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FBI SWAT: The Most Miserable Job
Imagine being an FBI SWAT team member today. Can you really feel proud? You signed up (possibly motivated by the TV presentations of heroism) to take down the violent terrorists and menacers of the most vulnerable among us. And now you are being used to intimidate and “send a message” mafia-style.
How else to explain the many recent no-knock raids and arrests? The latest story is the arrest of Mark Houck in Philadelphia. Yes, he is charged with a federal crime of pushing a 72-year-old volunteer who was escorting a Planned Parenthood worker to the ground, twice. Accusations, of course, are not proof. And Mr. Houck has yet to have an opportunity to present his evidence of innocence or justification. And he may be guilty, I don’t know.
Certainly there will be many supporters and detractors of Mr. Houck as his case goes forward. But the key question remains in this case and so many others in our political divide: Why use an FBI SWAT team? This is becoming the preferred method of the Left.
It is intimidation, pure and simple. It is dangerous, and the government is way to overconfident about their ability to manage the reaction to a Ruby Ridge or Waco-style blunder. No doubt Ceaușescu felt similarly confident up to the moment he didn’t.
Pray the Left comes to its senses before the Right loses its mind.
Published in General
Either they were SWAT or they were well- armed local agents. What is the difference to housewives?
Maybe he wanted his son to be aware of what in involved in peaceful protesting for a worthy cause.
He put his son in a bad situation, where he had to shove someone who was physically intimidating him. So good on him for defending his son. Bad that he put his son in that situation in the first place.
I can never understand those who say that we must avoid any potentially dangerous situation because we must always avoid any risk. Lots of people seem to say it’s every person’s responsibility to not enter any even vaguely potentially dangerous situations or else therefore he is somehow at fault. If one is doing right, peacefully and even nobly and lovingly, it is in no way that person’s fault if someone else in angered by one’s good work and wants to berate and beat him. That’s my thinking on it.
The alternative is to shut up and teach your children to shut up.
Pretty much the message concerned parents are hearing at school board meetings around the country.
I agree with you in once sense. Children should be given more agency to work things out for themselves on the playground. We’ve made playgrounds too safe, the edges all smoothed out, and certain items banned.
Children are too supervised which has resulted in them unable to deal with social conflict as adults. The “snowflakes” we talk about today are the result of that kind of upbringing.
But taking a child into an adult conflict is quite a bit different than letting children deal with conflicts amongst themselves.
The man has seven children, including at least one teenaged son. I have just naturally been assuming that this was the son whom the man was harassing. If this is the case, he is in many ways an adult, and certainly at least an adult in training. He must be exposed to some adult situations or else he will grow up to be a snowflake.
So if the kid is old enough to be there, then perhaps he’s old enough to take care of himself, instead of having dad do the shoving?
Notice it was Friday morning, Friday, all the more difficult to get your act together and find a lawyer to avoid spending the whole weekend in jail.
Now that’s stretching it a bit. Sink or swim is not parenting.
My understanding is that no one touched the kid. They were just “in his space.” Dad should have prepared the kid for that and how to handle it. Or, not bring him there in the first place.
Glenn Beck says “rule of force” is a replacement for “rule of law” and the purpose is intimidation.
None of which warrants a SWAT team if they did that
Like Ben Shapiro says, both can be true. I agree that the FBI had no business using a SWAT team. A couple of FBI agents could have taken him into custody, without weapons drawn.
The State could have done it. If the assaults was that bad, why is this not first a state issue?
There are reports of video of the incident. Has anyone seen any?
This has the feel of the high school kids at the Lincoln Memorial.
I brought that up in a reply to the flagship podcast today. That’s been a bugaboo of mine for years.
Maybe he did show the kid exactly how to handle it. And though I don’t know the distances and the tones of voice, if a 72-year-old guy in good health is within a foot of your kids face and shouting spittle a him, and he repeatedly refuses to back off (1) is this really to be expected? and (2) what would you do?
I don’t have kids, but I’d like to think I’d defend him. But I wouldn’t bring a teenager to an adult conflict in the first place.
The kid should be playing high school football if he’s the physical type, not getting into physical altercations with adults.
Or if we’re going to go with the definition of an adult male of one hundred twenty years ago, where they were still sending teenagers into coal mines, then no doubt the kid would have been raised and expected to do his own shoving.
Well, we certainly don’t know the details, but (1) is was not supposed to be an adult conflict, (2) the boy wasn’t getting into an altercation with an adult, that’s why his father had to intervene. And (3) I would think that not shoving a man so much his senior would be commendable. Are you saying that the kid should have raised his voice and shouted back tit-for-tat? Should he have thrown a punch?
I don’t know how hard the father pushed the guy, but that sounds pretty restrained.
In the end, I don’t know that either the father or the child was getting in anyone’s face and shouting in anger. It sounds like one guy was doing it, and pretty one-sided. And he didn’t even get hurt.
This and the fact that the charges were dismissed, goes all the more to the point that this was one man’s and only one man’s fight.
My working theory is that the Feds are baiting for a violent act on the part of a deplorable so that they can then wrap the flag and democracy around themselves, crucify the deplorables and distract from everything else.
“Pro-life activist guns down Federal Agent serving a valid warrant. Agent on Life Support” CNN – “See I told you these crazies are against the rule of law and law enforcement. Don’t look at inflation, your retirement savings, the coming economic collapse from overspending, your terrible local schools, the sexualization of your children etc. Look away!”
I agree.
They want to make the argument that the loss of fundamental freedoms, the grooming and abuse of children, the destruction of universities as custodians of truth and the scientific method make for a small price to pay to prevent the MAGA-Fascist-Nazi takeover.
The astounding part to me is the fact that the Left can sustain the lie that the MAGA movement is fascist when it is Left progressive woke movement that is, in fact, fascist. I know this distortion has been around and built up since Hitler and Mussolini but why has it not been exposed and accepted as wrong? Maybe what is happening in Italy will help.
EDIT: @oldbathos In another thread you divide the Left(most American Democrats) into Woke and Whig, with the Whigs encompassing those who are patriotic Americans who have a sense of guilt for the things America has failed to get right (yet). On the fascist issue, why have they abandoned truth. I know, for instance, the academic university class has enough intelligence to figure this out and teach the correct view.