by Tucker Carlson
If you were on social media over the weekend, you probably saw the video. It was shot Friday afternoon, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It seemed to show a group of teenage boys taunting an elderly American Indian man who was holding a drum.
The young men had come to Washington from a Catholic school in Kentucky to demonstrate in the March for Life. Some of them wore “Make America Great Again” hats. They seemed menacing. Within hours, the video was being replayed by virtually every news outlet in America. The American Indian man with the drum in the video is called Nathan Phillips. He described the young men he encountered, the ones in the hats, as aggressive and threatening — essentially shock troops for Donald Trump.
“I heard them saying, ‘Build that wall. Build that wall,'” Phillips said.”This is indigenous land. We’re not supposed to have walls here.”
It’s hard to remember the last time the great American meme machine produced a clearer contrast between good and evil — it was essentially an entire morality play shrunk down to four minutes for Facebook.
On one side, a noble tribal elder, weather-beaten, calm and wise. He looks like a living icon. You could imagine a single tear sliding slowly down his cheek at the senselessness of it all.
On the other side, you had a pack of heedless, sneering young men from the south, drunk on racism and white privilege. The irony is overwhelming: The indigenous man’s land had been stolen by the very ancestors of these boys in MAGA hats. Yet they dare to lecture him about walls designed to keep people who look very much like him out what they were calling “their” country.
It was infuriating to a lot of people. At the same time, it was also strangely comforting to the people who watched it from Brooklyn and L.A. The people who run this country have long suspected that middle America is a hive of nativist bigotry. And now they had proof of that. It was cause for a celebration of outrage. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as having your own biases confirmed.
But did the video really describe what happened? That should have been the first question journalists asked. Checking facts and adding context is what journalists are paid to do. It’s in the first line of the job description. Yet, amazingly, almost nobody in the American media did that.
That’s a shame, because there was a lot to check. The full video of what happened on Friday in Washington is well over an hour long. The four minutes that made Twitter don’t tell the story, but instead distorted the story. A longer look shows that the boys from Covington Catholic in Kentucky weren’t a roving mob looking for a fight. They were, in fact — and it shows it on the tape — standing in place waiting to be picked up by a bus.
As they waited there, members of a group called the Black Hebrew Israelites, a black supremacist organization, began taunting them with racial epithets. Nathan Phillips, the now-famous American Indian activist, also approached them, pounding his drum. The footage seems to suggest the boys were unsure whether Phillips was hostile or taking their side against the Black Hebrew Israelites. But in any case, there is no evidence at all that anyone said, “build a wall.”
So, what really happened on Friday? Watch and decide for yourself. There’s plenty of video out there, and some of it is fascinating. What we know for certain at this point is that our cultural leaders are, in fact, bigots. They understand reality on the basis of stereotypes. When the facts don’t conform to what they think they know, they ignore the facts. They see America not as a group of people or of citizens, but as a collection of groups. Some of these groups, they are convinced, are morally inferior to other groups. They know that’s true. They say it out loud. That belief shapes almost all of their perceptions of the world.
It’s not surprising, then, that when a group of pro-life Catholic kids who look like lacrosse players and live in Kentucky are accused of wrongdoing, the media don’t pause for a moment before casting judgment. Maggie Haberman of the New York Times suggested the boys needed to be expelled from school. Ana Navarro of CNN called the boys racists and “asswipes” and then went after their teachers and parents.
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SOURCE: Fox News
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