Over the weekend, a BLM activist in Portland told a cheering crowd that the police officers involved in the George Floyd arrest should have been strangled to death by their umbilical cords as babies. Throughout her deranged rant, she repeatedly intimated that she is ready and willing to shoot cops. All of her violent fantasies and threats were met with vocal approval by the crowd. Lest anyone make the mistake of taking this for empty bluster, it was only hours later that BLM and Antifa activists beat a man unconscious and left him unresponsive on the street.
The lead up to this latest bit of barbaric violence is still coming into focus. It appears that the victim attempted to drive away from an angry mob and crashed his vehicle in the process. He was then “detained” — not by cops but by the rioters, some of whom were sporting jackets that ironically said “SECURITY.” They continued to threaten the man and randomly pummel him, until one activist ran up from behind, kicked him in the face, and sent his head crashing into the pavement. While he lay there unconscious and bleeding, they robbed his truck and continued taunting him. Police where nowhere to be seen throughout this entire incident.
Nothing that happened in Portland that night was new. And if the victim tragically dies, that will not be new, either. In just the first few weeks of rioting, nearly 20 people were killed. We are now approaching three full months of violence and anarchy, with no sign of abatement. The rioters have essentially held Portland hostage for weeks. In Seattle, they’ve made their way into the suburbs where they are terrorizing communities and demanding that residents give up their homes. They caused half a billion dollars in damage in Minneapolis. In Atlanta, they killed an 8-year-old child.
And if we zoom out a little farther, we see that the death of George Floyd was merely accelerant on a fire that had already been burning. Antifa has engaged in open political terrorism for years. Leftist “protesters” have long since been embolden to flout laws with impunity. Recall the climate activists last year who periodically shut down traffic in cities across the country — an act that, we should always keep in mind, is actually illegal. And perhaps most prominently, BLM has been wreaking havoc and destruction ever since it gained national recognition on the heels of the completely justified shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. BLM riots in St. Louis, Baltimore, and elsewhere caused damage from which these cities still have not recovered. In Dallas in 2016, five police officers were executed during a BLM protest.
The point here is that these incidents are not isolated, and they are not spontaneous. This is part of a growing and coordinated movement — a movement explicitly supported by many of the Democratic mayors and governors of the cities and states where this is all happening. And the support goes higher than that, all the way up to the most prominent Democrats in Congress. Indeed, on the same weekend that left-wing activists were dragging a man out of his crashed vehicle and beating him half to death, Rep. Ayanna Pressley went on MSNBC and called for more “unrest in the streets.” What we are witnessing is certainly not a protest, and even the word “riot” doesn’t quite capture it. This is a movement — well-funded and supported — to destabilize our society and overthrow our government. It is insurrection. And the insurrectionists are quite clear about that, if only we listen and take them seriously.
Fortunately, there’s an act for that. President Trump should do what he has repeatedly threatened to do and invoke the Insurrection Act to deal with violent criminals who are currently engaged in this coordinated campaign of terror and destruction.
We use the military to establish order in cities 10,000 miles away, protecting citizens that are not our countrymen, in parts of the world most of us have never been. If the military can do that over there, they can do it here. To those of us who came of age in the era of nonstop interventionist war in the Middle East, it seems at first scandalous to suggest that the American military can actually be used to protect American cities, but it can, and should. These violent elements will not stop until they are made to stop. Only overwhelming force, at this point, can accomplish that. It’s time for President Trump to do what needs to be done.
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