BuzzFeed, the internet’s traffic monster, isn’t just a website, it a content-creation machine — complete with a YouTube channel that tosses out videos on topics as varied as “Women’s Ideal Body Types Throughout History” to “Americans Try Canadian Candy for the First Time” (which, astonishingly, has more than one million views). Two of their recent videos, however, make their staff and target audience look almost impossibly narrow-minded, ignorant, and bigoted. With a dash (more than a dash?) of hipster weeny tossed on top. First, feast your eyes on this video, where a collection of disproportionately queer and/or feminist Millennials discuss how they’re Christian, but still cool:
My favorite moments, in no particular order:
“That badge is real shiny.”
“Ahhh, this is the hard part.” (As a guy handles — gasp — a gun)
“Ahh Jesus.” (He looks at the officer’s belt, with flashlight and other tools of the trade attached, and puts it down in apparent disgust.) “I can’t do it.”
“I am scaring myself, watching the mirror.”
“Honestly, I see jerk before I see hero, and that sucks.” (After looking at himself in a mirror.)
“The fashion sensibility of being a police officer seems like it would be . . . sorta a weird burden to deal with.”
With all due apology to my readers for using a liberal buzzword, but it’s remarkable how dehumanizing both videos are — to cops and to Christians. They’re painted as a mysterious and scary “other,” with BuzzFeed’s hipsters on hand mainly to assure you and everyone else that they’re not really like “those people.” In fact, “those people” are so bad, so scary, that when the hipster puts on their clothes, they see “jerk.”
It’s a tiny bit amusing, except to the extent that it betrays a mindset we see on campus and in liberal urban enclaves – where leftist Millennials combine condescension and ignorance to create their own toxic ideological stew. Ladies and gentlemen, the young liberal elite.