Now the Covington 'Blackface' Video Liberals Loved Has Just Blown Up in Their Faces Too
The establishment media just can’t seem to catch a break.
OK, that’s not entirely true. They can — they’re just so blinded by their own narratives that they keep tripping over themselves.
Over the past few days, the media beclowned themselves by pushing a now-debunked story about Covington Catholic High School. Teenagers from that Kentucky school, as you probably know by now, were accused of racism and mocking a Native American man after one of the boys — gasp! — smiled while wearing a pro-Trump hat.
When numerous videos emerged, it quickly became clear that many of the breathless headlines were not just wrong, but bordered on slander. Nearly all of the core claims were false: The Catholic boys didn’t surround the Native American man, and actually tried to distance themselves from a hateful racist group that was nearby.
But those facts didn’t stop leftists from flying into a frenzy, with some well-known names trying to ruin the kids’ lives with everything from suspensions to actual death threats. The school was forced to close in the face of those security risks.
Then the narrative fell apart even further. After countless outlets reported that the native man was a Vietnam veteran, facts came out showing that this wasn’t true. Not only had he never been to Vietnam, he was a known political activist who seemed to revel in mixing it up with protesters.
There’s more. The left scrambled to pretend that Covington boys using a common basketball hand signal was racist, and was quickly embarrassed by numerous photos of professional players — many of them black — doing the exact same thing during games.
You’d think that after all those eggs in their faces, the media would take a deep breath and learn their lesson. But no.
Yet another claim being spread by left-leaning outlets — that the Covington school used racist blackface to explicitly mock African Americans — has just been debunked by video.
“SEE IT: Covington Catholic High students in blackface at past basketball game,” New York Daily News declared in a headline on Monday.
“The photo depicts several white students, some in blackface, shouting at an opposing black player,” that outlet continued, before admitting that “the photo’s origins couldn’t be verified.” Journalism!
Left-leaning fact-checking site Snopes implied that the claim of students wearing blackface to mock African Americans had been verified.
“A photograph shows a Covington Catholic High School basketball game with students wearing blackface and/or black body paint in the stands,” that site declared, giving a giant “true” check-mark to the claim.
Here’s the problem: There’s a huge difference between “wearing blackface” and “wearing black body paint,” a distinction which Snopes apparently didn’t think was important.
It turns out that the black-clad students were taking part in the school’s spirit section during sporting events, during which fans were encouraged to dress up for various themes to fire up the crowd.
Black was just one color of several that the cheering section used, with students also painting themselves in other colors such as white and blue as part of the school spirit. There is scant evidence that race had anything to do with this — after all, sometimes a color is just a color.
A “Covington Catholic Colonel Crazies Compilation Video” which is currently on YouTube makes this perfectly clear. The video depicts Covington students doing what almost every school with active sports teams does: participating in different spirit themes while using colors and body paint to support their team.
Portions of the video show Covington fans playfully dressing in togas, while others depict the fans wearing blue face paint.
One of the most important clips of the video shows the same cheering group wearing all white, complete with white body and face paint and blue wigs. Others wore white sailor’s caps. There’s no indication of any racial overtones, just excited teenagers getting into school spirit.
It’s time to stop this faux outrage and tell the truth. Smiling while wearing the president’s campaign hat is not a crime, nor is it racist. Donning various-colored body paints for school spirit isn’t cause to ruin students’ lives and threaten the school — yet that’s exactly what the left is doing.
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