Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes has reportedly declared he will not prosecute “people who were arrested…over the past few weeks while peacefully protesting police brutality or systemic racism.”
Olympia Mayor Cheryl Selby, upon finding her home vandalized by protesters a few days ago, told the Daily Olympian via telephone, “It’s like domestic terrorism. It’s unfair.”
Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan is called out by KIRO-FM broadcaster Dori Monson for giving kid glove treatment to protesters who have taken over a neighborhood in her city, but back in 2016 when a group of land rights activists took over the Malheur Wildlife Refuge headquarters in southeast Oregon, she wanted to throw the book at them.
According to some critics of what has been occurring in Seattle, and other liberal-dominated enclaves in the Evergreen State to include the capital city of Olympia, the time has come for “adult supervision.” It’s a polite way of suggesting incompetence is loose in the state and needs to be reined in.
Several days ago, after the Seattle-based Alliance for Gun Responsibility—the billionaire-backed gun prohibition lobbying group—held its “virtual” luncheon, it uploaded a video of the event during which Washington Gov. Jay Inslee pushed for more gun control.
“We should not rest until we ban assault weapons,” the governor stated.
And then, he added this: “You know it’s really interesting to me that the connection to what happened the last couple of days (in Seattle). It was prominently shown that when a police car had been burned, somebody came in and pulled out, it looked like an AR15 out of the car, a young man, and he was fiddling with the gun and another person came and took it away from him.
“And it was interesting,” he continued, “because I sense that everybody was terrified that (if) this young man had gotten hold of an AR15 and they were just stunned that that could happen, and that happens legally every day in the state of Washington, and that’s why we need to ban these things. So I will remind people of the terror they felt when they saw people, a guy stealing it from a police car. We should not allow that to happen legally, either.”
Inslee conveniently omitted the fact that the man who disarmed the gun-grabbing protester was an armed private citizen and that he took the rifle at gunpoint. That man, working for KCPQ as a security officer, retrieved two stolen AR rifles on the first night of violent protests and later returned them to police. Observers called him a hero and contended he prevented a tragedy.
The governor also didn’t mention that in the aftermath of the passage of Initiatives 594 and 1639, anyone under age 21, including a protester, doesn’t acquire a semiautomatic rifle legally “every day” in his state.
Durkan’s administration has allowed protesters to take over part of the city. She and Inslee have done nothing about that. That neighborhood doesn’t belong to either politician, it belongs to the people who live there and own businesses there. The streets belong to the taxpayers, as does the abandoned East Precinct police station.
For better or worse, the eyes of the nation have been on Seattle. Attempts to create the same kind of “autonomous zones” in other cities have been nipped in the bud.
And through it all, the pandemic panic over COVID-19 is in the background, as people moving through the so-called “CHOP” (Capitol Hill Organized Protest) zone have been wearing masks and social distancing…or not.
KIRO’s Monson has suggested Seattle has become a national laughingstock.
Critics suggest it’s not the city, but the people now in charge.
