One thing I have learned in the last few days is when people say, “I support peaceful protests, but…” what they actually mean is they don’t support peaceful protests.
Or rather, they only support peaceful protests for causes in which they could envision themselves going out into the street and taking a wooden bullet in the head for the crime of not leaving an area when the police politely asked you to leave.
For some people in this country that’s the closing of nail salons or Red Lobster in the midst of a pandemic without a vaccine. For others it is is systemic police brutality and the cowardly politicians that enable it. Whose anger is more righteous? It’s hard to say.
Protesting is not fun. Like the police, I wish I was back home jerking off and running protection rackets on strip clubs in my spare time. I wish we didn’t have to take to the streets to once again ask the Columbus Police Department to stop beating and murdering black people and protecting their colleagues that do.
Columbus Mayor Andy Ginther, a man who lives in a $525,000 house in the suburbs and sends his kids to private school rather than one of the city’s best public schools a mere block from his house, decided to declare a curfew of 10 p.m. last Friday before abdicating control of the city to Governor Mike DeWine and the National Guard.
The results have been predictable.
In the above picture, you will see members of the Ohio State Highway Patrol standing watch over the Statehouse. They are not in riot gear as there was no riot. When they said stay off the steps, we complied. When they asked us to take ten steps back, we complied.
There was no need for tear gas. There was no need for rubber bullets being shot from unmarked, blacked-out Ford vans. It was the kind of peaceful protest that every American swears they support.
We marched from the Statehouse down High Street to the Ohio State Student Union, the building built on surprise fees sprung upon students when I attended back in 2010.
The most violence perpetrated was moving construction cones into High Street to block cars and protect marchers behind us. We waved drivers off High Street and 99% of them honked in support while we did so. One driver for a local heating company got out and gave us all the bottled water he had in his trunk.
After a brief stop at Oval Beach, we dispersed peacefully without a Columbus Police Officer in sight. What sucked is knowing they were back in their lairs, polishing their riot gear and preparing to go to “war” against their fellow citizens as soon as the sun set.
Denver has also declared a curfew on their citizen in wake of the George Floyd protests that have erupted in every single state. However, their power-brokers have chosen not to threaten their citizens with one-year in prison for violating that curfew.
This is the result:
This is exactly the scene that has played out every single night in Columbus. We congregate at the Statehouse and then march down High Street with people of all races, genders, non-genders and religious and non-religious creeds. It is truly a beautiful sight to see and gives me hope America will become the country we pretend to be. It won’t happen in my lifetime but that stop me from fighting for a better world for the kids to come after me.
Of course Columbus police cannot stand chants of, “Whose streets? Our streets!” Because in their minds, they are the sole patriarchs of the streets on account of having a state monopoly on violence.
After receiving a tip from a friend in the Lawyers Observance Guild about how the police and National Guard were planning to up their level of violence in an effort to break the protests for once and for all, I hobbled my ass back down to the Statehouse where I found wild scenes of carnage like this:
After being visually upset at the scenes of property damage, I walked over to the Columbus Police Department Headquarters where protestors were demanding the presence of Chief Thomas Quinlan (more on him in a bit).
The disinterested bike cops in riot gear eventually produced a deputy chief. He brought a pre-written speech that basically amounted to, “I have minorities in my family, so I understand your pain which is why I have taken the benevolent step of asking my officers to stop shooting wooden bullets and macing people who are running the other way.”
We shouted him down. His cops are trained adults, and they needed to be told not to brutalize people running the other way? We eventually decided we had enough of talking to a pencil pusher. We wanted the Chief.
(TFW your speech did not go to plan and you have to report back to your boss.)
This was the point where there was a mutiny against the protestors who had been speaking.
They allowed two white men(???) on the mic; one of whom pleaded with protestors that we needed “a direct line of communication” with police, and if we wanted real change, we should join the police or military. He was immediately shouted down for being a simp.
Then this black woman wearing a “Miss Ohio” sash took the mic and referred to Breonna Taylor, the woman murdered by Louisville Police last month, as “that other woman.” She was immediately shouted down.
At which point I witnessed one of the most stunning things I have seen from protestors: “Miss Ohio” admitted she is actually from New York and is only going off “what she sees on social media.”
At this point, the crowd lost it. “Why are you here trying to represent us for Instagram likes?” a black man in a white shirt and red pants (bottom left in the picture below) shouted. “Isn’t the same shit going on in New York? Why aren’t you up there?”
This showed a weakness in decentralized protests. There are many view points, no adequate PA system, and the movement becomes ripe for grifters who want to be seen preening with a microphone in their hand for social media clout.
The movement split between idealistic teenagers who think we can sit around and sing Kumbuya with killer cops and those that understand there is no point in addressing this unaccountable, racist gang. Kumbuya with your opponents only works if your opponent has a conscience.
This was also why J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI assassinated everyone from Fred Hampton to Martin Luther King to prevent a “Black Messiah” from rising to power.
The moment called for a singular voice and it turned into infighting among people on the same side, much to the entertainment of police.
Eventually word came that Chief Quinlan would appear outside City Hall in a couple minutes. Surprisingly he wasn’t already clad in riot gear. He is the one in the center of the below picture holding a bullhorn:
Chief Quinlan’s big revelation was that, effective immediately, the Columbus Police Department would be adding “accountability” to their core values, which was an inadvertent admission that protestors’ rage over unaccountable cops was entirely justified.
This might seem like a noble fig leaf from people unfamiliar with the CPD. But Quinlan is not the man to deliver that reform on account he was hired for the exact opposite reason.
After the Vice Squad got caught extorting strip club owners, targeting the president’s political opponents for arrest and abducting, raping and murdering sex workers (among other crimes)… Mayor Ginther responded with typical political courage by replacing “retiring” Chief Kim Jacobs with a man who had worked within that same corrupt institution since 1989.
If there was any reason to take Quinlan at his word, that was erased minutes later while we continued our march through the streets of downtown:
If I sprayed a man with mace like that, I would be rightfully hauled off to jail for assault. But the cops, who have less physical control over their bodies than retail workers when customers yell at them, have “qualified immunity” which means they can do whatever the fuck they want and then go cry in court about how they were justified because their job is hard and they feared for their life.
So, protestors did what we have been doing: We marched up High Street. And then the National Guard and police did what they have been doing: Lied about receiving “reports of property damage” in order to let slip the dogs of war.
Mayor Ginther is often heard lamenting “outside agitators” fermenting violence within these otherwise peaceful protests. He is right about that. The outside agitators are the cops and the National Guardsmen who don’t even live in the city who come to bang on residents with legitimate grievances.
I really don’t want to hear anymore nonsense about North Korea or Venezuela from Americans who want to pretend we don’t live in a violent police state.
If you feel differently, congratulations on your privileged life where neither you nor miraculously anyone you know has been beaten, robbed or killed by a police officer. I guess these nationwide protests in the middle of a pandemic (remember coronavirus?) have erupted because George Soros decided to throw a few more billion dollars at Antifa supersoldiers to go loot a Target or whatever.
Despite our leaders’ best efforts to paint Columbus as the greatest city in the world, we can’t even deliver air conditioning to every one of our public school students. Our leaders are sending their kids to private schools or went there themselves. We can only shelter roughly 10% of bus stops for our already underfunded mass transit network. Our city is still segregated like it’s 1950 and wealth inequality is on the rise.
You’ll realize the money is there to fix all of that if you go downtown and witness the endless stream of cops and fancy Army toys that go rolling down the street to crush groups of peaceful people.
It should appall every American and wake us up to the fight to demilitarize our police.
These pigs — and there is no other word to describe them after what I saw this last week — see themselves “at war” with the very population they swore to protect. That’s why CPD is posing for group pictures in the street after violently clearing unarmed protestors as a momento for another victory over anti-police brutality protestors.
The good news is we are done assembling in downtown Columbus, where every law enforcement official from Central Ohio has been entrenched since Mike DeWine’s sorry ass rang the bell on us.
Tonight, we will take the fight to Mayor Ginther’s house and demand he sack Chief Thomas Quinlan and then resign.
Since the Mayor let pro-coronavirus protests peacefully harass Dr. Amy Acton in Bexley last week, I assume he will show similar restraint against peaceful protestors outside his own house — lest some of his wealthy neighbors taste the monstrosity that is tear gas, which most likely has already killed a violent criminal who came downtown to fight cops:
Our government had months to prepare America for a pandemic and failed. It took one week for the president to deploy the Army against its own citizens. They have suppressed wages, rewarded their corporate cronies with massive tax cuts, defunded social programs and denied us universal healthcare.
Suddenly these brain geniuses are shocked that despite the violence they deploy, more people keep taking to the streets to say we should burn this entire system to the ground and build a new world from the ashes.
To all the white people I saw filming the march on High Street last night: Get off your asses and join the fucking fight. You can live without brunch or yoga class for a week. I promise.
In the meantime, the Columbus Police Department contract is up next week. City Council President Shannon Hardin got pepper sprayed last Thursday, so we’re about to find out if he is about the defund the police life or just appeared for a photo-op. I have my doubts, but I’d love to be wrong!