During a section discussing the aftermath of Trump meeting with Senator Tim Scott and his yet again playing his “Both sides” game with a side dose of “Antifa are bad dudes” we get the usually back and forth generally condemning violence from anyone — but then Van Jones goes on to point out that he actually bothered to talk to some people who were there in Charlottesville and they had said that Antifa had protected them from the neo-Nazis.
Jones: I got a chance to talk to some of the people who were there including some who are quite well known people, and they said that had it not been for the anti-Fascist counter protestors more people might have been killed. I think that Antifa has a very bad PR problem now. I don’t know, they should just call themselves “Anti-Fascist”, everybody in the world is Anti-Fascist.
No, not everybody.
Jones: They call themselves “Antifa” nobody knows what that means. They went there to try and protect people from violence, some of them may have gotten out of hand. I don’t think that we’ve given enough credit to the people who actually came away saying that they would have died, that more lives would have been lost had their not been a protective sheild from those counter protestors. I think that’s important.
(Relevant portion at 5:54 as Van begins speaking.
Just to level set things up front, Jones is absolutely correct. It was Cornel West who stated that “Antifa protected us from the neo-Nazis when we were trapped in a synagogue.”
Beside’s West there’s also an interview with Rev Traci Bakmon who was live on air with MSNBC when she was whisked away by security when a set of “loud pops” were heard during the protest the next day. The neo-Nazis used those Tiki torches as clubs and caused the UVA librarian to have a stroke due to his injuries.
And — as pointed out in the comments — Slate has more testimonials from Charlottesville residents which are similar to what West says.
Black Trump supporter Reverend Darrell Scott nearly has a brain hemorrhage at Jones’ defense of Antifa.
Cooper: Do you believe there were “Very fine people” chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville?
Scott: No, I don’t. But I will also say there were very bad people on both sides. And I believe Antifa has a lot of bad people, they need to named the “Black Shirts” or the “Black mask” or something because you’re trying to act like Antifa’s a bunch of peace lovers that are simply there to stop violence. No Antifa was the architect of the violence and Antifa goes so far as to try and suppress free speech in this country by anyone that right leaning.
Not anyone right leaning, Just fascists like Milo, Anne Coulter and Ben Shapiro who are all purveyors of hate speech which isn’t completely protected by the first amendment
Gloria Borger jumps in for a bit talking about the length and history of the Nazis and KKK being very different from the history of Antifa, which is true but not really the point.
Scott: But as far as the violence is concerned, there are equal doses. You said you can’t equate [Antifa] simply because the Klan has a history, it’s because Antifa is a new group.
Jones: No, reverend…
Scott continues: But violence is violence. You can't say the violence from the KKK is worst simply because they’re White Supremacist. Whatever. Same difference. You can’t say that a bullet from a Nazi does more damage than one from Antifa.
Well, when only the neo-Nazis and KKK were the ones with guns, including AR-15s which caused the actual police to fall back and not protect anyone….
According to the federal lawsuit, Robert Sanchez Turner was sprayed in the eye with pepper spray and beaten with canes, and had urine thrown on him during the Aug. 12 rally in Charlottesville, as police officers stood less than 10 feet away and did nothing to stop the assault or arrest the assailants.
“By commanding their subordinates to stand down while hundreds of white supremacists and their sympathizers assaulted and seriously injured counterprotesters, these defendants were essentially accessories to, and facilitators of, unconstitutional hate crime,” states the lawsuit, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.
So yeah — that lone Nazi bullet is going to do more damage than someone who doesn’t have a gun. Although they weren’t alone, not even.
Jones: It’s almost like you’re taking on a straw person argument.
Scott: it’s not a straw man argument.
Jones: Let me tall you something, there wasn’t, you said somebody went there to “bust a crackers head” I did see anybody saying that kind of thing. They said they didn’t want Nazis there with guns and with torches attacking people.
Scott: Some…
Jones: Maybe you saw it different than me,
Scott; Some people from Antifa did show up armed. They had weapons with them. You don’t show up with weapons when you have peaceful intent.
Ok, so that means that anyone who shows up in a public place with a weapon only has harmful intent? Does that include the Nazis who had guns? Does that include cops, who are all armed? What about open carry laws? Everyone armed has negative intent? Really, man? What would the GOP’s masters — the NRA — say to that?
Some people in Antifa had sticks and clubs, that’s true — but they didn’t bring guns. Period.
Jones: But hold on a second, I mean Reverend, I think people are getting confused and you may have a better insight than I do. Here’s what I saw. You had people who were Nazis who were armed going with Torches into a city. I think if Nazis marched into your neighborhood, marched on your house. And you came out with a sidearm, and said “Hey, get away from here — you’re a Nazi you got weapons you got torches, back up.” I don’t anyone would call you “violent”, Sir. They would say you are correct to try and protect yourself from Nazis. [Unintellible] that people don’t have a right to defend selves?
To this of course we got more straw man posturing.
Scott: if I heard that Nazis were marching across town, then I armed myself to go across town and prevent their march then I have evil intent. Walking across my grass is one thing. How is it self defense if I come to you?
Actually the Nazis came to their town — not the reverse.
Borger: If Nazis…
Scott: How many gun shots went off at that meeting? How many people got shot by a White Supremacist?
Again, a point of fact is that we know that there was one gun fired by a White Supremacist who screamed “Hey Nigger” as he shot at a black man, Corey Long, who was in fact trying to protect an elderly white man from the neo-Nazis at the time. That happened here.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — As demonstrators clashed near a downtown park here two weeks ago, a white nationalist protester in a bulletproof vest turned, pointed a pistol toward the crowd and fired a single shot at the ground, in the direction of a black man wielding an improvised torch.
To make his escape, a video recording shows, the armed protester strolled past a line of about a dozen state police troopers who were safely positioned about 10 feet away behind two metal barricades. None of them budged.
Please note again that the police where there when this happened and didn’t do a thing, you can see the gunman walk right past them as he leaves, although he was later arrested.
This is Corey Long who was shot at, using a spray can the neo-Nazis had thrown at him and you can see the elderly man cowering next to him.
“I went out to voice my opinion. To have my freedom of speech. Just like the racist Nazis who took over my town,” Long said in an interview with The Root.
But what started out as a peaceful protest eventually turned violent. And Long says the cops stood around and did nothing.
“At first it was peaceful protest,” Long said softly as he spoke. “Until someone pointed a gun at my head. Then the same person pointed it at my foot and shot the ground.” Long said the only weapon he had was a can of spray paint that a white supremacist threw at him earlier, so he took a lighter to the spray paint and turned it into a flame thrower. And a photographer snapped the photo.
But inside every photograph is an untold story. If you look closely at Long’s picture, there’s an elderly white man standing in between Long and his friend. The unknown man was part of the counterprotests, too, but was afraid, and Long and his friends were trying to protect him. Even though, Long says, those who were paid to protect the residents of Charlottesville were doing just the opposite.
Then there of course was the attack on Deandre Harris, who is a friend of Long’s, which happened literally around the corner from a police station.
Nothing like this, even remotely, happened to a Neo-Nazi or neo-Confederate. Not even close. It’s not just a lack of moral equivalence, it’s a lack of factual and violent equivalence.
I’ve done a forensic look at this an multiple video looking for “violent Antifa attackers” and so far I’ve only found ONE GUY who punched and kicked an old man right after Deandre was attacked. Two other Antifa members that were they didn’t pile on and help — they pulled him back — after which the police finally arrived to break up the melee a day late and a dollar short.
Sure yeah, that one guy, perpetrated some apparently unprovoked violence — unfortunately we don’t see what happened just before as the camera is facing the other way at that time — but nearly all the rest of Antifa who may have been in Charlottesville — didn't. To be fair they have committed acts of clear violence at Berkeley and other locations at other times, but that simply wasn’t the case in Charlottesville, not the way that Trump or Scott claim.
Scott is talking straight up bullshit. The exact scenario he is trying to claim didn’t happen — DID FUCKING HAPPEN. And Jones is quick to point out — somebody died, and it wasn’t one of the Nazis.
Jones: Wait a minute a woman was murdered! Hold on a second..
Never the less, Scott persisted.
Scott: How many people were shot? How many guns went off? One person was run over by a car, and you’re absolutely right that was horrible.
It wasn’t just one. person. it was about 20 people. Heather Heyer died but almost two dozen were seriously injured. And we do know thanks to chat logs and screen grabs that the neo-Nazis were planning this violence in advance, and were even “joking” about hit counter protestors with their cars. So again, like most Trump supporters have to, Scott is still talking BULLSHIT.
These various angles from the crash show that he targeted a crowd of people who weren’t even walking anywhere near the neo-Nazis and they certainly weren’t blocking his way out, he got out pretty easily even driving backwards. (NSFW)
And then Scott really goes into the toilet.
Scott: If that’s the case then anybody who drove up their went with a weapon then.
What. the. actual. Fuck?
Borger: If a Nazi is coming to my house to kill me, as a Kurd, as we all know there is a right to self defense.
Scott: That’s hypothetical. These hypotheticals that you’re saying are not what happened.
No, it’s not hypothetical, it is what happened as the videos above show — and it’s been happening for years. A neo-Nazi attacked the Sihk Temple in Wisconsin and Killed 8 people. Yes, with a gun. A neo-Nazi attacked the Washington DC Holocaust Museum and killed a security guard. Yes, with a gun. Another attacked the Knoxville Unitarian Church, yup, with a gun, vowing he was out to “Kill Liberals.” A neo-Nazi/skinhead couple in South Carolina plotted a vigilante killing of a sex offender. An 8 year-old biracial boy was nearly lynched by a gang of white teenagers just last week. And then there was Dylann Fucking Roof!
No one in Antifa has done anything like that, and there’s no serious suggestion from anyone who isn’t tragically deluded that they ever will.
However White Supremacist, neo-Nazi and Right-wing terrorists have committed twice as many violent murderous acts over the past decade as Muslims have inside the U.S. But Homeland Security is calling actions by Antifa “Terrorist” and they’re ignoring the murders and firebombings committed by Army of God members like Scott Roeder, Shelly Shannon, Paul Hill, Robert Dear and Eric Robert Rudolph as being just State Crimes rather than a consistent and persistent implementation of Right Wing Terrorism even when AoG members have signed a pledge to violence.
The Army of God is an extremist religious group that was organized about 1962 and has declared its objective to be the waging of total war on “the ungodly communist regime in New York” and the “legislative, bureaucratic lackeys in Washington.” With the battle cry “Death to the New World Order,” the Army of God targets homosexuals, abortion clinics, and all those who“preside over the death of children and issue policies of ungodly perversions that are destroying the American people.”
People like Scott are completely oblivious to all this. On purpose. These are not random isolate acts, they are connected and they are deliberate.
Scott: Neo-Nazis have been marching in America for 100 years, they marched during President Obama’s administration, the only thing that brought attention to it was that it happened on [Sometime Something] Trump’s watch.
No, I would argue what brought attention to it during Trump’s watch — was this.
Also during that 100 or so years, the Klan murdered over 4,000 Americans.
According to the Tuskegee Institute figures, between the years 1882 and 1951, 4,730 people were lynched in the United States: 3,437 Negro and 1,293 white.3 The largest number of lynchings occurred in 1892. Of the 230 persons lynched that year, 161 were Negroes and sixty-nine whites.
So, yeah, people are paying attention now. They’d better.
People say CNN is “Leftist” but they pretty much let Scott rant without a real serious challenge to his endless pile of FUD and BS. I do wish that anyone, besides Jones, was actually versant in the facts enough to truth check someone like Scott in real time, but they aren’t — so people me like have to do it after the fact.