[He actually is named on social media]The MAGA Teenager Who Harassed a Native American Veteran Is Still Unnamed, but We’ve Seen His Face Before
Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/201 ... opgtzWRiFgThe encounter between the teenager and the older man didn’t end in violence. They apparently didn’t even exchange words. Why, then, did this unexploded grenade of a moment read as so fundamentally disturbing—and spread so quickly? There’s the ahistorical idiocy of wearing a Make America Great Again hat while harassing a veteran, of course. There’s the physical contrast between the young white punk and the Native elder, and between the teen’s cruelty and Phillips’ calm. And there’s the crowd of hooting MAGA teens ringing the central conflict, bouncing along to the drumbeat with a mix of giddiness and scorn. (In a video posted to Instagram, a teary Phillips said he heard them chanting “build that wall.”) Cameras are everywhere in the crowd. The boys know they’re being recorded—some of them are even seen capturing the moment themselves—but either their homosocial glee is too orgiastic to be dampened by the instinct for self-protection, or they don’t think anyone who matters to them will care. (And yes: Where are the adults?)
The context is key to the clash’s virality, too. It took place just days after President Trump made light of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee to mock Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whom he often refers to by the racist nickname “Pocahontas.” More broadly, it takes place in an era in which chanting the president’s name has become a tool of racial intimidation.
But I think the real reason the clip has spread is simpler: It’s the kid’s face. The face of self-satisfaction and certitude, of edginess expressed as cruelty. The face remains almost completely still as his peers hoot in awed delight at his bravado. The face is both punchable and untouchable. Many observers recognized it right away.
The face is in this photo of a clutch of white young men crowding around a single black man at a lunch counter sit-in in Virginia in the 1960s, and in many other images of jeering white men from that era. The face is the rows of Wisconsin high school boys flashing Nazi salutes in a prom picture last year. The face is Brett Kavanaugh—then a student at an all-boys Catholic prep school—“drunkenly laughing” as he allegedly held down Christine Blasey Ford. Anyone who knew the popular white boys in high school recognized it: the confident gaze, the eyes twinkling with menace, the smirk. The face of a boy who is not as smart as he thinks he is, but is exactly as powerful. The face that sneers, “What? I’m just standing here,” if you flinch or cry or lash out. The face knows that no matter how you react, it wins.
