With Pinochet in Portland, where are liberty's defenders?
By Sid Schwab / Herald columnist
Maybe it was a dream. When Barack Obama was president, and now it sure seems like a dream — intelligence, integrity, competence, humor, nice family, no indictments — weren’t a bunch of self-described “patriots” hoarding guns and ammo like toilet paper in a pandemic? Predicting government troops would be rounding up civilians and hauling them away? Building bunkers, promising to defend our “freedoms” with their lives?
Funny thing: What they predicted with the certainty of Covid-hoaxers and climate-change deniers has come to pass, just down I-5. Anonymous, heavily-armed federal agents, uninvited, snatching citizens off the streets, hauling them away in unmarked vans. Citizens who, for the most part, had been protesting non-violently. No identification on those armed government kidnappers, no warrants. Swinging truncheons, gassing, shooting rubber bullets. Maybe I shouldn’t have said “funny.”
Unlike those fevered “patriots,” people having more than two Betz cells to rub together knew this would never happen under President Obama. Same with those imaginary “antifa” demonstrations, to which the tumescent, mega-armed, MAGA-hatted have been showing up, ready to lay down their lives for Old Glory, Confederate flags and the occasional swastika. That those events were obvious troll-jobs didn’t occur to them, even after the third or fourth time.
Maybe those heroic one-minute men knew President Obama was never going to lead UN tanks and ISIS soldiers up their driveways; knew they’d not need make good on their rodomontade. But where are they now, as Portland is Pinocheted? Citizens are being disappeared, though less permanently, as if America were 1970s Chile. As if our “president” were the third-world strongman to which he aspires, against which those faux militias promised defiance. Having claimed resistance as its primary purpose, the NRA is missing, too. Moms are there, though, arm in arm, braving the gas. Who are the real patriots?
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/schwab-with-pinochet-in-portland-where-are-libertys-defenders/
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