In Friday’s online NPR piece “The story behind the arrest of 87-year-old veteran John Spitzberg at the Capitol,” Alina Hartounian, who edits and writes for NPR.org from Arizona, played up how a clip went viral on the Left of a protester getting arrested by Capitol Police next to his walker. NPR played up the feisty old man angle to an embarrassing extent.
This is a standard stunt: Police tell you not to cross a line, so all the protesters who want to get arrested quickly (or slowly) violate it.
The report began in medias res, the reporter striving to tell a compelling story of a sympathetic scene, as opposed to an objective report of a standard arrest.
In the video, one officer wheels away John Spitzberg's rollator walker, while the other uses zip ties to bind his hands behind his back.
The 87-year-old veteran is unsteady on his feet -- the result of several disabilities he suffers -- as the crowd applauds, cheers and chants, "We won't back down, we won't retreat!"
Soon, the cheering turns to jeering and booing and chants of "Shame!" against the officers.
The scene has been shared widely across social platforms and viewed millions of times, becoming a crystalizing moment for those protesting the Trump administration. Now back at a care home in Florida, Spitzberg told NPR he's ready for what's next.
"I plan to be as active as I physically can be at my point in life and whatever the Veterans for Peace and the younger people who are activists, whatever they need, I'll do the best I can," he said.
Video shows Spitzberg is wearing a shirt his group was sporting. It says "VETERANS AGAINST FASCISM." It also shows the cops gently treating him.
So what sort of veterans groups protest a military parade? Leftist ones, of course, though NPR settled for the description “anti-war.” There was no use of potential ideological labels: liberal, leftist, progressive, radical, socialist, or even pacifist. Veterans for Peace recently held a fast "for Gaza."
Anti-war groups Veterans for Peace and About Face: Veterans Against the War organized last Friday's protest against America's peacetime military parade. It was held to mark the Army's 250th anniversary, but also coincided with President Trump's 79th birthday. The parade has drawn heavy criticism from protesters and politicians who saw it as a waste of resources and politicization of the U.S. Armed Forces.
Hartounian cited the Capitol Police comment that protesters illegally crossed a police line while running toward the steps of the U.S. Capitol.
Spitzberg said he crossed the barrier because he saw officers manhandling his fellow protesting veterans.
"I just couldn't stand there behind those barricades while my fellow veterans were being pummeled," he said.
Pummeled? Is that on video? The NPR story is anti-climactic: He was warned he would be arrested if he kept walking, he did and he was, without being mistreated.
Capitol Police, whose officers were at the center of defending the Capitol against Jan. 6 rioters, said the heightened political threat environment means that the officers were on high alert.
Needless to say, NPR gave Spitzberg far nicer treatment than the kind it meted out to those same January 6 rioters and protesters.
As well as being a war veteran, Spitzberg is a veteran of seemingly every kind of left-wing protest movement on offer, though Hartounian was too kind to put an ideological label on the feisty old man who “will continue to stand for what he believes is right,” despite his frailty.
This was far from his first protest. He has been arrested before, in Zuccotti Park in New York, where Occupy Wall Street protests railed against economic inequality in 2011 during the fallout from the Great Recession. And he stood at [an anti-pipeline protest at] Standing Rock in 2016, reported the Frontiersman in Alaska.....And Spitzberg says despite his health challenges, he will continue to stand for what he believes is right.
