Imagine: If Barack Obama hadn’t “evolved” on the subject of gay marriage, thereby adding a new political euphemism to the national conversation, we’d still be accusing politicians of flip-flopping when they suddenly went from one extreme to another on a given issue.
Take Sen. Tim Kaine. Shortly after the clash in Charlottesville between neo-Nazis and the group that calls itself Antifa, Kaine added his two cents via Twitter on which side deserved the most blame for the violence, which turned deadly.
Charlottesville violence was fueled by one side: white supremacists spreading racism, intolerance & intimidation. Those are the facts.
— Tim Kaine (@timkaine) August 15, 2017
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As I noted previously, Kaine’s assessment turned out not quite to be “the facts,” as was evidenced by Antifa’s behavior a week later. Members of what the Washington Post backed then labeled as a group of “peace activists” turned up a peaceful prayer rally in Berkeley and without provocation attacked those assembled with baseball bats studded with nails.
But Kaine may have had an ulterior motive for giving Antifa a pass on its conduct in Charlottesville. Namely, his son Linwood is a member of the group and was arrested St. Paul in March for disrupting a pro-Trump rally.
It is likely this same motivation that has suddenly prompted the 2016 Democratic vice presidential candidate to take the Fifth on whether Antifa should be formally viewed as a domestic terror organization. In 2016, the Department of Homeland Security classified the group’s activities as “domestic terrorist violence,” but the group was never placed on the FBI’s terrorist watch list.
When asked last week by The Daily Caller whether that should be the case, Kaine replied (via Kerry Picket):
I don’t like broad brushes and I don’t know enough about them to say that they’re terrorists but people who do violent things. The law should take care of them.
Interesting. In less than a month’s time, a man who might have been a heartbeat away from the presidency went from viewing Antifa as non-violent to having no opinion about them at all because he doesn’t “know enough about them.”
Who knew knowledge could “evolve”?
