This is Pastor Tim’s article that appeared in the Evening Leader on Monday, July 20, 2020
Many of you know Kellyanne Conway. She was President Trump’s campaign manager and she has been a Republican political advisor for many years. She is the first woman to manage the campaign of a candidate who won the presidency.
Regardless of your feelings about the Republicans or the Democrats, I think it is safe to say that Kellyanne is a great supporter of the Republican party. Love that or hate it, that is a fact.
A couple of days ago, I was scrolling through my Google newsfeed (why do I keep doing that?) and an article from the Washington Post came up. The article was written by a journalist named Tamar Lapin. What jumped out at me was the title of the article, “Kellyanne Conway’s daughter posts ‘last tweet’ after being kicked off social media.” My first thought that the “kicking off” was being done by Twitter and that cancel culture claimed another person.
But upon reading the article, because I didn’t judge it by the title, I found out that the kick wasn’t by Twitter, it was by her mother. Claudia, Kellyanne’s daughter, had a Twitter following of almost 118,000. If you go to Columbus and fill up the Shoe to capacity for an OSU football game, you will have 104,944 people. Claudia had twice the population of St Marys, more followers than that capacity crowd. Why does this matter? SHE IS 15.
She is living under the scrutiny of being a celebrity for no other reason than her last name is Conway. On a platform that no 15-year-old is ready to be responsible for, she spouted a whole lot of hatred for President Trump and the Republican Party. I know that this kind of rhetoric isn’t new to Twitter, but this is coming from the daughter of a major player in the Republican party.
How do I know that this is a problem? Because I read about this in the Washington Post! A 15-year-old spoiled, privileged girl rebels against her mother. Is this news? Would any of you with a 15-year-old daughter want her to spout her rejection of you on a platform of 118,000 and get written up by a journalist in the Washington Post?
There are two lessons to be learned here.
First, Twitter is dangerous.
It freely gives power to people who are not ready for it, and this goes triple for 15-year-old kids. Twitter is designed to do one thing and one thing only. It is to provide a way for you to place before the world anything you may want to do, say, think, believe or practice. This is why everything has the potential to become a fight – people who are against you have to clash with people who affirm you. Just know this is what Twitter is designed to do.
Second, our modern media is predatory.
A news article in the Washington Post on a rebellious teenage girl – is this what qualifies for news anymore? They took advantage of this girl because her mother is Kellyanne Conway. If that doesn’t qualify as predatory, I don’t know what does. If you want to write all the articles in the world on Kellyanne and drag her through the mud, I am fine with that, but leave her children out of it. If we don’t have that respect for each other, then journalists for the Washington Post will write articles about them with dishonest headlines.
I would have written this exact same article had the Washington Post done this to Nancy Pelosi’s daughter.