In my opinion U.S. District Judge William Bertelsman is an idiot and hates the little people smeared by the Washington Post

 If a person as private and unknown as Nick Sandmann can be libeled and slandered in this fashion without any recourse to the courts, then none of us is safe from this abuse at the hands of the media with the collusion of judges who are more interested in currying favor with the right people than administering justice.

In a 36-page ruling, U.S. District Judge William Bertelsman noted that the Post never mentioned Sandmann by name in its initial coverage of the incident, referring only to groups of “hat wearing teens.” Bertelsman added that “the words used contain no reflection upon any particular individual” and thus could not be constituted as defamation. The judge also ruled that the newspaper used language that was “loose, figurative,” and “rhetorical hyperbole” which is protected by the First Amendment.

This is insane. It is now legal for a major newspaper to single out a teenager and label him a racist and generate an online mob to make death threats and to cause incalculable to the kid’s future because this incident will be on the internet forever, visible to college admissions staff and human relations staff, none of whom are the sharpest tools in the shed and could fail to find the resolution of the issue.

The Sandmann family said they would be asking the appellate court to review the trial court’s decision on appeal.

“I believe fighting for justice for my son and family is of vital national importance,” said Ted Sandmann, Nicholas’ father. “If what was done to Nicholas is not legally actionable, then no one is safe.”

“The law must protect innocent minors targeted by journalists publishing click-bait sensationalized news,” Todd McMurtry, co-counsel for the Sandmann family, said in the statement. “This is especially true in the current hyper-partisan political environment.”

Bingo. What the Washington Post did was wrong and they did it for the political hit against Trump and for the f***ing clicks. What this shows more than anything else is how we are now subjects and not citizens. The institutions of government and the large corporations are allies. They protect one another against the powerless and we’re expected to nod at their wisdom and move on. If a person as private and unknown as Nick Sandmann can be libeled and slandered in this fashion without any recourse to the courts, then none of us is safe from this abuse at the hands of the media with the collusion of judges who are more interested in currying favor with the right people than administering justice.

This proves conclusively that the judiciary is partisan, biased and evil.   And Judge William Bertelsman is exhibit "A" for what's wrong and needs to be impeached.   These are members of the ruling class, protecting each other.

Mark Steyn's Take On Jussie Smollett Fake Hate Crime: "The Tinge of Fake hate"

"In Chicago where people are violently attacked all week long, every weekend dozens and dozens of people get shot, this is the only guy who actually has to pay somebody four grand to whack him. That's how little homophobia and racism there is in Chicago.  Everybody else is too busy shooting each other on a non-racial, non-homophobic basis that this guy has to pay two Nigerians four grand to beat the crap out of him."  

View the whole thing.

Mark comments on the reaction from the media and Democrats: what's fascinating is that a lot of big shot commentators who don't refer to the Smollett "attack" as a freakish thing - which it is - but that they actually say that this is America in 2019 as if black homosexuals are attacked on sub-zero temperatures in Chicago, doused with bleach and having clothesline hung around their necks every day.   That's insane!

Covington Teen's Lawyer Releases Brutal 14-Minute Video Showcasing Lies of Nathan Phillips and Media

A new fourteen-minute video of the incident in Washington, D.C., last month emphasizes the starring role Phillips took in spreading the fraudulent narrative and the supporting roles the uncritical media took in smearing the innocent kids.

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.

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

The Left's ambush technique.

Oh, that Shithole Media!

Poorly sourced, slanted reporting has become the new standard among prestige media. Three weeks ago, a little girl, black, was shot and killed in a Houston parking lot; initial reports that the shooter was white turned a local police item into national news. The New York Times ran stories on the case for days, exploring the implications of targeted, race-based murder in an age of intolerance. When it emerged that the child was killed by two black gang members gunning for their enemies, coverage of the story ceased....

. . . Over the last year, we've seen a spate of cellphone videos capturing petty disputes amplified across social media and reported in the national media--as long as the footage depicts a white person complaining to or about a black person doing something relatively minor. Whether the incidents in question have anything to do with race is unimportant. Pushing the narrative that Trump has ignited a firestorm of white racism across the country requires a continual flow of stories making that point, regardless of accuracy or context. . .

Remember that Nathan Phillips and his group got to frame the narrative that produced such rage against the Covington boys -- before the activists knew that another video existed. "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."

Main action item: if you are ever in a position where you may encounter hostile leftists, have video running before you encounter them. Because otherwise, the videos will start when they start screaming.

Viet Nam from lies the MSM's "Native American Elder"

🚨Nathan Phillips, January 3, 2018🚨

"I'm a Vietnam Vet. I served in Marine Corps 72 to 76. I got discharged May 5, 1976. I got honorable discharge and one of the boxes shows peacetime or, what my box says is that I was **in theater**. I don't talk much about my Vietnam times." pic.twitter.com/nIoYxGoPqM

— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) January 24, 2019

John Hayward Tweets on the fundamental press lies about the Covington story

Media: These kids are racists wearing red hats instead of white hoods!

Reality: False

Media: OK, but other people at the school did racist and homophobic stuff!

Reality: False

Media: WHY CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG? https://t.co/0D21CHTRJD

— John Hayward (@Doc_0) January 24, 2019

Imagine if Fox News had done to a Muslim School what the MSM did to the Christian kids

ADDENDUM: Imagine the Muslim school is shut down for days on end due to death threats from right-wingers, while Fox News interviews the conservative activist who staged the confrontation and asks if he "forgives" the kids who can't go to school because he went after them.

— John Hayward (@Doc_0) January 24, 2019

The Media Botched the Covington Catholic Story

Did you expect anything else?

Lying Indian

"Passive Conservatism" and the Surrender Caucus

Well said by John Hayward:

Nick Sandmann and the students of Covington have become symbols of Fake News and how evil it can be. They have captivated the attention of the world, and I know they will use it for the good - maybe even to bring people together. It started off unpleasant, but can end in a dream!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2019

Passive conservatism was so thoroughly terrorized away from social issues over the past generation that it became reluctant to engage even when leftists are clearly the aggressors and their attacks are utterly dishonest.

The debate on the passive Right was never about pushing back or fighting, especially not by top-tier Republican officials looking to preserve their "electability." The only serious topic of discussion was how much ground to yield, how many of the Left's premises to agree with.

The idea was that yielding all cultural battles to the Left would allow Republicans to focus on "fiscal conservatism" and win over moderate voters who only care about pocketbook issues. Curiously, the Left never saw it that way, not for an instant.

As we would learn, ceding cultural battles to the Left without a fight, or actively HELPING them to score a little Strange New Respect and maybe some roundtable seats, made the "pocketbook issues" largely irrelevant. The Left frames EVERYTHING in moral terms now.

"Moderates" are not a homogenous voting bloc, and not many of them were soothed by Republicans putting on their green eyeshades and waving stacks of financial reports while refusing to engage fiercely in cultural battles. Instead, middle Americans felt bereft of representation.

What passive conservatism ceded to the Left was *righteousness*. Every left-wing issue is presented as a righteous crusade which no one can legitimately resist. The motives of dissenters are ruthlessly challenged and they are damned as apostates by the Church of the State.

The Left gained an almost unchallenged ability to designate cultural villains and target them for destruction, an ability they were boldly exercising against the Covington kids until citizen-journalists brought them up short with amateur video.

Meanwhile, the Right was completely stripped of righteousness. It cannot present anything as a moral crusade, not even when it speaks up for unborn children or victims of violent crime - not even when it champions those the Left allegedly cares about, like the "working class."

The passive Right lost the ability to project righteousness even when defending core American principles, and indeed the pillars of Western civilization, like the presumption of innocence. The Left openly demands we sacrifice those things for THEIR crusades.

Now it's free speech and even basic political rights on the chopping block. Wearing a MAGA hat and marching for life? You deserve whatever happens to you, including life-destroying fake allegations and even violent assault. Shut up, stand down, and submit or your life is forfeit.

The Left defines what your symbols mean, evaluates the true content of your heart, and parses every word you speak. What an insidious assault on free speech - your every word and even facial expressions mangled by hostile translators, your ability to impart MEANING stolen.

And passive conservatism does nothing to help, because they're terrified of engaging in cultural battles they believe themselves fated to lose, because refusing to engage for decades gave the Left absolute cultural dominance.

They don't want to accuse the media of being thoroughly corrupt, because they want to become "respectable" parts of it. They don't want to upset the delicate surrender negotiations they've been conducting with the Left. They dislike the "deplorables" almost as much as Lefty does.

The academic heavyweights of passive conservatism are beginning to think religion is effectively dead as a cultural force, the people who cling to it scare away those much-sought-after "moderates," and causes like pro-life are a futile waste of their energy.

Above all they are animated by the dream of a "socially liberal but fiscally conservative" moderate majority quietly turning to them and delivering electoral victory. They tell themselves such a silent majority lurks in every demographic, awaiting the right activation signals.

Passive conservatives are easily frightened away from any issue they think might disturb the dreams of this socially liberal, fiscally conservative sleeping colossus. Shrewd left-wingers know this and play to that passive conservative fear to manipulate them.

The fatal problem with this strategy is that the Left plays by no such passive rules. It ACTIVELY reshapes the electorate with government power and cultural influence. It's not worried about freaking out the moderates - it subdues and conquers them by redefining what is "normal."

The Left attacks relentlessly because it pays no price for failed assaults... because it has no active conservative enemy to make it pay. There's nobody else on the field. Passive conservatives merely quibble about how many yards the Left should get on every play.

Trump appealed to that quiet group of moderates precisely because he saw them under attack and offered to take some hits by standing up for them. Criticize his approach all you want, but which of his GOP opponents even saw the problem? Who else saw moderation itself under attack?

So yes, Trump inevitably wades in for the Covington kids, as most prominent Democrats would do for their treasured constituencies... but as few other Republican leaders of recent vintage would do for theirs. Sure, Trump fumbles some balls, but he's in the game. /end

Glenn Beck Exposes the Real Story of the Covington Catholic High School Controversy

PLEASE SHARE

Lawyer for Covington Catholic HS Families Threatens Lawsuits Against Media Unless They Retract False Stories

Good.

Liberals Are Bigots, But It's Okay Because That Kid Had a MAGA Hat

Then, every lib on earth went completely insane. They saw a white kid wearing an enemy uniform, and they projected all their fears and hatreds onto him.

Honest question. Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s? pic.twitter.com/jolQ7BZQPD

— Reza Aslan (@rezaaslan) January 20, 2019

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.

4 Lessons We Can Learn From The Despicable Smear Campaign Against The Covington Catholic Students

There are way more than four, but the number one lesson is that the MSM lie.

More Covington

Black adults to white kids: "F*ggots, crackers, bigots, incest kids."
White kids: [smiling, not responding]
Everyone: "omg did you see that smile?! So disrespectful!"

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) January 21, 2019

Mark Steyn: "The Drumbeat of the Mob"

~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.

The Covington chronicles: on hating the face of a teenage boy

What is it about the boy's face that caused so many people to hate him and wish to do him harm?

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.

HATE HOAX: Native American Activist Approached Chanting Covington Catholic Teens, Got In Their Face

A comprehensive rundown of the hoax of Covington Catholic teens harrassing a Native American man.

Read the whole thing.

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.