Indian Who Was Part of March Admits MAGA Students Actually Sang with Protesting Indians: AP
Well, this is an interesting wrinkle to the weekend’s biggest story.
As I’m sure you’ve no doubt heard by now, there was quite a commotion caused when a viral video appeared to depict a teenager on Friday smugly getting in the face of and terrorizing a Native American activist near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
“Appeared” is the key phrase here because the story isn’t quite what it seems.
Leftists and their lapdog media lunged at the narrative, and it’s easy to see why. It hit all of their check-boxes.
White males? Check. “Make America Great Again” hats? Check. A minority victim? Check.
The problem is that in their zeal to push anything even remotely anti-Trump, the media fell into the usual trap they set for themselves by not getting the whole story.
There are now numerous videos that dispute — or even debunk — the prevalent narrative that MAGA-hat wearing teenagers were terrorizing a minority activist.
To give them the slightest modicum of credit, some major media outlets have corrected the original narrative.
The problem is that, much like toothpaste, once that narrative’s out there, you can’t rein it back in. The damage has been done and that wildly inaccurate leftist narrative has already been embedded.
In the face of this new evidence, even the most receptive of leftists seem to be trying to cling onto some shred of an argument.
Even if this weren’t the racially charged hatefulness they so desperately want it to be, surely, those teenagers were being disrespectful little punks. Right? Yeah, about that…
As The Associated Press reports, there may have initially been some disrespect and mocking. That’s a tidbit you’ve surely already surmised from what leftists are whining about.
But — and I’m beginning to feel like a broken record here — that’s only part of the story.
The AP interviewed Marcus Frejo, a member of the Pawnee and Seminole tribes who is also known as Chief Quese Imc, and he painted a slightly different characterization of those students.
“They went from mocking us and laughing at us to singing with us. I heard it three times,” Frejo told the AP. “That spirit moved through us, that drum, and it slowly started to move through some of those youths.”
The groups eventually dispersed and scattered, the AP reported.
That’s a far cry from the initial narratives. From the way Frejo describes it, it very much sounds like teenagers, by virtue of being teenagers, may have been poking fun at first before just giving in and enjoying the moment.
That’s not exactly a lynch mob surrounding an activist.
Check out this CNN compilation of videos from the incident. It appears to largely exonerate the teenagers and places blame for what tensions there were on a group of militant black demonstrators on the scene.
About the 2:40 mark, the narrator notes that the teens were dancing to the Native American drumming.
If Frejo is completely accurate in his description, then it sounds like the initial reports of this incident were grossly overblown. Even if Frejo is wrong, as the CNN video shows, then the liberal reporting on this incident was still misleading.
Either way, it’s pretty clear that it took a while for the whole story to come out. It would’ve been prudent for the media to wait for the story to develop and for all the facts to emerge before pushing a damning narrative about teenagers on a trip to the nation’s capital to participate in the annual March for Life.
Then again, this is the leftist media we’re speaking of. Maybe I’m expecting far too much of them.
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