Good thread about Covington Catholic and the kid in the photo

[RVN VET71]

19. 2 cents plain:

Without the mouthy pseudo-Israelites, it's probable that the little snots wouldn't have become engaged as they did. Maybe -- possibly -- they would have just hung out until their buses came to take them back to McConnell-land.

Has anyone determined why these little jackasses were unchaperoned? Were there no adults in the room?

Of course what the kids did was wrong and awful, but they are out in the real world and have never been trained how to behave. Once the mob mentality kicked in, it was all over. To paraphrase Willie the Bard's Henry V: You may as well send precepts to the leviathan to come ashore as expect the unleashed emotions of unchaperoned, repressed, and privileged teenage boys to act like men when dealing with people who do not look like them.

The kids actions were deplorable, but they were lured into acting like assholes by the pseudo-Israelites who, I think, knew exactly what they were doing and delighted in it. The kids were a mob-manque waiting for a reason to fire up. The pseudo-Israelites simply lit the fire, stood back, and laughed their asses off at the howling-monkeys in the red hats. (And, yes, the fire image is deliberate here. Constitution guarantees free speech, but you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater, right? Those mouthy men knew exactly what the result would be -- that's why they did it. And that kind of deliberately inflammatory speech, intended to incite a mob, is not protected speech.)