Ari Fleischer: 'Alarming' thought police tactics of left will hurt Democrats, they should denounce it

Fleischer made the comments reacting to videos of Black Lives Matter demonstrators screaming at people as they dined outside in the nation’s capital. The videos have gone viral this week while protests picked up steam nationwide following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, in Kenosha, Wis., on Sunday.

Frederick Kunkle, a Washington Post staff writer, posted a video Tuesday on Twitter that showed a crowd of protesters gathering closely around a woman, identified as Lauren Victor, as she sat outside on a sidewalk. The group demanded she raise her fist in solidarity as they chanted at her, “White silence is violence” and “No justice, no peace!”

One woman asked her, demandingly, “Are you a Christian?”

Other diners appeared to raise their fists, but Victor did not. She appeared to try reasoning with the crowd, raising her arms in seeming disbelief. Kunkle reported that after the confrontation, a citizen journalist named Chuck Modiano asked her, “What was in you, you couldn’t do this?”