Brats v. Brats: The Nick Sandmann Story
Why does the Resistance want this to be a pogrom so badly?
Confession time: for roughly one year of my life, I was a Republican. Sort of.
I was 17 at the time, so I never cast any votes to that effect. For that matter, I never put any conscious thought into Republican politics as a belief system, and as far as I can remember, I held no meaningful Conservative views of any kind. After all, kids lack the life experience to hold meaningful political views unless they’ve survived a school shooting. It was just something I said because two adults I looked up to identified as Republicans, and it sorta pissed my mom off, which I was into at the time.
Unsurprisingly, one of those two men was my father, but he was actually dismayed with my lack of youthful idealism, as well as the timing of my hollow conversion. It was 2004, a year in which he would not only cast his first Democratic vote since Carter, but went off on his entire family for voting for “dangerous, warmongering lunatics” over Thanksgiving dinner. He was not a booster of my views, in other words.
The real motivator was my arch-conservative shrink, Dr. Jack. He actually liked W., and I was fond enough of him to ignore the sinister racist undertones that laced our therapy sessions, not to mention his virulent atheism and anti-Catholicism. He convinced me — rather unethically in retrospect — to declare for his team, but I was never really a Republican. I just said it to say it. Thinking back on it, I did show up to one meeting of my high school’s Young Republicans club, but I never came back after I noticed that everyone involved was a massive tool.
The only concrete action I ever took in service of the Right was slapping a Bush/Cheney ‘04 bumper sticker on a liberal friend’s car in the junior parking lot, but there was nothing about that move which constituted real political activism. It was a meaningless, snickering act of sarcastic-little-shittery, whose implications I did not even begin to understand — it was no more purposeful and thought-out than, say, some high school kids wearing MAGA hats in a deep-blue city to own the libs.
No matter how bad the left wants it still to be the case that the Covington Catholic fiasco confirms the unified field theory of everyone we dislike, and no matter how righteous the anger we felt when the video came out, this all began with misleading editing, no different from these kids’ moms freaking out about Planned Parenthood selling baby parts. The context within which we felt our righteous anger was falsified, made to conform to that narrative by the fake Twitter account that posted it. Malign actors were intentionally riling us with a non-story, the media bought it hook, line, and sinker, and the left’s collective refusal to admit that is troubling evidence that Trump is rapidly degrading our intellectual temperance.
Yeah, Nick Sandmann is a smug little shit, and his tomahawk-chopping friends are a bunch of little thugs. You will brook no argument from me about that, but like everyone else, I’m not really basing that on their actions in particular. I was a a really weird kid who went through hell at a Catholic prep school, courtesy of kids much like these wee bastards — I reflexively despised Brett Kavanaugh from the moment I laid eyes on him — and I was victimized by the sort of aggressive groupthink behind the worst behavior in that video. Actually, the kids I went to school with did much worse.
For five years of middle and high school, it was a baseline expectation of my social environment that everyone around me had to mock and condemn everything I said or did, because failing to attack me put one’s own status at risk. I still have PTS reactions when I see people being publicly embarrassed in TV shows. Thusly, I view these boys from a place of deep distrust and resentment, as I carry memories that make me loathe teenagers with near-genocidal intensity: they’re redeemed by the fact that they get older, but if white teenage boys were an ethnic group… O, how I would dance by the light of the cleansing fires, to the music of their screams.
In spite of that, as ready as I was to smack some manners into Nick Sandmann when I first saw the story, I felt trepidation at the insistence that his actions were the purest expression of white privilege.
You know how I found out about the September 11th attacks? I was leaving the cafeteria at the end of second period around 9:40 AM, shortly after the Pentagon got hit, when I saw a table of my classmates snickering at a crude drawing of a plane flying into a building. The second plane had hit the South Tower at 9:03, but information moved slower back then, so I can’t say if they thought they were mocking a terrorist attack or an aviation accident. They did know they were laughing at a mass-casualty event in the beating heart of America’s white power structure, which clearly wasn’t an expression of white privilege. They were boys being boys, and boys are horrible.
Yeah, I’d doubtless have my issues with Covington parents and the excuses they make for treason, but that’s not cause to put equal responsibility for their messed-up beliefs on their kids’ shoulders, just because they wore the hats. While I’m glad that the children of Democrats pay lip service to wokeness and battling white privilege, that is a product of the exact same grown-up posturing that drives teenagers to fog up our middle schools with the petty rebellion of fruity steam. In an age where politics run through everything, having a political identity is a way to act more adult than you are, even if you don’t exactly get what you’re talking about.
It’s the same with Republican kids: Kentucky is a Republican state and the Covington kids have Republican parents, so they’re claiming their meaningless tribal affiliation for the same empty reasons I once did. That wouldn’t mean anything more than my facetious bumper sticker had, even if they had actually chanted “build the wall.” Except, ya know, they didn’t chant that, because Nathan Phillips lied about that. Repeatedly.
Mr. Phillips approached the kids and drummed in their personal space, a rather obscure mode of human interaction for which there is no known appropriate response in American culture, even if one cannot say the same of the tomahawk chop. While he may be a tribal elder, a status which all woke white people are honor-bound to pretend to understand (despite our oft-stated contempt for the wisdom of our own elders), every mention of Mr. Phillips brought up his nonexistent service in Vietnam to justify the level of indignation surrounding him.
Also, it came out that Black Israelites spent an hour hurling racial epithets so vile that white people could credibly claim to be genuinely offended by them, a feat which is damn near impossible to pull off. They went after the native marchers, too: I’d say that “Uncle Tomahawk” is worse than anything the kids managed.
But the kids were Catholic and pro-life, or enough to fake it so they could take a trip to DC, and they were nominally conservative, so progs couldn’t accept that these “woman-hating bigots” weren’t as bad as they had been made to look (by what could well be a Russian influence operation). Instead of backing down, vast swaths of the left claimed some sort of “media conspiracy to buy into right-wing gaslighting” because journalists reappraised the situation after watching the raw footage, the same reportorial process which has debunked every James O’Keefe video and hounded Trump throughout this nightmare.
Daring to mention the quibbling, tangential detail that “batshit-crazy black supremacists screamed homophobic epithets at minors (and black and native passersby who came to their defense)” was condemned as making excuses for hatred. Not to sound like Tucker Carlson, but that sure sounds like the LGBTQ-lovin’ left making excuses for hatred so we can continue to focus on the people we already wanted to hate. Speaking of Tucker: offhand, admittedly-bigoted comments by individual students have been used as proof that we were originally correct to condemn these kids for mass racist chanting, a distinctly Trumpian note of non-logic.
The most insufferable part has been the Ol’ Ocasio-Cortez two-step that ensued when the reappraisals began: the howls of indignation that anyone in the media would dare to neutrally assess someone whom liberals are making newsworthy by constantly talking about them. Even worse was the collective horror that they would even consider the other side. Slathering Nick Sandmann’s face all over the internet made him a story, therefore he had the right to give a statement — by the way, people of color with enough money also hire Crisis PR reps when this stuff happens to them. It’s a viable business for a reason, and paying them is not an admission of guilt. Every story is more complicated than the 20 second snippet which the public has been specifically instructed to be horrified by.
It was the progressive insistence that this is a meaningful story nearly a week later, with federal workers out there starving, that got this pibsqueak on the Today show, not gaslighting. It was that continued insistence that no climb-down was needed when a smartassed kid is catching death threats for standing in front of a guy (in the crowd that guy consciously decided to walk through) that have made him a cause celebre on the Right. It was the fact that everything about the initial reporting of the story was wrong. Fox and their friends could make conservative media darlings out of a lynch mob, but we can’t really blame them for this one.
Speaking of death threats, this outpouring of progressive righteousness is likely making militant Trumpists out of kids who are still figuring out their identities. I came to my senses when I got to college and caught a FB message from a dude whose profile pic was a Rebel Flag overlaid with “NEVER APOLOGIZE FOR BEING RIGHT!!” asking if I wanted to start a pro-life campus group. I went back to visit Dr. Jack a few years after that, just as Barack was coming on the scene, and upon hearing him say “I can’t believe you’re voting for that half-breed Islamite,” I left and never talked to him again. It was seeing the lunacy of the Right that made me blue to the bone.
Once they’re out on their own, I doubt these kids will be open to the same reevaluation of their priorities when they remember the time that they were victims of actual fake news, or the month they spent besieged with “IM GONNA FUCKNG MURDER U RACIST PEICE OF SHIT” day in and day out until the lunatics saying it lost interest and moved on to the next lion killed by an orthodontist. By the way, liberals really need to accept that death threats will inevitably happen when we get this indignant about anything — our ownership of that phenomenon has been lacking.
Nothing is more dangerous in the Trump era than letting his own awfulness distract us from the constant need for vigilance and self-regulation. We are temporarily the army of all that is good, but we are still fallen creatures who are capable of being wrong, sometimes spectacularly so. We’ve got our own crazies and our own crazy, and if we really want to be better than the opposition, we need to check ourselves against every excess no matter how good it feels to let it all out.
And if you’re a liberal who’s still somehow furious at my moral obtuseness: your government has been shut down by people who have actually chanted “build the wall” numerous times. Kids are in cages that your tax dollars are paying for. You need to slow your roll about kids in hats.