Thought crimes, media abuse and those Catholic high school boys from Covington

John Kass, Chicago Tribune

Usually, media isn’t all that interested in the March for Life. Media mostly leans to the left and employs social justice warriors to protect abortion rights.

But this year, with the anti-Trumpers deflated after the collapse of the BuzzFeed story, something happened to lift their spirits.

Those Covington High School students were waiting for their bus after the march, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, with their “MAGA” hats.

The boys were wrongfully and publicly accused of confronting Native American activist Nathan Phillips, because that was what was highlighted on a short video of the event that went viral.

But it turned out the aggressors were Phillips himself, pounding his drum and singing loudly within inches of a Covington boy’s face, and several Black Hebrew Israelite protesters shouting horrible racist insults at the boys.

Phillips’ credibility is becoming shakier by the day. I don’t want to call an old man a liar when he’s playing the hero, but he’s all over the map on his facts.

“There was that moment when I realized I've put myself between beast and prey," Phillips told reporters, rather dramatically. "These young men were beastly, and these old black individuals was their prey, and I stood in between them and so they needed their pounds of flesh and they were looking at me for that."

Prey? That’s ridiculous. I won’t repeat what the Black Hebrew Israelites said, but what they said was racist and cheap and stupid and ugly.

One of the students, Nick Sandmann, was unlucky enough to be confronted by Phillips. Sandmann was provoked, clearly, but he didn’t attack, he just smiled nervously.

But the way many reacted — including media — suggests they’ve never raised a child.

If you’re a parent, think of your child in that situation, not being angry, not overreacting, just standing, calmly, with a nervous smile that was derided as a hateful smirk of privilege.

CNN legal analyst Bakari Sellers wanted the boys to be punched.

“He is deplorable,” Sellers tweeted. “Some ppl can also be punched in the face.”

He deleted that tweet, but does that erase the fact? CNN’s Ana Navarro also deleted a tweet that likened Covington parents to paper towels in a toilet.

“Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?” asked former CNN personality Reza Aslan.

But it wasn’t just CNN and those on the left that peeled the skin of the boys from Covington.

The most depressing part of it all is that the center-right also jumped on them hard, lest they, too, be accused of supporting thought crimes.

The National Review put out a short piece online suggesting the boys had defiled their faith, as if they’d spat on the cross. To its credit, the National Review removed the article when it became clear that the boys had been the victims, rather than the aggressors.

This is the new debilitating fear in America: being accused of thought crime and attacked by cyberbarbarians. You may be shamed and lose your career and have everything taken away.

Depending, of course, upon your politics.