What The Covington High Schoolers Tell Us About America

Hint: It’s not that straight, white, Christian males are the problem.

Over the weekend of January 18–20th, a viral video surfaced across the entire internet. The clip portrayed a standoff between a group of white, Catholic, MAGA-hat wearing high schoolers and a Native American elder. Just about everyone with a Twitter account rushed to explain what the situation told us about white male entitlement among the privileged class, and about how this was a textbook example of racial hatred on full display in the nation’s capital.

Well, the collective twitter reaction was right about one thing, and just about one thing only: The story of the Covington high schoolers certainly reveals much about the state America right now. But the hidden truth of the incident has nothing to do with white supremacy; the media debacle surrounding this group of high schoolers is a case study in how the contemporary intellectual sphere and social networks place narrative and agenda above truth and facts. To put it simply, it exposed many of the supposed “guardians of democracy” as biased, politically motivated actors.

For almost a day after the initial incident, the following narrative was being reported, based on a handful of minutes of video: Nathan Phillips, a Native American…