If you’ve missed the news out of Atlanta recently, over the past few months, Antifa-aligned activists have occupied the site of a former prison farm where the city plans on building a public training facility.
Authorities have arrested over a dozen of these Antifa goons and charged them with domestic terrorism. The group — largely from out of town and overloaded with young white people from privileged backgrounds — has camped out on the land under the pretense that it’s some sort of forest that needs protection.
The “protesters” against what the left calls “Cop City” have vandalized the offices of the contractor in charge of the project, confronted contractor employees at their homes, and disrupted church services where employees of the contractor worship. Antifa punks even firebombed a center for at-risk youth located near the planned facility.
Those events took place last year, but a January shootout with police that injured a state trooper and ended the life of one of the Antifa thugs led to even more violence, including the burning of an Atlanta Police cruiser and damage to some buildings in downtown Atlanta.
These incidents, coupled with Friday’s release of the footage of Tyre Nichols’ death at the hands of Memphis police — the type of violence that Atlanta’s public safety training facility is meant to help prevent — led Gov. Brian Kemp (R-Ga.) to declare a state of emergency that allows him to call up the National Guard to deal with threats like these.
Charges of domestic terrorism against these people make perfect sense. Unless you’re NBC.
Related: Turns Out the Atlanta Terrorists Are Children of Privilege
The network claims that domestic terrorism charges “can be politicized and used against marginalized groups or those disliked by government.”
The NBC article cites Patrick Keenan, a professor of law at the University of Illinois, who says that civil rights groups aren’t crazy about domestic terrorism charges “because of the risk of politicization, because they can be used against politically disfavored groups by the government.”
No, seriously.
What’s really funny is that the article proves that the Atlanta protesters are domestic terrorists by citing Georgia law:
A 2017 Georgia law defines domestic terrorism as a felony intended to kill or harm people; “disable or destroy critical infrastructure, a state or government facility, or a public transportation system”; “intimidate the civil population or any of its political subdivisions”; and change or coerce state policy or affect the conduct of government “by use of destructive devices, assassination, or kidnapping.” Conviction carries a maximum sentence of 35 years in prison.
The allegations against the protesters include trespassing, resisting arrest, throwing rocks and glass bottles and damaging property, including setting fire to a police car. Authorities have also said they found “explosive devices, gasoline, and road flares” in an area in the forest where protesters had makeshift treehouses.
But what these civil rights groups who are all up in arms about calling these people domestic terrorists either miss or willfully ignore is that the current administration is lining up against “politically disfavored groups.”
Take a look at the way the federal government has treated those who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While it’s true that there were some people involved in the J6 riots who had nefarious intent to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, the vast majority of those who walked into the Capitol that day were innocent people who found themselves swept along in the excitement of the day. Most of them were peaceful and certainly not violent extremists, insurrectionists, or domestic terrorists.
Consider the Department of Justice under Attorney General Merrick Garland. Garland and his federal law enforcement apparatus have sought to go after parents who disagree with leftist indoctrination in their kids’ school curriculum and targeted pro-life protesters and activists. This iteration of the DOJ has proven itself to be nothing short of vindictive and nasty.
Let’s not forget President Biden’s own rhetoric, in which he broad-brushed essentially anybody who stands in the way of his administration’s far-left agenda as an enemy of “democracy.” He’s made such statements on more than one occasion, drawing sharp lines in the sand on who is politically acceptable in his eyes and who is, to use the words in the NBC piece, “politically disfavored groups by the government.”
We shouldn’t let the left’s lack of self-awareness surprise us, but there’s still something head-shakingly novel about NBC and its “legal experts” and “civil rights groups” complaining about domestic terrorism charges against Antifa thugs in Atlanta while looking the other way as the Biden administration otherizes everybody who doesn’t agree with the far left.
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