The First Amendment of the United States Constitution is easily the most frequently cited section of the Bill of Rights. It's also the most frequently misunderstood, misinterpreted, and abused. A classic example of the latter is the notion that if public school kids gather on the field and pray before a high school football game and mention Jesus, it means that the government is forcing Christianity on the populace.
Interpretations of "the right of the people to peaceably assemble" are more all over the place than Sylvia Plath on a camping trip without her lithium. In much of my lifetime, the "peaceably" part tends to get glossed over. My first memories of television news were of the antiwar protests of the late '60s, and I don't recall a whole lot of Kumbaya going on then.
In more recent memory, the 2020 George Floyd Summer of Mostly Peaceful Riots and Love featured quite a bit of arson, vandalism, looting, and assault.
Peaceful protests do still happen. After co-founding the Los Angeles Tea Party in 2009, I spent the next three years flying to Tea Party rallies all over the country. Most of those rallies were, in fact, protests, especially in the first 18 months. We never burned, broke, or stole anything. Heck, we'd even pick up our own trash. Of course, the Democrats' flying monkeys in the mainstream media would lie about us all the time, just like they did about the levels of violence during the summer of 2020 riots when covering for the Antifa/BLM crowd.
Is prevarication covered under the First Amendment?
My personal belief is that the deliberate and frequent disruption of other people's lives is in no way peaceful. A modern leftist protest strategy is the blocking of traffic, sometimes on very large scales. Preventing people from getting to their jobs or families is bad enough and should be dealt with. Preventing first responders from getting to emergency situations and hospitals is criminal and should be an easy ticket to an extended jail food diet.
The "Free Palestine" Hitler Youth have been disrupting a lot of lives of late, especially those of students who want to do outlandish things like go to class, prepare for finals, and get good grades.
After a while, many of them aren't so peaceful:
But conservatives and rightwing domestic terror threat or something. https://t.co/ramVuABDNh
— SFK (@stephenkruiser) May 2, 2024
Joe Biden's handlers have been trying to figure out how to suck up to the radical Islamist vote in Michigan while not appearing to completely throw Israel under the bus. This has led to Biden doing what he does best in a crisis — nothing. He's like a point guard on a basketball team who doesn't know how to dribble, pass, or shoot, but he's the starter because his dad is the coach.
The team is just stuck with him.
Now that things have reached a fever pitch, the people running Biden's brain decided that it was time to make him put down the Cheerios baggie and pretend to be president.
President Biden condemned the unrest disrupting campuses across the United States, saying in a televised address on Thursday that Americans have “the right to protest, but not a right to cause chaos.” But Mr. Biden rejected Republican calls for National Guard intervention and added that the protests had not influenced his Mideast policies.
The president spoke as authorities across the United States stepped up efforts to dismantle pro-Palestinian protests at universities nationwide. Police officers in riot gear clearing a pro-Palestinian encampment early Thursday at the University of California, Los Angeles.
You know things are bad when any high-ranking post-Obama Democrat has to pretend to be on the side of law enforcement.
I can almost guarantee that the discussions leading up to the remarks were largely focused on how anything he said would affect Biden's population in Dearborn, Mich. OK, maybe the whole state. They've been leg-humping those 15 electoral votes too hard to risk throwing them aside.
Because he had to wake up and pretend to pick a side, Biden will now probably need to nap on a Delaware beach for a few days. Some lament his lack of leadership in situations like this. The old boy can't bring something to the table that he never had, though.
There's also the fact that, when he does put on his big president pants, he always makes things worse.
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