Fighting Words

by digby

Free Republic posted a YouTube video of their counter-protest on Saturday. Judge for yourself. It runs about 9 minutes, but it’s worth looking at. Clearly there was some point when people were able to walk closely by the counter-protesters on the sidewalk and it’s possible that somebody spit on Sparling during that period. It’s not captured on this film. Police are casually walking through and people are lolling about with baby strollers, so it doesn’t appear to be a very dangerous scene. (You can see a woman dressed in black who appears to be interviewing Sparling at one point. Perhaps she is the NY Times reporter who observed that he was spit on?)

The video shows the Freepers with a megaphone shouting things to the protesters and protesters shouting back. The guy with the megaphone calls them things like “nutcases” and and some protesters shout back things like “asshole.” (The tough guy freeper filmakers get very delicate when one of the protesters “drops the M—F– bomb. Mercy me!) I observe no violence, however, and no shouts of “baby-killer”, “you have blood on your hands,” “you’re just upset because you can’t run.” In fact, the worst thing most of the protesters say repeatedly is “enlist,” which I’m sure Sparling and other veterans there found particularly insulting, but which actually isn’t. The filmmakers put up some title cards that have protesters saying “go back there” but I didn’t actually hear it.

There is nothing in this footage that shows Sparling speaking at the Code Pink rally to mostly polite response earlier or standing up close to the stage and loudly booing the speakers, as has been reported. Perhaps someone else has that footage.

In this film, mostly what you see is just some people shouting back and forth across two chain link fences separated by about 30 yards and a couple of people having a heated face to face interaction. (There is a lot of focus on black faces in the crowd for some reason.)

The Freepers set up shop with their megaphone clearly seeking a response from the protesters. Nobody who watches the footage can believe that they weren’t asking for a response. They were “march trolls” being deliberately provocative, looking for trouble. All they got was some people shouting back at them, as far as I could tell. That they are now complaining about how terrible they were treated shows them to be whining little children. Please.

They are perfectly within their rights to do what they did. But the protesters were also perfectly within their rights to shout back. This is still America, the last I heard, and nobody is required to be polite to Freepers with a megaphone.

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