I've seen things like this before. One that comes to mind was during Michigan's 2010 gubernatorial campaign when Democrat nominee Virg Bernero showed up at a rally for Republican nominee Rick Snyder. Bernero's intent was to create a confrontation. Snyder diffused it by inviting Bernero to join him on stage and turn the rally into a joint Q&A, which reflected well on both men and was actually much more informative than a media-moderated debate would ever be.
But the potential for trouble in that situation was not what it might have appeared to be here. I watched the video once and suspected that "Now This" had staged the whole thing. But a little more research generated enough independent coverage that I'm convinced this really happened. We need more of it, but this is an excellent start:
First the obvious observation: Reverse the ideological identities here and this pretty well never happens, right? A rally of Obama or Hillary supporters doesn't invite right-wing counterprotesters up onto the stage to have their say, under any circumstances whatsoever. Do they? Show me an example that proves me wrong and I'll gladly cop to the mistake, but I've never heard of one and I frankly can't imagine it.
To start with, it's not as much the right-wing thing to counterprotest at liberal events. I'm not saying no counterprotesters ever show up - some do - but they're generally just trying to have their point of view heard rather than protesting the whole idea that the other side can have a rally. The silence-the-other-side impulse seems the exclusive domain of the left, which you can see now because some liberals are starting to actually admit this is a problem, but they're trying to say it's a "bipartisan" one. When liberals admit their side is part of the problem, that's when you pretty much have confirmation that their side is the entire problem.
Now, about the statement of the Black Lives Matter leader, to whom I give enormous credit for getting up there and sharing his thoughts with the pro-Trump crowd:
His basic premise is that when bad cops kill black people unjustifiably, there is no justice. I think he also believes white people by and large yawn at these events, but he didn't say that so I'll present that as my supposition.
The problem with his premise is that he assumes every white-cop-shoots-black-man incident is racial by definition, and any time the white cop is not convicted of murder in these situations, justice has been denied. Yet we know that is not always true. The real facts of the Darren Wilson/Michael Brown shooting were very different from what the media and activists originally led us to believe, and that's the incident that really kicked off the current round of Black Lives Matter activism. Remember St. Louis Rams players taking the field in the "hands up, don't shoot" pose, only to have us learn later that this never happened?
Where I believe Black Lives Matter misses the mark is in their refusal to understand that sometimes people get themselves shot by the police by their own reckless decisions, and not because someone was racist. And while the speaker above insists he is not anti-cop in general, he and BLM jump to conclusions about these incidents in a way that makes them anti-cop in practice, even if they won't admit to themselves or to anyone else that they are.
All that aside, though, I loved what happened in this video and I want to see more of it. The guy at the end is right. We're not really listening to each other, and nothing good is coming from that
