This isn’t news.

I hadn't followed it that carefully I guess but it was news to me. I'd assumed they were heckling a performance but Phillips says his performance was over and he was playing the drum as an intervention.

The situation is more complex than the original clip—the group of Black men sounded like street crazies, but the boys chaperones allowed them to react. It was pretty loud. Phillips decided to get between them

I step in between X and Y to prevent an altercation and X makes fun of me. How does that absolve X?

If you're a MAGAt, the boys were the victims.

If you hate the MAGAt's, what the boys did was fucked up.

I really think no 'news' is likely to change that unless Phillips were to come out and say he purposefully harassing the boys because he hates whites, which I rather doubt is going to happen. Or the boy does/admits the converse.

The NPR interviewer tried to get a clearer statement but Phillips didn't clarify. It was kind of surprising to hear.

describe the events coherently.

Occam's Razor suggests the MAGA protester's intentions weren't noble.

And his gang didn't need to surround and jeer the Natives.

They were being little shits.

To be clear. I'm just sayin, it would take much more extraordinary news than this to change anyone's feelings or 'side' about it ... than hearing that Phillips was, in effect, defending the group of 5 from the group of 100+.

To a MAGAt, this may seem somehow exonerating for the boys, but they already thought the boys victims. To the rest of us, it is not. But we already think the boys the aggressors.

We're right, but no minds are changed either way.

OTOH, they ARE children, and likely EXTREMELY freaking sheltered children being brought up by lame parents (by our thinking anyway) at that. They really probably should've never even there in the first place, and the school has considerable blame IMHO for poor chaperoning of these minors.

It's ironic that participants in a "March For Life" had such little concern for the dignity of the living.

If you're a MAGAt, you have to try to twist yourself into racist pretzels to make the boys the victims.

If you hate the MAGAts, you're right to hate these fucking pricks that are destroying America and making racism great again... and you're on the right side of history.

That's the correct take. Anything else is an exercise in the most vile form of bothsiderism.

And I agree with your assessment

?

Obviously, to people on scene, the boys needed to be calmed down. It was probably because they came so close to the BI men (BI men never moved an inch, no matter who they were arguing with that day. I wondered whether it was strict compliance with a permit to demonstrate, or just self-imposed discipline). No matter how ugly their speech was, the BI men never moved an inch towards anyone they were taunting. (They were taunting everyone that day, not just the MAGAhats. Partly racist and anti-gay hate speech and Old Testament fire and brimstone)(we are all going to die because we don't live the commandments)(The black equivalent of Westboro Baptists). The MAGAhats did not get (or ignored) the difference between words and getting in someone's personal space.

Interesting that Phillips came to the rescue of the men who were taunting his group along with all others. He did not perceive the BI as a threat to him or to others. The power of the MAGAhat is that we all assume that these kids will be violent. The wearing of the hat tells us that they are brown shirts.

I have to admit that the looks on the faces of the kids when they were called "school shooters" was worth watching the video for over one hour. Some of those kids stopped dead in their tracks. I don't think they ever perceived themselves as a threat to society. (It's always the Other). The kids looked intelligent. I think a lot of what the BI man was saying was sinking in. Hearing that their priests were all child molesters must have opened their eyes, too. Hearing other people's "truths" (Nathan Phillips's word) can sometimes open our eyes.

If you go to school in New York, or even in Macon, Georgia, where I went to high school, our teachers probably would have asked us on the bus: What did we learn? What speech was offensive? What part of the speech got you to think about something in a way you would not have thought before? Unfortunately, the taunting of the Native American was the default mode the boys fell back on. It's what they've been taught to do to express their superiority.