It’s not easy to keep up with all of this. But it’s been reported by the Catholic News Agency that Native American (and non-Vietnam-vet) Nathan Phillips and his merry band of drummers had an even busier Washington weekend than had previously been thought:
While chanting and playing ceremonial drums, a group of Native American rights activists reportedly led by Nathan Phillips attempted Jan. 19 to enter Washington, D.C.’s Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception during a Saturday evening Mass.
The group of 20 demonstrators was stopped by shrine security as it tried to enter the church during its 5:15 pm Vigil Mass, according to a shrine security guard on duty during the Mass.
“It was really upsetting,” the guard told CNA.
“There were about twenty people trying to get in, we had to lock the doors and everything.”…
A source close to the shrine’s leadership corroborated the security guard’s account, telling CNA that during the Mass, Phillips and the group tried to enter the church while playing drums and chanting, and were prohibited from entering the building by security personnel, who locked the main basilica doors with the congregation still inside.
Just to give you the timeline, the incident with the Covington boys happened on Friday, the video went viral some time Saturday, and the attempted disruption of the Mass occurred late Saturday afternoon.
Phillips was just trying to do a bit of peace-making at the shrine, no doubt. And those nasty Catholics, disrespecting him by locking him out! Bigots!
There were a lot of visitors at the Mass because they had come from all over the country for the pro-life demonstration, as Phillips and his fellow-demonstrators almost certainly were quite aware.
The story is one of harassment, all right, but it isn’t Phillips who was harassed.
I’m still seeing tons of people who believe the original story about Phillips and the Covington teenagers, and are still spewing hatred towards the kids. After all, a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on.
And those boots seem to be hip-waders, sloshing through thick mud. Slow and arduous going.
[ADDENDUM: I’ve been meaning to put this story up somewhere, and I think this might just be the place. Phillips seems to be a serial victim of racist students he just happens to come across.]
I think of the Covington story and the Buzzfeed Cohen/Trump story as connected, even though their subject matters differ tremendously. The common meta-subject-matter of both, the lessons to learn from both, go like this:
(1) There is no limit to the degree to which the media will lie in order to hurt the right.
(2) It can start with a fringe-type of media source (usually reporting on something manufactured and/or distorted by a leftist activist unidentified as such in the report). Then the supposedly more reliable media, the MSM, will quickly pick up and run with it, with what you might call reckless disregard for the truth. This is not carelessness or accidental at all.
(3) If an exposure of the falsehood occurs and the truth finally comes out through some other conduit, there will be minimal or no apology or retraction from the original source or from the MSM. They will either double down or issue a fake and/or inadequate “apology,” often “apologizing” for some minor element they got wrong and leaving the thrust of the story and their errors intact.
(4) In the minds of most MSM readers and listeners, the story will therefore stand mostly as originally reported. Most readers probably won’t even catch any corrections that are issued, and the ones who do will either reject them or consider them of minimal import.
(5) Then without breaking stride, the MSM will go on to the next episode of the same game—because it works for them.
I finally noticed and comprehended this game about two years post-9/11—a process I’ve described in my “a mind is a difficult thing to change” series—and this was one of the main reasons for my political change.
The tactic is even more blatantly obvious now. But many people who self-describe as being on the right seem to remain blind to it. That’s one of the themes of this recent post of Ace’s, in which he quotes a Twitter user named davereaboi as writing the following (the “you” here is the supposedly conservative press):
People are furious that those of you who bought into it and couldn’t resist making knee-jerk Virtue Signaling condemnations have not yet learned about the nature of the enemy we’re fighting:
Activists are trained to set up these scenarios, the media runs with stories that are too good to check because they reinforce their biases. They do this on purpose. You just have to read Lefty activist literature. It’s all there, for decades. *Not knowing is your failure.*
That is the heart of the matter. How can intelligent people have been taken in by this? I really don’t know. It’s not just that they’re in the Beltway, or interested in virtue-signaling, although those things are part of it. At this point they seem incredibly stupid and destructive, or else only pretending to believe in what they say they believe.
At least if their apologies sounded sincere and complete I might give them the benefit of the doubt, even now. We all make mistakes. But to act this way over and over and over, with so little remorse and seemingly no learning at all, from people who are inclined to think themselves superior to the rest of us? No. Fools or knaves or both, take your pick.
That is why so much of the right’s ire in response to the Covington story has been directed at pundits supposedly on the right who fell for the lie. It’s sort of like an error in baseball, or an own-goal in soccer. Doesn’t that make fans much angrier than when the other team scores? We know what game the left plays. Why don’t all writers on the right know it, too?
I just found this correction in which the WaPo admits that Nathan Phillips is not a Vietnam veteran.
Fancy that. It’s something the right half of the blogosphere suspected almost immediately. I had made a comment or two about it, but was waiting for confirmation. Now we have it, straight from the WaPo horse’s mouth:
Correction: Earlier versions of this story incorrectly said that Native American activist Nathan Phillips fought in the Vietnam War. Phillips served in the U.S. Marines from 1972 to 1976 but was never deployed to Vietnam,” according to a note at the end.
I still don’t know whether Phillips himself ever claimed to be a Vietnam vet, or whether the MSM had added that little bit of icing to the cake and then broadcast it around the world without fact-checking. The most I could find as a direct quote from him was that he was a “Vietnam times vet,” which is technically correct.
One of the most interesting posts I’ve seen since the whole Covington thing began is this one by William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection, describing a technique commonly used by leftist activists:
The recent interaction in DC between high school students (one in particular) and an older activist who is Native American reminded me of a warning I once received from a colleague as to how I needed to prepare myself if I ever was in a hostile crowd or confronted.
A classic leftist/occupy activist tactic, I was warned, was to confront a target and immediately start screaming that the target was being aggressive even though that was not true.
Unsuspecting people in the vicinity would not start recording the incident until there was this commotion. The videographers accompanying the provocateur also would edit the video to start when the provocateur started screaming. The target, not knowing what was about to happen, would not be prepared for it, and might even take the bait, such as in pushing the person away physically.
Regardless of what the target did or didn’t do, you would have video of the innocent target being portrayed as the aggressor, and the provocateur portrayed as the victim.
It happened to me at Cornell…
Professor Jacobson goes on to describe several such incidents. I believe this is most likely to have been the technique followed by Nathan Phillips in the Covington confrontation—and boy, did it work!
For a while, anyway.
Phillips got his video and the story went out. He got his interviews and he got to frame the story, and although almost every word he said was wrong, he never thought his narrative could be disproved.
The only reason it was disproved (for those with eyes to see and ears to hear) was that someone else was videotaping the whole thing, not just the part he wanted to air. Almost certainly unbeknownst to Phillips, someone else had started recording long before Phillips moved into the crowd of boys.
That “someone” was apparently part of the Black Israelite group that was harassing the teenagers with racial and other threats and insults. And that group, the Black Israelites (who are neither Israelis nor Jewish, by the way, but are anti-Semitic among their other hatreds), posted the lengthy nearly 2-hour video online—until they took it down, probably realizing how it was being used to exonerate the Covington boys. But taking it down didn’t make it disappear.
That was the longer video that showed that it was the Covington students who were being abused and who were actually being rather polite and non-confrontational under some very trying circumstances. That was the video that showed Phillips marching into the group of boys (at variance with his initial description) and getting into their faces. That was the video that gave the lie to his contention that they surrounded him and made it impossible for him to leave. That was the video that showed the Black Israelites as the aggressors, completely the opposite of what Phillips had reported. That was the video that failed to show the boys saying anything about the Wall, contrary to Phillips’ description.
That was the video that proved Phillips was lying. And that was the video he never thought would exist.
And if that longer video hadn’t existed, Phillips would have succeeded in the technique that Professor Jacobson has described, because no one would have believed the students against the word of this righteous Native American elderly guy.
The big guns were apparently called in for the task of composing the FISA application based on the sketchy Steele dossier. This was completely out of the ordinary in terms of protocol [emphasis mine]:
A former top FBI lawyer [James Baker] acknowledged he was personally involved in the warrant application to surveil then-Trump campaign aide Carter Page and confirmed other “unusual” steps taken in the FBI’s Russia probe in 2016, during a closed-door congressional interview…
Baker said he was briefed on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant “as time went by” and recalled how he got involved early in the process. The warrant relied heavily on the unverified anti-Trump dossier, which was financed by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign via the law firm Perkins Coie.
“I don’t want to see it at the end, like when it is about to go to the director [for] certification, because then it is hard to make changes then,” Baker told House investigators when Republicans controlled the chamber. “So I wanted to see it when it was gelled enough but before it went through the process and before it went to the director. I wanted to see it and I wanted to read it because I knew it was sensitive.”
Fox News confirmed the Baker transcript also includes the following exchange with investigators regarding his involvement in the surveillance application:
Question: “So that is why you took the abnormal or unusual step in this particular situation because it was sensitive?”
Baker: “Yes.”
Question: “So you actually got involved because you want to make sure that, what?”
Baker: “I wanted to make sure that we were filing something that would adhere to the law and stand up over time.”
Baker also told lawmakers, as part of the joint investigations by the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees, that it was not routine for him to get involved personally in such matters.
“I did not … at that point in time when I was at the FBI … almost all of the FISA applications did not go through me,” he said.
What does the euphemism “sensitive” mean? I would suggest it meant “this is so out of the ordinary—ultimately, we are spying on a presidential candidate based on evidence cooked up by his opposition—that the lower-down lawyers aren’t good enough to craft something that won’t seem every bit as suspicious as it really is.”
Well, it hasn’t really “stood the test of time,” has it? But only because Trump was elected and for two years the Republicans controlled Congress. That is the reason—the only reason—we know about any of this.
[NOTE: By the way, we’re talking about this James Baker, not this one. It’s confusing because they both have the middle initial “A.”]
[NOTE II: In the first sentence of this post, I originally made this error: “The big guns were apparently called in for the task of composting the FISA application…” Pretty funny, eh?]
Nicholas Frankovich wrote a scathing piece in National Review on the Covington teenagers entitled “The Covington Students Might as Well Have Just Spit on the Cross.” I mentioned it in an earlier post, noting that I’d read his article when it first came out but by the time I got around to writing about it, the piece had fallen not-so-mysteriously down the “not found” memory hole.
But I see that Ace has thoughtfully pried it from the Wayback Machine, so if you’re inclined to take a look you can.
Frankovich has finally issued something he calls “An Apology.” Here’s the entire text:
Early Sunday morning, I posted a “strongly worded” (Rich Lowry’s description) condemnation of the conduct, seen far and wide on video, of a group of high-school students at the conclusion of the March for Life on Friday afternoon. I was preachy and rhetorically excessive, and I regret it. The overheated post I wrote has been taken down. Let this apology stand in its stead, both here on the Corner and in the memory of readers who justifiably objected to my high-handedness.
Theoretically, an apology is a good thing. But this is not an apology. Rather, it’s a pretend apology, a fake apology, and in my opinion it’s actually worse than no apology at all.
Here’s a little sample of Frankovich’s original “rhetorical excess”:
It appears that most of the teenagers in this video are from a Catholic high school near Covington, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. They mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ. “Bullying” is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here…
I don’t know how Phillips would describe his religious affiliation. He speaks of indigenous traditions. Some people who observe them integrate them with Christianity, but some don’t. In any case, keeping in mind the parable of the proper priests and the Good Samaritan, whose religious practice Jesus’s listeners thought was wrong, listen to Phillips reflect on his experience on the Mall. Decide for yourself who is more pleasing to Christ, Phillips or his mockers. As for the putatively Catholic students from Covington, they might as well have just spit on the cross and got it over with.
Frankovich wrote all of this and more based on a very short video devoid of context, plus the word of Phillips, who was lying through his teeth in describing the incident. Frankovich’s errors were not merely rhetorical; they went to the heart of the matter: he got almost every single thing about the encounter wrong.
So just say it, man: “I was wrong. I relied on false reports. I didn’t use good judgment. I rushed to a conclusion on the basis of completely inadequate information—and in addition my rhetoric was rhetorically excessive, overheated, cruel, and uncalled for and I regret it. It was especially wrong to do this to teenage children, who are particularly vulnerable.”
Now, would that be that so hard?
Apparently way too hard. That “apology” from Frankovich is worse than nothing. No apology would at least have been sincere; this reeks of insincerity. If he wants to get credit for an apology then he should issue a real one that addresses what he did wrong, not a pretend one. Titling something “an apology” doesn’t make it so.
Now let’s take a look at how the Atlantic is dealing with the Covington incident at the moment. The title of the piece is promising: “Stop Trusting Viral Videos.” The subtitle? Not so great: “A controversial video of Catholic students clashing with American Indians appeared to tell a simple truth. A second video called that story into question. But neither shows what truly happened.”
Now, it’s technically true that “neither shows what truly happened.” No video, no article, no account even with all parties thoroughly vetted and interviewed for many hours and days, can show “what truly happened.” But that goes without saying and is a weaselly evasion. Even though no reporting and no video can show the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, that doesn’t mean that a video that’s nearly two hours long doesn’t ordinarily (and almost always) tell far more truth about an incident than one that’s a few seconds long.
Note also the way that subtitle is written: “A controversial video of Catholic students clashing with American Indians” is their description of the original short video that went viral. But no, it didn’t show the students clashing with American Indians at all. It showed an encounter in which the students were clapping and/or smiling and basically not doing much. So even this language is misleading.
Nor did the second video merely “call that story into question.” It demolished it.
And that’s just the subtitle.
The rest of the article is a meditation on the fact that, through clever editing, videos can be made to tell whatever story the editor desires. Sure, particularly if the segments shown are very short. But it doesn’t mean the longer video doesn’t tell us much much more and doesn’t actually come very close to “the truth”—at least, as much truth as we’ll ever get about the incident.
The author, Ian Bogost, goes on and on about the longer video and various moments and insults in it and how the video might be edited to tell a different story, without ever acknowledging that the Black Israelites are the ones hurling insult after insult and the white teenagers are guilty of nothing other than existing (save, perhaps, a tomahawk chop or two from a random boy—a chop which originally, by the way, was a sports gesture that meant support of teams named after Native Americans, not insults—and a smile).
Bogost doesn’t acknowledge a lot of other things, such as the fact that the teenaged student Sandmann’s narrative about the incident fits the evidence in the long video far better than does the tale told by Nathan Phillips, whose story clashes with just about all the evidence on it. That we can’t know the entire truth from the perspective of an omniscient narrator doesn’t mean we can’t come to conclusions that are mostly true. And we should endeavor to do that.
[NOTE: Regarding the National Review and its editorial decisions—I have no idea whether this report is true, but it says:
According to a source inside of #NeverTrump stalwart National Review, who spoke to Big League Politics on the condition of anonymity, the magazine is in turmoil after publishing a now-deleted piece [by Frankovich] bashing the Covington Catholic High School students.
Deputy managing editor Nicholas Frankovich penned a piece called “The Covington Students Might as Well Have Just Spit on the Cross,” which was published at 3 a.m. on Sunday.
“The guy who posted that did it at 3am without running it by anyone,” an employee familiar with the situation told Big League Politics.
The source said that editor Rich Lowry is “deeply chagrined” by incident.
I have little doubt that Lowry is “deeply chagrined” by the reaction to the piece, plus subsequent events. And it’s possible that Frankovich’s piece really did get published without Lowry’s approval. That possibility kind of fits the facts, which are that Lowry took the piece down at least a day before the Frankovich “apology” appeared, and Lowry had issued his own rather tepid apology at least a day prior to Frankovich’s. Some sort of arm-twisting by Lowry may have gone on before Frankovich came through with his “oh, I just used some too-strong wording” statement.
Another issue for NR might be a legal one. Does confessing wrongdoing or carelessness or regret matter in the legal sense? Is it an admission of guilt that would factor into a lawsuit and reflect negatively on the confessor? If so, lawyers may have advised strongly against it. And you better believe that lawyers have been involved by now.]
[ADDENDUM: Here’s an apology that seems sincere. It passes muster, and I think the author may even have learned something to guide her in the future. However, it’s by a “writer based in Cincinnati” who is not a journalist (at least so far as I can tell).]
I’ve noticed many pundits, in the fallout from the Covington boys vs. the Native American incident, saying that the kids shouldn’t have worn MAGA hats. I’ve seen it said over and over, mainly by people walking back previous vicious comments about the boys and trying to balance it by now saying “well, they shouldn’t have been wearing the hats.”
Others have chimed in, too, for example this member of Congress. I kid you not:
I am calling for a total and complete shutdown of teenagers wearing MAGA hats until we can figure out what is going on. They seem to be poisoning young minds. [1/2] https://t.co/yq5bLd4kE2
Actually, only a few of the Covington boys had on MAGA hats—the ones more heavily featured in front in the video. But however many wore them, it’s stunning that we’ve gotten to the point that wearing a hat in support of a president and making America great is considered a provocation to violence and trouble, and something that should not be done.
It is something like telling Jews in France (or anywhere else) not to wear their skullcaps, although of course a religion is different than a political hat. But both are public statements about a belief (or in the case of religious Jews, an identity and a belief). In Europe, that’s what it’s come to:
But to countless Jews across Western Europe, these debates featuring high-profile figures, politicians and Jewish community leaders have little bearing on their own personal choice. Not waiting for anyone’s invitation, hundreds of thousands of them have been hiding their kippahs and other Jewish symbols for years now in Paris, Marseille, Brussels, London, Amsterdam and many other European cities with a large population of Muslim immigrants.
At least a quarter of Europe’s Jews had resolved not to wear their kippahs or any other Jewish symbol publicly before any of the debates even took place, according to a 2013 survey in nine countries. In that European Union poll of 5,100 Jews — the most comprehensive study of its kind — 49 percent of 800 Swedish respondents said they refrained from wearing clothing that identified them as Jewish. In Belgium, whose capital city is the seat of the European Union, the figure was 36 percent.
When civility has broken down and hatred is being fanned, it’s dangerous to wear any symbol that offends anyone.
One of the most chilling aspects of the hatred fanned by the duplicitous reporting on the videotaped incident regarding the Covington students and the 60-something Native American has been the venomous rage directed against the face of one of the students, as well as the conclusions drawn about the expression on the face and what it might signify about the person.
I’ve talked about Orwell before in connection with all of this, and I’m going to bring him up again, because the anger unleashed resembles Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate (although this hasn’t been limited to two minutes at a time). In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell wrote of the feeling stirred up in the audience—interestingly enough, by a propaganda film designed for the purpose:
A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.
The image that provoked a truly hideous rage in an enormous number of people on the left and some on the right was of a teenaged boy named Nicholas Sandmann, whose statement can be found here along with the video screenshot that seems to have sparked the most outrage:
“Bullying” doesn’t even begin to describe what has been done to Sandmann by supposedly responsible and thoughtful adults. Even if the original story of what occurred had been true—and it was most definitely not—the depth of the rage would be way out of line.
From the article by Ruth Graham, which shows us what the author is fantasizing based on the manipulated story and video:
I think the real reason the clip has spread is simpler: It’s the kid’s face. The face of self-satisfaction and certitude, of edginess expressed as cruelty. The face remains almost completely still as his peers hoot in awed delight at his bravado. The face is both punchable and untouchable. Many observers recognized it right away.
What is it they “recognized”? A face that is now permissible to hate, apparently; they’re not shy about writing about their hate and signing their names to it. That face is white, male, and supposedly “privileged” (whether they know a single thing about that person’s actual life circumstances or not). I have come to think of it in a kind of shorthand as hatred towards the “frat boy” in their minds. And it’s not new, although I’ve never before seen a national eruption of this hatred expressed towards someone who is not yet an adult
This hatred is bigoted and prejudiced, pure and simple. The hatred’s origins lie not just in the work the media had undertaken to shape its audience towards feeling this hatred—although that is most definitely part of it—but it also is an opportunity for the viewer to draw in all sorts of historical references to other white men and/or boys they have grown to hate, and to make often-absurd parallels.
Graham obliges by telling us who those other white men she hates might be, the ones Sandmann supposedly resembles and conjures up in her fevered brain [emphasis mine]:
The face is in this photo of a clutch of white young men crowding around a single black man at a lunch counter sit-in in Virginia in the 1960s, and in many other images of jeering white men from that era. The face is the rows of Wisconsin high school boys flashing Nazi salutes in a prom picture last year. The face is Brett Kavanaugh—then a student at an all-boys Catholic prep school—“drunkenly laughing” as he allegedly held down Christine Blasey Ford. Anyone who knew the popular white boys in high school recognized it: the confident gaze, the eyes twinkling with menace, the smirk. The face of a boy who is not as smart as he thinks he is, but is exactly as powerful. The face that sneers, “What? I’m just standing here,” if you flinch or cry or lash out. The face knows that no matter how you react, it wins.
There are hints there of what’s going on in the minds of the haters. A reversal in which the white Sandmann—who actually had been “crowded” by the Native American, Phillips, and was also the object of bigoted racial taunts towards whites from the Black Israelites—becomes falsely identified by Graham with bigoted white aggressors from the past, solely on the basis of their races. Blacks and Native Americans are victims, whites are victimizers, because of the way they look.
The Kavanaugh reference is obvious, and shows the damage done by that entire brouhaha—the stirring up of this same rage against the supposed predations of the “laughing” preppie. Before that, we had the “Jackie” lies in Rolling Stone and the demonization of a fraternity as a result. And prior to that, of course, the Duke lacrosse team falsely accused.
Graham also alludes to more personal origins of this feeling, which for some people at least comes from high school experiences in which some white jock or frat boy was mean to them. That has become a stereotype, reinforced by countless teen flicks and TV shows where this is a stock character. The person is seen as entitled, self-centered, rich, powerful. And hated, well into adulthood.
It’s a pernicious, dangerous game being played here. People such as Graham are now perpetrators who see themselves as the righteous ones. This hatred is growing thanks to the awfulness of Twitter, although it was around long before Twitter ever came to exist. One of the most memorable examples comes from 2003, when TNR’s Jonathan Chait wrote a piece that begins “I hate George Bush” and goes on to say [emphasis mine]:
There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I’m tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too. I hate the inequitable way he has come to his economic and political achievements and his utter lack of humility (disguised behind transparently false modesty) at having done so. His favorite answer to the question of nepotism—”I inherited half my father’s friends and all his enemies”—conveys the laughable implication that his birth bestowed more disadvantage than advantage. He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school—the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks—shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks—blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudopopulist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing—a way to establish one’s social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.
There seem to be quite a few of us Bush haters. I have friends who have a viscerally hostile reaction to the sound of his voice or describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche. Nor is this phenomenon limited to my personal experience: Pollster Geoff Garin, speaking to The New York Times, called Bush hatred “as strong as anything I’ve experienced in 25 years now of polling.” Columnist Robert Novak described it as a “hatred … that I have never seen in 44 years of campaign watching.”
Bush, at least, was a grown man and a public figure who had put himself in the limelight. Sandmann is not. And yet the root of the rage appears to be the same.
The people hating on Sandmann ought to be ashamed of themselves, but there is no indication of even a flicker of that feeling. Nor are they likely to damp down their hatred based on the evidence of Sandmann’s innocence.
They know that face, you see, and it’s the face of their enemy.
[ADDENDUM: Some people on the left have been deleting their most rabid tweets, apparently. I would bet a large sum of money that this is because they are afraid of lawsuits. These boys were not public figures, so Sullivan would not apply even for the newspeople.]
[NOTE: This story brought me out of my usual Sunday blog-hibernation.]
The news story of the Catholic high school students in MAGA hats who were captured on video supposedly harassing a Native American Vietnam vet was a tale I ignored till now. As presented, it seemed relatively trivial to me—a group of teens acting like jerks. What’s more, I tend to follow the 48-hour rule on stories like that, because so many turn out to be fake or exaggerated.
Since then, it’s come out that the story was an excellent example of Fake News Tweaked to Advance the Narrative.
I’m not going to go into all the Byzantine details, but you can read them (and watch videos) here, here, here, here, here, and at plenty of other sites.
There are sites and people who ran the original story and have since issued corrections or retractions, but so far those sites do not include the WaPo, which has made a big big deal of the story. Even as I write these words the comments there are overwhelmingly in condemnation of the teens based on the original propaganda story, despite a few attempts in the comments by others to give the context and links to the corrective videos (those people are being called paid trolls or alt-right members).
Way too many people reporting this sort of thing and making it go viral on Twitter are uninterested in getting the facts right or telling the truth. They know from previous experience that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. They count on it, and they know that most of the people ranting and raving about this and wanting to punch that Covington kid in the mouth and ruin his life will never, never ever, believe that the first story wasn’t the real story.
No surprise there. A great many of these bigotry stories are not only false, but they are inversions of the truth. Too many times the offense is actually self-inflicted and the so-called victim is actually the one who (for example) wrote the offending word or drew the offending graphic. And although a video would seem far less easy to fake (although with advancing technology it will become more and more easy to do so, and harder and harder to tell fake from real), it can be rather easily done with clever editing and attention to setting up certain expectations and interpretations.
Here are a few of the details (follow any or all of those previous links to find plenty more):
The teen is not smirking in this clip, and Phillips [the Native American who was supposedly harassed] has an entourage with cameras. One of the Native activists argues with a Covington teen, who argues back. This and other clips have shown the Indian activists racially taunting the teens, saying things like ‘go back to Europe.’ Phillips has claimed that the teens were chanting ‘build the wall!,’ but that isn’t in any of the videos that circulated Saturday. Based on what can actually be seen and heard, it’s looks as if Phillips and his crew sought out Catholic teenagers and tried to make them uncomfortable. And of course, they recorded it…
…[S]o far, there’s no evidence to support that scenario [that the teen students were the racists], 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:
A great deal of hatred has been directed at these kids, and all of this was going on more or less at the same time that the Buzzfeed story about Trump asking Cohen to lie to Congress was being exposed as a whole lot of hooey.
Several things made the Covington story absolutely irresistible to the left. The kids were white (most of them; not all, but the featured ones were). They were male. Some were wearing MAGA hats. They were Catholic. And they were returning from an anti-abortion rally. They were supposedly (according to Phillips, although nowhere in any video has any corroboration surfaced for his claim) chanting that we should build the wall. A perfect storm of terribleness on the part of the teens, right?
These boys weren’t accused of drunken rape, like Brett Kavanaugh and his teen Catholic school buddies. But what we are seeing is exactly the same venomous desire to brand and discredit them as nasty soulless thugs, and from similar motives: anti-white, anti-right, anti-male, anti-Catholic, anti-religion, anti-Trump.
One of the sadder things about this particular incident is that many on the right, as well as the boys’ Catholic school, jumped on the leftist bandwagon—at least to a certain extent. And some jumped on it to a greater extent and have yet (at least, as of this writing) to retract their words.
One of the latter group is Nicholas Frankovitch of National Review. Here is his Twitter feed linking to his terrible article at NR—an article which has very suddenly disappeared. I had read it just a little while ago, but when I checked back just now to link to it, it’s disappeared with no explanation. Maybe by the time I publish this piece, even his Twitter feed will have changed:
One person who did apologize, and quite profusely, was Scott Adams. I’m embedding his video in case you’re interested in watching. As Adams says, “This is fake news that actually damages the lives of children.” What I find especially interesting—and what I haven’t yet heard Adams explain—is how he, of all people, was originally among those taken in by this story:
When Orwell wrote his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of his brilliant innovations was the telescreen, a way for the government to spy on its people twenty-four hours a day by placing a sort of reverse-TV in all homes and monitoring inhabitants for any un-PC actions or utterances. In the world of his novel (based on a futuristic view of the Communist regimes of the day with which Orwell was familiar), the telescreen’s ubiquity was combined with the always-existing possibility of being informed on by neighbors and relatives and supposed friends. In a Communist totalitarian dictatorship, you could trust no one. And of course, all media were organs of the state.
But at least everybody knew it. There was no pretense of free speech, and the press wasn’t free either. Now we have a pretense of both. And yet no government has to threaten or torture the liars and propagandists of the press; they do this of their own free will. Unfortunately, there are so many of them—they were always present in the MSM but in recent decades they have pretty much taken it over—that their noise has become deafening, amplified by the social media clamor of Twitter.
Today’s smart phones (not envisioned by Orwell) can record, as well. But what they record, how it is edited and used and described and slanted, is the task of social media and the MSM. If the viewers of such videos don’t have a huge amount of skepticism, they are easily taken in by people using videos to mislead. Even people with a great deal of skepticism, such as Scott Adams, can apparently be taken in by the right video presented in a very clever way.
This is obviously a grave danger, because videos (like photos before them) can easily give the appearance of being the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and can whip the crowd up into enormous hatred. And yet the actual truth can be something very, very different.
[ADDENDUM: I now see a too-mild apology from Rick Lowry at NR, and an acknowledgement that he took down Frankovitch’s article that had “relied on the incomplete video.” Kyle Smith has published this piece, also at NR, that discusses the fact that Phillips repeatedly lied.]
[ADDENDUM II: (Hat tip: commenter “Kate.”) The teen-aged Covington student featured in the video has issued a statement which you can find here.]
[ADDENDUM III: And then there are the tweets of this Buzzfeed editor (yes, Buzzfeed). She also appears to be, or to have been in the past, some sort of teacher.]
As part of a previous discussion about UFOs, commenter “huxley” wrote:
I must say, if one sees a UFO and takes it seriously, it’s a crisis. One asks, or at least I did, what is reality, how do we know what we know, and how much should we trust our authorities.
I never got over seeing that UFO.
Sagan’s response is I must have been hallucinating or lying. By Occam’s Razor that’s an understandable response, if one is merely listening to someone else’s account. I can’t dispute Sagan in terms of logic.
But I saw it and other people saw it with me. Occam’s Razor doesn’t help me, unless I want to live in a world where I can’t trust anything I see because I might be hallucinating.
I believe UFOs have an explanation. I don’t know how weird that explanation might be, though I doubt it’s alien beings flying super-alloy saucers out to say hello or study us.
I saw a UFO too, in 1984. I was with another person (my husband) who saw the same thing, and we later read about the sighting in the paper because it had been seen by so many people. For a while my husband retained an otherworldly explanation (I think he’s since revised it), but from the start I thought there was a much less weird explanation, one that we just didn’t know yet.
Two different personalities, same event. But I must say, it was a very strange sight nevertheless. Definitely gets your attention.
Throughout northern Westchester County, Dutchess and Putnam Counties and western Connecticut this summer, thousands of residents have reported strange objects in the sky – each usually in a V-shape or a circle, about the size of a football field, absolutely noiseless and outlined in brilliant lights of white, red or green.
Today we’re going to travel up the Hudson River Valley in New York, and back in time to the summers of 1983 and 1984. On many occasions, on clear summer nights, something terrifying and unexpected appeared in the sky. It was a gigantic craft, black as the sky, rimmed with bright lights in white, red, or green. It would drift over towns with a steady hum, witnessed by many. Police phone lines lit up every time it appeared, and the newspapers were choked with reports. It’s called the Hudson Valley UFO, and it’s one of the mainstays of evidence for those who believe we are not alone…
A year before, in the summer of 1983, Tony Capaldi was a local air traffic controller, and here’s what he told Unsolved Mysteries:
“There’s anywhere from upwards of seven to ten aircraft that fly around in formation, and this is visible from our tower… The first time I observed the formation flying, it looked a little peculiar. From our vantage point in the tower they just appeared to be just one big light because they are flying in tight formation. To estimate the size, maybe two football fields wide.”
And just to be clear, there’s no evidence that these pilots ever intended a UFO hoax. As Discover magazine put it in a 1984 article:
“The area abounds with amateur pilots who fly private planes out of a number of airports, including the strip at Stormville. Several years ago, it seems, a few of the Stormville pilots begin practicing formation flying, first in daylight, then, as their skills improved, at night. Before long, other pilots joined them, and what began as loose groupings of planes became tight formations of aircraft with as little as 6 inches between wingtips.”
If you’re inclined to believe that we have been visited by aliens and that the government knows and is covering it up, that probably won’t even make a dent in your conviction. I tend to believe the opposite, so it satisfies me.
This is a long and very chilling report on how legalized euthanasia operates in the Netherlands. I’ve read about the phenomenon before, but not in as much depth.
The suffering that can occur, particularly at the end of life, can be extremely profound. People want relief, relatives want help, and doctors are placed in the middle of it. Although they’ve taken an oath to help people and hope to save as many from illness and pain as possible, with doctor-assisted suicide doctors are called on to administer death.
Some will not do it, but according to the article, in the Netherlands only 8% of doctors say no. I find that a remarkably small number. We’re not talking about the administration of doses of morphine as life is ebbing and suffering increasing. We’re talking about something else entirely, something much more dramatic and more clearly willful killing, and the Dutch experience is that the slippery slope is very real:
“The process of bringing in euthanasia legislation began with a desire to deal with the most heartbreaking cases – really terrible forms of death,” Boer [an ethics professor] said. “But there have been important changes in the way the law is applied. We have put in motion something that we have now discovered has more consequences than we ever imagined.”
I think they lacked imagination—the basic consequences were quite obvious from the start, and those who didn’t see them were deluded. The article discusses some very harrowing “assisted” deaths that have occurred at the hands of doctors. This one in particular seems to have been horrific, so much so that the doctor is being charged with malpractice:
It involves a dementia sufferer who had asked to be killed when the “time” was “right”, but when her doctor judged this to be the case, she resisted. The patient had to be drugged and restrained by her family before she finally submitted to the doctor’s fatal injection. The doctor who administered the dose – who has not been identified – has defended her actions by saying that she was fulfilling her patient’s request and that, since the patient was incompetent, her protests before her death were irrelevant. Whatever the legal merits of her argument, it hardly changes what must have been a scene of unutterable grimness.
The underlying problem with the advance directives is that they imply the subordination of an irrational human being to their rational former self, essentially splitting a single person into two mutually opposed ones. Many doctors, having watched patients adapt to circumstances they had once expected to find intolerable, doubt whether anyone can accurately predict what they will want after their condition worsens.
Much more at the link.
One of the interesting things about the article is that it discusses an aspect of euthanasia that I’ve long thought was almost ignored: its effect on family members who may not agree with the decision (particularly in non-terminal cases) but cannot stop it, or even family members who agree with it but who are present at the death and traumatized. There are many dangers, in particular that a person who is primarily depressed uses a physical ailment to obtain the suicide he or she would want even without that illness.
Suicide, assisted or otherwise, nearly always hurts the surviving family members very intensely. But knowing that the doctors and the state are helping out must add an extra burden for some of these families. Of course, watching a family member suffer through a natural death (even with the help of morphine, something I’ve witnessed several times) is terrible as well.
[NOTE: Religion doesn’t seem to be much of a factor in the Netherlands.]
[ADDENDUM: Here’s a beautiful and relevant essay by Gerard Vanderleun of American Digest.]
