Covington Catholic High (in case it hasn't been mentioned already)

[AK84]

@Evil_Economist

The elderly man, who was a *Marine *and a Vietnam veteran, felt threatened. If that’s not enough for you, then nothing will ever be enough for you.

Oh? You mean he partook in an Imperialist War to ensure the continued division of the natives…
See.

[GIGObuster]

@Fuzzy_wuzzy

In the video a Native American looking man(not the drummer) does make racist comments to the schoolkids. I assume this Native American man was not with the Black Israelites, I assume he had some link to the drummer, either a close link or simply at the same rally. This racist comment, and the drummer only confronting the schoolkids and not the Black Israelites suggests to me the role the Native Americans here was not neutral.

The article points out that the Black Israelites reported that they were not the ones iniciating the confrontation. Not that I would support them replying in kind, what the article shows however is that the confrontation with the BI was dismissed and already taken care of by the kids chanting school songs.

A parent of a Covington Catholic sophomore, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of safety concerns for his family, said his son, who attended the event, said the students were shouting school chants to drown out harassment from the black men. When it worked, the students were “hyped up and high-fiving each other,” he said.

The parent and Mr. Sandmann’s statement denied that the students chanted about building a wall at the border with Mexico, as Mr. Phillips had said. But in an interview on Sunday, Chase Iron Eyes, a spokesman for the Indigenous Peoples Movement, which organized the march, said he had also heard chants of “build that wall,” a rallying cry of supporters of Mr. Trump.

Marcus Frejo, an Indigenous hip-hop artist who is also known as Quese Imc, said he was standing with a friend near the black men when tensions flickered. He said he was worried “something ugly” was going to happen.

Around that time, he said, Mr. Phillips approached, asking to borrow a drum. Together, they headed into the center of the students, creating a sort of prayer circle. They sang what he said was a well-known spiritual song associated with the American Indian Movement of the 1960s and used for prayer and resistance.

In separate interviews, Mr. Frejo and Mr. Phillips said they heard the students making noises that seemed to mock Native American chanting. (Some students also appear to make the tomahawk chop gesture popularized at certain sporting events.) But Mr. Frejo also said he heard some of the students sing along. “Regardless of their ignorance and bigotry,” he said, the “spirits moved through them.”

Moments later, the group of students disbanded. But to many, the interaction — and the disparate way it was perceived — reflected the national mood.

Mr. Frejo, who works with youths to prevent suicide and alcohol abuse, saw this as “a teachable moment” to help show what can happen when you push past anger and hatred.

“We chose to go over there,” he said, “to sing a song to hopefully change something.”

[asahi]

@AK84

True. But the juvenile is not the one beating a drum in the senior citizen’s face.
From what I have read, neither party intended to be aggressive in that transaction.
But, at the end of the day the adult is the responsible one.

Get the fuck outta here with your disingenuous bullshit.

[ElvisL1ves]

@AK84

Oh? You mean he partook in an Imperialist War to ensure the continued division of the natives…
See.

He IS a Native American. :rolleyes:

[RTFirefly]

@D_Anconia

You’re going to be paid for NOT working. What other job on the planet does that? :dubious:

Oh, fuck that shit and take it to one of the zillion and one shutdown threads if you really want to argue about that. :rolleyes:

[RTFirefly]

@The_Tooth

The right-wing Christian garbage was free to take their Trump hats and fuck right off at any time.

This trip was supposedly organized by this crummy Covington Catholic school, right? What were they doing, wearing all those MAGA hats in the first place? I guess that particular branch of Roman Catholicism is all for separating toddlers from their parents and locking them up in freezing cages.

What are they trying to do, compete with the white Protestant evangelicals to see which can be a more hideous perversion of the teachings of Jesus?

[Quartz]

This article paints a very different picture.

Saturday night, a two-hour long, full video of the confrontation became widely available on social media, and that video shows a very different interaction than the one initally portrayed. The video, taken from the point of view of a second group of protesters who witnessed the interaction, shows that Phillips approached the teens — not the other way around, as Phillips claims — and that the teens were relatively peaceful during the incident, laughing and clapping along with Phillips’ drumming, and occasionally asking questions like, “what is going on here?”

…

The video also seems to show that the Covington High School kids were the victims of racial slurs: the group that recorded the video, a group called Black Hebrew Israelites, called the students “fa***ts,” Reason’s Robby Soave — who has done one of the most comprehensive investigations on the incident — reports.

“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,” Soave reports.

Has this been picked up by a less biased site? The BBC merely refer to 'additional footage.

[The_Tooth]

@Dacien

So here we have the first victim.

https://twitter.com/PikePlaceTechie/status/1087117202749378560

This is just terrible in every possible way.

That must be what being chained to an airplane floor to be taken to Guantanamo to be tortured or being separated from your parents and stuck in an internment camp on the border as a toddler feels like. I haven’t seen such a humanitarian tragedy unfold before me since Ann Hedonia forced that creep from Utah to use a really big font and flounce away.

[Ale]

@Dacien

I do know some innocent kid who wasn’t involved at all getting him and his family doxxed is pretty terrible. According to his brother, they even called the culinary college he was trying to get into and told them what a racist horrible person he was. And it’s just not even the right kid.

I’m just exhausted and saddened. This whole affair is just deeply depressing. I’d be the first one calling out the bigotry if these kids had surrounded some Native American vet who was preparing to leave a protest, as he initially claimed (he later changed his story and said that this didn’t happen). But it’s clear that these kids were being berated with homosexual and racial slurs by Black Hebrew taunters, kept reasonable composure (better than most adults I’d argue), then some guy approached them and banged his drum and sang in some kids face, then freely departed.

It’s just crazy and depressing. I have to believe that the vast majority of people are looking at this and saying, “Oh, okay, it’s not what I thought. That’s uplifting,” instead of the people who are determined to cling to versions of events not supported by video.

It’s pretty hard, as evidenced here, to have a person that have been led into irrational hatred to recognize it. People would much rather prefer to think they are too smart and righteous to fall for something like that, it’s much easier to substitute reality with an appropriately validating narrative than to recognize that they’ve been fooled and engaged in the kind of behaviour they would readily condemn on the type of people they would classify as evil.
It would be a painful recognition, needing some deep soul searching, which is not what would come naturally for the sort of person that so readily joins a mob for a taste of dishing out “justice”.

[GIGObuster]

@Quartz

This article paints a very different picture.

Has this been picked up by a less biased site? The BBC merely refer to 'additional footage.

As the NYT reported, Phillps did say that he and another Native American did approach the kids, what gets me is how the picture the Daily Wire paints is to declare Mr. Phillip’s a liar when that is not the case. Point being that that bit about changing his story is IMHO an accusation that seems tailor made to discredit and ignore the big picture.

[The_Tooth]

@RTFirefly

This trip was supposedly organized by this crummy Covington Catholic school, right? What were they doing, wearing all those MAGA hats in the first place? I guess that particular branch of Roman Catholicism is all for separating toddlers from their parents and locking them up in freezing cages.

I think they were there to oppose women’s rights.

[AK84]

@ElvisL1ves

He IS a Native American. :rolleyes:

He is an American soldier.

[RTFirefly]

@The_Tooth

I think they were there to oppose women’s rights.

Certainly one of the many messages that’s effectively conveyed by a MAGA cap.

[GIGObuster]

@Ale

It’s pretty hard, as evidenced here, to have a person that have been led into irrational hatred to recognize it. People would much rather prefer to think they are too smart and righteous to fall for something like that, it’s much easier to substitute reality with an appropriately validating narrative than to recognize that they’ve been fooled and engaged in the kind of behaviour they would readily condemn on the type of people they would classify as evil.
It would be a painful recognition, needing some deep soul searching, which is not what would come naturally for the sort of person that so readily joins a mob for a taste of dishing out “justice”.

Of course the uplifting part is ignored when you think about it, in the end the trolling group of kids did dissolve peacefully as they realized they could not continue trolling* with no consecuences. As Ghandi could had told you, non violence does not means to not ever stand up to groups that think they are entitled to maintain superiority to others.

*Sorry, but ignoring the MAGA hats that have by now turned into a political statement against immigrants, minorities and women rights is disingenuously ignoring contex. Particularly when most schools discourage the use of political gear when going as a group representing an educational institution. If it can be argued that kids should not be harassed for resorting to trolling (And it was more than just hats BTW), I do think that some adult organizers of the trolling group need to explain themselves.

[RTFirefly]

@GIGObuster

I do think that some adult organizers of the trolling group need to explain themselves.

Very much so. The teenage assholes were being teenage assholes, and appear to have been molded into teenage assholes by the formative environment of Cov Cath. They may or may not grow out of it better than Brett Kavanaugh managed (or not) to grow out of a similar youthful environment.

But the adults who shaped their environment have no such excuse.

[RTFirefly]

Interesting to contemplate the Cov Cath kids and the Gillette ad together.

[bobot]

My high school (Catholic) never organized any trips to Washington D.C… My stepdaughter’s high school (public) did, and you know what they did while there? They visited the Holocaust museum, the Smithsonian, that kind of thing.

[Lord_Feldon]

@bobot

My high school (Catholic) never organized any trips to Washington D.C… My stepdaughter’s high school (public) did, and you know what they did while there? They visited the Holocaust museum, the Smithsonian, that kind of thing.

The way I’ve seen it explained is that the organizers of the march want as many people there as possible, so they reach out to religious schools, which in turn bus in a bunch of teens (many of whom don’t care one whit about the issue) to pack the street and make the event look more popular than it is.

[Ale]

@RTFirefly

Interesting to contemplate the Cov Cath kids and the Gillette ad together.

As a way to highlight the hypocrisy of the people now doing the same thing they condemned not long ago?

[l0k1]

@bobot

My high school (Catholic) never organized any trips to Washington D.C… My stepdaughter’s high school (public) did, and you know what they did while there? They visited the Holocaust museum, the Smithsonian, that kind of thing.

This is the annual march to protest Roe v. Wade, not a trip to the National Zoo. These kids are tasked with making political statements while in DC. They frequently shout slogans in peoples faces, brandish disgusting mass produced posters of fetuses, and conduct themselves like to whole thing is a ride at disneyland. The hats, and other behavior is 100% in line with how they act every year.