Thursday, September 24, 2020

Breonna Taylor riots were anticipated. Why were cities, states, and DC not prepared?

By Scott Boyd

The shooting of two police officers in Louisville yesterday highlighted a night of violence that spread through many Democrat-led cities across the nation. Riots were rampant in Louisville, Austin, Portland, Seattle, and the other usual suspects following an announcement of “light” charges against one of the officers who shot and killed Breonna Taylor.

According to The Blaze, a suspect is in custody:

The interim chief of the Louisville Metro Police Department said that a suspect was in custody after the shooting of two officers during the violent protests over the death of Breonna Taylor.

Interim Police Chief Robert Schroeder said in a short media briefing on Wednesday evening that the two officers were in stable condition, and that one was undergoing surgery.

Schroeder said that police were responding at about 8:30 p.m. to a call of shots being fired at the corner of First and Broadway streets when more shots rang out and two police were struck.

Those police were taken to University Hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

Many took to social media with concerns about why the riots were allowed to get so out of hand. Law enforcement at every level has known there would be protests and likely riots for over two days when Louisville announced they would be releasing the results of the grand jury investigation of the officers involved in the shooting. As our EIC noted yesterday, the riots were definitely going to happen and had very little to do with Breonna Taylor herself.

There were attacks on law enforcement reported in multiple cities, including Seattle and Portland. According to Tayler Hansen and Andy Ngo:

Seattle: Antifa rioters beat a cop on the head who is knocked to the ground. #SeattleRiots #antifa #BLM https://t.co/OVyqe4LsRf

— Andy NgĂ´ (@MrAndyNgo) September 24, 2020

But the violence was not just isolated to attacks on law enforcement. Many independent journalists reported attacks, including Savanah Hernandez, a journalist based out of Austin who has gone to several hotspots since the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots began in the spring. She was hit in the head and had her phone stolen.

With all of this unrest, one has to ask why more wasn’t done to prevent it. Again, they had over 48 hours to prepare. The National Guard was called into Louisville, but clearly it was not enough to prevent this level of violence. As journalist Jack Posobiec said in a video he posted last night, fingers shouldn’t just be pointed at local and state leaders. FBI Director Christopher Wray did not do enough to prepare for or prevent the domestic terrorism that everyone knew was coming.

Anyone who has been paying attention could see this brewing from a mile away. We had 48+ hours to prepare. It’s inexcusable for this level of chaos and violence to be happening in America.

https://noqreport.com/2020/09/24/breonna-taylor-riots-were-anticipated-why-were-cities-states-and-dc-not-prepared/

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Dems Admit Portland Is a Problem They Can’t Solve

By Cam Edwards

The nightly violence from the far Left in Portland, Oregon has become campaign fodder for Republicans  rom Donald Trump on down, and in a new piece at Politico Magazine, several Democrats are reluctantly admitting that they don’t have a good answer to the accusations that politicians like Mayor Ted Wheeler are soft in their response to the ongoing unrest.

Of course the Politico piece is sure to try to lay some of the blame for the disorder in Portland on the Right as well, noting that as agitators have continued with destructive acts of violence on a nightly basis, conservative groups have responded by coming to the city to counter the protests.

Portland’s homegrown clash of extremists on both sides has become so entrenched it is creating a gravitational pull on others from around the country. Left-wing forces, including antifa and others, insist that “Riots andlooting” are “a legitimate and profound form of protest,” as a post on one of the popular far-left regional Facebook pages encouraging violence recently read. Meanwhile, the pro-Trump group Patriot Prayer, headquartered north of the city, are eager to confront the opposition. “They go there to provoke physical confrontation, to try to bait people into street fighting,” Daryl Johnson, a former Department of Homeland Security official focused on domestic extremism, said. “Now people are transiting the country, learning from people in Portland. People may have traveled from Portland to get some battle experience, so to speak.”

What’s a Democratic mayor like Ted Wheeler to do? Unsurprisingly, gun control activist Chelsea Parsons from the Center for American Progress tells Politico that the answer lies in going after gun owners.

The solution, such as it is, rests largely on being proactive, rather than simply reacting to the latest convoy of would-be Minutemen facing off with masked antifa crowds. “In the absence of leadership federally, it is incumbent on state and local leaders to get in front of it and at least start educating the community,” Parsons said.

Part of that solution stems not from new policies, necessarily, but from local leaders familiarizing themselves with the laws as they exist—especially those laws that prohibitarmed crowds massing near polling places, or that limit open-carry rights. There are still “widespread misunderstandings of the scope of the Second Amendment, and the scope of the abilities to openly carry firearms in the community, and where lines are around the ability to do this,” Parsons said. Or as Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision expanding the rights of private citizens to wield firearms, the “Second Amendment right is not unlimited.”

No matter how much gun control activists claim that “police violence is gun violence,” they always come back to the idea that armed agents of the State targeting gun owners is the way to make our society safer.

Parsons is actually correct when she says that officials in Portland need to be proactive in their approach to stopping the violence, but she’s off-target by focusing on gun owners. People have a right to keep and bear arms. They don’t have a right to try to burn down a federal courthouse or go rampaging through the downtown streets destroying every business they can break into.


Every window that’s been broken in Portland, every fire that’s been set, and every threat to burn down the homes flying American flags is another example of the unwillingness of supposed leaders like Wheeler to keep the peace and restore order. Even Biden supporters are forced to admit that the deteriorating situation in Portland isn’t likely to get better anytime soon.

Confrontations—and escalation—will almost certainly continue in Portland and its environs, from the steps of the Oregon capitol to the Confederate memorial just a few miles north of the city. “I thought some of the recent killings might cause some people to pause for a moment, take a breath,” Pitcavage said. “But that doesn’t seem to have happened, and I don’t see any reason for it to go away in the conceivable future.”

“We’re in for a long six to eight months,” Johnson said, “and maybe even longer than that.”

It didn’t have to be that way. Ted Wheeler and Gov. Kate Brown have had years to let the far-Left in Portland know that violence wouldn’t be tolerated. Instead, he gave them space to riot and excused their violence by blaming Trump and conservatives for the destructive actions of Antifa, allowing the unrest to grow exponentially worse. How do you solve a problem like Portland? Thanks to the continued cowardice of Wheeler and Brown, all of the easy options are now off the table.

https://jonsnewplace.wordpress.com/2020/09/23/dems-admit-portland-is-a-problem-they-cant-solve/