Nathan Phillips is fast wearing out his more-than-15-minutes of fame. But before he goes off our radar screen—and the next ramped-up Twitter brouhaha comes our way—I must point out something I think is important but which has been almost totally ignored even by the right and by the defenders of the Covington students.

I’ve read an awful lot about the Covington incident and Phillips’ role in it. Left and right are in profound disagreement, of course, about most of it. But there is one “narrative” about which many on both left and right seem to agree, and that is that people initially came to conclusions based on the first short video, and that the left hated Sandmann and the other boys based on people’s perceptions of that video, amplified by discussions on social media and in the press.

So even if you think the Covington teens were innocent and the rage against them obscene, you tend to think that rage was a reaction to the first video and the press and all the other viewers and tweeters who were similarly rage-filled.

The role of Phillips himself was (and still is) felt by the right to be the following: that he purposely stirred up the initial face-to-face confrontation, that he lied about his military service, lied when he stated the boys had said “build the wall,” lied when he said they had approached and surrounded him, and that he also omitted the details of the racial and other slurs the boys (and the Native Americans) had endured coming from the Black Israelites. And the media gave Phillips a forum for repeating those influential lies.

However, what’s being almost completely ignored even on the right (the NY Post is just about alone in mentioning it, and they don’t emphasize it much at all) are Phillips’ most vicious lies, told quite early in the game (I’ll get to what they were in a minute). These particular lies probably had a big role in shaping people’s perceptions of the boys and helped to spur their widespread demonization.

It was Phillips himself who quite early on, during his Saturday interview with CNN that set the original tone and was widely disseminated, gave the following description of the Covington boys:

It looked like these young men were going to attack [the Black Israelites]. They were going to hurt them. They were going to hurt them because they didn’t like the color of their skin. They didn’t like their religious views. They were just here in front of the Lincoln — Lincoln is not my hero, but at the same time, there was this understanding that he brought the (Emancipation Proclamation) or freed the slaves, and here are American youth who are ready to, look like, lynch these guys. To be honest, they looked like they were going to lynch them. They were in this mob mentality.

That is not some disagreement about who went up to whom, or whether the wall was mentioned by the boys, or what caps some of them wore. This is an extremely defamatory statement by a political agitator, designed to shape perceptions that the boys were vicious racists with a killer instinct. The language is purposefully inflammatory and of the harshest variety.

It is a lie, and unless Phillips is clinically insane and out of touch with reality (something I don’t believe is the case), it is a knowing and purposeful lie about a bunch of teenagers who were minding their own business. It is a lie so egregious, so foul, that I really lack words to describe the depth and depravity of that lie.

And as far as I can see, just about everyone is ignoring it now.

The lie wasn’t a one-off, either. This incredibly misleading article in Rolling Stone (written that same Saturday) is typical of reactions to the incident as well as to another statement by Phillips that he gave (in an interview with the Detroit Free Press) on Saturday [emphasis mine]:

“There was that moment when I realized I’ve put myself between beast and prey,” Phillips told the Detroit Free-Press. “These young men were beastly and these old black individuals [the Black Israelites] was their prey, and I stood in between them and so they needed their pounds of flesh and they were looking at me for that.”

So that saintly elder Nathan Phillips, casting himself as peacemaker, defames the boys once again, in terms designed to inflame the left into a frenzy of hatred against them as beasts preying on innocent black people. And the left (and some on the right) bought his peacemaker-against-beasts story, perhaps because of his Native American status and because his demeanor while telling the story fed into some other stereotypes that he, as an activist, was well aware they held.

Note also the literary reference (although I’m not sure how conscious it was on Phillips’ part) in speaking of “their pounds of flesh,” which is an old anti-Semitic trope from “The Merchant of Venice” that has passed into the common vernacular for describing a vengeful, bloodthirsty (and also money-hungry) person.

Why is practically no one highlighting these words of Phillips? He certainly did his bit, and then some, to set the story and release the howling Twitter dogs. Of course, people on Twitter—and especially the newspeople who pushed all of this further into the spotlight, never questioning Phillips’ statements but simply broadcasting them—were fully responsible for what they themselves did and said. My point is that Nathan Phillips was a very active and involved leader in setting the extreme tone of the demonization “narrative.”

If not for that long video that finally emerged (ironically, as a result of the Black Israelites taking it and posting it), Phillips’ pernicious and poisonous narrative would have carried the day. As it is, his narrative continues to override reality for many many people. And that is also with the assistance of the MSM, including Savannah Guthrie’s gentle, respectful later interview of him (a contrast to her challenging one of Sandmann) that failed to question Phillips on a single one of his lies. Rather, she let him continue to spread his narrative as he wished.

The evidence indicates that Phillips is an activist hatemonger who should be sued, but unfortunately he has shallow pockets and is therefore probably safe from lawsuit. I also believe it likely that someone and/or some activist group is guiding and financing him, and I hope the truth about that will be revealed as time goes on.

But my question remains: why is this portion of the story not being emphasized, even by those on the right who are highly critical of Phillips? Are they afraid of being demonized themselves for pointing out the obvious, if it reflects even more poorly on a man who’s been lionized by the left and the media? Or have they just forgotten those quotes of his because they’ve been buried in a sea of other verbiage?