-By Warner Todd Huston
In a move so typical of the hypocritical left, the ACLU is urging protesters at Donald J. Trump’s inauguration to be sure and take video of police and security agents attempting to keep everyone in D.C. safe but at the same time they are warning the police to be sure and turn off their body cameras so as not to record protesters.
In essence, the ACLU wants to make sure protesters feel free to destroy property and put people in danger while feeling just as free that their identities won’t be revealed by video from images recored by police body cameras.
Yet even as they are warning police to turn off their body cameras to give protesters perfect anonymity, the ACLU is also urging activists to get in cops’ faces with their own video cameras.
As security forces in Washington make their plans to insure the security and safety of the thousands who will be attending the inauguration of Donald J. Trump, the ACLU is warning officers to make sure their body cameras are turned off during the inevitable protests and attempts at disruption, according to NEA.com.
“Those cameras shouldn’t be on. The police shouldn’t be allowed to surveil First Amendment activity. Our concern around the availability of body cameras, what is done with that data, who looks at that data, what that data is used for?” the American Civil Liberties Union’s Monica Hopkins-Maxwell said earlier this week.
But the ACLU’s Hopkins-Maxwell is also urging protesters and anarchists to make sure they record everything and everyone around them. In fact, the ACLU has gone so far as to create a new smart phone app to help people take video of police on the streets.
“The more people who are watching, the less incidents collision between the police and protestors,” Hopkins-Maxwell claimed.
While it may seem outrageous, there is some basis for Hopkins-Maxwell’s demands that the police turn off their body cameras. The germ of her reasoning can be seen in a very vague D.C. statue that gives city police officers scant guidance on just when to turn on and off their body cameras during protests. The statute is essentially meant to protect protesters from body camera footage being used as an intelligence-gathering tool to identify peaceful protesters and to have their identities put in a registry held by police.
But with various protest groups announcing dangerous plans to disrupt the inaugural ceremonies on Friday, the ACLU’s demands that the police keep body cams off is nothing short of giving protesters the go-ahead to engage in any manner of mayhem they want and giving them the expectation that they’ll get away with it.
But in this case, where protesters aren’t just announcing plans for peaceful protest but openly calling for violence, turning off body cameras not only endangers the innocent members of the public who will be caught betwixt and between the protesters and police, but also endangers the police because it will invite the anarchists to be more violent than they might otherwise be if they think they’ll be on video.
The danger is real because of the overwrought condition of the easily bruised psyches of today’s leftists. Sadly, liberals are becoming increasingly unhinged. Both Robert Tracinski and S.E. Cupp, for instance, recently noted that as Democrats edge more into paranoia over Trump they are setting the stage to both lose future policy fights as well as making Trump’s re-election in 2020 increasingly likely.
In her most recent New York Daily News article, S.E. Cupp scolds Democrats for not controlling their most insane tendencies.
Cup notes that the inauguration of Donald J. Trump will “mark the culmination of more than two months of total liberal meltdown since he was elected in November.”
But Cupp warns that these meltdowns are making them ridiculous and destroying any chance that they can take serious action during the age of Trump. “Trump derangement syndrome will not help win policy fights,” she sensibly writes.
For his part, Robert Tracinski of TheFederalist.com is even more severe in his judgment of the left’s idiocy.
Tracinski points out that, “everything in the behavior of Trump’s opponents on the Left tells us they are determined to learn nothing from this past election and to double down on everything that drove voters into Trump’s camp.”
“This doesn’t really come across as a protest against Trump,” Tracinski continued, “…They are protesting the fact that the rest of the American public isn’t good enough for them.”
These constant protests all come as a slap in the face, Tracinski points out, to millions of Americans – those millions that make up over half the country — who disagree with the hardcore left.
Tracinski sums up this display of insanity sayig, “So what are the inauguration protesters doing? Describing Trump voters as a bunch of fascists and backward redneck bigots whose opinions shouldn’t count.”
This isn’t a recipe for reaching across the aisle and gaining enough support from the other side (or even the middle, for that matter) in order to get at least some of what they want put into action.
Indeed, we can already see the clear results of the left’s increasingly childish temper tantrums in the fact that Democrats now only have clear power in four states and have lost well over 1,000 political seats across the country since the year 2007.
But there is one thing that both Cupp and Tracinski seem to misunderstand, likely because both are #NeverTrump centrists and not really conservatives. Their mistake is that they both imagine that the left wants to work with the center or the right to do things for the betterment of the country.
The sad truth is the left has never, ever wanted to work with anyone who deviates from their most cherished, anti-American ideals. After all, it’s why liberals drove out of their party every centrist member it once had. At one time there were millions of Scoop Jackson Democrats, so many that it kept the Democrat Party in control of most of the nation for nearly 100 years.
But today all that is left of the Democrat Party are the extreme liberals. And they are determined to do to the country what they did to their party, namely destroy the lives of anyone who disagrees with an extremist, left-wing agenda.
In the end, talk radio giant Rush Limbaugh is right. We should not want to “work with the left.” The left needs to be destroyed, not coddled.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as Constitution.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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