The Left’s narrative about the incident involving students from Covington Catholic school has collapsed, but they will not drop their pitchforks quietly. Instead of admitting that they were played by a conman named Nathan Phillips, and that they wildly misconstrued an event that actually began when a group a black activists yelled racist and anti-gay slurs, they have instead set out to retroactively justify their treatment of the innocent students. They have already declared the Covington kids racist and bigoted, now all they have to do is find some sort of evidence to go with that charge. And, of course, if they find no evidence, they can always just lie. Which brings us to the latest smear.
A picture went viral yesterday showing a group of Covington students at a basketball game wearing all black, some in black paint, screaming at the black player of another team. Anyone with, say, a third of a functioning brain rattling around in their skulls will immediately understand the scene. The kids are all wearing black because the fans of sports teams often will come to games all in the same color. Oftentimes fans will wear black as part of a “blackout.” Other times they’ll white as part of a “whiteout.” Or sometimes they’ll wear blue or red or any other color. This is standard operating procedure in American sports, especially scholastic sports.
Why are they screaming at the opposing player? Well, because he is the opposing player and that’s what the home fans do and have done in every basketball game or football game ever played anywhere on Earth. Why is the opposing player black? Well, because that just happens to be his race. If he was white, they would be just as unwelcoming. This is part of the pageantry of sports.
Many leftists, though, apparently want us to believe that they have never watched sports or even been introduced to the concept of sports. Feigning an extraordinary amount of ignorance, they accused the students of wearing “blackface.” Several media outlets got in on the act. A worthless trash rag called the New York Daily News put the lie right in their headline: “Covington Catholic High students in blackface at past basketball game.” The Daily Mail added emphasis: “Kentucky students from the same Catholic high school as the teens who taunted a Native American man were allowed to don BLACKFACE at their sports events – and openly goaded African American players.” Prominent leftists like Tariq Nasheed and Matthew Yglesias helped to spread the smear on Twitter.
These people, if they had any integrity, might ask themselves why the school would take pictures and videos of their own students in blackface and then publish them on the internet. They might ask whether it is at all likely or plausible that a whole student body would get together and agree to wear racist costumes to a basketball game. But these considerations are irrelevant to the smear merchants. The smear need not be likely or plausible or, least of all, true. It need only succeed in keeping the narrative alive. And what if that false narrative succeeds in getting a kid hurt or killed? The smear merchants couldn’t care less about that. They are empty, amoral husks of human beings. Nothing matters to them but the political victory.
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