Leftist groups like Antifa had been getting away with carrying out violence, destruction, and mayhem for quite a while. Some liberals have been silent in the face of their behavior; others who bothered to speak up compared them to heroic World War II allies who fought the Nazis.
But lately Antifa's efforts to beat down, destroy, and intimidate have been met with pushback from some liberals who perhaps finally realized that silence or support regarding violent criminal elements in their ranks does more harm than good.
Clearly, left-wing "artist" group INDECLINE didn't read the memo.
Remember the jokesters who placed large naked statues of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in very public places last year? That was INDECLINE. Classy bunch. Anyway, they thought it would be a fine idea to go to a Richmond, Virginia, public park in the middle of the night Thursday and hang clowns dressed in KKK garb from a tree.
Their point?
To “protest of the White Nationalist uprising in the United States,” the group said in statement, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. They even released a video showing a tiny band of merry men — curiously dressed in Antifa-like black clothing with bandannas covering their faces — driving to Bryan Park and hanging the KKK clowns after having spent some time putting them together.
Image source: YouTube screenshot
But if INDECLINE wanted to score political points with black leaders, they barked up the wrong tree.
Image source: YouTube screenshot
“When you look at something like that, whether you consider it art or not art, lynching is not something that we’re in agreement with at all,” James “J.J.” Minor, president of the Richmond branch of the NAACP, told the Times-Dispatch. “We do not support any groups that support violence.”
Bernice Travers, president of the Richmond Crusade for Voters — which the paper said is the city’s oldest black voter advocacy organization — went even further, telling the Times-Dispatch that INDECLINE “does not understand ... the pain black people endured then, and still feel today, about hangings.”
More from the paper:
In a news release, INDECLINE said it chose Richmond for its latest action because it is the former capital of the Confederacy and Bryan Park because it’s the site where Gabriel Prosser plotted a famous slave rebellion in 1800.A sign hung around the neck of one of the clowns read, “If attacked by a mob of clowns, go for the juggler — INDECLINE.”
This is not the first time the group has used imagery of hanging figures. In 2012, the group vandalized billboards in Las Vegas, writing “hope you’re happy Wall St.” and “dying for work” on them and dangling a mannequin from a noose off the side.
Image source: YouTube screenshot
Richmond police responded to the incident by sealing off the area around the tree with crime-scene tape and then closing the park, the Times-Dispatch said. There have been no arrests, police told the paper.
INDECLINE, eh? The name suddenly seems fitting.
(H/T: The Daily Wire)
