The following article by David Haggith was published on The Great Recession Blog:
Shootings, stabbings, beatings of bystanders, police officers blinded by lasers, thrown bombs, burned vehicles, and the usual plethora of broken windows, stolen merchandise, obstructed traffic and graffiti. These phrases describe many of the so-called “protests.” All illegal. All unconstitutional.
Yet, the Democratic mayors of the cities taken over by such conflagration cheer on the people destroying their towns and do their best to ignore complaining businessmen and citizens who cry out for justice. Not the least of these unashamed, lawless, wild-west towns is Seattle, whose Democratic mayor turned part of the town into a Petri dish of failed anarchist aspirations.
Seattle’s Petri dish provides a microcosm of a new world, ungoverned by constitutional law, in fact, ungoverned at all. In other words anarchy, and Democrats are bending over backward to deliver that world.
As conservative writer Victoria Taft summarized,
Democrats, so far as I can find, have never denounced the violent mobs…. Indeed, the only remonstrance issued was over people burning down black-owned businesses – their “own house” as [New York Governor Cuomo] put it, because burning your own stuff “never makes sense….”
Mayors, governors, and prosecutors have fallen all over themselves to support the violent mobs in Seattle, New York, St. Louis, Washington, D.C…. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan ceded a section of the fancy Capitol Hill neighborhood to the mob. She handed over a police precinct to the mob. Two murders, gunshot wounds, assaults, and rapes took place at her pet mob’s little “summer of love” squat. She’s never apologized….
How-dare-Trump-send-police-to-defend-a-federal-building that the left is obsessed with bringing down…. Far from denouncing the violent and destructive nightly arsons and assaults, Democrats embrace the riots to denounce President Trump.
Don’t let Trump ruin our riots, the mayors of Seattle and Portland seemed to say, after abdicating their legal authority to anarchists in order to let their cities be taken away from decent, law-abiding citizens. Trump, they claimed, by sending in US forces to guard federal buildings that these mayors clearly were not protecting, was breaking the law. An odd claim from mayors who care so little about others who are shattering the law like so many broken windows.
There is no such thing as a constitutional right to violent protest or to overthrow of the state or an unregulated right to bear arms!
Like graffiti artists, these mayors and their ilk have painted over the constitution to pretend it enshrines concepts that it clearly does not. Here is what the constitution actually says on these matters. Maybe it is time both the hard Left and the hard Right stop and actually read it:
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petitionthe government for a redress of grievances.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects….
First, notice the word “protest” is not even in the constitution. The more orderly sounding and peaceful word used is “petition,” and the only manner in which petitioning your government is protected in the US constitution is clearly stated as “peaceably.” If you are petitioning your government in any way that is not peaceable, you are not protected constitutionally, nor is your behavior advocated.
There is nothing in the constitution saying people can disturb the peace. There is nothing saying they can block streets. Nothing saying the can break things to express their rage. There is nothing saying they can laser police officers in the eyeballs or throw things at the police. This is all lawlessness, and the constitution expresses no protection for it whatsoever.
What the constitution does protect is the people’s right to assemble peaceably to petitiontheir government — not even necessarily to petition the entire populace in the city streets, but specifically to “petition the government.” Peaceably. Got it?
The drafters of the Bill or Rights were wise enough to know that lawless riots have no place in a democracy. For those on the far Right who sometimes claim the constitution enshrines the right to armed insurrection, which is ironically exactly what Antifa on the far Left is aiming for, you had better get new reading glasses because you, too, have left out the significant qualifiers:
Amendment II
A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
The operative words there are “well regulated.” So, yes this right can be regulated. It says so right in the very expression of the right. And, no, it is not to allow for the possibility of violent overthrow of the state if the state gets out of line as the far Right sometimes claims. It is specifically for the purpose of assuring security of the state. Not even the security of the people; the security of the state.
Why? Because the state in this constitutional republic embodies government by law and by majority consent; outside of that, all you have is “might is right,” — in other words strongman rule, a.k.a. anarchy, which typically ends in tyranny. You may not have the government you want, but it is the government that the majority has approved, however wrong-minded the majority may be or however tacitly they approved it by just sleeping and letting it happen.
There is NO RIGHT expressed anywhere in the constitution to violent overthrow of the state for any reason, whether by anarchists on the hard Left like Antifa or by their neofascist counterparts on the hard Right. Ironically, both groups, thinking they are the antithesis of the other, are far more alike than they think. Violent overthrow of the government or even violent protests of the government were never enshrined in the constitution. Leaders who allow this are not leaders at all. Right now that applies particularly to America’s most liberal cities.
Both the hard Left and hard Right need to learn this obvious fact, which goes against the grain of their penchant for violent expression of their rage. What they really like is the right to simply destroy whatever they don’t like or just to vent their spleens — not peaceable constitutional government at all.
What is, in fact, enshrined by the constitution is the right of all citizens to be secure in their persons and in their homes. And that cannot exist in a nation where racial riots are happening or when neofascists are trying to overthrow a government they viscerally disagree with by armed insurrection. You have a right to change the government by peaceable petition and by legal amendment to the constitution if you don’t like this kind of government and only if you can persuade the majority to follow you.If not, you’re out of luck. And that is ALL you have.
The present wild-west lawlessness stomps all over the constitutional principle referenced in the Fourth Amendment as the right of all citizens to live with security for their persons and their homes and their things. No one’s right to petition the government comes with the right to trounce on that enshrined principle of security, and it is government’s responsibility to maintain and assure that security when some parties think they can do what they want because they are angry.
You have no right to light the town on fire or bust its windows or attack the police, no matter how much you may hate them, not even if some of them do some terrible things. You have a right to pursue them legally. You have a right to vote in different people who will pursue them legally. You have a right to meet with others and peaceably express your grievances.
In major cities across this nation, the rule of law now lies in tatters. Numerous Democrats obviously don’t care — so much so that they actually seem to be climbing all over themselves for the opportunity to support unconstitutional violence. Democratic officials are outshouting each other for the opportunity to get rid of their own police departments. And enforce the law with what? Good intentions? Inept committees? Police agencies that go by some other name than “police?”
Antifa doesn’t want any of that, so liberals are not going to appease them if their changes still involve enforcement of law. Apparently Black Lives Matter in Seattle doesn’t want law either because they claimed the right to be their own law, or they got co-opted by Antifa into such a movement, as I’ll lay out below in this saga of Seattle’s Petri dish of lawlessness.
It is no coincidence that the cites that were in the news most for violent riots have been run by liberal Democrats for decades who have long encouraged protests of any kind while nurturing a keen sense of victimization in as many citizens as they can in order to incite us all against each other so people will turn to them for salvation. (And, as you can see in this article, I don’t tip my hat to the hard Right that equally does all it can to perpetuate division and even hatred between people based on nationality or race. I’m just talking straight-down-the-center truth.)
Here’s a little clip showing how supportive these Democratic mayors are to the violent overthrow of their own towns and to the attacks on law enforcers who are attempting to protect buildings in those towns from clearly intended destruction via clearly illegal, unconstitutional violence. Watch how the mayor of Seattle’s liberal neighbor to the south, Portland, supported anarchy in his own grandstanding fashion:
CHAZ got CHOPped and Seattle with it
Let’s survey how the “peaceful protests” in Seattle’s Capital Hill neighborhood actually went down via a timeline of the criminal offenses that Seattle’s liberal Democrat government bent over backward to excuse, defend and even wholeheartedly support.
When what I’ll call the “Capital Hill Anarchist Petri Dish (CHAPeD)” was first carved out as a place to try Antifa-style anarchy on for size, it was given the jazzy name “CHAZ” for “Capital Hill Autonomous Zone.” It would have more accurately been called “Capital Hill Anarchy Zone.”
Week One: Seattle gets all CHAZzed up with nowhere to go but down
The first thing that happened when Seattle surrendered a part of itself to become an experimental “autonomous zone,” a.k.a, an “anarchist zone,” is that a strongman seized the neighborhood under his own pretentious, self-righteous tyranny … as could be predicted:
I’m sure we all noticed right off that the chief of the very police Black Lives Matter claimed to be protesting when it shut down the local police precinct is a Black woman. (And, it seems to me, in the story that follows, she’s a pretty reasonable person, carrying out her ill-begotten orders from the mayor and the city council.)
When the Seattle police are defunded, perhaps this voice of reason from the Black community will be the first to lose her job.
After being told from on high to close the precinct, Chief Best points out how crime immediately got worse and police response time tripled:
Rapes, robberies, and all sort of violent acts have been occurring in the area that we’re not able to get to. So, it is not a right for us not to be able to deploy our officers here. We owe that service to everybody,
A despot named Raz became the new leader of CHAZ once the cops abandoned their post as they were instructed by the city’s leaders to do.
Complained one anarchist idiot:
Sorry, Fool. That’s how anarchy works. If you wanted “order,” it comes with “law,” and law comes from the state. In a true democracy like you claim you thought you would get, the state comes from the consent of the governed. Those who don’t consent to be governed by the democratic rule of all citizens, not just their own handful or rebels, get exactly the kind of Neverland surprise to their unreality that you just got. Jack rules over the rebels.
And it took just two days to get you there!
Of course, it also didn’t take long for anarchist airheads to discover that, without the support of all the law-abiding, hard working citizens who have something better to do than protest their purported right to be free of the law, they would starve. And, so the rebels began begging the people whose businesses and jobs they were pillaging for food:
One complaint of the CHAZites was that some lawless people, then, stole all their donated food. Really?
Wow! Who coulda seen that coming?
And they’re picky beggars, too! Don’t feed the animal-mutilating meat-eaters.
As alt-media writer Michael Snyder humorously noted,
But please don’t bring them anything that has been heavily processed because that will just make them angry, and if you try to give them anything that contains real meat that could potentially set off a riot.
Or, as Zero Hedge noted,
“Gotta say I’m impressed, it usually takes Marxists at least 3-4 months to achieve starvation,” said one Twitter user.
Below, the rifle-bearing Raz of Chaz, accompanied by his goons in black, self-proclaims the right to rule the neighborhood:
I can’t vouch for the character claims about Raz put out by the anonymous Black woman who posted the video; but, from what I’ve seen in print elsewhere, her claims against his character appear to be true.
Warlords rule in autonomous zones. That’s how it always goes. Too bad, the “unsigned” autonomy geek who complained in the other video above didn’t get the memo that such is the nature of the anarchist beast.
Raz unwittingly accepted the claim that he is a strongman ruler when he rebutted Trump’s claim that he is is a terrorist: (What can we expect from the Witless One? (Oops, it just occurred to me many will think I was referring to Trump with that moniker. Sighs. Such is our universe in this COVID year that it might just as easily apply to the president of the United States of America; but, no, I refer to the Raz of Chaz.)
The world has seen many times how strongman rule goes. It never ends well, regardless of the color of the “strong man.” Black or orange.
A rapper named Raz Simone, appears to have tried to position himself as the leader of the “No cop, Co-op,” where hundreds have been encouraged to remain camped out to occupy area in Seattle’s capitol district.
Of course, the first order of disorder was to shut down the police.
Hundreds stormed Seattle’s City Hall Tuesday night to demand Mayor Jenny Durkan defund police or step down.
Simone, a local rapper with an AK-47 slung from his shoulder and a pistol attached to his hip, screamed, “This is war!” into a white-and-red megaphone and instructed armed paramilitaries to guard the barricades in shifts.
It Only Took 2 Days For Seattle’s “Autonomous Zone” To Descend Into Chaos…
Protesters in Seattle decided that they were going to give us a living, breathing example of how the world should really operate. The police were completely kicked out of a six block area of downtown Seattle, and armed guards were posted at all the entrances to the “Capital Hill Autonomous Zone” in order to make sure that their “utopia” would not be interrupted.
One might reasonably wonder why a police-free antonymous zone needed armed guards. Aren’t those just “police” under someone else’s authority?
Ah, but don’t bother me with truth.
By day three, all semblance of legitimate government had cut and run from the area: (Apparently a semblance of government is all Seattle ever was.)
Oddly, the CHAPeD nouveau-authorities of CHAZ wanted the city’s police disarmed and defunded, even as they armed their own surrogate police replacements. Can anyone spell “hypocrisy?” (Hopefully, I spelled it correctly just now so I don’t become the subject of my own ridicule. Better check that…. OK, back, we’re fine.)
Seeing the opportunity to right the injustices of the world, Seattle City Council Member Kshama Sawant said she was putting forward legislation to effectively de-annex CHAZ, as a separate zone from city rule.
Seattle Councilwoman Kshama Sawant called the “CHAZ” movement a major victory. She said the area should be turned over permanently into community control, instead of back in the hands of the Seattle Police Department.
This elected member of the city government righteously saw that the city should not police itself and that the government (herself included) should not be vested in the city, but should be abrogated to those who laid siege to the neighborhood.
Hopefully, she sees things the same way for all Seattle neighborhoods so the wrongful government of the city — herself included — can rightly be deposed from all parts of the city and placed under anarchic rule. Such is the total ill-conceived, illegal illogic of the Lunatic Left. (The Far Side of Left.)
Sawant said she plans to create legislation to turn the East Precinct into a community center for restorative justice. The councilwoman wants to discuss the legislation with people involved in CHAZ, black community organizations, restorative justice, faith, anti-racist, renter orgns, land trusts, groups, labor unions that have a proven record of fighting racism.
This idiot Sawant wants all of that because, obviously, the government she is a part of has zero capacity to fight racism. Government had best be turned over to someone other than she and her colleagues who self-admittedly are not capable of being the rightful and right-headed government of the Neo Non-Republic of CHAZ.
President Trump offered his assistance, but Mayor Durkan and Governor Inslee told him to crawl back to his own neighborhood. They have the dismantling of the city fully out of control just as they want it.
“Make us all safe,” Durkan tweeted Wednesday night. “Go back to your bunker. #BlackLivesMatter.”
Inslee responded to Trump: “A man who is totally incapable of governing should stay out of Washington state’s business. ‘Stoop’ tweeting.”
Well written, Inslee. Take sides with anarchists for the completely unconstitutional takedown of your state and cities and against the President of the United States of America who wants to defend your cities. Good call. It turned out so wonderful for the city of Seattle.
Once the barricades were removed Monday afternoon, and the buildings’ windows were boarded up, hundreds of protesters took control of a five-block radius near Cal Anderson Park.
Of course, Capital Hill has been gravitating toward anarchy for decades. So, CHAZ or CHOP or CHAPeD is just the fulfillment of its ungoverned dreams.
The wise police chief spoke out:
In a YouTube video to her staff, Best said she did not agree with the move to hastily abandon the precinct building….
“There’s no game plan for this,” Best said. “This is absolutely unprecedented. I’ve never seen people force a decision to be made to move officers out of this facility in this manner. So, there is no game plan, there couldn’t be, because it’s unimaginable, what’s happening to us right now. So that’s where we’re at…. Our intention is to get our officers back in this precinct. We really think it’s important.”
Sadly, her city government was not able to see things through her Black eyes.
So pleased were the appeased by the mayor’s removal of the police that they demanded the immediate resignation of the mayor who had bowed immediately to their demands. Some of us recognize that is how appeasement toward lawlessness almost always plays out, but not Mayor Durkan, who dizzily described all of this as “a summer of love” — a comment, which for all of its ditzy wonderment, she eventually had to walk back.
Durkan’s love fest with the pillaging anarchists didn’t go as well as she had envisioned. Another alternative-press writer, Brandon Smith, summarized the week as follows:
The mainstream media would have you believe that CHAZ is a burgeoning progressive Utopia where people live in harmony and free from the police. However, It did not take long before the “self sustaining” SJW [Social Justice Warrior] nation of CHAZ became a laughing stock among web denizens, who have been tracking their bumbling exploits with equal parts glee and bewilderment.
When your society is immediately taken over by low budget weak talent rapper “warlords”, when you run out of food and have to order Dominos pizza delivered to your southern border daily and citizens beg for soy based vegan products to to be donated, and when people are attacked by a mob for “unauthorized graffiti” on the wrong turf after that mob already tore up the neighborhood, there’s certainly room for improvement….
There are already some amazing hypocrisies flowing from CHAZ, including the fact that protesters quickly placed barriers and fencing all around the six block area to keep people they don’t like out. Apparently, Antifa and BLM are now proud advocates of building walls. But two of my favorite examples have happened in the past couple of days, including the man who slipped into CHAZ and started preaching biblical verses at them on the street. This incident should tell you half of what you need to now about the social justice cult.
The man was immediately set upon by a crowd of angry leftists, had his life threatened, was attacked, robbed of his phone and beaten. In the video of the attack, you can clearly see one of the CHAZ citizens trying to put the man in a choke hold; I guess “I can’t breath…” was a temporary motto.
Seattle is fine. The president is just afraid of democracy the Seattle liberals would have you believe.
Week Two: Chez CHAZ learns to garden
As you can see, CHAZ soon realized it might have to provide its own vegetative matter. It turned out they were good at vegetating, but not at growing vegetables. The picture of their chaotic, unattractive splat of a garden speaks for itself. Rather than dig up the park, and kill the turf, they laid down paper and covered it with dirt to save the turf. The turf died under their subjugation, of course, as everything does under the subjugation of anarchy, no matter how well-intended some of those involved might be. (Some, not most.)
The picture captures gardening by mob rule. The plants, of course, were pregrown and likely purchased (or donated upon coercion) by some capitalist nursery. If they were purchased, as Brandon notes, it was likely with their mamma’s money.
Maybe the CHAZites were not even trying to save the earth by placing paper over it. Maybe they were just too effete to turn the earth over. That would be more work than throwing some bagged dirt on top, and more work than they had seen in their well-provisioned college lives; but, then, why the paper towels? So, maybe both? Save the turf and save the work but kill a tree?
Alas, I digress. As funny as CHAZ gardening is — and as begging to be lampooned — some of us who actually know how to work on a farm must move on to the deeper manure of CHAZ enlightenment and fertile thoughts.
After a weekend of bad gardening lessons by which CHAZ attempted to feed itself via donated plants and soil,
The owner of an auto shop in the zone found a man attempting to light his business on fire, he detained the culprit, or so he told a crowd gathered outside. However, rather than let their comrade be handed over to law enforcement, the crowd set about pulling down the fence around the lot, in a bid to free the thwarted arsonist.
“The police won’t come,” the owner told a cameraman. “The fire department won’t even come. This is really bad for business. Covid was bad enough, and now this stuff basically put the icing on the cake.”
At least, the police-hating group was self-policing, which is how these things eventually go — their own rules and then their own equally or more hostile police:
With the police absent, the zone’s de-facto warlord, rapper Raz Simone, arrived to defuse the situation. However, Raz is not bound to the same rules of conduct as the Seattle Police Department. In a series of videos published by conservative journalist Jack Posobiec, the rapper-turned-strongman can be seen chasing down an accused thief later on Sunday night and ordering his bag searched, as gun-toting guards keep the suspect on the scene.
Police are fine, so long as you are the warlord who controls them.
One of the CHAZ occupiers took to Reddit over the weekend to complain that their tent had been looted and their laptop stolen, along with $400 in cash. The CHAZ community quickly stepped in to reassure the victim that “a disadvantaged resident was in greater need of the items than you,” and to think of the theft as an “unplanned donation.”
What’s to complain about? The occupier got the self-ruling government he wanted. Sounds like utopia to me.
In less than two weeks, the non-government government realized they needed a government, so they set up their own council to replace the one they had just abolished:
The new city council of CHAZ was appropriately named CRAC. Sounds like a controlling government all over again to me, just starting back from scratch with the same old ideas, albeit appropriately “non-racist,” which translates in this case as more Blacks than Whites by decree. Never mind the original Seattle City Council already had people of color.
No sooner did the new non-government government begin its self-reformation, than the CHAZites realized they had already, as privileged society members, left out key special-interest groups, so they added a handicapped council member, a homeless person and some LGBTQ folks, who also added more letters to their constantly growing appellation of special sexual interests, becoming now the LGBTQIA people.
(I won’t even ask. Let’s just add “expialidotious” and be done with it. Did I spell that right? Probably not. Don’t care, and not going to look it up in the Disney script. There should be no spelling rules in true anarchy anyway. Spelling rules are top-down, suppressive authority, handed down by the privileged past by mostly White spelling supremacists who sought to make their own language dominate us all. Defund the Oxford English Dictionary. We must free ourselves of the spelling police, and this monument of a dictionary they have burdened us with must be torn down.)
Fake news? Who can tell in the autonomous zone where nothing feels quite real?
One “real-news” journalist was kind enough to chronicle the entire week for us from his perspective:
My terrifying five-day stay inside Seattle’s cop-free CHAZ:
During five undercover days and nights in the zone, I witnessed a continuing experiment in anarchy, chaos and brute-force criminality. In order to avoid being exposed as a journalist — several reporters have been barred or expelled — I slept and showered outside the zone….
Crime has surged inside and outside the zone.
On Saturday morning, a shooting erupted that left at least one person dead and another injured near a border checkpoint. Police were reportedly met with resistance when they tried to get to the victims, who apparently were then taken in private cars to the hospital….
On Thursday, police arrested Robert James after he left the CHAZ. He is accused of sexually assaulting a deaf woman who was lured inside a tent. The same day, former city council candidate Isaiah Willoughby was arrested on suspicion of starting the arson attack on the East Precinct on June 12.
(Such is life in the Wild West, reborn.)
Police Chief Carmen Best expressed her deep concern about the police department’s inability under CHAZ occupation to respond to ..
“emergency calls, which often means somebody’s being assaulted, sometimes it’s a rape, sometimes it’s a robbery, but something bad is happening if it’s a top priority call, and we’re not able to get there….”
CHAZ occupants, ranging from several hundred to 10,000, depending on the day, with many openly armed, control all of the Capitol Hill neighborhood….
Before the takeover, violent clashes between rioters and police defending the East Precinct resulted in dozens of officers injured by rocks and other projectiles. Protesters and rioters complained of police brutality, leading Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and Best to ban cops from using tear gas, pepper spray and flash-bangs for 30 days.
Apparently, it was fine to be brutal to police. Seattle’s mayor was good with that. At least, she didn’t make much of a whisper against it. Just make sure the police cannot protect themselves or their neighborhood.
Masked protesters stole city property — barricades, fencing and more — to create makeshift barriers. These barriers became the official border checkpoints in and out of the CHAZ. They were later fortified with additional layers of security: more blockades and 24-hour guards.
A large team of volunteers assembled to designate themselves “security” for the CHAZ. Many of them wear patches signaling they’re part of the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club, a far-left militia-type organization named after the radical abolitionist.
The unguarded apparently needed guards and were nearly instantaneous in recreating the same armed policing forces they had been rebelling against. The CHAZ patrol even installed the same kinds of barricades the city police had put up, using the very same materials the city police had “donated” to CHAZ by virtue of the CHAZites tearing them down, only to put them up in their own approved locations.
Government was so much different under CHAZ. So re-envisioned!
Despite the group’s link to violent extremism, its armed members were celebrated in the CHAZ for “protecting” the new denizens. The head of the CHAZ’s security is a short female named “Creature.”
So, you can have armed police under the autocratic rule of Creature or under the democratically appointed supervision of Best. Was Creature more civilized and professionally trained than Chief Best? Did Creature operate under overseen regulations that protect others from abuse? Time would quickly tell!
Some of them openly carry rifles, handguns, batons or knives.
Sounds like a peaceful bunch; but, at least, they are well regulated! Right? Well, if you call capricious subjectivity a “well-regulated citizen’s militia,” then sure!
Though the CHAZ claims to have no rules, it quickly developed a complex code of conduct that varied from zone to zone and even the time of the day. For example, those in the garden area, who are mostly white, need to make sure they do not “recolonize” the space.
Mainstream media reports have focused on the “block party” atmosphere of the occupation, repeating a talking point from the Seattle mayor. She, along with Gov. Jay Inslee, a fellow Democrat, have gone to great lengths to emphasize the “peaceful” nature of the occupation.
As peaceful as a Molotov cocktail, but that is good enough for these hopelessly dishonest or denial-laden leaders of the Democrats.
Lacking agreed-upon leadership, those who have naturally risen to the top have done so with force or intimidation.
Who could imagine that anarchy would rule by “might is right” when it always does, but we owe it Mayor Durkan for providing the Petri dish where we could watch this experiment play out to its full putrid ripeness. The putrefaction didn’t take long. (Throughout this process, CHAZ only had any success and hope of survival due to stolen property or donated property and continued (albeit chaperoned) police assistance on crimes along the way, government-funded streets to protest on, etc. backed by full mayoral and gubernatorial support.)
For example, rapper Raz Simone, real name Solomon Simone, patrols the CHAZ on some nights with an armed entourage. Simone, originally from Georgia, has an arrest record for child cruelty and other charges. He usually conducts his patrols carrying a long semi-auto rifle and sidearm. Last weekend, a livestream recorded Simone handing another man a rifle from the trunk of a car.
Not everyone in the CHAZ recognizes Simone’s police-like presence, but no one is willing to stand up to him and his group.
Anarchy always turns (quickly) into strongman rule. The Seattle Petri dish just gave that bacteria time to colonize on other people’s land and prove the take-over method of colonization all over again! They immediately became no better than the Whites they decry for taking the land from Indians earlier in this long line of hostile takeovers of which they immediately showed themselves fully a part. They didn’t rewrite history. They repeated it!
Those unfortunate enough to have homes or businesses within the CHAZ — an estimated 30,000 residents — have no say over their new overlords. Residents have discreetly voiced their concerns to local media. Gunshots and “screams of terror” at night have been reported.
Messages in CHAZ called for murder of police — a pacifist murder, I’m sure. So, brutality by police is protested while brutality toward police is written on stone.
Every business and property inside the CHAZ has been vandalized…. Businesses outside the CHAZ are also suffering. Last week, the Trader Joe’s in Capitol Hill announced it was closing immediately and indefinitely because of “safety and security concerns….”
Left-wing political groups have capitalized on the opportunity to recruit new members. The Democratic Socialists of America features prominently in addition to the Seattle Revolutionary Socialists. But in the absence of any vetting, perhaps intentionally, extremists have also set up shop. One station that operates off and on distributes extremist anarchist-Communist agitprop — the political ideology of Antifa. In one manual titled, “Blockade, Occupy, Strike Back,” instructions show how to use human shields against police, and make rudimentary “bombs” using light bulbs and paint. Another booklet is titled “Against the Police and the Prison World They Maintain.” It features short essays on why police, capitalism and the state must be destroyed by any means necessary, including through violence….
I’m sure the closure of terrified Trader Joe’s, a quality grocery store with a lot of organic foods, helped with the instant food shortage inside of CHAZ.
Here was one of the takeover group’s most telling lines:
“Our contempt for the media is inextricable from our hatred of this entire world.”
That’s all Antifa and other anarchist groups like it are really about at the end of the day (or end of the world) — sheer hatred of the entire world — total annihilation — but the City of Seattle and the State governor sucked it up wholesale, too fearful to be so nuanced as to point out the sheer hatred and fully displayed hypocrisy behind their terror.
And, so, Antifa and their cohorts colonized their own policed prison on top of Capital Hill with the full approval of Seattle city government, which practically thanked them for the benevolent occupation.
Thus,
Despite the pleas from those who live and work inside Capitol Hill for law and order to be restored, Seattle’s city council has determined that the CHAZ should continue.
So, let it be noted that, after two weeks of marauding mayhem in breach of the US constitution, the city government begged for more of the same!
Week Three: CHAZ gets CHOPped.
Following shootings, city leaders and local businesses apply pressure
Several hundred demonstrators are staying in an autonomous area claimed by protesters for racial justice in Seattle, even as its size is shrinking and pressure to shut it down completely is increasing from local businesses and residents, as well as city officials.
While Mayor Durkan beneficently declared CHAZ a “peaceful protest,” it did include its share of murders, burnings and rape with little chance for enduring justice, given the lack of policing and criminal courts. Those on the receiving end of CHAZ’s vigilante justice or its lawless nightlife might not have appreciated the mayor’s apparent glee at the beautiful flowering of free expression on Capital Hill.
In spite of the mayor’s benediction, CHAZ quickly became such a vile name that it decided it needed to run from its own reputation and renamed itself CHOP (Capital Hill Organized Protest) to try to reclaim the “peaceful protest” ground it so quickly lost to the anarchists who took over during the lack of policing by civilized, democratic government.
Apparently, the Capital Hill gang had no specialists in branding, or they would have noticed that “CHOP” sounds a little more violent than jazzy “CHAZ.” Mostly, they were rapidly trying to take back ground from anarchy and Antifa by the removal of the “A” from their new zone’s name.
I know from the twenty years I lived in Seattle that Seattle has a fairly long history of dancing with Antifa by Antifa’s rules, so you have to blame the city for allowing what may have started as legitimate protest over the death of George Floyd to turn into total anarchy. The city did nothing to protect the movement by keeping illegitimate actors out. They actually enticed them in by ceding control to them.
However, the major eventually caved in to more civilized voices:
Seattle’s mayor said Monday that officials will move to wind down the blocks-long span of city streets taken over two weeks ago….
She said the city is working with the community to bring the “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest” zone to an end.
“The cumulative impacts of the gatherings and protests and the nighttime atmosphere and violence has led to increasingly difficult circumstances for our businesses and residents,” Durkan said.
“The impacts have increased and the safety has decreased.”
Truth at last.
I guess it takes hard experience and repeated head pounding for a leftist liberal to get through her head what most of us could have told her before she even created the Seattle Petri Dish — her replacement for SPD. Streets had to become occupied encampments. Businesses had to be vandalized and then entirely shut down. People had to get beaten. Shootings had to happen. A few young people needed to die by the occupiers hands. Once the zone was fully punished, the mayor saw the light that Antifa is nothing but darkness.
Or was that really it?
The announcement was a remarkable turnabout for a Democratic mayor who received significant criticism for allowing rioters and protesters to take control of the neighborhood two weeks ago and then suggesting on CNN that the CHOP might become the epicenter of a long “summer of love.”
Remarkable, indeed. Perhaps even more remarkable was how she learned this lesson only after her own home was imperiled by the peaceable protestors during the mayor’s pre- summer love-in.
The mayor’s response came the very morning after her home was threatened?
“After days of peaceful demonstrations, two nights of shootings have clearly escalated the situation on Capitol Hill,” Durkan’s office said in a statement.
And who helped bring the threat to the mayor’s lovely home?
City Councilmember Kshama Sawant led a march to Durkan’s home, where she railed against the Mayor and police brutality to a whipped-up crowd of BLM protesters. In response to Sawant’s stunt, Durkan called for her expulsion from the City Council in an angry Tuesday letter.
The next day, the city began dismantling the outer blockades from the ‘autonomous zone,’ and on Wednesday at 5 a.m. police issued an order to disperse the ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.’
Ah, the love of the ultraliberals knows no bounds! When liberal protest turned on the mayor by one of her own apparently more liberal colleagues, the mayor suddenly saw the light and ordered the colleague be terminated and CHAZ be shut!
Let’s be fair to Seattle’s politically-correct LGBTQexpialatrocious mayor: How could she have been expected to see this coming? Who could guess that, if you removed the police department from part of your city, crime would rise in its absence? It defies imagination. At least in the liberal mind. No one could have seen this coming!
Oh, that’s right! Trump saw it coming all along — agent Orange, whom the major and state gov wanted no part of. Trump, bad. Antifa, good.
Other than the threat to her home, what else brought the mayor back into the light of human reasoning?
Seattle Sued By Businesses, Residents Over CHOP
Over a dozen businesses, property owners and residents filed a class-action lawsuit against the city of Seattle on Wednesday over the decision to cede a roughly six-block area to BLM protesters, who then established the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ)….
Plaintiffs – which include several property management firms, an auto repair shop and a tattoo parlor, say the absence of police, firefighters and ambulances has subjected them to “extensive property damage, public safety dangers, and an inability to use and access their properties.”
Wasn’t there also something in that Bill or Rights, which these rioters claim gives them the right to protest this way, that said no land may be seized from private ownership without paying fair-market value and without due process? Ah, such splitting of hairs over inconvenient parts of the constitution that governors are sworn to uphold and protect.
Again, I have to ask, who could have seen this illegal seizure of land from those who owned it coming? Certainly not Gov. Jay Inslee or Mayor Jenny Durkan. Antifa, of course, hates the concept of land ownership as a from of supremacy … unless they are the ones who control, occupy and use or destroy the land at will as they, in fact, did in CHAZ.
That said, the plaintiffs want everyone to know that they support Black Lives Matter “who, by exercising such rights, are bringing issues such as systemic racism and unfair violence against African Americans by police to the forefront of the national consciousness.”
How Seattle of them! Only in Seattle, home of eternal political correctness, would the plaintiffs be quick to add such qualifications. “We’re still some of the good ones! We’re still liberals like the rest of you, and we want you all to know we’re not racists.”
So, what do you do if you’re the mayor confronted with these grim results developing so quickly from your official policy toward the unofficial secession of part of your city from the civilized world entrusted to your governance?
Denial.
“City leadership have been on the ground daily having discussions with demonstrators, residents and businesses and trusted community-based, Black-led organizations to determine a path forward that protects the right to peacefully protest and keeps people safe,” the mayor’s office said in a written statement.
Mayor Durkan didn’t seem at all concerned about making sure the protests were carried out peacefully during the first two weeks when she instructed the police to get out of Dodge and let all Hell break loose.
Plaintiffs are seeking damages for property damage, lost business, deprivation of their property rights and demand that full public access be restored to their businesses.
Now, that’s how you “peaceably petition” your government. Hire a lawyer and go for the purse.
Week Four: And, so, law came back to town
Things hit their worst before they get better. At the start of Week Four, a young thief was executed without questioning by the CHOP security patrol.
The 16-year-old boy who was shot dead by CHOP security in Seattle was homeless and had just carjacked a Jeep when he was told by a friend to drive to the cop-free zone ‘for safety’….
Antonio Mays Jr died in a hail of bullets in the early hours of Monday morning and his passenger, a 14-year-old, was critically injured after armed security guards fired on their white Jeep Cherokee, which crashed into the barriers of the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) security zone.
Mays was Black. As a Black kid, he didn’t find safety in the cop-free zone. He found new cops with poorly-though-out, subjective rules and little restraint. He got CHOPped. Another teen shot in the zone only days before was also Black.
While those murders didn’t get the mayor to change, the threat on her house a day after Mays was murdered by the CHOP Patrol along with a law suit certainly marked her turning point.
Chopping CHOPped happened all in a morning’s work once the city’s ultra-liberal mayor got out of the way and the police were given the highly protective gear they needed to get the job done safely.
Police in Seattle converged on the city’s protest zone early Wednesday, making arrests and sweeping through streets that demonstrators occupied for weeks to protest police brutality and systemic racism.
Mayor Jenny Durkan issued an executive order for protesters to vacate the area, and police enforced it….
Police Chief Carmen Best said she supports peaceful protests, but “enough is enough. The CHOP has become lawless and brutal.”
It’s amazing how quickly you can deal with such things when you decide to just do it and stop dancing with the devil!
“Officers enforcing today’s order are wearing a higher-level of protective gear,” said Seattle PD in a statement. “Police are utilizing this equipment because individuals associated w/the CHOP are known to be armed and dangerous/may be associated with shootings, homicides, robberies, assaults & other violent crimes.”
Yes, this is from the same police chief who earlier on had the sense to ask why Black lives kept dying in the Black-Lives Matter CHOP zone:
Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best asked why two African-Americans were dead at a place that “clamed to be working for Black Lives Matter” after a 16-year-old teenager was killed inside the CHOP police-free zone.
You didn’t hear that reported in the politically correct mainstream media, coming out of a Black woman’s mouth.
It turns out that, when you stop just herding protestors from area to area — thus accomplishing nothing but a lot of show and a lot of agitating — and start actually letting the police do their job and arrest them, you quickly get them behind bars and off the street.
It turns out that in a matter of mere hours of actual police enforcement, you can end the rioting protest. They may have been protesting, but they were also rioting, and there is no constitutional right to riot, block streets, burn other people’s property, damage government property, scream all night long, kick out the city and state governments and create your own sovereign zone, attack bystanders and police, graffiti buildings and, oh, kill Black people!
The city mayor didn’t know that. Neither did the governor who both did nothing but lecture Trump about how peaceful the protests were. This was just a nice summer love-in, Seattle style!
And, so …
Police in riot gear and on bikes formed lines along the streets and marched through the area, pushing back demonstrators. Officers tore down fences, cleared trash and poked around bushes….
Most protesters left several hours after police began clearing the area around 5 a.m. Wednesday. A loud bang around 6:15 a.m. was followed by a cloud of smoke, though there were no signs of major clashes between police and protesters.
Stop playing police and let your police actually start actually BEING police, and peace is restored. But use the police to just herd people and to disperse the mob, and the mob keeps coming back or just moves into another area. It took weeks for Seattle to figure this out, but if you actually put the illegal actors in jail awhile, you slow them down a lot.
By midmorning, police said they were providing perimeter security as city crews cleaned up the area. Heavy equipment was brought in to remove concrete barriers, and debris was taken away on trucks.
It turns out, if the police are actually allowed to do their job and arrest unruly, constitution-defying, hate-filled, enraged mobs, cities can avoid weeks of murder and mayhem; and they don’t look nearly as stupid as they do if they take the Durkan Seattle Petri Dish approach.
Who coulda seen that coming?
Maybe more police chiefs like Best could have seen it coming? You would think her kind of common sense would be … well common:
Apparently not in Seattle. Not even when you are a working Black woman speaking on behalf of Black lives that matter because all lives matter to her! Not to Antifa!
Attorney General William Barr praised Best and the department in a statement Wednesday, saying the protest area had “became a haven for violent crime.”
“The message of today’s action is simple but significant: The Constitution protects the right to speak and assemble freely, but it provides no right to commit violence or defy the law,” Barr said.
That kind of organized, orderly and civilized action, looks like this:
It’s what happened when Best was allowed to do her job best. It’s what happened when Durkan and Inslee let police be police.
And, guess what? If you’re blocking the police in the path of their duty by occupying a public street, you’re not (as the Antifa guy screams in a totally non-peaceable manner in this video) “F—ing Peaceful”:
You’re obstructing justice. Also against the law. Not constitutionally protected.
After all of that, did the City of Seattle learn anything from this horrendous experiment?
Of course not:
Seattle Officials Back Defunding Police By 50%
After four shootings over 10 days in Seattle’s cop-less ‘autonomous zone’ left two teenagers dead last month, the majority of City Council is now backing proposals to defund the police department by 50%….
“The status quo is no longer acceptable,” said Council President Lorena Gonzalez in a Thursday statement reproted by KIRO7. “We have to take away the things that no longer and should have never belonged to law enforcement in the first place….”
Others on the council, including budget chair Theresa Mosqueda echoed the sentiment during a news conference, saying “I look forward to implementing the proposals outlined by you all….”
“It is the institution of policing itself that must be dismantled,” she added….
“You want us as visionaries in thinking through community solutions to policing,” Jaelynn Scott with the Black Trans Taskforce said….
The change would mean firing approximately 1,000 personnel from the Seattle Police Department.
They’ll probably start with the Best. No one ever said Seattle liberals are smart…. Well, except Seattle liberals!
Police Chief Carmen Best pushed back, telling KIRO7: “I respect Councilmember Mosqueda. I think she is very passionate about what she’s doing, but she also needs to think about the fact that public safety and the budget are intertwined,” adding … “It’s really interesting — if anybody recognizes issues of system racism and institutional racism, it’s me.”
How might this defunding be implemented if it doesn’t start with firing Best? In a completely non-racist manner, of course:
Seattle City Council Member Suggests Firing White Officers In Massive Reduction Of Police Department
The Seattle City Council is facing something of a dilemma in its popular pledge to cut the police budget by 50 percent. To do so would require firing a significant number of police officers, which is also popular. The problem is that the firing would be done by seniority and many of the less senior officers are black. The solution according to City Council member Lisa Herbold is simple: fire officers based on their race.
While that would be the definition of racial discrimination, Herbold clearly believes that it is discrimination for a good cause….
In taking this position, Herbold is opposing one of the best known opinions by Thurgood Marshall. In McDonald v. Santa Fe Trail Transportation Co. (1976), Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote opinions that called for the broad interpretation of Title VII to protect everyone. In McDonald, two white employees were fired after a theft in the business. The two white employees were held jointly and severally liable with a black employee. However, only the white employees were fired. After they sued under Title VII, Marshall wrote for the majority in denouncing such discrimination against white employees, insisted that “racial discrimination in private employment against whites [must be] on the same terms as racial discrimination against nonwhites.” He denounced “the illogic in retaining guilty employees of one color while discharging those of another color.” While Marshall would vigorously support affirmative action (including his dissent in Bakke), he believed that all races were protected from discrimination under federal law….
This of course would be even more egregious since Herbold wants to fire white officers due to their race alone. They would not be accused of any wrongdoing or failure. The problem is their race.
Again, only Best spoke sense to the senseless, self-loathing, self-righteous racists like Herbold:
Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best released a video calling the plan of Herbold and others “completely reckless.”
Best said she will …
fiercely advocate that we focus on realistic, rational and responsible solutions, not political gestures or pandering or political posturing.
From the video below
She called the city council’s decision …
… abdication of the duty every leader of the city swears to when they take their oath of office.
I’d be honored to know Best and to admit she does know best! She can come to dinner at my house anytime!
Of course, the violence in Seattle is not over because the outlaws who stormed the town are emboldened by the knowledge that they still have the city’s egregiously sympathetic ear. It’s also not over because liberal courts send these outlaws back out the revolving door to terrorized the streets all over again.
In order to show themselves politically correct in every way to their liberal constituents, Seattle’s noodle-spined door mats to madness chose to appease violence by squashing their own police. This they do self-righteously, pandering to pandemonium, as supporters of everyone’s constitutional right to riot! Well, not everyone’s, but anyone whose imaginary constitutional rights exceed others by virtue of race and rage.