Many listeners or Facebook friends of mine have asked if I was going to retract my last blog. I asked, “Why would I?” The basis of the blog in the situation with the kids from Covington Catholic from Kentucky in Washington D.C. was that chaperones weren’t there to diffuse the tension. But here is the problem, because the kids were wearing the President Trump signature, “Make America Great Again” hats; it became more about that than the actual incident.
The left jumped to conclusions that these kids confronted Nathan Phillips, the Omaha American Indian elder, which wasn’t true, and went as far to egregiously go to social media to threaten the school, the kids, the parents or whoever might have any connection with the Covington Catholic School. The overreaction from these people and try to smear teenagers was outrageous, and does a lot to hurt the political discourse in this country, especially since much of their anger was entrenched in the fact many kids were wearing those hats.
Another video came out, and the start of it showed Mr. Phillips approaching the boys, and it didn’t take too long for the right-wing websites to feed the narrative that Trump supporters wanted, “these poor young boys just stood their ground.” Well that wasn’t the case either. The full video of almost two hours of what was happening tells the whole story. 1) The Black Israelites group were the worst of this bunch, harassing the young men, and to be honest anyone who was around them. If you watch the full video you can hear him call Mr. Phillips group, “Uncle Tomahawks” and mocks them for what he called, “worshiping animals” and referenced buffalo worshiping.
2) The boys from Covington Catholic weren’t exactly innocent here no matter what the conservative media outlets want to tell you, and I go back to the subject of my original blog, where were the chaperones? The narrative that, “we were just waiting for the bus” is a little weak for me if you have ever been to the Lincoln Memorial. To me they were on the steps looking at the spectacle of the protesters. As Nathan Phillips said on MSNBC’s AM Joy show Sunday morning, the numbers in the group of boys grew; and they were cheering and I would argue taunting the Black Israelites group. That was when Phillips went to, as he claims diffuse the tension, which led to the young man staring at Phillips and the boys dancing around goofy, while doing the sports chant of the “tomahawk chop” while Phillips was drumming. I’m sorry but that is not proper behavior by the boys in that scenario. With that said, and as I wrote in the previous blog, I possibly could have acted worse when I was 16 or 17, and I think I turned out OK; so I don’t think these kids are awful or should be harassed for any reason. I invite you to go to the video, fast forward to about 1:03:00 and you will see what I am talking about, and again I ask, where where the chaperones to diffuse the situation? (WARNING EXPLICIT LANGUAGE):
