You ever wonder how something like the Big Lie about the Covington Catholic teens harassing a Native American Vietnam Vet gets started? Well, turns out that once people started looking for the "trigger" they found tell tale signs of a possible Russian Twitter operation.
We already know that Twitter trolls working for the Russian government at the direction of Vladimir Putin used fake Twitter and Facebook accounts to stoke racial unrest in the U.S. before and after Trump's election. There is every indication that they continue to do this. And why not? It works. Gullible left wing racebaiters leap at the chance to spread hate and hysteria and don't seem to mind at all that it's A. not true and B. backed by Russians.
In the case of the Covington teens, Twitter suspended a dubious account with the username @2020fight which was set up a few weeks after Trump was elected in November 2016. CNN has the initial details. It was this Twitter account which first spread the misleading video which purported to show Native American Nathan Phillips, aka Chief Full of Bull, surrounded by the Covington teens and omitting the part where Phillips purposely walked up to the teens.
Tracking the account directly to Russian sources will take time as the investigations in 2017 showed. CNN's Tech reporter who wrote the initial stories also tweeted this:
That's right. All you folks who STILL think the Covington Catholic kids are racists who disrespected Chief Full of Bull, despite the clear video evidence, are actually serving as Putin's puppets to sow hate and hysteria in the United States. Putin thanks you!In 6-12 months when Facebook and Twitter figure out what Russian accounts are posing as Americans *right now,* you can bet that the Native American / #MAGA teens encounter will be all over it. Stoking both sides.— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) January 21, 2019
Some retractions and corrections but the Big Lie persists!
a few chinks in the armor of the Big Lie. Most notably, the corrections about Phillips war record. In short, he doesn't have one. Here's the original Washington Post tweet:
Phillips lied about Vietnam servicePhillips, who fought in the Vietnam War, says in an interview “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.” https://t.co/owlzVlxMAu— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) January 19, 2019
The New York Times and other media also referred to Phillips as a Vietnam vet. But, Phillips, aka Chief Full of Bull, never served in Vietnam. He lied about it. But that didn't stop the entire Trump hating media from reporting that he did. Now that WaPo and others have made a correction, will anyone who took offense at the first report see it?
And for those who continue to lie about what happened, another video clip clearly showing the Covington kids minding their own business and singing their school song while Full of Bull walks right up to them. He sought to provoke a reaction and the best he got was Nick Sandmann's smirk. But that's enough for Sandmann and his parents to be killed and the school burned down with the kids locked inside!
Let's review. National Review, which initially jumped on the hate Covington bandwagon has reflected on the facts. Perhaps others should do the same:Here is a video clearly showing that Nathan Phillips approached the students. On the basis of the evidence we now have, I believe that people who issued categorical and one-sided condemnations of the students should retract and apologize. pic.twitter.com/GxmXcMuQgC— Matthew Schmitz (@matthewschmitz) January 20, 2019
If you’re in a public place and someone starts heckling you, are you entitled to heckle back? How about if someone does something much worse than heckling you in a public place? What if that person in fact takes a drum up to you and starts banging it in your face? Are you entitled to heckle back? How about smirking? Are you allowed to smirk?Full of Bull fooled a lot more people than the useful idiots at the Washington Post and NY Times. The sad part is that while many have realized and admitted their mistake a great number refuse to even concede they were manipulated and lied to. But this has been typical of the entire Hate Trump hysteria media which lurches from one fake news story to the next.
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To put it another way, if you were minding your own business in a public place and someone came right up to you and put a drum up to your face and made a huge racket inches from your nose, would you be happy about it?
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I’d say their reaction was if anything more restrained than you would expect from teenagers. I’d advise them to do better next time. I certainly wouldn’t consider expulsion. Phillips, on the other hand, is an adult, and he repeatedly lied about what happened to the Washington Post, which was utterly taken in by him and reported everything he said uncritically.
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Phillips, on the other hand, is an adult, and he repeatedly lied about what happened to the Washington Post, which was utterly taken in by him and reported everything he said uncritically.
It would have been revolting if Nathan Phillips had been minding his own business doing a tribal chant while a gang of kids swarmed around him and started jeering. That’s what many media outlets reported: “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous Peoples March,” ran a New York Times headline over a story that said “a throng of cheering and jeering high school boys” were “surrounding a Native American elder.”
That isn’t what happened. Phillips was the aggressor in the situation. It’s a curious feature of our culture that people aggressively seek to be victimized, go out of their way in hopes of getting punched in the face, but here we are. People do that because they know the media hand out condemnation based on perceived ranking in the victim hierarchy.
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Phillips has on at least one other occasion gotten himself into what he says was a racist altercation with a group of youths. This one, four years ago, also involved him approaching others, in this case a group of college students. (“Why did Phillips go over to the fence? Why not just walk away?” wondered a reporter. “For me just to walk by and have a blind eye to it,” Phillips said. “Something just didn’t allow me to do it.”)
Friday he waded into a group of Covington students, evidently hoping to troll a response out of them suitable for a viral video. According to the Washington Post, Phillips, 64, said that he felt threatened by the teens and that they swarmed around him as he and other activists were wrapping up the march and preparing to leave. This is a lie. They didn’t swarm around him. He strolled right into the middle of their group.
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Phillips then pivoted to a completely different version of his story with the Detroit Free Press, in which he admitted that he approached the students, not the other way around. His interviews and the various videos of the incident paint a picture of him saying he is a) terrified of the Catholic students yet b) walking right up to and into their group; a) doing his best to leave yet b) pressing forward insistently; a) trying to go up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial yet b) not noticing that there is a clear path up those steps approximately ten feet to his right.
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Nathan Phillips went out seeking to create an incident, and he fooled the New York Times and the Washington Post into accepting his false version of it.
Full of Bull goes to Catholic Cathedral and attempts to disrupt Mass
Showing his true colors the next day Full of Bull takes his traveling Indian show to the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC. He and his pow wow of drum beaters attempted to enter the Basilica during Mass which would have caused a major disruption. It's an unprecedented situation where guards were forced to lock the doors and later described the "anger" coming from this group. It doesn't take a genius to see where the real hate and disrespect is coming from here. Too bad so many on the left cling to that anger and hate. They have nothing left!
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