[Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt. To read the entire article, please click here.]
If someone walks up to you and bangs a drum in your face, are you guilty of harassing the drummer? You might be if you’re white and wearing a MAGA hat. Just a day after rushing to judgment about a BuzzFeed story that claimed President Trump had instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress — a story Robert Mueller’s own office subsequently debunked, the blue-checkmark media elite had a new instant narrative to promote. It was a tale perfectly tailored to liberal biases: white Catholic teenagers in MAGA hats had harassed an old and frail Indian veteran during the March for Life, which was also the date of an Indigenous People’s March.
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The videos appear to depict more than one engagement between the Indians and the Catholic teens, and without knowing which happened first, and what circumstances led to the first encounter, it’s hard to form any conclusions, if fairness is your objective. Maybe the teens chanted ‘Build the wall!’ or something else at the Indian activists, which prompted Phillips to approach them. But so far, there’s no evidence to support that scenario, only the words of Phillips and his associates. That hasn’t stopped blue-checkmark media figures like former CNN blatherskite Reza Aslan from not only branding the teens as racists but in Aslan’s case musing about inflicting violence on them:
Honest question. Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s? pic.twitter.com/jolQ7BZQPD
— Reza Aslan (@rezaaslan) January 20, 2019
Rhetorical questions about punching kids? Imagine the response of Aslan’s professional friends if he’d asked that about, say, one of the high schoolers campaigning for gun control after the Parkland, Florida shootings. Or imagine Aslan saying that about any teenager who’s not wearing a MAGA hat. Nonviolence and protecting children don’t apply when you’re an enemy to the woke, enlightened left. And another double-standard bears mention, as well: watch the rest of the nine-minute video with the Covington teens after the encounter with the Indian activists. Also on the scene are a group of Black Hebrew Israelites, a crackpot sect that takes this occasion to spew gay-baiting rhetoric at the Covington teenagers. This part of the Covington’s teens’ experience in Washington, D.C. has somehow gone unmentioned in most media, and the social justice enforcers on Twitter have not paid any attention at all to the hate explicitly vented here — certainly nothing like the outrage lavished on the Phillips-Covington incident.
But try to imagine for a minute that instead of black separatist leader ‘General Yahanna’ (for it seems to be he) asking teens, ‘You proud of sodomy? You look like a product of sodomy!’, someone in a MAGA hat saying that. Do you think it would get a little more coverage? Do you think Reza Aslan would start fantasizing about tossing punches? I can tell you for damn sure he’s not going to punch General Yahanna, and not just for reasons of political correctness. It’s a lot easier to bully high-school student than angry militants.
Time will reveal what really happened between the Covington students and Phillips, though it may be too late to give them justice. If they’re guilty of what liberals assume, of taunting and provoking Phillips, then they deserve harsh punishment by their school. But with the climate of outrage that’s been created around these Catholic teenagers already, the school may not want to look too closely, lest it find itself forced to fight for the truth rather than submitting to the power of the righteous narrative — a costly battle, and the enforcers of correct opinion know it. They count on it. They don’t need all the facts when they already know the people they want to hate.