Blog Post – The Tale of Two Groups of Teenagers
On Friday, January 18, after attending the March for Life, a group of teenage boys from Covington Catholic High School gathered near the Lincoln Memorial waiting for their bus to take them back home to Covington, Kentucky. There they were verbally assaulted and harassed by a group called the Black Hebrew Israelites. In the midst of this attack Nathan Phillips, described as a Vietnam veteran and a Native American elder, waded into the middle of the crowd beating on his drum. He locked his eyes on Nick Sandmann and walked directly towards him. Sandmann did not move, assuming Phillips wanted to communicate with him. Fearing the situation may escalate, Sandmann remained calm and occasionally smiled at Phillips as the latter continued to beat on his drum — and that is the picture the media latched onto: Boys in MAGA hats harass/block passage of a Native American Vietnam veteran.
The picture of Nick Sandmann smiling (most of the media said smirking) and the media’s interpretation of it quickly went viral. As a result, vicious attacks and threats were leveled at Sandmann and his parents have received death threats and professional threats. Other students have been threatened and Covington Catholic High School was forced to cancel classes for a day because of protests and threats. When they reopened, it was with added security. The boys were immediately lambasted from both the right and the left for their perceived hate and disrespect. Even after the entire hour plus video was released that told the whole story, many were slow to apologize, and some have still not. How this incident and the distortion of what happened will impact them, especially Nick Sandmann, as they seek employment and/or apply for college is yet to be seen. The Left is very good at destroying lives.
Now, let’s look at another group of teenagers from Emmaus High School in Lehigh County. On June 11th last year two parents addressed the school board about their concerns over videos that were shown to the student body during homeroom throughout an entire week in April. Their simple request was to be given the URLs so they could see what their children had been exposed to. Even though the parents had already jumped through all the hoops demanded by the district, to that point their request had been ignored.
Now move forward two weeks later to June 25th. The parents’ request had morphed into ‘hate.’ Why? Because the videos were dealing with homosexuality and transgenderism – even though this was not even mentioned by the parents two weeks before, the activist students in the high school immediately jumped to the conclusion that these concerned parents were haters and bigots. During the June 25th school board meeting the real hate spewed forth from the mouths of eight of the nine who addressed the board in order to attack the parents and the AFA of PA. Four of those eight were students at Emmaus High School. The school board did nothing to urge that respect and dignity be shown by the eight attackers. The following day the media praised the students for speaking up in defense of the school’s GSA, LGBT students and the outgoing superintendent. Nothing was said about the viciousness of the attacks.
The Covington Catholic students were attacked and threatened for weeks simply for wearing MAGA hats, singing a few school chants and standing in front of a Native American, who turns out not to be a Vietnam veteran, but an American Indian Movement activist. They and their school were smeared and vilified by a media that did not witness the incident, but instead choose to create a narrative in order to portray high school boys from a Catholic school as haters. Unlike the incident at the June 25th school board meeting at Emmaus High School when the media was there for the entire meeting, witnessed the vicious attacks, but choose to portray the students as righteous defenders of a sexual minority rather than the haters that they really were.
The stark differences of how the media covered these two groups of high school students is quite startling!
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