![\"Covington](\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/Covington-High-School-students-confrontation.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nOn Friday, January 18, a group of white teenage boys wearing MAGA hats mobbed an elderly Native American man on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, chanting \u201cMake America great again,\u201d menacing him, and taunting him in racially motivated ways. It is the kind of thing that happens every day\u2014possibly every hour\u2014in Donald Trump\u2019s America. But this time there was proof: a video. Was it problematic that it offered no evidence that these things had happened? No. What mattered was that it had happened, and that there was video to prove it. The fact of there being a video became stronger than the video itself.<\/span><\/p>\n The video shows a man playing a tribal drum standing directly in front of a boy with clear skin and lips reddened from the cold; the boy is wearing a MAGA hat, and he is smiling at the man in a way that is implacable and inscrutable. The boys around him are cutting up\u2014dancing to the drumbeat, making faces at one another and at various iPhones, and eventually beginning to tire of whatever it is that\u2019s going on. Soon enough, the whole of the video\u2019s meaning seems to come down to the smiling boy and the drumming man. They are locked into something, but what is it?<\/span><\/p>\n Twenty seconds pass, then 30\u2014and still the boy is smiling in that peculiar way. What has brought them to this strange, charged moment? From the short clip alone, it is impossible to tell. Because the point of the viral video was that it was proof of racist bullying yet showed no evidence of it, the boy quickly became the subject of rage and disgust. \u201cI\u2019d be ashamed and appalled if he was my son,\u201d the actress Debra Messing tweeted.<\/span><\/p>\n A second video also made the rounds. Shot shortly after the event, it consisted of an interview with the drummer, Nathan Phillips. There was something powerful about it, something that seemed almost familiar. It seemed to tell us an old story, one that\u2019s been tugging at us for years. It was a battered Rodney King stepping up to the microphones in the middle of the Los Angeles riots, asking, \u201cCan we all get along? Can we get along?\u201d It was the beautiful hippie boy putting flowers in the rifle barrels of military policemen at the March on the Pentagon.<\/span><\/p>\n In the golden hour at the Lincoln Memorial, the lights illuminating the vault, Phillips stands framed against the light of the setting sun, wiping tears from his eyes as he describes what has happened\u2014with the boys, with the country, with land itself. His voice soft, unsteady, he begins:<\/span><\/p>\n As I was singing, I heard them saying, \u2018Build that wall, build that wall.\u2019 This is indigenous land; we\u2019re not supposed to have walls here. We never did \u2026 We never had a wall. We never had a prison. We always took care of our elders. We took care of our children \u2026 We taught them right from wrong. I wish I could see \u2026 the [young men] could put that energy into making this country really great \u2026 helping those that are hungry.<\/span><\/p>\n It was moving, and it was an explanation of the terrible thing that had just happened\u2014\u201cI heard them saying, \u2018Build that wall.\u2019 \u201d It was an ode to a nation\u2019s lost soul. It was also the first in a series of interviews in which Phillips would prove himself adept\u2014far more so than the news media\u2014at incorporating any new information about what had actually happened into his version of events. His version was all-encompassing, and he was treated with such patronizing gentleness by the news media that he was never directly confronted with his conflicting accounts.<\/span><\/p>\n When the country learned that Phillips was\u2014in addition to being, as we were endlessly reminded, a \u201cNative elder\u201d\u2014a veteran of the Vietnam War, the sense of anger about what had happened to him assumed new dimensions. That he had defended our country only to be treated so poorly by these MAGA-hatted monsters blasted the level of the boys\u2019 malevolence into outer space.<\/span><\/p>\n The journalist Kara Swisher found a way to link the horror to an earlier news event, tweeting:<\/span><\/p>\n And to all you aggrieved folks who thought this Gillette ad was too much bad-men-shaming, after we just saw it come to life with those awful kids and their fetid smirking harassing that elderly man on the Mall: Go fuck yourselves.<\/span><\/p>\n You know the left has really changed in this country when you find its denizens glorifying America\u2019s role in the Vietnam War and lionizing the social attitudes of the corporate monolith Procter & Gamble.<\/span><\/p>\n Celebrities tweeted furiously, desperate to insert themselves into the situation in a flattering light. They adopted several approaches: old-guy concern about the state of our communities (\u201cWhere are their parents, where are their teachers, where are their pastors?\u201d: Joe Scarborough); dramatic professions of personal anguish meant to recenter the locus of harm from Phillips to the tweeter (\u201cThis is Trump\u2019s America. And it brought me to tears. What are we teaching our young people? Why is this ok? How is this ok? Please help me understand. Because right now I feel like my heart is living outside of my body\u201d: Alyssa Milano); and the inevitable excesses of the temperamentally overexcited: (\u201c#CovingtonCatholic high school seems like a hate factory to me\u201d: Howard Dean).<\/span><\/p>\n By Saturday, the story had become so hot, and the appetite for it so deep, that some news outlets felt compelled to do some actual reporting. This was when the weekend began to take a long, bad turn for respected news outlets and righteous celebrities. Journalists began to discover that the viral video was not, in fact, the Zapruder film of 2019, and that there were other videos\u2014lots and lots of them\u2014that showed the event from multiple perspectives and that explained more clearly what had happened. At first the journalists and their editors tried to patch the revelations onto the existing story, in hopes that the whole thing would somehow hold together. CNN, apparently by now aware that the event had taken place within a complicating larger picture, tried to use the new information to support its own biased interpretation, sorrowfully reporting that early in the afternoon the boys had clashed with \u201cfour African American young men preaching about the Bible and oppression.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n But the wild, uncontrollable internet kept pumping videos into the ether that allowed people to see for themselves what had happened.<\/span><\/p>\n The New York Times<\/em>, sober guardian of the exact and the nonsensational, had cannonballed into the delicious story on Friday, titling its first piece \u201cBoys in \u2018Make America Great Again\u2019 Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous Peoples March.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n But the next day it ran a second story, with the headline \u201cFuller Picture Emerges of Viral Video of Native American Man and Catholic Students.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n How had the boys been demilitarized from wearers of \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d hats to \u201cCatholic students\u201d in less than 24 hours?<\/span><\/p>\n O, for a muse of fire.<\/span><\/p>\n It turned out that the \u201cfour African American young men preaching about the Bible and oppression\u201d had made a video<\/a><\/strong><\/span>, almost two hours in length, and while it does not fully exonerate the boys, it releases them from most of the serious charges.<\/span><\/p>\n The full video reveals that there was indeed a Native American gathering at the Lincoln Memorial, that it took place shortly before the events of the viral video, and that during it the indigenous people had been the subject of a hideous tirade of racist insults and fantasies. But the white students weren\u2019t the people hurling this garbage at them\u2014the young \u201cAfrican American men preaching about the Bible and oppression\u201d were doing it. For they were Black Hebrew Israelites, a tiny sect of people who believe they are the direct descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel, and whose beliefs on a variety of social issues make Mike Pence look like Ram Dass.<\/span><\/p>\n The full video reveals that these kids had wandered into a Tom Wolfe novel and had no idea how to get out of it.<\/span><\/p>\n It seems that the Black Hebrew Israelites had come to the Lincoln Memorial with the express intention of verbally confronting the Native Americans, some of whom had already begun to gather as the video begins, many of them in Native dress. The Black Hebrew Israelites\u2019 leader begins shouting at them: \u201cBefore you started worshipping totem poles<\/em>, you was worshipping the true and living God. Before you became an idol worshipper<\/em>, you was worshipping the true and living God. This is the reason why this land was taken away from you! Because you worship everything except the most high. You worship every creation except the Creator\u2014and that\u2019s what we are here to tell you to do.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n A young man in Native dress approaches them and gestures toward the group gathering for its event. But the Black Hebrew Israelites mix things up by throwing some dead-white-male jargon at him\u2014they are there because of \u201cfreedom of the speech \u201d and \u201cfreedom of religion\u201d and all that. The young man backs away. \u201cYou have to come away from your religious philosophy,\u201d one Black Hebrew Israelite yells after him.<\/span><\/p>\n A few more people in Native costume gather, clearly stunned by his tirade. \u201cYou\u2019re not supposed to worship eagles, buffalos, rams, all types of animals,\u201d he calls out to them.<\/span><\/p>\n A Native woman approaches the group and begins to challenge its ideology, which prompts the pastor\u2019s coreligionists to thumb their Bibles for relevant passages from Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. He asks the woman why she\u2019s angry, and when she tells him that she\u2019s isn\u2019t angry, he responds, \u201cYou\u2019re not angry? You\u2019re not angry? I\u2019m making you angry.\u201d The two start yelling at each other, and the speaker calls out to his associates for Isaiah 58:1.<\/span><\/p>\n Another woman comes up to him yelling, \u201cThe Bible says a lot of shit. The Bible says a lot of shit. The Bible says a lot of shit.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Black Hebrew Israelites believe, among other things, that they are indigenous people. The preacher tells a woman that \u201cyou\u2019re not an Indian. Indian<\/em> means \u2018savage.\u2019 \u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Men begin to gather with concerned looks on their face. \u201cIndian<\/em> does not mean \u2018savage,\u2019 \u201d one of them says reasonably. \u201cI don\u2019t know where you got that from.\u201d At this point, most of the Native Americans who have surrounded\u2014\u201cmobbed\u201d?\u2014the preacher have realized what the boys will prove too young and too unsophisticated to understand: that the \u201cfour young African American men preaching about the Bible and oppression\u201d are the kind of people you sometimes encounter in big cities, and the best thing to do is steer a wide berth. Most of them leave, exchanging amused glances at one another. But one of the women stays put, and she begins making excellent points, some of which stump the Black Hebrew Israelites.<\/span><\/p>\n It was heating up to be an intersectional showdown for the ages, with the Black Hebrew Israelites going head to head with the Native Americans. But when the Native woman talks about the importance of peace, the preacher finally locates a unifying theme, one more powerful than anything to be found in Proverbs, Isaiah, or Ecclesiastes.<\/span><\/p>\n He tells her there won\u2019t be any food stamps coming to reservations or the projects because of the shutdown, and then gesturing to his left, he says, \u201cIt\u2019s because of these \u2026 bastards over there, wearing \u2018Make America Great Again\u2019 hats.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The camera turns to capture five white teenage boys, one of whom is wearing a MAGA hat. They are standing at a respectful distance, with their hands in their pockets, listening to this exchange with expressions of curiosity. They are there to meet their bus home.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhy you not angry at them<\/u>?\u201d the Black Hebrew Israelite asks the Native American woman angrily.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s right,\u201d says one of his coreligionists, \u201clittle corny-ass Billy Bob.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The boys don\u2019t respond to this provocation, although one of them smiles at being called a corny-ass Billy Bob. They seem interested in what is going on, in the way that it\u2019s interesting to listen to Hyde Park speakers.<\/span><\/p>\n The Native woman isn\u2019t interested in attacking the white boys. She keeps up her argument with the Black Hebrew Israelites, and her line of reasoning is so powerful that it throws the preacher off track.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cShe trying to be distracting,\u201d one of the men says. \u201cShe trying to stop the flow.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re out of order,\u201d the preacher tells the woman. \u201cWhere\u2019s your husband? Let me speak to him.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n By now the gathering of Covington Catholic boys watching the scene has grown to 10 or 12, some of them in MAGA hats. They are about 15 feet away, and while the conflict is surely beyond their range of experience, it also includes biblical explication, something with which they are familiar.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t stand to the side and mock,\u201d the speaker orders the boys, who do not appear to be mocking him. \u201cBring y\u2019all cracker ass up here and make a statement.\u201d The boys turn away and begin walking back to the larger group.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cYou little dirty-ass crackers. Your day coming. Your day coming \u2026 \u2019cause your little dusty asses wouldn\u2019t walk down a street in a black neighborhood, and go walk up on nobody playing no games like that,\u201d he calls after them, but they take no notice. \u201cYeah, \u2019cause I will stick my foot in your little ass.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n By now the Native American ceremony has begun, and the attendees have linked arms and begun dancing. \u201cThey just don\u2019t know who they are,\u201d one of the Black Hebrew Israelites says remorsefully to another. Earlier he had called them \u201cUncle Tomahawks.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The boys have given up on him. They have joined the larger group, and together they all begin doing some school-spirit cheers; they hum the stadium-staple opening bars of \u201cSeven Nation Army\u201d and jump up and down, dancing to it. Later they would say that their chaperones had allowed them to sing school-spirit songs<\/a><\/strong><\/span> instead of engaging with the slurs hurled by the Black Hebrew Israelites.<\/span><\/p>\n