Not that they didn't bring weapons. Here a masked Communist loses his metal baton to one of the guys he wanted to beat up. I note that the masks seem to be worn only by one side here, which might indicate something about which side intended to lawfully protest, and which side came to do unlawful things to the other.
CBS news (top link, above) quotes a radio station interview with the leader of the Patriot's Prayer march, where he claims that -- as has happened in several other marchers in liberal cities -- the police stood down and allowed the attacks to go on unmolested.
Patroit Prayer organizer Joey Gibson told KOIN the clashes "good in terms that we showed that there's a political move right now to have the police stand down in order to impact free speech in some of these big cities."It does seem like this is a recipe for disaster. I think that local governments that order their police to allow protesters to be beaten and attacked are asking for a mess of trouble, and they're likely to get it.
"Portland's the last city on the West Coast that's doing that, so we just have to keep hitting it -- I don't see what else to do other than that," Gibson said. "We'll make Portland so ugly in terms of how they allow these protesters to charge us when we have a permit. The police stood down, we were told they would not stand down, so we have to challenge it."
6 comments:
1968 didn't work out well for the protesters.
I was thinking the same thing. We aren't near that level of violence, fortunately. Not yet. But the 1968 protestors had unrelenting and dishonest apologists for decades after.
We might not be at that level of violence, but we are far beyond that level of demonization.
The Dem elites, in academia media & Deep State, seem to truly believe that conservative Reps are evil.
Their demonization beliefs are leading to ever greater amounts of protests & illegal actions.
I wish there would be more video-taping of the masked & violent protesters, as well as citizen arrests & large lawsuits against the violent ones AND against the city / cities where the cops are told to stand down (and allow the violence).
I wonder if the Left will rediscover their love of explosives? These fireworks are toys, but in the 1970s Weather Underground and other radical groups set off hundreds of bombs.
In my continuing experiment to see if I can communicate effectively with my neighbors of a more Progressive bent, I'm constantly amazed at how easy it is for them to assume I'm hiding an evil motive. They'll say something that makes it plain they're either ignoring or have never heard of any sane basis for the fact that roughly half their fellow American disagree with them about some controversial topic: open borders, say, or abortion. I'll try to point out how differently their conservative neighbors approach the question, and how the difference is not that their conservative neighbors simply don't care about people or good things. It's amazing and discouraging to me how often the answer is not "but don't you see how things don't work out that way, they more often work out this way," which could lead somewhere useful, but instead, "I don't see how any person of good faith can believe that."
One neighbor tried to tell me this week that he couldn't see how a good person would try to suppress the rights of Texas women. At one point he argued that I must be wrong because I claimed to be a Republican, and yet many Republicans support abortion. That's right, I'd say, many do, but I'm not one of them. The R tent currently accommodates my point of view among a range of views on this topic. The D tent no longer does.
He would express dismay that so many people--even the neighbors he lived among--disagreed with him on this. I asked, "How do you account for that?" His answer was that it was a failure of leadership: leaders (and in context this was aimed at me) obviously knew better, but failed to persuade the more benighted sorts of Republicans to go along with them. The idea that people genuinely oppose abortion for other than evil motives cannot find a way to lodge in his consciousness.
I tried hard to explain that, whatever you may think of zygotes, many people can't easily distinguish between a late-term fetus and a regular baby, so we can't necessarily adopt a "hands-off" attitude any more than we can to any homicide. He then fell back on, "I don't support abortion, only choice, and I look forward to a day when it is rare because we've prevented all unintended pregnancies with financial aid and education." I knew there would be little point in responding that I could as easily say I don't support prison or capital punishment and that I look forward to the day that we eliminate it by eliminating all crime. No border crashing, no detention! Instead, I left it there, because at least he had reached the point where he was no longer insulting me and was closer to simply exchanging different views. Small steps. Also, I've learned late in life that you can't reason by analogy with most people, any more than you can explain hypotheticals. In both cases, you'll usually get back only "but those facts aren't exactly the same."
@ Tom Grey - that's a good point. The radicals of the Weather Underground were more violent, and the riots in the cities after MLK's assassination were worse violence, but there was little broad support for them. Today, people give only tepid criticism: "Well, I don't approve of violence, but you can understand..."
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