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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief
New UFC Women's Champion Ronda Rousey drew the ire of many on Tuesday, tweeting out a link she claimed was "interesting" and a "must watch."
The link was a 30-minute video supposedly "dissecting" the media coverage of the tragic Sandy Hook elementary school shooting and claiming it to be a government conspiracy. Rousey immediately came under attack for helping spread a ridiculous "theory" regarding a senseless massacre that killed 20 children and six adults, but she brushed such reaction off, saying "criticism is always expected."
She eventually deleted the Tweet, but not before defending it with a few statements, first saying "I just figure asking questions and doing research is more patriotic than blindly accepting what you're told," and later backtracking with the comment "I just said it was interesting, don't know what I believe yet, but yes, mainstream media isn't the only way to get info."
Her manager, Darren Harvey, has now come to her defense as well, broaching the subject in an interview with MMAJunkie.com.
"Ronda's the kind of person that doesn't take everything at face value, and doesn't have 100 percent faith in all the news that's put out there by the mainstream pres," Harvey said. "...I don't think that she did anything so horrible. I think what she was doing is retweeting something that gave a different perspective as to what transpired on that day. I don't think anything in that video denied that it happened."
"I don't know if it's the truth or not. I'm not an investigator, but it seemed to me that if that Bushmaster (rifle) really was sitting in the trunk of a car, and the guy killed himself inside the school, how would the gun end up in the trunk of a car? Maybe it's just bulls*** facts. I didn't investigate it. I think Ronda thought it was interesting and retweeted it, and that was the extent of it. I don't think she was saying the mainstream press was wrong. It was just a different perspective."
Following that interview, Rousey tweeted the following:
"I never meant to insult or hurt anyone, sorry if anyone was offended. It was not my intention in the least."
Penick's Analysis: There are so many things wrong with not only that video, but the defense of Rousey spreading it and falling back on the old conspiracy-theorist maxim "I'm just asking questions." She says she's just "asking questions and doing research" rather than "blindly accepting" what she's told, yet she did no such research on that disgusting "truther" conspiracy garbage. Had she done any research on it, and it's not hard to do, she would have seen that the video's claims and supposed "evidence" have already been debunked.
Harvey makes things worse by trying to justify what's in the video, and bringing up one key fact from that day which has been clarified in subsequent investigation. The rifle used that day was not, in fact, found in the trunk of the car, it was a separate shotgun that was found in the trunk. I'm not going to go point by point on the rest of the garbage, but if you want some more research into it, you can simply look to the Snopes.com breakdown of the supposed conspiracies surrounding that day and their various debunked claims therein.
It's not about whether or not Rousey "offended" anyone here; this is a fighter the UFC wants to be a mainstream crossover star latching on to crazy conspiracy-theorist garbage and passing it along to her 161,000 followers on Twitter. Not only that, but her response was insulting as well. To say she's not just "blindly accepting" what she's told by the mainstream media is fine, but tweeting that video out to her followers by saying it was "interesting" and a "must watch" is blindly accepting the claims made as more credible than the "mainstream" version of the events. Simply put, this sequence of events, along with Rousey's initial response to the negative reaction to the original Tweet, calls her sense and character into question.
Source: http://www.mmatorch.com/artman2/publish/UFC_2/article_15634.shtml
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