For such a young person, Brown had lived a very public life. He wrote for his college paper and The Courier Journal. He appeared on MSNBC. He met several progressive luminaries, like Barack Obama, Al Sharpton and Kentucky Senate candidate Charles Booker.
Brown reemerged in 2022, running for local office and apparently drifting toward even more radical politics than before. The Daily Beast reported that Brown had been meeting recently with a Black nationalist organization with a long history of antisemitic views.
We don’t know for sure what led Brown to allegedly shoot at Greenberg, a prominent figure in Louisville’s Jewish community, but it is fair to ask whether this was a hate crime.
Is it any wonder that Brown’s story ended this way? He was present during the civil unrest in 2020 that was frequently labeled “peaceful,” even though we could all see the smashed and boarded up windows, the looted businesses, and the street fires. Two cops were shot. What did he learn there? That violence will be excused by many as long as the mob’s cause is judged to be right or moral.
This is a reckoning moment for Louisville. We must snap out of this alternate reality, discuss these truths openly, and stop justifying and rationalizing violence for those who want instant political gratification. In some way, Brown’s alleged attempt at murdering Greenberg is the logical conclusion of the 2020 protests, and the natural culmination of the kinds of influences to which he had been exposed.
It’s no different than the insurrectionists of Jan. 6. The Republican National Committee passed a resolution calling their actions “legitimate political discourse,” as though we all didn’t see the Capitol being smashed and defiled, or the cops being beaten. What happened was the natural conclusion of Donald Trump’s campaign to overturn the election based on unadulterated lies.