So. There is another side to these Trump rallies then is being presented in the media. Courtesy of a Tucson police officer named Brandon Tatum. Mr. Tatum, an African-American, had some off-duty time on his hands and decided, out of curiosity, to attend a Trump rally in Tucson. He went dressed in civvies, no one knew he was a cop. And he was so amazed by what he found that he took to Facebook to discuss what he saw — as seen here.
Amazingly, in a miracle of media reporting, the Washington Post actually did serious reporting on Tatum’s video. The headline:
Police officer: Trump protesters were ‘the most hateful, evil people I’ve ever seen’
The story, in part, reads thusly:
Protesters at recent Donald Trump campaign rallies have made almost as much news as the presidential candidate himself — getting sucker-punched, landing sucker punches, stopping traffic, stopping the rallies, claiming they were banned from the events.
Brandon Tatum, an officer in the Tucson Police Department, went to a Trump rally on Saturday as a civilian to see what was going on. In a subsequent video, he said he thought there was going to be “a full-fledged riot” at the event — but not because of Trump’s supporters.
The protesters were the problem, Tatum said.
“These people were acting so outrageous,” he said in the video, which went viral after it was uploaded to Facebook.
“You were just thinking that somebody was going to lose their temper and there was going to be a full brawl.”
… But at the door, he said, protesters were “verbally violent” — shouting “black lives matter,” holding up their middle fingers and screaming “f— Donald Trump.”
“I could not believe what I saw,” said Tatum, who is African American.
Someone in the crowd was wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood, Tatum said, and people were “cussing and screaming” and tackling one another to the ground.
A mother was covering her child’s ears, said Tatum, a former spokesman for the police department who is now a patrol officer. (A Tucson police dispatcher confirmed Tatum’s employment with the department.)
“People were directly yelling at me as if I’m a criminal, and all I’m trying to do is just hear what the man has to say,” Tatum said in the video.
He added: “I thought I was going to have to punch a couple of people in self-defense.”
Amazing, yes? Well, no.
For those for whom this campaign is not the first rodeo, it is utterly un-amazing that (a) the American Left is violent and (b) that the actions of the Violent Left — the provocations, the enticement — are then blamed on the targets.
Questions?
Were black Americans responsible for the actions of the Ku Klux Klan? Of course not. The Klan, which the Left always love to ignore, was the military arm of the Democratic Party, a staunch ally and admirer of Democratic and progressive presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. And yet to hear the Klansmen of the day spin their propaganda if only black Americans had not incited violence by doing outrageous things like, you know, voting in elections, eating in public restaurants, and demanding equality with their fellow Americans of all races — or in other words living the free life that is the guarantee of the Declaration of Independence — there would have been no need for all those lynchings, murders, and burning crosses.
Was the city of Chicago responsible for the Vietnam War in 1968? Of course not. But that didn’t stop the Left from bringing mass violence to the streets of Chicago.
Was the University of California, Berkeley responsible for the crazy idea in 1969 that it had property rights — and that the thug students who tried to forcibly steal university property had to be evicted? Of course not.
On and on and on goes this routine with the American Left. It is so predictable as to be formulaic. Provoke violence and blame the victim. It was true in 1968 and it is true today. There is nothing that Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter or all these anti-Trump “protesters” have done that differs in the slightest in the long trail of Leftist violence that stains the last several decades.
What Brandon Tatum saw with his own eyes in Tucson at that Trump rally was what Americans have seen repeatedly across the years. There is nothing new here, right down to the media presentation that somehow, in some way, the perpetrators of the violence are somehow the innocents, the victims.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
