Right-wing columnist Mike S. Adams decided to use his Twitter account to protest. He writes dumb things for disinformation websites like The Daily Caller and Town Hall. Hashtagging #ReopenNC, Adams wrote: “Police officers in Raleigh declared protest a non essential activity. We no longer have a first amendment right of peaceable assembly. This is why we have a second amendment.”
Let’s unpack this—or just take the one-layer-deep fold of this statement apart. Adams was remarking on the protest going on right now in Raleigh, North Carolina, where residents are demanding that Gov. Roy Cooper, who on Monday applied stricter guidelines enforcing social distancing in stores, “reopen” North Carolina.
This is an interesting protest. There are so many people just staying in their cars … probably because it’s safer in there than out on the streets of Raleigh.
First Amendment rights are very important and a federal government that isn’t doing enough to help anxious citizens who are losing work and livelihoods does not help. However, the famed #BlueLivesMatter folks are very quick to call for armed rebellion against those blue lives when they don’t get their dumb way.
I don’t think that phrase means what you think it does.
Adams is a consistently high-pitched and angry right-wing figure who sees socialism’s ugly head rearing itself in all kinds of actions—like when the majority of NC voters didn’t vote for his candidate. He’s also been a big proponent of performing civil disobedience in the face of stay-at-home orders in his state. Surprisingly, Adams—who writes for a living and ostensibly gets to work from home—doesn’t seem to have made any trips out to the protests himself.
Interesting.
