His name is Sean Yetman, and he’s famous now.
In a YouTube video that has since gone viral, a fellow named Ryan Berk – a veteran of Afghanistan – was doing some Black Friday shopping last week in a Pennsylvania shopping mall. It was there that Berk noticed Yetman walking the mall in digital camouflage. More importantly, Berk spotted a problem with Yetman’s uniform right away.
“The first indicator was his flag was placed on the wrong part of his right shoulder.,” Berk writes on his YouTube page. “His boot laces were unbloused, and his badges were all off center. I immediately had suspicion that he was a fake, so I quietly pulled the manager of the store to the side and asked her if they give military discounts. When she said yes, I asked her to ensure they ask him for his CAC card [which stands for Common Access Card, a standardized identification card for active-duty uniformed service personnel] upon him making his purchase and told her that I was almost certain he was a fake. At this time, I waited for him to leave the store to confront him. As I waited, I listened to him tell a 9-10-year-old little boy about his time in the special forces, and watched him show the boy pictures online from ‘his’ military experiences. This is when I began to film. About 15 minutes after he originally began talking to the little boy, he finally came out and that is when I confronted him.”
Berk’s video shows him angrily confronting Yetman and asking him several questions that betray Yetman’s ignorance of the Army, including his MOS (the military designation for what his job was in the Army). While Berk makes it clear that he is himself a military veteran, Yetman continues to insist that he is also a veteran, at one point either taking or faking a phone call in an effort to deflect Berk’s barrage of questions. What Yetman was doing, if he was using the uniform of the United States Army to gain shopping discounts on Black Friday, is illegal and considered “stolen valor.” What happened to Sean Yetman, however, is more than just being confronted by a man who recognized this alleged military fake for what he was.
At the time that the video was originally posted, Yetman was unknown. The video has since been shared thousands of times on both Facebook and YouTube. Internet sleuths determined Yetman’s identity, his home address in Pennsylvania and the fact that he was not a military veteran (or at the very least, not the veteran of the special forces that he described himself to be). Yetman’s Facebook page url was posted online, and he received enough negative attention that he deleted it. Do a news search for “Yetman” and you’ll receive a flood of hits, showing the moon-faced, hapless-looking Sean Yetman staring lamely at Berk’s camera and insisting he is really a soldier.
The video quite rightly sparks outrage among most who view it (a few comments are devoted to criticism of the righteously indignant Berk for “harassing” the lumbering Yetman) – and now Sean Yetman is enjoying his 15 minutes of fame, none of them good. There is no word yet whether the video has affected Yetman’s professional life, whatever that may be, and Yetman himself has made no public comment as of this writing. It’s safe to say, though, that his reputation is ruined and his ruse is forever exposed.
The term “shaming” has many negative connotations for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that liberals use the word to refer to any criticism they cannot handle. If you tell an overweight person that he or she is neither healthy nor beautiful, you are “fat shaming.” If you tell a promiscuous woman that she bears some responsibility for the consequences of her behavior, you are “slut shaming.” Liberals are trying to use public shaming to embarrass men who hold their legs too far apart on public transportation (no, that’s not made up; the liberal Democrat urge to control every waking moment of your life extends to how far apart you hold your legs while sitting, not to mention whether you pee while standing up). That egregious crime is called “man-spreading.” (Liberals love to invent Newspeak terms for imagined offenses, such as “man-splaining,” which is explaining anything to a woman in a way she finds condescending.)
The double-edged sword that is public shaming, though, can cut you as easily as it can me. “A close relative of restitution is shaming,” writes Cal Thomas. “The convicted should be brought before those harmed by their behavior and publicly shamed. No one seems to be ashamed of anything nowadays, but shaming might help prevent future violence. Rioters and looters who are black could be shamed by law-abiding African-Americans.” In other words, while liberals are convinced that any criticism of a Democrat is “shaming,” publicly exposing vile behavior – which is also shaming – can be very useful, such as in exposing alleged military frauds like Sean Yetman.
What makes possible all this shaming, good and bad, left and right, politically correct and politically incorrect, is modern interconnectivity. If not for Facebook and YouTube, Sean Yetman’s name would not be nationally known. If not for social media, rude behavior on public transportation, Black Friday brawls, obnoxious liberals harassing law-abiding citizens for idling their trucks and black men detained for simply walking down a street with their hands in their pockets would not be known by the public. These news stories, without the Internet to promulgate them, would be relegated to the relatively small circles of direct participants who witnessed and experienced them. Instead, thanks to the Web and the ways we use the Internet socially, a new standard for public ridicule and public shaming has been established.
This is the modern world. We are, all of us, only a single viral video away from lasting infamy. Whether that’s a good or bad thing depends on your definition of “shame.”
Media wishing to interview Phil Elmore, please contact [email protected].
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