The scene at the Lincoln Memorial last weekend was a perfect microcosm of America’s current culture wars. One thing happened, yet two completely different stories have taken hold, with each side telling its own tale to confirm its own prejudices.
What America needs is a class of professionals who could review all the evidence, without fear or favor, and present to the public a clear and comprehensive picture taking in many perspectives.
Of course, most of our press is not doing that. Most of our press rushed without sobriety, without facts, and without even the slightest effort at balance or even perspective and believed the most one-sided version of the story.
They believed a story that originated with a pseudonymous troll and that was amplified by a man, Nathan Phillips, who repeatedly changed his self-serving story, particularly after further video evidence debunked it. The Washington Post’s credulous article about him being mobbed by the boys from Covington Catholic was published after the contradictory videos were widely circulating online.
Why did the press take the word of Phillips and Twitter trolls without skepticism or checking? Why did they continue to parrot Phillips’ account after it was clearly demolished by further video evidence? Why were they slow to correct their reporting?
Why? Because Phillips and the anonymous Twitter trolls had told the press exactly the story they wanted to hear and the press couldn’t bear to let go of their precious parable. The bad guys in this morality tale were the bad guys who populate the imagination of most of the elite press.
White? Check.
Male? Check (even attending an all-boys school).
Trump supporters? Check (even wearing “MAGA” hats).
Conservative? Check (even attending the March for Life).
And of course, Christian? Check-plus (because they were Catholics).
So, yes, this whole incident needs to be put in a larger context. The larger context is burgeoning anti-Catholicism on the political Left and in the press.
Phillips is an activist who targets the Catholic Church. As the Catholic News Agency reported on Tuesday, Phillips and his gang showed up banging drums and chanting at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, D.C.’s grandest Catholic church, in an effort to disrupt the holy Mass. Guards had to lock the doors.
Earlier in the month, Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, opposed a federal judicial nominee on the grounds that he belongs to the Knights of Columbus, the largest Catholic service organization in the world. The Knights’ top crime is agreeing with Catholic teaching on abortion.
This was a replay of the attack Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., launched on Catholic judicial nominee Amy Coney Barrett for being too Catholic. “The dogma lives loudly in you,” Feinstein said. That confirmation hearing proved to be a warm-up act for the trial of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in whose guilt every Democrat and every reporter believed from Day One. The only proof they needed was that Kavanaugh attended Catholic school.
This is bigotry. But it’s bigotry that echoes the prejudices of so many media elites, and so it gets a pass. But now it grows into something ugly.
