- The leftist print and electronic media have smeared a group of young students with a fake news report based on a snippet of video of an incident in D.C. that went viral before anyone took time to learn the whole story. The hatemongers have lost this battle, however, as onlookers posted video of the entire exchange, and the student most directly attacked responded with a polite, honoring statement explaining his point of view on what happened to him and his classmates. Bravo, Mr. Sandmann!
Fresh on the heels of a far-left media company claiming erroneously that President Donald Trump had told his former attorney to lie to Congress, a storm of fake news circulated the third weekend in January purporting to show a group of entitled, pro-Trump boys disrespecting an elderly Native American.
The story had all of the hallmarks of the phony modern narrative the anti-Trump media loves to promote. Here was a group of young, mostly white males supposedly shouting, “Build the wall,” and mocking a minority group, in this case, Native Americans, one of whom falsely claimed to be a Vietnam veteran. Partial video footage of the encounter, which supposedly proved the reports’ veracity, went viral on social media and was picked up by countless mainstream media outlets in a blatantly dishonest attempt to portray the high school students, who had just participated in a pro-life rally in the nation’s capital earlier that day, as entitled, disrespectful, hateful bigots.
It turns out, that is not at all what happened.
In the age of cellphones, individuals who were on the scene at the time posted video to the Internet that showed that none of what the media and far-left activists online were claiming actually happened.
So what really took place?
At 4:30 p.m. on Jan. 18, a group of mostly white high school students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, many of whom were wearing President Donald Trump’s iconic red “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) hat, arrived at the Lincoln Memorial with adult chaperones to wait for their bus to travel back to Kentucky.
Upon arriving at the Memorial, four protesters from a crazy group that calls itself the Black Hebrew Israelites began engaging the boys, taunting them and calling them vulgar, hateful names. In response, the students began chanting school spirit songs that are normally reserved for high school football and basketball games.
Soon thereafter, a group of Native American protesters, who were also at the Memorial for an event, confronted the students and began chanting and playing a drum.
The partial video footage initially picked up by the fake news media only shows the students chanting at the Native American protesters, giving the false impression that the high school students confronted and surrounded the Native Americans. Media narratives emerged contending that the students were disrespectful, racist, and bigoted, when in reality they were simply waiting for their bus to arrive and were themselves confronted by both the Black Hebrew Israelite protesters and the Native American protesters. It was made worse by the fact that the elderly Native American man in the picture, Nathan Phillips, told media outlets that the children were shouting “build the wall” at him during the encounter—a claim that has been disproven by video that shows the entire encounter from start to finish.
Phillips is a member of the American Indian Movement, or AIM, which has a long history of provocations, including a now-infamous incident at an Indian reservation in South Dakota that resulted in the deaths of two federal law enforcement agents.
Left-leaning activists and personalities were outraged at the footage, with many prominent figures calling for the students to be “doxxed”—having their personal information exposed online in an attempt to defame, slander, and harass the students—while others called for violence.
“The reply from the school was pathetic and impotent,” Kathy Griffin, a radical left-wing, anti-Trump actress, tweeted following the incident. “Name these kids. I want names. Shame them.”
Jack Morrissey, a well-known Disney film producer, posted an image on Twitter of a fictional person being shoved into a woodchipper with fake blood spewing from the machine with the caption: “#MAGAkids go screaming, hats first, into the woodchipper.” The tweet has since been deleted, but not before it caught the attention of numerous journalists and social media users.
It was so bad that some of the students’ names and home addresses were uncovered by liberal activists. Nick Sandmann, the boy who can be seen awkwardly smiling at Phillips in the commonly posted video of the incident, has received death threats and other forms of harassment and ridicule following this dishonest media reporting.
Following the publication of more detailed and objective analyses of the encounter, which gave a fuller picture of what really transpired, a number of journalists and pundits have had to apologize for their rush to judgment of the high school students.
Nick Sandmann issued a public statement describing his experience at the memorial and what has transpired in the aftermath.
[You can read Sandmann’s full statement below this story.]
President Trump has offered support for the students, tweeting that the students were “treated unfairly with early judgements proving out to be false—smeared by media.” In a separate tweet, the president lambasted the fake news media for disseminating the highly distorted and dishonest narrative that initially emerged.
“Nick Sandmann and the students of Covington have become symbols of fake news and how evil it can be,” Trump tweeted. “They have captivated the attention of the world, and I know they will use it for the good—maybe even to bring people together.”
NB: This article was originally published by American Free Press on January 29, 2019. Subscribe to America’s last real newspaper today!
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