If you are in a public place and someone starts heckling you, are you entitled to heckle back? What if your heckler starts banging a drum in your face? Are you allowed to answer him with a smirk?

I think you are, even if you are wearing a MAGA hat. Even if you’re an entitled brat.

The kids from Covington Catholic HS in Covington, Ky., were ambassadors for causes much bigger than themselves: ­Catholicism and the March for Life. As such, they should have comported themselves better than to jeer and do a tomahawk chop in front of Nathan Phillips , an indigenous man who banged a drum at them in front of the Lincoln ­Memorial on Friday.

Ideally, the kids would have ­ignored him and walked away. ­Until about 10 minutes ago, though, it was broadly agreed in our culture that kids are allowed to do some dumb things because they are kids.

Should these kids’ lives be ruined because some of them ­responded to obnoxious provocation by being a bit rude themselves? I would say their reaction was, if anything, more restrained than you would expect from teenagers.

Phillips, on the other hand, is an adult, and he repeatedly lied about what happened to The Washington Post and other prestige outlets, which reported ­everything he said uncritically.

It would have been revolting if Phillips had been minding his own business doing a tribal chant while a gang of kids swarmed around him and started jeering. That’s what many media outlets reported: “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous Peoples March,” ran a New York Times headline.

That isn’t what happened. Phillips was the aggressor in the situation. It’s a curious feature of our culture that people aggressively seek to be victimized, but here we are. People do that, because they know the media hand out condemnation based on perceived ranking in the victim hierarchy.

“Old Ypsilanti man” is near the top, while “privileged-looking young white male in a MAGA cap” is the absolute bottom.

The surface appeal of the story short-circuited the reporters’ brains to such a degree that they failed to perform basic tasks, such as asking the people they were ­accusing for their version of events. The Times and other outlets had zero evidence that a “mob” “surrounded” Phillips, ­except a claim of Phillips that he has since retracted.

His interviews and the various videos of the incident paint a picture of him saying he is (a) terrified of the Catholic students yet (b) walking right up to and into their group; (a) doing his best to leave yet (b) pressing forward insistently; (a) trying to go up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial yet (b) not noticing that there is a clear path up those steps 10 feet to his right.

Phillips, who claims to be a former Marine and a Vietnam veteran, told The Detroit Free Press that the Covington kids “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?”

Because naturally, when you see a group of individuals “attacking” another group in a public place where there are lots of police, the proper response when you are a 64-year-old man is not to inform a cop but to take charge of the situation yourself. Go up to the “attackers,” stand toe-to-toe with one of them and start loudly banging a drum in his face.

There is a nearly two-hour video of the incident in which about five black individuals from another outfit called the Black Hebrew ­Israelites shout abuse at Catholics and Trump supporters near the Lincoln Memorial. “You believe in a f - - - ing child molester,” they shout. “Christ is coming back to kick your cracker asses.”

One youth, apparently part of the Covington group, takes off his shirt, leads the group in what looks like a choreographed school cheer, everyone joins in, then most of them sit down or take a knee at about the 1:12 mark. At that point, Phillips emerges from the crowd and walks up to the kids with his drum. The kids get up and start dancing and jumping again.

A lot of people were making videos of the incident. At least one of these videos, it appears, was taken by an ally of Phillips. Yet I haven’t come across a video that shows the Covington kids chanting “build that wall,” as a Washington Post reporter claimed, much less “attacking” black people, as Phillips says.

If you insult someone, and that person insults you back, you don’t get to cry, “Oh my gosh, for no reason whatsoever I’ve just been insulted!”

Nathan Phillips went out seeking to create an incident, and he fooled The New York Times and The Washington Post into accepting his false version of it.

Kyle Smith is the critic-at-large for National Review, from which the article was adapted.