Don't Link The MAGA-Bigots To Covington-- They're From Park Hills

Covington Catholic High School (CCH) is a private, all-male high school in Park Hills, Kentucky, southwest of Covington. It used to be in Covington. It moved in 1954 and kept its name. Covington is a small city (population 40,797) in Kenton County directly across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, where the Ohio is joined by the Licking River. Its population has been steadily decreasing since 1950, when there were 64,000 living there. The biggest employee in the city is the IRS-- 4,500 workers haven't been paid in a few weeks. The city is a blue island in a very red area, Tom Massie's 4th congressional district. In 2016 primary day was interesting in Kenton County:

• Hillary- 5,146
• Bernie- 4,880
• Cruz- 2,475
• Trumpanzee- 1,997
• Kasich- 1,741
•Rubio- 1,095

The general election was... less interesting, if more predictable and more in line with the statewide vote which had gone to Trump 62.5% to 32.7%.

• Trumpanzee- 42,958 (59.7%)
• Hillary- 24,213 (33.7%)

Don't expect this state and this county to be at all sympathetic with Nathan Phillips. Don't recognize the name? I'm about to tell you about him and what happened to him and what it has to do with Covington. First of all, I have 2 friends who live there, "Jack" and "Jill." Jack was born and raised in Covington and Jill moved there when they got married. They both agree that the behavior from these Covington Catholic High kids was disgusting, and they told me that "most of the people who actually live in the City of Covington are pretty firm on that" but wanted me to remember that Covington Catholic High School is not in the City of Covington and that most of the kids who go to Covington Catholic do not live in the City of Covington. They live in the surrounding suburbs with their MAGA-obsessed parents. They are alarmed that the national media is showing-- at best-- its lazy nature and is using terms like "Covington High School" and "Covington kids" and "Covington parents" etc. "Everybody. said Jill, "knows exactly what they're seeing in those videos because we all see it at basketball games and football games when they show up at your local school. There are lots of folks who will rally behind Cov Cath, but their reputation for obnoxious behavior towards other people and the way they weaponize 'normal school chants' has been a topic of conversation in the region for decades. They've always been like this, and lots of other schools hate them because of it... even some of the other Catholic schools, but the public schools especially. You can imagine why people in Covington are alarmed. Dave explained it:

"The Covington Independent Public School system is the poorest school district in the state of Kentucky. As poor as any district in the mountains of Appalachia, in the fields of Western Kentucky, in the cities of Lexington or Louisville. 89% of the students in Covington Independent Public Schools qualify for free and reduced lunches. 46% of the students in CIPS are white or Caucasian, 31% Black, 14% Hispanic. CIPS is a majority-minority district.

As #CovingtonBoys continues to trend, and news stories about “Covington High School” spew forth, and national media self-flagellate for jumping the gun, the real story of Covington is lost. CIPS is bounded by some of the wealthiest public school districts and private schools (like Covington Catholic) in the state.

This is not a complicated story, nor a story unfamiliar to most. It’s a story of social, racial, and economic stratification, of white flight and urban-suburban division.

As national news descends on the city and region, I ask three things: 1. spend some time talking with actual Covington High School students; 2. spend some time focusing on the larger structural problems that produce the absurdity you’re witnessing; and 3. visit and enjoy the city of Covington."

On Tuesday, Jodi Jacobson published a post at Rewire News, that is crucial reading for anyone following this story: White-Washing White Supremacy: Media Rushes to Excuse Covington Catholic Students. Short version: "In another incidence of white-washing white supremacy, white journalists are rushing to excuse a clearly racist incident involving white teens from Covington Catholic school in Kentucky, in part by discounting the testimony of a Native elder and Vietnam war veteran." Jodi starts off by expelling how Nathan Phillips wound up interacting with a gang of racists from a private Catholic school in Park Hills, Kentucky.

Every single day across America, women seeking abortion and other forms of reproductive health care have to run a gauntlet of intimidation just to enter health clinics. Protesters, self-anointed street “counselors,” and religious fundamentalists bring gory signs, and yell and scream—often using high-decibel amplification equipment—to harangue and harass patients and staff calling them “baby-killers” and promising them damnation. Clinic protesters feel righteous in their actions because they believe they are morally superior to the people seeking care, and they believe they have a right to impose their will on others. These and other tactics of intimidation are an integral part of the misogynistic, patriarchal arsenal of the “pro-life” movement, which every year in January hosts a “March for Life.” And every year, the march organizers bus students in from parochial schools across the country to ensure someone actually shows up. This year, they brought students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky.

The students’ visit to D.C. did not end well.

In a now widely reported video, students from Covington Catholic, a virtually all white, all male elite private school, taunted and mocked Nathan Phillips, a Native elder from the Omaha Nation, former U.S. Marine, and Vietnam veteran. Phillips was in D.C.-- which like much of the United States is land from which indigenous peoples were forcibly removed-- to attend the first Indigenous People’s March, a gathering of prayers, songs, dances, and speeches, calling attention to the global injustices perpetuated against indigenous peoples. In trying to intercede in what he believed to be an escalating situation between a large and increasingly rowdy group of at least 60 white teen boys and five Black men, he walked between the two groups, drumming in an effort to defuse the rising tension. Phillips then came face to face with Nick Sandmann, the young man who became an instant and iconic image of white entitlement exhibited by him and his classmates.

What happened next is telling: In short, the testimony of a Native elder, former Marine, and Vietnam veteran of an incident in which a very large group of raucous boys surrounded him and acted with extreme disrespect is being ignored in favor of an after-the-fact narrative created by white teens from a virtually all-white school with a history of blatant and public racism. The boys narrative also is being amplified by white journalists, further disrespecting the Native elder, and of eye witnesses at the scene. This discounting of experience is familiar to many of us, the women who seek reproductive health care who are effectively told we should endure abuse, the Native elder who on sacred ground is the only adult who tries to intervene in a situation being made the “aggressor,” the people of color who constantly have largely male, majority white media telling them “there’s more to the story” of their abuse than they what they say. It’s the same story, different characters that we saw played out only recently in the Supreme Court hearings of Brett Kavanaugh, who also attended an elite Catholic school and who many defended as just “boys being boys.” White boys, of course.

The entire incident reads like the script of a remake we’ve seen too many times before. The initial video showing a large group of boys being aggressive and disrespectful to Phillips exploded across the internet and drew outrage. Then, new videos purporting to show “other perspectives” (including helpful offers by #MAGA followers on Twitter to send me their “spliced videos” showing the “true picture”) were circulated. This was followed by a letter ascribed to Sandmann but actually written by a PR firm, which effectively blamed Phillips for the entire incident, stating: “he waded into the crowd, which parted for him. I [Sandmann] did not see anyone try to block his path. He locked eyes with me and approached me, coming within inches of my face. He played his drum the entire time he was in my face.”



The letter was crafted and disseminated by RunSwitch, a Kentucky-based PR firm. One of the three founding partners of RunSwitch is Scott Jennings, a conservative commentator, and a former political operative who worked for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, George W. Bush, and other Republican politicians.

I watched at least five of the initial short videos shot by different people, and there was no question as to what I saw: A large unsupervised group of boys, acting entitled and out of control. They had come from an event that is focused on controlling women’s lives, choices, and bodies. Indeed, a group of them harassed a young woman before the incident with Phillips. And another suggested that rape “is not rape if you enjoy it.” The young men who’d just come from the “March for Life” were directly mimicking their movement’s views on the agency of women by harassing young women and discounting rape. In other words, in their eyes women deserve no agency.

The boys were wearing #MAGA hats, “March for Life” sweatshirts, and toting bottles of “Trump water,” which in several videos they can be seen proudly exhibiting to others around them. Though they were high school students, they appeared to have no adult supervision, but for one lone adult who stood at the back of this large pack of boys and did... nothing. Indeed, in a nearly two hour video, Phillips was the only adult I saw who tried to intervene in what clearly appeared to be an escalating and potentially dangerous situation. If I had been there, I would have done the same.

In the videos, it is clear the boys surrounded and hemmed in a Native elder, laughing, chanting, “war whooping,” and at various times doing “tomahawk chops” right in Phillips face. Hunter Hooligan, who attended the Indigenous People’s March to honor her Mvskoke family, wrote in The Cut: “Nathan stopped walking, but he kept singing and playing his drum-- staring right into the smirking boy’s eyes. We all huddled around him as the other boys began to push, prod, and bump us into a tighter and tighter cluster. They were mocking Nathan’s sacred music with purposefully disrespectful dancing and a perverted imitation of his singing. Their imitations were the racist tropes of “Indian chants”-- the stereotypical grunting and “hiyahiyahiyas” of representations past.” Her personal testimony appears not to have been read by many of the Covington Catholic boys’ apologists.

But all it took was the mournful letter written by a right-wing PR firm to change the situation. Almost immediately after “the other side” letter was released, the white-washing began. White journalists across the internet paused for a collective white sympathy moment, writing mea culpas at having “misread the situation.”

Robby Soave of Reason claimed that the media had “wildly mischaracterized” what happened. Jake Tapper tweeted his piece, without indicating whether he’d personally looked into whether Soave’s position had merit.

John Harwood and S.E. Cupp tweeted mournfully that they’d wished they’d waited for more information. Michael Cohen of the Boston Globe complained on Twitter about lost nuances, and Sam Stein of the Daily Beast asserted “it was a tricky story to unpack.” In other words, those of us who saw this scene for what it was, a pack of entitled, racist boys taunting a Native elder were engaged in “motivated reasoning.” In The Atlantic, Julie Irwin Zimmerman wrote about how she “failed the Covington Catholic Test” [🙄].

I hated the MAGA hats some of the kids were wearing, their listless tomahawk chops, the way some of their chanting mocked Phillips’s. But I also saw someone with Phillips yelling at a few of the kids that his people had been here first, that Europeans had stolen their land. While I wouldn’t disagree, the scene was at odds with the reports that Phillips and those with him were attempting to calm a tense situation.

As I watched the longer videos, I began to see the smirking kid in a different light. It seemed to me that a wave of emotions rolled over his face as Phillips approached him: confusion, fear, resolve. He finally, I thought, settled on an expression designed to mimic respect while signaling to his friends that he had this under control. Observing it, I wondered what different reaction I could have reasonably hoped a high-school junior to have in such an unfamiliar and bewildering situation. I came up empty.

“Listless tomahawk chops?” Of course Zimmerman “began to see the smirking kid in a different light.” That was the point of the PR effort in the first place. Poor young white boy trying to stave off 60 of his best friends yelling and chanting disrespectfully by staring down a Native elder and-- really-- just praying for peace. It’s as though the PR firm had cast a spell.

In an effort to figure out what had actually happened, I watched the nearly two hour video taken by a member of the Black Hebrew Israelites three separate times. And here is what I saw.

In the first hour of the video, four members of the fringe Black Hebrew Israelites sect are standing well in front of (not on, as Sandmann claimed) the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the patio that leads to the reflecting pool. They were facing the Washington Monument, away from the memorial steps. They never moved from this spot. Black Hebrew Israelites, which the Southern Poverty Law Center says includes a small extremist element, believe that African Americans, not Jews, are the real descendants of Israel. They often engage in street preaching in places like New York City and D.C. They are homophobic, racist, and misogynistic. They can be verbally abusive but, as police in New York attest, they are not generally physically dangerous. Most people ignore them.

In the long video, hundreds of people do just that… either walk right by them, or mill around listening for a while and then walk away. At one point in the first hour, two women engage them in an argument for a few minutes and then walk away. In that first hour, the Hebrew Israelites appear to get agitated by a skateboarder who circles them purposefully over and over, clearly there to taunt them, and indeed the skateboarder is the only one with whom they engage directly. One of the Hebrew Israelites suggests getting a “MAGA hat for this Republican,” referring to the skateboarder.

At 59:09, the video pans to the steps of the memorial, well behind the Hebrew Israelites and it’s clear that sometime in the prior 15 minutes or so, a large group of the Covington Catholic High School teens has assembled there. The Hebrew Israelites still have their back to the steps. The man making the video says, “Take a look at these Make America Great Again crackers,” apparently referring to the large group.

While the Hebrew Israelites face the Washington monument, the teens jeer from behind them. At 1:04:00, a homeless man wanders past and exchanges words with the Black Hebrew Israelites. At 1:05:00, it is clear that the group of teens behind the Hebrew Israelites has grown much larger and they begin to further engage the Black Hebrew Israelites by yelling from behind them, catcalling them; one of the Hebrew Israelites turns around at 1:06:00 to engage the boys briefly and turns back. The students continue to talk to the Hebrew Israelites from the steps. At about 1:08:00 the Covington Catholic students start chanting and jeering, though it is hard to hear what they are saying. At 1:09:51, a student runs down the stairs to face the others. He throws off his jacket, sweatshirt, and t-shirt, and naked from the waist up, starts jumping up and down and leading some sort of loud and grunting chant. The Black Hebrew Israelites never leave the spot they have been at this entire time.

Then the crowd of teens gets even rowdier. They are clearly taunting the Black men. Some of the teens move onto the patio and closer to the men, who still for the most part face away from them, talking to others. The teens are dancing and chanting. Then suddenly they huddle. At around 1:12:20 you can hear faint drumming of Phillips walking slowly into the picture, a distance away from the stairs.

Sandmann claims in his letter that “The protestor everyone has seen in the video began playing his drum as he waded into the crowd, which parted for him.” First of all, Phillips was not a “protestor.” Second, this is clearly not what happens in the video. Instead as Hooligan wrote, the teens surround Phillips and start hopping, chanting, chopping hands, laughing. By 1:13:00 there is a very large crowd of teens surrounding Phillips; they are openly mocking him. There’s nothing respectful about it. If there is a chaperone or teacher around the vicinity, it is not obvious, and if as Sandmann asserts, they asked for and received permission from a teacher to do what they in fact did…well then, as a parent, I am aghast.

The Hebrew Israelites video focuses back on the teens who move closer to the Hebrew Israelites, some clearly taunting them again. Finally at 1:17:17 someone yells for the students to back up, but instead they quickly re-converge around and engage the Hebrew Israelites at which point the Hebrew Israelites themselves ask the teens several times to step back. From there until the end of the video, the Black Hebrew Israelites and teens are talking back and forth until it appears they leave.

Sandmann’s letter states: “I never felt like I was blocking the Native American protestor. He did not make any attempt to go around me. It was clear to me that he had singled me out for a confrontation, although I am not sure why.”

But as this video shared on Twitter by Waleed Shahid shows, Phillips was surrounded by jumping, whooping, mocking teens. As you can see in the frame below, Sandmann is in the background (red cap, gray jacket) smiling. It does not appear to me that Phillips “singled him out” for confrontation. That assertion also appears to be a lie.

Be sure to read Jodi's entire post here. And if you need more about the racism of these MAGA-hat brats... this HuffPo piece by Andy Campbell, who emphasizes that the "confrontation between MAGA-hat-wearing students at Covington Catholic High School and a Native American sparked a nationwide conversation about racism, the symbolism of the “Make America great again” hat and what it means for a group of white kids to stand face to face with a dark-skinned man and mock, sneer and howl at him."


UPDATE: Irony

This morning Ro Khanna told me that "the irony of having privileged kids yell build a wall to a Native American-- the first inhabitants of the land-- leaves me speechless. I kept thinking of Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom and how much work of reconciliation remains."