The confrontation between the Covington Catholic students and Native American elder Nathan Phillips has generated lots of controversy with reactions breaking down along racial, cultural, and political lines. But one thing is for sure, it has provided Tucker Carlson with lots of opportunity to promote his patented narrative about white, Christian, male victimhood.
In a nutshell, the incident happened after Friday’s “March for Life,” an anti-abortion march which includes vast numbers of Catholic school students. A group of MAGA-hat-wearing boys from the pricey, Kentucky Covington Catholic High School encountered four members of an African-American extremist group who taunted the boys. Phillips, who was with the Indigenous Peoples March, became concerned that there would be a physical confrontation and, thus, went towards the group of boys while drumming and chanting a peace song. In a now iconic picture, one of the MAGA boys was shown standing face-to-face with the Native American while smirking.
Despite hours of video, the incident remains a source of disagreement, except on Fox News where Tucker Carlson devoted time on Monday's and Tuesday's white power hours to defending the Covington Catholic snowflakes whilst reinforcing his central thesis about poor, persecuted white folks.
Backed by the graphic, “Rush to Judgment,” Carlson lectured us again last night.
He immediately began the victimization meme with his comments about how, after the initial video, the poor young men were accused of being bigots, bad Christians, and (OMG) privileged. This whine was followed by Tucker’s claim that subsequent video exonerated the boys who, rather than being the aggressors, stood stoically in place while being harassed. Carlson asserted that the original story was a “lie.” He accused Phillips of having “concocted key elements of his story as well as parts of his own biography.”
In keeping with the Fox/right wing whine about the liberal media, Carlson went on to castigate various reporters: “There’s no sympathy for Covington Catholic in America’s newsrooms. In the mind of your average reporter in Washington, these kids are from a different country. Less than that, actually. They’re from a hostile country, a place we must subdue for our own safety.”
He continued with a further appeal to white victimization: “Keep in mind, as you read that, that there is literally nothing in the record, the documentary record – on tape or in the testimony of anyone – to support any of [Deadspin reporter Laura] Wagner’s claims. Every word is just made up out of nothing. Imagine if someone was writing things like that about your son.”
Carlson wrapped up his diatribe with yet another appeal to right wing victimhood while invoking the popular right-wing narrative about Antifa, a small and relatively inconsequential left-wing anarchist group:
“That’s the attitude. And it may account for the left’s embrace of violent rhetoric in the age of Trump. Back more than a year ago, when CNN anchors publicly defended Antifa, it seemed at the time like they might have misspoken. Maybe they didn’t know what Antifa was. Now it’s clear they knew exactly what Antifa was. Our ruling class has told us that they’re fine with punching Nazis. Now, they’ve declared they’re okay with punching children. How long before they’re okay with punching you?”
Funny, I don’t recall Carlson getting outraged over the defamation of Trayvon Martin at the hands of Fox News. I don’t recall him asking African-American parents to “imagine if someone was writing things like that about your son.” Obviously different strokes for different (white) folks!
Watch it below, from the January 22, 2019 Tucker Carlson Tonight.
The Covington students were called out, appropriately, for their bigoted and vicious behavior. I cannot believe that anyone is falling for the frantic Right Wing attempts to respin the situation and rewrite the facts.
In reality, the Covington students were gleeful participants in the hateful anti-choice and frankly anti-female “March for Life”, which only exists as a Right Wing middle finger toward the annual Women’s Marches that go on throughout the US. The Right Wing has long hated that women gather together in solidarity against efforts to dictate to them, and has particularly been incensed that more women than ever are attending these marches in the miserable epoch of the Pence White House. As part of the Covington student’s fun for their day in DC, they were decked out in MAGA gear, as an additional and deliberate middle finger toward everyone else at the National Mall. They weren’t going there out of some quiet, dignified wish to pray. They were there to try to bully and intimidate. (And there is a strong argument that’s been made that the wearing of the MAGA gear may have opened up Covington to legal action, since they are now directly endorsing a political candidate and violating the entire notion of separating church and state…)
The various videos that have been circulated of the mess at the Lincoln Memorial are notable for not including the first 9 or so hours of the day, when the Covington students, along with other “March for Life” agitators, ran around the Mall and tried to intimidate anyone they could, including the tiny group of black “Hebrew Israelites” protestors. I note that these counter-protestors appear to have been present at the National Mall as a direct response to the “March for Life”. They knew that angry Right Wingers were going to be making hay on that day and they decided to raise a challenge. Granted, this group of counter-protestors are clearly wingnuts, easily as offensive as the Westboro Baptists. And clearly, they were shouting offensive things at the students. (And again, we’re not being shown the hours of back-and-forth that preceded what footage we do have, so who knows what the Covington students and other angry Right Wingers said to kick the whole thing off.)
Into the middle of the situation steps Nathan Phillips from the Indigenous Peoples Day March, something the “March for Life” Right Wingers were knowingly disrupting on the same day. Phillips saw the confrontation brewing between a small group of loud black counter-protestors and a large group of angry Right Wing students wearing MAGA gear. And since the Covington chaperones were doing nothing to handle the situation (such as, perhaps, telling the students to go to the other side of the Memorial and walk away from the mess), Phillips decided to try to use his medicine to calm the kids down. He was thinking in terms of following long-used Native American techniques, with the chants and the drum and a direct approach to the students to encourage them to respect their elders and walk away from this situation.
The video footage that stirred this controversy is of what happened next – the one smug student refused to back off, and the other students surrounded them, jeering, mock-chanting, taunting and otherwise throwing a virtual wall of hatred at Nathan Phillips. It’s fairly clear that Phillips was taken aback by the sheer intensity of the students’ hatred for him, and he admitted later that he realized he’d put himself in an extremely dangerous situation. (Again, where were the Covington chaperones?)
The Right Wing would very much like to pretend that the earlier taunting between the students and the counter-protestors somehow erases the way the students expressed their hatred for Nathan Phillips. But that would require everyone to forget that the students were doing just that – expressing their hatred, and their smugness and frankly the ugliness of the typical Trump deplorable. The Covington students provided just the latest example of the continuing wave of hate crimes we have seen the Pence White House and Fox News embolden across the US. These students would have been right at home with the guys who terrorized Charlottesville in 2017, or with the guys who tried to terrorize Berkeley. Even if we were to say that they were angry at the counter-protestors, that does not excuse the behavior we clearly see in the video.
In a just world, the Covington students would be publicly disciplined by their school and by their parents. (Although the school bears the actual responsibility, given that the kids are minors) The correct and appropriate course of action is to insist that these students apologize for their behavior and do some community service, preferably to assist Native Americans. Otherwise, the Right Wingers will think they can get away with this behavior again. And that’s a lesson that should not be taught to these students.