Truth, lies, and videotape: the CNN interview with Nathan Phillips

The New Neo Posted on by

When you read the transcript of this interview CNN did with Nathan Phillips, it’s good to remember that it occurred last Saturday, when Phillips was enjoying his fifteen-minutes-plus of fame and the longer video hadn’t come to public attention yet. It illustrates the extreme deference paid by CNN to the man and showcases his feelings and his point of view.

It also showcases what an incredible, pathological liar Phillips is. Just about everything he says there isn’t just untrue, it’s an inversion of the truth, as can be demonstrated by evidence in the long video. But he’s displaying the mindset I wrote about yesterday in this post:

Phillips…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.

But at the time he gave the CNN interview, he was still in a state of unawareness that a longer video existed and would ever come to light. So he could lie to his heart’s content and think himself immune from being discredited.

That’s Phillips, but what of CNN? The media operation has had quite a few days to comment on its own interview. Any self-respecting news organization worthy of the name ought to have done a great deal more to correct the impression made by Phillips’ words than CNN has. CNN made an attempt so half-hearted it’s almost laughable, with efforts such as this:

Since the [CNN] interview, the diocese in charge of the school has denounced the students’ actions, a lawmaker has defended them and the boy in the video, Nick Sandmann, has denied characterizations of his and his classmates’ behavior and said he was simply standing in front of Phillips to let him know he wouldn’t be baited into an altercation.

Also, several new videos have surfaced, including one showing the students engaging in a “Tomahawk chop,” mocking the Native Americans, and another showing a group of Hebrew Israelites hurling slurs and epithets at the teenagers both before Phillips arrived on the scene and after he left.

That’s it. That’s all I could find from CNN in the article that presents the interview transcript, all that CNN has to say there about the new videos which disprove nearly everything Phillips said in the interview, and also don’t show much from the boys that could be characterized as “mockery” of the Native Americans. Also, CNN’s description doesn’t even come close to describing the intensity and offensiveness of what was happening to the boys for a solid hour at the hands of the Black Israelites (and note also that CNN refers to them as “Hebrew Israelites”—probably the least common of the many names they go by, and a very misleading one at that).

This is how Phillips describes the Black Israelites in the CNN interview (a group he never names, but it’s clear he’s talking about them), as well as the Covington boys’ reactions to the Black Israelites:

…[T]here were some folks there that were expressing their (First Amendment) rights there, freedom of speech. … Then there was this young group of young students that came there and were offended by their speech, and it escalated into an ugly situation that I found myself in the middle of…

Oh, what I was witnessing was just hate? Racism? Well, hate. What I’m saying is that when these folks came there, these other folks were saying their piece, and these others they got offended with it because they were both just expressing their own views. And if it’s racism, that’s what it was because the folks that were having their moment there, they were saying things that I don’t know if I agreed with them or not, but some of it was educational, and it was truth, and it was history about religious views and ideologies, but these other folks, the young students, they couldn’t see it. They had one point of view, it seemed, and that was that their point of view was the only point of view that was worthwhile. And that’s now what I was feeling…

I didn’t feel that I could just stand there anymore and not do something. It looked like these young men were going to attack these guys. They were going to hurt them. They were going to hurt them because they didn’t like the color of their skin. They didn’t like their religious views. They were just here in front of the Lincoln — Lincoln is not my hero, but at the same time, there was this understanding that he brought the (Emancipation Proclamation) or freed the slaves, and here are American youth who are ready to, look like, lynch these guys. To be honest, they looked like they were going to lynch them. They were in this mob mentality.

That’s what I mean by an inversion of the truth. The longer video—the one Phillips never thought would surface—shows the situation to be quite the opposite. The verbal aggression was totally on the side of the Black Israelites—verbal attacks and bullying of the most vile and abusive (as well as racist) kind. It is a euphemism to describe what they said to the boys as mere “slurs and epithets” (as CNN did, in its weak attempt at a corrective).

And it was misleading for Phillips to describe the Black Israelites’ behavior this way: “some of it was educational, and it was truth, and it was history,” as well as viciously mendacious of Phillips to say that the Covington boys “were going to hurt [the Black Israelites] because they didn’t like the color of their skin…[or] their religious views,” and “to be honest” (often the biggest “tell” of all that a whopper of a lie is coming) that the boys “looked like they were going to lynch” the Black Israelites. An incredible and truly vile thing to say to a national news organization. Nothing even remotely like that was happening; at no point did the boys seem about to attack anyone, and there was nothing bad said by the boys about the color of anyone’s skin.

But CNN doesn’t appear to feel the need to correct anything about this.

Want a sample of these “religious views” of the Black Israelites? Robby Soave has some of it at Reason:

Far from engaging in racially motivated harassment, the group of mostly white, MAGA-hat-wearing male teenagers remained relatively calm and restrained despite being subjected to incessant racist, homophobic, and bigoted verbal abuse by members of the bizarre religious sect Black Hebrew Israelites, who were lurking nearby. The BHI has existed since the late 19th century, and is best describes as a black nationalist cult movement; its members believe they are descendants of the ancient Israelites, and often express condemnation of white people, Christians, and gays. DC-area Black Hebrews are known to spout particularly vile bigotry.

They call them crackers, faggots, and pedophiles. At the 1:20 mark (which comes after the Phillips incident) they call one of the few black students the n-word and tell him that his friends are going to murder him and steal his organs. At the 1:25 mark, they complain that “you give faggots rights,” which prompted booing from the students. Throughout the video they threaten the kids with violence, and attempt to goad them into attacking first. The students resisted these taunts admirably: They laughed at the hecklers, and they perform a few of their school’s sports cheers.

If you’re interested in watching the video, you can find it here. I looked at some of the comments to the video posted at YouTube, and I’m going to reproduce a few that I found especially interesting:

As a black man, I’m embarrassed by these “Hebrew Israelites.” MLK is rolling in his grave.?

This story couldn’t have been more wrong. No wonder people believe trump when he says fake news?

Lmao at CNN – a “this video shows a different side to story” ……you mean the TRUTH??

WHY ARENT THESE GUYS THE CENTER OF THE CONTROVERSY???

Hard to imagine a more hate filled diatribe than what these teens were subjected to. They handled it better than most kids would. The reporting on this is 100% wrong in the mainstream media. NPR now makes a reference to this video, but no mention of the extreme racist and homophobic tirade against these white kids. And they are just kids. It’s the “adults” who started the fracas and acted like children. I feel sorry for the kids that have been wrongly blamed, even by their own school, for anything here.?

This one is simple, and it just might be my personal favorite:

Man I gotta rethink how quick I was to hate those kids?

This one’s much longer.It’s from a young woman who seems to have originally bought much of Phillips’ story as filtered through the MSM. But she’s a thinker:

I’ve watched this entire 2 hour clip about 3 times all the way through. I wanted to make sure I had no bias’s that saw what they wanted to see. After finishing my third watch I honestly can’t find anything disrespectful about these kids. If anything, things I thought were disrespectful (chanting along to the drum beat) have totally changed with context. The boys disapproved of the guy saying faggots shouldn’t have rights, they yelled back when the guys yelled at the one black kid, they asked questions like “why did you call us clan members” or “no one cares” (in reference to Jesus being black). They started chanting when they got tired of the religious racist nuts preaching. Then Nathan comes over with his drum for whatever reason and the kids think he’s on their side so they start chanting along to the drum beat (a natural human instinct to dance or chant to a drum beat. It’s seen in all cultures at all time periods, very much like the natives do). Then another video shows the maga kid gesturing to his friend to not respond to the native yelling “go back to Europe”. I mean wtf. This is reminding me of reading “1984” in high school. It’s straight out of the 2+2=4 scene. My god. I’m scared for the future of people don’t even WANT to find the truth.?

Phillips isn’t just a liar, he’s an Orwellian liar. And if it weren’t for this longer video, he would have been successful in his lies. Even now, he’s been fairly successful. If you polled Americans, how many have seen the longer video or even know much about it? How many have read the truth about what happened?

And why is CNN so reluctant to have them know the truth? In this case, the truth reflects poorly on the left, CNN, the MSM in general, Phillips, and the Black Israelites. It reflects well on the teenaged boys from Covington.

We can’t have that, can we?

[NOTE: By the way, National Review has been pretty good on this aspect of the story. David French wrote about Phillips’ lies here, and Charles C. W. Cooke opines on the same theme here.

But it’s not just CNN that refuses to deal with the truth. Maybe I’ve missed it, but I’ve yet to see a single news outlet in the MSM deal with the magnitude of its errors (or its lies). Whether you believe they are errors or lies (or some combination of the two) depends on how you answer the “knaves or fools?” question regarding the MSM.

And in case you’re wondering, here are some examples of the tons of people who—thanks to the propaganda—cling ferociously to the original narrative.]

The Chinese economy

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m pretty sure that this change will have consequences for the world, but I can’t say I know what they will be:

A key driver behind China’s declining current account is that after having long been the world’s heavyweight saver and a huge buyer of foreign assets like Treasurys, the world’s most populous nation is now a big spender, and in early 2018, China got more of its growth from consumption than the U.S., the global king of consumer spending where some 70% of economic growth is due to consumer spending. And as China’s increasingly wealthy population spends more at home and abroad, its total trade surplus with the rest of the world has shriveled to a fraction of its former size.

In other words, China is rapidly becoming the next US.

This transformation of China into a consumption-driven economy has enormous implications for global capital markets, and impacts everyone from retirees investing in U.S. Treasurys to fund managers investing in emerging markets like Indonesia or India. It could, the WSJ notes, also eventually help ease some of the frictions between the U.S. and China.

Well, that very last bit would be good.

Defamation lawsuit, here we come: my hat is off to Attorney Robert Barnes

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not a MAGA hat (I don’t own one and have no plans to), but my metaphorical hat is off to Robert Barnes, who has taken the Covington defamation case pro bono:

On Fox and Friends Wednesday morning, Barnes, who is representing the families at no cost, explained that because the kids are private citizens and minors, anything someone says about them that is false can be libel, according to the law. Rather than proving malice, “all you have to prove is negligence,” he said…

Barnes said he was representing the families in a possible class-action lawsuit pro bono because libel lawsuits are difficult for average citizens to bring as they are very expensive. “They cost between a quarter of a million and a million dollars in legal fees to bring,” he explained. “So I wanted to equalize the playing field. These are people who couldn’t afford to bring this claim on their own behalf. That’s why I offered my services for free because somebody needed to stop this from reoccurring.”

The attorney stated he was giving the the libelers 48 hours to correct and retract their smears.

“Everybody now is on 48-hour notice. So by Friday everybody needs to retract and correct any false statements they have issued about these kids. That includes any major member of the media, that includes any major celebrity, that includes anybody with a substantial social media platform. If you’ve said anything false about these kids, they are willing to extend you a 48-hour time period — a period of grace consistent with their Christian faith — for you to, through confession, get redemption and retract and correct and apologize.”

The lawyer warned that if libelers don’t do this by Friday, they may be “a defendant in a lawsuit because those lawsuits will start to occur next week.”

We’ll see what happens.

I don’t think mere removal is enough, although I’m not sure of the law on that. Barnes says “retract and correct and apologize,” but that might just be what the families want rather than a legal condition for dropping a suit against a particular person.

More:

Barnes told the Fox and Friends hosts that he is representing three different groups of families: the kids “who were at the Lincoln Memorial who have been libeled”; families of kids who have been in some of the photos and had false statements made about them based on those photos; and “alumni who feel that their entire school and everything associated with them has been libeled and they too want to seek legal remedy for these people who refuse to correct, retract or make any apology for their false statements.”

I’m all for it.

I think that too many people on Twitter forget that they’re not just playing some sort of verbal one-upmanship game in which the person being most clever and most outrageously nasty wins. They are bullying, defaming, and threatening real people, and teenagers at that.

The same people doing the bullying and threatening probably consider themselves part of the anti-bullying crowd, and don’t even recognize themselves as doing what they profess to hate. They need to learn that when you defame and threaten real people as part of an online mob, there are consequences.

Facecrime

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four many times, but I haven’t opened it for a long long time. I recall a great many of his Newspeak terms—and I think his explanation of Newspeak’s nomenclature and aims is one of the most brilliant inventions of political literature and perhaps even literature—but I had forgotten this particular term until I was reminded of it yesterday.

The Orwell quote describing it:

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

Facecrime. That’s the offense the howling Twitter mob accused 16-year-old Nicholas Sandmann of committing. The fact that these people were purposely misled by propagandists doesn’t excuse them, because even if he had been smirking at a Native American elder playing the drum in his face, what’s the enormous big deal that would justify physical threats against him and his family? The facts that later emerged utterly contradicted the original propagandist story, of course, but in many people’s minds Sandmann’s facecrime persists and remains an unconscionable outrage.

In Orwell’s novel, the government is the main enforcer of this extreme social conformity and need to control one’s visage at all times. But even in the novel, one’s friends, co-workers, family, and/or anyone in the public at large could report and denounce you. These days it’s not the government, it’s fellow citizens who are the main conduits for facecrime accusations. Youth will not protect you if you check off the wrong demographics—and I think hatcrime (that’s not a typo) could be added to Orwell’s lexicon.

Twitter is the perfect mechanism for public shaming and metaphorical stoning. Orwell didn’t quite foresee Twitter, but he was no less a genius for that.

[ADDENDUM at 2:32 PM: A few minutes after I published this piece, I went to National Review just to see what they were talking about there today. An article by Kyle Smith entitled “Hatcrime and Facecrime” immediately caught my eye, for obvious reasons.

I think it’s pretty clear that Kyle Smith hadn’t seen my post when he wrote his. I hadn’t seen his, either, when I wrote mine. As they say, “great minds…”. Some ideas are just too good (or perhaps too obvious?) not to be thought of by multiple people, I guess.]

One way to deal with Nancy Pelosi if you’re president

The New Neo Posted on by

[Scroll down for UPDATE]

Override what she says and take the high road as you do it:

President Trump told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a new letter Wednesday that he still plans to deliver next week’s scheduled State of the Union address from the House floor even though Pelosi urged him to delay the speech because of the government shutdown.

The president, in his letter, said there are “no security concerns” surrounding the event, in response to Pelosi raising that as a potential issue because of the partial shutdown.

Therefore, I will be honoring your invitation, and fulfilling my Constitutional duty, to deliver important information to the people and Congress of the United States of America regarding the State of our Union,” Trump wrote. “I look forward to seeing you on the evening on January 29th in the Chamber of the House of Representatives. It would be so very sad for our country if the State of the Union were not delivered on time, on schedule, and very importantly, on location!”

I didn’t think of that particular approach—but then again, I’m not Trump.

Next move, Pelosi. The article points out that “House and Senate still must approve a concurrent resolution approving the use of the chamber for the State of the Union.” Pelosi controls the House, so it seems to me that she still could block this. But it would look petty—except, of course, to Democrats and the MSM.

Trump has alternatives venues, of course, if he is denied by the House. I happen to think the alternatives are better, but he might disagree.

UPDATE 9 PM:

Pelosi answered no. Now Trump is mulling over an alternate venue.

I can’t imagine that Trump ever thought she’d say yes to the idea. I believe this little dosey doe was all just theater, and that his goal was to re-emphasize her pettiness. And no doubt he’s been considering alternate venues for quite some time now, in a place a lot more friendly and enthusiastic towards him than the House or the House chamber.

An update on Nathan Phillips and the Catholics

The New Neo Posted on by

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.]

This is the lesson to learn from all of this, if you haven’t learned it already

The New Neo Posted on by

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?

The speedy and brilliant fact-checkers at the WaPo have come up with a correction

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

The Covington incident: activism, and how to provoke and shape a story

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

Constructing the FISA warrant application: handled with care

The New Neo Posted on by

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?]

Frankovich’s “apology” and the Atlantic’s attempt at a corrective on the nature of truth

The New Neo Posted on by

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).]

[ADDENDUM II: Ace lets Frankovich and NR have it. And they deserve it.]

Don’t wear your MAGA hats out in public

The New Neo Posted on by

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:

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.