On July 24, Nick Sandmann announced on Twitter that his $250 million defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post had been settled. Sandmann’s suit revolved around the Washington Post’s coverage of a viral video of Sandmann and his Covington Catholic classmates at the 2019 March for Life in Washington, D.C. The footage showed the students, many of whom were wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, interacting with Native American activist Nathan Phillips at the Lincoln Memorial. This interaction quickly earned the students widespread condemnation and scorn from media pundits, religious leaders, and politicians.
They believed that Sandmann and his classmates were harassing Phillips by blocking his path and chanting inappropriate slogans. To many in the media and on Twitter, the Covington Catholic students represented the white supremacy and bigotry they believed to be so prevalent in Donald Trump’s America. Footage of the event and witness testimony revealed a more complicated story. While waiting at the Lincoln Memorial for school buses to pick them up after the March for Life, the students were approached by a group of Black Hebrew Israelites. This group began shouting vulgar and racially insensitive comments at the students. Phillips, who was in Washington for another demonstration, walked in between both groups, beating a drum. He walked straight up to where Sandmann was standing alongside his classmates. Sandmann, unable to back away because of the large crowd, stood as Phillips proceeded to beat the drum in his face. Phillips believed he was deescalating a tense situation, while Sandmann later confessed he did not know what was happening.
The day after the incident, filmmakers Steve Oldfield and Ryan Anderson decided to investigate and produce a feature-length documentary on the controversy. The end product, titled Rush to Judgment, was set to premiere at the Anthem Film Festival in Nevada in July before cancellation due to COVID concerns. Despite this setback, Oldfield and Anderson still hope to take the film to college campuses, film festivals, and a streaming service this coming year.
“We want everyone to see this, including people who might not agree politically with wearing a MAGA hat, or might not be, you know, a fan of President Trump. This isn’t about Trump, this isn’t about politics as much,” Oldfield explained. “It’s about what do you do with an image that you’ve been given, what do you do with a video, how do you react to it? Do you share it, or do you investigate it?”
The initial coverage of the Covington controversy surprised Oldfield, as he had filmed at Covington Catholic for a promotional video and had been impressed with the students’ conduct. Spurred on by this and the fact that he had exclusive access to footage of the school, Oldfield called Anderson, and they began to discuss making a film the day after the incident. Going through hundreds of YouTube videos to create a back-and-forth between online commentators and interviewees, Anderson believes that viewers of the film will come to recognize the importance of critical thinking. “Really, the overall, arching goal of it for me was to get people to just think more critically — really pay attention to how they’re consuming media and, you know, research.”
After years of working in TV news, Oldfield believes the coverage of Sandmann and his classmates represents a low point in the history of TV broadcasting. “This is the classic case of why journalists can never take something they see that’s blowing up on social media and just put it out there as a news story, without doing any research,” he said.
Some of the journalists who were quick to pile on the Covington students appear to have learned their lesson. Featured in the film, Julie Irwin Zimmerman, a contributor to the Atlantic, wrote an article discussing her handling of the story. In it, she wrote, “If the Covington Catholic incident was a test, it’s one I failed — along with most others. Will we learn from it, or will we continue to roam social media looking for the next outrage fix?”
Politically, both Oldfield and Anderson identify as libertarians. They believe this gives them a unique vantage point to tell the story. “We saw this as a big Democrat vs. Republican kind of thing, which we thought was really wrong, the way that people assumed that Nick Sandmann was a monster because he was wearing a MAGA hat,” Oldfield said.
When putting together interviews for the film, Sandmann deeply impressed Oldfield. “Nick Sandmann is one of the nicest, smartest, most articulate kids I have ever met, and I’ve worked as a high school teacher for 10 years,” Oldfield said. “And what I would say is, all these hateful people on the internet who decided to attack him and make him a symbol of bigotry in this country, they picked the wrong kid.”
In the film, Sandmann relates how the media drowned out his perspective. “Their rush to judgment I think was aided by the fact that Nathan Phillips had put out four or five interviews by the time I was able to talk.” Sandmann’s father, Ted, discussed with Oldfield the violent nature of many of the messages directed at his family. Threats included “We know where you live,” “We’re going to put your son six feet under,” and “You better be watching over your back every day.” “Every time you step out the door, you’ve got to realize now that I’m not in the safety of my home,” he explained. “I’m out here, and the world has changed.”
Sandmann was not alone in experiencing the rage of the social media mob. In fact, the ire of the crowd first directed itself at Covington student Michael Hodge, who people believed to be Sandmann. Hodge actually wasn’t with the school, but away attending his brother’s wedding. Someone found his mother’s phone number and called to inform her how horrible her son was. Others in the online mob threatened violence against Hodge and his family, while some told Hodge’s mother that she should have aborted her son.
This anecdote illustrates the sobering reality of social media’s effect on the news cycle and its toxic consequences for civic discourse. Oldfield wants consumers and content producers viewing the film to “learn that it’s not OK to just trust a picture and a tweet, and that it is not OK to say the most hateful, horrible thing you can about someone you disagree with online because you think that’s going to make you look good.”
With no verification or further research, the mob decided that Sandmann, Hodge, and their classmates were evil and thus deserving of hate. This environment is exactly what Oldfield and Anderson expose in Rush to Judgment and why the film speaks so powerfully to today’s cancel culture environment and its vigorous enforcers.
Leif Le Mahieu is a journalist whose work has appeared in outlets such as WORLD and Religion Unplugged.
