Law Prof Suggests Portland Needs Federal Intervention Over Antifa Violence
“when people are permitted to hide their identities behind a mask, as antifa thugs are, no one gets caught”
Scalia Law School professor F.H. Buckley thinks the attack on writer Andy Ngo provided a tipping point against Antifa.
He writes at the New York Post:
It’s time for a federal civil rights intervention in Portland
The savage beating of journalist Andy Ngo in Portland by far-left antifa rioters last Saturday shocked everyone. Well, conservatives anyway, plus a few honorable liberals. As the police stood by watching at a distance, masked thugs hit him, stole his camera and threw milkshake, rocks and eggs at him. He ended up in the hospital with a brain hemorrhage.
Criminal laws are supposed to deter criminal behavior. But that only works when the criminal gets caught and punished, and when people are permitted to hide their identities behind a mask, as antifa thugs are, no one gets caught.
Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, has vowed to hold the offenders accountable. Let us know who the perpetrators are, he asked, and the city would hold them accountable — a supremely useless plea when dealing with a largely masked and anonymous group.
The antifa slogan in Portland is “we own the streets.” And they do. The city has let it happen. Last October, they blocked a street and threatened drivers and passers-by who wanted to get through. A few months before that, they beat up a Bernie Sanders supporter who was carrying an American flag…
It’s the masks that save them. They’re a get-out-of-jail-free card. Deterrence doesn’t work when you can hide your identity. That’s a lesson we should have learned from the Ku Klux Klan.
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Comments
A civil RICO action and an injunction banning masks would be start.
The USA government needs to treat ANTIFA the same way they treated the KKK. First determine who is organizing and funding them then start arresting the ANTIFA storm troopers.
The masks make a difference but the real problem is political. Portland and a lot of there democrat controlled cities don’t want to stop antifa. Sometimes the even assist them. Even if they are arrested and convicted there are no serious punishment.
It would be nice if some of them are kneecapped, and then interrogated for names.
The problem is not the masks–itn is. thvattnhe police have been ordered by the mayor not to act against anti-fa violence. As I previous ly suggested, P:rersidentTrump should federalize the Oregon national guard to enforce the law given the refusal of the city authorities to do so.
Why not send up the someone from the DOJ Civil Rights division to investigate the mayor’s actions of telling the police to stand-down as people enjoying their free speech are beaten by masked thugs.
“During the commission of a misdemeanor or a felony, anyone found wearing a mask to hide their identity will be subject to ten days incarceration”
Sounds great, right?
Except that Portland mayor, Ted Wheeler, will never issue such an order and his puppet, Police Chief, Danielle Outlaw, would never carry it out.
And should the heavens open and this actually occur, the local judges would never enforce it.
Portland is so far anti-American, so far anti-Law and Order that it’s already gone further than most of California and the uprising of the Left will start here.
Cops were right there and didn’t attempt to interfere nor to grab the perpetrators.
They didn’t want to know the identities because they didn’t want to know the identities.
A civil rights intervention on the city government level is certainly in order, but also it seems that some public officials should be personally prosecutable for crimes. Can they really stand down, or give orders to stand down, and not be criminally liable?