In the matter of Indian activist Nathan Phillips, it seems, the media speak with a forked tongue.
The heretofore relatively unknown agitator, who became a left-wing hero after he provoked a confrontation with Catholic high-school boys protesting abortion at the March for Life, didn’t just fake his military past. He has also a rap sheet that shows he was a violent criminal.
And he had a big problem with the firewater.
Of course, the media didn’t look into Phillips’ past before they portrayed the bedraggled “Native American elder” as a “victim” of “privileged” white boys who ridiculed his drum-pounding and chanted gibberish.
Nor have they said much about his attack on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.
Story Unravels
The Fake News story about the confrontation at the Lincoln Memorial between Phillips and the boys of Covington Catholic High began with the usual leftist narrative. But it quickly collapsed after a full video account surfaced, which undermined the short video with which leftists in the media gleefully savaged the boys.
Such was the hysteria that the boys and their families received death threats. Representative Ilhan Omar, the hijab-wearing, anti-Christian, Muslim Democrat from Minnesota, attacked them in a defamatory, now-deleted tweet.
But then, as is typical, the wheels came off the wagon that pulled the leftist narrative.
Nathan Phillips isn’t the man the media said he was. The put-upon Omaha Indian has something of a checkered past. Very checkered.
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The Washington Examiner has disclosed that Phillips was a violent criminal who escaped jail.
As The New American reported yesterday, when Phillips enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve in 1972, he enlisted under another name, Nathaniel Stanard. In his late teens and early 20s, the Examiner found, Phillips, then Stanard, was a dangerous and violent criminal who tangled more than once with John Barleycorn — and lost.
At 19, Phillips was “charged with escaping from the Nebraska Penal Complex where he was confined May 3,” the newspaper reported, citing an article in the Lincoln Star.
As well, “he pleaded guilty to assault on June 19, 1974, and was fined $200. In addition, he was charged with underage possession of alcohol in 1972, 1973, and 1975, as well as negligent driving. A destruction of property charge against him was dropped in August 1973, but Phillips was sentenced to one year probation for a related charge of alcohol possession by a minor. In December 1978, he was charged with driving without a license.”
But even before the Examiner disclosed Phillips’ lengthy rap sheet, news surfaced that he lied about his military record. He told Vogue magazine that he was “recon ranger” in the Marines. And the media turned Phillips into a “Vietnam veteran,” and “Native American elder” who “fought in Vietnam.”
Of course, it was all false.
Phillips was not a “recon ranger” and didn’t serve in Vietnam. He was a refrigerator repairman who never left the states. And he went AWOL — Absent Without Leave — multiple times.
To his credit, it appears that Phillips never claimed he fought in Vietnam. The media simply assumed he did. And that, as former Navy SEAL Don Shipley said, made the narrative even better, or conversely, made the scene at the Lincoln Memorial “look even worse, him being a Vietnam vet and getting harassed.”
Shipley posted a video on YouTube that exposed the military record of Phillips.
Attack on the Mass
But the former jailbird and Marine Corps refrigerator repairman wasn’t satisfied with nearly starting a riot at the Lincoln Memorial.
Phillips and some fellow “Native American activists” went to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception at Catholic University. There, they demanded that the boys be punished, and, somewhat amusingly, that the papal bull encouraging the age of discovery be “revoked.”
A spokesman for the basilica confirmed for the Catholic News Agency that Phillips led the raid that aimed to disrupt a special Mass on January 19.
“A group of approximately 50 individuals attempted to gain entrance to the basilica while chanting and hitting drums,” the spokesman told CNA. They assembled “across the road from the shrine before setting off toward its main entrance, chanting and playing drums.”
Security guards, CNA reported, were forced to lock the doors to keep the angry protesters out.
A California seminarian told CNA that protesters pounded on the basilica’s doors.
Image: screenshot from YouTube video of 2015 interview with Phillips
