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The Nisqually Valley News printed an editorial written by Keven Graves on Friday titled "Time to send that bigoted old warrior into retirement".
The Freedom Foundation--as part of a government corruption investigation--turned up and published videos of JZ Knight in profanity-laced tirades against Hispanics, Jews, Catholics and others.
This story caught fire in the media just prior to the November elections when it was also discovered that Knight was a major donor to the Democratic Party and many Democratic candidates--many whom slow-marched away from Knight's bigoted videos and donated the campaign cash to charities.
Keven Graves makes a couple of salient points in his op-ed:
The first point he makes is that the continued media attention is Knight's own fault.
It seems to be a story that won’t be going away any time soon. That’s in large part because of Knight’s own litigious actions.
His second point is, that Knight's litigation is aimed at removing videos from the Internet, and good luck sterilizing the Internet and the minds of people that have already seen the videos.
From an outsider’s perspective, I think the strategy at hand is pretty clear — Knight is effectively trying to make all of the videos that show the profanity-laden diatribes pouring from her mouth disappear from public view.
Unfortunately for Knight, things posted on the Internet have a way of hanging around for a while.
There are undoubtedly copies of all of those videos downloaded on more than one hard drive. At the very least, they cannot be unseen.
I'm reminded of an op-ed that Peter Callaghan wrote for the News Tribune titled "Strangest bedfellows: Candidate and Ramtha". His piece appeared November 1, 2012 just before the general election, and was meant as a reflective commentary on the whole Ramtha story. Here is the last paragraph.
The lessons here seem clear, yet none of the candidates or party committees learned them all. First, don’t rush to judgment. Second, don’t make a two-day story into a 10-day story. Third, don’t take money from bigots.
He could rewrite that story today to read, "Second, don't make a two-day story into a 10-month story." The perpetuation of the bigoted video story and subsequent public relations damage that JZ Knight is experiencing, is her own fault--she is being hoist by her own petard.
Related:
Time to send that bigoted old warrior into retirement
Strangest bedfellows: Candidates and Ramtha
