A graphic designer and activist who made TikTok content debunking Jason Aldean’s claim that his controversial music video only uses «real news footage» has faced a wave of violent and racist hate mail from defenders of his song.
Destinee Stark is among the first to publicly criticize 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. Stark, a former fan of the country star, first heard the song about two weeks ago and later watched the music video.
The more he thought about the words and images, the angrier he got, Stark told NBC News on Monday.
«I’m online all the time and I share my opinions online all the time. It’s, you know, something I do,» Stark said. «And that first video I made, I posted it like…at 11:30pm…I didn’t think it would go anywhere. And I woke up to 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’s not a single video clip that isn’t actual news material,» Stark said it was easy to prove him wrong.
In a TikTok video that garnered at least 1.5 million views, Stark discovered that two of the clips in the video came from stock footage. One showed a woman playing pranks on the police in at the labor day event in germany and another was a commercial clip of a Molotov cocktail.
«I just think people have a right to know,» Stark said. «Things like this, they inform politics and they inform how we vote, how we see the world and who we interact with. And I think if we’re consuming content that’s not even accurate, it’s just propaganda. And it’s just driving people, you know, to commit more violence.»
NBC News also found archival clips of a protest in Montreal, Canada, and a protest in kyiv, Ukraine. He Montreal clip it has no date or context for the cause behind the protest.
The Ukraine clip appears to be from a 2013 protest in central Kyivwho opposed the former president’s refusal to sign an agreement that would have aligned the country with the European Union.
A representative for Aldean did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
Stark shared screenshots with NBC News of the hate messages he’s received since posting his videos about Aldean’s song, including racist slurs, fat-phobic comments and death threats.
Stark said he has tagged Aldean on social media, asking him to report hate mail and discourage advocates from engaging in violent and racist rhetoric.
In one message, someone referred to her with two different insults and threatened to hang Stark in her backyard so people could gather around. She described that particular message as the «worst» of the messages so far.
“They are trying to defend and say that the song is not racist while using racist rhetoric to bring me down, which literally defeats the purpose of their entire argument,” Stark said.
Stark encouraged those people to look inward and really think about why they were so outraged by his videos, because others have sent kinder messages about how his content has made them more aware.
«Even people who were Jason Aldean fans came up and said, ‘You know, I would have been vibrating to this song until you pointed all this out,'» Stark said.
«So even though it seems like the trolls and the hate are much stronger, it’s really changing things and it’s really changing people’s perspectives,» he added. «And I think that’s the really important part to focus on as well.»