In this week’s episode of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Robby Soave, the journalist at the center of what has become the biggest national news story in America, eclipsing the thirty-five-day-long government shutdown that ended today.

This conversation centers on a drama that began unfolding over the previous weekend and which has continued into this week. It concerns a group of Catholic school students from Kentucky’s Covington Catholic High School, who were thrust into the national spotlight for seeming to have denigrated and mocked the dignity of a native American man who was solemnly beating his drum at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during MLK weekend and on the day of an Indigenous Peoples March in the nation’s capital.

This story hit all the trigger buttons. The protagonists were a group of adolescent, white, privileged, Catholic schoolboys from Kentucky wearing MAGA hats who were smirking at and mocking an individual from what is perhaps the most marginalized group in American society. The oppressors were taunting the oppressed. Here it was in all its despicable glory, and the media and millions of people across social media ate it up. They swallowed it hook, line, and sinker and these students were all but crucified by both sides of the political spectrum before all the facts had been collected and laid bare.

Were it not for our guest, Robby Soave, and his timely reporting about what actually transpired at the Lincoln Memorial this past Friday, the 18th of January, this news cycle may have ended and these Covington Catholic High School kids could very well have been expelled, their applications to colleges denied, and their families attacked before anyone would learn the truth of what really happened.

Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

Robby Soave is an associate editor at Reason.com. He enjoys writing about college news, education policy, criminal justice reform, and television. He is also a columnist for The Daily Beast and has penned articles for The New York Times, New York Post, CNN, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, The Orange County Register, and The Detroit News. Forbes named him to the 2016 "30 Under 30" list in the category of law and policy.

Soave is perhaps best known for his early skepticism of Rolling Stone's investigative reporting on sexual assault at the University of Virginia. He won a 2015 Southern California Journalism Award for his commentary on the subject.

In 2016, Soave won the Alumnus of the Year Award at the International Students for Liberty Conference. He was also appointed to the D.C. Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Soave is a 2017-2018 Novak Fellow at The Fund for American Studies and a graduate of the University of Michigan, who appears regularly on Fox News, CNN, and syndicated radio programs.

@robbysoave