Rubio Adds to Viral Freak Out Over Hippie Jugglers Mistaken for Antifa Invaders

[Dennis Donovan]

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/rubio-adds-to-viral-freak-out-over-hippie-jugglers-mistaken-for-antifa-invaders

By Josh Marshall

June 12, 2020 5:28 p.m.

I love this story. It’s an amazing story, which is part of the suburban Antifa invasion genre but takes it in an interesting and novel direction. We start in Columbus, Ohio, another city with BLM protests and what is probably best described as an old school hippie bus with all the flowery freeform murals and the like. It’s the home of a group of street circus performers who do something called Flow Art which the paper calls “an umbrella term for a type of street performance that usually involves juggling and spinning flaming objects.” I just learned about Flow Art. Maybe you already know about it. The troupe call their bus Buttercup. Fair enough. The bus is co-owned by Marisa “Reese” Digati and her partner, Jonathan “Bearpaw” Crane. They live in the bus.

The crew heads down at the protests and they get stopped by the Columbus police SWAT Team. It’s a bit tense but it ends up being a pretty low key affair. They’re detained for about 45 minutes but just sitting on the curb, no zip ties or handcuffs. Here’s a video* one of the jugglers took from inside the bus. According to the jugglers, the cops made clear they weren’t in trouble and hadn’t done anything wrong. They just had to leave downtown. The bus was impounded. The circus folk left and picked up the bus the next day from the impound lot. So far it’s like just another day at the intersection of militarized policing and urban hippiedom. No one’s really the worse for wear.

Then it gets weird.

The next day Columbus police went on Facebook to announce they’d finally caught one of those Antifa invasion buses red handed.



<snip>

Then Marco Rubio got involved.



* - video unavailable at link

</snip>

🤡🤡🤡

[panader0]

1. Hippie jugglers are coming for you. Be afraid, very afraid.

[cojoel]

14. We should be afraid

They go right for the jugular...

[SWBTATTReg]

2. Our fearless leader and the police department, eh? What if something really serious happened (and

not this fake antifa BS)...how would the police department and rubio truly act in an emergency? It really does boggle the mind at their incompetence and nonsense.

[Crunchy Frog]

11. I wonder if SWAT teams that are faced with genuine emergency situations

are equipped with diapers. It sounds like something they would need.

[dewsgirl]

3. K and R

[FM123]

4. O Marco, you embarrass us on so many levels....

[yellowcanine]

5. Rubio needs to apologize. He jumped on a raw police narrative because

it fit his agenda to discredit protestors. Hold him accountable!

[Midnightwalk]

6. I'm not amused

They are drumming up fake charges. Those charged will probably have to wait a year or more for charges to be dismissed.

The owners live on the bus and the cops are claiming household items were essentially terrorist supplies.

It is infuriating. The right will use this bus in perpetuity as an example proving antifa is a terrorist group. Even when the charges are driving and Columbus tax payers pay for the civil settlement the facist right wing crooked immoral lying bastards won this battle.

[csziggy]

7. "The rocks were crystals and fossils."

From the article linked in the OP:

According to the Flow Art jugglers all these claims are bogus. On Facebook Digati said: “The ‘weapons’ that were found are tools. Axes for my wood stove, knives for cooking, etc. … The ‘riot gear’ was literally a child’s shoulder pads, elbow, and knee pads for sports.” Another member of the troupe chimed in: “Yeah, there’s a hatchet on the bus — with a bunch of wood sitting next to a wood-burning stove. Well, duh. The rocks were crystals and fossils. They emptied out a knife block [from the kitchen area] and said they found a meat cleaver.”

[LuvNewcastle]

8. He's such a fucking idiot.

I wonder if he has any idea how lucky he is to have that job. Of course not, he is an idiot after all.

[Crunchy Frog]

9. "With shovels and rakes and implements of destruction."

I'd like to see how that trial ends up playing out.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

10. Cops lie. Who knew.

[marble falls]

12. The bungler was confused over the jugglers?

[love_katz]

13. Wow. What an epic eff-up by the cops and Rubio.

Hippie jugglers = antifa terrorists. . I take it that none of the eff-ups have ever gone camping, let alone used an old school bus converted into a motor home. What a bunch of bozos. I feel sorry for the folks who live in and own the bus. Alice's restaurant masacree, but not funny for the folks who got there bus impounded.

[LiberalArkie]

15. Well, they are probably anti fascist like most people

[rickford66]

16. Jugglers ? Thank God. I thought they might be clowns.

[jmowreader]

17. Meat cleavers. REALLY?

Of all the edged weapons in the world, I cannot think of one less suited to fighting than a meat cleaver.