High School Students in MAGA Hats Harassed and Mocked Native Americans

Discussion in 'Off-Topic Discussions' started by sanantone, Jan 19, 2019.

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  1. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    Native Americans attending the Indigenous Peoples March in Washington, DC were surrounded and taunted by high school students wearing "Make America Great Again" hats. It's believed that the students were from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky. One of the Native American elders in the video said that the students were chanting, "Build that wall." It was also reported that they were chanting "Gone in 2020." The elder is a Vietnam War veteran and can be seen weeping in one of the videos.

    https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/article224806590.html
     
  2. cookderosa

    cookderosa Resident Chef

    the kid is an ass. Bad manners, presumptuous and obnoxious - I wouldn't have been upset if someone knocked that smirk off his face. I'd be embarrassed if it was my son. Yet. A protest or a march is an exercise protected in this country- and as disgusting and ignorant as I *personally* find this young man's behavior, the same laws that allow the Native American to beat his drum allow the kid to stand.
     
  3. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    CNN showed video that started about an hour earlier. A small group of Black Hebrew Israelites (a cult) was harassing people walking by the area. Then, they saw the kids with the MAGA hats basically telling them that they shouldn't be at an indigenous march. I think the kids were waiting for their bus. There was first a small group of Catholic high school kids, and the group grew bigger. Nathan Phillips, the man from the Omaha Nation, said that he started drumming and singing between the two groups hoping to calm things down and prevent violence. He said that's when that one kid stood in his face and made him feel uncomfortable. I also saw video on another website of one of the Native Americans getting angry and telling the kids that they should go back to Europe.
     
  4. Steve Levicoff

    Steve Levicoff Well-Known Member

  5. FTFaculty

    FTFaculty Well-Known Member

    Sad days. I went to a high school 35 years ago that was out in the middle of nowhere, almost competely isolated, a dirty little Nevada desert town with a large military base close, a brothel, bars, a couple casinos, and a silver mine up in the mountains. The miners would come down into town for the weekend and there'd be big fights with the military guys and locals. You could get drugs easily--and we did. People would literally shoot it up sometimes. They'd have a parade every year in the town and sometimes the prostitutes from the brothel would be on the floats--kid you not! It was like the Wild West. Town had a lot NOT going for it. But there was a diverse racial mix. There was a NA tribe about 15 miles out of town, so a lot of kids from the tribe attended the school. Every race was in that little high school, I think because a lot of people would settle down from the military and retire and live in the town. You know what? For all that was wrong with that backwards place, nobody seemed to notice their race. At least not that I ever saw. People just mixed freely among the races. I dated girls of every race, and there in the 1980s, less than 20 years the other side of Jim Crow, no one ever said a negative word to me about consorting with "those people". Noticed no bad vibes. I hung out with a group of guys who were primarily black, we played on the same city league basketball team--and ditto, in that backwards, ignorant place, no one said a negative word. Never saw any racist atttudes. Not saying they didn't exist, of course there must have been bigots there--but evidently they shut up because they were outnumbered by those who weren't and they seemed to have no power over things. But I do see the bigots today out in full force, this tribalism coming from all races. I don't know what's going on, but it's not good. Racism is learned behavior, somehow we're sliding backwards right back into it.
     
  6. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    As always, the media selectively showed carefully chosen clips that, taken out of context, make the HS students look bad.

    Of course, things aren’t always as they seem.

     
  7. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

  8. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    It's ironic. When the topic is "bigotry", everyone these enlightened days loves to ascend to what they perceive as the moral high ground and then cast condemnations down at those perceived as being beneath them. People have been doing it throughout history: (Heretic!, Blasphemer! Faggot! Nigger! Racist! Bigot!) Those doing it might change as time passes, as do their targets, but the self-righteousness always seems to be the same in all cases.
     
  9. FTFaculty

    FTFaculty Well-Known Member

    It does appear that the kids weren't the monsters they were made out to be--and the kid who was called an "ass" isn't one. It also appears that Nathan isn't the helpless victim he made himself out to be, either, but rather an opportunistic activist--and a bit of an ass himself. If anyone wants to pretend the Black Hebrew Nationalists are anything but lunatics and bigots who provoke at every opportunity is dreaming. I understand some of the kids in the background acted like jerks, but they were at least in part provoked by a group of full-blown nuts and an aging activist who never saw an opportunity he didn't want to expoit. I give them more of a pass than that old activist, he's old enough to know better.

    Even the NYT is stepping their initial and very typically ill-informed, knee-jerk reaction: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/us/nathan-phillips-covington.html. While it stops short of the full blown apology they owe the kids (because the reporters at the NYT have no integrty), and in particular the kid who was captured in the video and stills, it is better than nothing.
     
  10. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    The media didn't selectively show clips. The first video clip to get attention got attention on social media, and that's all anyone had access to. These videos are slowly trickling in from the public. Remember, these are coming from various people recording on their smartphones. CNN showed new video yesterday and even more video today. CNN is mostly placing the blame on the Black Hebrew Israelites.
     
  11. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    Then perhaps you shouldn’t have pulled the trigger prematurely and created a thread with such a misleading and provocative headline? :cool:
     
    SpoonyNix likes this.
  12. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    The problem isn't the fact that better and more complete videos are slowly trickling out. The problem is that the media immediately leaped to publicize what turned out to be fake-news circulating on social media, without having any real idea what they were dealing with. (So much for professional journalistic standards, if such a thing exists any longer in our age of anti-Trump media "resistance".)

    Everyone immediately jumped to conclusions based on their preferred anti-MAGA agendas, with all the media pundits posturing themselves into pretzels in an orgy of self-righteous moral indignation against what they had decided long beforehand was despicable Evil. (They just needed an illustration and thought they had one.)

    Stuff like this isn't going to make those of us who already dislike and distrust the media feeling any more friendly. I'll add that there's speculation in Trumpist corners of the internet that the reason the media jumped so quickly and eagerly to publicize this is that they wanted to drive the Buzzfeed debacle off the top of the Sunday news, since that was just played into the growing distrust of journalism out here in the real world.

    Sure didn't work as planned...

    Apparently some of the Covington kids have already been "doxxed" and their names have been spread around among the good and virtuous activists, and their families are being harassed, threatened and intimidated.

    Bottom line: "social justice" and real justice aren't always the same thing. Sometimes they aren't even close.
     
    Last edited: Jan 21, 2019
    SpoonyNix likes this.
  13. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    I posted both sides, and the title is still true. But, I'm not the media, and there aren't millions of people reading this forum. I posted an article from a Kentucky newspaper.
     
  14. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    The title is still true? You really think those HS kids “mocked and harassed” the Indian activist?

    More and more facts are coming out about this non-story by the hour. Just like the fake news Buzz Feed fiasco, this was just too good to actually check out.

    And the media wonders why their reputation is in the toilet? :rolleyes:
     
  15. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    If you watched all the videos, you would see some of the kids mocking the Native American chants. Of course, it's not as bad as the adult Black Hebrew Israelites saying racist and homophobic things, but just like the KKK, they do these things every day. So, in that sense, it's a non-story.

    At least the media adds information as it comes and corrects misinformation. If only the constantly lying 45th president would do that. No wonder why his approval ratings are in the toilet when the economy is doing well.
     
  16. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    I have watched the videos, and naturally you jumped to conclusions.

    "We are an all-male school that loves to get hyped up," said this student. "And as we have done for years prior, we decided to do some cheers to pass time. In the midst of our cheers, we were approached by a group of adults led by Nathan Phillips, with Phillips beating his drum. They forced their way to the center of our group. We initially thought this was a cultural display since he was beating along to our cheers and so we clapped to the beat." According to this student, the smiling student was grinning because he was enjoying the music, but eventually became confused, along with everyone else. (Indeed, multiple people can be heard to shout, "what is going on?")

    https://reason.com/blog/2019/01/20/covington-catholic-nathan-phillips-video
     
  17. cookderosa

    cookderosa Resident Chef

    I completely agree.
     
    FTFaculty likes this.
  18. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    The Washington Post is walking that back today. It seems that while Phillips is a veteran who served for four years during the Vietnam war, he was never deployed to Vietnam.

    In other news, Covington Catholic High School was forced to cancel classes today because of safety concerns and everyone was told to stay away from the campus. The Principal wrote: "After meeting with local authorities, we have made the decision to cancel school and be closed on Tuesday, January 22, in order to ensure the safety of our students, faculty and staff... Please continue to keep the Covington Catholic Community in your prayers."

    Fox News reports: "Kenton County Commonwealth's Attorney Rob Sanders told the Cincinnati Enquirer on Monday that threats against the school and students are being investigated. He didn't reveal the exact nature of the threats, only that students and the school were threatened with actual violence."

    https://www.foxnews.com/us/covington-high-school-closes-tuesday-as-uproar-persists-following-viral-video-of-confrontation-with-native-american-man
     
  19. FTFaculty

    FTFaculty Well-Known Member

    In Sanatone's defense, it sure did look different based on the evidence that was available at first.
     
  20. FTFaculty

    FTFaculty Well-Known Member

    I have a tiny bit of experience with the fake news thing. A national article came out last year claiming my university was stifling free speech rights. It was over this particular policy. I remembered, however, that my university had explicitly repudiated the policy several years before--I got the memo and everything. So when I saw the article, I was aghast. I knew we'd recently gotten a new general counsel and figured "That jerk university attorney must've gone back to that old backwards policy!" So I contacted our general counsel and asked "What's going on around here? Is that our policy again?" The G.C. got back to me and was very nice and said that was absolutely NOT our policy and hadn't been for many years (just like I thought) and had no earthly clue where the reporter got the idea, other than they must've been looking at what someone else wrote way back when it was. So as it turns out, we were getting roasted in the media for a policy we hadn't followed in years and had specifically disavowed and was removed from our rules.

    Just some lazy butt of a reporter who couldn't be bothered to do what I did: send a quick email to a person in the know. Many people in the media just have no integrity and are outright turds.
     

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