Leftists have erased the line between free speech and physical action, which allows them enormous, self-serving latitude. However, when this latitude crashes into someone who served as a police officer in the national guard and a civilian police officer, the benefit vanishes. That was the case when Rep. Clay Higgins dealt with a leftist who went from heckling to charging at Democrat congresspeople.
When I say that leftists, by blurring the line between speech and physical activity, give themselves enormous, and beneficial, latitude, here’s what I mean: In the world of leftists, when a political opponent speaks, that speech is actual violence (that is, it’s a physical attack), and must be silenced, by force, if necessary. Thus, if a conservative says something leftists dislike, it’s appropriate to strike the conservative because the conservative, through “hate” speech, violently attacked the leftists.
Image: Rep. Clay Higgins removes a threatening protester. Twitter screen grab.
It’s not me saying that; it’s college students, and it’s a problem that’s been around for a while. A poll in 2018 revealed how leftists believe offensive speech justifies a physical response:
Eight hundred students’ answers in the McLaughlin & Associates online poll (on behalf of Yale’s William F. Buckley, Jr. Program) revealed that over half the respondents said their professors often “used class time to express their own social or political beliefs that are completely unrelated to the subject of the course.” A similar percentage said they “felt intimidated” offering up opinions in class which differed from their professors.
An even greater number of students feared expressing themselves due to the possibility of viewpoint conflicts with peers, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Most alarming, however, is that a third of respondents agreed with the statement “If someone is using hate speech or making racially charged comments, physical violence can be justified to prevent this person from espousing their hateful views.”
Leftists don’t just bully people into silence. They also bully people into speaking, as seen in their slogan that “silence is violence.” We often heard that during the 2020 BLM riots when gangs of screaming activists mobbed groups of white people while hollering “silence is violence,” all to bully people into actively siding with the mob or being scared off the streets.
But here’s the great thing about being a leftist: The rules that apply to you don’t apply to others. Thus, if you’re a leftist, you can be both verbally hateful and physically and still be immune from the charge that you were criminally violent. And that gets me to what happened when a protester got too close to Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), and Clay Higgins (R-LA).
Higgins has an interesting background. He spent six years in a police unit of the Louisiana National Guard. When he left the military, he went into civilian law enforcement and, over the next almost two decades, he worked for local police and sheriff’s office, and at the Louisiana Department of Justice (with which he’s still affiliated).
With that background, let’s get to what happened when Reps. Higgins, Boebert, and Gosar showed up on Wednesday for a press conference on Capitol Hill to object to the Biden White House’s negotiation to turn our healthcare over to the World Health Organization. (Please note that, while Biden and his puppet masters can’t meet with House Speaker McCarthy to negotiate our debt ceiling, they will talk to WHO about downgrading care for Americans during a pandemic in the name of “equity.”)
Also appearing at the press conference was a leftist named Jake Burdett. As Higgins, Boebert, and Gosar tried to speak, Burdett constantly shouted them down by hollering inane, insulting questions, unrelated to the matter at issue. That was bad. What was worse was when Burdett suddenly charged Boebert, Gosar, and Higgins. That’s when Higgins’s training kicked in, and he responded with amazing speed. He didn’t hurt Burdett. He simply corralled him, doing it with such grace that it looks like a dance.
Higgins’s video, which he posted the next day, tells the story from beginning to end, including the fact that there were no Capitol Police to protect the Congressman. This video first shows the whole experience from the activist’s point of view, and you can see how Burdett tries to set himself up as a victim by claiming “owies” and repeatedly naming Higgins. Then, the video switches to an objective viewpoint:
Rep. Boebert’s account has an even clearer video:
As a reminder, despite that woman screaming “assault,” you don’t lose your right to self-defense (or the defense of others) just because you’re a U.S. Congressman. Also, if you’re wondering, a “103M” means a “Disturbance By A Mental Person.”
And that is how you serve leftists with their own medicine. It’s a perfect example of Rule 4 from Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” Because Burdett’s words were violence (per the left’s own definition), and he followed them with an imminently threatening act, Higgins had two choices: Escalate or de-escalate. He chose the latter option, and it was a beautiful thing to see.