The most fascinating thing about the Covington Catholic incident is that nothing happened. There is no evidence that the Covington Catholic boys harassed anyone. No blood was drawn. But that didn’t stop the media from manufacturing a national outrage out of nothing to stage a political attack on a group of innocent boys.
It is appalling how quickly the left turned a four-minute video of a non-violent encounter into a pretext to exact their most violent racial and tribal resentments on a bunch of high school kids. Within hours, a vicious online mob of adults was calling for them to be punched, doxxed, expelled from school, or tossed headfirst into wood-chippers.
What did the boys do to deserve this? At first, they were accused of surrounding and harassing the Native American protester. As that story began to unravel, the mob began to cling to circumstantial evidence of ambiguous, possibly prejudiced horseplay — one or two boys were seen making tomahawk gestures — while zeroing in on one particular kid who was making a “disrespectful” face.
It didn’t take long for some astute political minds on the left to note that, like Brett Kavanaugh, the MAGA-hat-wearing kid is also a white male. A white male who smiles. Smiles! To think of it! And he had the audacity to smile, ambiguously, in a confusing situation while being confronted by a belligerent protester.
What is the connection between this kid, who is seen doing nothing but minding his business, and Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of rape?
The smirk! He smirked! He’s one of them. A white male who can afford to smirk! Burn the witch! Burn him!
Perhaps he was simply confused. Is that not allowed? His reaction is suitable for the circumstances. Most people would find it odd to be approached by a stranger beating a drum and chanting incoherently.
But, see, he is a white male, and Nathan Phillips is a Native American elder. Because the boy is a white male, he committed a grave sin, punishable by banishment from society, for finding himself in an unfamiliar and intimidating situation with a grown man who, as the left sees it, has the moral agency of a toddler.
The MAGA hat, of course, sealed his fate. He should have known that by wearing this hat, he revealed everything about his character without even speaking. The Trump hat, he surely knew, is the moral equivalent of a klansman’s hood.
When was this decided? By whom? Doesn’t matter. And so as the evidence of wrongdoing vanished, the real reason the mob targeted the boys became incontrovertible: they are white, male, Catholic boys wearing MAGA hats, hats which the left decided marks them as racist.
Nathan Phillips, by contrast, is a paragon of humanity. He contains multitudes. He is the meaning of America. The real America that existed before those kids’ ancestors came and stole his land. And, let’s not forget, he served in Vietnam.
Oh, what? That isn’t actually true? Never mind. That’s not what this story was really about. Oh, and just forget about the Black Hebrew Israelites. That never even happened.
See, the important thing is not that a group of innocent kids were smeared. The real takeaway is what this incident has to teach. The lesson is obvious: this short viral video exemplifies racial hierarchy in such a manner that it provides a teachable lesson on dismantling oppressive power structures!
It is remarkable how the left, after being caught pulling the most disgusting garbage conceivable, turns evil into yet another opportunity to edify the public on social justice. In came the hit pieces about the dark history of Catholic oppression of Native Americans. In came the pious commentary from hate-filled pundits on the smirk — the smirk — the intolerable smirk! – of white male privilege.
After ruining a kid’s life for “smirking,” the left pounced on the “incident” they created to serve as a further pretext to “expose” the bigotry of the Catholic church. Long after the original story has been debunked, the mainstream media is still spreading it despite overwhelming counterfactual evidence. They are publishing articles about Covington Catholic that have nothing to do with the controversy, but which paint the school as a swamp of hatred.
Some clever takes on Covington have compared the event to a kind of political inkblot test, like the Kavanaugh hearings, in which both sides see what they want and are utterly convinced that the other side is evil and motivated by deceit.
But there is little room here for any abstract both-sides-ism. With the Covington case, there is video evidence which any reasonable person would agree exonerates the boys of any serious wrongdoing. When context cleared them, some who attacked them admitted fault — but many doubled down, unwilling to acknowledge the fuller story and concede their confirmed biases.
Like the Kavanaugh hearings, the Covington incident thrust tensions over identity into the open. Those who rushed to condemn the boys came prepared to see them as guilty not because of anything they did but because of who they are. From the initial frenzy to the half-hearted retractions and the hit pieces on the Catholic church, that’s what this “story” was about from the start.
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