Some members of the anti-Democratic faction of a site intended to elect Democrats have been gleefully touting an appearance by Bernie at a recent BET-covered forum as evidence of… well, we’re not quite sure what, but it’s apparently supposed to reflect badly on Hillary somehow.

Except there’s something, ah, interesting about how that forum came to be (emphases mine):

“To have a serious conversation about criminal justice reform, community policing, the militarization of police, the oxygen is being taken up by a group that doesn’t understand what it’s going to take to actually make this happen,” Ashley Bell, the Republican co-chairman of the 20/20 Club, says of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Bell’s group, which he co-founded earlier this year, is scheduled to host a presidential forum at Allen University Nov. 21-22 in hopes of creating a space for candidates of both parties to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

Because so far, as the 34-year-old Bell, a former Georgia county commissioner, pointed out in an interview with The Daily Caller, Black Lives Matter has controlled the conversation using fiery rhetoric more in the mold of Malcolm X than Martin Luther King, Jr.

And yes, the story from which those three paragraphs came was published in (of course!) The Daily Caller, the racist online magazine that loves to pretend that all complaints about racism are bogus, and will even gin up a few bogosities to wave around like pictures of J.C. Watts at the RNC.  (See, for example, this breathlessly headlined recent DC piece claiming that evil PC scientists are saying that “SLEEP is now Racist”!)  

So who is Ashley Bell, the black Georgia Republican who attacks Black Lives Matter by invoking Malcolm X, a perennial boogeyman of the racist right despite being dead for half a century?  

Among other things, he’s a Rand Paul supporter who now backs Marco Rubio (hat tip to Denise Oliver Velez for this).  As noted in the DC’s piece quoted above, his 20/20 Leaders for America Club is supposed to be a kinder, gentler bipartisan alternative to Black Lives Matter — though interestingly enough, the 20/20 Club shies away from making specific demands or policy suggestions (as stated on the website, “We are not a prescriptive or policy-making organization”), a behavior shared by both BLM and the earlier Occupy movement, and one for which both of these latter two groups were and are often chastised by the establishment.

So what sort of things did we see at Bell’s presidential forum?  Well, there was Dr. Ben Carson denying that racial bias was a problem with policing: 

Carson, who is at or near the top of several GOP presidential preference polls, made his remarks in response to questions about high-profile cases of alleged police misconduct, including several where African-Americans were either killed by police or died in custody.

The retired neurosurgeon told moderator Jeffrey Johnson of the Black Entertainment Television network, “I’m not aware of a lot of cases where a police officer just comes up to somebody like you and says, ‘Hey, I don’t like you. I’m going to shoot you.”

Carson continued, “I’m still waiting for the evidence.”

In my opinion, Hillary made the right choice to attend the Blue Jamboree instead.