Minneapolis can condemn Lang’s racism, charge him for unlawful conduct and still refuse to celebrate the people who attack him. Anything less turns equal justice into a political loyalty test.
Minneapolis now has a superhero fundraiser for a man charged with misdemeanor assault. You cannot make this up, although apparently you can give it an origin story.
William Nicholas Love, the 33-year-old counterprotester who arrived outside City Hall dressed as Spider-Man, was captured on citizen video climbing into the bed of Jake Lang’s pickup, tussling with him and throwing multiple punches. Police arrested Love, and the Star Tribune reported Monday that he had been charged with misdemeanor assault.
A fundraiser organized on Love’s behalf tells a more cinematic story. It calls him an “antifascist superhero,” says police let a Nazi escape and asks donors to support his legal defense. By Monday evening, the appeal had collected tens of thousands of dollars. The costume did more than conceal the man’s identity. It supplied a hero’s role before anyone had to examine the conduct.
The costume is memorable, but the more consequential story is how quickly an alleged assault can be recoded as courage when the target is sufficiently despised—and how reluctant political leaders become to state an otherwise familiar rule: offensive speech does not authorize physical violence.
LANG IS RESPONSIBLE FOR LANG
Let’s be clear about Lang. He came to Minneapolis carrying a sign built around the ugliest racial slur in the English language. He announced that he was coming to defend a Rochester woman whose treatment of a Black autistic child had already disgusted much of the state. He wanted outrage, cameras and confrontation. He got all three.
Police said the two vehicles carrying Lang and his associates illegally mounted the sidewalk beside City Hall and moved toward a crowd. Chemical irritants were deployed by people associated with opposing groups. Three officers were injured as police tried to separate the crowd from the vehicles. Officers later arrested Lang and six associates on probable cause of riot and impounded both vehicles.
If Lang drove unlawfully, endangered pedestrians, assaulted anyone, used chemical spray illegally or committed riot, charge him. If the evidence proves those offenses, convict him. Free speech is not immunity from traffic laws or criminal law.
None of that transfers responsibility for the crowd’s conduct to Lang. The available video is chaotic; not every shove, spray or thrown object can be assigned with confidence. Love’s punches are unusually easy to see. An adult who climbs aboard the truck and swings at another man has made an independent choice. So has anyone who throws a bottle or a hard object at an officer. Hatred of the target does not erase the actor.
PROTECTION IS NOT ENDORSEMENT
Some counterprotesters accused Minneapolis police of protecting white supremacy because officers separated Lang’s group from the crowd and moved the vehicles out of the immediate confrontation. Love’s fundraiser advances the same accusation: police supposedly cared more about roughing him up than confronting Lang.
The receipts tell a different story. MPD erected barriers, attempted to keep the opposing groups apart, extracted the vehicles from a volatile crowd and arrested people on both sides. Lang was protected from the crowd and then arrested away from it. Love was arrested at City Hall.
That sequence—protection followed by arrest—is what impartial law enforcement looks like. Police protection is not a character reference, and an arrest is not a declaration of political loyalty. Officers do not get to decide that an unpopular defendant must absorb a few punches before the law applies to him.
Three officers were hurt while carrying out that obligation. One was struck in the head with a hard object, another injured an ankle beneath a vehicle and one was briefly hospitalized. Their injuries receive little attention in the heroic version of the story because they complicate the casting.
THE MAYOR’S MISSING SENTENCE
Before the rally, Mayor Jacob Frey urged residents to let what he called a “lame-ass racist rally fall flat and fade into irrelevance.” Afterward, he said that if someone comes to Minneapolis, drives on the sidewalk, incites a riot and threatens public safety, “you’re gonna get arrested.” On Lang’s alleged misconduct, the mayor was direct.
What his widely reported comments did not include was the equally direct sentence required for the other side: If you climb into a vehicle and punch someone because you hate his politics, you are going to get arrested too. If you throw objects at officers, your cause does not excuse you. If you answer racist speech with assault, the assault remains yours.
Frey already knows the words. When Rep. Ilhan Omar was attacked at a Minneapolis town hall in January, he called it unacceptable and said: “Violence and intimidation have no place in Minneapolis. We can disagree without putting people at risk.” He was right. The sentence did not need an exception clause for Jake Lang.
Imagine a right-wing mob following progressive streamer Hasan Piker from city to city, boarding his vehicle, punching him and chasing him until he bled. Imagine a fundraiser praising the attacker as a patriotic superhero. No responsible progressive leader would explain the beating as the foreseeable consequence of Piker’s rhetoric. They would condemn it—and correctly so—because the principle cannot change with the identity of the victim.
MINNEAPOLIS HAS SEEN THIS BEFORE
This was not Lang’s first Minneapolis demonstration. In January, he brought a small group downtown for an anti-Muslim and anti-Somali rally. He shouted crude insults, threatened to burn a Quran and proposed marching into Cedar-Riverside. Hundreds of counterprotesters overwhelmed his group.
Then the event crossed a line. Counterprotesters shoved and punched Lang, chased him for blocks and left him visibly bleeding from the back of his head. Video showed a man who had come to provoke the city running for shelter from a mob. News accounts reported no arrests from that assault. I found no comparable public condemnation from the mayor or other prominent local officials.
William Nicholas Love turns out to be a domestic abusing convicted felon. Some hero the “progressives” are celebrating.
This Lang guy is a disgusting human being BUT he was full on physically assaulted last time he came to town. He was bloodied and may have been knocked to the ground.
Confusing to me, since so much of it was captured on individual videos on phones, why some were not charged with assault, or at least battery…back then
Of course Lang invites, and maybe even appreciates this level.of response BUT a crime is a crime, is a crime….So unless there was a self defense component to anyone putting THEIR hands on this guy, I hope those tha did that, are aggressively charged
Then, FOR SURE, let’s not blame the MPD for having to take action, in response, and against, one side or the another.
Exactly. Lang is responsible for coming here to provoke people, and everyone else is responsible for how they respond. Unless force was used in self-defense or to protect someone else, assault remains assault—even when the victim is thoroughly unlikeable. MPD’s responsibility was to separate the groups, stop the violence and apply the law to conduct on both sides. Protecting Lang from a beating was not an endorsement of anything he said.
I probably agree. Probably.
The question left unanswered: when IS political violence justified? Presumably most would agree (Hasan Piker being an exception, of course) that violence would have been acceptable in opposition to Nazi Germany.
That’s a fair question, but Nazi Germany is the wrong analogy. Armed resistance to a totalitarian regime committing genocide and waging aggressive war is fundamentally different from attacking a racist provocateur in a constitutional democracy. In the United States, violence is justified in immediate defense of yourself or others—not because someone’s politics or speech are abhorrent. Once citizens are allowed to label opponents Nazis and physically punish them, well, I don’t think we want to go there.
I think Nazi Germany is a very fair analogy. Nazi Germany did not begin with the Holocaust, nor did it begin with a totalitarian regime. Nazi Germany started off slowly in 1919, winning elections, gradually gaining power. It was a slippery slope. Hitler didn’t get dictatorial powers until 1933, 14 years later. Before that, Germany was…a democracy.
At some point, presumably, you would agree, that between 1919 and 1933 political violence against Nazis would’ve been OK in Germany? Because after July, 1933, the Nazi party was the only legal party in Germany. Resistance of any kind after July, 1933 was futile.