A member of the Polish Parliament for the governing Law and Justice Party, Dominik Tarczynski, reacted to the incident involving the Catholic students from Covington Catholic High School and a Native American former Marine, Nathan Phillips, at the Lincoln Memorial on Friday by inviting the students to speak to the Polish Parliament.
Dominik Tarczyński tweeted, “Dear Covington Catholic students, I’d like to invite You to the Polish Parliament. After watching this video, I am now standing up for these wrongfully accused young men and all of you! You are very welcome to come and speak out what you believe in!”
Using all available information as distilled from video footage he saw of the full incident, Robby Soave of Reason concluded that the media’s narrative that the high school boys had harassed the Native American veteran after the March for Life rally in Washington, D.C. was inaccurate. Soave noted that the boys themselves had been harassed after the incident on social media, with numerous calls for them to be punished or doxxed. Further, the evidence from the footage showed that the boys themselves had been subjected to “incessant racist, homophobic, and bigoted verbal abuse by members of the bizarre religious sect Black Hebrew Israelites.” The boys apparently responded by performing their school’s cheers.
Phillips told his own version of the incident to the Detroit Free Press, likening the boys to “beasts,” stating, “They were in the process of attacking these four black individuals. I was there and I was witnessing all of this … As this kept on going on and escalating, it just got to a point where you do something or you walk away, you know? You see something that is wrong and you’re faced with that choice of right or wrong … There was that moment when I realized I’ve put myself between beast and prey. These young men were beastly and these old black individuals was their prey, and I stood in between them and so they needed their pounds of flesh and they were looking at me for that.”
Phillips claimed there were chants of “build the wall.” Soave commented, “While I cannot rule out the possibility that some of the kids indeed chanted this—those who were wearing MAGA hats are presumably Trump supporters—I did not hear a single utterance of the phrase in the nearly two hours of video footage I watched.”
Soave concluded, “ … there’s shockingly little evidence of wrongdoing, unless donning a Trump hat and standing in a group of other people doing the same is now an act of harassment or violence. Phillips’ account, meanwhile, is at best flawed, and arguably deliberately misleading.”
In 2015, the Law and Justice party won the parliamentary election with a true majority, something no Polish party had done since the fall of communism. The party originated from the secular, anti-communist Solidarity trade union that was championed by Pope John Paul II. The party’s main base of support comes from older, religious people who have conservative principles and come from rural areas and small towns.