A word about hats. Now that the vicious media assault on the teens from Covington Catholic has been exposed as a lie, one of the fallback positions is that the boys shouldn’t have been wearing MAGA hats.

First of all, I very much doubt that they were wearing the hats during the March. They were allowed to sightsee after the March, and my suspicion is that’s when some of them bought the MAGA hats, which are far more easily available from tourist stalls in DC than they are in Covington. They were at the Lincoln Monument because that’s where they’d been told to meet the bus taking them home. In the specific context of this event, the argument that the students should not have been allowed to wear the hats is likely an argument that they shouldn’t have been allowed to buy souvenirs.

But even in the larger context, the argument that Trump hats should not be worn in public is an argument that an item of clothing that is associated with a sitting President elected after earning the votes of over 60 million Americans should be treated as the equivalent of a Klan robe. Not only is such an argument an indictment of roughly half the country, it is likely to engender the very civic discord its proponents say they wish to avoid.

 

[Image via James McNellis from Washington, DC, United States [CC BY 2.0]]