A strange thing happened on the way to get Kony: the media began attacking Kony’s attackers.
Those who believe in right and wrong, good and evil, and do not want innocent people around the world to get murdered, often find themselves being viciously attacked by the media as “conservatives.”
Here is the standard media playbook against conservatives: simple-minded, arrogant, rich, evangelical Christians who want to control the world with American military might.
Now, that same playbook of attacks is being used against the creators of the “KONY 2012” campaign; “the most viral video in history” with 100+ million views.
PLAYBOOK PAGE 1: CALL THEM STUPID & SIMPLE-MINDED
George Bush, Sarah Palin – move over – there’s a new target in town. The creators of KONY 2012 are being slammed as “stupid,” “simplistic,” narrators of a “bad guy script” which is “the ugly end result of the reduction of complex international issues to black-and-white morality tales.” Critics bemoan “the relentless dumbing down of our understanding of global conflicts so that everything ends up being squeezed into a straitjacket of Good and Evil” as they slam the KONY 2012 video as “Dangerous Ignorance” and “vastly oversimplified.”
PLAYBOOK PAGE 2: CALL THEM ARROGANT
In “The Arrogance of ‘Kony 2012,’” The Atlantic called it “insulting and arrogant” to paint Kony’s victims as “so helpless that they must wait around to be saved by a bunch of American college students with stickers.” “Why is it” asks another media outlet, “that everyone in the western world seems to think that they can solve all of Africa's problems in a western way?” “At its heart,” continues another, “is an arrogant, almost neocolonial sentiment.”
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PLAYBOOK PAGE 3: ACCUSE THEM OF BEING RICH WHITE GUYS
From Wall Street “fat cats” to rich oil barons to “Vulture Capitalists” like Mitt Romney; if you’re a Rich White Guy (RWG), you are a target-rich environment for left-wing demagogues. Witness the “Left-on-Left” assault from the Salon.com story “There’s money in the white savior complex” which snidely notes that “painting Africans as helpless victims remains popular, profitable.” After KONY 2012 was repeatedly slammed for raising millions of dollars, the filmmakers were forced to release their detailed financial statements (much like their fellow Rich White Guys: the Republican candidates, earlier this year).
PLAYBOOK PAGE 4: ACCUSE THEM OF BEING ANTI-GAY FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIANS
This one is still bubbling, but watch for it. By the time the Left is done its work, KONY 2012 will be synonymous with “Rick Santorum.” Here are some recent tidbits: “Kony 2012 filmmakers under fire for funding from anti-gay Christians.” “’Invisible Children’ Co-founder Jason Russell (KONY 2012) Hints It’s About Jesus, and Evangelizing.” “Invisible Children has received donations from a host of Christian evangelical groups with strong anti-gay platforms” which “deemed Invisible Children to be a worthy investment that would help advance particular visions for establishing God’s kingdom on Earth.”
PLAYBOOK PAGE 5: THEY WANT TO CONTROL THE WORLD WITH AMERICAN MILITARY MIGHT
By far, this has been the biggest criticism of the KONY 2012 campaign. At its heart, the KONY 2012 campaign clearly identifies a “bad guy,” in a foreign land, and calls for him to be brought to justice by American soldiers. To the left-wing ear, the KONY 2012 campaign sounds downright neo-conservative. The KONY 2012 campaign doesn’t call for the International Criminal Court’s most-wanted scumbag to be limply criticized by some spineless UN resolution. It doesn’t try to understand Kony’s complex motivations. It doesn’t blame Kony’s rapes and murders on poverty, pollution or colonialism. And it doesn’t blame America for creating Kony in the first place. It aims to stop Kony. With American boots on the ground, and with support for those troops, and their mission, back home.
That kind of moral clarity (Kony is the problem, American soldiers are the solution) is, to the Left, like sunlight is to the cast of Twilight.
That’s why the KONY 2012 campaign is being slammed as “pro-military interventionist foreign policy propaganda” and “the perfect excuse for US militarisation of oil-rich Uganda.” (From the same playbook page as “oil-rich Iraq” with only one word changed.) Another story calls supporters of KONY 2012 “‘useful idiots,’ being used by those in the US government who seek to militarise Africa” and asks the question “how often does the US government find millions of young Americans pleading that they intervene militarily" to stop an evil man from doing evil things?
The answer? Not often enough.
USA Today summed it up best when it said our “world [has] no shortage of evil people committing evil acts,” before it criticized the KONY 2012 campaign for perhaps not being the best way to raise public awareness, to shift public opinion, and to stop an evil man from doing evil things to innocent people.
100 million YouTube viewers say otherwise.
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