Aug 28, 2017
A Super Inconvenient Truth
Finding a way to acknowledge the beating from the Berkeley rally.
At some point over the weekend I caught a glimpse of a video that was teased as “Anti-Fa Beating Alt-Right Protester.” My first thought was that this was just more of that disingenuous “woe is me” alt-right propaganda where somehow they’re always the victim of the left’s oppression despite the fact that they’re armed to the teeth and spouting off garbage rhetoric that is designed to provoke a response.
But in the very short clip it was clear. Here was a group of people in black riot gear like attire, beating a man on the ground with clubs. I don’t know enough about specific Anti-Fa or left-leaning protest groups to pin it on them or not and the clip is so short that I can’t really say what group the man on the ground aligned with, if any at all, except to say that it doesn’t really matter because nobody deserves to be beaten by clubs in any situation. At least it appears that a man named Al Letson tried to stop the group from going further and appeared to shield the man.
But I didn’t hear much about it beyond that clip, until this morning that is when right wing propagandist Dinesh D’Souza was retweeted by the president, attacking the Washington Post for finally acknowledging the attack.
I don’t know if his claim that they waited to admit he truth is valid or not, but I do know that it wasn’t heavily featured on CNN or MSNBC this weekend, or made major headlines in online news outlets. So maybe he’s not wrong in this case. And nothing feels worse than saying that.
That’s the hard part right? This scuffle between a group of idiots who decided to beat a guy for what he was saying or representing, is probably not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things. But for all the crap we gave the President, and rightly so, for being wishy washy and two-faced about a the Charlottesville protests, something this minor and stupid and unnecessary gives him just enough wiggle room with certain groups to be able to stand by his claim that there was violence “On many sides.”
You can bet that right wing websites and Fox News probably have been sounding the sirens about it at the same time that other news outlets have only mentioned it in passing — a surface level boost to Trump’s constant complaint that the media is “Fake News™” and biased.
I’m not out to excoriate anyone for not covering the incident to the right wing’s satisfaction, or to even lend credence to Trump’s claim that both sides of the racists vs. non-racists debate are equal and valid. I’m just saying that it happened, it looks wrong and if you truly care about fighting racism and white nationalism and the Alt-Right, you can’t run away from your own problems. It really doesn’t matter what that man was saying prior to the beat down, he shouldn’t have to fear for his life. In fact nobody should fear for their physical well being for speaking out in this country, rightly or wrongly.
And we know this. That’s why we try to avoid the topic when it rears its ugly head. That there are dumb, violent people who just want to crack heads. And that’s not what this is about. The fight is presumably about what we believe our country is, was, and should be. It’s about watching Donald Trump undermine those things, and contribute to a culture of confusion, division, distrust, and yes, violence and standing in solidarity against it. You will never beat a man into agreeing with you, you’ll only strengthen their resolve.
When I try to convince my conservative friends and family that Trump is bad for the country and they assuage my fears by saying that he’s no different than any other politician — I remind myself that being against him is the easiest call I've ever made as an adult. I don’t need the latest Washington D.C. gossip, or the Russia investigation, or the Social Democrat party, or Jake Tapper or even Chris Hayes’ Thing 1, Thing 2 segment, to know that he is detestable, wrong and unequipped to lead this country. His own words do that and have always done that going back 30 or 40 years.
It’s okay to admit a mistake, to condemn violence where it should be condemned, to openly face our human nature. It doesn’t undermine our words or feelings, it confirms that Trump’s are wrong because he couldn’t bring himself to do either, and he never will.
