Misreading the Covington teens in MAGA hats
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
News reporting is the first draft of history. It needs to be revised when details emerge that give an entirely different picture.
By now, most folks know that a viral video that appeared to show Catholic students mocking an older Native American man after the March for Life on Jan. 18 was a fraud. A longer video shows that the man, Nathan Phillips, had barged into the group of kids and was banging a drum in the face of one of the boys, Nick Sandmann.
Unsure of how to react, Nick merely smiled. The media reported it as a "smirk." The other boys clapped and chanted along to the drum while ignoring slurs from another group, the Black Hebrew Israelites.
Some of the boys, including Nick, wore red MAGA hats they had purchased in Washington, DC. That alone made it open season on them. The left has pounded the meme that a Make America Great Again hat is shorthand for hate. And the apostles of tolerance sure know hate. Just let it slip that you don't think President Trump is such a bad guy or that you think America is a good country and watch the fist of tolerance reflexively clench.
Last Wednesday, a report commissioned by the diocese of Covington, Kentucky, found no evidence that the boys from Covington Catholic School had behaved badly. Four licensed investigators spent about 240 hours interviewing witnesses and reviewed 50 hours of videos from major networks along with posts on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
You can't be too careful these days. The left's non-stop propaganda aimed at fanning grievances has been wildly successful.
On a cautionary note, it's important to acknowledge America's history of black slavery and treatment of Native Americans. And, it wasn't so long ago that Jim Crow laws were in effect and black Americans faced horrendous discrimination. A friend from church recalls when he and his wife were barred from buying a home in certain Fairfax County, Virginia, neighborhoods.
We have come a long way, but still need racial reconciliation. It's harder to come by when Democrats and their media allies grind salt into those wounds, create new ones, and make sure they stay open and raw. They peddle racial hatred for political purposes while virtue signaling that they're the enlightened ones.
Many Americans are now so paranoid about appearing insufficiently outraged at any perceived slight over race, sex or gender identity that they go into a crouch or scan the ground for stones to throw.
As such, reactions can be loud, swift and dead wrong.
Within hours of the first video's posting, Covington Mayor Joe Meyer released a statement, saying in part, "teens from a local high school were filmed surrounding and mocking native Americans participating in the Indigenous Peoples' March in Washington D.C. Videos of the confrontation are disturbing, discouraging, and – frankly – appalling. And they are rightfully inspiring a tidal wave of condemnation."
Mayor Meyer went into full virtue-signaling mode, describing Covington as "a diverse community, in areas of race, national origin, ethnicity, religious preference, sexual orientation, and income," and a human rights ordinance that protects "diverse gender identities and sexual orientation." He boasted that he helped lead Northern Kentucky's gay pride parade, in which city vehicles were used and "department heads marched with a banner proudly proclaiming our beliefs." Wonder if any department heads were allowed to sit it out?
Four days later, the mayor issued another release, proclaiming, "If you read my actual words Saturday it's clear that condemning was not the motivation, my motivation was simple – Covington's reputation was being attacked on a national level and I stood up to defend it." So, applauding a "tidal wave of condemnation," was what, exactly?
Other Democrats also had swiftly joined the frenzy. New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland, a Native American, tweeted: "The students' display of blatant hate, disrespect, and intolerance is a signal of how common decency has decayed under this administration. Heartbreaking."
Even the Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School first released a statement, extending "our deepest apologies to Mr. Phillips" and promising to investigate and "take appropriate action, up to and including expulsion."
Did anyone talk to the boys before issuing this?
On the other side of the ledger, Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie, both Republicans from Kentucky, expressed support for the students. In a Jan. 21 tweet, Mr. Paul cited a Reason article correcting the record, noting that "these kids are taking all sorts of abuse they don't deserve."
Mr. Massie tweeted: "The honorable and tolerant students of Covington Catholic School came to DC to advocate for the unborn and to learn about our nation's Capitol. What they got was a brutal lesson in the unjust court of public opinion and social media mobs."
And lots of virtue signaling from all quarters.
Robert Knight is a Washington Times contributor and author of "A Nation Worth Fighting For: 10 Steps to Restore Freedom" (djkm.org). This column first appeared on The Washington Times' website.
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“Did anyone talk to the boys before issuing this?
On the other side of the ledger, Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie, both Republicans from Kentucky, expressed support for the students. In a Jan. 21 tweet, Mr. Paul cited a Reason article correcting the record, noting that "these kids are taking all sorts of abuse they don't deserve."
Mr. Massie tweeted: "The honorable and tolerant students of Covington Catholic School came to DC to advocate for the unborn and to learn about our nation's Capitol. What they got was a brutal lesson in the unjust court of public opinion and social media mobs."”
Nothing to 'misread' about the Covington Teens.
The 'Smirky One' wants $250 million dollars. MAGA unchained.
To advocate for the unborn? Yeah. Sure.
The Covington teens did absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever. They were in fact there to defend life. They bought their caps while there. As for the 250 million that is only directed at the Bezos Post daily rag. They will go after others for more. I hope that they get every cent of it. Democrats need to stop obstructing the healing of racial divisions and quit pouring salt on the wounds they keep open.
future incels
....From the sheer scale of this pile-on, you’d think Sandmann had shot up a school.
If there was any attempt by these reporters to get Sandmann’s side of the story or talk to anyone who was with the Covington group, the article gives no indication of it. This is shoddy journalism, pure and simple, and it’s especially disappointing coming from a paper still basking in the light of Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Meryl Streep.
By the seventh article, Sandmann was quoted and the story was becoming more balanced, but the damage was already done. For so many readers, the nuances and even the truth of the story don’t matter. If the MAGA hat is indeed the new white hood, then any attempt to be evenhanded is tantamount to offering aid and comfort to the enemy. One Twitter user summed up this opinion nicely: “Oh yes the kid who was marching against women’s reproductive rights while wearing a hat promoting an evil homophobic racist misogynistic sociopath was TOTALLY misrepresented.”
The details aren’t important when you can simply weigh the race, gender, class, and sexual identities of the parties involved and thereby come to an arithmetical solution. And that’s exactly what Sandmann’s lawyers accuse the Post of doing. The duty of a journalist is to explore every aspect of the story without prejudice, not to paint in broad, politically convenient strokes. That method is best left to the Soviets, as evidenced by a 1918 article in one of their newspapers:
Trump, despite his bluster, has made no real attempts to muzzle the “fake news media,” but he is cheering on this lawsuit. Now it looks like the Post ‘s hatred of the president and his supporters could lead to disaster to the tune of $250 million....