Meet the Press Panelist Rehashes Nathan Phillips Story, Says Wall is About 'Xenophobia'

As Newsbusters has previously reported, the media painted a group of Catholic high school students as racists after a video surfaced appearing to show them mocking Native American veteran Nathan Phillips at the Lincoln Memorial. Additional video came out showing that Phillips approached the kids, gathered in DC for the March for Life, and began banging a drum in one of the kids' faces. NPR's Josh Johnson, a guest on Sunday's edition of Meet the Press, apparently didn't get the memo. Discussing the developments in the government shutdown, Johnson described the border wall as a "moral issue" and a "campaign promise the President made to play on something very deeply held that his political base feels."  According to Johnson, "if you want to look for an image that actually speaks to this, it's probably those protesters who were on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the Native American man who was beating the drum, Nathan Phillips, and those kids and the Make America Great Again hats that were kind of smirking at him and kind of looking down their noses at him." Johnson connected the ultimately misleading original videotape to the debate over the wall, saying "this is about xenophobia.  For many Americans, this is about race."