How Not To Scalp A Catholic Schoolkid

Most of our readers are probably aware of last week's latest media fiasco, deriving from events at the otherwise-ignored March for Life in Washington, D.C., but we'll briefly recap.

On their way home from participating in America's largest annual pro-life protest march, a bus load of students from Covington (KY) Catholic High School had an encounter with an elderly American Indian and a few black counterprotestors.  The signature photo, splashed across front pages nationwide, showed the Indian standing alone, surrounded by a circle of grinning schoolboys, separated only by his traditional drum.  Reports claimed that racial slurs were flying, though of course these weren't visible in the picture.

Over the next few days, the massed chorus of both the mainstream and social media excoriated the teenagers and their school as the worst sort of racist bigots.  Many went further: death threats poured in to the kids' families, relatives, schoolmates, and fellow church members, and a strange package arrived at their school.

PJ Media reports what happened next:

Then longer videos emerged, and the story turned completely around. The group of African-Americans, who turned out to belong to a racist, anti-Semitic cult, the Black Hebrew Israelites, had been screaming at the boys, calling them “crackers” and “faggots” and the products of incest, among much else. The elderly Indian turned out to be notorious left-wing mischief-maker Nathan Phillips, whose claims to be a Vietnam vet have been challenged and who in 2015 accused some Michigan college students of harassing him. Last Friday, he wasn't surrounded by the boys from Kentucky; he got up in their faces, banging a drum and chanting. Other Indians with him called the Kentucky boys interlopers on Indian territory and told them to go back to Europe.

The "smirking" boy never moved either his body or his face the entire time; he just froze where he was as Mr. Phillips marched up to him.  As he later told the Today show, "I had every right to be there"; indeed, he was there first.

The whole narrative as previously reported was entirely false, proved so by multiple video recordings. Did the left change their tune? Not on your life!

A bare handful of journalists walked back their words, with their stories and tweets mysteriously disappearing.  For the rest, the kids' families have retained several of the nation's best-known libel attorneys; all those who spread lies about the teenagers have been warned to issue public retractions or prepare to be sued.

It's hard to imagine a more open-and-shut libel case.  The victims are the textbook definition of non-public figures: underage children nobody has ever heard of, attending a legal public function as part of a school event, and who provably committed no crime nor wrongdoing.  The damages from the libel are equally obvious: the Internet is forever full of their names described as racist, and death threats continue to arrive.

Fortunately, the kids and their school are from Kentucky, whose authorities take an old-fashioned and less tolerant attitude toward such behavior.  It's our hope that dozens or hundreds of frothing lefties nationwide find themselves arrested, extradited, tried, and convicted under Kentucky's laws against terroristic threats.  As for the media, surely a vast chunk can be ripped from the hides of the New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, their corporate parents, and the individual journalists whose gross negligence and malice stands so plainly revealed - to say nothing of the fellow-traveling celebrities, many of whom are wealthy and have significant social media followings.

We'll be watching the court fireworks with overwhelming glee as it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of thugs and liars.  But we have one burning question we've not seen addressed anywhere:

Is every last mainstream journalist literally insane?

Missing: The Animal Sense of Self-Preservation

Consider the circumstances: A photo-perfect lefty story appears.  It's almost too good to be true, as the targets hit just about every box on the Left's list of evil: white, male, privileged (private school), religious, pro-life, even wearers of MAGA hats.  And their supposed victim is appealing too: while unfortunately also male, he's elderly, tribal, and a Vietnam Veteran (which turned out to be, itself, a media lie).

But this happened in the midst of what is traditionally one of Washington, D.C.'s largest marches and one of the oldest.  Of course, being pro-life, it doesn't get reported, but certainly local and national journalists know it exists so they can be sure to be elsewhere and pretend it didn't happen.

It gathers marchers from around the country.  These tens of thousands of people must have money, because getting to D.C. and back is not cheap.  We can reasonably expect that nearly all of them carry a smartphone, all of which have video recording capability, and some of them carry more than one.

Journalists also know that these conservative-by-definition marchers take, let us say, a rather dim view of their profession and of most denizens of the District.  Common sense indicates that, again, nearly all of these tens of thousands will instinctively start recording anything odd that occurs, knowing from years of bitter experience that the media will lie about it to their disadvantage.

With an event of this nature, a moment's thought would suggest that there had to have been literally dozens of independent video recordings from a multitude of angles - as, indeed, turned out to be the case.  Did it not occur to one single journalist to, um, do their job and go out and find a few of these videos to get the whole context?  Just to make absolutely sure these underage children were indeed the vicious racist haters as claimed?

The libelous fake news carefully reported that these boys attended a private Catholic school; it was part of the framing of their attack.  Did no journalist realize that private schools of any sort cost money?  That money has to come from somewhere, presumably parents who can be assumed to have a) resources to get lawyers and b) enough education themselves to understand how to do that.

Oh, and let's point out again: it was a religious school.  So there wasn't a single lonely target; there were dozens, closely connected to several hundred parishioners who actually know them as people.  If ever there was an easy class out of which to create a class-action lawsuit, this is it!

It wouldn't even require any imagination on the part of the journalists: every single one of them knows the fate of the erstwhile publication Gawker, bankrupted for libeling Hulk Hogan, as public a figure as there ever was.

Yet they decided to go full-bore with this utterly false story: not one, not dozens, but hundreds of well-paid professional journalists, pundits, and even celebrities who have nothing to do with it.  Then, when the truth came out, they still continued to push their proved-false narrative.  This isn't mere carelessness, gross or otherwise, it rises to the level of actual malice.

Are that many of our elites so absolutely confident in their own virtue that it doesn't even occur to them to concern themselves with the concept of truth?  Anyone with the slightest sense of shame would back down in abject apology as soon as the rest of the video came out, but "one" is about the actual number of people who did.

Do our media mandarins believe they've already won and that their enemies on the right have no recourse?  Our courts have plenty of leftist judges, but as every newspaper bemoans daily, no longer do they hold a majority on the Supreme Court.

What sort of psychopaths float above the world, sublimely confident that nothing they do, no matter how wicked and wrong, will ever come back to bite them?  What kind of life have they led to bring them to this pathological delusion?  How hard of a shock will be required to bring them down out of the clouds and into the sordid reality they inflict on the rest of us?  Clearly the election of Donald Trump wasn't nearly enough.

We hope they personally and their employers are bankrupted and driven from public view forever - a box under a bridge seems suitable, which at least will let them remain in the urban centers they adore.  These nationally-abused schoolboys should spend the rest of their lives as billionaires - not because what actually happened to them was that bad or because there aren't worthier recipients, but because the people who committed these crimes against truth deserve that level of punishment.  It's called "punitive damages", and the more punitive the better.

No coincidence that, last week alone, a thousand journalism jobs vanished.  May it be just the tip of the iceberg!