Ep. 283 - The Kids Are Alright
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
180.00757
Summary
In the wake of the Covington incident, Michael Knowles takes a look at what the mainstream media, the left, and the Catholic Church have done to a group of teenagers wearing MAGA hats and minding their own business in Washington D.C.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
The mainstream media vent their daddy issues by baselessly smearing teenagers from Covington High School.
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We will analyze the leftist character assassins and the quasi-conservatives who aided and abetted the slander.
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Then, to make two contrived leftist and non-traversies in two days,
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the media assail our very own Ben Shapiro for refusing to murder a baby.
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Finally, Martin Luther King goes to the mountaintop.
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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This Covington High School story, what the media and the left and a lot of conservatives and the Catholic Church
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and what just about everybody has done to these kids who were wearing MAGA hats
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and minding their own business in Washington, D.C., is the most disturbing story that I have seen in a very long time.
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Non-traverses abounding and the child abuse that occurred at the hands of the media,
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at the hands of the Catholic Church, at the hands of many conservative pundits, at the hands of politicians,
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at the hands of this Native American charlatan, Nathan Phillips, at the hands of the black Israelites,
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They're this wacky black supremacist group that, coincidentally, I've actually spent a fair bit of time speaking to in person
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The child abuse that went around at the hands of these people is absolutely repulsive.
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It was the biggest Twitter pile-on mob that I had seen since Friday when they tried to do it to Ben.
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Here is the viral clip that everybody was reacting to, just to give you some context.
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You can see in this clip, what you can see in this clip is this kid is staring at this Native American fellow
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who's banging a drum right in the kid's face, inches from his face,
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and the kid there is just sort of smiling in a bemused way.
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A lot of the kids in the background are just standing around, not doing anything.
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A couple of them are kind of bopping around to the drum beat.
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Some of them are wearing Make America Great Again hats, and that's it.
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And the kid has just got a sort of bemused look on his face.
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I have been there as a political campaign aide.
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I've been there as a speaker where there have been protests or whatever.
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When people come up to you, when crazy people come up to you with drums yelling in your face,
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If you get in his face, that's portrayed as wrong.
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If you push him away from you, that's portrayed as wrong.
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If you're frowning, that looks a little strange.
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So one of the only ways to react is to sort of have a bemused look on your face.
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That shows that you have a bit of sense of humor about politics.
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All of a sudden, people lose their minds over this.
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He ate human brains one time and then talked about it on television.
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He said that he had never seen a more punchable face than this kid.
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He says that's the most punchable face I've ever seen because Reza Aslan has never looked
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Immediately on Twitter, Uber Facts puts up a tweet.
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They say, a group of students from Covington Catholic High School were mocking Nathan Phillips.
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That's the Indian guy, a Vietnam veteran, as he was singing the AIM song during the Indigenous
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Doesn't matter what side of the aisle you're on.
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And then that's where everyone starts piling in.
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So the first question, when you see that real clip, the viral clip is, how did this start?
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Okay, so all we see is this Indian guy and this MAGA kid face to face and the Indian
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Was the Indian guy there minding his own business, banging his drum, doing whatever, and then
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all the kids swarmed around him and this MAGA kid gets right in his face?
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Or were the kids minding their own business and then the Indian guy comes up and gets in
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But to show you how this goes all around the world, how a lie gets around the world before
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the truth can put its pants on, here is just one story from just CNN.
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We are hearing from a Native American elder and Vietnam War veteran speaking to CNN after
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a disturbing viral video shows a group of teens harassing and mocking him in the nation's
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And this was on Friday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial when he saw a clash erupting
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I'm not even saying, unfortunately for these fake news people, for this charlatan Indian
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elder, whatever, Nathan Phillips, and for the black Israelite, black supremacists, unfortunately,
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and for the fake news, unfortunately for them, other people took video.
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See, they didn't think that the whole video would ever come out, so they could have pushed
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But even from just that clip that was going around, do you see the kids taunting the Native
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Actually, the thing that the kid is being criticized for is for not doing anything.
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He's standing there doing nothing with a bemused look on his face while some lunatic named Nathan
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If somebody starts banging a drum in my face, he will not be banging it for very long.
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I would not have the restraint to stand there while some guy is banging some stupid instrument
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This kid showed remarkable restraint, remarkable respect for his elders.
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Would that we all had that sort of reverence and that sort of wherewithal not to do it.
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If I would, I would love to say her name on the air to shame her for what was a truly shameful
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Can anybody get me a photo of the taunting, a clip of the taunting?
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This was on Friday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial when he saw a clash erupting between
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a group of teenage students and four African-American young men preaching about the Bible and oppression.
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Four African-American young men preaching about the Bible and oppression.
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We've got the teenagers who are there wearing MAGA hats waiting for their bus.
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They're by the Lincoln Memorial waiting for their bus to come.
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You've got this Indian guy who's banging a drum in the kid's face.
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You then have this third group just introduced, which are called the Black Israelites or the
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These are guys who I ran into in New York years ago, and I actually got into a long conversation
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They hate everyone but black people, and they think that the blacks are the real Jews.
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They're the fake Jews, and the blacks are the Jews.
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They're the real descendants of the tribes of Israel.
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I actually get kind of a kick out of them because they're spewing this vile racist hatred.
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But then you talk to them, and they're like kind of funny in this quaint.
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They're like a throwback to this era that is gone, this era of kind of crazy, awful race
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And thankfully, we don't really have that anymore.
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So I think there are about 20,000 of these guys in the whole country.
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So when you see them, you just sort of think, huh, thank goodness we don't have that
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And so I have actually talked to these guys at length.
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And I said, what, you don't like me because I'm a white guy?
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They say, well, the white people are the devils.
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So these guys are just lunatics who stand in the street and spout this awful racial rhetoric.
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They're mocking a black kid who went to this high school who was with the group.
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They were saying that the white kids from the school were going to steal the black kids' organs.
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I mean, they're just crazy people that you see in D.C. and New York.
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So the one thing they don't do is preach about the Bible.
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With that racist garbage on, look at these dirty s*** crackers.
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When's the last time you ever seen a Mexican, a Hispanic, a Native American, or a Negro shoot up a school?
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They look like they're about to shoot up a white hat.
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The truth's gonna be told whether y'all want to hear it or not.
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Four young African American men preaching about the Bible.
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That's how CNN reports on the black Israelites.
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So now you have to ask, are the people at CNN, the stupidest people on the face of the earth, totally ignorant of anything?
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These kids should sue them for everything they're worth.
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So CNN now, you've already seen how dishonest this is.
00:13:43.800
They refer to these guys who are calling the white kids animals, calling them slurs for homosexuals, calling them all these awful things, incest babies.
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They refer to them as African-American men preaching about the Bible.
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As though Osama bin Laden, he was just a Middle Eastern man preaching about the Koran.
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You know, Adolf Hitler was just a German fellow preaching about government reform, wasn't he?
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So it actually gets even more dishonest, if you can believe it.
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When I was there and I was standing there and I seen that group of people in front of me and I seen the angry faces and all of that,
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I realized I had put myself in a really dangerous situation, you know.
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It was like, here's a group of people who were angry at somebody else, and I put myself in front of that,
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and all of a sudden, I'm the one who's all that anger and all that wanting to have the freedom to just rip me apart, you know.
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And I'm a Vietnam Times veteran, and I know that mentality of there's enough of us.
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Maybe he could have been ripped apart by the black Israelites.
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And this guy, Nathan Phillips, this charlatan, this liar, goes on television and intentionally lies about these kids.
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Some people are trying to rehabilitate Nathan Phillips in the media.
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He's a liar who went on television and slandered these kids, and they should sue the pants off him, too.
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They should sue him and take his drum with them.
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If he's a Vietnam veteran, thank you for your service.
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Love it whenever anyone goes out and defends my freedom.
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That's a strange phrase, a Vietnam Times veteran.
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And actually, it was Nathan Phillips, the Indian guy with the drum, who approached the kids.
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So this is all being filmed by the black Israelites.
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You can hear the black Israelites in the background because they're the ones filming.
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Here you can see Nathan Phillips is the guy leading the charge, doing something with his voice and then banging on the drum,
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walking straight up to the kids, marching up with them, with the whole posse behind him, a lot of people filming.
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And it was a setup by this lying charlatan named Nathan Phillips, aided and abetted by the mainstream media.
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He says at the end of that clip, he says, it reminded me of the Vietnam Times, this mentality of if there's enough of us, we can do this.
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It's amazing how self-aware that statement is because what he's really talking about is the setup and the sham that he instigated
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that was abetted by everybody else in the media and the conservative movement, the Catholic Church, everybody,
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to set up these kids to lie about what they did, to try to ruin their lives, to try to get them expelled from school explicitly.
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And CNN gives him even more time, even more lies.
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Then Phillips describes the tense moments now being replayed over and over again online when a young man got right in his face.
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When I started going forward in that mass of groups of people started separating and separating and moving aside to allow me to move out of the way
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or to proceed, this young fellow put himself in front of me and wouldn't move.
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And so if I took another step, I would be putting my person into his presence, into his space, and I would have touched him.
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And that would have been the thing that the group of people would have needed to spring on me.
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Can you imagine how vicious and awful these kids could have been in Nathan Phillips's imagination?
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Can you imagine the awful crimes they committed in this lunatic's imagination?
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He said that the kid put himself in Nathan Phillips's space.
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You just saw Nathan Phillips leading all of these other guys directly to the kids.
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He went, he targeted the kids exactly, went right up to them.
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It's not that the kid was in his way and he couldn't get around him.
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If the kid had moved, this lunatic probably would have moved as well.
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And then in his mind, you see, because what the kids did in reality is absolutely nothing other than stand there and not flinch and smile
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and not take the drum, which he probably should have done, and thrown it over the guy's head.
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What happened in Nathan Phillips's imagination is they were just waiting to pounce and rip him apart.
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And CNN pushed it like the narratives that it always does.
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My main takeaway watching this last night, in horror, watching the media pile on, is that Trump was right.
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The fake news media, the media that construct fake narratives, intentionally fake narratives, is the enemy of the people.
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They're trying to ruin these little kids' lives, get them expelled from school.
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The mayor of this town, where the school is from, Covington, the mayor denounced them immediately.
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The diocese, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington, denounced them immediately, said that what they did was contrary to Christianity and the teachings of Christ.
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Here's what Laura Diemer, the spokesman for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington, said.
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So she admits in her stupid statement that she doesn't have any of the facts.
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But they immediately condemn their own kids, their own students.
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And they say that this guy, Nathan Phillips, a total fraud, is some wonderful man.
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Another, a Catholic priest, James Martin, a Jesuit priest.
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He's a very popular on social media, very left-wing.
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Again, no facts, no waiting, no reserve judgment, no who am I to judge that we always hear from our Pope and probably from James Martin himself.
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Quote, I am as disgusted by the contemptuous laughter of the mass of students as I am moved by the quiet dignity of the solitary man who continues to chant.
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Those students could learn much from this elder if they had chosen to or if they choose to.
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Even conservatives, even conservatives piled on.
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The National Review sent out an article immediately.
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It said, the Covington students might as well have spit on the cross.
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Fortunately, National Review took that piece down.
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Finally, they took that piece down when the new video totally exonerated the kids.
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Rod Dreher, Robbie George, a lot of conservatives came out.
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Now, fortunately, those conservatives apologized.
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The difference is the mayor of Covington hasn't apologized.
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He sent out, I think he's archbishop around Louisville.
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He sent out tweets condemning the kids and all that.
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And actually, what Father James Martin did was he just tweeted out, he went on this rant,
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this sort of rambling rant about how there were different perspectives and how can we
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And then he says, quote, this teachable moment can offer us, if we are both open and humble,
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important lessons about racism and marginalization, about dialogue and encounter, and about truth
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and reconciliation during this coming week, which is, believe it or not, Catholic Schools
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He said he would be happy to apologize if, you know, if there's some reason to do it,
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if it turns out they're good and moral Christians.
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He says, if we're open, if we're open and humble enough for the teachable moment, the
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teachable moment is for you, Father Martin, you rushed to judgment.
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You, in your haste to tweet, condemned a group of Catholic school students who did absolutely
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And in fact, who were the only people who behaved appropriately out of all of them, out of the
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charlatan Indian elder, Nathan Phillips, out of the black Israelites spewing hatred at
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The only one, the only group of people to behave well were those students.
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And you don't, you shouldn't use mealy-mouthed platitudes to get out of it and say, oh, there
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And you should apologize for what is actually not a vice unique to you, but was taken up
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It was taken up by politicians, which is this outrageous self-aggrandizement, even at the
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cost of the truth, even at the cost of the reputation of these kids who did nothing wrong.
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The actual teachable moment comes from BuzzFeed, BuzzFeed, Ann Peterson at BuzzFeed, a senior
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culture writer over there, tweeted out, I have watched all the videos.
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You can understand that the situation was more complex than the first video and still recognize
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why the sight of that face caused a visceral reaction in so many.
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It's pretty disgusting, but she's admitting the obvious.
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The left holds a categorical hatred for white men.
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She's not saying the experience of his character.
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The sight of that face and the purely physical characteristics are he's a young white man and
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she hates him because the left hates young white men.
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The left is creating a white racial consciousness.
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All of us, conservatives, left-wingers, we talk about how bad that is.
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I don't want a politics that is primarily racial.
00:25:51.320
Sam Francis, the columnist, predicted this decades ago.
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He said if the left continues to embrace leftist identity politics, they're going to create
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He thought the culture was already too far gone to avoid it.
00:26:11.320
There were tweets going around of a juxtaposition between this kid and Judge Kavanaugh.
00:26:21.960
The worst thing you can be in our intersectional culture is a white guy, according to this
00:26:27.740
That's the worst thing because they're the oppressors.
00:26:32.900
They're the worst people on the face of the earth.
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That's the worst thing you could possibly be in this culture.
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I guess a straight white guy who thinks that he's a male.
00:26:46.340
We have the most important teachable moment in a second.
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The teachable moment here for conservatives and for the clergy is to stop being so self-aggrandizing.
00:28:00.060
The defining sin, I guess the queen of all sins is pride, and it's particularly pronounced in our time.
00:28:07.640
We have pride parades, not just for gay people, for everybody.
00:28:14.360
We have constant self-referential tropes in our culture.
00:28:22.840
And that's why all these guys from the clergy to the diocese of Covington to the conservatives to National Review,
00:28:30.760
which thankfully took down that awful piece, it's all about pride.
00:28:37.180
It's about regardless of the truth, regardless of the facts, regardless of the potential victims here,
00:28:41.460
it's about showing, see, I'm good, I'm really good, I'm better than these people, I'm so good, aren't I good?
00:28:50.220
That's what it's about, and we should take a break from that.
00:28:54.280
It goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.
00:29:09.800
I'll show you how they do it to Ben in a second.
00:29:11.820
But before we cut to the break, I do want to read.
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I'll read it in full because the media won't give this guy airtime.
00:29:34.200
I am providing this factual account of what happened on Friday afternoon at the Lincoln Memorial to correct misinformation and outright lies being spread about my family and me.
00:29:43.480
I am the student in the video who was confronted by the Native American professor.
00:29:52.240
when our buses were due to leave Washington for the trip back to Kentucky.
00:29:56.000
We had been attending the March 4 Life Rally and then had split up into small groups to do sightseeing.
00:30:02.200
When we arrived, we noticed four African-American protesters who were also on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
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I'm not sure what they were protesting and I did not interact with them.
00:30:11.120
I did hear them direct derogatory insults at our school group.
00:30:16.240
They called us racists, biggists, white crackers, a British term for cigarettes, which is a slur for homosexuals, and incest kids.
00:30:25.460
They also taunted an African-American student from my school by telling him that we would harvest his organs.
00:30:32.720
I have no idea what that insult means, but it was startling to hear.
00:30:35.360
Because we were being loudly attacked and taunted in public,
00:30:38.500
a student in our group asked one of our teacher chaperones for permission to begin our school spirit chants
00:30:43.320
to counter the hateful things that were being shouted at our group.
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The chants are commonly used at sporting events.
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They are all positive in nature and sound like what you would hear at any high school.
00:30:53.620
Our chaperone gave us permission to use our school chants.
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We would not have done that without obtaining permission from the adults in charge of our group.
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At no time did I hear any student chant anything other than the school spirit chants.
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I did not witness or hear any student's chant build that wall, or anything hateful or racist at any time.
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Our chants were loud because we wanted to drown out the hateful comments that were being shouted at us by the protesters.
00:31:17.540
After a few minutes of chanting, the Native American protesters, who I hadn't previously noticed, approached our group.
00:31:23.540
The Native American protesters had drums and were accompanied by at least one person with a camera.
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The protester everyone has seen in the video began playing his drum as he waded into the crowd, which parted for him.
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He locked eyes with me and approached me, coming within inches of my face.
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He played his drum the entire time he was in my face.
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I did not make any hand gestures or other aggressive moves.
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To be honest, I was startled and confused as to why he had approached me.
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We had already been yelled at by another group of protesters, and when the second group approached, I was worried the situation was getting out of control where adults were attempting to provoke teenagers.
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I believed that by remaining motionless and calm, I was helping to diffuse the situation.
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I realized everyone had cameras and that perhaps a group of adults was trying to provoke a group of teenagers into a larger conflict.
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I said a silent prayer that the situation would not get out of hand.
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During the period of the drumming, a member of the protester's entourage began yelling at a fellow student that we stole our land and that we should go back to Europe.
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I heard one of my fellow students begin to respond.
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I motioned to my classmate and tried to get him to stop engaging with the protester as I was still in the mindset that we needed to calm down tensions.
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I never felt like I was blocking the Native American protester.
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It was clear to me that he had singled me out for a confrontation, although I'm not sure why.
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The engagement ended when one of our teachers told me the buses had arrived and it was time to go.
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I obeyed my teacher and simply walked to the buses.
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At that moment, I thought I had diffused the situation by remaining calm, and I was thankful nothing physical had occurred.
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I never understood why either of the two groups of protesters were engaging with us or exactly what they were protesting at the Lincoln Memorial.
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We were simply there to meet a bus, not become central players in a media spectacle.
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This is the first time in my life I've encountered any sort of public protest, let alone this kind of confrontation or demonstration.
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I was not intentionally making faces at the protester.
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I did smile at one point because I wanted him to know that I was not going to become angry, intimidated, or be provoked into a larger confrontation.
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I'm a faithful Christian and practicing Catholic, and I always try to live up to the ideals my faith teaches me,
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to remain respectful of others and to take no action that would lead to conflict or violence.
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I respect this person's right to protest and engage in free speech activities,
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and I support his chanting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial any day of the week.
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I believe he should rethink his tactics of invading the personal space of others, but that is his choice to make.
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I am being called every name in the book, including a racist,
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and I will not stand for this mob-like character assassination of my family's name.
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My parents were not on the trip, and I strive to represent my family in a respectful way in all public settings.
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I have received physical and death threats via social media, as well as hateful insults.
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One person threatened to harm me at school, and one person claims to live in my neighborhood.
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My parents are receiving death and professional threats because of the social media mob that has formed over this issue.
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I love my school, my teachers, and my classmates.
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I work hard to achieve good grades and to participate in extracurricular activities.
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I am mortified that so many people have come to believe something that did not happen,
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that students from my school were chanting or acting in a racist fashion toward African Americans or Native Americans.
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I did not do that, do not have hateful feelings in my heart,
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and did not witness any of my classmates doing that.
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but I can tell you my experience with Covington Catholic is that students are respectful of all races and cultures.
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We also support everyone's right to free speech.
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I'm not going to comment on the words or account of Mr. Phillips,
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as I don't know him and would not presume to know what is in his mind or heart.
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Nor am I going to comment further on the other protesters,
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I have read that Mr. Phillips is a veteran of the U.S. Marines.
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I thank him for his service and am grateful to anyone who puts on the uniform to defend our nation.
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If anyone has earned the right to speak freely, it's a U.S. Marine veteran.
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I can only speak for myself and what I observed and felt at the time.
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But I would caution everyone passing judgment based on a few seconds of video
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to watch the longer video clips that are on the Internet
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as they show a much different story that is being portrayed by people with agendas.
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I provide this account of events to the Diocese of Covington
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and I stand ready and willing to cooperate with any investigation they are conducting.
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The kid acted tremendously well and has my absolute admiration.
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The Diocese of Covington and many of the clergy,
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including Father James Martin and the Archbishop,
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whose name escapes me at the moment probably to his benefit,
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and others in the conservative movement, others in the mainstream media, of course,
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many politicians have disappointed me tremendously.
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that was pushed forward by their pride and self-aggrandizement.
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We all get it wrong sometimes, and we're all prideful.
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I don't mean to disparage any of those people for having pride or for making a mistake.
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But where they go wrong is that they haven't apologized.
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The Diocese of Covington, most of the conservative movement actually has apologized
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Many other clergy, I don't mean only to single them out, have not apologized.
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They're sticking to their guns despite so much exonerating evidence.
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It is causing scandal not only in the Catholic Church,
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not only in the town of Covington, but throughout the mainstream media.
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It's why people have declining trust in politics and in the Catholic Church
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That's a good thing about a graceful society is you can be forgiven.
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But you have to, instead of doubling down or pontificating with vague and stupid platitudes,
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you should just apologize because you got it wrong.
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This is the clip that caused mayhem, according to the mainstream media.
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This one has become popular in recent years after the book Freakonomics came out.
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That argument is that abortion lowers the crime rate.
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That what has lowered the crime rate traditionally has been killing all the would-be criminals.
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First of all, I don't know who's comfortable with the pre-crime version of humanity,
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where we get to decide before you're born whether you're likely to be a criminal
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and then abort you based on future criminal activity in which you have not participated.
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The argument, I guess, here is that would you kill baby Hitler?
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And the truth is that no pro-life person on Earth would kill baby Hitler.
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But the Huffington Post made this the big story.
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They have their sources from the special counsel investigation.
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Bob Mueller, the special counsel, makes his first statement in a year
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to say that the BuzzFeed story is not accurate.
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And then they arrange facts or falsehoods to fit that narrative.
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You know, look, the truth always gets trampled on.
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They're trying to ruin these kids' lives to suit their sick, false narrative.
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So I want to leave on a happy note, on a note of real inspiration.
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This was the speech, the last speech that Martin Luther King gave before...
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And it's one of the remarkable moments in American oratory.
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Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.
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And he has allowed me to go up to the mountain.
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That we as a people will get to the promised land.
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Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
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The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
00:41:41.620
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
00:41:47.220
Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, a group of Catholic schoolboys.
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They have been defamed and slandered, smeared all over the internet, all over the media.
00:41:58.620
So we're going to sift through this, sort through this, and figure out who the real bad
00:42:07.140
Also, a company responded to that Gillette ad with an ad of their own, and it's a pretty
00:42:11.600
So I'll play that for you, too, today, over on the Matt Wall Show.