From Delaney Hall to ‘Freedom 250,’ lefty violence is what real insurrection looks like
Threats made to the safety of performers booked for a national celebration of America’s 250th birthday.
We could be in for another long, hot summer of leftist violence.
Last week rocker Bret Michaels pulled out of the planned Freedom 250 State Fair in Washington, DC, citing “concerns” regarding “the safety of my fans, band, crew, family and myself, including threats that are completely unfounded and unforgivable.”
An earlier Freedom 250 event was marred by vandalism, NBC News reported Tuesday, when saboteurs cut fuel lines and contaminated the National Mall.
As one social-media wag responded, “The fact that we are having a hard time throwing America a 250th birthday party because leftists are threatening to kill everyone involved is the most zeitgeist s–t I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Ever since President Donald Trump’s initial inauguration in 2017, leftist groups ranging from Antifa to Black Lives Matter to the Democratic Socialists of America to the ever-present ANSWER have been staging protests that very frequently turn violent.
Under federal law, codified at 18 USC 2331(5), such events could be deemed domestic terrorism.
That’s because they involve criminal acts “dangerous to human life” that “appear to be intended . . . to intimidate or coerce a civilian population,” to “influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion,” or to “affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction.”
Things like the Delaney Hall riots outside a New Jersey ICE facility, featuring not only violence but death threats against ICE agents, would seem to fit the bill.
So would threats against prospective performers at a national event.
“It is impossible to understand the politics of the left without grasping that it is all about deniable intimidation,” as writer Richard Fernandez put it decades ago.
But today they’re not even bothering to deny it — and leading figures of the Democratic Party are complicit in these efforts.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, of course, famously threatened conservative members of the Supreme Court shortly before a crazed leftist tried to murder Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called for “maximum warfare” against Republicans and Trump — and did so right after another assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April.
Numerous Democrats have compared Trump to Hitler, condemned him as a threat to democracy, and suggested that his supporters should be sent to re-education camps and worse.
With that sort of rhetoric, Democrats might be accused of what they themselves have called “stochastic terrorism” — the use of inflammatory language to lure their more unbalanced supporters into acts of violence that can’t be directly connected to the speaker.
And much of the violence we’re seeing isn’t spontaneous at all.
Riots like those at Delaney Hall are not just sudden effusions of public anger.
They’re organized events, funded and supported with training and supplies courtesy of a whole web of leftist organizations, themselves funded by left-wing billionaires who launder their money through tax-exempt NGOs.
Piles of supplies — bottled water, gas masks, face shields, snacks, medical equipment and more — seem to just appear wherever the agitators descend.
They’re not the product of spontaneous generation.
This support may not be terrorism per se, though under federal law it may qualify as “material support” for terrorism.
We heard a lot from the Democrats, and the traditional media (but I repeat myself), about the Jan. 6 “insurrection.”
But no such infrastructure — much less truckloads of supplies — accompanied the Jan. 6 rioters’ confrontations with police at the US Capitol.
“Insurrection,” unlike terrorism, carries no specific statutory definition in US law.
In general parlance, it’s understood to mean a violent, organized uprising or resistance against government authority or its laws.
Federal law uses the term in criminal and emergency-powers statutes, but leaves its meaning to judicial interpretation based on context, history and common understanding.
That would certainly seem to apply to a series of organized riots against the execution of federal statutes.
A duly elected president — one who won a majority of both the electoral vote and the popular vote, as well as carrying every swing state — is trying to enforce valid federal laws widely supported by the public.
His political opponents are trying to use violence to stop it.
The federal government has vast resources at its disposal to fight an insurrection.
Some of those were deployed at the drop of a hat in 2021.
Where are they now?
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
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