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Defense contractor employee fired after role in violent Charlottesville riot revealed
Although American progressives have weaponized identity politics and defaulted to racism to explain the most mundane and guiltless of inequities, society should continue to reserve severe forms of punishments for violent acts of bigotry. That’s exactly what defense contractor Northrop Grumman did by firing a systems engineer after video evidence portrayed him beating an African American protester at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina last year.
If only corporate America was as quick to punish left-wing hate.
Exposing a monster
Where the criminal courts are too slow or ineffectual to mete out justice, the private sector and society at large are free to intervene to take appropriate action. In this case, a giant from the military-industrial complex found it could not consciously continue to employ someone who might represent a threat to fellow employees and who undermined their unit cohesiveness.
On Friday, Northrop Grumman confirmed that Michael Miselis, a PhD student who maintained a security clearance as a systems engineer at the firm, was fired. “The individual is no longer a Northrop Grumman employee,” company spokesman Tim Paynter told The Washington Post.
It took the defense firm just one day to terminate Miselis after footage was publicized showing the 29-year-old “pounding on” a black counter-protester. The video shows Miselis shoving an African American to the ground before mercilessly beating him.
Northrop Grumman is within their rights as a private company to fire an employee for violent actions. One would hope that they would be equally quick to fire an employee that moonlighted as a member of a violent left-wing group, such as antifa.
ProPublica Investigation
Miselis was identified after a months-long investigation by ProPublica and Frontline reporters to identify white supremacists involved in violent demonstrations across the country. The professional sleuths were soon unmasking individuals from the Unite the Right rally last August and identifying them as belonging to a white supremacist group in Southern California.
However, other demonstrators proved harder to pin down, and it took journalists longer to identify “a bearded, husky man” who attacked counter-protesters in Charlottesville and was also seen brawling with activists at Trump rally in Berkeley, Calif. In both cases, the unidentified man came to fight, wrapping his hands in tape and wearing protective goggles to ward off pepper spray.
White supremacist moonlighter
Investigators soon learned that, besides pursuing a doctoral degree in aerospace engineering from the University of California, Miselis was moonlighting as a white supremacist enforcer for the Rise Above Movement, a Southern California hate group that expresses contempt for Muslims, Jews, and immigrants.
Northrop Grumman promised to take “immediate action” following their employee’s unmasking — and they did. After firing Miselis, CEO Wes Bush circulated an email to employees promising to preserve the company’s ethics. He elaborated:
There is no place in our company for those who demonstrate behaviors that are counter to our values. If we allow such inconsistencies to be present in our company, we erode the foundation of our enterprise —our ethics and our integrity. Our leadership team will not allow that to happen, and we are determined to take the appropriate actions to ensure our foundation remains strong well into the future.
Ignoring left-wing hate
Americans should continue working together to ensure that extremism, in its various and nuanced forms, is exposed, punished and condemned. While ProPublica’s efforts are certainly commendable, they risk delegitimizing their accomplishments and politicizing their work when they exclusively pursue examples of right-wing extremism.
At college campuses and demonstrations across the country, Antifa and other left-wing radicals use violence to censor, intimidate and otherwise obstruct peaceful protests. When ProPublica and Frontline actively ignore these acts of violence and vandalism, often occurring in greater numbers than from the groups they seek to expose, they lend an air of partisanship to an otherwise honorable endeavor.
ProPublica’s single-minded approach to countering extremism was palpably clear when they teamed up with the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to use as a resource in their “Documenting Hate” undertaking. This “anti-hate” group has been successfully sued for mislabeling legitimate right wing groups as “extremists,” and its activist-lawyers have openly admitted that, “We’re not really set up to cover the extreme Left.”
While it is great to see a known white supremacist like Miselis taken to task for his crimes, there is a fine line between seeking justice and “doxing” someone as an exercise in politically-motivated vindication. When Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube rely on groups like ProPublica and SPLC to monitor your newsfeed for perceived examples of hate from overwhelmingly right-wing groups, one has to wonder if the means justify the ends.
