Black conservatives tailed by white Antifa leftists at Denver parade

FPI / January 21, 2020

A group of Antifa leftists, all of them white, harassed a group of black conservatives who were marching in the Martin Luther King Jr. parade in Denver on Monday, a report said.

The Antifa thugs eventually drew a police escort as they followed the Rocky Mountain Black Conservatives (RMBC) during the parade, Valerie Richardson reported for The Washington Times.

If the Antifa group, short for “anti-fascists,” saw any irony in a bunch of whites carrying “Black Lives Matter” signs while intimidating blacks during an MLK event, they didn’t show it, said RMBC executive director Derrick Wilburn.

“They’re a bunch of white kids, and here they are harassing the Rocky Mountain Black Conservatives, who are marching in a parade to honor Martin Luther King,” said Wilburn, former vice chairman of the Colorado Republican Party. “They don’t get it. They can’t see the hypocrisy of their own position.”

Wilburn told the Washington Times that the intent of the Antifa thugs was to harass the group of 40 to 50 conservatives, who included members of the Denver Republican Party and supporters of Casper Stockham, a black Republican seeking the party nomination to run against Democratic Rep. Jason Crow.

“Obviously they planned this in advance,” said Wilburn. “They clearly just wanted to irritate, agitate, so they walked alongside us, in front of us, behind us, with their stupid little bandanas on. I don’t know how the Denver PD got tipped off, but they were right there, walking right alongside them as they walked alongside us.”

It was the first time the black conservatives had been targeted by Antifa “punks,” he said, “but then again, Antifa wasn’t really a thing until the last couple of years.”

“We just wanted to be there for the reason everyone else was there, to celebrate Dr. King and remember everything he’s done for our country,” Wilburn said. “But these knuckleheads, they can’t stand that, so there they were.”

Denver’s 35th annual “Marade,” one of the largest MLK holiday parades in the nation, typically draws between 50,000 to 75,000 participants and onlookers. This year’s crowd included Denver Mayor Michael Hancock, Gov. Jared Polis and former Gov. John Hickenlooper.

Wilburn said the Antifa group left alone the predominantly white progressive groups participating in the event.

“We should be just as able to walk in a parade, harassment-free, as the Greenpeace people or any other leftist group should,” said Wilburn. “They were clearly there to harass us. It wasn’t like it was any big secret. Any fool could have figured out what they were doing. We didn’t care.”

“Other than just being annoying, they weren’t acting like they were looking for a problem, but you never know. They all have on backpacks, and you don’t know what’s in there,” Wilburn said. “We’ve all seen the videos of them pepper-spraying people in other cities. I think it’s probably fortunate that the Denver PD were just a few steps away, or who knows what these idiots might have been capable of?”

Free Press International