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No doubt you’ve heard the story about the Catholic school kids who supposedly surrounded and mocked a Native American man after the March for Life in Washington, D.C.
The usual libertarian suspects promptly took to social media to assure us of their profound respect for Native Americans (good thing they cleared that up!) and their outrage at these students.
It was the usual embarrassing p.c. sh**show.
By the next day the full video was surfacing, and the original version of the story turns out — you’ll never see this coming — to be a fabrication.
Here’s the video:
The truly central figures in the story are the Black Hebrew Israelites, or the Black Hebrews. I could tell you all about their theology, but frankly, nobody cares.
At the beginning of the video we see the Black Hebrews taunting the native Americans gathered at the Lincoln Memorial (where the students had gathered at the conclusion of the march, and where by coincidence some Native Americans were having a gathering of their own). “You[‘re] not supposed to worship eagles, buffalos, rams, all types of animals! This is the reason the Lord took away your land!” one of them bellows.
(Gee, I wonder what we’d be discussing right now if those school kids had been shouting things like that.)
A woman who may have been with the native American gathering (it’s unclear from the video) approaches the Black Hebrews to dispute their position. One of the men turns to the camera and says, “This is the problem, Israel; it’s always our women coming up with they [sic] loud mouth…thinking they can come and distract things with they [sic] loud-ass mouth, cause they [sic] not used to dealing with no [sic] real men.”
The native Americans are later told, “You think there’s Uncle Tom? You’re an Uncle Tomahawk. You got your head up the white man’s ass! You say peace? There ain’t gonna be no peace!”
The video also shows a black man shouting at them. They respond, “You got all these racist bastards — you nigger! you nigger! — all these crackers with these racist-ass Make America Great Again hats on, and you want to get violent with us? Get your Uncle Tom ass out of here!”
Meanwhile, for a solid hour the students endure language like: “You little dirty-ass crackers, your day coming!” “Dusty-ass animals!” “Bunch of child-molesting faggots!” The kids are also compared to “dogs” and “hyenas.”
Astonishingly, the kids keep their cool.
Then they’re told that only whites shoot up schools, and that they themselves “look like they [sic] about to shoot up a school right now!”
The kids, who had gathered to listen by that point, showed remarkable restraint by walking away.
(Would the people taunting them have done the same? The question answers itself, doesn’t it?)
The students pass the time (and drown out the Black Hebrews) with some school sports cheers.
It is in this context that Nathan Phillips enters the scene, banging a drum and marching into the crowd of students.
He later told the media that the students “were in the process of attacking these four black individuals.” “There was that moment,” he went on, “when I realized I’ve put myself between beast and prey. These young men were beastly and these old black individuals was their prey, and I stood in between them and so they needed their pounds of flesh and they were looking at me for that.”
Not one word of that story is true, we now know. Nobody was attacking anybody. The Black Hebrews themselves had threatened people, it’s true, but the students? Not a single threatening word.
(The mainstream media story, that the kids confronted and surrounded the native Americans, is of course completely preposterous and as false as anything can possibly be.)
The Black Hebrews had shown up to taunt Phillips’ own people, and had been doing so over and over. Phillips doesn’t even mention this. But that’s obviously the whole story!
If he had really wanted to defuse the situation, he should have banged his drum in the faces of the hysterical lunatics who had been screaming racialist inanities for over an hour by that point.
I doubt he would have lived to tell the tale, so he chose instead to confront some high school students, whom he knew full well would not lay a hand on him.
Phillips also told the media that the students had been chanting, “Build the wall!”
We have all two hours worth of footage of what occurred. Not one person uttered those words.
One student recalled: “In the midst of our cheers, we were approached by a group of adults led by Nathan Phillips, with Phillips beating his drum. They forced their way to the center of our group. We initially thought this was a cultural display since he was beating along to our cheers and so we clapped to the beat.”
Soon the situation became confusing, especially with Phillips inappropriately in the student’s physical space. No one quite knew what was happening; you can hear multiple people asking, “What is going on?”
But they had shouted their cheers to the beat of Phillips’ drum, and this is unforgivable.
As Robby Soave wrote in Reason, after watching all two hours of the video, “There’s shockingly little evidence of wrongdoing.”
But these students should be ruined for this, according to major celebrities and half the Twitterverse, the vast majority of whom never saw the video.
Immediately afterward, by the way, the Black Hebrews were back at it, telling the kids that America will be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust, and that they themselves are all bound to become school shooters.
This is ignored. It’s kids jumping up and down to a drum beat for two minutes that everyone needs to note.
You’d think we’d also want to note that this Native American man thought it was the students, after an hour’s worth of vile filth being spewed at them, who needed to be approached with his drum. How deranged is that?
Meanwhile, half the country rushed to judgment on the basis of Phillips’ false statement, and of a picture of a student staring at Phillips, who was banging a drum an inch from his face.
I’d say the kid handled himself well. After having endured a full hour of vicious taunting — which would itself have been national news had the races involved been reversed — he stood there silently.
Oooh, but standing there silently can also be “racist”!
What can you say to something like that?
Again: the Black Hebrews had been taunting Phillips’ own people since they arrived, but Phillips claims he thought the students were the problem! If I’d been taunted and abused for a solid hour, and someone thought the right thing to do was to pound a drum in my face — my face! — I’d be flabbergasted myself: what the hell is happening here?
Come on.
It seems vastly more likely that he knew he could make an incident out of it (as has happened with Phillips in the past) by choosing the side that had been restrained and reasonable. (Again, don’t believe me? Watch the video.)
Meanwhile, this kid has been compared to a Klansman and a ’60s-era segregationist — for standing there amidst what was obviously intended to be a provocation, and a completely unwarranted one.
That kid — and his classmates — had done nothing. They had goofed off, or even just remained silent, during a full hour of abuse. They deserve medals.
Of course, the school administration and chancery officials in the diocese condemned these kids as soon as they heard the first version of events. These people are cowards, without exception, and if you ever find yourself in a situation where you’re thinking, “I sure hope the school administration [or the chancery office of the diocese] will back me up,” trust me, you’re sunk.
If I were a parent in this situation I’d talk to a lawyer immediately, and I would be sure the school and the diocese knew that I and other parents were doing so.
Message: if you cowards are going to sacrifice my kids to the social media mob, I am going to make your lives miserable.
There is a reasonable chance that the bishop of that diocese may be enough of a man of reason to intervene and stop whatever the cowards have planned. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, note well that major conservative individuals and publications rushed to judgment just as much as the mainstream media and the left. National Review has since posted a non-apology apology, as has the March for Life itself.
The conservative movement’s first instinct is always p.c. grandstanding. The left feels no comparable urge to appease its own opponents. Then conservatives wonder why they lose.
Now this may be just one incident, but you know what? I don’t think it is. The fault lines are becoming more and more pronounced. If you’re not on board with the SJW program, don’t expect better treatment than this.
Prominent figures on Twitter demanded these kids be doxxed and their lives destroyed.
Some Twitter folks, even when presented with the full video, couldn’t help themselves, and basically thought whatever happened to a kid wearing a MAGA hat was deserved.
“Oh, but I don’t like those hats, either,” say clueless libertarians — as if the SJW mob, which calls you a Nazi for opposing Obamacare, will be sure to make careful distinctions in your case.
Things are getting crazier every day.
I think it’s time, if you still haven’t, to join me — along with plenty of other bright, principled, and non-cowardly folks — in my special group.
The fake #Resistance is happy with the foreign policy of Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton, and Marco Rubio, and dominates the media, academia, and Hollywood.
Some “resistance”!
We’re the real resistance: we resist the very Establishment the fake resistance loves.
And my group is a haven of sanity, which we need now more than ever.
Join me:
