Yes, there’s blame to go around — chaperones, where were you? — but those Covington school kids are no heroes | Opinion

Upon further review, my initial ruling stands: Those boys from Covington Catholic High School were acting like jerks.

You’ve seen the videos by now of the unsettling confrontation earlier this month between a smirking, MAGA-hatted teen staring down a weathered, drum-beating Native American man near the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. The tribal elder is singing. The boy’s classmates are standing nearby, laughing, mocking, and taunting.

The initial condemnation of the boys, particularly the smirking student, Nick Sandmann, was swift. It called out the entitled, disrespectful white kids with their tomahawk chops and satirical, sports-team war chants.

The backlash — the condemnation of the condemnation — began about a day later and ferociously defended the students. It said the snippets everyone was reacting to lacked important context: Black Hebrew Israelites on the scene had started the confrontation by taunting the Covington boys at length with vicious invective.

The American Indian man, Nathan Phillips, 64, then interposed himself between the two groups and moved toward the boys, escalating tensions rather than calming the situation as he said he intended.

Sandmann put out a statement portraying himself as a victim: “I was worried that a situation was getting out of control where adults were attempting to provoke teenagers,” it said. “I believed that by remaining motionless and calm, I was helping to [defuse] the situation ... I said a silent prayer that the situation would not get out of hand.”

Even President Donald Trump got into the revisionist act. In a pair of tweets he wrote that the “Covington Catholic students were treated unfairly with early judgments proving out to be false,” and that “Nick Sandmann and the students of Covington have become symbols of Fake News and how evil it can be.”

This is what’s called “gaslighting” — an attempt to persuade us not to believe our own perceptions, in this case what the multiple videos plainly show. There is no mistaking the smug condescension and lack of respect in Sandmann’s expression, and the confrontational defiance in how he alone stood his ground as Phillips approached.

You don’t defuse a tense situation by simpering at someone and staring him down.

Nor, to be fair, do you defuse a tense situation by banging a drum in someone’s face.

The idea put forth in Reason magazine that the Covington boys “tentatively joined [Phillips'] chanting” is belied by videos from every angle showing them ridiculing him by hopping around and satirizing his singing.

Is there blame to go around? Sure. The Black Hebrew Israelites are a small but nasty band of provocateurs whose insults were vile and inexcusable. Phillips should have approached them — the instigators and prime offenders — with his drum and his song, not the amped-up teen goofballs who were, again, acting like jerks.

The adult chaperones overseeing the boys during their participation in an annual anti-abortion rights rally deserve their share of blame as well. The Cincinnati Enquirer has reported that there were “at least five on the scene” as the Covington students waited for their buses.

Sandmann’s statement said “a student in our group asked one of our teacher chaperones for permission to begin our school spirit chants to counter the hateful things that were being shouted at our group [by the Black Hebrew Israelites].... Our chaperone gave us permission to use our school chants.”

Bad idea.

“Turn the other cheek” would have been far better advice. “Ignore them. We’ll wait over here.”

Kooky, hateful protesters like the Black Hebrew Israelites are not uncommon at major events in Washington. Acknowledgment is their oxygen.

I don’t expect high school kids to know this, but adult supervisors in the tinderbox of social protests should. And the subsequent rowdy student display led to the tense standoff that followed, during which no chaperone was evident.

Is this incident a big deal? It shouldn’t be. No one was hurt and no punches were thrown. Adults and teens behaved badly, as they will when passions are high. Cooler heads did not prevail. It happens. Apologies are in order, including from those on social and conventional media who misreported basic facts. Recrimination, however, and broad condemnation of white Catholic high school students is not appropriate.

But don’t be gaslit by Trump and others into thinking the first impressions were “false,” “fake,” and therefore “evil.”