Political Dissent or Law and Order

Protests against racial injustice continued across the country over the weekend in cities including Austin, Texas, Portland, Oregon, Louisville, Kentucky, Seattle, Washington, Aurora, Colorado, Oakland, California, and Chicago, Illinois. Before all of those though, there were protests in Boston where a group of protesters were yelling at and threatening a government agent guarding a government building when he’d had enough he struck one of the protesters with is weapon. The other protesters took exception and began throwing clods of dirt at the agent who then for reinforcements further inflaming the situation and shortly after the agents fired their weapons at the protesters killing five and injuring six others. More recently Boston protesters met at the harbor and destroyed merchandise being delivered.

Now if you sided with the government agents in Boston, congratulations you’re a Tory supporting King George as those were the events of the Boston Massacre in March 1770 and the Boston Tea Party in December 1773. The agents were British troops protecting a customs office.

The Boston protesters were fighting what they saw as tyranny, being taxed without having a voice in the government unlike landowners in England who elected their representatives to Parliament. Current protesters are fighting injustice perpetrated by officers of the law too often killing unarmed people, sometimes completely innocent ones such as Emergency Medical Technician Breonna Taylor shot to death when police invaded her home, while rarely being punished for it.

My conservative neighbors are quite boisterous in about their right to keep and bear arms as provided for in the Second Amendment. Unfortunately they seem to have forgotten the provisions of the First Amendment specifically freedom of assembly in their desire to see protesters arrested. Yes, there has been some looting in areas where protests are held, as in any group there will be bad apples. My neighbors should know as that’s the excuse they give for police shooting unarmed people and other abuses.

We should all be aware that the Black Lives Matter protests in Portland were winding down when the president ordered federal agents to the city ostensibly to protect government buildings and businesses. The presence and actions of those agents have incited greater furor and brought out even more people than the original protests including far more white protesters.

Among the actions taken by federal agents that have reactivated the protests have been the heavy handed use of force including blinding one individual who was simply standing holding a speaker over his head and snatching people off the street at gunpoint and without identifying themselves as federal agents, holding them for many hours and then releasing them without charges or questioning. These federal agents are not trained in riot control or de-escalation and are in fact using tactics reminiscent of authoritarian governments like Spain’s Francisco Franco in the 1930’s and the military junta that held power in Argentina in the 1970’s.

In a Fox News interview with Chris Wallace a couple of weeks ago, the popular vote loser in the White House refused to say he would accept the results of the 2020 election, adding that he will “have to see” and claiming without evidence that mail-in voting will “rig the election.”

All this has led former members of the federal government from both parties to wonder what will happen if this president loses in November and refuses to leave office. Eighty of those people met via online conference to discuss and game out what might happen and how to mitigate the damage. One conclusion is that there are no provisions in law for a president who won’t leave gracefully.

 Published in the Seguin Gazette - July 29, 2020