The Virginian

Back in the old days, white supremacy meant burning crosses, threatening and hurting and killing people, saying racist things, etc. Now all you need to do is stand in one spot, literally saying nothing, and that's white supremacy. It's a lot less work, I guess?

The white kid, who I'm not going to name, didn't roll up on the elderly Native American man. He wasn't trying to intimidate anybody. He just stood there while some dude he didn't know walked up and banged a drum in his face, after listening to some other guys he didn't know screaming insults at him. The kid's big crime was... smirking. That was it. A teenager smirked at somebody who was trying to provoke him, and it's national news because the troll was a designated victim and the kid was wearing the Hat of Evil.

You've heard of "Standing While Black"? Well, this was "Smirking While White." What this country needs is some common-sense smirk control!

This was a highly successful propaganda effort. It's completely unfair to this kid, but the people who created and disseminated the propaganda don't care. They don't care about people as individuals, and they know their target audience doesn't either. They just see a face they're supposed to hate, underneath a hat they're supposed to hate. So that's what they do. They hate. Then they congratulate themselves on standing up to "bigotry."

Orwell was an amateur.

So now what are they going to do? Ruin this kid's life? They're already doxing him, and doxing people who vaguely resemble him. The roaming outrage mob has found its new target. It's MLK Day, and they're judging a young man not by the content of his character, but by the color of his skin. And hat.

~Guest-hosting for Rush on Friday, I mentioned the strange need of the right to virtue-signal to their detractors - as in the stampede of Congressional Republicans to distance themselves from their colleague Steve King over an infelicitous interview with The New York Times. Democrats never do this; Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam declare that the Jews are pushing defective marijuana on black men in order to turn them gay - which would appear to be a prima facie slur on at least four Democrat constituencies: blacks, gays, Jews and potheads. Yet Clinton, Obama et al speak not a word against Calypso Louie.

There was another conservative virtue-signaling stampede over the weekend. A short video from the Lincoln Memorial went "viral" (notwithstanding its ubiquity, I'm keeping the word in scare-quotes because, like any other virus, this one should be contained): it purported to show a group of Catholic schoolboys in MAGA hats harassing an elderly Native American drummer. The lads were instantly identified as students from Covington Catholic High School, which I'd never heard of but is clearly the kind of tony white-privilege joint where they book Brett Kavanaugh to spike the punch at the gang-rape prom. So naturally social media instantly convicted them and moved on to the usual doxing and death threats. The school itself leapt to dissociate itself from its own pupils and threatened to expel them.

Midst the present fevers, my advice and practice is that, when the media are in lockstep on a particular "narrative", proceed with caution and, if you must join the great thundering herd of independent minds, tag along at the tail end out of sight. A genuinely conservative temperament should be wary of crying "Me too!" and scampering after the media-Democrat-cultMarx bandwagon - if only because, regardless of the wrongs and rights, no true conservative should assist in furthering the nano-second due process of trial by social media, through which whole lives are destroyed by the reflex twitching drive-thru jury of Twitter. "Sentence first - verdict afterwards," said Alice's Queen. Hang him high - and we'll figure out later what, if anything, he's guilty of. That's about as deeply unconservative a proposition as one could find. The cure is worse than whatever disease (racism, sexism, transphobia, Islamophobia) it claims to be healing.

Yet, instead of a prudent skepticism, my former colleagues at National Review joined the stampede and decided to get way out in front of the story. My old friend Jay Nordlinger was anguished:

The images of those red-hat kids surrounding and mocking that old Indian are unbearable. Absolutely unbearable. An American disgrace.

Of course, the virtue-signaling availed him naught from fellow Tweeters. Alex Natt:

'Old Indian'?

Tracy Kennedy:

Yeah, 'Native American man' or 'Indigenous Man' or even 'Vietnam Vet'...

Etc.

National Review decided to up their game and published a piece by their deputy managing editor, Nicholas Frankovich (presumably the assistant to Jason Lee Steorts), with the arresting headline:

The Covington Students Might as Well Have Just Spit on the Cross

Unfortunately for the scolding schoolmarms of the right, the facts were not as they appeared to be from that brief clip. Over at Reason (with hindsight, a better name for a magazine than I used to think it was), Robby Soave watched the two hours of surrounding footage, and found - surprise, surprise! - that it told an entirely different story:

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...

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.

Under sustained crude and obnoxious provocation, the boys were remarkably good-humored throughout - a credit to the school that threatens to expel them.

Halfway through, Jay's "old Indian" decided to insert himself in between the Black Hebrew Israelites and the MAGA cracker-faggot-paedo schoolboys, and start his "Native American drumming". A little ethnic drumming goes a long way with me. Have you ever heard that Japanese taiko drumming? It's not exactly Buddy Rich. So I wouldn't welcome someone doing it in my face, and needless to say, if a white male drummer (from the Edinburgh Tattoo, say) went up to some black kids and started drumming, it would be a hate crime.

Nathan Phillips, on the other hand, is a revered tribal elder - so revered he plays one in a "music" video that has 380 million hits (best to hit the mute button before pressing play):

Almost nothing about this story is as reported. Jay Nordlinger's "old Indian" isn't that old: he was born in 1955, which, not to be ungallant or anything, puts him in slightly-older-brother territory to Jay - who has known some seriously old men, like the recently departed Bernard Lewis, born 1916. Nathan Phillips seems to be some sort of Native American version of Quaker Oats pitchman Wilford Brimley, who's been playing old since Cocoon in 1985, when he was barely fifty yet was cast as a contemporary of Don Ameche, Hume Cronyn, Jack Gilford and other chaps three decades his senior. In fact, Steve Sailer wonders if Nathan Phillips is, in fact, a "Vietnam vet", at least in the quaint and possibly obsolescent sense of having been in the vicinity of Vietnam while wearing a military uniform. All US forces were withdrawn in March 1973, when Mr Phillips would have been either a few weeks past his eighteenth birthday, or still seventeen and in drum school.

Curious. But, as the appellate judges say (hey, welcome to my world), we need not reach the merits of Mr Phillips' antiquity, because long before that question arises the official media narrative turns out to be thoroughly bogus. This was just another fake hate crime - I believe you can do a Master's in them at Oberlin. My old boss at National Review, Rich Lowry, has deleted his Tweet, as has Jay Nordlinger (seconding Rich with a somewhat perfunctory "same here"), and the spit-on-the-Cross piece by their hysterical junior editor has disappeared from the website. By contrast, over at The New York Times, the in-house conservative, Ross Douthat, can rouse himself to no more than ecumenical scolding:

Good rules for life: Don't let your Catholic school's students wear MAGA hats on a field trip for the March for Life.

Don't *immediately* make a teenager a symbol of everything you hate about your political enemies based on a short video clip. Give it a day at least.

That doesn't quite do it for me. What's disturbing about this fake hate crime is not that the Twitter mob scented blood in its nostrils and went bounding after its prey, but that a big chunk of Conservative Inc piled on, as enthusiastically as the left. And Jay Nordlinger's finger-wagging about an "American disgrace" is absurd in its sanctimony: However you wish to characterize a professional tribal elder intervening in a showdown between upscale Catholic private-school pupils and "Black Hebrew Israelites", it isn't an "American" disgrace. An American disgrace is the declining life expectancy of white males due to addiction, or the collapse of the family in rural America, or a bipartisan political class admitting millions of unskilled illegal immigrants to the country so that MS-13 gangs are now a fact of life in suburban Long Island in order that the Dems can get voters and the GOP's donors can get cheap labor ...or any one of a ton of other "American disgraces" Conservative Inc doesn't talk about because it only takes to the field on the left's terms.

I talked on Rush last Friday about the folly, in philosophical terms, of always accepting your opponents' premises, even unto accepting and advancing the notion that "western civilization" is hate speech. How is that in the interest of even the most milquetoast and watery version of "conservatism"?

But accepting not just your opponents' framing of the argument but their most repulsive totalitarian rituals is even worse. The Orwellian Twitterstorm is something utterly disgusting: It reduces man to a cyber-jackal, feasting on whatever prey is tossed in his path. I have argued, at some length, that you cannot have truly conservative government in a liberal culture. Culture is like air - it's all around, and you don't even think about it. So we live in an age of social-media feeding frenzies that can vaporize a fellow's Oscar-hosting gig or drive an unfortunate porn actress to suicide. There is nothing in the least bit "conservative" about such a world: It's like the young student in Milan Kundera's great novel of Warsaw Pact totalitarianism, The Joke, facing the party committee and wondering why none of his friends will speak up for him - except that it's now at Spaceballs Ludicrous Speed, and the respectable right cannot even bring itself to forgo the pleasure of getting played for saps. Every time.

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....

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.

Statement of Nick Sandmann, Covington Catholic High School Junior, Regarding Incident at the Lincoln Memorial

I am providing this factual account of what happened on Friday afternoon at the Lincoln Memorial to correct misinformation and outright lies being spread about my family and me.

I am the student in the video who was confronted by the Native American protestor. I arrived at the Lincoln Memorial at 4:30 p.m. I was told to be there by 5:30 p.m., when our busses were due to leave Washington for the trip back to Kentucky. We had been attending the March for Life rally, and then had split up into small groups to do sightseeing.

When we arrived, we noticed four African American protestors who were also on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I am not sure what they were protesting, and I did not interact with them. I did hear them direct derogatory insults at our school group.

The protestors said hateful things. They called us “racists,” “bigots,” “white crackers,” “faggots,” and “incest kids.” They also taunted an African American student from my school by telling him that we would “harvest his organs.” I have no idea what that insult means, but it was startling to hear.

Because we were being loudly attacked and taunted in public, a student in our group asked one of our teacher chaperones for permission to begin our school spirit chants to counter the hateful things that were being shouted at our group. The chants are commonly used at sporting events.

They are all positive in nature and sound like what you would hear at any high school. Our chaperone gave us permission to use our school chants. We would not have done that without obtaining permission from the adults in charge of our group.

At no time did I hear any student chant anything other than the school spirit chants. I did not witness or hear any students chant “build that wall” or anything hateful or racist at any time. Assertions to the contrary are simply false. Our chants were loud because we wanted to drown out the hateful comments that were being shouted at us by the protestors.

After a few minutes of chanting, the Native American protestors, who I hadn’t previously noticed, approached our group. The Native American protestors had drums and were accompanied by at least one person with a camera.

The protestor everyone has seen in the video began playing his drum as he waded into the crowd, which parted for him. I did not see anyone try to block his path. He locked eyes with me and approached me, coming within inches of my face. He played his drum the entire time he was in my face.

I never interacted with this protestor. I did not speak to him. I did not make any hand gestures or other aggressive moves. To be honest, I was startled and confused as to why he had approached me. We had already been yelled at by another group of protestors, and when the second group approached I was worried that a situation was getting out of control where adults were attempting to provoke teenagers.

I believed that by remaining motionless and calm, I was helping to diffuse the situation. I realized everyone had cameras and that perhaps a group of adults was trying to provoke a group of teenagers into a larger conflict. I said a silent prayer that the situation would not get out of hand.

During the period of the drumming, a member of the protestor’s entourage began yelling at a fellow student that we “stole our land” and that we should “go back to Europe.” I heard one of my fellow students begin to respond. I motioned to my classmate and tried to get him to stop engaging with the protestor, as I was still in the mindset that we needed to calm down tensions.

I never felt like I was blocking the Native American protestor. He did not make any attempt to go around me. It was clear to me that he had singled me out for a confrontation, although I am not sure why.

The engagement ended when one of our teachers told me the busses had arrived and it was time to go. I obeyed my teacher and simply walked to the busses. At that moment, I thought I had diffused the situation by remaining calm, and I was thankful nothing physical had occurred.

I never understood why either of the two groups of protestors were engaging with us, or exactly what they were protesting at the Lincoln Memorial. We were simply there to meet a bus, not become central players in a media spectacle. This is the first time in my life I’ve ever encountered any sort of public protest, let alone this kind of confrontation or demonstration.

I was not intentionally making faces at the protestor. I did smile at one point because I wanted him to know that I was not going to become angry, intimidated or be provoked into a larger confrontation. I am a faithful Christian and practicing Catholic, and I always try to live up to the ideals my faith teaches me – to remain respectful of others, and to take no action that would lead to conflict or violence.

I harbor no ill will for this person. I respect this person’s right to protest and engage in free speech activities, and I support his chanting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial any day of the week. I believe he should re-think his tactics of invading the personal space of others, but that is his choice to make.

I am being called every name in the book, including a racist, and I will not stand for this mob-like character assassination of my family’s name. My parents were not on the trip, and I strive to represent my family in a respectful way in all public settings.

I have received physical and death threats via social media, as well as hateful insults. One person threatened to harm me at school, and one person claims to live in my neighborhood. My parents are receiving death and professional threats because of the social media mob that has formed over this issue.

I love my school, my teachers and my classmates. I work hard to achieve good grades and to participate in several extracurricular activities. I am mortified that so many people have come to believe something that did not happen – that students from my school were chanting or acting in a racist fashion toward African Americans or Native Americans. I did not do that, do not have hateful feelings in my heart, and did not witness any of my classmates doing that.

I cannot speak for everyone, only for myself. But I can tell you my experience with Covington Catholic is that students are respectful of all races and cultures. We also support everyone’s right to free speech.

I am not going to comment on the words or account of Mr. Phillips, as I don’t know him and would not presume to know what is in his heart or mind. Nor am I going to comment further on the other protestors, as I don’t know their hearts or minds, either.I have read that Mr. Phillips is a veteran of the United States Marines. I thank him for his service and am grateful to anyone who puts on the uniform to defend our nation. If anyone has earned the right to speak freely, it is a U.S. Marine veteran.

I can only speak for myself and what I observed and felt at the time. But I would caution everyone passing judgement based on a few seconds of video to watch the longer video clips that are on the internet, as they show a much different story than is being portrayed by people with agendas.

I provided this account of events to the Diocese of Covington so they may know exactly what happened, and I stand ready and willing to cooperate with any investigation they are conducting.

This is the only statement that has been made by the Sandmann family. Any comments attributed to any member of the family that is not contained in this document are fabricated. The family will not be answering individual media inquiries.

The answer lies in the statement of a man named James Roche, newly famous as Brett Kavanaugh’s freshman roommate at Yale. Speaking of Debbie Ramirez (accuser #2), Roche said: “I cannot imagine her making this up…I believe that he and his social circle were capable of the actions that Debbie described.” Bingo. He and his social circle. Not Kavanaugh as an individual; Kavanaugh as part of a group. Not he “did”; his type “were capable.”

The pieces fall into place. Progressives hear generic stories about a preppy jock turned frat boy who enjoys parties and beer. “Guys like that” have been getting away with murder for years. (Just ask Ted Kennedy.) “Guys like that” skirt on DUIs. (Just ask Beto O’Rourke.) And who are their victims? Innocent women from the same social circle. (Just ask Bill Clinton.)

In the Progressive moral universe, it all makes sense. It doesn’t matter what teenage Brett Kavanaugh did or didn’t do, the allegations are credible because they describe the “sort of thing” that “guys like that” do. Kavanaugh is guilty because he was a “guy like that.” His accusers must be believed because other women have been doubted in the past.

This reasoning is not an anomaly. It is not mere cynicism. It is not mere politics. It is an entirely illiberal replacement morality. It is an intentional rejection of human rights, personal responsibility, and the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is something very new — and it is, by every standard of Western civilization, profoundly evil. It also is terrifying: a brutal caste system that inflicts punishment based on gender, race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, and orientation; a venting of rage, without regard to impact on individuals or civilization.

Senator Booker’s self-aggrandizing Spartacus reference made him an instant laughingstock. In many ways, however, gladiatorial combat — or perhaps the auto da fe — is the best possible analogy to the gruesome public spectacle of an innocent, decent, honorable public servant being slaughtered to satisfy Progressives’ thirst for blood. But Kavanaugh himself is not the Progressives’ real target; he is just as much collateral damage as is Dr. Ford. This Progressive bloodsport provides a glimpse of what American life will become should the new Democratic Party ever gain power.

More than 109 lobbyists and 39 Democrat members of Congress attended a "winter retreat" last weekend in Puerto Rico, ... The fun in the sun was enhanced by a limited run of the Broadway hit "Hamilton," starring its creator, lead actor, and Democrat partisan, Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Much of the media ignored what used to be called a "junket," probably because the cast of characters were Democrats and the major media prefer to focus on bashing President Donald Trump and Republicans.

How is a statement of faith rooted in ancient religious orthodoxy at all relevant to Trump? If the school followed Trump’s beliefs, it would reject Christian sexual morality and embrace adultery.

Liberals lie all the time, but when they know they're vulnerable they lie even more than all the time. They're vulnerable on immigration. Even heroic, nonstop lying doesn't help -- as CNN has discovered.

So, naturally, the media have turned to their larger project of relentlessly trying to discredit conservatives as "white supremacists."

Unfortunately for them, apart from a few crackpots -- whom I assume exist in a country of 320 million people -- there are no "white supremacists." There were white supremacists 50 years ago, and they were all Democrats. (See my book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama.)

Today, "white supremacy" is nothing but a comfortable fantasy the left developed to explain its sick preoccupation with white people.

Talk about a manufactured crisis! The same people who love to snicker about Fox News viewers worrying about Sharia law sweeping the country are convinced that mythical "white supremacists" are hiding under every bed.

The whole concept is bogus. In my life, I've encountered a number of white people -- some of them are my best friends. I've never heard any of them suggest that whites should rule over other races. None of them has argued that a substandard white person should get a job over a more competent person just because he's white -- you know, what every other group openly advocates for itself.

There is a whole swath of journalists who have decided that instead of investigating relevant news, they will spend their time doing oppo-research on prominent conservatives, hoping against hope to call them "racists."

If the facts don't fit, they'll make them up. The New York Times' Maureen Dowd once famously imagined a Republican congressman calling Obama "boy."

Last year, The New York Times hired Sarah Jeong, a Korean journalist who has posted such venomous anti-white tweets as:

"White men are bullshit."

"(F)uck white women lol."

"White people have stopped breeding. (Y)ou'll all go extinct soon. (T)hat was my plan all along."

"Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants."

"#CancelWhitePeople."

"Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?"

"(O)h man it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men."

There's no question but that such racist attacks would never be tolerated toward any other group. Jeong never apologized and happily took her seat on the Times' editorial board.

Consider the current Gillette ad, "We Believe: The Best Men Can Be" (after the board of directors rejected the more accurate title, "ANNOUNCEMENT TO SHAREHOLDERS: WE'RE FOLDING THE COMPANY"). The ad shows only white men harassing women -- and being corrected by minority men.

As long as they brought it up, every culture in the universe is galaxies more misogynistic than Western European culture. The ad should have been titled, Hey, white America, you've got to stop doing the things that everyone BUT you does.

When other groups talk about themselves, they instantly go to: We rock, we're awesome! Only the descendants of white Western Europeans are not allowed to be proud of their culture.

There is still casual racism, and that should be quickly and severely condemned. Iowa Rep. Steve King, for example, was fanatically obsessed with vindicating a white defendant accused of, first, murdering a half-Pakistani woman, and, second, falsely accusing a Congolese man of the murder.

Except King never did that. Newsweek's Burleigh did, writing an entire book in defense of alabaster-white Amanda Knox, after she was convicted of the brutal murder of her half-Pakistani roommate -- later overturned -- and also convicted of falsely accusing an innocent Congolese man of the crime, for which she served four years.

Liberals could never, in a million years, survive the standards of "racism" applied to conservatives.
...If you want to know about white supremacy, Nina, interview yourself. After that, maybe you can learn your maid's name.

Hasher Jallal Taheb, 21, of Cumming, was taken into custody in Gwinnett County while allegedly trying to exchange his vehicle for explosives. He later appeared in court in downtown Atlanta in the case brought by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Authorities said Taheb was acting alone and they made no accusation that he had ties to any terrorist group. He was arrested after a tip from a resident who said the young man had been radicalized....

“Taheb explained that jihad was an obligation, that he wanted to do as much damage as possible, and that he expected to be a ‘martyr,” the complaint said.