A Response to MRC TV's Reality Check - Some Thoughts on Charlottesville

MRC TV offered up a video that did go viral today on Facebook. I saw it several times make the rounds and I finally had to respond to it.

I do not know if she is ignorant but certainly annoying. The argument seems to be that not only are nazis and white supremacist to be condemned, but also Black Lives Matter and Antifa. You cannot be against the Nazis and the KKK, and not the BLM and Antifa. You must condemn them all. If you do not, it is an act of hypocrisy. 

"If you want to condemn hate, you must condemn all of it."

The problem is that she conflates hate with violence. And she makes these assertions so strongly, vehemently. Hate and violence, however, are not equivalent. What happened this past weekend was violence, but there is more to this then this weekend. 

The weekend began on Friday night with the tiki march, which really just involved a series hateful and at times comic (I loved those tiki torches!) symbols. It was Saturday morning that members of Antifa and others were allowed to get in the faces of the multiple white supremacist groups and they were off - the fuse was lit. The result, of course, was the death of Heather Heyer, and numerous others beaten and injured. Law enforcement probably at the end of the day underestimated the challenge here. Saturday was a violent day in Charlottesville VA. 

So all parties were in some way guilty in regard to what happened this weekend. In the eyes of the law, in this age of videos on every phone, arrests will hopefully be made and people will go to jail. One hopes that anyone who committed an act of violence, damaged property, harmed others, used a vehicle to kill a woman; one hopes that anyone who engaged in such things is prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

But the speaker in the video is asking us for more. She wants us to condemn not only what happened Saturday, she wants us to condemn these political movements. Is this right?

How is a political movement such as Black Lives Matter, which originated out of the fact that a black man is 2.5 times more likely than their white peers to be killed by a police officer. How is such a movement comparable to the Ku Klux Klan? It would appear that Black Lives Matter is challenging an injustice. Not only an injustice, but one which if they are right, is perpetrated by the police, the very people who we look to to protect us, enforce the law, and carry out justice. 

She list various cities and locales which she claims Black Lives Matters has come to and wreaked havoc on. If these claims were true, if they were substantial, would not the FBI and other authorities be investigating them, prosecuting case against them? I have heard of no such investigations or trials. Yes, we have Dallas where a lone gunman shot and killed five policemen, and wounded nine other policemen, but as a political movement, as a politically driven conspiracy, we have nothing. 

Sadly, the same is true of the other side. there was most likely no conspiracy for that young man to get into his car and drive into that crowd, and killing that woman. So the violence though at times there, is not main reason we condemn such movements. If it was just violence then they would just be a gang. We condemn them for their beliefs. We condemn them for their beliefs that whites are superior, for their beliefs about the very concept of race, for their belief in fascist politics. The list goes on. 

The point is that to condemn them for simple violence is to say they are criminals. If we are to truly challenge white supremacist and facists, we must condemn their beliefs, their political philosophy, which does not values liberty, justice, equality, ultimately human life. It is the violence, the danger of their beliefs, which must be condemned. 

I have said nothing about Antifa. I know little. I feel they are largely the anarchist, that they largely just enjoy a fight, but again I do not know. They claim they exist to challenge fascism, but their methods quickly become the question. Black Lives Matters has a similar challenge. There seems to be no Martin Luther King in either of these movements, but then in 1966 I would guess that Martin Luther King was not Martin Luther King. I have rambled, no doubt, but I hope I have at least challenged the idea that if we condemn the white supremacists, we must condemn all groups. And second, I hope I have pointed to why we really want to condemn these groups. It is not just their violence, but their beliefs that we challenge and condemn.

And it is there that Black Lives Matters is a different animal. Again, they are fighting an injustice. Now we can disagree about some of their rhetoric, we can question if they are in fact a criminal conspiracy, but their pointing to what certainly seems like an injustice makes me pause. It makes me think they might actually offer something of value and that we cannot condemn after a five minute video.