Every day I become more embarrassed to be a member of the human species - today's edition

Two more that I've come across this morning:

Ben Shapiro has now lost two podcast sponsors due to his perfectly reasonable assertion during his March for Life speech that we (meaning collectively any and all of us as human beings) wouldn't kill Hitler as a fetus because at that point he was still innocent.

These companies, Calm and Quip, are virtue signaling to a swath of the public they know damn well to be willfully dense, deliberately ignorant of what anybody not trying to be stupid knows Shapiro's point to have been.

Rather than engage their brains, they signed onto a "defense of Hitler" conclusion.

They've chosen to lie to themselves.

Then there is this situation, also from the March for Life:

[A] massive controversy . . . has erupted over the Covington (KY) Catholic school boys and the Native American man, Nathan Phillips, in the aftermath of the March For Life. Several video clips of the confrontation between an elder of the Omaha tribe and a large group of Catholic high school boys wearing MAGA hats have gone viral. Here’s a news story about the video, summing up the basics of the controversy. 

A selected part of the clip shows boys jumping and hooting and acting in a somewhat intimidating way towards the older man, as if to mock him. Some people interpret the boy standing in front of the man, the kid with a rictus grin, as sneering at the old man. Others say that you can’t assume that was a sneer; maybe the kid just didn’t know what to do.

In any case, the Catholic school has apologized for its students’ action, and the mayor of their hometown has denounced them. The boys were in town for the March For Life. The video is being widely cited as an example of the Trumpification of Christianity, and connected to the Karen Pence school controversy as yet another example of why conservative Christianity is an evil that must be driven from the precincts of the decent.

It is possible that the Catholic boys were complete asses. My initial judgment was that they certainly were that. You don’t treat a peaceful elderly person like this. Even if they thought he was wrong, those boys owed him respect. Yes, the old man approached them, but they could and should have handled him with respect. They come off as bullies.

But then I watched more clips, showing the greater context of the incident. It is not as simple as it has been portrayed. Below is a more complete video account of what happened. In it, one of the Catholic boys is overheard asking, “Does anybody know what he’s doing? Does anybody know what’s going on here.”

And, in it, one of the Indians with Phillips shouts: “White people, go back to Europe. This is not your land.” He curses the students with f-bombs (video is NSFW). He goes on: “You’re being a white man about it. That’s all you know how to do.”

You didn’t see that in the news reporting, did you?

In other words, the students were basically confused about what Phillips was trying to convey:

To be clear, it is POSSIBLE that these boys really did make fun of this old Native American man. If that’s what happened, they should apologize.

I don’t think this is what happened at all, though. These boys were already chanting their high school chants. Nathan Phillips confronted them. They don’t appear to understand what point he was making with his own chanting and drum-beating. And now they are held up to the contempt of the country for something they appear not to have done at all. And, the news accounts conveniently ignore the provocative, racist, foul-mouthed attacks on the boys by one of Phillips’s Native American companions.

And Phillips' backstory needs to be part of the discussion:

Here’s something else: in 2015, this same Native American elder, Phillips, confronted college students wearing Indian garb at a college party, and claimed he was treated disrespectfully by them. So he said; no video exists. It appears that he was looking for a confrontation of some sort. If those college boys behaved that way, it was indeed wrong, and offensive. But Nathan Philips seems like a man who seeks out these opportunities for confrontation, and then to go to the media with them. Notice in the clip that went viral, Philips had a man with a camera following him as he approached the MAGA boys.

We must speak plainly about what is going on here:

. . . the white Catholic boys in their MAGA hats appearing to intimidate a Native American elder serves as a useful club with which to beat the entire March For Life, as well as conservative Christianity in general.

 Both of these stories are designed to try to portray anyone attempting to speak for people who aren't born yet as goons and blowhards.

More generally, it's another lifting of the middle finger to Almighty God.

That seems to be a major theme in 2019. This is the year that America takes a sledgehammer to its own foundation.