This is a quick shout out to the Auburn, Alabama Police Department and the Alabama State Police for the way they handled the hooded and masked people who showed up to demonstrate against Richard Spencer.
Understand, I have no quarrel with those who wish to demonstrate. Feel free. You absolutely should protest, whether I agree with your point of view or not. You get that right, and I’m happy for you to exercise it, even if it makes you look like a complete imbecile in your pussy hat and Women-Who-Hate-Men Tee shirts. You want to look like a moron, that’s okay. But you can’t act like one.
And that’s how the Alabama police departments differed from the Berkeley Police department: they made anyone wearing a mask of any size or shape to take them off. They stopped the people outside the venue and told them to either take off the mask or be arrested for loitering. You can go to the protest, or go to jail. Your choice.
Why is this a brilliant strategy? Because the Antifa scum who caused great harm and grievous bodily injury out in California could only get away with it because they were masked. Even then people figure out who some of the scum were, including a purported professor that 4Chan people identified through public domain photographs. If you take away a person’s mask, you take away their freedom to be violent. If you make it difficult to avoid arrest and identification, then you make it difficult for them to participate in a riot.
Now, you can’t tell me cops in California couldn’t figure this out. Clearly they could. They simply were not allowed to do this, and there’s no good reason why not. Unless, of course, the city fathers were aligned with, instead of antagonistic towards the law breakers. Indeed, that is an allegation that has been made by anonymous cops in internet forums where they can tell the rest of the country they’re not chickens.
It’s also interesting to note that the students at Auburn University were not the people who were arrested at the Richard Spencer event. It wasn’t the college students that acted up. Nope, it was a pair of middle-aged idiots with delusions of adequacy that got into a fist fight and both came away looking like they’d gone a few rounds with a prize fighter. The Auburn cops tackled, cuffed, and perp-walked them away. And what do we find when we look? A tattoo artist from Montgomery and two more clowns, one from Trussville and one from Birgmingham. And the one named Benjamin looks suspiciously like a girl.
Recent video showing an African-American student telling one of the overt racists at this event that they were not going to allow him to use their campus for hate was especially informative because the young man kept his arms folded at all times, and while he raised his voice, he never raised his hands.
And despite what you may believe about cops, they let this young many verbally spank the racist, and didn’t do anything because they too respect free speech. I wish I could identify the young man; I’d send him a thank you card. He demonstrated that counter-protest doesn’t need to be violent to be effective.
The Well Armed Attorney 