Politics

Anti-Koch progressives call for violent acts against Justice Clarence Thomas at rally

Matthew Boyle Investigative Reporter
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In an edited video released Thursday, progressive protesters are shown calling for violent attacks on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas while protesting outside a summit billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch held last week in Palm Springs, Calif.

Asked by the filmmaker to say what he would like to do to Thomas, one protester says: “put him back in the fields.”

“He’s a scumbag,” the man says. “He’s a dumb shit scumbag.” The man also said Thomas’s colleague, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, “should go back to Sicily.”

A young woman at the rally said that though she was “all about peace,” she would like for Thomas to undergo “torture.”

Two other protesters appear to call for Thomas’s death. When asked what should happen to Thomas, one person says “hang him” while another protester says “string him up.”

Videographer Christian Hartsock, who has worked with undercover specialist James O’Keefe in the past, told The Daily Caller this video is different from undercover work he’s done previously because he held a camera right up in these people’s faces.

“I’ve worked on undercover investigations before where hidden cameras were involved and this was not such a case,” Hartsock said in a phone interview. “In this case, I had a very prominent camera. These people knew that they were on camera and, in a way, I didn’t even deceive them.”

WATCH: Progressives use vitriolic hate speech at anti-Koch brothers rally

Hartsock said the progressives he interviewed continued with their vitriolic hate speech even though they knew they were on camera.

“They knew that they were accountable for their own words and that their look and likeness would be reproduced later,” he said. “That still did not deter them from expressing the most vile forms of hatred, and some would say racism, on the record.”

Hartsock said he did wear a t-shirt with the logo for “Common Cause,” the left-wing organization that staged the anti-Koch protest. In the video, Hartsock also appears trying to portray himself as an ideological ally of the people he interviewed. Nonetheless, he told TheDC he ”just asked questions” and was “really nice.”

“If a liberal journalist were to produce the kind of footage at any one Tea Party, we would not be allowed to forget about it for the next five years,” Hartsock said.