Why the Covington Kids Were Deemed Guilty

"Let's not forget - this entire event happened because a group of boys went on a school-sanctioned trip to protest against a woman's right to her own body and reproductive healthcare. It is not debatable that bigotry was at play from the start."

The Left Is Not Interested In Sharing a Country

John Daniel Davidson is a senior correspondent at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Texas Monthly, The Guardian, First Things, the Claremont Review of Books, The LA Review of Books, n+1, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

After days of outrage and condemnations, the Covington affair has revealed a disturbing bigotry among far too many media figures and outlets on the left.At a few days' remove from the Covington Catholic High School incident at the Lincoln Memorial,The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and dozens of lesser news organizations that condemned the high schoolers from Kentucky have not retracted or walked back their initial, warped narrative: that racist white teens harassed an elderly Native American man.Nor will there be any public contrition from many individual members of the media who were in the vanguard of the online mob. CNN's Reza Aslan tweeted an image of one of the boys and asked, "Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid's?" Filmmaker Michael Green tweeted the same image with the comment, "A face like that never changes. This image will define his life. No one need ever forgive him."Same for James Fallows at The Atlantic, who initially compared the high schoolers to Arkansas segregationists in the 1950s then doubled down, noting thatAlthough some journalists have recanted at length, and others have apologized and deleted their early, emotionally charged reactions, plenty of others have not and will not . They believe that whatever the video footage actually reveals about the incident- specifically, thatafter they had been harassed by a bizarre racist group called the Black Hebrew Israelites - is irrelevant to what they say is the larger point: that "privileged" white teenage boys who wear MAGA hats are racist bigots and deserve no mercy.The Covington kids are certainly getting none. They and their families have been doxxed, harassed, and threatened for days on end. On Tuesday, Covington Catholic High School was closed over security concerns.It's hard not to see the parallels here to the Brett Kavanaugh affair, the Rolling Stone-UVA rape hoax, and the Duke Lacrosse scandal.They were guilty not based on the facts of what happened, they were guilty because of who they were: supposedly privileged white males.The Covington high schoolers were in this sense the perfect villain for the social justice outrage mob. Not only were they mostly white, male, and Catholic, the entire reason they were in Washington was to attend the annual March for Life. As noted cultural commentator Alyssa Milano put it Bigotry is what now animates the unrepentant members of the media like Deadspin's Laura Wagner, who describes the "visibly aggressive teens" as "draped in racist, misogynist paraphernalia." Bigotry is what's behind comments like those of Mollie O'Reilly of Commonweal magazine, who declared , "You don't let your kid wear a MAGA hat and then act offended when they get taken for a racist."These are not the thoughts and feelings of people who want to share a republic and live in peace with their political opponents. If opposing abortion or supporting the president marks you out as a bigot and a racist, then civic comity is impossible, there is nothing left to say, no way to compromise or live and let live. The only thing that's possible is a zero-sum contest of brute strength. The only thing left to do is silence or destroy your enemy.This is the meaning behind another recent social justice pile-on that has received much less news coverage. Karen Pence, wife of Vice President Mike Pence, was denounced last week as the embodiment of hate and intolerance for having the temerity to teach art part-time at a small Christian academy in Northern Virginia called Immanuel Christian School. Pence's crime is that the K-8 academy's employment contract contains a provision asserting that marriage is between one man and one woman, "a single, exclusive covenant union as delineated in Scripture."The existence of an unremarkable contract that affirms what all orthodox Christians believe was first reported as news by HuffPo. It quickly had the desired effect. CNN's John King wondered aloud whether the second lady should continue to receive Secret Service protection. Lady Gaga interrupted a set in Las Vegas to aver that the Pences are the "worst representation of what it means to be a Christian." The Washington Post found a professor to tut-tut about how Immanuel Christian School embraces creationism and therefore can't lay claim to orthodox beliefs about marriage: "They cannot have their orthodoxy and eat it, too."And you don't apologize to bigots. You destroy them.