There’s a new religion in the United States: secular Leftism.
And it demands that you ignore facts. Instead, you just look at the narrative presented and then believe it. This is what the #MeToo movement was about. It didn’t matter if you asked for ancillary facts to support a contention; it didn’t matter if you weren’t even really doubting the contention and just wanted some evidentiary support.
No, you needed to believe all women.
When it comes to DEI, it’s the same sort of schtick. You’re supposed to believe DEI is good for business, that it’s good for everyone, that it has positive externalities.
Intersectionality? Same sort of thing.
These are narratives, and the narratives must be believed. The media loves seizing on particular stories they believe drive the narrative and then ignoring all of the facts of those stories in order to achieve the narrative.
The latest example of this nonsense comes courtesy of a terrible story out of Oklahoma in which a 16-year-old girl who called herself “gender non-binary” died. Her name was Nex Benedict. According to the media, she collapsed the day after an altercation in a girls bathroom at a public high school.
This confused teenager died in tragic circumstances, but we don’t actually know how this person died. The one thing that we do know, according to the autopsy now, is that this person was not actually murdered in the bathroom. The original reports out of this Oklahoma school were that this person had an altercation in a girls bathroom with other girls and then was effectively beaten to death, or, at least, injured so badly she ended up dying the next day.
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So the media ran with the story. Not only did they run with the story, but they also used this story as a prop in order to push against two particular political elements.
The first is Chaya Raichik, aka Libs of TikTok, whose great sin in the modern political world has been to take clips of the Left doing things and expose them to broader public view so people notice. It’s not even her advocacy they hate; it’s the fact that people are doing something publicly, wanting attention, and then she gives them attention — but the attention they get is from people who don’t provide a warm round of applause for all of their insanity.
Raichik serves on the statewide library advisory board for the state of Oklahoma.
This meant the media were now going to try to pin the death of this young lady on her because they’ve been trying to blame pretty much everything on her for the last couple of years. If there’s a bomb threat at a hospital that provides “gender affirming care” after Raichik reveals what exactly they do at the hospital, they blame it on her.
When a girl dies in disputed circumstances in an Oklahoma high school, they try to blame Raichik. The basic idea is that she’s a “stochastic terrorist,” a term they’ve been using for her for the last couple of years. It’s a term that means nothing. It’s a term in which they suggest that without inciting, she is, in fact, responsible for incitement — despite the fact that she’s never called for violence against anybody.
But they’re going to claim she is responsible for violence that is done by anybody who might theoretically see material that she posts, including material of people who publicly posted the material themselves. Thus, she’s target number one.
Target number two is a law in the state of Oklahoma that says you have to go to the school bathroom that corresponds with your biological sex. You cannot be a boy and go into the girls bathroom just because you claim you are a girl. And if you’re a girl and you claim that you’re gender non-binary, you can’t walk into the boys bathroom and start using the urinal.
So the media jumped on this case immediately; it became national news when Benedict died.
There are many people who die across the country every day in the United States, and many of them are clearly murdered. We’re not talking under disputed circumstances. We are talking, every day in the United States, many, many people are murdered. The fact that people of color, minorities, young black males, get murdered disproportionately pretty much every day in the United States gets zero media coverage because that would not promote the narrative the Left wishes to promote, which is that basically everything in the United States is a result of American racism because it turns out that the vast majority of those people who are being killed are also being killed by other young black males.
The media don’t cover that. The facts don’t matter to them. Only the narrative matters.
The narrative in the Oklahoma case seemed to be one the Left could use, so they jumped in with both feet. Teen Vogue, which has suddenly become a source of information, pushed a piece saying:
Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old Oklahoma high school sophomore, was beaten by three girl classmates in the bathroom of Owasso High School on Feb. 7. On Feb. 8, Nex – who identified within the Two Spirit, transgender, and gender nonconforming (2STGNC) umbrella – was declared dead at the hospital.
Now LGBTQ+ Oklahomans are mourning the loss of a straight-A student, a Minecraft fan, and animal lover – a teenager – in a school district previously targeted by Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik; Raichik now sits on the statewide library advisory board. In 2023, Oklahoma censured the state’s only nonbinary representative — not to mention signing into law a bill forcing public school students to use the bathroom associated with their gender assigned at birth; advocates are currently closely watching several anti-trans pieces of legislation.
Before Benedict’s name was made public, a source who claimed to be the mother of Benedict’s best friend told a local outlet the cause of death was “complications from brain trauma,” and that “three older girls were beating the victim and her daughter in the girl’s bathroom.” (We are not linking because the story uses Benedict’s deadname. According to Freedom Oklahoma, it’s not presently clear which pronouns Benedict used, so this story will refrain from using pronouns for Nex.)
The media are not interested in reporting actual facts. And if you read these stories, you have no idea if this person is a biological girl or if this person is a biological boy.
But again, obscuring information is what the legacy media do. Teen Vogue continues:
The anonymous source also alleged that Benedict couldn’t “walk to the nurses’ station” without assistance and that the school did not call an ambulance, while the school claims they were unaware of the fight until informed by a parent.
Texts allegedly sent by Nex after the fight to a family member … began, “I got jumped at school 3 on 1 had to go to the ER… They had been bullying me and my friends and I got tired of it so I poured some water on them and all 3 came after me. School did not report to the police and is probably getting sued.”
Benedict’s grandmother Sue, who also adopted Nex, brought Nex to the hospital after the fight, then home again; the next day, Nex was brought back to the hospital and was pronounced dead. Sue told The Independent that Nex was suspended for two weeks from school on the day of the fight; Sue also mentioned that Nex had been bullied throughout this school year.
So everybody on the Left ran with this story; it became front-page news across the country.
But as it turns out, this person may not have died as a result of the actual beating. USA Today reported on this yesterday, saying, “As police continued Thursday to probe the death of an Oklahoma teen … authorities announced a preliminary autopsy showed the student’s death was not the result of ‘trauma.’”
They have not yet released the results of a toxicology report, so we have no information on whether drugs or anything else was involved.
What we do know is that the autopsy does not attribute the death to trauma.
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But it doesn’t matter. The cat is already out of the bag. The story already has legs and it’s already running because this is the way our legacy media work.
So this becomes just another hate crime against a person who apparently was involved in an ongoing altercation with these other girls, pouring water on them; they were beating her up.
Again, bullying of any sort is truly terrible and shouldn’t be tolerated at any school. But the media attempts to turn this into a weapon against the basic idea that biological sex exists or against legislation suggesting girls should be protected from boys in the girls bathroom.
There’s no evidence whatsoever that the Oklahoma law that says the girls should go to the girls bathroom is responsible for this.
USA Today continued in their report:
A news story that went viral about Nex’s death included allegations that teachers failed to summon medical care for the teenager after the altercation, and that Nex was so badly injured in the fight that they could not walk on their own. Police and school officials said the claims were false.
In a statement on Facebook, the Owasso Police Department said each student involved in the fight “walked under their own power to the assistant principal’s office and nurse’s office” after it was broken up. A registered nurse at the school then assessed the health of each student involved in the fight, according to police. Though she determined that “ambulance service was not required,” the nurse recommended that Nex “visit a medical facility for further examination,” the statement said. Nex was taken to the hospital that afternoon.
None of this matters to the Left.
The narrative is more important.
How many race stories about supposed systemic American racism by police have turned out to be lies, whether it is the “hands up don’t shoot” narrative of Michael Brown or whether it was the supposedly racial killing of George Floyd (that provided zero evidence whatsoever that anything that happened was motivated by race)? Zero evidence was even alleged or presented in court in that case that proved racism, beyond which it is pretty obvious George Floyd died of medical complications and not because of the mishandling by Derek Chauvin according to autopsy reports.
Another example: the death of Matthew Shepard being attributed to homophobia.
It doesn’t matter once the narrative is set. The media is populated by people on the far Left. Those people on the far Left have a story they want to tell about the way the world works. And if the evidence does not line up with the story, they just ignore the evidence, and they tell the story they want to tell in pursuit of the ends they want to pursue.