A Tale of Two Smiles

On selective outrage in the mainstream media

On January 18, 2019, a group of high school boys took part in the annual anti-abortion March for Life rally in Washington, DC. The boys ranged from 15 to 16 years of age and they had come to the nation’s capital from the all-male Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills, Kentucky.

After the rally, the boys gathered at the Lincoln Memorial plaza to wait for their buses back home when a group of Black Hebrew Israelites began to taunt them. Black Hebrews are a black supremacist, Holocaust denialist group that believes in a coming race war. The grown men screamed racist slurs at the boys, in particular targeting the black students in the group. They called the boys “incest babies” and “dirty ass little crackers.” They called them “school shooters.” They said “you give faggots rights.”

When a passing black man told the racist men to stop attacking children, they called him a “coon.” They also called a group of nearby Native Americans “savages.” But these disgusting racist remarks were not the focus of what was to become a national media firestorm over racism.

Instead, the target of media attention came when the boys countered the verbal abuse, not by confronting their attackers, who were grown men after all, but by singing a school chant to raise morale and performing a simplified Maori haka. But because some of the boys were wearing MAGA hats, a few of the nearby Native Americans assumed the haka was directed at them and two of them approached the boys.

These two Native American men had not acted when the Black Hebrews called their group “savages,” but now they were going to confront a group of young kids over basically nothing. Not only that, but one of the men, Omaha tribe member Nathan Phillips, later claimed the boys “were in the process of attacking these four black individuals,” an absurd lie made especially gross by the fact that it reversed the roles of attacker and victim. It wasn’t the only lie Phillips would tell about that day.

He and another Native American walked up to the boys, beating a ceremonial drum in their faces. Some of the boys began to sing and dance along, but stopped once they realized Phillips and his friend had not come in peace. One of the boys, a young man named Nicholas Sandmann, stood his ground and smiled.

The media took Sandmann’s smile as a racist smirk. The New York Times ran the headline, “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous Peoples March.” This was an outright lie, but even when the Times later corrected it, they changed “mob” to “surround,” based on Phillips’ false claim that he had been “encircled” and that Sandmann “blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat.”

Also, the insinuation that the boys had attended the Indigenous Peoples March to harass Native Americans remained in the “corrected” headline.

After the scandal broke, the communications director for Covington Catholic High School released a statement apologizing to Phillips rather than to Sandmann. Then the school and the Diocese of Covington apologized to Phillips and condemned Sandmann’s behavior, saying they were considering his expulsion.

People called for the boys to be doxxed. Others sent death threats to the students’ families. The school had to close down for days due to the threats. But then the bishop of the Covington Diocese found his wits and apologized to Sandmann, saying they should not have allowed themselves “to be bullied and pressured into making a statement prematurely.”

Later, a longer video was released showing that Phillips had been the antagonizer, getting in Sandmann’s face while Sandmann had merely stood there, smiling. People began to realize Phillips had been completely lying about what happened, and that he had tried to intimidate a group of minors simply for being white conservatives, all while ignoring the seething racism directed at his group from several black men.

Phillips had also lied about himself, repeatedly claiming to be a Vietnam veteran when in fact he had only served four years as a U.S. Marine Corps Reservist, was never deployed to Vietnam, and was later discharged as an E-1 private after disciplinary issues. It was also later reported Phillips has a violent criminal record, having been charged with assault, escaping from prison, and multiple alcohol-related crimes.

“I’m a Vietnam vet,” he said. “I don’t talk much about my Vietnam times. I usually say I don’t recollect. I don’t recall those years.”

Not long after the incident, Vogue ran a puff piece on Phillips with the headline “The Power of Nathan Phillips’s Song,” which began, “I am honored to know the Omaha Nation elder and activist Nathan Phillips.”

The author writes that when she saw Phillips get in Sandmann’s face, she was “livid, disgusted, and ashamed for this country” But not because of the aggressive and arguably racist behavior of Phillips, of course. No, like much of the rest of liberal media, she blamed Sandmann. She even described how Sandmann was “inches from Phillip’s face,” without saying it was Phillips and not Sandmann who got so close. Nor did she make any mention of Phillip’s criminal history, but she did repeat the lie that he served in Vietnam, although her editors later issued a correction.

I spoke to Sandmann to ask what was going through his mind at the time, having wondered myself whether I would have been so calm and collected after being verbally assaulted by a bunch of racists and then having some jackass beat a drum in my face. Many guys would not have the poise to simply stand there and smile.

“My smile was a combination of two responses,” Sandmann told me. “The first reaction I had was to try and communicate in some way that I was friendly and there was no need to have a tense situation.”

Ernest Hemingway once defined courage as “grace under pressure,” and I can think of no better illustration of such grace than a teenage boy offering a Buddhist-like smile as a grown man gets up in his face face and another man, also in his face, loudly beats a drum. The air that day was charged with racial tension, especially because of the gross behavior by the Black Hebrews but also because of Phillips and his friends. There are so many different ways this could have gone wrong, possibly even ending in physical violence, and on some level, I am sure Sandmann understood that, and yet his response was to stand firm and smile. That’s courage.

“As the encounter continued,” he told me of his smile, “it became somewhat of a manifestation of my nervousness. It was completely odd and unprecedented in my school experience and things felt wrong.”

Five years later, things still feel wrong, and now many of us are now wearing nervous smiles. In the wake of the scandal, mainstream media outlets tripped over themselves to give Phillips a chance to tell his side of the story. Sandmann and his family filed lawsuits against The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major media outlets, accusing them of defamation. But a lower court and the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Phillips’s lies were a matter of opinion.

In Sandmann's appeal to the Supreme Court, his lawyer said the case has “come to epitomize the high-water mark of the cancel culture,” adding that Sandmann went from being an “anonymous teenager into a national social pariah” and that his peaceful, if somewhat nervous, smile “became a target for anger and hatred.”

It’s enough to make your blood boil. But if that doesn’t do the job, the next smile I tell you about surely will. Last month month in the parking lot of a Giant Eagle in North Olmstead, just outside of Cleveland, Ohio, a black woman named Bionca Ellis stabbed a 3-year-old boy named Julian in the face and back as he sat in a shopping cart. When the mother tried to pull him out, Ellis stabbed her too. The child did not survive.

In court, the mother and father appeared to ask the judge to set the bail as high as possible. Bail was set at $5 million. As the father was making this request, barely holding back his tears, Ellis stood nearby with a smile on her face that can only be described as psychopathic, demonic, and pure evil.

And yet there was no national outrage over this sadistic grin. Major news outlets did not obsess over the story. They did not give the parents lavish coverage. They did not accuse Ellis of racism. They did not describe her smile in detail, analyzing what it could have possibly meant. For the most part, they even bother to cover the story at all.

Cleveland 19 News, News 5 Cleveland, Fox News, and ABC covered the story. But over at The New York Times, not even a whisper. The Washington Post covered it, but focused on the fact that Ellis’s bail had been set so high. And that was it. The rest was crickets.

Of course, had this been a white perpetrator and a black child, we would be hearing of nothing else for the next several months. There might even be major protests. Indeed, there might be riots. People would claim this horrific act is representative of whiteness writ large, or that all black parents must be wary of white people in parking lots. And of course, we would be treated to another round of discourse on how America is a white supremacist society.

The lesson to be learned here is not that we should indulge in the same racial hysteria that we were treated to during the Covington Catholic scandal. Or that we have been treated to on a variety of issues for years now. The lesson is that this inconsistency in the media reveals a larger truth that demands our attention. As the Dutch minister Hermann Friedrich Kohlbrügge once wrote on the subject of hypocrisy, “We reject the pharisaical sanctity, which is but a covering of shame, under which sin has free play.”