The protests in Ferguson have exposed a
tension between two threads on the populist right. On one side,
there are people whose resentment of the federal government is tied
up with the idea that the local authorities’ hands should not be
tied when meting out violence. On the other side, a relatively
libertarian element extends its critique to the local police as
well as the feds.
I just called those threads “sides,” as though they’re
entirely distinct. In practice, things can get kind of tangled.
Consider the St. Louis/St. Charles branch of the Oath
Keepers.
The Oath Keepers are a collection of current and former
military, police, and public safety officials who have pledged not
to obey unconstitutional orders. Institutionally, the group has
been harshly critical of the cops’ behavior in Ferguson. Last week
it released a
communiqué that begins like this:
The events in Ferguson have shown us daily that the
looting and violence by a few is not being stopped, while the right
of the people to peaceably assemble and petition government for
redress of grievances is not being respected. The current riot
control tactics of the local police, rooted in outmoded techniques
developed in the 1950’s—and only made worse by the ongoing
militarization of our police—are failing the people of Ferguson,
giving them a false choice between rampant looting on the one hand,
and hyper-militarized police and curfews on the other (which also
fail to stop the looting, leaving the mistaken impression among
many of the American people that even more militarization
and curtailment of free speech and assembly is
needed).
Some earlier
comments from the Oath Keepers hit a similar note, declaring:
“The police should not be militarized in logistics or in attitudes.
The people are not an ‘enemy.’ Police should not make war on the
people.” The St. Louis chapter’s president, Duane Weed, has
a Facebook
feed filled with critiques of police behavior in Ferguson,
along with conspiracy theories blaming violence
among the protesters on agents provocateurs. The photo
above shows Weed at a Ferguson protest—he’s the one on the right.
The woman with him is wearing a T-shirt that says “National
Cannabis Coalition.”
Meanwhile: Last Friday, the St. Louis County Police Department
suspended Dan Page, an officer who achieved some infamy during
the protests by pushing protesters and a reporter
live on
CNN. That isn’t what got him relieved of duty. He was relieved
of duty because someone dug up a video of him giving a talk to
Weed’s chapter of the Oath Keepers. In his lecture, Page warned
that Washington was plotting to impose a dictatorship, offering a
conspiracy story of a sort that Oath Keepers often embrace. But he
didn’t stop there, or even start there: He also declared that the
Constitution is a Christian document, fretted that the military was
filled with “sodomites and females,” and went off on a variety of
other bizarre and sometimes offensive tangents. There’s plenty in
there to embarrass the St. Louis Oath Keepers, but the most
embarrassing thing for them should be the sight of Page
participating in the very activity their group just denounced. (“We
need officers focused on looters, not on bullying the media and
protesters,” their communiqué declares.)
Weed has
told CNN that Page was merely a guest speaker, not a member of
the group. And indeed, Page says in his talk that he didn’t realize
he was going to be speaking to the Oath Keepers (“I thought that
this was just a church meeting”), and he always refers to the
organization in the second person. He does accept an Oath Keepers
pin at the end of the video, but he looks a little uncomfortable as
he takes it; I doubt he ever wore it. But Page’s presence at the
meeting—and the friendly reaction he gets on the video—show how
entangled those two threads can be.
So does this Facebook post from Weed…
…with this weak caveat reserved for the comments below it:
The Page incident speaks to more than just the ongoing evolution
of the populist right. The point of
the Oath Keepers is to resist unconstitutional commands. If
just one of the officers deployed in Ferguson this month had laid
down his arms and refused to restrict people’s right to free
assembly, the effect could have been huge. Instead, the biggest
incident involving a cop connected to the Oath Keepers featured a
man who interacted with nonviolent people by literally pushing
them around. He wasn’t a member of the group, but he was the
only guy bringing their name into the news. Evidently, either the
St. Louis Oath Keepers aren’t very good at organizing civil
disobedience or the police being deployed in Ferguson have no
interest in being organized.
I like the idea of public officials defending liberty by defying
unjust orders. I’d like the idea even more if, at some point while
I watched those feeds from Ferguson, I’d actually seen it
happen.
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1tMPp90
via IFTTT