by David Haggith, The Great Recession Blog:

Shootings, stabbings, beatings of bystanders, police officers blinded by lasers, thrown bombs, burned vehicles, and the usual plethora of broken windows, stolen merchandise, obstructed traffic and graffiti. These phrases describe many of the so-called “protests.” All illegal. All unconstitutional.

Yet, the Democratic mayors of the cities taken over by such conflagration cheer on the people destroying their towns and do their best to ignore complaining businessmen and citizens who cry out for justice. Not the least of these unashamed, lawless, wild-west towns is Seattle, whose Democratic mayor turned part of the town into a Petri dish of failed anarchist aspirations.

Seattle’s Petri dish provides a microcosm of a new world, ungoverned by constitutional law, in fact, ungoverned at all. In other words anarchy, and Democrats are bending over backward to deliver that world.

As conservative writer Victoria Taft summarized,

Democrats, so far as I can find, have never denounced the violent mobs…. Indeed, the only remonstrance issued was over people burning down black-owned businesses – their “own house” as [New York Governor Cuomo] put it, because burning your own stuff “never makes sense….”

Mayors, governors, and prosecutors have fallen all over themselves to support the violent mobs in Seattle, New York, St. Louis, Washington, D.C…. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan ceded a section of the fancy Capitol Hill neighborhood to the mob. She handed over a police precinct to the mob. Two murders, gunshot wounds, assaults, and rapes took place at her pet mob’s little “summer of love” squat. She’s never apologized….

How-dare-Trump-send-police-to-defend-a-federal-building that the left is obsessed with bringing down…. Far from denouncing the violent and destructive nightly arsons and assaults, Democrats embrace the riots to denounce President Trump.

PJ Media

Don’t let Trump ruin our riots, the mayors of Seattle and Portland seemed to say, after abdicating their legal authority to anarchists in order to let their cities be taken away from decent, law-abiding citizens. Trump, they claimed, by sending in US forces to guard federal buildings that these mayors clearly were not protecting, was breaking the law. An odd claim from mayors who care so little about others who are shattering the law like so many broken windows.

There is no such thing as a constitutional right to violent protest or to overthrow of the state or an unregulated right to bear arms!

Like graffiti artists, these mayors and their ilk have painted over the constitution to pretend it enshrines concepts that it clearly does not. Here is what the constitution actually says on these matters. Maybe it is time both the hard Left and the hard Right stop and actually read it:

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects….

Bill of Rights Institute

First, notice the word “protest” is not even in the constitution. The more orderly sounding and peaceful word used is “petition,” and the only manner in which petitioning your government is protected in the US constitution is clearly stated as “peaceably.” If you are petitioning your government in any way that is not peaceable, you are not protected constitutionally, nor is your behavior advocated.

There is nothing in the constitution saying people can disturb the peace. There is nothing saying they can block streets. Nothing saying the can break things to express their rage. There is nothing saying they can laser police officers in the eyeballs or throw things at the police. This is all lawlessness, and the constitution expresses no protection for it whatsoever.

What the constitution does protect is the people’s right to assemble peaceably to petition their government — not even necessarily to petition the entire populace in the city streets, but specifically to “petition the government.” Peaceably. Got it?

The drafters of the Bill or Rights were wise enough to know that lawless riots have no place in a democracy. For those on the far Right who sometimes claim the constitution enshrines the right to armed insurrection, which is ironically exactly what Antifa on the far Left is aiming for, you had better get new reading glasses because you, too, have left out the significant qualifiers:

Amendment II

A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

The operative words there are “well regulated.” So, yes this right can be regulated. It says so right in the very expression of the right. And, no, it is not to allow for the possibility of violent overthrow of the state if the state gets out of line as the far Right sometimes claims. It is specifically for the purpose of assuring security of the state. Not even the security of the people; the security of the state.

Why? Because the state in this constitutional republic embodies government by law and by majority consent; outside of that, all you have is “might is right,” — in other words strongman rule, a.k.a. anarchy, which typically ends in tyranny. You may not have the government you want, but it is the government that the majority has approved, however wrong-minded the majority may be or however tacitly they approved it by just sleeping and letting it happen.

There is NO RIGHT expressed anywhere in the constitution to violent overthrow of the state for any reason, whether by anarchists on the hard Left like Antifa or by their neofascist counterparts on the hard Right. Ironically, both groups, thinking they are the antithesis of the other, are far more alike than they think. Violent overthrow of the government or even violent protests of the government were never enshrined in the constitution. Leaders who allow this are not leaders at all. Right now that applies particularly to America’s most liberal cities.

Both the hard Left and hard Right need to learn this obvious fact, which goes against the grain of their penchant for violent expression of their rage. What they really like is the right to simply destroy whatever they don’t like or just to vent their spleens — not peaceable constitutional government at all.

What is, in fact, enshrined by the constitution is the right of all citizens to be secure in their persons and in their homes. And that cannot exist in a nation where racial riots are happening or when neofascists are trying to overthrow a government they viscerally disagree with by armed insurrection. You have a right to change the government by peaceable petition and by legal amendment to the constitution if you don’t like this kind of government and only if you can persuade the majority to follow you. If not, you’re out of luck. And that is ALL you have.

The present wild-west lawlessness stomps all over the constitutional principle referenced in the Fourth Amendment as the right of all citizens to live with security for their persons and their homes and their things. No one’s right to petition the government comes with the right to trounce on that enshrined principle of security, and it is government’s responsibility to maintain and assure that security when some parties think they can do what they want because they are angry.

You have no right to light the town on fire or bust its windows or attack the police, no matter how much you may hate them, not even if some of them do some terrible things. You have a right to pursue them legally. You have a right to vote in different people who will pursue them legally. You have a right to meet with others and peaceably express your grievances.

In major cities across this nation, the rule of law now lies in tatters. Numerous Democrats obviously don’t care — so much so that they actually seem to be climbing all over themselves for the opportunity to support unconstitutional violence. Democratic officials are outshouting each other for the opportunity to get rid of their own police departments. And enforce the law with what? Good intentions? Inept committees? Police agencies that go by some other name than “police?”

Antifa doesn’t want any of that, so liberals are not going to appease them if their changes still involve enforcement of law. Apparently Black Lives Matter in Seattle doesn’t want law either because they claimed the right to be their own law, or they got co-opted by Antifa into such a movement, as I’ll lay out below in this saga of Seattle’s Petri dish of lawlessness.

It is no coincidence that the cites that were in the news most for violent riots have been run by liberal Democrats for decades who have long encouraged protests of any kind while nurturing a keen sense of victimization in as many citizens as they can in order to incite us all against each other so people will turn to them for salvation. (And, as you can see in this article, I don’t tip my hat to the hard Right that equally does all it can to perpetuate division and even hatred between people based on nationality or race. I’m just talking straight-down-the-center truth.)

Here’s a little clip showing how supportive these Democratic mayors are to the violent overthrow of their own towns and to the attacks on law enforcers who are attempting to protect buildings in those towns from clearly intended destruction via clearly illegal, unconstitutional violence. Watch how the mayor of Seattle’s liberal neighbor to the south, Portland, supported anarchy in his own grandstanding fashion:

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