Make America Hate Again

The gist, as I understand it, was there were initially 5 Black Hebrew Israelites shouting at the National Mall near the Lincoln Memorial and it was these Hebrews who first taunted the teenagers when the boys arrived from a pro-life March for Life rally. By the way, certain factions of these Hebrews are regarded as a hate group. According to my read of one article (and I didn’t save it, not thinking I would even refer to it) the Hebrews admitted to taunting the kids and said they have the freedom of speech right to do so. The taunts were related to Trump and white privilege, most likely instigated by the red MAGA hats. After a while, the kids started to push back and started chanting back, even going so far with one boy taking of his shirt and leading the cheers (supposedly upon the approval of some adult chaperone). At some point, the American Indians arrived from their own rally and saw this scene: white boys wearing red MAGA hats and 5 blacks yelling/chanting at each other. What happened next gets fuzzier to me.

1. As Nick said, it would have been better to walk away and ignore those Hebrew Israelites because “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never harm me.” But these are boys, not grown men, so I don’t expect them to have the emotional maturity to not respond; that should have been the job of the adult chaperone(s) to have guided the boys away from the Hebrews.
2. Hold back from jumping to conclusions until somebody, like a news organization, has a chance to do a fuller investigation of what happened. Videos can be cut to show only portions of the story and that portion could be deceiving. It’s unfortunate we are now living in an era where anybody can act as a reporter but that “any person” may not have the training or maybe even the desire to get at the truth. Only the major news organizations – and I mean those that have been around for decades, not Infowars or Breitbart – have the experience and the philosophy of digging for the truth. So we have to hold back before making judgements.
3. Death threats should not be thrown at the kids and their families, whether or not they are faulted for displaying bigotry. Death threats are unacceptable.

And Republicans and evangelicals should realize that the red MAGA hat has become a symbol of bigotry, hatred and cruelty, in the same manner the swastika became a symbol of the Nazis heinous crimes against the Jews. Wear the hat and automatically most people outside of Trump’s base will assume “hat = bigotry”. We’ve had too many incidents in the last two years where white people act aggressively against blacks, sometimes bringing in Trump and “Make America Great Again”, to not make that association.