With considerable courage, Ngo both reported on and photographed the months of rioting in Portland and Seattle, entailing direct assaults on police departments and courts in both cities, attacks on police resulting in hundreds of injuries, and multiple deaths. But as independent journalist Andy Ngo documents in his just-published book Unmasked, widespread rioting led by the loosely organized anarchist group Antifa began in his home city of Portland several years before the Floyd event. The wave of riots, violent crime, and looting ostensibly provoked by George Floyd’s death while police attempted to restrain him is of course well known. Capitol, let alone the other attempts to intimidate lawgivers and judges just mentioned. The threat to the rule of law, and even to the constitutionally protected freedom of speech, in today’s America goes well beyond the attack on the U.S. Yet it would be difficult to find criticism of either Schumer’s warnings or the Wisconsin unions’ attempt to intimidate their state’s public institutions in most of the “mainstream” media. And one woman who emailed death threats to Republican lawmakers also pleaded guilty to making a bomb threat. Although nobody died in the Wisconsin protests, several legislators, both Republicans and Democrats, reported receiving death threats at the time. ![]() (See Walker’s retrospective view of the “Capitol Siege,” with over 100,000 occupying the building and its surrounding square). Walker’s reforms even went so far as to require public employees to contribute to their health-insurance and pension costs-while still paying less for those benefits than the average Wisconsin citizen. Schumer was threatening or encouraging violence.)Ī decade ago, an even more direct and threatening, though ultimately (mostly) nonviolent, challenge to constitutional government was offered by Wisconsin public employee unions who invaded that state’s Capitol to protest and attempt to block Governor Scott Walker’s program of reforming public-employee contracts so as to balance the state budget without raising taxes, and also liberate public school administrations from rigid tenure rules (closely paralleled in school districts throughout the country) that prevented them from hiring teachers based on merit and adjusting their pay based on performance. (Schumer’s act won a rare rebuke from the normally reserved Chief Justice Roberts, who denounced Schumer’s comments as “inappropriate” and “dangerous,” stressing, that “all members of the court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.” In a proto-Trumpian response, Schumer spokesman Justin Goodman explained that his boss’s words didn’t mean what they sounded like, and denied that. More recently, a thoroughly anti-constitutional precedent was set by then-minority leader Chuck Schumer only last March, when he led a posse of about 75 members up the steps of the Supreme Court to warn recently appointed justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh that they had “released the whirlwind,” would “pay a price,” and would “not know what hit” them if they voted the “wrong” way on an abortion case. ![]() Starting with the election of 2000, prominent Democrats have questioned the legitimacy of every election in which a Republican won the Presidency-indeed, devoting a majority of Trump’s term to trying him to remove him, on grounds far more spurious than those on which his post-Presidential impeachment rested. ![]() Whether or not Donald Trump’s January 6 address to his supporters rose to the level of criminal incitement under the Supreme Court’s perhaps excessively liberal Brandenburg standard, it was undeniably a thoroughly reprehensible act, or, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell put it following the impeachment trial, “a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty.” Nothing can excuse it.īut while news media have every right and reason to condemn Trump’s behavior in provoking a mob (despite his admonition that they should act “peaceably”) to engage in a violent assault that resulted in five deaths (and might have cost more, had it not been for the courageous acts of the understaffed Capitol Police), it is unfortunate that few have placed Trump’s act in a broader context that would acknowledge the threats to our Constitutional order arising from elsewhere on the political spectrum.
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