Zach Hoyt, also known as Asmongold, took a dispassionate look at what works on social media and embarked on a racist rant against Palestinians: "I don't give a fuck," he said about the deaths of 40,000 of them, mostly women and children. "They're terrible people."
Twitch suspended him and cut off his access to 1.8m followers there. Now he does give a fuck.
Looking back on it, I was way too much of an asshole about the Palestine thing My bad Of course no one deserves to have their life destroyed even if they do things or have views I find regressive You guys deserve more than me saying stupid shit like that, I'll do better
He rationally blames the social media nightmare world of his life "devolving" him into "the most mean-spirited … rude, nasty, callous, psychopathic version of myself." It's good he knows his problem and maybe can now do something about it.
But here's the thing. The notion that Palestinians are a mindless hive whose humanity is suspect sprouts not just from social media. It grows at prestigious news sources too. Here's Reuters taking care to cite Gaza's health ministry as the source of a claim it wants to make clear is journalistically questionable: that people under 18 there are "children":
Here's The Guardian using similar tortuous phrasing, having forgotten a word it used earlier in the same sentence:
Why don't they want to use the word? Perhaps because children are innocent.
They're citing sources they wish to please, too: often the law enforcement, military and government agencies doing the things being reported. So perhaps it's also an example of mistakes were made talk, the "exonerative mode" in reportage.
