Thread by @RBrulin

Today in class I played 3 mins of @IlhanMN 's CAIR speech incl "some people did something" passage & asked students to discuss
They agreed w/ her, saw nothing wrong w/wording & were STUNNED & ANGRY when I showed them Tweets & NYPost front page
This campaign v Omar is SHAMEFUL

Here is full speech. I played it fm min 13.08 to 15.55. My students were unaware of controversy around it. I tried to push them to look for words or ideas that might be "shocking" or problematic. They could not find any. Then I showed them Post Front Page

They were frankly DISGUSTED. They were STUNNED. They could not believe how the people who sent the first tweets could get away with it. How so many people could RT & like those tweets. And how the editors at the NY Post could print such a disgusting & BLATANTLY UNTRUE Front Page

My students are not political junkies. Most did not know who Omar is. Only ones who did only knew that she had received death threats recently, by a man who apparently was a Trump supporter. That's all they knew before watching video. They came to it without any preconceptions.

As they came to understand during our discussion, whereas they came to the video without preconceptions (& saw several minutes of it) the tens of thousands who RTed initial tweets came w/ clear biases, saw ONLY 18 secs of it & were SATISFIED since it confirmed their initial bias

This was eye-opening for them & for me as I saw the true ANGER on their faces when they discovered initial tweets, numbers of RTs & likes, coverage on Fox, etc. They were MAD at the NY Post: "This is NY! We are a diverse city! How CAN they print a racist Front Page like this?!"

Several said "This is SO dangerous! And it proves exactly what she was saying in her speech! This is clearly about her being a Muslim woman!" (which allowed us to talk about intersectionality). Others noted that Omar received death threats & said that Front Page was irresponsible

Mostly, they were stunned that so many "serious people" (Republican representative, the Post editors etc...) could help spread what they saw as absolute & blatant lies. And they all expressed true respect for Ilhan Omar's (a woman most had never heard before) courage & voice! END

PS: Something else we discussed is how easy it is to find online articles that misrepresent Omar's words VS efforts required to find full speech, ie to find the context for those FOUR WORDS (one thing they were SHOCKED by is that ALL this came fm FOUR WORDS taken out of context)

As they expressed, most people will NOT go thru effort of finding full speech. And (we talked confirmation bias, "sharing culture" of social media) most people who RTed initial tweet probably did so BECOZ of their own biases & so would NOT feel need to check its veracity anyway

Just saw video montage Trump tweeted. I thought we had reached absolute bottom with NY Post front page. I clearly underestimated Trump. This is incitation to hate & violence of worst possible kind. So irresponsible. That this could come from PRESIDENT of USA is mind-numbing.....