When the story exploded over the weekend about a group of pro-Trump teenagers allegedly harassing a Native American veteran at the Lincoln Memorial, I had the same reaction many did. I was disgusted at the sight of a grinning, smart-alecky looking teenager in a red MAGA hat getting in the face of an elderly Native American man, an activist who was peacefully beating a drum. I thought the image almost perfectly encapsulated some of the uglier aspects of the Trump era.
Video shows a crowd of teenagers wearing ‘Make America Great Again’ hats taunting a Native American elder after Friday’s Indigenous Peoples March at the Lincoln Memorial https://t.co/Llu2d3bn3g pic.twitter.com/UZg4Qraqt8
— CNN (@CNN) January 20, 2019
Except I was wrong. That’s not at all what happened. The young man was approached by the activist, not the other way around. The teenager never said a word during the encounter. Reports of “build the wall” being yelled by kids are never heard in any of the available videos. In one part of the video, you can hear a teenager defending the humanity of LGBT Americans to a homophobic group called the Black Hebrew Israelites, who accused the kids of giving “faggots rights!”
The kids were laughing, behaving the way one might expect teenagers to behave when unexpectedly confronted with such bigoted lunacy. Late Sunday, the young man of so much focus and ire, high school junior Nick Sandmann, released a statement.
“I was not intentionally making faces at the protester. I did smile at one point because I wanted him to know that I was not going to become angry, intimidated or be provoked into a larger confrontation,” Sandmann said. “I am a faithful Christian and practicing Catholic, and I always try to live up to the ideals my faith teaches me — to remain respectful of others, and to take no action that would lead to conflict or violence.”
Sandmann also encouraged critics to watch the longer videos, as I eventually did, because “they show a much different story than is being portrayed by people with agendas.”
“I am mortified that so many people have come to believe something that did not happen — that students from my school were chanting or acting in a racist fashion toward African-Americans or Native Americans,” Sandmann said. “I did not do that, do not have hateful feelings in my heart, and did not witness any of my classmates doing that.”
The longer videos back up Sandmann’s claims. Overall, it looks like these people and events were foisted upon the visiting school kids, rather than the other way around. The Spectator USA’s Daniel McCarthy and Reason’s Robby Soave were among the first to watch the longer clips within a broader context and both concluded what was being reported was a “wild mischaracterization” of the event.
“The boys are undoubtedly owed an apology from the numerous people who joined this social media pile-on,” wrote Soave.
“This is shaping up to be one of the biggest major media misfires in quite some time,” Soave added.
Well, it was the biggest major media misfire since BuzzFeed published a now highly questionable supposed Robert Mueller “bombshell” about President Trump that team Mueller denied. That fake Mueller story was the latest media misfire since about two days prior, when major outlets reported that opponent of socialized medicine, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., would be having surgery at a Canadian hospital where government healthcare is the norm. Virtually all of the original stories downplayed or left out the important fact that the senator would be treated at one of Canada’s few private hospitals and paying out of pocket for the procedure.
In each of these stories, major new outlets got their stories wrong or majorly askew both in content and, more importantly, headlines. Left ideologues on social media jumped to false conclusions based on stories written by supposed journalists quick to jump to conclusions.
Even when fact-checking finally occurred (or didn’t) and corrections were made (or weren’t), one can find plenty of liberals on social media right now who still believe Rand Paul has completely flip-flopped on socialized medicine, Mueller really did have the goods on Trump last week, and that angry young Trump mobs are roaming Washington, D.C.
None of this true, but it doesn’t change the fact that many are invested in it being true. They need it to be true.
They are allowing their political faith to dictate facts.
This kind of willful ignorance is not exclusive to the Left. In 2015, many Republicans believed that the WMDs President George W. Bush invaded Iraq to find in 2003 had finally been found, when the New York Times reported that some old chemical weapons from the 1980s had been discovered by soldiers.
Never mind that these old weapons had nothing to do with the potential nuclear “mushroom cloud” Americans were told was justification for deposing Saddam Hussein — so many right-leaning ideologues had been so deeply invested in the inherent righteousness of the Iraq War for so long that they were eager to believe this. So they did.
These conservatives spun a false narrative to tell the story they wanted to tell. They let their political faith dictate facts. And just like liberals in this moment, they were wrong.
In the world of professional wrestling, the phrase “working yourself into a shoot” means wrapping one’s self so much into a fictional story that you begin to believe it’s legit.
People in politics do this too. Many will go to any ridiculous length to be proven right, even when they’re not.
Even when it could hurt innocent people.
Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.
