Miranda Devine: Seattle’s police-free zone is a nasty woke joke
Want to see how things look in the anarchist, Antifa utopia of a police-free state? Just have a look at Seattle, where activists have set up a “model” society full of racism, crime and chaos, writes Miranda Devine.
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It’s frightening how quickly the protests over George Floyd’s death have pushed America towards cultural revolution.
What once seemed an outlandish demand in the Black Lives Matter’s Marxist manifesto, to abolish or defund the police, is now being put into practice across the country.
In Minneapolis, where Floyd, a black man, was killed by white police officer Derek Chauvin callously kneeling on his neck for nine minutes, the city council last week voted to dismantle the police force and use social worker outreach instead
All over America, cities are vowing to slash police budgets, with obvious consequences for crime.
In New York, the city council is talking about taking $1 billion out of the NYPD budget.
NYPD commissioner Dermot Shea has announced he will abolish the 600-strong anti-crime unit which played such a crucial role in getting guns off the street and driving down violent crime after the bad old days of the 1980s and 1990s.
This leaves the most vulnerable in the poorest, crime-ridden black neighbourhoods, less safe. Quite how that accords with valuing black lives is one of the many paradoxes of the BLM cultural revolution.
Nowhere do we see their socialist dream realised more than in a six-block zone in the centre of Seattle which has been occupied by protesters since last Monday, and renamed the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” or CHAZ.
Protesters from BLM and other socialist and Antifa groups laid siege to the police station until Seattle’s progressive Democratic Mayor Jenny Durkan ordered the cops to evacuate.
The victorious activists then announced the “cop-free” socialist paradise of CHAZ was no longer part of America.
With no sense of irony, they set up a border wall, policed by heavily armed, aggressive men, led by the “warlord” of Chaz, Raz Simone. Awkwardly for Raz, his Twitter account was found to be littered with homophobic comments, though he claims it was hacked.
Toting AK-47s, his troops check ID, search bags, and deport wrongdoers.
CHAZanistas also set up a “cop-free co-op” of free food, but within days, an 18-year-old self-described “lesbian anarchist”, was tweeting for donations of “vegan meat substitutes” and “soy products” after the “homeless people we invited took away all the food”.
They dug up a park to create a community garden but within days that, too, descended into acrimony as signs went up segregating it for “black and indigenous folks and their plant allies”.
Mayor Durkan has refused to intervene to restore order, despite Police Chief Carmen Best warning that serious crimes, such as rape and extortion, were occurring and her officers are unable to respond.
Durkan compared the armed occupation to a “block party”. On CNN she described it as a “summer of love”.
Meanwhile, Warlord Raz was seen on video Sunday opening the boot of his Tesla in CHAZ and doling out automatic rifles to young anarchists.
Videos posted online by conservative infiltrators, such as Andy Ngo, from Canada’s The Post Millennial and Jack Posobiec from One America News Network, show violent skirmishes and fights breaking out all over CHAZ over the weekend.
In one case, a white Christian preacher was attacked by the mob before he was forcibly bundled out of the zone. In another, a black man carrying a large American flag was escorted out while protesters threw beer at him and a man on a megaphone denounced him as “race traitor” and “imperialist “b*tch”.
On Saturday, another video showed a protester on a microphone demanding cash from white protesters.
“I want you to … give $10 to one African-American person from this autonomous zone. If you have a hard time giving $10, you got to think are you really down with this struggle …
“The white people … I see you, I see every single one of you and I remember your faces”.
According to the Daily Beast, businesses inside CHAZ, the wokest precinct in one of the wokest cities in America, “love” the occupation and are handing out free granola bars.
They daren’t do anything else. Most shops are shuttered and defaced with BLM graffiti such as “kill the police”.
Local business Car Tender was torched on Sunday night.
The owner and his son managed to put out the fire and detain the alleged arsonist, they told local TV outlet KIRO7 News.
But a mob of protesters forced them to release the arsonist, or they would “kill us,” said the son, Mason McDermott.
He said he tried to call 911 repeatedly but police “never showed up”.
That’s anarchy for you. Strongmen take charge and the weak live in fear.
Of course, everything in America right now is about the November election.
President Donald Trump has threatened federal intervention unless Seattle authorities enforce the laws.
“You have a governor who doesn’t do a damned thing about it, and you have a mayor that doesn’t know she is alive. If they don’t do the job, I will do the job,” he told reporters on Monday, adding that he had discussed with Attorney-General William Barr how to “solve the problem quickly”.
The mayor and her fellow Democrat, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, responded by denouncing Trump and accusing him of inciting violence.
Inslee, a green progressive who vied with Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, is motivated to extract maximum political damage for Trump from a situation that is his responsibility and that of Mayor Durkan.
Trump’s ability to deploy federal troops has been hampered by retired military leaders who teamed up to attack him after he earlier suggested sending in troops to restore order in rioting cities. Disgruntled former Defence Secretary General James Mattis even suggested he was using “Nazi” tactics.
Yet past presidents have deployed military personnel without the threat of mutiny, including during the 1992 LA riots.
For Trump to do nothing could make him look weak and ineffectual.
But intervening also could backfire. Democrats are itching to portray him as the notorious police chief “Bull” Connor, who turned dogs and fire hoses on peaceful black civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 and flipped public opinion against the authorities.
With no guarantee he can deploy the military effectively, Trump is better off doing nothing.
Let the woke suffer a woke fate.
Let CHAZ be a shining example to the world of the filth and chaos of socialism.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph