DA charges violent protesters in Oklahoma City with 'terrorism,' 'rioting,' and 'assault'

June 29, 2020 By Thomas Lifson

The damage by Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, who withdrew police from his city's third precinct and allowed rioters free rein, extended across the nation. The message was clear: it was open season for violent thuggery as long as it was in the name of politically correct slogans like "black lives matter" and "antifascism." The toleration of CHAZ/CHOP in Seattle amplified the signal that there would be no legal consequences for lawlessness in the name of the correct causes.

A return to law and order, a situation in which people think twice before committing criminal acts while in mobs, will take longer, but it is finally underway. On the federal level, two New York City lawyers who allegedly aided a Molotov cocktail attack on police car face felony charges that could land them in prison for the rest of their lives. And now, on the local level, a district attorney is bringing grave felony charges against violent rioters.

"This is not Seattle," proclaimed Oklahoma County district attorney David Prater on Friday, adding, "We're not putting up with this lawlessness here" after pressing felony charges related to violent demonstrations there the last weekend in May. Nolan Clay writes in The Oklahoman: ...............Read more

Shutting down CHOP: Seattle's leftist mayor now up to her keister in alligators

June 29, 2020 Monica Showalter


Where do liberals get the idea that if you just talk nicely to warlords, expropriators, pirates, and invaders, they'll do what you say?  That's the approach Seattle's Trump-hating mayor, Jenny Durkan, took, and she's about to learn the hard way how that works, except that she doesn't learn. She called for the shutdown of CHOP, and its defiant and entitled denizens have since walked all over her, making her look like a fool.

Here's the miserable monument to her ineffectualness, according to local KING5:

Seattle officials said barriers around the "Capitol Hill Organized Protest" zone (CHOP) would be dismantled on Sunday morning, but the scene remains intact as of Sunday night.............

Here's her pathetic response:

Seattle has a long tradition of peaceful protest and advocacy for progressive change, and Mayor Durkan strongly supports those rights. Mayor Durkan will continue to listen to leaders in Seattle's Black community. She is working hard to translate the calls for change into real, tangible systemic changes to policing and all the other systems needed for strong and healthy communities. She has prioritized these as Mayor, with investments in housing, education, youth opportunity, and economic equity. She proposes investing an additional $100 million into the Black community...............

She still doesn't quite get that when someone says he's a warlord, believe him. Or that the CHOP doesn't have nice feelings about prosecuting criminals, which is derived from police activity, because, well, they are the criminals. And she still doesn't get it..........Whatever she does, it's a disaster for her.  Look for more foolish decisions from this, given her record of utterly stupid choices.

My Take - Another member in good standing of the Club For the Galacticly Stupid.   

Voluntary Socialism and the Dubious Viability of CHAZ

June 17, 2020 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

Like most libertarians, I support decentralization and federalism. Under the right circumstances, I’m even sympathetic to the idea of secession (hooray for Brexit!).

This is why I have no problem with a community based on voluntary socialism. History tells us that approach doesn’t work (largely for the reasons captured in this cartoon), but people should be free to try over and over again.

Which brings us to “CHAZ.”

For those who haven’t been following the news, protestors in Seattle (motivated in part by legitimate concerns about police misbehavior) have seized control of a neighborhood and declared it to be the “Capital Hill Autonomous Zone.”

Some people see CHAZ as an example of self-government based on a strange mix of libertarian impulses (pro-gun, for example) and leftist impulses (anti-cop, for example).

The Washington Post has a rather sympathetic report about the group, written by Gregory Scruggs.

For the past several days, Ochoa, 28, has been serving as an unarmed volunteer “sentinel,” or guard, in the protest zone. Ochoa, a self-described leftist libertarian recently furloughed from the Seattle International Film Festival, and other volunteers have been serving four-hour shifts to help to keep the peace. …Core to the zone is a vision of a self-governed community with no formal policing. Instead, volunteers, many of them avowed police abolitionists, have begun to organize their own safety force. …Volunteers say this work is a way to highlight what a city without police might look like. “We have a chance to really build something here, so I have a vested interest in defending that as a part of my community,” said Ochoa, who lives in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. …Markinson describes himself as an anti-fascist, anti-racist community defense advocate. He is a gun owner… Markinson views Seattle’s ongoing experiment as part of a lineage of anarchist neighborhoods… a sentinel who gave his name as James Madison stood at the southern barricade with an AR-15 draped over his chest, as he has done on other nights. …“There are a few of us who are armed.” …a hand-painted sign approaching the barricades offers watchwords: “In a world without cops we must never again become the cops ourselves.”

If nothing else, CHAZ is anti-authority, at least if traditional city government is the definition of authority.

But is it a viable system?

Robert Tracinski, in an article for the Bulwark, discusses potential problems.

…the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, endearingly nicknamed CHAZ…is the product of anti-police protests in Seattle that led the mayor to order the abandonment of one of the city’s downtown police precincts, ceding a six-block area of Seattle’s downtown to the protesters, who have turned it into a kind of anarcho-socialist utopia, with free food, free music, no cops, and lots of peace and love, man......

…CHAZ certainly set a record for socialist utopias when it comes to running out of food. Within the first day, they were already sending out the alarm: “The homeless people we invited took away all the food at the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. We need more food to keep the area operational…” I’ve checked to see whether this is parody, and as far as I can tell, it’s not. …

Another area where they are well ahead of schedule for a socialist utopia is in putting up walls and establishing checkpoints with internal passports. … This leads us to the big question about the “autonomous zone”: Whose “autonomy” is it? Certainly, it’s not the autonomy of the people who actually live there, who did not invite the protesters and never had the opportunity to vote on whether they wanted to reject the protection of the Seattle PD and establish new protectors. …

With leadership seemingly up for grabs, CHAZ is the scene of sporadic petty scuffles, which activists are asking people not to film because it might make them look bad. Yes, well, I’m sure the Minneapolis PD felt the same way. …

My favorite description of CHAZ is from a Seattle Times article which says it has “mostly been peaceful.” That’s a favorite bit of journalistic spin. “Mostly peaceful” is how you describe something that’s violent when you don’t want the reader to draw that conclusion.

Tracinski certainly is correct that existing property owners haven’t consented to the new system.  And he’s probably correct in that the new form of authority in CHAZ may be even more arbitrary and unfair than the old system (time will tell).

But he only scratches the surface of the issue that is of greatest interest to me, which is whether CHAZ has a viable economic system.

Ideally, local businesses will be free to operate and to transact with the outside world. And if there are no taxes and nobody to enforce red tape, we might almost see an example of anarcho-capitalism.  For what it’s worth, I’m guessing Seattle bureaucrats intend to retroactively collect taxes and take other steps to make sure there is no long-run reduction in the burden of government for CHAZians.  What about in the short run? In a column for Spectator USA, Ben Sixsmith suggests that authorities should adopt a hands-off attitude and let CHAZ sink or swim.

A group of anarchists and leftists collected in Capitol Hill, known for its hipster and LGBT scenes, they have barricaded themselves into a small area and established an anarchic intentional community…

Seattle’s aspiring revolutionaries had only just announced the creation of CHAZ, as a place in which progressives can live free of corporate consumerism and police violence, when a local rapper-cum-warlord named Raz Simone began stalking the place with an armed militia. …

I believe that the state and federal authorities should leave them alone. If people are being raped and killed in CHAZ then the officials will have to get involved, of course, but otherwise they should be left to their own devices. …for radical leftists to establish their own territory is, frankly, refreshing. For years they have been insisting that the culture, communities, education, religious beliefs et cetera of their fellow citizens be transformed in accordance with their own idiosyncratic ideas. Everyone has had to conform with their progressive beliefs. The CHAZers? They aren’t trying to reshape America. They are trying to build a place of their own. How is that not preferable? …

Of course, I think CHAZ will be an embarrassing failure. I suspect it will collapse in a heap of shortages, grievances and recriminations… If it all collapses of its own accord, then a lot of radical progressives are going to have a tough, useful lesson in the value of civilized institutions.

In other words, let’s allow CHAZ to be a test case.

If it adopts a bunch of leftist policies (which seems likely), then we’ll almost surely see another example of socialism failing, even when it’s voluntary.

Though I’m crossing my fingers that the CHAZians adopt a libertarian approach to economics.
Given that Seattle has a very left-leaning government, we then might finally get an example to disprove Jacob Leddy.

Sadly, I don’t think that will happen. The city’s crazy politicians will be more than happy to tolerate CHAZ if it’s a socialist experiment, but they’ll send in the cops if it morphs into a libertarian experiment.

 

My terrifying five-day stay inside Seattle’s cop-free CHAZ

By Andy Ngo June 20, 2020

On June 8, Seattle police frantically loaded what they could from the east precinct onto trucks and cars. Within hours, they boarded up and abandoned the station. That night, left-wing protesters from Black Lives Matter and Antifa declared ownership of the six-block neighborhood in the middle of the Pacific Northwest’s largest city. They named their new territory the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” or CHAZ. No laws or rules applied here except for one: “No cops allowed.”

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. (Those inside have no showers but they do have portable bathrooms.) I took meals, and most of my water breaks, elsewhere because I was reluctant to remove my mask and risk being recognized. Every day I entered the zone twice through its semi-porous borders — once in the early afternoon, and again after sundown, staying until the wee hours.

Crime has surged inside and outside the zone................

 Mainstream media reports have focused on the “block party” atmosphere of the occupation, repeating a talking point from the Seattle mayor. She, along with fellow Democrat, Gov. Jay Inslee, have gone to great lengths to emphasize the “peaceful” nature of the occupation. For media crews that arrive during the day, that is certainly what they will see. People have barbecues in the street. Many bring their children to make street art. People walk their dogs.  But at night, a whole different side of CHAZ emerges...............

 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 CHAZ should continue. On Tuesday, the city even provided upgrades to CHAZ, including street blockades that double as graffiti canvases, along with cleaning services and porta-potties...........To Read More....

Will CHAZ Become a Cradle of America's 'Color Revolution'?

American protests are being supported by the same powers that influenced and financially supported the "color revolutions" around the world

June 17, 2020 By Veronika Kyrylenko

Six blocks of the Seattle downtown that were ceded to protesters after several tense nights of standoffs with police were declared the "Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone" (CHAZ).  It resembles a commune and is centered on the East Precinct building, which the police abandoned on June 8.  Protesters used blockades and fences to construct staggered barricades at intersections.  The entrance of the Zone's territory is marked by a barrier reading, "You Are Entering Free Capitol Hill."  Other signs declare, "You are now leaving the USA."  Spray paint renamed the occupied police station the "Seattle People's Department East Precinct" amid other anarchist symbols and graffiti.

On June 12, the mayor of Seattle, Jenny Durkan, compared CHAZ to a block party rather than an armed takeover and described it as "no threat right now to the public."...................Shockingly, American protests are being supported by the same powers that influenced and financially supported the "color revolutions" around the world — globalist establishmentarians who include former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and George Soros and his Open Society Foundation (formerly Institute), who now generously funds Black Lives Matter — just as he did with all those NGOs that fought the "dictatorships" elsewhere...............

We see how local authorities and liberal media portray CHAZ activists exercising their First Amendment rights, demanding "justice," and protesting police brutality — which is "beyond repair" — peacefully. You can't touch them! You're a dictator if you do!..............

Before our eyes, a new reality that allows for protests against a singular injustice that turn against the whole system and declare it all unjust is being formed and rapidly developed. Today, the primary target of the protesters is the police. Tomorrow, it may be the courts. The legislatures. The federal authorities. Whatever and whomever their organizers would find it fit for their purpose to point their finger at................ To Read More

My Take - Just like Satan, the left keeps changing itself into an angel of light to fool the uninformed, the unintelligent, the misinformed along with the selfish, greedy, envious and the violent.

•  CHAZ devolves into a Fyre festival, a really bad band camp that didn't quite get the Porta-Potties up   Building nothing, CHAZ exists by begging because it produces absolutely nothing of The Capital Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), is now being rebranded as the Capital Hill Organized Protest (CHOP), and still disgusting as ever. That's a sign of a public relations problem and the pictures are clear enough from journalist Andy Ngo:............. 
• Schadenfreude overload: Progressive, BLM-supporting mayor of Olympia, WA calls riots 'domestic terrorism' after her home is vandalized "Mugged by reality." Rioters never stop to check the politics of the owners of buildings that they trash.  The gay rainbow banner bought her no immunity.  But many liberals somehow seem to think they are exempt from the chaos they unleash by offering their support to violent radicals.
• As American politicians cower before BLM, they get a lesson in courage from...France -  I am sick at heart that our entire political leadership is cowering before mobs of vandals seeking to destroy our collective memory of the past. But now we see mob rule imitating the tactics of the Red Guards of China's Cultural Revolution, who destroyed that nation's precious artistic and literary heritage in the name of revolutionary purity, and the Taliban in Afghanistan, who blew up ancient Buddhist statues — to almost universal condemnation outside the Islamic world. As we see mob rule imitating the tactics of the Red Guards of China's Cultural Revolution and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Americans get a necessary lesson from the president of France. It's that bad.
• Is old-fashioned Marxist class warfare at work in America's media? New York Times reveals that the real class divide exists in America's newsrooms and magazine headquarters.  
• A video catches a brave woman telling leftists the truth about the Democrats -  She ventured into CHAZ and then, coming from a place of love and honesty, sweetly and politely set some protesters straight.