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In other totally-not-a-slide-into-fascism news, peaceful protestors who had a permit to march were teargassed on the way to vote.
They have elections in all those shithole dictatorial countries too. They just make sure the wrong people don't vote.
The participants in Saturday’s “I Am Change” march had intended to conclude at an early-voting site to emphasize turnout in the final days of the presidential campaign. Those plans were thrown into disarray when law-enforcement officers in riot gear and gas masks insisted demonstrators move off the street and clear county property, despite a permit authorizing their presence.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2020, @12:46AM
it's called civil disobedience and it's a very American thing to do. This country was founded by people who routinely engaged in civil disobedience like the Boston Tea Party. Perhaps you should go back and read how the colonists rebelled against British rule.
Hitting protesters with cars sounds a lot like the murder of Heather Heyer. It should be noted that both the Unite the Right rally and the counterprotesters marched in the streets of Charlottesville. Although it didn't involve a car, Bloody Sunday was an ambush of peaceful civil rights protesters.
There's a long history of marching in the streets, going back at least to the Selma to Montgomery marches. The intent is to get attention and for the protests to be inconvenient [washingtonpost.com] while not physically damaging anything. After Bloody Sunday, the marches were explicitly permitted by a federal court order issued by Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., who ruled that the rights of the protesters were protected by the first amendment [latimes.com].
Those rights have since been scaled back, essentially allowing the government to designate free speech zones while preventing any sort of demonstrations in other areas. The effect is to minimize the impact of protests by confining them to less visible areas.
During this past week, a bill has been introduced in Nebraska that would make it a felony to block roads while protesting [omaha.com]. But conservatives are outraged when they're told to move to free speech zones [aclu.org].
If you truly care about liberty, anyone should be free to protest on public property when they want to, provided they're not damaging the property. This means that both liberal and conservative protesters should be free to protest in this manner. Protesters shouldn't need a government permit to exercise their speech on public property, even when it's inconvenient for others. Protesters shouldn't be allowed to block emergency vehicles but should otherwise be free to exercise their freedoms of speech and expression on public property. They shouldn't need to demand a permit from the government; the first amendment is the only permit they should need.