By Kyle Smith
Sunday, January 20, 2019
If you’re in a public place and someone starts heckling
you, are you entitled to heckle back? How about if someone does something much
worse than heckling you in a public place? What if that person in fact takes a
drum up to you and starts banging it in your face? Are you entitled to heckle
back? How about smirking? Are you allowed to smirk?
I think you are, even if you’re wearing a MAGA hat. Even
if you’re an entitled brat. Even if you’re an entitled Catholic brat.
We’ll stipulate that the Catholic boys from a high school
in Kentucky were a little obnoxious when an indigenous man named Nathan
Phillips banged a drum at them in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Friday. But
Phillips was being a lot more obnoxious. To put it another way, if you were
minding your own business in a public place and someone came right up to you
and put a drum up to your face and made a huge racket inches from your nose,
would you be happy about it?
The kids from Covington Catholic High School in
Covington, Ky., were ambassadors for causes much bigger than themselves:
Catholicism and the right to life. As such, they should have comported
themselves better than to jeer and do a tomahawk chop in front of Phillips.
Ideally, the kids would have ignored him and walked away. Until about ten
minutes ago, it was broadly agreed in our culture that kids are allowed to do
some dumb things because they’re kids. Should these kids’ lives be ruined
because some of them responded to obnoxious provocation by being a bit rude
themselves? I’d say their reaction was if anything more restrained than you
would expect from teenagers. I’d advise them to do better next time. I
certainly wouldn’t consider expulsion.
Phillips, on the other hand, is an adult, and he repeatedly
lied about what happened to the Washington
Post, which was utterly taken in by him and reported everything he said
uncritically.
It would have been revolting if Nathan Phillips had been
minding his own business doing a tribal chant while a gang of kids swarmed
around him and started jeering. That’s what many media outlets reported: “Boys
in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous Peoples
March,” ran a New York Times headline
over a story that said “a throng of cheering and jeering high school boys” were
“surrounding a Native American elder.”
That isn’t what happened. Phillips was the aggressor in
the situation. It’s a curious feature of our culture that people aggressively
seek to be victimized, go out of their way in hopes of getting punched in the
face, but here we are. People do that because they know the media hand out
condemnation based on perceived ranking in the victim hierarchy. “Old Ypsilanti
man” is near the top, while “privileged-looking young white male probable
heterosexual in a MAGA cap” is the absolute bottom. The surface appeal of the
story short-circuited the reporters’ brains to such a degree that they failed
to perform basic tasks such as asking the people they were accusing for their
version of events. The Times and
other outlets had zero evidence that a “mob” “surrounded” Phillips, except a
claim of Phillips that he has since backed away from.
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.
Phillips, who claims to be a former Marine and a Vietnam
veteran, told the Free Press the
Covington kids “were in the process of attacking these four black individuals.
I was there and I was witnessing all of this. . . . As this kept on going on
and escalating, it just got to a point where you do something or you walk away,
you know? You see something that is wrong and you’re faced with that choice of
right or wrong.”
Because 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.
There is a nearly two-hour video of the incident in which
a group of about five black individuals from the Black Hebrew Israelites shout
abuse at Catholics and Trump supporters near the Lincoln Memorial. “You believe
in a f***** child molester,” they shout. “The Purge is coming.” “Christ is
coming back to kick your cracker asses.” Etc. One youth, apparently part of the
Covington group, takes off his shirt, leads the group in what looks like a
choreographed school cheer (this appears consistent with the account one
student provided to WKRC TV in Cincinnati), everyone joins in, then most of
them sit down or take a knee at about the 1:12 mark. At that point Phillips
emerges from the crowd and walks up to the kids with his drum. The kids get up
and start dancing and jumping again.
A lot of people were making videos of the incident. At
least one of these videos, it appears, was taken by an ally of Phillips. Yet I
haven’t come across a video that shows the Covington kids chanting “build the
wall,” much less “attacking” black people as Phillips says.
If you insult someone, and that person insults you back,
you don’t get to cry, “Oh my gosh, for no reason whatsoever I’ve just been
insulted!” The Christian thing to do is of course turn the other cheek, but if
we’re being honest, people do tend to take the bait when they’re being baited,
and teens are less likely than others to turn away from outright provocation.
Nathan Phillips went out seeking to create an incident, and he fooled the New York Times and the Washington Post into accepting his false
version of it.
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