Who is Duncan Lemp?
Duncan Lemp is a name you’ve probably never heard. It’s never been on a picket sign or splashed all over 24/7 news channels. But Lemp was gunned down by police, unarmed, while he slept next to his pregnant girlfriend on March 12 of this year for the crime of owning a firearm. There were no riots or protests in his name. When his friends and family planned to protest the Montgomery County police in Maryland, they were threatened with a $5000 fine and a year in jail because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Jim Bovard at The American Conservative has done a great job reporting on this story that no one else in the mainstream press seems interested in, maybe because Lemp is white and his death doesn’t help paint the police as racists in order to divide people and foment hatred. His death is simply not interesting to the race baiters, but it is terrifying and relevant to what happened to George Floyd and every other innocent person who has died at the hands of police.
Lemp was the subject of an anonymous call turning him in for suspicion of having a gun illegally. He was executed without a trial while he slept as a result of “red flag laws” that are in use in the state of Maryland and effectively erase due process. Five guns were found, none of them illegal.
…a Montgomery County SWAT team launched an unprovoked attack on the Lemp family home at 4:30 a.m. on March 12. Lemp was fatally wounded by the first shots that the police fired through his bedroom window. His family says he was sleeping in bed with his pregnant girlfriend at the time.
Police claim that they received an anonymous tip two months earlier that Lemp possessed firearms. The police department asserted Lemp was prohibited from owning firearms due to a juvenile conviction but there are apparently zero court records or other records to support that justification. Regardless of Lemp’s juvenile history, there was no evidence that he posed an imminent threat justifying a frontal assault that included throwing flash-bang explosive devices into the family home.
The coverup
The police are in overdrive to hide everything from the family who want answers. Even the arrest warrant used to attack him in his home has been withheld from the family. Montgomery County has spied on the family’s Facebook postings and sent their lawyer a nasty letter threatening them with fines and jail if they protested the police.
County prosecutor Haley Roberts sent a warning letter to Lemp family lawyers Jonathan Fellner and Rene Sandler: “Open source information indicates that your clients intend to participate in this planned protest” over the killing of Duncan Lemp at Montgomery County Police headquarters on April 25. “Open source” apparently means that the local police are tracking Lemp family members on social media, where the Lemp killing is still enraging legions of folks. Roberts warned that Gov. Hogan’s “‘stay-at-home’ order… does not appear to include planned protests.” Roberts stated that the county police department asked the lawyers to remind the Lemp family “of the Governor’s orders, as well as the charge from those orders and state law mandating law enforcement must enforce these orders.” At least the prosecutor did not hint that the SWAT team would attack them if they showed up.
Contrast this reaction by police to the protests over the killing of George Floyd where law-enforcement are just letting people burn down buildings and loot entire cities without any repercussions. But Lemp’s family is being stalked on social media by government agents and threatened with arrest should they try to speak up about this injustice.
Police are refusing to release bodycam footage of Duncan Lemp’s killing
One way America could check police power is to pass legislation making it illegal to withhold bodycam footage from the public. This is a story that happens over and over again. Chicago police held onto the bodycam footage of the Laquan McDonald shooting for over a year. When it was released it proved the police were lying about the incident and ended up having to pay the family millions. This is unacceptable.
If America could get out of its own way for a minute, maybe we could all realize that we have a police state problem that is more pressing than whatever racial problems people are arguing about. Is race an issue with many of these cases? Perhaps. And I do not deny that it appears to be more dangerous for black people to interact with police. Even so, I’m scared of police too. I’ve seen enough bad policing and corrupt, power-hungry jerks operating with a badge to know to fear the guys with state-issued guns.
There is a fundamental problem here that we are missing and it’s that the government has grown to enormous proportions and has amassed more power over our lives then they should ever have. We have a big-government problem that far outweighs any individual cops who might be racists. It’s the big government monster that has conditioned government workers to believe they are in a higher class than others. They are “essential,” they are the “authority,” they are not accountable and they rarely do jail time. This goes way beyond police officers.
It is a systemic cancer in all of our government agencies from the FBI to the CIA to your local school board. This attitude of superiority instead of servitude to the Constitution and the People opens the doors for people to be targeted for their color or economic status by bad actors given the power to taze you if you look at them the wrong way. It is this environment where the government is always right, all-powerful, able to invade your life in ways you never dreamt possible that these abuses trickle down.
There’s no accountability at any level anymore. We have a Constitution that exists to limit the power of the state over your life no matter what color you are. If we would hold our government to it, this would end. Instead, we allow people to write legislation that erodes your liberty and empowers the state. Mankind is conditioned to accept the abuses while the abuses are tolerable. But this has become intolerable. Don’t you feel it?
This is not the country we were given by our forefathers. It has been transformed into something that looks like America on the surface with baseball games and Fourth of July fireworks but when you take those things away (as conveniently the COVID-19 panic has) we can see clearly a place that bears no resemblance to a free country.
This wasn’t done by racists, but by statists. Wear your mask, or we will beat you. No church, or we will arrest you. You will be vaccinated by whatever we say you will get (your body is not your choice at all) or you will not travel or work. You will submit to authority or we will oppress you until you do. These things are not congruent with liberty. This is not America. This is the Deep State’s ultimate fantasy come true. You are a slave and most of you don’t even know you’re walking around in chains.
No more unchecked police power! No more suppression of evidence!
We can all agree that the lack of transparency when police are under the microscope is a huge problem. And the courts appear in on the scam. In the Lemp case, the warrant for his arrest that is hotly contested by the family has been sealed for thirty days by a judge. Why? At this point, always assume that any government agency refusing to hand over public documents is hiding something bad. They should not be allowed to do that. There should be jail time for any public official who will not hand over documents for the people to see what they did in our name with our money. If we are financing murder, we have the duty and a right to audit them.
Stronger together
We know that the system protects itself. We laugh about “internal investigations” because we all know the fox cannot guard the henhouse. Yet we put up with it from the police department to child welfare agencies who have the power to TAKE YOUR CHILDREN from you. Why? It’s time for the people to reform the whole system and demand oversight and accountability in every state agency. And when we start realizing that we are all at risk of being murdered by police or having our families destroyed and ripped apart by government workers, or having our businesses wiped out by executive edict by people who have too much authority and next to no accountability, perhaps we could do something about it.
But if we continue to divide into little groups who yell at each other over whose life matters more, the unchecked out-of-control state wins. They continue to do what they do and we continue to argue amongst ourselves while the terror continues. Black lives do matter. And more of them will be saved when we remove the heavy boot of the all-powerful government that does not fear the people any longer but views us all as cattle to be herded, enslaved, controlled, manipulated, and sacrificed at its whim.
They’re gaslighting us
The manipulation is at unprecedented levels. The entire country was united behind justice for George Floyd. Even Rush Limbaugh is talking to hugely popular black influencers and radio hosts, The Breakfast Club, to express his disgust and outrage at what happened and ask them how we can come together. Our big-government Deep State overlords cannot let that happen. Unity is a terrible enemy to bad state actors. In order to divide us again and break us apart, the bad guys sent antifa to cause their usual chaos, riots, murder, and mayhem while encouraging useful idiots to join in. Then the media gets in on it with the mass manipulation and propaganda and throwing gasoline on an already explosive situation. All we can do now is divide into the usual groups: pro-riot/protest and anti-looting/violence. We’re all screaming at one another again instead of fixing the damned problem.
It’s not us. We are not the problem.
White Americans and black Americans all want the same thing. We want our lives, liberty, and the right to pursue our happiness. But the emotional manipulation that the puppet masters use to gin up dissent and hatred work on us every time. We never learn. We’re so used to it, we can’t help but fall into our usual defensive positions. But what if this time we did something different and refused to aim at one another and instead turned that rage onto the people who continually pit us against one another while they loot America and continue to consolidate power to a very small number of people?
There is an inequality problem in America
That tiered justice system that black activists talk about is real. The people pulling the strings who revel in all this chaos never pay for their massive crimes. They get away with treason, presidential coup attempts, mishandling of classified documents, child trafficking, insider trading, and even murder (Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself) while the cattle are thrown into prison for twenty years for petty drug offenses or shot dead in their beds with no explanation. We are not who we should be mad at. We are in the same herd of oppressed and abused livestock. Some of us get abused more regularly than others but we’re still locked up in the same rancid farm. It’s time to act in unison and break out of the prison they’ve built around us. Together we are unstoppable. Imagine the fear and terror in the ruling class if all races in America turned around and focused their rage on them.
George Floyd and Duncan Lemp are victims of the same enemy. When will we wake up and see it?
Tune into my VIP podcast “The Fringe” this Friday, June 5, to hear Jim Bovard discuss this case in detail. If you are not a VIP subscriber, sign up now!
Megan Fox is the author of “Believe Evidence; The Death of Due Process from Salome to #MeToo,” and host of The Fringe podcast. Follow on Twitter @MeganFoxWriter
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