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Extinction Rebellion Picked the Wrong Nation
Tribal land is not the place to do stupid things, liking blocking a highway. Tribal lands are a combination of a Sovereign Nations and Federal Districts.
You may be able to open carry in your state, but you better do some research before you open carry on the Rez. In fact you should make sure you can bring a firearm onto tribal land.
As a former police officer in Oregon, I could make an arrest anywhere in the state, but there were some exceptions. Federal buildings and tribal lands were places where I had no lawful authority as a police officer.
The Extinction Rebellion tried to block the highway to the Burning Man event in Nevada. The Nevada Rangers of the Paiute Nation weren’t having it.
It begs the question of exactly how the climate activists got a trailer into the Big Nowhere without fossil fuel. Glue yourself to a painting and block traffic across the globe with the exception of tribal lands, unless you want an old-fashioned butt-kicking.
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Published in Policing
Apparently the Ranger is under investigation. Which stinks. The tribe ought to back him up.
I’m sure that there is some tension between the FBI, who do have authority on tribal lands and tribal police at times.
Someone was blocking a road. It’s their road. They unblocked it.
Yep, and they would have had an easier time if they confined their demonstration to a college campus in Reno or Las Vegas.
Here’s 10 minutes leading up to it. 16 minutes total.
Having read nothing of the details I offer no opinion regarding the wisdom or justification of the roadblock-breaking action, far less regarding its legality.
But it made me happy.
Here’s the traffic.
Yah-tah-hey!
I’d investigate. It’s routine. Then when the investigation is done I’d say, “Yep. Did everything right.”
There are several things in this that I could criticize, but I won’t, because in the big picture, civilization is falling to the fascism favored by cretins like this. The difference, @misthiocracy, between these fools and the Canadian truckers or the Dutch farmers is that these fools are protesting for more government, and they got more government right in the face.
“We’re environmental protestooors…..pleaaase”
oh, sorry I did not realize that means you can do whatever you want.
Video was worth the price of admission…
Thanks Doug, I am going to use that line next time I am under duress…..
The relationships between tribal lands, or nations, and the states and federal government can be complex. The Navaho Nation covers just under 28,000 square miles and includes Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. The Navaho nation is larger than 10 states.
Law Enforcement in the Navaho Nation:
Navajo law enforcement consists of approximately 300 tribal police officers; only three are non-Native.
Burning Man Fans Vs. Greenies. Fight it out.
The ends justify the means. Got it.
I am not interested in Freshman debates on the shore of the University duck pond.
Your basic Iran-Iraq War situation.
A pity they can’t both lose.
Yesterday at Powerline Steve Hayward called it the “feel good video of the day”.
Indeed.
One of the protesters comments that every cultural change has been accomplished through civil disobedience. While I suspect that’s literally incorrect, I don’t doubt that there’s a germ of truth in it.
But there are species of “civil disobedience.” I was thrown out of a high school basketball game because I refused to don a mask. That was civil disobedience on my part: New York state government mandated that I wear a mask (though the mandate was scheduled to expire four hours later), and I refused.
What is different about the kind of civil disobedience of the environmental activists, whether this group or the Just Stop Oil folk in the UK who execute similar stunts, is that it is executed specifically to create hardship for the public, and thus to motivate the public to support policy changes in order to end the hardship.
Contrast that with, say, Rosa Parks’ choice of seating, or with my own trivial expression of petty defiance. There was no intention in either case to inconvenience others. Rather, each was an act of symbolic defiance.
The people who block roads with their bodies are the ideological kin to terrorists, not peaceful protesters. Their point is to inflict hardship on the populace: they do it by stealing time and freedom of motion, rather than detonating nail bombs and crashing airplanes. Calling them “terrorists” is hyperbolic, but to call them “protesters” is to use a similarly inadequate descriptor. They are extortionists, criminals motivated by arrogance and ideology rather than personal enrichment, but nonetheless bent on causing harm until people surrender to their demands.
They should be prosecuted.
That’s just the start. The Rosa Parks’s – and the Henry Racettes, apparently – understand that there will be consequences to their actions that they will face. The lefty protestors of today don’t think they should have any consequences.
That was my favorite line! Kept replaying it.
The traffic was backed up in both directions. And one guy said he had to get to work. I think they were more than just burners in those cars.
We got into this mess by confusing free speech with free actions.
We also somehow came to the conclusion that the roads we built for moving vehicles could be blocked if the blockers feel strongly enough about something.
We also somehow came to the conclusion that people who don’t have a home are entitled to camp in places where no camping is allowed.
Blocking traffic is not protected speech. Under Oregon statutes, although it’s rarely done it is an unlawful detention. Denying someone the use of their motor vehicle is a theft. If a person feels that they cannot leave their vehicle, in other words if they can’t walk away then it strays into a kidnap charge.
I’d charge them with every statute I could and let a prosecutor make the decision as to how many charges they would be willing to prosecute.
This is excellent advice you are offering.
And of course as you ask, how did the environmentalists get to the location with their huge trailer without fossil fuel?
Having lived in the environmental mecca of the world before most areas knew of such, that is, Sausalito Calif, I can’t tell you how many times I was almost run over by some crazed cyclist.
One Saturday in order to use my car, I waited 10 minutes to get out into the street, open my car door and get in the driver’s seat. The cyclist convoys were that heavy duty on weekends.
To accomplish this, I had to block off the bike lane from the one lone cyclist who at that moment was the only biker. I had a clear shot at using my car except for him.
But he refused to move out into two empty lanes of street asphalt, screeched to a stop and belittled me as I unlocked my car door How dare I obstruct “his” bike lane.
I shrugged and got in the car, grateful he had not pummeled me to death with his backpack.
But I would have loved to ask him the manner of transportation he had taken to get to Marin.
The vehicles of choice for such travel often involved humongous SUV’s.
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This is exactly on point.
Often protesters use bridges or other thoroughfares that block off the only way a neurosurgeon can get to a hospital in a short amount of time to save a badly injured individual. Often due to their proclivity for accidents, that someone is a child.
In any case, these people need to be arrested and charged with endangering the public.
Because that is exactly what they are doing.
And if the mob is agitated (as this one was not except in some understandable confrontations), I hold that it is a deadly threat — to be unlawfully detained by angry people who both surround and outmaneuver you.
It’s an asymmetric threat to be sure — Reginald Denny could easily have rolled over whole crowds of rioters in 1992 with his massive tractor-trailer rig and 400-odd horsepower, but civilization expects us not to. This is the vulnerability exploited by pedestrian street mobs. The “unthinkability” of simply motoring through the threat takes your only effective defense away, and if you become immobilized, you are defenseless. Your windows and doors will be rendered meaningless soon enough, and shortly after so will the distinction between wht is “inside your skin” and what is not, unless the mob is not interested in you. That’s a miserable condition to be reduced to, hoping that you have the mob’s permission to maintain possession of all your blood.
We have seen enough examples of ambushes and road-mob violence againt motorists that in my opinion, nobody should extend a presumption of non-violence toward an agitated mob. Assume they are hostile because if you do not, you are defenseless. If a mob is thick enough, most of the vehicles that we drive now will be hard pressed to do more than maim those directly in front of you, crushing them into the mob, before there are simply too many shoes on the ground for you to prevail. You will be dragged from your vehicle and abused to death by the mob.
In this particular case, these hippies in the desert (the eco-loons) were not an agitated mob, so even in my maximally defensive rubric, I would not be justified to prioritize my defensive mobility over the potential of one or more of them being in the way. I would be hard-pressed to legally defend the officers on the particulars of some of their actions apparent in the clips. This is what I want to see happen at the more strident, agitated mob scenes, instead of police tending the law-abiding like cattle.
The more the zeitgeist says #FAFO for road hijinks, the better off we will all be. I’m a fan of deterrent effects. And of keeping my blood right where I have it.
I am starting to wonder if we should all have baseball bats, tasers, and pepper spray.
I would be content with some perfectly safe but profoundly bad smelling spray. Preferably something extremely hard to wash off.