Laura Wagner over on The Concourse (Deadspin) has written a very powerful article regarding the brouhaha over the MAGA-kid’s actions caught on video and pictures:
What was happening was clear and unmistakable, not just resonant but immediately recognizable as iconic. If you wanted to compress the history of relations between the powerful and the powerless in America, or the dynamics of the current moment, into a single image, you couldn’t do much better than to present a white teen in a MAGA hat, surrounded by a screaming horde of his peers, smirking into the face of an old Native American man.
Perhaps—probably—because what had happened was so undeniable, it was immediately denied. Right-wing trolls not only immediately proposed that the visibly aggressive teens, who were draped in the symbols of white nationalism and misogyny, were in fact the aggressed upon, but began a campaign of brutal online harassment against anyone—especially journalists and especially female journalists—who accurately described what they had seen, or reacted to it on the terms it deserved.
Emphasis mine.
The resultant push-back from the RW noise machine resulted in much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments amongst media, pundits, and just plain people, as the rush to be the most-perfect apologista was on:
The reaction ... was as depressing at it was predictable: Respectable news organizations and journalists, to whom being seen as balanced, level-headed, and more attuned to context and contingency than the reactive social-media mob is more important than reporting the most accurate version of the truth as best they can tell it, backed off...
Please read the whole article. It’s well-crafted and a highly accurate of how this process is playing out.