“Phillips and the students chanted together for a few minutes before the students appear to lose interest and filter away. During that time, though, Phillips claims he felt threatened, though separate videos seem to show that a handful of Native American protesters were taunting the students with racially tinged chants.”
A media disaster.
(Emily Zanotti – Daily Wire) On Saturday, a video went viral, seemingly showing a group of Catholic high school students confronting and harassing a Native American protester who appeared to be peacefully playing a drum, but by Saturday night it was clear the confrontation wasn’t the end of the story.
The three-minute video was posted online by a group of Native American protesters who claimed they were harassed and intimidated by a group of Covington Catholic High School students waiting for their bus near the Lincoln Memorial. The video is heavily clipped at the beginning and end, and shows only an apparent “confrontation” between a protester named Nathan Phillips and a Make America Great Again-hat wearing teen.
Watch the video on the site
Phillips also did an interview with The Washington Post, where he accused the teens of harassing and intimidating him, and claimed the scene grew “ugly.”
“It was getting ugly, and I was thinking: ‘I’ve got to find myself an exit out of this situation and finish my song at the Lincoln Memorial,’” Phillips told the paper. “I started going that way, and that guy in the hat stood in my way, and we were at an impasse. He just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat.”
He and others accused the teens of chanting “build the wall” and hurling racial epithets at the group of Native Americans. Phillips said that the MAGA-hat wearing student closest to him taunted him — an assessment that was immediately adopted by most commentators, who compared the student to a white student taunting black customers at a Civil Rights lunch counter, and in some cases, even threatened the student outright.