There's nothing figurative about the war characterization anymore

This:

Covington Catholic High School is closed Tuesday over security concerns, according to school officials.

“After meeting with local authorities, we have made the decision to cancel school and be closed on Tuesday, January 22, in order to ensure the safety of our students, faculty and staff,” reads a letter to them from the school’s principal, Robert Rowe.

“All activities on campus will be cancelled for the entire day and evening. Students, parents, faculty and staff are not to be on campus for any reason. Please continue to keep the Covington Catholic Community in your prayers.”

Earlier this morning, it was not clear if the closure was due to security or bitterly cold temperatures.

The school was among many operating on a delay until the closure was announced about 6 a.m. Dixie Heights and all Kenton County Schools also are closed as well.

Extra security was to be in place at Covington Catholic High School when students returned to campus Tuesday after threats were made against the school and its students over the weekend.

The American Indian Movement Chapter of Indiana and Kentucky is holding a protest at 10 a.m. Tuesday outside the Diocese of Covington.

The protest was moved from the school Monday as a precaution. 

Then this from the New York Daily News sports desk:

This won’t help Kentucky student Nick Sandmann’s case.

A photo said to be featuring Covington Catholic High School students clad in blackface during a 2015 basketball game made the rounds on Twitter Monday morning amid last week’s Indigenous Peoples March controversy.

Except that this is the truth:

Number one: The article claims that the photo is from 2015, but it's apparently from 2011. So despite the article's contention that the photo "won’t help Kentucky student Nick Sandmann’s case," it has nothing to do with him or any of the other kids who were in D.C. for the March for Life. They would have been in elementary school at the time.

Number two: It's called a "blackout" game, you dummies. This has been going on at school games since at least 2008, according to this New York Times report:

No team has pulled off the blackout with as much aplomb as baseball’s White Sox last Tuesday night — the same night that Middle Tennessee State’s football team celebrated an appearance on ESPN2 with a blackout of its own. Fans flipping channels might have thought the color had gone out on their flat screens.

With a day’s notice, a crowd of 40,354 arrived in black at U.S. Cellular Field for a tie-breaker game with the Twins. The team handed out 40,000 black towels.

It cast a fresh, eerie and somewhat intimidating backdrop to Chicago’s 1-0 victory.

“When you had all the fans in black, waving their towels, it almost looked like a stadium full of bats,” said Brooks Boyer, the team’s vice president and chief marketing officer.

The fans loved it, and hope that a tradition has been born.

It was a fun new tradition until the Trumpy Covington Catholic High School kids did it, apparently. Then it became a deplorable minstrel show proving once and for all that the high school is full of irredeemable racists.

Number Three: Adam Fatkin, a former Covington Catholic High School student who went on to play basketball for Rockhurst University, said the black guy in the picture wasn't being racially taunted. In fact, he was a good friend. 

Add the above to this list:

• The attacks on Karen Pence for returning to the Christian school in northern Virginia to teach art, and the framing of the school's adherence to sound doctrine as "banning" LGBT people.
• The bogus Buzzfeed story about Trump telling Cohen to lie. 
• Ben Shapiro losing two podcast sponsors because, in his March for Life speech, he said that we - meaning humanity, collectively - wouldn't kill baby Hitler because, at that theoretical point, Hitler would still be innocent.

I saw a piece somewhere this morning that said that the MAGA hat is the problem. The author, while clearly displaying a leftist bent, made sure he had his aware-of-the-latest-developments bona fides in place, even to the point of pointing out the toxic role played by the Black Hebrew Israelites, but then went on to say that the MAGA hat has come to stand for racism. Flimsy, if you can't offer some solid substantiation, right? The best he was able to do was cite Trump's trutherism about where Obama was born, the "good people on both sides" remark about Charlottesville, and the remarks about an abundance of rapists among the illegal immigrants coming from Mexico.

Granted, the Trumpist segment of the Right brings such linkage upon itself. The above-cited uttering of the Very Stable Genius are out there for all and any to make of what they will. But unless you're trying to perpetuate a very shaky agenda, you know that the guy just has a very reckless mouth. Bigotry and racism are not among his considerable shortcomings.

In other words, Donald Trump does not make it any easier for actual conservatives to cut through the present nonsense.

But Catholic teenage boys at a pro-life rally should not be set up as symbols of something.

Alas, they are, and now their school is shut down. And now Nick Sandmann's parents are getting death threats and professional threats.

This is now at a level that is way past that of the pussy-hat march days, or the days of the mayhem on campuses such as Berkeley, the University of Missouri and Dartmouth.

They mean to stomp anyone who cherishes ordered liberty and the foundations of Western civilization out of existence.

Do no doubt that.