The internet nearly broke yesterday as a clip of Omaha tribe member Nathan Phillips standing toe to toe with a smirking boy wearing a MAGA hat went viral. The image of Phillips calmly playing a drum and singing while surrounded by a chanting, mocking mob of almost entirely white, male, high school students quickly became a stand-in for white supremacy under the Trump administration.

By this morning, every major news agency including The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and The Guardian had run stories about the incident, and videos of the event had been shared millions of times on Facebook and Twitter. Rare was the politician or celebrity who hadn’t weighed in condemning the boys’ behavior. But nearly every lesson drawn by liberals from this event is wrong, and the narrative being spun out is already one that incorrectly reinforces mainstream, liberal talking points.

1. The high school boys’ behavior wasn’t ‘extra wrong’ because Phillips is a veteran. “This veteran put his life on the line for our country” tweeted Representative Deb Haaland. “Yes, the high school boys were taunting an American veteran” wrote Sarah Quinlan on conservative news website RedState (emphasis hers). According to the Post and the Times, Phillips was a combatant in the Vietnam War, an event that objectively ranks as one of the bloodiest events of state-sponsored terrorism in the 20th century with over 600,000 civilian deaths including an estimated 84,000 children. Even the shallowest of investigations into Vietnam reveals an illegal war, fought over fabricated pretenses that involved the intentional targeting of civilians. The use of defoliant Agent Orange by the US is reported to have killed an additional 500,000 in Vietnam since the war ended, with another 650,000 suffering from chronic conditions as a result. While an argument can and should be made that American soldiers in this war were victims of US imperialism as well, holding them up as heroes worthy of extra-special attention or consideration only perpetuates a rampant, out-of-control militarism in this country.

2. The focus and praise on Phillips’ use of non-violence in this instance is an attempt by liberal commentators to control the narrative, and create ‘right and wrong’ classes of resistance that help in managing oppressed and potentially insurgent populations. Within hours of videos of the incident going viral, liberal observers were heaping praise on Phillips for his use of non-violent methods. One post on Facebook that was shared 82,000 times as of this writing, proclaimed “Instead of sharing those red-hat miscreants, I share and lift up this warrior of peace”. Another, shared 7.8 thousand times, stated “I honor Elder Nathan Phillips for choosing to be a peaceful warrior in the face of an arrogant child’s cowardly disrespect.” Though the authors of both of these posts are themselves native, the ones sharing them, as judged by my social media streams this morning, were largely white liberals.

To be explicitly clear, the issue is not with Phillips’ use of non-violent tactics in this situation. He was there on the ground, we were not. It is his struggle as a native, not mine as a descendant of European colonizers. As with any oppressed people, we should support whatever tactics he deems necessary. But I do take issue with the infantilizing insistence that non-violence is always the correct tactic to use in the face of oppression, or that it the prerogative of white, liberal commentators to pass judgement on whether a particular instance of resistance was correctly used or not. Given that tomorrow is Martin Luther King day it is only appropriate to cite one of his most famous (and famously misused) passages: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate,, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

3. Phillips was not a victim in this situation, and the attempts of liberals to paint him as such undercuts his entire effort. As reactionary YouTubers, Twitter influencers, and websites have been quick to point out, Phillips was the one to initiate contact with the group of over privileged, MAGA-hat wearing private high schoolers. Though certainly more of the story will emerge over the coming days (there appear to be dozens of hours of footage captured of the event, with some clips extending for over an hour), the event seems to have started when Phillips observed the boys surrounding a group of four black men, identified by Phillips as Black Hebrew Israelites. In a quote from the Detroit Free Press Phillips recounts what happened: “They were in the process of attacking these four black individuals. I was there and I was witnessing all of this … As this kept on going on and escalating, it just got to a point where you do something or you walk away, you know? You see something that is wrong and you’re faced with that choice of right or wrong.”

Videos, now being shared by right-wing websites then show Phillips and a small group of mostly native followers, approaching the boys while singing an American Indian Movement song and playing drums. Scott Adams, disgraced cartoonist and white-supremacist apologist, was then in a position to post a video where he claimed that the true victims here were the white high schoolers, and that the narrative had been fully flipped by the ‘mainstream media.’ This illustrates perfectly a problem of the liberals’ own making. If we create a situation in which the only acceptable forms of resistance are passive, non-violent, expressions of victimhood, then just by taking an active, confrontational, aggressive, or even militant stance we give up the high ground and invite condemnation from all sides.

The correct course to have taken from the outset here would have been to celebrate Phillips’ agency in this situation, and to acknowledge that he made the first move. That this didn’t happen, and that his actions as the initiator will almost certainly be down-played by liberals and touted by reactionaries in the days that come, feels like a deeply painful repetition of history. In some of the most commonly posted memes on social media, Phillips’ confrontation with this group of future Brett Kavanaughs is compared to the lunch counter sit ins of the 1960s. The irony is heavy here, but at its most potent we can see today in the insistence by liberals on respectable forms of protest a reflection of the vicious condemnations of the lunch counter sit-ins, also by liberals, who feared they would certainly lead to violent disaster.

4. The oppression of native peoples does not begin and end with MAGA-hat wearing white faces performing racism for a national audience. And we will not eliminate the effects of colonization by eliminating its most visible, viral outward manifestations. While native peoples are living 5 less years of life on average, and experiencing rates of poverty at more than double that of their European colonizers, any attempt to hang their ongoing oppression on Donald Trump can only be considered deliberately misleading. The most violent act of militarized state aggression against a native tribe in recent memory occurred under our most progressive leader of modern days, it will be remembered.

Nathan Phillips is a hero, of that there is no doubt. And the privileged white boys, wearing red MAGA hats surrounding him, singing their private school fight songs, are an apt stand-in for the future, and past, and of American white supremacy. But the lessons to be learned from the incident‑that oppressed peoples are constantly exercising their own agency outside of the control of their oppressors, that non-violence is just one tactic amongst many, that veteran-status in the US military should not confer extra-special consideration (to the contrary), and that systemic, racist oppression is not limited to video clips of angry white boys-these lessons will almost certainly only be available to those willing to look deeper than the liberal, social-media pile-on.

From Gaza, to Ferguson, to Standing Rock (where Phillips also was an active participant), the correct path is always to stand in solidarity with the liberation struggles of oppressed peoples everywhere, learning from them, supporting wherever possible, and following their lead.