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- Photo by Amanna Avena on Unsplash A couple of weeks ago, Savanah Hernandez, a Turning Point USA reporter, was assaulted by three members of the same family, plus one’s boyfriend, at an anti-ICE protest in Minnesota.
There’s video of everything that happened, and it started simple enough. People found out who Hernandez is, and the youngest member of the family started blowing a whistle in Hernandez’s ear.
Tilting At Windmills is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The video shows that Hernandez raised her hand and put it between her and the girl, Paige Ostroushko, and then tried to walk away.
What followed was a series of assaults, starting with Paige, then her mother, and finally her father. Apparently, somewhere along the way, Paige’s boyfriend took a shot, too.
Again, this is all on video. Beege Welborn’s got a good breakdown of everything at Hot Air.
Since then, we’ve seen something fascinating.
The video is out there. Anyone who wants to see what happened can do so. It’s right there.
However, many on the left are instead siding with the Ostroushko family, buying into the claims by the family, including 250 lbs Dad Chris, who shoved Hernandez to the ground while he was walking away, that they’re not violent.
“I just wanted her to leave,” Chris said, even though the video shows him shoving a woman to the ground from behind as she’s walking away from him.
Paige claims that Hernandez backhanded her, again, even though the video shows otherwise, and the leftists are eating it up.
Now, let’s flip this a bit. Let’s look at the shooting of Alex Pretti.
When I watched the video, I acknowledged that, based on what I saw, it looked like a bad shoot. I’ve held firm on that, though I acknowledge that I don’t have all of the evidence, and maybe I’m missing something.
I can acknowledge that what I see is what I see, even if it’s not great for my own cause. That’s called being honest.
Here, though, despite clear video evidence, at least three people assaulted a woman because of her views, even as she was trying to move away from them, and the leftist authorities there dragged their collective asses to file charges—misdemeanor charges, mind you—and still haven’t bothered to make an actual arrest.
But the family has been on a media tour claiming they’re the real victims.
And the left is eating it up.
See, the problem for the left is that they’ve already decided that everything is subjective, which allows them to look at clear evidence and simply assume that it means whatever is most convenient. In this case, a white family of dedicated leftists is in the right when they assaulted a woman of Filipino and Mexican descent simply because, in this case, the “woman of color” holds the wrong opinions.
Reality means whatever they want it to mean.
Think about how much information discredited the Russian collusion hoax, or the Steele dossier, yet leftists still go on and on about it as if it’s an indisputable fact.
Climate change research has produced countless models and just as many warnings of how awful things would be a decade later, only for literally none of them to turn out. They pushed “global cooling” years ago, which never came to pass, either, and they just shifted gears a bit.
Paul Erlich pushed his overpopulation myth for decades, and no one on the left had the balls to call BS on him…or they simply accepted it as true because they wanted it to be true.
January 6th was an insurrection, despite it being made up of the most heavily armed group in America, yet not a single firearm was evident.
This isn’t spin. This isn’t them knowing the truth and trying to reframe it so that it doesn’t make them look bad.
No, this is them being unable to accept reality simply because it works against the narrative, so they delude themselves into seeing things that simply don’t exist.
Hernandez raising a hand, the back of it facing Paige, then bumping her incidentally becomes a backhand because Hernandez’s restraint doesn’t serve the narrative.
All around us, we’re being manipulated. We’re being manipulated by the media leviathan that takes an incident like this and elevates the narrative over reality, to the point that people can’t accept the truth even when they see it before their very eyes.
It’s not an accident. It’s not something that just happens.
No, this is intentional.
In 2007, leftist journalist Ezra Klein created a private Google Group called JournoList. It was made up of a number of journalists from numerous publications, and it created quite a scandal when the contents of that list became public several years later. It was clear they were colluding on messaging, including at least one asking how to attack Sarah Palin and another saying that rather than address an actual issue, people like Karl Rove should simply be called a racist.
They were more than willing to coordinate on the narrative then. They stopped the group not because it was wrong, but because they got caught. JournoList was the start of a lot of people’s distrust in the media, to say the least.
However, even without overt collusion, it doesn’t take much for someone to say something that covers for the left or advances something the left favors, then others to pick it up and run with it independently.
And regardless of which is at work now, the truth is that the narrative shapes what people think, even today, where there are more outlets than ever before. While the right has tools to address the narrative, especially as it runs opposite to reality, people have to seek those out. Not everyone will. Most don’t care enough.
Today, as I write this, we’re looking at what happened in Virginia. The state, largely driven by the beltway bunch living in Northern Virginia, voted to essentially disenfranchise millions of Virginia voters. This was framed as being both temporary and fair, which we all know it’s neither.
A decade ago, though, Virginia’s House of Delegates had a Republican supermajority.
What happened? Share Part of that is more leftists moving into Virginia, sure, and some of it may be people on the right leaving, but a lot of it is the narrative. People bought into the idea that there was an affordability crisis, and people like Abigail Spanberger could and would fix it. The narrative was clear. Inflation had nothing to do with the Biden administration, its policies, or its lack of response when inflation first reared its head. No, it was a Republican problem, and Democrats could fix it.
So, a lot of normies who don’t follow politics bought into it. They were informed that the facts weren’t the facts. Reality wasn’t what actually happened, but what the left told people happened.
The American public is being willfully manipulated by a media elite that pretends it exists to inform, but is instead using its power to dictate what is “real” in most people’s minds.
When President Trump referred to the mainstream media as an enemy of the people, he pissed a lot of people off. They attacked his words viciously and did everything they could to show he was wrong.
Their own actions, however, make it clear that he was 100 percent correct.
We’re being played, and unless the average American wakes up to this fact and starts taking steps to prevent it from continuing, we’re going down a long path with no good destination at the end.
It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about global catastrophes or assaults on reporters. Like Ned Beattie’s character in Shooter, the media’s take is, “The truth is whatever I say it is.”
It’s not, but if no one recognizes it, does it make a difference in any practical way?
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