In January 2019, Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann became an overnight infamous household name after a video of his interaction with Native American activist Nathan Phillips went viral.
“On Saturday, a video went viral, seemingly showing a group of Catholic high school students confronting and harassing a Native American protester who appeared to be peacefully playing a drum, but by Saturday night it was clear the confrontation wasn’t the end of the story,” the Daily Wire reported at the time.
“The three-minute video was posted online by a group of Native American protesters who claimed they were harassed and intimidated by a group of Covington Catholic High School students waiting for their bus near the Lincoln Memorial. The video is heavily clipped at the beginning and end, and shows only an apparent ‘confrontation’ between a protester named Nathan Phillips and a Make America Great Again-hat wearing teen.”
Despite it becoming clear that the Covington High School students were actually the victims of racial slurs, with a group of Black Hebrew Israelites calling the students “fa***ts,” with Phillips apparently lying about the so-called “confrontation,” the legacy media rallied to portray the students — and Nick Sandmann in particular — as guilty of a hate crime.
On CNN’s website, Nick Sandmann is mentioned in 30 articles, including the presumptive headline “March For Life teen’s confrontation with Native American reveals an ugly divide.”
The Washington Post mentioned Nick Sandmann 52 times, and the New York Times mentioned him 11 times since early 2019. Covington Catholic High School is referenced 92 times by the Washington Post, and 169 times by the New York Times.
At the time, prominent figures on the Left also came out in vocal condemnation of Nick Sandmann, such as an SNL comedian saying “I will blow whoever manages to punch that maga kid in the face,” Alyssa Milano concluding that “The red MAGA hat is the new white hood,” and Reza Aslan saying that Sandmann had a “punchable face.”
Conversely, in the same city in March 2021, a 66-year-old Uber Eats driver was killed after being thrown from his vehicle after two teenage girls — aged 13 and 15 — reportedly used a stun gun against him and stole his car. The incident was also caught on video, showing Anwar’s crumpled body on the sidewalk, as the two teenage girls appeared to show more concern for their phones than the man left dead on the street.
Nick Sandmann was not guilty of any crime, while these two teenage girls — whose names have not been released — appear to have murdered an innocent man after assaulting him and stealing his car. Surely, in terms of objective reporting, Mohammad Anwar’s murder deserves far more scrutiny and coverage?
However, a search for “Mohammad Anwar” on CNN yields one result, relating to an article that was shared on Twitter as “Police said the girls, 13 and 15, assaulted an Uber Eats driver with a Taser while carjacking him, which led to an accident in which he was fatally injured.” Similarly, the Washington Post provides one article dedicated to the incident, reporting “Girls, 13 and 15, charged with murder after alleged carjacking in D.C.” The New York Times has made no mention of Anwar, according to their website.
Thanks to the media, the death of Mohammad Anwar will remain hidden from the majority of the country. There won’t be any marches for him, no furious protests, and no concerned phone calls from Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.
The same celebrities who jostled to condemn Nick Sandmann for the crime of standing still are now as silent as the disinterested media who — without a racially convenient perpetrator — have immediately moved on.
All that matters to the media is whether they can use the skin color of victims and/or alleged perpetrators to promote the narrative of systemic and unrepentant white supremacy.
For them, Mohammad Anwar’s alleged killers don’t fit the bill, and so he has been immediately forgotten.
Ian Haworth is an Editor and Writer for The Daily Wire. Follow him on Twitter at @ighaworth.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.