Calling BS: Gaslighting for the MAGA Teens

I’ve learned the hard way not to sound off before getting all the facts. So, I kept my own counsel after the footage of the MAGA Teens bubbled to the surface of the social-media stream.

Oh yeah, I was totally disgusted by these little douchebags from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, particularly the one trying to intimidate Native-American activist and Marine Corps veteran Nathan Phillips with a prep-school smirk. But I waited for context, and sure enough more footage came down the pipe within a day or so — just after the smirker’s parents hired a PR firm to deal with the blowback.

I’ll say this: I got into a lot of trouble when I was a teenager, but I never did something so horrible that my parents had to hire a PR firm.

So fine. The kids were scared of some black men yelling at them. And sure, Phillips injected himself between the Hebrew Israelites and the MAGA-clad Catholic schoolboys, thinking his drumming and chanting might chill everybody out — which it actually seems to have done.

But nothing I’ve read or seen can deter me from my initial assessment: They’re punks. So screw these kids, and anyone who made them think it was okay to act that way.

This is a school where students wear blackface. Ample footage has surfaced of the students harassing others on the National Mall during their field trip to the nation’s capital — which, it’s worth adding, was to participate in a protest against a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body.

It was an anti-abortion field trip, for a bunch of Catholic high school virgins! What could they possibly add to the discourse? Besides MAGA, I mean.

So please don’t try to sell me this story about a group of nice high school boys who got harassed in the big city while trying to do the right thing, and how the media is turning them into pariahs. The only people who believe that bit are the ones who desperately need to.