On Fri., April 23, the Democratic mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, declared a state of emergency in his city, imploring its citizens to help unmask the black clad protesters who had been disrupting Portland life intermittently for more or less a year. Referring no doubt to incidents such as the April 11 attempt to burn the Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] building to the ground, he declared: “They want to burn, they want to bash, they want to intimidate, they want to assault.” Later that same evening, the activities of approximately 75 “black bloc” members in the bar section of town morphed into property damage which the police described as a riot, albeit a relatively minor one.
On Wed., May 5, another crowd of mask-wearing dissidents took to a busy Portland intersection to block traffic in support of a Black man killed by police in 2018. Two White motorists, fed up with the cops’ failure to do their job, decided to breach the blockade. That no one was killed in the ensuing confrontations is a minor miracle. One of the individuals, Joe Hall, was a military veteran in possession of his own firearm. Leaping from his vehicle, calling his adversaries “idiots” of a very specific kind [starts with the letter F], he was quickly tackled by five or six of them, suffering broken ribs, head trauma, etc. But what is truly troubling is that Hall noted among his assailants, AK-47s and AR-15s! Apparently, if one is of the Left, one can wander the streets of America’s cities these days sporting the most deadly of military weapons without being immediately, automatically arrested!
If Ted Wheeler is serious about restoring Law and Order to his city, why have I just read [May, 8] that over half of those in Portland charged with taking part in the multiple riots of 2020 have had those charges dropped?
Reliable information on the nature of the protests that have broken out in every corner of the U.S. is hard to come by. “Progressive” publications insist that over 90% of them have been peaceful. Yet one cannot help but recall the CNN reporter last year who made the same claim of the events unfolding behind him even as his cameras ironically revealed several buildings seemingly burning to the ground! What no one can deny is that the “peaceful” protests of 2020 led to the deaths of more than 25 people as well as property damage in excess of two billion dollars. Those are FACTS!
On May 2 in Plano, just north of Dallas, B.L.M. blocked a major intersection to express its outrage over the death of Marvin Scott who died suspiciously while in police custody in March. Once again violence was averted when an irate White driver who had emerged from his vehicle was quickly escorted away by a nearby cop, but not before belligerently swiping at the cell phone of a female who was filming him. He has subsequently been charged for the misdemeanor. But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was astonished that none of the protesters had been charged or arrested, stating that the local Police Chief seemed “unwilling to enforce the law.” The Chief in question responded: “We have to negotiate with these people. Do you expect us to mass arrest these people? You know that’s not going to happen.” So also, of course, do the protesters who, as his comment clearly implies, can pretty much do whatever they want.
How does one separate bias from truth? Articles by those sympathetic to B.L.M. emphasize that the White motorist in Plano was crazed, violent and a geyser of obscenities.Yet the signs I witnessed in dozens of videos last summer exclaiming “Fuck the Police” and “Fuck all White people” no doubt passed without comment from the same “journalists.” The Plano protesters, I read, were not intentionally blocking traffic but merely en route to another destination. How am I to know? With unparalleled sarcasm the Dallas Observer noted that Paxton and indeed most “conservatives” seemed more concerned with the disruption of traffic in a Dallas suburb than the murder of an innocent Black man by police. Really, does such a comment do any justice at all to the complexities of the issues at hand?
The reality apparently beyond the comprehension of the Left, the reality which the rationalists of the Enlightenment knew only too well, is that once you sanction a fundamental disrespect for the Rule of Law, you unleash that natural propensity for evil which sadly but unequivocally infects a significant portion of the species. Wikipedia, which in a variety of ways manifests its naive Leftist bias, proudly declares that from May 24 to Aug. 22, 2020, there were approximately 10,600 demonstrations across the U.S., 95% of which were peaceful. But that means that in a mere 3 months there were 500 which were not so, 500 “social justice” initiatives that deteriorated into looting, pillaging, and outright violence. It is in defense of a Principle, one deemed to be essential to any civilized society, that Ken Paxton and “conservatives” in general defend the basic integrity of the Rule of Law. The suggestion that they care more about being held up in traffic for a few minutes than the life of a human being is but another example of the sort of silly, reductive generalization with which the Left, not really interested in Principles, typically attempts to destroy its opponents.
In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens discussed the case of Atlanta police officer Garret Rolfe who was fired almost immediately after the shooting death of Rayshard Brooks in June of 2020. Justifying her decision to forego the due process to which Rolfe was legally entitled, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms lamented that had she acted otherwise, her city most assuredly would have burned. Candace’s glib comment was simply that criminals seemed to be running the cities of her country.
As reported by the Blaze on May10, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has warned that demonstrators in his state who imperil the property or well-being of its citizens will be met with “swift” and “severe” consequences. Portland, he says. is entirely responsible for its situation in that it has repeatedly released previous offenders who quite naturally offend again. The rationale would appear to be that “social justice warriors” are not really bad people, no matter how often they break the law. DeSantis isn’t buying it and I don’t buy it. Destroying a Starbucks, pillaging a Walmart or burning a government building in no way advances the cause of social justice. Treat those who do so like any other criminal, making no allowances whatsoever for the eminently arguable “justice” of their cause!
In yet another embarrassing admission of the silliness of the Left’s reaction to the death of George Floyd, New York’s Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio, who in June of 2020 promised to reduce the city’s law enforcement budget by 1 billion dollars, recently announced N.Y. would annually devote 105 million more to keeping the peace in Times Square. A shooting there last week in which three were injured, including a child, seemed to him a dire threat to the tourism upon which his city most assuredly depends.
Really, Bill, first you reduced police funding out of concern for Black Lives, and now you’re moving in the opposite direction in search of tourist dollars. Whatever happened, one wonders, to what is now ironically considered the “conservative” Principle that in a healthy Liberal Democracy a government’s primary responsibility is the protection of all its law-abiding citizens all the time, whatever the color of their skin, economic status or political affiliation?