Conservative Activist Encourages Violent Rhetoric at Koch Brothers Protest

There’s a YouTube video currently making the rounds that purports to show “Progressive Rallyists Call(ing) for the Lynching of Clarence Thomas.” The clip does include a montage of reprehensible suggestions from people at a Koch Brothers protest, and the titular suggestion from a couple of people outside the rally, but the real surprise here is that conservative filmmaker Christian Hartsock spends the entire clip cheering them on! He laughs, and when he’s not cutting away before we can hear him, he agrees with suggestions like sending Clarence Thomas “back to the fields,” or “torturing” Thomas.

Here’s the clip, filmed by Christian Hartsock and what sounds like a really excited goose: (warning: language is NSFW)

On the surface, it appears that Hartsock cleverly egged on some moonbat protesters, in a desperate attempt to provide some false equivalence with leading conservatives like Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle. However, the damaging claim he makes in his video’s title is belied by the footage, which actually shows the most reprehensible, racially-charged suggestion being made by unidentified people outside of the protest. If this video was from a Tea Party event, I expect Hartsock (or his influential mentor, Andrew Breitbart) would be the first to point this out.

They would also probably point out the videographer’s history of deceptive editing, and the very real possibility that the people in that section of the video weren’t part of the protest at all. Maybe they were infiltrators, sent to discredit the patriotic dissent of their fellows. They would probably also wonder if the filmmaker had left out hundreds of tepid responses, and disbelieve the answer if it was provided.

Those are the wages of the sin of dishonest journalism. As much as I’d like to denounce the people in these clips, I have no idea who they are. Even at face value, Hartsock never bothers to find out, or to ask them why they would say such completely counterintuitive things. While Hartsock’s encouragement is in no way a mitigation of their words, his intent is clearly not to reveal truth. Unless he truly agrees with what these people were saying, Hartsock nakedly employs deception, then asks the viewer to believe that such deception ends at the camera lens. I can tell you, from personal experience, it does not.

Be that as it may, whoever these people were, what they said was offensive and wrong, and if Hartsock’s sole premise is that there are hateful idiots wherever you go, I won’t argue with that. This is especially egregious when said idiots betray their own ideology, as with the protester who insulted Andrew Breitbart by calling him “gay.”

I would simply argue that a reputation for fairness and honesty are crucial in order to effectively call them out. When I present video of Tea Party protesters, no one has any reason to doubt its accuracy, because I have never given them one. That’s the difference between a journalist, opinionated or not, and a propagandist.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.