Your opinion of what happened at the March for Life last weekend largely depends on your point of view on the Trump administration. You either…:

• Watched the full two hours of video (or take the counsel of those who did) and have come to believe that that CNN edited the video maliciously, with full intent to defame a bunch of MAGA hats ahd the kids they were sitting on, or
• believe that in abeyance of all the actual evidence, MAGA cap + white + Catholic private school = smug racist, evidence be damned

That’s Robby Soave’s conclusion over at Reason – the Covington Kids are a Rohrschach Blob that says more about the viewers and their opinions than they do about themselves.

But the most frustrating and worrying reactions have come from those who have convinced themselves that the extended video footage confirms their initial impressions. Of all the myriad examples of this, perhaps none is more contemptible than the effort by Deadspin‘s Laura Wagner, who writes, “Don’t Doubt What You Saw With Your Own Eyes.” Wagner accuses the Covington kids’ defenders—me among them—of “siding with some shithead MAGA teens and saying that 2+2=5 in the face of every bit of evidence there is to be had.”
But I know what I saw, and I think I know what Wagner saw, too. She saw a group of white teens wearing MAGA hats who had just engaged in partisan political activity on behalf of a cause she opposes (this last detail is more than sufficient on its own to convict the teens, according to several prominent progressive feminists). And that was enough.

Of course, this country – and by “This country” I mean “mobs of entitled bobbleheads spurred on by the agenda-driven parts of our idiot media” – have a dismal record of seeking truth:

In writing and speaking about this, I have drawn parallels to the Rolling Stone/University of Virginia gang rape hoax of 2014, which provides a powerful example of mainstream media getting a story very wrong in ways that permanently damaged the magazine’s reputation.
But in the less insane media world of 2014, at least the Rolling Stone debunking was accepted by pretty much everyone. When friends of “Jackie,” the alleged rape victim, came forward to help clarify that her alleged attacker did not exist, and was in fact a persona she had invented in order to catfish them, I don’t remember many major pundits sticking their fingers in their ears and pretending not to hear this.
The ongoing effort to pretend that videos of boys doing pep rally type cheers in opposition to a hate group is in fact evidence of deep-seated racism makes me wonder whether Rolling Stone truther-ism would have been much more common had the story come out in 2019.

Things are getting much, much worse out there.