Anti-Trump social media mobs value ‘rapidity and extremism’: Victor Davis Hanson

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Report: Multiple investigations into Twitter users making terroristic threats against Covington students

Hoover Institute senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson weighed in on the “electronic lynch mob” that took place targeting the students of Kentucky's Covington Catholic High School after their confrontation with Native American elder Nathan Phillips that went viral last weekend.

In his appearance on Tuesday's "The Ingraham Angle," with Fox News' Laura Ingraham, Hanson began by accusing social media giants Facebook and Twitter of being “on the side of the mob,” so that members of the mob don’t see the “downside” in their rhetoric since they won’t be censored or punished.

MEDIA TREATMENT OF COVINGTON STUDENTS 'WAY WORSE' THAN KAVANAUGH COVERAGE, CRITIC SAYS

“When it was released that these were young, innocent kids, they’re not gonna be ready to fight back and they had MAGA hats on and they were white and they were Catholic, that was a turkey shoot for all of these bullies,” Hanson said. “And when you look at the upside, when you combined the electronic mechanism with the hate Trump, the result is two values; rapidity and extremism. So there was a race, like a dog race, almost. Who can get out first and virtue-signal, ‘I was the first one to attack these kids’? And the next incident was, Who can be the most extreme? ‘I said beat them up,’ ‘No, I said shoot them,’ No, I said burn them up.’… It was a race to the bottom.”

He told Laura Ingraham that there was “no downside” for the media to learn anything from the misreporting that took place early on.

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“You see what’s happened is when you have Silicon Valley and you have the great fortunes in America -- whether the Bloomberg or Apple or Google -- all of that great money, and foundations and Hollywood and the media and the universities, this story starts out -- It’s a force-multiplying effect and it permeates our entire society,” Hanson continued. “And when you look at the other side, we don’t have those resources. And when Trump, our conservative ranks, are bifurcated, there were people in the Never Trump side that joined in because felt this was the magic key that will unlock my analysis of Trump.”