1. Fuck you if you're watching the videos of students from Covington Catholic School hooting and yelling and chanting and dancing in their douchewear of MAGA hats and Trump shirts and you think, "Oh, this is totally innocent and not racist." And double fuck you in your mouth and your ass if you look at images and videos of very white Nick Sandmann standing and smirking in front of very Native American Nathan Phillips and believe, as Sandmann's parents' hired guns wrote for Sandmann, "I said a silent prayer that the situation would not get out of hand." Bullshit. Anyone who has ever been around a group of young white dipshit males has seen that fuckin' smirk, that face that says, "You wouldn't touch me because I'm white and I got a group of angry white boys around me who are pissed off that they missed the era of lynching." Jesus, it must have been frightening to be surrounded by those howling pissants in their MAGA gang colors.
1a. The one thing I'll give the forensic videologists of the right is that I never clearly heard the racist dipshit kids chant, "Build the wall." They may have. They may not have. I'm just saying I didn't hear it. Update: I watched another video, the one where the kid (whose name is probably Squee) rips his shirt off, and they are definitely chanting, "Donald Trump" for a couple of moments.
1b. Don't fuckin' tell me to "Watch the video of the whole thing." Motherfuckers, I did watch it. And it shows exactly what it looks like: a bunch of privileged white Christian boys getting off first on confronting some black people (the Hebrew Israelites are fuckin' assholes) and then on confronting some Injuns. They likely thought they'd finally get a hug from their MAGA fathers for doing it. Hell, they were probably gonna circle jerk about how brave they were for months after. Probably still will. While a Trump speech is playing on their phones.
1c. Teenagers know that everything...every fucking thing...will be recorded. They love it. They want it. They want to see how the stupid shit they do gets major likes and hearts and whatever the fuck. That's also what Sandmann was thinking standing there, knowing that his boys were recording. "Holy shit, this is gonna be so sick on my Insta." The old person argument of "I could do stupid things when I was a teenager and no one would ever see it" is bullshit because today's kids expect to be recorded. They do the stupid shit because they want it recorded.
2. As a liberal, I think the way that teenagers of color are treated by our American justice system, our American culture, and our American politicians is fucking disgusting. It is a savage fucking country that arrests kids and tries them in court as adults and talks about them like they are grown ups and not bundles of hormones whose brains haven't fully developed. It's a savage fucking country that lets kids live in abject poverty and does almost nothing to help them get out and then punishes them when they step even a little out of line, like acting up in school. All of this need to change, be reformed, overturned, anything. We have failed our kids miserably in so many ways.
2a. If you're conservative and you're pissed off at all the people on the left who are condemning the Covington Catholic dipshits, saying that they're just kids and are making stupid kid mistakes, I wonder how you'd've reacted if it had been a group of African American teen boys who just came from a Black Lives Matter march and were smirking at and mocking a white minister singing, "Amazing Grace"? Fuck you. You know what you would've said. You'd've been calling for them to be castrated and sent to the fields. Yet now you act like the public outrage at the dipshits makes them the moral equivalent of unarmed black teens shot by the police.
2b. The right also viciously attacked the Parkland teens for daring to speak out about gun control. When they planned a national school walkout for students, conservatives lost their goddamned minds. "They're being manipulated by adults," they said. "They're just being exploited." Yet somehow when you arrange for groups of Catholic school kids to go march against abortion rights, that's not exploitative. Weird, huh?
2c. If you're liberal and you want the racist dipshits treated like non-white kids are treated in America, well, sorry, but that's just fuckin' hypocritical. I don't want the racist dipshits gunned down by cops or sent to prison for absurdly long sentences or anything like that. I don't want that to happen to any teenagers. I do want the entire goddamn country to get back to the idea that all kids are kids, and, except in exceedingly rare cases, they should be treated as such. That's not a way to excuse the racist dipshits from Kentucky. But it is to say that our reaction to all teen dipshittery, criminal or not, should be contextualized by the fact that they are still kids. (And if you think sending death threats to the school or the kids is right, you can go fuck yourself.)
2d. To get super-harsh here, when teens are gunned down in a school or are the victims of some other crime, we are quick to label them as "children." Well, why do teen victims get to be innocent children while teen criminals get to be adults?
2e. Yeah, the dipshits deserve to be punished by their school and, if a crime was committed, charged with it. Of course. That's obvious. But punish them as kids, as we should all kids.
3. The dipshits have shitty parents, shitty teachers, and shitty religious leaders. They all have failed. The chaperones on the trip failed. The adults failed. They should be punished. They should be fired if they are at the school. Too bad we can't fire parents. The adults close to these kids are gonna fuck it all up. They already are.
4. Nathan Phillips has actually been incredibly insightful about the whole situation. In an interview with the Cincinnati Enquirer, he said, "I'm disappointed with [Sandmann's] statement. He didn't accept any responsibility. That lack of responsibility, I don't accept it." All he wants is for the dipshits to accept that they were dipshits. That's where learning begins. "I'm just working for a better future for all of our children," he said. "But, I can't work with liars and thieves." And, in one of those so-wise-it's-almost-a-stereotype moments, he added, "I live in the plains and I've watched a tornado come down. It's very destructive. What I saw in front of me that day was destruction from a terrible storm tearing apart the fabric of my America and threatening the future of all our children." He now wants to meet with the dipshits and try to teach them what they did was wrong, in case they don't understand that simple fact. Maybe he can tell them what the Indigenous Peoples March was for, too.
4a. Yeah, he's not a Vietnam War vet, although he did serve in the Marines. Well done, right-wing media. So? Does that mean Phillips deserves the treatment he received? Assholes.
5. Just shut the fuck up, David Brooks.
