"If one line captured the essence of Saturday’s Boston Common rally and counterprotest, it was a quote halfway through Mark Arsenault’s Page 1 story in the Globe:
“‘Excuse me,’ one man in the counterprotest innocently asked a Globe reporter. ‘Where are the white supremacists?’”
That was the day in a nutshell. Participants in the “Boston Free Speech Rally” had been demonized as a troupe of neo-Nazis prepared to reprise the horror that had erupted in Charlottesville.They turned out to be a couple dozen courteous people linked by little more than a commitment to — surprise! — free speech.
The small group on the Parkman Bandstand threatened no one.
One of the rally’s organizers, a 23-year-old libertarian named John Medlar, had insisted vigorously that its purpose was not to endorse white supremacy.
“The rally I’m helping to organize is about promoting Free Speech as a COUNTER to political violence,” he had posted on Facebook.
“There are NO WHITE SUPREMACISTS speaking at this rally.”
Indeed, nothing about the tiny rally seemed in any way connected with bigotry or hatred..."
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