By Christine Flowers
The last time that I wrote anything about the Proud Boys, I got into some hot water.
There was a young man from the Bon Air Fire Department in Delaware County who had attended one or two Proud Boys meetings, and decided that it wasn’t for him. However, the mere fact that he had dared attend a meeting was considered sufficient grounds to treat him as a Nazi, which is what many people called him.
When the YouTube video of me defending this young man’s First Amendment rights was made public, several Antifa sympathizers started trolling me on social media, and I responded in kind. That was a big no-no for a news organization that thought I needed to be “nice” to people who hated me, and eventually they decided I was too much of a liability to keep.
Score two (the firefighter and the columnist) for Orwell.
I haven’t paid much attention to the Proud Boys since that incident. Nothing in their platform seems remotely legitimate, and their involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol make them repellent, repulsive and stupid. And, they have too many tattoos.
That being said, their members also happen to be U.S. citizens entitled to all of the protections of the laws including the First Amendment.
They deserved to be convicted, and sentenced, commensurate with the gravity of their crimes.
But in order for us to have some sense of confidence in our legal system, we need to believe that the laws are applied fairly, and consistently.
We need, for example, to believe that someone who is rioting in the streets of Philadelphia, smashing store windows and stealing flat-screen TVs under the guise of social justice, is going to be charged with a crime.
We are not asking that they receive 17-year prison sentences. We are not asking that they be kept in solitary confinement. We are not calling them traitors to the state.
We just want them to, at the very least, have a criminal record that can later be expunged if they stop acting like vandals.
We also want the Justice Department to stop targeting pro-life fathers who protest outside of Planned Parenthood clinics, get into tussles with obnoxious old men who lie about being injured, and have the audacity to preach about the sanctity of unborn human life.
We would have no problem whatsoever if one particular pro-life father was charged with simple assault, assuming that the victim of the assault really did suffer some injury.
We would be fine with this father being ticketed and forced to stay beyond a 25-foot radius of the clinic.
What we have a big problem with is when federal agents, in a SWAT team maneuver, wage a pre-dawn raid upon his home, in front of his terrified wife and young children, and charge him with felonies under a statute, which was essentially designed to protect clinics from annoying (but legal) protesters.
Although the FACE — Freedom of Access to Clinics — Act was purportedly enacted to address the wave of violence against clinics, it has been used as a way for pro-abortion advocates to silence dissent, including the peaceful dissent of rosary-carrying grandmothers.
That’s because if you think there is even the slimmest possibility that you will be charged with felonious trespass, you might just stay home. End of protest.
You might be saying to yourself, what does any of this have to do with the Proud Boys and their involvement in Jan. 6?
And the answer is simple: the laws should be applied to everyone on an equal basis, without fear or favor depending upon your race, class, gender or political persuasion.
If the women who defaced churches after the Dobbs decision, beheading statues and writing obscenities on walls were hunted down and prosecuted the way that the Jan. 6 protestors have been, I would have no issue with the execution of American justice.
If, again, the vandals who set our cities on fire after George Floyd was killed had been charged with actual crimes, instead of receiving apologies and payments for the “violation of their civil rights,” I’d be celebrating the glory of the legal system.
If women who lied about being raped were actually prosecuted for filing false reports at the same rate that men are being falsely accused of being rapists, I’d throw away all of my books about the horrific Kavanaugh hearings, and write a column praising Gloria Allred.
But that is not the case.
The Proud Boys have no reason to be proud. They are repugnant. But so are the George Floyd protestors who, in their own way, tried to destroy the foundations of our society with their hatred. Or in other words, your terrorists are no better than mine.
Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].
Annie says
I agree with you. I know this is a tough stand to take, but you are correct. We have the right to peaceful protest, emphasis on the “peaceful “. As I tell my civics students, in such a tightly constructed sentence as the First Amendment every word carries weight.
Ed says
I’m in agreement with Ms. Flowers. Even the most liberal woke individuals have to be seeing all the issues being generated by this intellectual dishonesty in the application of the law. The old adage, give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. We’ve reached the tipping point.
Between “Justice Reform” and open borders, we are loosing our freedoms and our country. This path is simply unsustainable. I just hope it’s not too late and pendulum swings back toward common sense.
Ray W. says
Something tells me that you didn’t even do the simplest Google search looking for information about the number of arrests of those who were involved in protests in various cities.
I easily found a February 22nd, 2022, article in USA Today that cites to The Hill for reporting that some 17,000 arrests occurred in multiple cities, and to the Post, which reported 14,000 arrests, most of them for misdemeanor offenses. I concede that I did not go to individual cities to look up the numbers on that basis. Arrests, as the author points out, can be expunged, depending on the state and the circumstances. In Florida, one cannot expunge convictions, but individuals can seek expungement from a court if the case was dropped or adjudication of guilt was withheld, with some limitations. The number of convictions would be very difficult to assess, because it requires following up on a case-by-case basis. Reporters can easily access first appearance lists in each city, but following up requires going onto a clerk’s website, name by name.
When I was still an Assistant Public Defender, I had access to prior criminal histories of my clients through discovery and I commonly looked up the outcome of old cases on the various county clerk websites. Looking up prior criminal histories for each State witness took time and I certainly did not go to all 67 Florida clerk’s websites.
The gullible just keep exposing themselves for what they are to all FlaglerLive readers. For that matter, the author appears to have failed to do her own simple research before typing away.
If you continue to accept ideas from those who are wearing blinders, you will remain ever gullible.
Yes, approximately 1000 people have been arrested for attempting on January 6th, 2021, to overthrow the government by interfering with the peaceful transfer of powers from one administration to another. Most were charged with misdemeanors.
The rest of your comment is mostly drivel.
Tipping point? Please! Living in a fantasy world is unbecoming of you. There are over 330 million Americans today. The vast majority do not want an authoritarian government. Yes, many are disaffected. All my life I have worked alongside or with disaffected people who constantly complain about how bad things are. You are just the next in a long line of the disaffected, always complaining that the world is not perfect. You might be close to a tipping point as a person, but the vast majority of the rest of us are not.
Justice reform? We are constantly changing the law, so reform has been a constant all my adult life. How many seminars have I attended that were devoted to changes that occurred during the most recent legislative session? Too many to count. As my father used to say: “Don’t go about memorizing the law. Someday a legislator is going to come along and wipe out all your knowledge. Look it up every time.” In 1982, the Florida Supreme Court first published a set of sentencing guidelines. At that time, everyone in the legal system understood that sentencing was a procedural act and, therefore, a matter for the courts. In 1993, the legislature declared that sentencing was a substantive act and, therefore, the legislature could publish its own sentencing guidelines. Somehow, it was no longer procedural for a court to sentence someone. Every year, someone decides that sentencing statutes need to be tweaked. Change in the law (reform) is one of life’s constants.
Marcy’s Law is now being interpreted by the State as limiting appeals in death penalty cases in a state that has seen 30 people exonerated from death row since 1976. Florida leads the nation by far in death penalty convictions that turn into exonerations, many of them for DNA. And you oppose reform? What is wrong with you? When we learn that we have been doing things the wrong way, we should reform what we are doing wrong. It is not possible to argue that wrongfully sentencing 30 innocent people to death is right. Simple as that.
Open borders? Decades ago, we had seasonal entry, mostly by Mexicans seeking to make money when crops needed picking. Once the crop picking season ended, they returned to their communities to live with their families. Then they came back to make more money. Once we began erecting walls and impeding both ingress and egress, more and more seasonal workers decided it was wiser to begin living permanently in America. A couple of months ago, I looked up the number of undocumented immigrants living in this country, using the Department of Homeland Safety reports. DHS took over that assessment responsibility after 9/11. Since 2005, the numbers of undocumented immigrants, as reported by DHS, has remained remarkably stable (it did drop during the Bush recession and DHS did not publish its assessment in 2020), and the percentage remains identical over the 17-year span that I looked up: 3.1% of our ever-increasing census population, as I recall. We do have an increase in the number of immigrants seeking legal entry and documentation, which is an entirely different story. Interestingly, at one time, DHS reported that there was a significant number of undocumented Polish immigrants, but that the number dropped in recent years by some 40%, which decline coincided with an improving Polish economy over that time. Likewise, the number of undocumented Mexican immigrants also dropped, which corresponds with Mexico’s improving economy.
We need more science. We need to educate those who contort reason to fit their preconceived beliefs. After all, the author of this opinion column gave you an inch and you took a mile.
Ed says
Ray,
Are you kidding about illegals in the US? You just lost all credibility when you try to tell me that the wall is the problem and the illegal head count is stable/flat since 2005. Figures lie and liars figure.
In the first 28 months of the Biden Administration, total CBP encounters nationwide are at least 6,547,515 (January 2021-may2023) This excludes getaways! Estimated to be another 1,454,000 known getaways. Are there another 1,000,000
unknowns? That’s a conservative 9,000,000.
Also, my lying eyes are also telling me that cashless bail is bad. How can it be a good policy?
Am I also wrong about the First Step Act(2022) that let 30,000 people out of prison early? Am I wrong that 50-80 percent of convicted felons reoffend?
We live among 19 million people with felony convictions. Not all violent or dangerous but I have never even been arrested.
I stand by my previous post and assessment of you.
In your opinion, I am and will remain gullible but you will always be a pompous ass.
I must have hit a nerve with you. Your next post referring a post over something from more than a month ago. Take a breath and let go.
Ray W. says
Okay, Ed. Back to basics for you once again.
We have had cashless bail for far longer than I practiced law. We call it release on one’s own recognizance, or ROR. Many counties have a pre-trial services department, to which many other defendants are released without having to post bond. And, I have never advocated for cashless release in all cases. I advocated, and will continue to advocate for reform, in whatever form it needs to take. Yes, your eyes are lying to you, or at least you cannot accurately assess what you are seeing.
As usual, since you won’t actually do any research before you set fingers to keys, the First Step Act was passed in 2018. Senate vote: 87-12. House vote: 358-36. Trump signed the bill on 12.21.18. Seems to me like it was a bipartisan effort. In its latest annual report, released in April 2023, of the nearly 30,000 early releasees, 12.4% have reoffended. Once again, you are not just wrong, you are spectacularly wrong.
As for CBP encounters, these include both undocumented immigrants and those seeking legal entry. You don’t mention that. And, the University of Washington conducted a 25-year study of immigration patterns, from 1990-2014. The authors of the study concluded that 45% of immigrants return to their home countries or move on to other countries. You didn’t factor reverse migration into your comments. Large numbers of undocumented immigrants leave the country each year. Many live here for decades. Others for far less time. I found a New York Times article that focused on reverse migrants. Many had sent money home for years and their family members bought land and built homes for them. When they were ready, they returned to live in their home communities.
Given your track record of posting misinformation, gross exaggerations, outright deceptions, and simple errors due to lack of effort, I will take DHS reports over anything you write.
Since you can’t control your own mistakes in judgment, should everyone have to exposed to your inaccuracies over and over again?
Once again, you don’t decide whether you are gullible. The facts do. If people could decide for themselves whether they were gullible, how many would choose to describe themselves as gullible? You claimed you were far from gullible after posting a spectacularly inaccurate comment, on multiple points. Since then, you have been consistently wrong in other posts. How many times will it take for you to realize that you really need to study issues before you comment on them? Intellectual rigor can cure most forms of gullibility. I want to read well-researched comments on controversial topics. Everyone benefits from such posts. Claiming that the U.S. is sitting on a 300-year worldwide supply of crude oil, when we are sitting on a 10-year supply, does not qualify as a well-researched comment. Claiming that we were oil dependent during the Trump administration, using a home-made standard, when we are producing more oil now than we ever produced during the Trump years (not months), does not qualify as a well-researched comment. Claiming that we were close to dominating the world crude oil market when we were producing 12.3 million barrels of oil per day, averaged over the year 2019, when the 23 OPEC (+) nations are capable of producing over 60 million barrels of crude oil per day, if they were to choose to stop manipulating the world’s oil marketplace, does not qualify as a well-researched comment.
When James Madison, in his final paragraph of Federalist Paper #37, described partisan members of faction as “pestilential”, you have to know that he knew that people like you would always exist among us. You just say things. They don’t have to be accurate. They don’t have to be true. To Madison, the virtuous citizen of his hopes exercised reason and followed it to wherever it took her. The pestilential partisan member of faction contorted reason to fit whatever preconceived belief he wanted to promote.
Ray W. says
And as an aside, Ed, Saudi Arabia announced a few days ago that it was extending its one million barrels per day cut in crude oil production, this time through the end of the year. When Saudi Arabia announced in June that it was cutting production, starting in July, it was to end at the end of September. Russia, too, announced its plan to extend its own 300,000 barrels per day cut. Taking 1.3 million barrels of crude oil out of the production side of the worldwide energy equation for a longer term means that principles of supply and demand will prevail.
The EIA, in yesterday’s monthly short term energy outlook report, predicts that crude oil inventories will continue to be depleted, and gasoline prices are likely to rise. Crude oil prices are already above $90 per barrel, internationally, up from a steady $80-85. The U.S. is not dominant in the worldwide market. OPEC(+) is dominant. It’s 23 nations combined are capable of producing over 60 million barrels of crude oil per day. If OPEC wants to keep prices high, it can keep cutting production whenever it wants.
The U.S., according to last month’s short-term energy outlook report, will break the previous record, set in 2019, by an average of 500,000 barrels of oil per day, at 12.8 million barrels, but we are not oil dominant. The EIA predicts that next year, the U.S. will average 13.3 million barrels of oil per day over the year, another record, but if that comes to pass the additional 500,000 barrels of oil per day will not offset the Saudi-Russian cut of 1.3 million barrels per day, if they announce additional extensions.
I haven’t even addressed the drought in Panama that is disrupting traffic flow through the Panama Canal during peak shipping season for Christmas. Much of the great mass of product ordered by American companies for the Christmas season is sitting in containers on ships that are waiting in line to enter the Canal from the Pacific. Drought regulations announced by the Canal authority are expected to last 10 months.
We need more science. We need commenters who will let reason guide them to whatever end, instead of contorting reason to fit a preconceived belief.
Pogo says
@Ray W.
As always, intelligently and honestly well said.
Alas, you’re speaking directly to a person of bad faith words, no original ideas, and ordinary nonsense — an LP troll. Imagine David Nolan and Dagny Taggart had a child using artificial insemination and sold the hapless babe for a dollar’s worth of a penny stock of a company selling a secret formula for winning any lottery…
Related reading about the sources of so much of the drivel that abuses free speech in this cabbage patch:
Nuts and Grey Poupon to go with any whine
https://www.google.com/search?q=world%27s+smallest+political+quiz#ip=1
“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
Ray W. says
Thank you, Pogo. I read the quiz. The question about private charity caught my eye. I have written many times about a former assistant public defender, whose office in DeLand was next to mine. He considered himself a huge conservative. We commonly debated various issues. Even though I seldom agreed with anything he argued, I enjoyed his company and spent a little time each day, often during lunch, discussing various issues. One day, he brought up the idea that the average American gave more money to charity than did the average European, because, in his estimation, they lived in socialist countries and, therefore, didn’t need to give charitable donations. I asked him to come into my office. I Googled a phrase about charitable giving by country as a percentage of income. A site came up. I asked him to pick any European country. He selected Denmark. The average Dane contributed a higher percentage of his or her earnings to charity than did the average American. I asked him to pick another country. The same result. A third country provide the same result. Of course, since one of the highest average incomes in the world at that time was the United States, the average American gave more money as a total sum than did almost any other world citizen, but as a percentage of individual earnings? Not so.
Sherry says
@Pogo. . . Excellent analysis regarding the futility of presenting credible facts and highly educated reasonable logic to indoctrinated devotees of Tucker Carlson.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste!
Happy Monday from amazing Sausalito! Peace! Love! Joy!
Sherry says
Thanks so much Ray. . . I especially liked your last sentence:
“We need more science. We need commenters who will let reason guide them to whatever end, instead of contorting reason to fit a preconceived belief.”
Walt says
Well said Christine, well said!
From a former Delaware County resident who now lives in the free state of Florida!!
The dude says
I dunno… maybe one or two concrete examples of Philadelphia rioters being arrested for their actions and then all charges being dropped for no discernible reason other than the prosecuting attorneys see them as playing for “their” team?
Or maybe a real life example of that poor poor beleaguered “pro-life father”, set upon by rabid Auntie Fa, and subsequently being arrested for no reason?
I mean much like your incessant MAGA cries of “ELECTION FRAUD!!!” and “ELECTION INTERFERENCE!!!”, there is no evidence or proof of any of this outside the tin hat wearing, and fevered swamps of the MAGA mind.
While I do appreciate Pierre bringing us voices from “both sides”… QAnon should have no legitimate seat at the table until it actually deals in reality.
As for “your terrorists” vs. “my terrorists”, I’ll fall on the side of those protesting for equal justice for all, not the ones protesting against equal justice for their own… every time.
Samuel L. Bronkowitz says
https://twitter.com/flowerlady610/status/1195854663284908034
Spend 5 minutes looking at this person’s tweets, and you’ll see that FlaglerLive is platforming a literal pile of flaming garbage. Good job.
JimBob says
Flowerlady610’s tweets, you must admit, reflect the moral philosophy embraced by a substantial majority of the Republican Party.
DaleL says
Christine Flowers bio says he is an attorney. As such she should realize that the crime of simple assault does NOT require the victim to be injured. Since an attorney should know this, he was lying when he wrote: “We would have no problem whatsoever if one particular pro-life father was charged with simple assault, assuming that the victim of the assault really did suffer some injury.”
The attack on the Capitol on January 6th was not a “protest”. People who conspire to disrupt the lawful function of government are not in the same category as criminals who vandalize and steal. Similarly, people who conspire to disrupt the lawful operation of medical facility, are not simple protesters.
In all the mishmash of words, how about just one specific identity so that the reader can verify the accuracy of Ms. Flowers claims? Particularly this whopper: “What we have a big problem with is when federal agents, in a SWAT team maneuver, wage a pre-dawn raid upon his home, in front of his terrified wife and young children, and charge him with felonies under a statute, which was essentially designed to protect clinics from annoying (but legal) protesters.” Where did this happen and to whom?
The story is a Gish Gallop. It is BS.