His decision to appear on the Kremlin’s propaganda network was bad enough. What he said was even worse.
His decision to appear on the Kremlin’s propaganda network was bad enough. What he said was even worse.
O n Thursday, Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported: “Mandela Barnes did several interviews with Russian-funded TV in 2015 and 2016 denouncing U.S. police actions.”
What was Barnes thinking? Politico reported in 2015 that RT, the Russian-funded TV station where Barnes appeared, which was formerly known as Russia Today, “now acts as the tip of the Kremlin’s information warfare machine, an agglomeration that seeks to undermine both notions of journalism and faith in the workings of liberal democracy.” The Russian government deliberately sought to undermine American democracy by inflaming racial tensions when Barnes, a Democrat now running for U.S. Senate, appeared on the network as a member of the Wisconsin state assembly.
Barnes’s decision to appear on the Kremlin’s propaganda network was bad enough. But what he actually said was even worse. From the Journal-Sentinel article:
In May 2015, for instance, Barnes told RT that police brutality is a “total epidemic” in the United States. A month earlier, he posted a screenshot of his interview with RT on the Baltimore protests, commenting, “People are tired of being targets.”
In July 2016, after five police officers were shot dead in Dallas in retaliation against alleged racial discrimination by police, Barnes told RT that “police officers across the country haven’t reformed their patterns and practices” and that “police officers are over-exercising their badges.”
Barnes’s full appearance following the Dallas massacre is worse than those quotations make it seem. (I could find the full video only at RT.com, so I can’t promise the Russian government won’t spy on you if you click the link to see it for yourself, but Barnes’s comments are remarkable.)
Even after five police officers were murdered, Barnes trained his rhetorical fire on them, choosing to spend the bulk of the ten-minute interview on incidents of police violence that preceded the Dallas massacre. At the start of the interview, Barnes said: “What the problem is . . . these police officers across the country haven’t reformed their patterns and practices, and that’s the scary part about it. Because when they see that nothing is gonna happen — if anybody can get away with something, you’re gonna do it, and that’s what’s happening all the time. These police officers are over-exercising their badges.”
As he turned to the Dallas murders, Barnes offered a perfunctory condemnation: “That killing is not justified in any way. I have repeatedly denounced that.” So far, so good, but then he went on to say:
This probably was a retaliatory attack, where somebody just said: “You know what, I’m tired of this happening in our country. I’m tired of this happening. I’m tired of waking up and this being the news. I’m tired of this being the new norm.” And you had a frustrated individual, somebody who took matters into his own hands. And I don’t justify it. It should not have happened. That’s not the way that you solve the crisis because it only makes these police officers even more tense.
So, you see, Barnes was not justifying the murder of five cops, but he was explaining the murderer’s motive — as he imagined it — in a sympathetic way.
Barnes’s all-lives-matter “condemnation” of the Dallas massacre — “I don’t want anybody to die” — is pretty weak. In addition to saying that the massacre did not “solve the crisis” of police violence, Barnes said “the attention has been lost on the two young African-American males who lost their lives to police violence. We have to keep this all in mind.” Which of these problems with the Dallas massacre is the biggest one in Barnes’s view? It’s not entirely clear from the interview.
At the end of the interview, Barnes returned to offering an explanation of the Dallas killer’s supposed motive:
When you feel devalued as a person, you can get driven to some extremes. You know, it is very hard to function after the last few days, seeing the [police-killing of] Alton Sterling and seeing what happened in Minnesota [to Philando Castile]. I look at myself, I look at my friends; this could have been any one of us in that situation.
To see how slow justice happens in those instances when it involves police officers, people get very upset, and that’s why you see what happened in Dallas. And again not to justify it because it shouldn’t have happened, but people have been pushed to a breaking point.
So, sure, the murderer shouldn’t have done it, but he was “driven” to do it and “pushed to a breaking point.” Notwithstanding the perfunctory condemnations, that’s just a jaw-dropping and inexcusable amount of sympathy for a man who murdered five police officers.