Since countering Aldean’s claim the video only contains “real news footage,” Destinee Stark has received a wave of hateful messages from defenders of the song.
A graphic designer and activist who made TikTok content debunking the claim by Jason Aldean that his controversial music video only uses “real news footage” has been facing a wave of racist and violent hate mail by defenders of his song.
Destinee Stark is among the first who publicly criticized Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” for the song’s lyrics and for featuring a Tennessee courthouse where a Black teenager was lynched in 1927. A former fan of the country star, Stark first heard the song about two weeks ago and then saw the music video.
The more she thought about the words and images, the angrier she became, Stark told NBC News on Monday.
“I get online all the time and I share my, like, opinions online all the time. It’s, you know, something that I do,” Stark said. “And that first video that I made, I posted it at like … 11:30 p.m. … I didn’t think it would go anywhere. And I woke up to like thousands of messages about it.”
Last week Country Music Television, which initially aired the video, pulled it from rotation. But after Aldean defended the music video by stating that “there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage,” Stark said it was easy to prove him wrong
In a TikTok video that’s gotten at least 1.5 million views, Stark found that two of the clips in the video came from stock footage. One showed a woman flipping off police at at labor day event in Germany and another was a commercial stock clip of a molotov cocktail.
“I just think that people have a right to know,” Stark said. “Things like this, they inform politics and it informs how we vote, how we see the world and who we interact with. And I just think that if we’re consuming content that’s not even accurate, that it’s just propaganda. And it’s just fueling people, you know, to commit more violence.”
NBC News also found stock clips of a protest in Montreal, Canada, and a protest in Kyiv, Ukraine. The Montreal clip does not have a date nor does it have context for the cause behind protest.
The Ukraine clip appears to be from a 2013 protest in downtown Kyiv, which was in opposition to the former president’s refusal to sign an agreement that would have aligned the country with the European Union.
