By David Harsanyi
Tuesday, July 21, 2020
Despite some occasional looting, chaos, property damage,
trespassing, rioting, graffiti, assaults, arson, and general mayhem, the media
consistently assures us that Antifa “protesters” are “largely peaceful.” And
since the majority of buildings in Portland, Seattle, and Denver haven’t been
looted yet, who am I to argue?
Of course, it takes only a sliver of the population to
transform downtowns into a mess and create quality-of-life issues for thousands
of law-abiding citizens. And the mayors who surrender parts of their cities to
left-wing “protesters” are tacitly endorsing lawlessness themselves.
There’s little doubt that if alt-right activists had
occupied a few city blocks in Seattle or tried to firebomb a federal courthouse
in Portland, we’d be in for feverish wall-to-wall media coverage, engulfed in a
national conversation about the perils of right-wing radicalism. Every elected
Republican would be asked to personally denounce the extremists to make sure
they take implicit ownership of the problem.
When a few hundred angry Tiki-Torch Nazis marched in
Charlottesville, you would have thought the RNC had deployed the Wehrmacht.
Those who led the riot were even asked to opine
on CNN. On the other hand, left-wing rioters — the people Chris Cuomo and other
journalists compared to GIs landing
on Normandy — are immediately transformed into apolitical actors, rogue “anarchists,”
as soon as any violence starts.
Who knows? Perhaps the majority of citizens and
businesses in Portland, Seattle, and Denver want their elected officials to let
Antifa act with impunity. Or maybe some of those citizens and businesses will
begin fleeing those cities. Whatever the case, it’s a local concern.
To a point. If mayors do nothing to stop anarchists from
tearing down federal monuments or from defacing, vandalizing, and attempting to
burn down federal buildings, the feds have every right to dispatch teams of
agents to restore order.
None of which is to deny that there are legitimate
concerns about how law enforcement is conducting itself. I’m sympathetic to
criticisms of the federal officers who operate in camouflage and in unmarked
vans. Cops should display badge numbers and identification — if they truly
aren’t doing so right now — otherwise civilians have no real way to hold those
in authority accountable for their actions. But the claim that Pinochet-like
secret police have begun snatching Portland protesters off the street and
making them disappear amounts to the arrest of one man, who refused to speak
without his lawyer and was released a little more than an hour later without
any charges.
If it were up to me, I’d leave Portland to the anarchists
and their political accomplices. But federal law enforcement — including
agencies such as the DEA, FBI, ICE, ATF, Department of Homeland Security, and
Marshal Service — regularly operate across the country. Sometimes they make
arrests, and sometimes they do so after going undercover. This happens under
every administration, every day, and it often happens for far less compelling
reasons. As far as we know, cops haven’t broken any laws in the streets of
Portland. The protesters who cover their faces have broken tons.
With this in mind, it’s been instructive watching many of
the same characters who cheer on governors who take undemocratic emergency
powers and shut down houses of worship without the consent of the people — and
who sometimes arrest Americans for playing Wiffle ball, attending church, or
cutting hair — act as if policing portends the end of democracy. The same
people who incessantly clamor to empower the federal government when it suits
their purposes now act as if protecting a federal courthouse is the Reichstag
fire.
MSNBC’s John Heilemann says that Trump’s sending federal
police into Portland is a “trial run” for using “force” to “steal this
election.” In a piece titled “Trump’s Occupation of American Cities Has Begun,”
Michelle Goldberg, somehow still allowed to freely opine at the New York
Times, says that “fascism” is already here. House speaker Nancy Pelosi
calls the police “stormtroopers” who are “kidnapping protesters.”
All of these contentions are ugly conspiracy theories, hyperbolic allegations meant to fuel partisan paranoia before an election. Even if we accept the criticisms of law enforcement, the driving problem, and it’s been happening to various degrees in a number of major cities, is that mayors are allowing “protesters” to trample on public and private property. They allow it because they share the same left-wing sensibilities. But protesting should never be a license to anarchy.
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