The rest of the story about what happened during the 'confrontation' between the school boys and the drummer on the mall

Caitlin Flanagan:

The Media Botched the Covington Catholic Story

And the damage to their credibility will be lasting.

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You know the left has really changed in this country when you find its denizens glorifying America’s role in the Vietnam War and lionizing the social attitudes of the corporate monolith Procter & Gamble.

Celebrities tweeted furiously, desperate to insert themselves into the situation in a flattering light. They adopted several approaches: old-guy concern about the state of our communities (“Where are their parents, where are their teachers, where are their pastors?”: Joe Scarborough); dramatic professions of personal anguish meant to recenter the locus of harm from Phillips to the tweeter (“This is Trump’s America. And it brought me to tears. What are we teaching our young people? Why is this ok? How is this ok? Please help me understand. Because right now I feel like my heart is living outside of my body”: Alyssa Milano); and the inevitable excesses of the temperamentally overexcited: (“#CovingtonCatholic high school seems like a hate factory to me”: Howard Dean).

By Saturday, the story had become so hot, and the appetite for it so deep, that some news outlets felt compelled to do some actual reporting. This was when the weekend began to take a long, bad turn for respected news outlets and righteous celebrities. Journalists began to discover that the viral video was not, in fact, the Zapruder film of 2019, and that there were other videos—lots and lots of them—that showed the event from multiple perspectives and that explained more clearly what had happened. At first the journalists and their editors tried to patch the revelations onto the existing story, in hopes that the whole thing would somehow hold together. CNN, apparently by now aware that the event had taken place within a complicating larger picture, tried to use the new information to support its own biased interpretation, sorrowfully reporting that early in the afternoon the boys had clashed with “four African American young men preaching about the Bible and oppression.”

But the wild, uncontrollable internet kept pumping videos into the ether that allowed people to see for themselves what had happened.

The New York Times, sober guardian of the exact and the nonsensational, had cannonballed into the delicious story on Friday, titling its first piece “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous Peoples March.”

But the next day it ran a second story, with the headline “Fuller Picture Emerges of Viral Video of Native American Man and Catholic Students.”

How had the boys been demilitarized from wearers of “Make America Great Again” hats to “Catholic students” in less than 24 hours?

O, for a muse of fire.

It turned out that the “four African American young men preaching about the Bible and oppression” had made a video, almost two hours in length, and while it does not fully exonerate the boys, it releases them from most of the serious charges.

The full video reveals that there was indeed a Native American gathering at the Lincoln Memorial, that it took place shortly before the events of the viral video, and that during it the indigenous people had been the subject of a hideous tirade of racist insults and fantasies. But the white students weren’t the people hurling this garbage at them—the young “African American men preaching about the Bible and oppression” were doing it. For they were Black Hebrew Israelites, a tiny sect of people who believe they are the direct descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel, and whose beliefs on a variety of social issues make Mike Pence look like Ram Dass.

The full video reveals that these kids had wandered into a Tom Wolfe novel and had no idea how to get out of it.
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There is much more.

It turns out the drummer has a sorted history that does not include a tour of duty in Vietnam.  As a Marine officer who was an executive officer of a rifle company in Vietnam, I can assure you the Marines had no "Recon Rangers."  They did have Force Recon units, but Phillips was not among those who served in them.  He was a refrigeration specialist who never left the US and when he left the Corps he was a buck private according to those who have seen his DD-214.

Flanagan does an excellent job of reporting what really happened.  It is journalism 101 where reporters are taught to put facts in perspective.  She does what most of the mainstream media failed to do because they tried to fit the facts into their hostile perspective about Trump and his supporters.  When people on CNN are comparing Make Amerian Great Again caps with KKK hoods you know they have jumped all sorts of sharks to get to that point.