On Friday January 18 2019, a video surfaced of a Native American advocate being seemingly surrounded and taunted by Catholic students, many of them with “MAGA” hats, at Washington D.C.  The Native American advocate was Nathan Phillips, also a former marine. The students were from Covington Catholic, a private all boys school in Kentucky.

The boys from the high school were on a field trip and were waiting for their bus when a group of protesters started insulting them.  To counter these insults, the boys got permission from a chaperone to chant their school chants. After some time of this going on, Nathan Phillips, the Native American in the story, approached the boys and was the one who started the interaction, all while the boys were just doing their school chants and being insulted by other protesters.  He went to the group of boys and started beating a drum he had with him and was doing his own chant to the boys. After the incident, Mr. Phillips was interviewed and said he heard many students saying “build the wall.” Now that many long videos of the whole incident have been released, it shows that there is not a single time where any of the kids were chanting about building a wall.  The most popular part of all the videos released features one of the students, Nick Sandmann, face to face with Mr. Phillips, standing with an apparent smirk on his face while Phillips continued to chant and beat his drum. Phillips walked right up to Sandmann, and in a later interview, Sandmann said, “I believed that by remaining motionless and calm, I was helping to diffuse the situation,” and “I was not disrespectful to Mr. Phillips.”  Over the past few days, news sources have been releasing interviews and videos from the incident about exactly what happened, and it has changed the perspective of most people from when the first video surfaced.