Protests Don’t Work

Bob Lefsetz’s Original Post – “Protests Don’t Work”

Stay home.

When you get the clarion call to go to some destination to wield signs and slogans in support of your mission I hope it makes you feel good, because it has no effect on the cause whatsoever.

Now, that’s not bad advice! But as usual, you quickly go off the rails with your biased left wing nonsense, such as this:

Now if enough people take to the streets…

It still doesn’t make a difference.

Black Lives Matter? What exactly changed as a result of that? Oh, that’s right, Fox and the rest of the blowhards got a talking point, making a false equivalency to 1/6. Yes, disrupting the election process is just like marching in the street. As for a few broken windows and some looting… I’m not endorsing them, but to equate them with trying to overturn the election results, threatening to hang Mike Pence, deaths in the Capitol, stealing the wares of elected officials… That’s like saying a stolen base in Little League is equivalent to a stolen base in the MLB. No, it’s like saying a blown call in Little League is equivalent to stealing signs in the World Series.

I’m not about to defend the protests at the Capitol that got out of control and did damage to some of the rooms and furniture therein. They were wrong, illegal, and the people involved should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But to describe the George Floyd riots as “a few broken windows and some looting” is the worst kind of fake news and misinformation. According to Newsweek magazine:

Many of the more than 1,500 businesses in Minneapolis and St. Paul damaged during last year’s riots following George Floyd‘s killing remain closed, while others are struggling to stay open. Along one especially hard-hit area, only 21 percent of the most damaged properties are back in business, according to the Star Tribune.

The newspaper also noted that with $500 million in damage to the Twin Cities, protests are the second-costliest civil disturbance in U.S. history behind the 1992 riots in Los Angeles.

https://www.newsweek.com/businesses-year-after-floyd-1596610

$500 million dollars in damages compared with $1.5 million dollars in damages caused by the January 6th protesters? But let’s look at the national costs of the George Floyd riots:

The New York Times ignored 18 deaths, countless injuries and nearly $2 billion in property damage nationwide in an article slamming Republican bills designed to stop what the liberal newspaper considered mostly “peaceful” protests.

How many people died as a result of the Capitol demonstrations? Just one – “Ashli Babbitt, 35, of San Diego and an Air Force veteran, died on the day of the riot after being shot in the shoulder by a Capitol Police officer.”

https://www.factcheck.org/2021/11/how-many-died-as-a-result-of-capitol-riot/ 

Like Alito’s theory employed to overturn Roe v. Wade. If you read it in a vacuum, if you read or hear about it in the right wing world, it seems logical. If you’re not exposed to analysis from the other side, you don’t get it. There are dog whistles in the opinion itself, right wing code that many people are completely oblivious to.

You can read an analysis here: 

I read it, and it IS logical. The Constitution was never intended to reflect popular opinion or political bias. We don’t need “analysis from the other side” to understand that. Whatever “dog whistles” you are referring to are irrelevant. The Supreme Court is designed to judge laws and issues brought before it on the basis of Constitutional law. And Roe v. Wade was a bad decision to begin with:

“Then, in 1973, this Court decided Roe v. Wade. Even though the Constitution makes no mention of abortion, the Court held that it confers a broad right to obtain one.

Justice Alito’s guiding principle is that a right to an abortion cannot be found in the Constitution. He adheres to a legal philosophy known as “original intent,” which involves scrutinizing the founding document’s language to derive direction on contemporary issues. —Jan Hoffman

Stare decisis, the doctrine on which Casey’s controlling opinion was based, does not compel unending adherence to Roe’s abuse of judicial authority. Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.”

States remain free to establish laws pertaining to abortion based upon the will of the people in that state, as expressed in the Tenth Amendment:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”