Free speech rights take a beating
Police fail to deal with violence on the left
— Berkeley, Calif., Police Chief Andrew Greenwood
This is how you lose your democracy: One grass patch at a time.
The specific patch of grass is Civic Center Park in Berkeley, Calif., where a group led by activist Amber Cummings of “Transwomen for Trump” (I did mention this was Berkeley, right?) planned to hold a “No To Marxism In America” rally. Once word got out, events unfolded according to script:
The organizers get called “Nazis.”
Progressives plan a massive counter-protest.
The original rally is disbanded.
The “counter”-protesters show up anyway, and violence ensues.
But how did this become our “script”? More importantly, why do we accept it?
Like Boston’s cops a week earlier on the Common, Berkeley’s cops established a perimeter around the center of the park. They used barricades and check points to keep out prohibited items including baseball bats, skateboards and scarves that could cover the face.
But when you watch the video of (allegedly) proTrump people being beaten and mobs of violent thugs moving among the crowd (five injured, three hospitalized, 13 arrested) you clearly see Antifa attackers with their entire faces covered, dressed in black, carrying bats, sticks and shields. What happened to the checkpoints?
The Berkeley police abandoned them.
As the Washington Post reported: “Berkeley Police Chief Andrew Greenwood told the AP the decision was strategic — a confrontation was sure to spark more violence between the protesters and police.
“‘No need for a confrontation over a grass patch,’ Greenwood said.”
Here’s the question for Chief Greenwood: Isn’t America just one big patch of grass, or asphalt, or sidewalk or public street? What is the Mall in Washington — where the Rev. Martin Luther King gave his “I Have A Dream” speech 54 years ago yesterday — but a “grass patch” with a couple of old statues?
The premise of our Constitution is that when a single American’s rights are violated, it’s a big deal. Our right to speak and assemble and worship aren’t held collectively. They’re our rights as individuals. We protect them collectively through our government.
Except when the cops don’t feel like it. Or when the people speaking are obnoxious or offensive. Or when you’re a pro-Trump transgender person and, suddenly, the media just don’t care what happens to you.
There’s another policing approach that applies here: The “broken windows” theory. The premise is that in communities where broken windows are left unrepaired, streets uncleaned, trash uncollected, etc. crime prospers. The bad actors in the neighborhood sense that the norms for behavior have been abandoned, and so they’re more likely to engage in crime and violence.
For years there’s been an ever-more aggressive intolerance demonstrated by the left. First an SEIU union thug roughs up a Tea Partier. Then a conservative speaker is chased off a campus. Occupy activists block streets, then set fires in them. The day President Trump was inaugurated, 231 people were arrested in protests featuring burned cars, smashed windows and cops under attack.
Then riots at Berkeley. Then a gunman shows up at a GOP baseball practice.
Like the crumbling neighborhoods where crime is on the rise, our crumbling commitment to civility and basic civil rights is allowing violence on the left to steadily increase.
How hard is it to say that everyone who shows up at a debate with a bat and shield is a bad guy? How hard is it for the police to defend the free speech rights of every citizen, regardless of what they have to say?
For the liberals of Berkeley, Calif., these rights are literally not worth fighting for.