That comment was made tongue in cheek. Would make perfect sense though since the media pounces to be first all the time so baiting them to lose credibility is pretty genius. Just take a look how popular this thread is, even when my 2nd post was the full length video showing the context.
SPORT LIFE WALL STREET JOURNAL Why the cultural elite leaped to judgment over MAGA schoolboysWSJ EDITORIAL BOARD Nick Sandmann was condemned after confronting a Native American man. Picture: Supplied. 12:43PM JANUARY 24, 2019 112 Facebook Twitter Email Of the most culturally deplorable boxes one can check in progressive America in 2019, the boys of Covington Catholic High School have most of them: white, male, Christian, attendees at the annual March for Life in Washington, and wearers of MAGA hats. What’s not to dislike? So when four minutes of video footage emerged online this weekend showing the students appearing to harass a Native American Vietnam veteran named Nathan Phillips, America’s media and cultural elite leapt to judgment. A short video clip of student Nick Sandmann supposedly “smirking” as Mr. Phillips banged his drum in the student’s face went viral, and instantly the boys of Covington Catholic in Kentucky were branded racists. Best-selling author Reza Aslan tweeted that the high school junior had a “punchable face.” Former Democratic Party chief Howard Dean opined that Covington Catholic is “a hate factory.” GQ’s Nathaniel Friedman urged people to “Doxx ‘em all,” i.e., make their personal information public. Meanwhile, mainstream news outlets published misleading accounts of what happened based on incomplete information. And pundits on the right and left rushed to demonstrate their own virtue by trashing high school students as somehow symptomatic of America’s cultural rot in the Age of Trump. Only it turns out there was a much longer video, nearly two hours, showing that almost everything first reported about the confrontation was false, or at least much more complicated. The boys had been taunted by a group of Black Hebrew Israelites, who shouted racist and homophobic slurs. Far from the boys confronting Mr. Phillips, he confronted them as they were waiting near the Lincoln Memorial for their bus. It also turns out that Mr. Phillips is not the Vietnam veteran he was reported to be in most stories. On Tuesday the Washington Post offered a correction, noting that while Mr. Phillips served in the Marines from 1972 to 1976, he was “never deployed to Vietnam.” Some of the students did respond to Mr. Phillips by doing the Tomahawk Chop, and it would have been better had they all walked away. But on the whole these teenagers were calm amid the provocations and far less incendiary than the adults who taunted them and the progressive high priests who denounced them. The new information has people who had so eagerly cast the first stones hastily deleting their tweets. Still, it is telling that some of the most disgusting tweets were the work of the blue-check elites who pride themselves on their tolerance. More surprising is the rush to judgment by those who might have been expected to consider the boys innocent until proven guilty, or at least until all the evidence is in. On Saturday the boys’ school issued a joint statement with the Covington Diocese saying they “condemn” the students for their actions and were considering appropriate action “including expulsion.” A post on National Review said the boys might as well have “just spit on the cross.” And the March for Life distanced itself from the “reprehensible behaviour” of the marchers from Covington. Many of these early critics have now apologised or walked back their initial condemnations. But these social injustices perpetrated on social media are not so easily redressed. Covington Catholic was closed Tuesday for security reasons. Most of those who so eagerly maligned these boys will face no lasting consequences, while the boys themselves will always have to wonder, when they are turned down for a job or a school, whether someone had Googled their name and found only half this story. This is an ugly moment in America, all right, but there are few things uglier than a righteous leftist mob. The Wall St Journal
Interesting article worth a read: Covington Boys: The Difference Between Jerks and Monsters The bothersome teens of Covington Catholic aren’t heroes or horrors. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/01/covington-catholic-the-scandal-that-isnt-a-scandal.html The clash between the rowdy teens of Covington Catholic and the stoic drumming of Native American activist Nathan Phillips is a perfect Magarorschach test—that’s when you somehow work an image of a MAGA hat into one of Hermann Rorschach’s original inkblots.* The standoff and resulting social media meltdown syncs with America’s fault-lines better than any meme or post dreamt up by the fanciest of bears working inside the Russian disinformation machine. As good as that machine has become at inflaming America, it has nothing on Americans ourselves. The confrontation at the Lincoln Memorial jabbed a finger at the most sensitive nerve within the cavity that is the national discourse. It had everything: Trump, white kids, a Native American elder, black cultists in the background throwing anti-gay invective, abortion, (remember, the teens were there for the March for Life), and forensic videography. The only way it would have been more polarizing would be if the footage had been found on Anthony Weiner’s hard drive. By now the vindication of the inappropriate teens of Covington Catholic has bled into near victimhood, with central figure Nick Sandmann having comported himself well enough on theToday show, mainly by acting appropriately overwhelmed. A backlash to the backlash to the reframing of outrage may yet occur, but for now there is no second smirker theory. So let me use this opportunity to recast the impertinent teens of Covington Catholic. With apologies to Mr. Overton, I aim to move the Covington window from a consideration of the teens as cruel/evil to insensitive/buffoonish. The thing to remember about the dumbass teens of Covington Catholic is that while they are dumbasses, they are also teens. They take their cues from adult instruction and cultural messages. Their chaperones failed them in not thinking of a different course of action. Instead they allowed their charges to play the dozens with the Black Hebrew Israelites, a collective of notorious provocateurs. And I blame the adults for allowing the wearing of MAGA hats. That headgear is more than an endorsement of a political figure—it’s a rebuke to any claim to faith-based compassion. A phrase some Catholics use to describe their social teachings is the “seamless garment.” It is the concept of the “consistent life ethic” that considers all life worth protecting—from fetuses to murderers—and also extends concern to nuclear weapons and the treatment of prisoners of war. The MAGA hat is the embodiment of a president who gleefully calls for the execution of convicted criminals, accused criminals and even exonerated non-criminals. To wear the hat doesn’t mean the clueless teens of Covington Catholic are ipso facto embodiments of privilege, power, and malice. But it does indicate they were poorly supervised, and that Sandmann’s “silent prayer” of de-escalation was to a warped kind of deity. The worst act of the obnoxious teens of Covington Catholic was to engage in the “tomahawk chop” and accompanying chant in the face of an actual Native American. That said, two days after the showdown, football fans rooted for the Kansas City Chiefs with that exact gesture and similar chanting, as touched off by the beating of a big, faux-ceremonial war drum. The presence of these chants in a sporting context does not excuse them in this one—aimed at an activist attending the Indigenous Peoples March. But it is the job of the adults to make clear the difference of those contexts, or perhaps to change the norms in all contexts. To Ben Shapiro and Laura Ingraham and Donald Trump, the teens of Covington Catholic are heroes, with their heroism lying mostly in the fact that they caused the libs to own themselves. To those who have not tempered their condemnation one bit, like Laura Wagner writing in Deadspin, news organizations that pulled back on their initial assessments are “so eager to perform reasonableness” because their desire to be seen as level-headed “is more important than reporting the most accurate version of the truth”. This doesn’t resonate with me at all. When I convey to listeners (or readers) my most careful and full interpretation of what happened, I don’t use “accuracy” to seem reasonable. I use reason to be accurate. I’d rather save my outrage for that which is outrageous and be set aflame only by that which is incendiary, not that which is stupid. By the way: One of the more interesting defenses of the foolish teens of Covington Catholic was that though they were accused of shouting “Build the wall!” There is no video evidence of that. Think about that. “Build the wall!” is the signature proposal of the president of the United States. It is the issue animating the most pressing short term dispute in America today (the shutdown). It is also shorthand for fighting words. Every conservative commentator who came to the defense of the obnoxious teens of Covington Catholic cited the fact that they, while perhaps obnoxious, did not say “Build the wall!” That’s remarkable—to not endorse the president’s platform out loud is cited as exculpatory, often by the very same people who think building a wall is the right policy. In any event, I have a strong suspicion that if we never saw this video, Phillips, Sandmann, the Black Hebrew Israelites, and all the people in each of their social groups would be going on with their lives today largely unaffected. I don’t think the petty mockery of ill-mannered teens would have seared itself onto the conscience of Phillips for years or even days to come. “What a bunch of jerks,” he probably would have said, and moved on. We have as a country expelled so much angst, so much societal tsuris over deeds best considered ignorant, rude, and forgettable. The Russians know us well. They’re so good at exploiting our fissures because we jump to outrage over actions that often fail to rise above irksome. The bothersome teens of Covington Catholic aren’t heroes or horrors. They’re not victims or villains. They’re symptoms of this fever that we ought to contemplate with our intellect, not lash out against with our emotions.
What makes this thread so popular was exactly the fact that you posted based on an initial jump that was wrong and then had to issue a correction. The fact that you issued your correction right after the initial post makes it all the funnier. If those leaping to conclusions without a vetting of the facts would just slow down once in a while, we'd never had these issues. We all leap to conclusions from time to time. None of us are immune from it. But the media does it over and over and over again and it is their job to get things correct. They can't overcome this until they do their job and report the news, and put their political biases to the side.
Nah, Americans just have hard-ons for any story involving race relations Excuse me for posting a story from the NY times and then having to go through the trouble of doing a background check.
The native american guy is just a professional cultural grifter. When he is not playing the stolen valor grifter con game. Sorry but not every old drunken indian is worthy of the "native american elder" mantle. Although they are in the lefty media. Maybe that is why Pocahontis thought it might help to have a beer the other day. Everyone on the left be having a cultural con game going.
This is my point entirely. All of those media outlets that were once trusted as news sources now make things up because they have a narrative. Many of us figured this out a while ago. Some still believe them to be news outlets.