what happened? 

Here's what I do know.

1. The news stories were inflammatory, and deliberately so.
2. The family left town.
3. The local reporter has a direct quote.
4. The ADL has an indirect quote.
5. Anyone who takes the ADL's statement as simple truth, ignoring points 1-4, is making a mistake.

UPDATED 12/24 7:00 AM - Confirmed the family left town one day early over concerns about local harassment. Is that "fleeing?" We are in a semantic debate here, but the ADL statement had such power, generating all kinds of FAKE NEWS headlines and tweets from major reporters, that forever this incident is going to be about motivations for leaving town - were they just worried or afraid - and not about the harassment. 

The premise of the story is that the family became aware of increasingly hostile comments on Breitbart, so yesterday I spent a few hours reading the 1200 comments or so on the story. I tweeted, with screenshots, a tiny fraction of what I found, mostly under the hashtag #BreitbartComments. They were super interesting. Hundreds of anti-Muslim comments before the focus intensifies on Jews. Whole strings of debates about the Crusades, about how feminists are ugly, about whether God exists (there's an atheist, and not a nice one, trolling in there). Hundreds of comments wondering why the rights of minorities should be protected over the will of the majority. And a distinct set of comments demanding the complainers be identified, with some direct and indirect threats of violence.

Here is a key example:

This is the tweet that allegedly got the family spooked. pic.twitter.com/C6t51J0VfE

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) December 23, 2016

Direct call for violence - "smoke the b'stardz" - against the Lancaster Jewish family in #BreitbartComments pic.twitter.com/mCbbmrI25F

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) December 23, 2016

Would I have fled my home in the face of such comments? Probably not. Would I have been glad to be leaving town were such a story trending about me? Yes, definitely. 

Next month, I'll say more about Breitbart's decision to use the Nativity picture, in a long piece for Pacific Standard on blood libel and modern anti-semitism. One of my fears is that I'll have to cut the paragraph on this story and replace it with whatever new horror unfolds.

UPDATE 12/23 12:00 CST - Lancaster Online stands by their reporting.

Editor’s Note: This story has been amended to reflect further comments from the parents of a Centerville Elementary School student who removed their child from class over concerns for their and their child’s safety. The parents told the Anti-Defamation League Thursday they were traveling on a previously planned vacation. The family told LNP and LancasterOnline their child was being harassed and blamed for the cancellation of “A Christmas Carol,” and that they were concerned for their and their child's safety. LNP and LancasterOnline stand by the original reporting on this story.

Bannon on Mental Health: Spank Your Children More

Steve Bannon's long history promoting sexist, antisemitic, and racist views are very much in the news right now, appropriately. I've been saying it's the first major test/fight of the President Trump era. He can place this man in the heart of American power. There's no Congressional approval. But here is where we find out if the media has learned anything from its normalizing of Trump during the long campaign, if the GOP has any qualms, if the Democrats can learn to fight.

Let's talk ableism, because where you find one (or more) form of oppression, you tend to find others, but ableism doesn't always track with partisan divides the way racism/sexism do. GOP ableism tends to be in the form of 1) disabled people are lazy 2) people with invisible disabilities are spoiled 3) disability supports are mostly vehicles for fraud 4) Defunding programs that keep people alive or out of institutions.

Here's what I've got on Bannon so far. The Autistic Self Advocacy Network put out a statement on Bannon which highlighted this passage from The Hill: 

In December 2015, weeks after Ryan became Speaker, Bannon wrote in an internal Breitbart email obtained by The Hill that the “long game” for his news site was for Ryan to be “gone” by the spring.

In the Dec. 1 email, Breitbart’s Washington editor, Matt Boyle, suggested to Bannon via email that a story promoting Ryan’s planned overhaul of the mental health system would be a good way to “open a bridge” to Ryan.

Bannon wasn’t keen on the idea.

“I’ve got a cure for mental health issue,” Bannon wrote to Boyle. “Spank your children more.”

This comment was made in the context of trying to get Bannon behind the "Murphy Bill," a bill I do not support. I have been persuaded by experts, as I wrote here, that stripping away rights in favor of incarceration of people with mental disabilities will in fact not radically improve mental health outcomes and will lead to increased stigmatization and loss of basic human rights.

But although I don't especially want Bannon to back it, the slur is telling. For him, mental health is just about spoiled children. The solution is violence and abuse.

Keep in mind that there are millions of Americans who have various forms of mental illness [note: ableist jokes mean I'll ban/block you] or have family members who do, including lots of Republicans. Many of them likely lack appropriate services. Trump just appointed someone making fun of them to the White House. Will they care? Will Republicans speak against this particular slur?

-----------------------------------------------

I searched Breitbart for terms related with disability and found mixed results, often leveraging anti-ableist rhetoric in order to attack the left. Search, for example, for the word "retard," and you'll find article after article detailing lefties of various sorts using the word "retard" or related stigmatizing language. What you won't find, though, is anything on Anne Coulter's consistent use of the word, or, of course, Trump's many instances of using that word.

Other searches yielded claims that Social Security programs are vehicles for fraud and should be defunded. And then there's this defense of the eugenicist Center for Immigration Studies. Their eugenic ideas detailed here from the Anti Defamation League.

On mental illness, the site has no consistent ethic, as it both wants to blame US gun violence on mental illness while trying to blame Islamic terrorism on Islam, decrying attempts to blame it on mental illness (sometimes).

I mostly left the Serge Kovaleski story out of this search. It's whole different set of epistemologies. Disability is a space where, unlike other forms of bigotry, even the racist right is uncomfortable using pejorative language in public. That's why they spent so much energy denying that Trump mocked the disabled reporter (he did) and trying to claim that Clinton mocked disabled children as First Lady of Arkansas (she did not).

-----------------------------------------------

What I find significant about Bannon's nasty slur is that it reflects broader GOP epistemologies surrounding disability. There's a tendency to divide disabled people into the "good disabled" - people with obvious conditions such as Cerebral Palsy and Down Syndrome - and the "bad disabled" - including people with invisible disabilities. Policies reflect suspicions that people who need benefits are just faking it or (to use the UK term) are scroungers. GOP pro-disability policies tend to reflect the needs of white, affluent, parents of kids with disabilities, but even there under highly limited contexts.

Bannon's "spank your children more" is just a quip, but it's a quip that leads us into a nasty place where people are denied care and subject to abuse.