https://hotair.com/archives/2018/08/13/point-unite-right-hype-machine/
Did you happen to catch the massive white supremacy march on our nation’s capital yesterday? You’re to be forgiven if you didn’t since it basically didn’t happen. After days on end of massive media hype – which I confess I bought into myself – the second Unite the Right rally in Washington turned out to be an affair which could just as easily have been held in a decent sized garage. Jason Kessler showed up in town with a grand total of as many as two dozen followers, but
as NBC recountsfrom their coverage, by the time they took the Metro down to Foggy Bottom, several of them peeled away, leaving less than 20 race warriors to march around in a small, sad circle, only to leave early, apparently because it began raining.
.....
So what was the point of all this? Don’t get me wrong… the press needed to be on hand in case there actually was some large rally or if violence broke out between the disparate groups. But nothing happened. Is this the extent of the “rising white supremacy movement” which has supposedly flourished across the country since Donald Trump took office? Some of the counterprotesters were cheering the small turnout, saying that they had succeeded in scaring Kessler’s people sufficiently to keep them away. But if that was the objective, it’s a poor one. We’re not supposed to be suppressing speech, bur instead opposing it with more positive speech.
The only real story of the day was Antifa being Antifa as usual, assaulting police and reporters.
As I wrote yesterday, it started at the Charlottesville march where they were obviously there to protest the police, not any white supremacists.(Some good videos at that link if you missed it over the weekend.) The Antifa presence in Charlottesville, however, was dwarfed by the number of “soldiers” they rounded up in Washington. And once again, they were there to fight, not speak.
To be sure, I have zero doubt that Antifa would have been happy to start swinging at Kessler’s people if they weren’t surrounded by ten times as many police officers as there were Nazis. But since nobody showed up to fight, Antifa had to find a new target. As usual, it was the police. They had already assaulted at least one police officer in Virginia, an event which is
now under investigation. They were throwing bottles at the cops and firing bottle rockets toward law enforcement lines.
The police weren’t the only targets of Antifa anger, however. They were
going after the media, too.
Because when your cause is righteous, you reflexively want to make sure that you cannot be identified.
There are all sorts of links available there. I would note that not one of the twenty or so White Nationalists got punched. So the leftists, who self identify and always show up with groups claiming to be Antifa, went ahead and moved onto their other fascist targets: the police and the media.
I’m not denying that there are isolated pockets of serious neo-Nazis and white supremacists out there. But that’s also nothing new. They’ve been lurking around for my entire adult life, though you don’t often hear too much from them in the modern era (thankfully). But it’s starting to seem as if the press is building more of a hype machine around this than their small numbers and even smaller influence warrant. Even the rally Kessler organized last year only managed to draw a couple of hundred people, and they were coming from all over the country just to assemble that many. Meanwhile, the media coverage of violence by Antifa is timid by comparison, assuming it’s picked up at all.
The media has a bunch of kindred spirits on this board. For a group that is not officially part of the Democratic Party, I see a bunch of people bending over backward to downplay their tactics....