Opinion
| January 21, 2019 11:12 AM
It had all the makings of the perfect 21st century crime. A seemingly incriminating social media video. That red hat. A victim from perhaps the single most oppressed class in American history, a Native American. A villain from its most privileged, a white male. And most damning, that incorrigible and unrelenting smile.
But as it turns out, hundreds of thousands or even millions of retweets of an encounter following the March for Life told the wrong story. Nick Sandmann, a junior from Covington Catholic High School, didn't impede on the personal space of a Native American veteran and activist, Nathan Phillips. He didn't gloat and glimmer with centuries of white privilege held over the head of a man whose people faced genocide at the hands of the colonizer. So it seems, the student with the now infamous smirk committed only one crime: existing.
The original scandal wasn't a story. It was a series of photos and uninstructive video clips of the Covington student in a MAGA hat smiling shamelessly at Phillips. Most everyone, yours truly included, assumed the worst, namely that the student intruded on a Native American rally just to be a jerk. It fit a narrative of white supremacy, white colonization, and white shamelessness, so the media pounced.
But stories like these aren't just snapshots in time. They have a beginning and an end. In this case, the truth changed everything.
[Read: Rush to judgment? New details emerge on Native American elder's standoff with MAGA-hat-wearing teens]
Thanks to hours of video and a torrent of witness testimonies, the greater story unfolded. Phillips, painted as the victim in the narrative, was actually the one who impinged on the Covington student's space, where they had been instructed to wait to be picked up following the anti-abortion march. Prior to Phillips encountering Sandmann, a group of "Black Israelites," a well-known hate group, had been barraging the Covington students with homophobic slurs and racially charged smears. Phillips then intervened — on behalf of the hate group! He got in Sandmann's face, banging his drum.
Phillips, whose been on a media blitz since the narrative went viral, has happily claimed the mantle of victimhood. He told the Detroit Free Press that he entered the situation because the Covington children "were in the process of attacking these four black individuals" and that he merely confronted Sandmann to de-escalate the situation. As video evidence now demonstrates, this was a lie. The Black Israelites had been verbally attacking the students for some significant amount of time, and the students had not attacked them.
Sandmann, whose serenely smirking face has gone viral as a poster child for hate — celebrities from Chris Evans to Alyssa Milano have tried to shame the minor, and the hashtag, #ExposeChristianSchools began trending shortly thereafter — emerged on Sunday with a statement issued by a public relations firm. His family has been doxxed, his school publicly smeared, and his very identity turned into a crime itself.
"I never interacted with this protestor. I did not speak to him. I did not make any hand gestures or other aggressive moves. To be honest, I was startled and confused as to why he has approached me. We had already been yelled at by another group of protestors, and when the second group approached I was worried that a situation was getting out of control where adults were attempting to provoke teenagers," wrote Sandmann. "I believed that by remaining motionless and calm, I was helping to diffuse the situation."
Sandmann committed the crime of not being ashamed of his own existence. Without facts, a progressive lynch mob pounced on a single image based on its biases about perceived power in America. Now we know that Sandmann was accosted. But to be clear: He was supposed to submit.
The trick of social justice is to eradicate individual justice — real justice. Because white men spent the better part of a century killing Native Americans out of existence with guns and germs, an innocent child being provoked by adults — both in his face and online — must now pay, hundreds of years later. He wasn't supposed to smile. He was supposed to confess to his original sin of whiteness.
The Left has equated Sandmann with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The comparison is largely correct. Both were accused, without any credible evidence, of something terrible, with no room for gray area or misunderstanding.
"This kid and his behavior is a symptom of something much larger. I don't think focuses on him, specifically, does much — and also leads to the current narrative of his victimhood," wrote BuzzFeed's Anne Helen Peterson of Sandmann. "I have watched all of the videos. You can understand that the situation was more complex than the first video and still recognize why the sight of that face caused a visceral reaction in so many."
There you have it: Even though the truth is out, Peterson will still blame the victim as the villain. You see, his crime was his exact attempt to diffuse the situation. He wasn't supposed to do that. He wasn't supposed to remain calm and smile. He was supposed to submit. He was supposed to pay for his whiteness, pay for that damned hat he insisted on wearing.
For Peterson and others, Sandmann's innocence in this matter doesn't change anything. He deserves to be punished for for the crimes of white slaveholders and colonizers who lived hundreds of years before he was born. Serenity is now smugness. A smile is no longer a call to detente; it's a call to arms.
You can blame the media, which embraced "social justice" over truth-telling long ago. More damning is the indictment of ourselves.
I retweeted the initial narrative. I had no evidence, just an image that fit a story I've been told a thousand times before. So I shared it and baselessly smeared a child. I now know that I was wrong. I am sorry. I apologize to Nick Sandmann, and I hope that those so quick to share the initial images will now learn the truth and make their own apologies if need be.
But make no mistake. For a disquieting portion of the American mob, the facts won't matter, even once they are aware of them. For them, Sandmann, standing with that godforsaken smirk, was crime enough.
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