Thread by @asymmetricinfo

Okay guys, new year, new tweet storms. It's time to talk Covington Catholic. washingtonpost.com/opinions/adult…

Pull up a chair. I think we're going to be here a while.

The overwhelming majority of the comments on this column fell into the category of litigating what happened on the Mall last Friday. So okay, let's litigate this.

First let's get the timeline on the ground. A video goes viral seeming to show a group of kids surrounding a lone Native American activist who is banging a drum. Kids are wearing MAGA hats, screaming, and generally looking uncomfortably like a lynch mob working itself up.

My paper, the Washington Post, locates the activist. He describes being taunted by March for Life People as another protest, the Indigenous Peoples' March, is breaking up. Chants of "Build the Wall" and other unpleasantness. He decides to remove himself to the Lincoln Memorial

Nathan Phillips, the activist, is on his way to the memorial when Nick Sandmann, aka The Smirker, blocks his way. The kids have swarmed around him, cutting off retreat. They're at an impasse. Phillips starts beating his drum and praying, thinking of his late wife.

Then a longer video surfaces, proving pretty incontrovertibly that almost none of this happened.

Were there shouts of "Build the Wall" from March for Lifers? Could be. Was he praying and thinking of his wife? Quite possibly. But he did not get cut off by the group while walking up the steps. He marched straight into the group, past a clear and open path up the steps.

The group had been holding what looks like an impromptu pep rally. They will later explain that they were doing school cheers because *they* were being harassed by the Black Israelites, a black nationalist religious group who was calling them some rather vilel names.

After Phillips arrives, they continue what they had been doing--shouting and jumping up and down--but now in time to the drum. There may be some tomahawk chopping and the kind of fake war songs people do at Kansas City Chiefs games.

I say "May" because we're not talking about a steadycam run by a professional cinematographer accompanied by an IATSE boom mike operator. The audio is terrible. The cameras are shaky, and the angles are weird. The boys were waving their arms long before Phillips arrived.

I cannot distinguish the sounds the boys were making from the actual Native American chants being made by the group of Native American activists walking with Phillips.

I also cannot be sure I'm looking at tomahawk chops rather than what the boys of Covington Catholic lightheartedly imagine to be dance moves, which were being performed long before Phillips waded in. I think I see at least one chop. But not 100% certain.

Phillips focuses on Sandmann; Sandmann doesn't give way. It's not clear to me that Phillips was trying to get him to give way; there's no audio of anyone doing the obvious if they were trying to get through: saying "Excuse me".

Sandmann alternates between smiling and being impassive. He also bites his lip a couple of times, and looks down.

This is obviously not even close to what Phillips said happened, and also, very hard to confuse with Phillips account; the discrepancies are not minor, and it's hard to see how they happened.

Phillips now gives another interview to the Detroit Free Press in which he tells a very different story. Now he was trying to defuse the escalating confrontation between the Black Israelites and the boys.

He does not explain why he thought it would have a calming effect to bang a drum in the faces of the boys. This does not seem to be a technique generally recognized by experts in conflict resolution.

So first, obvious thing: Any piece of information that comes from Phillips should be utterly discounted. Journalists do not rely on sources who tell two different versions of major events in quick succession, after video has disproven the first account. For obvious reasons.

I can't say whether he was lying, as Kyle Smith has alleged, or whether he was simply confused. It doesn't matter. He's totally unreliable.

So what do we see if we look at the longer context? We see a group of boys who are doing cheers, and an older man who strides into their group to bang a drum. We see boys who are smiling and cheering. They're not spewing racist insults.

They're just standing on the steps. Eventually they leave. According to Sandmann, who will later hire a PR firm and release a statement, they left because the bus they'd been told to wait for on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial arrived.

Of course, that's not all some people see. Some people see The Smirk.

So let's talk about the many, many people who claim, from a short, badly filmed video that a kid is smirking rather than, as he says, nervously smiling because he has no idea what's going on and is trying to stay unconfrontational.

I believe they believe they "can tell". This is, unfortunately, not true.

People are just not that good at reading other people, particularly out of context, particularly people they don't know. If they were, then society would look very different, because you could always spot liars and you'd never have to wonder about someone else's motives.

Can we read someone's body language and facial expression with better-than-chance accuracy? Yes. Is it anywhere near 100% accurate. No. Not even close to that. And the most reliable emotion to read is "amusement", not "superciliousness".

That's because most facial expressions are to some extent culturally constructed, even though we learn them so early we think they're innate reflections of our inner emotional state. They're not. And may expressions mirror quite different emotional states.

Try putting on your "Joyous surprise" face. Now try putting on your "horrified fear" face. You'll probably find they're quite similar: wide open mouth, wide eyes, eyebrows raised, sharp intake of breath.

You get my point; I won't belabor it. We rely on social context, cultural context, and our knowledge of the person to read expressions. The more distant you are on these axes from a person, the less accurate your read.

For example, lots of people smile funny for one reason or another--they have bad teeth (or used to), they have funny facial anatomy, neck problems, etc. If they're a stranger to you, you don't know. Period.

So if you admit there's at least a possibility that you cannot accurately detect the difference between a "smirk" and a "nervous smile" in someone you have never met, what are you left with?

You know what you're left with. The hats.

In a very high percentage of the interactions I have had on this topic, this is where people retreat: they were still wearing the hats. So we *know* they're horrible racists; we don't need to know anything else.

I'm not going to litigate whether one can wear a MAGA hat without being a horrible racist. It's pointless; no one changes their mind. So let's just grant, arguendo, that Red Hat Bad.

But is it impossible that someone could wear a red hat and also not threaten a Native American activist? We don't even have to argue about whether they inevitably will do threatening racist things. We can just ask, is it possible that maybe today they're tired and don't?

Can we agree that the Bad Red Hat is not a robotic mind control device operated by a movie supervillain? That wearers could still smile nervously, knowing they're being filmed, without doing anything malicious *on one particular day?"

I think if we're not lunatics we have to agree that it is possible to put a red hat on your head and not be automatically compelled to commit acts of overt racism while your are very obviously being filmed by multiple people, most of them members of minority groups.

Which means you cannot prove that he must have been committing an act of overt racism simply by pointing to the hat. You need something else, something less ambiguous than "I don't like his smile".

You also can't rely on the account of an incredibly unreliable witness. Which leaves us with not enough evidence to convict Sandmann, even in the court of public opinion.

Now, let me address some counterpoints.

Q) If you can't see why those hats *are* an act of overt racism then you're part of the problem!

A) I said we were going to bracket that particular unwindable argument. But here's the thing: the boys were not accused of wearing MAGA hats

That video didn't go viral because some boys were wearing MAGA hats while performing school cheers. None of us has sufficient hours in our day to watch videos of all the boys in America who wear MAGA hats while doing school cheers.

I myself think Trump's pandering to racism, his loaded and coded language, are immoral and corrosive. I think his supporters are, at best, ignoring or underweighting the grave moral errors of their candidate.

But I don't think that "wearing a MAGA hat" is in the same class as "surrounding an elderly Native American man and implicitly threatening him". I don't believe anyone else thinks those two offenses are of the same magnitude, either.

And when it becomes clear that the former *did not happen*, it is distressing to watch apparently sane adults claim that *nothing* has changed, that *no revision* of their earlier judgment is required, which is to say--that those two things *are* the same.

This is a frankly ridiculous statement, and no one would dare try to make it explicitly. Not with a straight face.

Q) What about the *other* videos? You need to watch them and realize how wrong you are!

A) I have watched everything that people seem to have in mind when they talk about "the other videos". I have watched so much video. I have bingewatched the Complete Nathan Phillips, Season 1

The "other videos" are, for the uninitiated, largely four:

1) A shorter video of The Event from a different angle.

2) A video of boys, allegedly from CCA, offensively catcalling a woman that day

3) A Youtube dissection claiming to prove that Sandmann moved to block Phillips.

4) A video of a 2012 CCA game involving blackface.

Video #1 changes nothing, although it does contain a clip of a member of Phillips' entourage further undercutting his story. She seems to imply that they are targeting the boys, not trying to calm things down, and that they are being targeted because of their politics.

Video #2 is too brief and badly focused to identify the boys as being from Covington Catholic. And no, they were probably not the only young men near there wearing MAGA hats that day, nor do I believe that the woman who took it can make a reliable ID from that brief encounter.

People frequently misidentify the people who physically assaulted them, over a much longer time period than that encounter. Eyewitness testimony is incredibly unreliable, and it is especially prone to being contaminated by wall-to-wall media coverage.

Video #3 demonstrates why amateurs should attempt forensic video analysis only with extreme trepidation. The narrator seems not to understand that if the camera moves, it can make things being recorded look like *they've* moved. And the camera is moving.

Video #4: Covington Catholic obviously needs some sensitivity training. To be clear, this wasn't intended as a "blackface" event; apparently, they like to paint their bodies different colors for sporting events.

But by 2012, they should have understood why "black" cannot be one of the colors you paint your body, for the same reason that people do not paint that beautiful Sanskrit symbol, the swastika, on their doors. The action has taken on a dreadful historical implication.

And at least one kid does seem to be aiming for a minstrel costume. NOT OKAY.

That said, this would have taken place when Sandmann was 10 or 11. It doesn't convict him of anything. Collective guilt is not an American value, or indeed a value of any decent society.

Does Covington Catholic have some work to do on cultural sensitivity? I think they do. But again, "cultural insensitivity", while bad, and in this case I should say inexcusable, is not the same thing as "surrounding and jeering at a lone elderly minority in a threatening manner"

If you have retreated to "The school seems to be insufficiently attuned to the dangers of racism and the need to be sensitive to non-white concerns", then you have retreated to "I owe Nick Sandmann an apology."

Because let's remember what happened to Sandmann, the abuse that was heaped on him. The guy fantasizing about feeding him headfirst into a woodchipper, and more realistically, the ones fantasizing about how he'd be denied college admissions and functionally unemployable.

Those are not appropriate punishments for "attended a school that needs some sensitivity training, wore a MAGA hat, smiled funny."

Yet these things may well happen anyway to him, because social media went berserk over much worse imagined offenses.

Which brings me to the last question I always get, whenever I write about some contretemps that catches one side or another in, let us say, Not a Good Look.

That question is "Why would you even write about this?" and the assumed answer is "I just hate you guys so much, I need to broadcast your flaws as broadly as I can."

That isn't why I wrote this.

I started as a blogger. And the lesson of all internet-speed communication is: the quicker you react, the more likely you are to find out you jumped the gun and made an ass of yourself."

I'm not going to do some tired lament about how we need to go back to setting type by hand. The internet is here. We are going to be barraged with incomplete information. We're going to jump the gun. It's lamentable, but then, life sometimes is.

But while I don't think we can avoid bad fast takes, I do think we can avoid the absolutely vicious way these kids were treated.

I wrote about this because of all the people I saw in my social media feeds *glorying* in the fact that Sandmann's life was going to be wrecked.

These aren't activists or journalists. They're random people, friends and acquaintances, who took time out of their Saturday afternoon to fantasize about something bad happening to a total stranger, based on a very short video clip. And I thought "What are we doing to ourselves?"

(Before you ask: do I worry about bad things happening to non-white kids? Yes! Yes, I worry about trying juveniles as adults, which we shouldn't do! Yes, I worry about the fact that affluent white kids get second chances others don't; it's in the first chapter of my book!)

But none of the people I know would ever take a Saturday afternoon to compose a social media fantasy about something horrible happening to a poor minority kid. Like most columnists, I occasionally write about things that thrust themselves into my attention. As this did.

These aren't bad people. But they were behaving like bad people. The sheer viciousness coming from people I know to be fundamentally decent disturbed me enormously.

As did the people who I know to be sane, intelligent professionals who insisted that there was no need to reassess anything when they had more facts, because, hats. The sober journalists straining for isolated details to support a collapsing narrative.

So let me close with three quotes. The first is from Daniel Davies, who will probably not thank me for using it.

"Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance"

He wrote that during the Iraq War, about which he was right and I was occasionally intemperate and uncharitable to my opponents, and also, completely wrong.

Fighting racism is a good cause. It is a GREAT cause. It does not require us to believe things that are not true. And it cannot afford for us to believe things that aren't true.

Which brings me to the second quote, from science fiction writer Robert Heinlein:

"I tell you this, once a man gets a reputation as a liar, he might as well be struck dumb, for people do not listen to the wind."

And the third quote, rather lengthy, is from CS Lewis:

"Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out ..."

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Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?

"If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils."

And that, in short--or rather, in long--is why I wrote that column.

I close with a reminder that this is not a restatement of my column; it's ancillary material that didn't fit. The column is here: washingtonpost.com/opinions/adult…

And please do read it. Also, hug someone.

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