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The Left Moves from Vacuous to Vicious
By Matt Labash
FROM THE FERTILE GROUND OF OCCUPYWALL STREET, THE LEFT NOWGROWS INTO VIOLENCE...
They came to the Bay Area for what Joey billed as “LibertyWeekend,” but cancelled his rallies at the last second out of safety concerns after the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Berkeley’s mayor had whipped the region into an anti-racism frenzy, calling the group’s members “white supremacists” and worse. Never mind that they weren’t supremacists. Patriot Prayer was calling for unity and moderation, while espousing that “love and peace [are] the only way to unify this country.” (Racial reconciliation is now considered the third rail of American politics.) Many of the patriots, Joey and Tiny included, weren’t even white . Their original slate of speakers advertised, “three blacks, two Hispanics, one Asian, one Samoan, one Muslim, two women, and one white male.” It sounds like the set-up to an old joke – you expected them to all walk into a bar or change a light bulb.
I don’t pretend to be the world’s quickest study, but I had a hunch that things were about to get sticky as we entered Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park. The raging mob – a third of whom were cloaked in masks and black ninja pajamas – began screaming at us: “f--- off fascists” and “Nazis go home.” Not a warm welcome. On this late August weekend, I’d tagged along to profile Joey Gibson, a half-Japanese house- flipper from Vancouver, Washington, and his sidekick, Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, a 6’6” 345-lb Samoan strip club bouncer and former youth pastor. They hailed from the group Patriot Prayer, a conservative-leaning free speech outfit founded by Joey in the wake of Donald Trump supporters getting beaten to pulps outside his 2016 rallies in San Jose.
American Consequences | 79
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