MAGA teen video: Nick Sandmann’s moment and its impact on America
The ‘Make America Great Again’ teen video sparked allegations of foreign trolls trying to sow online discord in the US and once again pitted the left and right against each other.
World
Don't miss out on the headlines from World. Followed categories will be added to My News.
It looked like 60 seconds of sneering, privilege-fuelled contempt, a white teenager smirking and blocking the path of a Native American elder as he beat a drum and sang peace songs in front of the boy at a crowded Washington rally.
Wearing a red Make America Great Again cap and marching against abortion rights, year 11 student Nick Sandmann was a definitive liberal nightmare. When watched in isolation, the incident beneath the Lincoln Memorial was viscerally offensive, and social media went nuts.
Within hours, millions had watched and shared that initial edit of the “confrontation“, and it was leading news bulletins and fuelling editorials across the United States. Within days, Sandmann and his fellow students were so rattled by death threats their Kentucky Catholic school temporarily closed.
Last weekend’s episode has sparked allegations of foreign trolls trying to sow online discord in America and once again pitted the left and right against each other in the culture wars that are tearing parts of the country apart.
It was also a text book study of the febrile modern news churn, where mainstream journalists jump en-masse into social media driven outrage and put out the very “fake news” US
MORE: Donald Trump faces competition from a line-up of Democrats
President Donald Trump and his supporters are weaponising to drive his war with some sections of the media.
Sandmann, the teen whose life has been “permanently altered” by the maelstrom, spoke for many when he said: “In hindsight, I wish we could have walked away and avoided the whole thing.”
What is known is that a group from Covington Catholic high travelled from Kentucky to join the March For Life, a regular trip for older students of the all-boy school who turn the annual anti-abortion protest into a field trip to the capital.
Late on Friday, January 18, some gathered in Washington Mall for an hour of sightseeing before they were to board their buses home to Kentucky at 5.30pm. The foot of the steps to the Lincoln Monument is a convenient meeting point in DC, with food trucks lining nearby streets to cater to tourists.
Before long, the Covington students were heckled by four members of an activist group called the Hebrew Israelites. This encounter was not captured in initial clips circulating online, but was revealed in hours of new video shot by bystanders on cellphones and released as the controversy grew over the weekend.
“The protesters said hateful things,” Sandmann said in a statement released by his school.
“They called us “racists,” “bigots,” “white crackers,” “faggots,” and “incest kids.” They also taunted an African American student from my school by telling him that we would “harvest his organs.” I have no idea what that insult means, but it was startling to hear.”
In retaliation, the Covington boys started chanting school slogans, after they were given permission to do so by a school chaperone, he said.
“The chants are commonly used at sporting events. They are all positive in nature and sound like what you would hear at any high school,” he said.
Countless social media take-downs of the boys described them yelling offensive slogans, including “build the wall”. In some video clips, teenage boys are seen heckling others there, including a group of unimpressed teenage girls, but News Corp Australia has seen no video of them using racist terms.
As the chanting continued, Native American elder Nathan Phillips, the man whose interaction with Sandmann was in the first, widely circulated clip, walked through the crowd towards him.
Phillips, an activist and former Marine who appears to have overstated his service in the Vietnam War (he served stateside and has called himself both a Vietnam vet and a Vietnam-era veteran), stood nose-to-nose with Sandmann for about a minute.
In interviews with several media outlets who contacted him after the video went viral, Phillips said he was trying to make peace between the opposing groups of Covington boys and the four African-American Hebrew Israelites, who he said looked like they were going to be “lynched”.
Phillips said: “When I was there and I was standing there and I seen that group of people in front of me and I seen the angry faces and all of that, I realised I had put myself in a really dangerous situation. Here’s a group of people who were angry at somebody else and I put myself in front of that, and all of a sudden, I’m the one whose all that anger and all that wanting to have the freedom to just rip me apart, that was scary.”
In Sandmann’s words: “He locked eyes with me and approached me, coming within inches of my face. He played his drum the entire time he was in my face.
“I never interacted with this protester. I did not speak to him. I did not make any hand gestures or other aggressive moves. To be honest, I was startled and confused as to why he had approached me. We had already been yelled at by another group of protesters, and when the second group approached I was worried that a situation was getting out of control where adults were attempting to provoke teenagers.”
The incident wound down when the Covington buses arrived, but it wasn’t long before the first clip dropped on Twitter.
One of the first accounts to share it has now been suspended amid concerns it was a fake profile, with possible origins overseas, according to CNN.
“This MAGA loser gleefully bothering a Native American protester at the Indigenous Peoples March,” was the caption on the minute-long clip, which was viewed at least 2.5 million times and shared more than 14 million times after being posted Friday, according to CNN.
The @2020fight account, which ostensibly belonged to a California teacher and was set up in December 2016, displayed bot-like behaviour, posting an average 130 tweets a day and amassing 40,000 followers. Twitter suspended it after media started asking questions.
According to online content vetting company Storyful, the account’s “high follower count, highly polarised and yet inconsistent political messaging, the unusually high rate of tweets, and the use of someone else’s image in the profile photo”, marked it as suspicious.
This was the video that spread like wildfire on social media and led to streams of abuse to the children and threats to their families and school.
Even as the events were clarified over ensuing days and some media outlets published apologies and retractions, the arguments raged on.
Like so many controversies in today’s America, the truth was lost somewhere in the middle of a furious stampede to judgment from virtually all sides. By the time people had decided what they thought had happened, the facts no longer seemed to matter.
As Julie Irwin Zimmerman - a writer for The Atlantic, put it, the story was “a Rorschach test”.
”Tell me how you first reacted, and I can probably tell where you live, who you voted for in 2016, and your general take on a list of other issues — but it shouldn’t be,” she wrote.
“If the Covington Catholic incident was a test, it’s one I failed — along with most others.”
Originally published as MAGA teen video: Nick Sandmann’s moment and its impact on America
Pope in critical condition, Vatican confirms
Pope Francis was in critical condition Saturday after he suffered a long respiratory crisis that required high flows of oxygen, the Vatican said.
Hamas frees more Israeli hostages
Hamas has released all remaining living Israeli hostages promised under the first stage of the ongoing cease-fire deal — including two who had been held captive for a decade.