A law professor at George Mason University is calling for federal intervention in Portland, Oregon following Antifa thugs’ beating of Andy Ngo put the reporter in the hospital.
F.H. Buckley writes in the New York Post that criminal laws “are supposed to deter criminal behavior,” but when police stand at a distance and do nothing — as they did in the Portland incident — there’s absolutely no accountability.
Masked Antifa goons roam the town at will proclaiming “we own the streets” … and they do, Buckley says, because the city’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, has let them. Even if they’re apprehended, their masks enable them to walk scot free as definite identification is a problem.
“That’s a lesson we should have learned from the Ku Klux Klan,” Buckley says.
Wheeler says he is against violence. But the hooded antifa riots are still tolerated. The Portland police chief wants to ban masks, but fat chance the state will pass such a law, against protests by civil libertarians. And an anti-mask law isn’t necessary. The state already has a perfectly suitable remedy, in its anti-riot law. A person commits the crime of riot if, while participating with at least five other people, he engages in tumultuous and violent conduct and thereby intentionally or recklessly creates a grave risk of causing public alarm.
I can’t think of a better definition of the antifa method of operation.
After Ngo was beaten, the police declared a riot. Next time, the riot should be declared the moment hooded antifa protesters show up. But Wheeler won’t let that happen. That would get in the way of antifa’s free-speech rights, he thinks.
Evidently, it’s time for the federal government to step in — and crack down. It has had to do so in the past, especially during the civil rights era in the South.
There’s a federal law against conspiring to injure or intimidate a person in the free exercise of enjoyment of his rights or privileges, and I should think the elements of the offense are complete the moment the antifa goons show up in Portland.
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