Links - 12th March 2019 (Covington)

The Media Wildly Mischaracterized That Video of Covington Catholic Students Confronting a Native American Veteran - "Partial video footage of students from a Catholic high school allegedly harassing a Native American veteran after the anti-abortion March for Life rally in Washington, D.C., over the weekend quickly went viral, provoking widespread condemnation of the kids on social media. Various media figures and Twitter users called for them to be doxed, shamed, or otherwise punished, and school administrators said they would consider expulsion.But the rest of the video—nearly two hours of additional footage showing what happened before and after the encounter—adds important context that strongly contradicts the media's narrative. Far from engaging in racially motivated harassment, the group of mostly white, MAGA-hat-wearing male teenagers remained relatively calm and restrained despite being subjected to incessant racist, homophobic, and bigoted verbal abuse by members of the bizarre religious sect Black Hebrew Israelites, who were lurking nearby. The BHI has existed since the late 19th century, and is best describes as a black nationalist cult movement; its members believe they are descendants of the ancient Israelites, and often express condemnation of white people, Christians, and gays. DC-area Black Hebrews are known to spout particularly vile bigotry. Phillips put himself between the teens and the black nationalists, chanting and drumming as he marched straight into the middle of the group of young people. What followed was several minutes of confusion: The teens couldn't quite decide whether Phillips was on their side or not, but tentatively joined in his chanting. It's not at all clear this was intended as an act of mockery rather than solidarity.One student did not get out of Phillips way as he marched, and gave the man a hard stare and a smile that many have described as creepy. This moment received the most media coverage: The teen has been called the product of a "hate factory" and likened to a school shooter, segregation-era racist, and member of the Ku Klux Klan. I have no idea what he was thinking, but portraying this as an example of obvious, racially-motivated hate is a stretch. Maybe he simply had no idea why this man was drumming in his face, and couldn't quite figure out the best response? It bears repeating that Phillips approached him, not the other way around... Phillips enters the picture around the 1:12 mark, but if you skip to that part, you miss an hour of the Black Hebrew Israelites hurling obscenities at the students. They call them crackers, faggots, and pedophiles. At the 1:20 mark (which comes after the Phillips incident) they call one of the few black students the n-word and tell him that his friends are going to murder him and steal his organs. At the 1:25 mark, they complain that "you give faggots rights," which prompted booing from the students. Throughout the video they threaten the kids with violence, and attempt to goad them into attacking first. The students resisted these taunts admirably: They laughed at the hecklers, and they perform a few of their school's sports cheers. It was at this moment that Phillips, who had attended a nearby peace protest led by indigenous peoples, decided to intervene. He would later tell The Detroit Free Press that the teenagers "were in the process of attacking these four black individuals" and he decided to attempt to de-escalate the situation. He seems profoundly mistaken: The video footage taken by the black nationalists shows no evidence the white teenagers had any intention of attacking. Nevertheless, Phillips characterized the kids as "beasts" and the hate-group members as "their prey"... He also claimed that he heard chants of "build the wall." While I cannot rule out the possibility that some of the kids indeed chanted this—those who were wearing MAGA hats are presumably Trump supporters—I did not hear a single utterance of the phrase in the nearly two hours of video footage I watched... The boys are undoubtedly owed an apology from the numerous people who joined this social media pile-on. This is shaping up to be one of the biggest major media misfires in quite some time."
Too bad being white, male and especially wearing a Make America Great Again hat especially means you're the villain and death threats against you are a good thing

Forced to Admit MAGA Teen Did Nothing Wrong, Libs Rage Against ‘Racist’ Smirk - "additional videos and accounts have since made it clear that the Native American man, an activist and Vietnam veteran named Nathan Phillips, initiated the confrontation. Both he and Sandmann said as much, though each insisted his intentions were entirely pure.Sandmann explained in a statement Sunday that his smile was intended only to signal that he “was not going to become angry, intimidated or be provoked into a larger confrontation.”Other established facts: A group of hectoring black Israelites helped escalate the situation. And no one got hurt― at worst, the boys made a few insensitive remarks... For Trump nemesis Rosie O’Donnell and many, many others Sandmann triggered traumatic memories of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process. Nick Martin at Splinter shared how Sandmann’s smile haunted his sleep, and Slate writer Ruth Graham linked “that face” to segregationists, Nazis, and “popular boys.”Nor was Graham alone in reporting having endured the unbearable power of white male smirks in her youth. Gizmodo senior editor Alex Cranz called it a “facial gesture that weaponized their privilege” and could “DEVASTATE.”... As is often the case in the culture wars, some conservatives embraced the liberal caricature of them. The term “assault smile” has been making the rounds."

After Covington Catholic controversy, Nathan Phillips rally attempted to disrupt basilica Mass - "While chanting and playing ceremonial drums, a group of Native American rights activists reportedly led by Nathan Phillips attempted Jan. 19 to enter Washington, D.C.’s Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception during a Saturday evening Mass. The group of 20 demonstrators was stopped by shrine security as it tried to enter the church during its 5:15 pm Vigil Mass... Covington Catholic High School was closed Jan. 22, following threats against students and staff in the wake of media coverage of Friday’s incident."
Presumably it was racist and white supremacy that they weren't let in

Nathan Phillips Lied. The Media Bought It. - "Phillips has on at least one other occasion gotten himself into what he says was a racist altercation with a group of youths. This one, four years ago, also involved him approaching others, in this case a group of college students. (“Why did Phillips go over to the fence? Why not just walk away?” wondered a reporter. “For me just to walk by and have a blind eye to it,” Phillips said. “Something just didn’t allow me to do it.”) Friday he waded into a group of Covington students, evidently hoping to troll a response out of them suitable for a viral video. According to the Washington Post, Phillips, 64, said that he felt threatened by the teens and that they swarmed around him as he and other activists were wrapping up the march and preparing to leave. This is a lie. They didn’t swarm around him. He strolled right into the middle of their group. Phillips then pivoted to a completely different version of his story with the Detroit Free Press, in which he admitted that he approached the students, not the other way around. His interviews and the various videos of the incident paint a picture of him saying he is a) terrified of the Catholic students yet b) walking right up to and into their group; a) doing his best to leave yet b) pressing forward insistently; a) trying to go up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial yet b) not noticing that there is a clear path up those steps approximately ten feet to his right... naturally, when you see a group of individuals “attacking” another group in a public place where there are lots of police, the proper response when you’re a 64-year-old man is not to inform a cop but to take charge of the situation yourself. Go up to the “attackers,” stand toe to toe with one of them and start loudly banging a drum in his face. This is a known mollification technique and it absolutely can never fail to defuse tensions. However, if it does fail, what you should do is move the drum even closer to the other person’s face, so it’s just a few inches from the guy’s ears, and keep banging away for several more minutes."

Truth and Disfavored Identities - "In every video of the incident that I have watched, the boys’ behaviour is arguably rowdy and insensitive, but I have yet to see any evidence that supports the far more egregious charge of racism. That is, unless we are prepared to accept that any confrontation between a Native American and a white youth is ipso facto racist, no matter who instigated it or why. Even then, the specific accusations made about the boys’ behavior seem to be false... even though the video footage now corroborates the (truthful) account that the boys gave to the media in the wake of this incident, the Diocese has apologized and some of the boys now face expulsion... This disgraceful affair is further evidence of America’s spiralling polarization and of group hatreds being used to justify sanctimonious mobbing and violence"

You’ll never guess which behavior the media deemed inappropriate for society : The_Donald - "*10-Year-Old Boy 'Drag Kid' Photographed With Naked Adult Drag Queen*
*Wearing red MAGA hat smiling in the face of intimidation*"

/pol/ - >be some little high school kid >go with your clas - Politically Incorrect - 4chan - ">be some little high school kid
>go with your class to a school trip to some kind of pro life event
>you go there and everyone is acting like high school students
>all of the sudden some indian dude comes up to you and sings you the song of his people while beating on a drum
>you think its pretty cool but dont know what to make of the whole situation so you just stand there while smiling nervously
>after a minute or two you just walk away
>tfw you're the face of racism in america and everyone wants to punch you
how is it possible to become the most hated kid in a country by just standing in place and smiling?"

Imam Tawhidi - Posts - "If those students were from an Islamic school and men approached them with a drum, yelling in their faces and telling them to go back to where they came from, every human rights org + the media will be onto those men, indigenous or not. They’ll be labelled bullies, named and shamed"
"Power relations" means double standards are good

A post by I,Hypocrite - refollow on Today - ""Just because she's dressed this way, doesn't mean she's asking for it"
*MAGA Hat*
*punch*
"He was asking for it!!!"

Dave Rubin on Twitter - ""He is a deplorable. Some ppl can also be punched in the face."
"Just @CNN employee @Bakari_Sellers fantasizing about punching a 15-year-old in the face."
"This is precisely what I started talking about 5 years ago. The Left traded in reasoned arguments in favor of calling everyone a racist, a bigot and then a Nazi. Then they said it was OK to punch a Nazi. Now they’ve moved it to punching kids. What’s next? Sadly we’ll find out"

Blowback Begins Over Covington Catholic 'Blackface' Accusation - "many have since pointed out, rather than showing high schoolers in "blackface" (wearing black makeup in order to imitate in a derogatory manner an African American), the photo clearly shows students in a "blackout" event... 'The kids are all wearing black because the fans of sports teams often will come to games all in the same color. Oftentimes fans will wear black as part of a "blackout." Other times they'll white as part of a "whiteout." Or sometimes they'll wear blue or red or any other color. This is standard operating procedure in American sports, especially scholastic sports.Why are they screaming at the opposing player? Well, because he is the opposing player and that's what the home fans do and have done in every basketball game or football game ever played anywhere on Earth. Why is the opposing player black? Well, because that just happens to be his race. If he was white, they would be just as unwelcoming. This is part of the pageantry of sports.'"

Twitter Allows 'Verified' Calls for Violence Against Conservative High School Kids - "Twitter has spent years assuring the public that it will crack down on trolling, harassment, and violent threats. It’s also pledged to tackle “misinformation” and “unhealthy conversation,” using these loaded terms as excuses to ban a wide range of anti-progressive dissidents from the platform.But when innocent conservative high school kids are flooded with violent threats, targeted harassment and doxing on the basis of media-promoted misinformation, Jack Dorsey and his staff seem to do nothing — it even briefly promoted the smears.Over the past 48 hours, an angry mob of Twitter users — many of them with blue checkmarks next to their name, signaling endorsement of their messages by the company — have flooded the platform with disgusting abuse, violent threats, and calls to harass innocent students of the Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky...
'Giving a shit-eating grin to a Native American's face isn't legally violence. But he is smiling *about* the violence. He is saying, "my people hurt you, and you can't touch me even while I gloat about it." It is fascism. And you should punch fascists.'"

Ilhan Omar on Twitter: "-The boys were protesting a woman's right to choose & yelled “it’s not rape if you enjoy it”
-They were taunting 5 Black men before they surrounded Phillips and led racist chants
-Sandmann’s family hired a right wing PR firm to write his non-apology 🤦🏽‍♀️"
So much for "stereotypes"
Luckily the top replies are all calling out her bullshit (from 23 Jan when the fake news had already been debunked)

Liberal, Not Lefty - "So let me get this straight. The kids who made -- and continue to make -- international news for yelling "build the wall" in the face of a Vietnam veteran:
- did not approach the Vitenam vet at all
- did not ever yell "build the wall" , at any time
- The "Vietnam war veteran" is NOT EVEN A VIETNAM VETERAN
- the actual racists and homophobes in the video -- the Black Israelite hate group members who yelled obscenities & racial slurs at the black Covington student for having white friends -- haven't been talked about at all.
And there are people who pretend the only reason to distrust mainstream media must be a right wing populist agenda or bigotry. K."

Covington students, Nathan Phillips viral video: Twitter suspends account that helped ignite controversy - "Twitter suspended an account on Monday afternoon that helped spread a controversial encounter between a Native American elder and a group of high school students wearing Make America Great Again hats.The account claimed to belong to a California schoolteacher. Its profile photo was not of a schoolteacher, but of a blogger based in Brazil, CNN Business found. Twitter suspended the account soon after CNN Business asked about it... McDonagh said he found the account suspicious due to its "high follower count, highly polarized and yet inconsistent political messaging, the unusually high rate of tweets, and the use of someone else's image in the profile photo."Molly McKew, an information warfare researcher who saw the tweet and shared it herself on Saturday, said she later realized that a network of anonymous accounts were working to amplify the video. Speaking about the nature of fake accounts on social media, McKew told CNN Business, "This is the new landscape: where bad actors monitor us and appropriate content that fits their needs. They know how to get it where they need to go so it amplifies naturally. And at this point, we are all conditioned to react and engage or deny in specific ways. And we all did.""
For all the dismissal of contrary opinions as coming from Russian bots, liberals are incredibly easily manipulated

1984: MAGA Kid Was Persecuted For Committing “Facecrime” - "In victimizing Sandmann over a facial expression, leftists are mimicking Big Brother’s treatment of dissidents who committed “facecrime” in Orwell’s fictional dystopian classic.
Orwell writes about facecrime in Part 1, Chapter 5 of 1984;
“The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.”...
innumerable leftists also had Twitter meltdowns over Sandmann’s expression alone, claiming that it represented bigotry and white privilege."
We don't need Big Brother when we have anti-racists

Fact-Check Update: Video Shows Nathan Phillips Saying He's A 'Vietnam Vet,' Was 'In Theater' - "Early reports describing Native American protester Nathan Phillips as a "Vietnam veteran" have since received updates clarifying that Phillips described himself as a "Vietnam-era vet"; he was not deployed in the conflict, as it would have been impossible due to the years of his service. But newly surfaced video shows Phillips unequivocally describing himself as a Vietnam veteran, and even adding that his honorable discharge papers prove that he was "in theater."... The only offensive recorded actions of any of the boys was a few briefly doing a tomahawk chop in response to Phillips' initially confusing "protest," which included banging his drum in the face of one high school junior, Nick Sandmann."

Gruntworks - Posts - "“We have his DD-214. here is the truth...
Nathan Phillips aka Nathan Stanard was a refrigerator mechanic in the Marine Corps Reserves who went AWOL twice, and was confined to the brig and kicked out of the Marines as an E1 - Private in El Toro, CA after spending most of his USMC Reserve service in Lincoln, NE, and never left the States.
He was NOT a Recon Ranger (whatever the f*ck that is) which he is directly quoted as claiming. He also never went to Vietnam, even though he never corrected multiple major news outlets when they inferred that from his statements, and subsequently reported that he fought in Vietnam.
Senior Chief Special Warfare Operator (SEAL) Don Shipley already has records.”

Liberal Comedian Offers Oral Sex to Anyone Who Punches ‘MAGA’ Teen in the Face - "Sarah Beattie, a vulgar feminist comedian and Twitter activist, declared in a since-deleted tweet: “I will blow whoever manages to punch that maga kid in the face.”"
Being a sex object is good as long as it's for progressive causes

Investigation finds no evidence of ‘racist or offensive statements’ in Mall incident - The Washington Post - "A report released Wednesday about an encounter between Kentucky high school students and Native American activists at the Lincoln Memorial found “no evidence” that the students made “offensive or racist statements,” either in response to the Black Hebrew Israelites who shouted slurs at them or to a drum-beating Native American... The firm, Greater Cincinnati Investigation Inc., said four licensed investigators spent approximately 240 hours interviewing witnesses and reviewing about 50 hours of Internet activity, including posts on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter and video from major networks... one of the chaperones told students that if “they engaged in a verbal exchange with the Black Hebrew Israelites, they would receive detention.”... The report did include a section about the hats, saying that most of the boys bought the headgear in Washington, where they had traveled to participate in the annual March for Life, an antiabortion demonstration. The report notes that, in previous years, some students bought “Hope” hats in support of then-President Barack Obama — and that such behavior violates no rules... The report concluded that Phillips’s public comments about the incident “contain some inconsistencies” that could not be resolved because the investigators could not contact him"
Naturally the liberal response was just to allege a coverup. Or that they were already guilty by wearing the hats and being at such a march and the school was reprehensible for bringing them to a political event (presumably wearing a 'Hope' hat is brave and stunning since it supports the Right ideology)

Covington Pile-On Will Destroy the Left - "How strange to treat a smirking teen’s face, something known to every parent and schoolteacher in the world, as an emblem of “tactics of genocide”—as though the root of ethnic cleansing were adolescent insolence... Treating a smirking teenager as a stand-in for the wanton slaughter of indigenous people, the brutal abomination of chattel slavery, the persecution of anti-war activists, the racial terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, the exclusion of Chinese immigrants, or the internment of Japanese Americans utterly trivializes bygone atrocities. Did these commentators swallow the trendy notion that microaggressions are “violence,” and apply it backwards in history?... Many who are sympathetic to the blue coalition’s concerns are baffled that a large faction within it spends so much energy on culture-war pile-ons, even opining that children are punchable or irredeemable or deserving of doxing. It’s the bizarre focus on these boys as what ails America, rather than on any of the many powerful people doing identifiable harm, or on any of the things that might end family separations, avert assaults, increase wages, reduce poverty, reform police, or increase access to medical care, that’s going to do in the left."

If You Still Think Nick Sandmann’s Smile Is Proof of Racism, You’re Seeing What You Want to See - "The Native American man says, "Go back to Europe where you came from. This is not your land, you have been here two, three generations compared to us. We've been here a million fucking years." The MAGA teen responds, "That's not true. Let's go all the way back to Africa," and proceeds to tell the story of the land bridge that once connected Asia to North America, which allowed humans to settle these lands some thousands of years ago. (His opponent counters that this a "bullshit theory.")Keep in mind, the teen saying that all human beings originally came from Africa is a member of the group of young people initially described by countless pundits as obviously, undeniably racist... Surely if Sandmann's objective had been to harass the Native Americans and sow racial discord, he would not have attempted to defuse the situation. In fact, this gesture supports the claim he made in his official statement that he "motioned to my classmate and tried to get him to stop engaging with the protestor, as I was still in the mindset that we needed to calm down tensions"... I have drawn parallels to the Rolling Stone/University of Virginia gang rape hoax of 2014, which provides a powerful example of mainstream media getting a story very wrong in ways that permanently damaged the magazine's reputation.But in the less insane media world of 2014, at least the Rolling Stone debunking was accepted by pretty much everyone. When friends of "Jackie," the alleged rape victim, came forward to help clarify that her alleged attacker did not exist, and was in fact a persona she had invented in order to catfish them, I don't remember many major pundits sticking their fingers in their ears and pretending not to hear this.The ongoing effort to pretend that videos of boys doing pep rally type cheers in opposition to a hate group is in fact evidence of deep-seated racism makes me wonder whether Rolling Stone truther-ism would have been much more common had the story come out in 2019."

Opinion | How We Destroy Lives Today - The New York Times - "The man, Nathan Phillips, told two different versions of what happened. He told The Washington Post that he was singing a traditional song when the teenagers swarmed around him, some chanting, “Build that wall, build that wall.” He decided the right thing to do was to get away. “I’ve got to find myself an exit out of this situation.”He told The Detroit Free Press that the incident started when the boys started attacking four African-Americans. So he decided to intervene. “There was that moment when I realized I’ve put myself between beast and prey. These young men were beastly and these old black individuals was their prey.” Many news organizations ran one of these accounts. Before you judge the reporters too harshly, it’s important to remember that these days the social media tail wags the mainstream media dog. If you want your story to be well placed and if you want to be professionally rewarded, you have to generate page views — you have to incite social media. The way to do that is to reinforce the prejudices of your readers. In this one episode, you had a gentle, 64-year-old Native American man being swarmed by white (boo!), male (boo!), preppy (double boo!) Trump supporters (infinite boo!). If you are trying to rub the pleasure centers of a liberal audience, this is truly a story too good to check."

Brett MacDonald on Twitter - "When vibrant inner-city youths kidnapped that white boy with autism and tortured him on Facebook live there was less commotion, concern, and media coverage than when a white boy smirked. Remember that and never forget it."