In case you haven’t seen Vice News’ report on Joey Gibson and Patriot Prayer, and Gibson’s tactic of using aggressive nonviolence against the raging mobs of leftists who oppose him as he demonstrates for, he says, freedom, love and peace, this might be worth four minutes of your time…

Who is Patriot Prayer? The legacy media describes them as an “alt-right” group, and makes a big deal out of what they say are “white nationalists” who attend their rallies. We’ll not get into that question, because let’s face it – the San Jose Mercury News and the Huffington Post aren’t exactly beacons of credibility when it comes to labeling right-of-center people. Gibson has been pretty outspoken in denouncing racism and has ejected violent people from his group.

It doesn’t really matter. They’re going to call him the same names they call everybody who isn’t a socialist and who dares to oppose the leftist mobs, and the legacy media will toe Antifa’s line when they do. Whether Gibson is what they say he is or not, the Vice report makes clear something he’s learned following the Unite The Right mess in Charlottesville – which is that engaging the mob with speech and earning insults and violence for his trouble is the way to win. Gibson generates arrests, usually of left-wing rioters, every time he shows up in Portland, Seattle or the San Francisco Bay area, and the conduct of his organization is usually nonviolent and lawful – if definitively provocative. And the Hard Left mob cannot handle provocation without rioting. They lack that kind of control.

And as the Vice report makes clear, the other side knows he’s winning. That’s true even though they have every advantage – the legacy media, the local leftist politicians, the large numbers of available warm bodies to be mobilized to do things other than work a job. When Gibson shows up at a demonstration to say his group is on hand to defend free speech and Christianity and to document property crime by the other side, and the other side proceeds to attempt to deplatform him, engages in violence and begins breaking things, it’s pretty clear who’s going to come out ahead in the long run.

Gibson says he’s running for the Senate in Washington. He’s not a major candidate. And we’re not going so far as to call him a rising star in the conservative movement or anything like that just yet. He’s probably not somebody we’d want at the cocktail party at the country club. That said, given the ugly phenomenon of Antifa and its relatives on the Hard Left using violence in an effort to silence dissent or opposition, it’s going to take the Joey Gibsons and Patriot Prayers of the world to beat back that tyrannical tide – so long as he does so without resorting to the tactics Antifa and the rest of the Left has made famous.

Hot Air’s John Sexton had this exactly right…

In short, the far left looks violent because the far left is violent. It’s not even a secret. The most distinctive aspect of Antifa is that they openly embrace violence against their enemies. So all Gibson is really doing is showing that the far left is exactly who they say they are. Until the left decides to rein in some of their more extreme elements, they are going to keep getting violent and looking bad to the majority of Americans who don’t support violence and don’t believe speech is violence.

And in the effort to expose this, Gibson deserves our praise for both the attempt and the method. More, please.