It’s not ‘mob rule.’ It’s our right

Re “Don't let the mobs rule,” Opinion Voices, Jan. IL

- 

SCOTT OLSON Getty Images DEMONSTRATORS confront federal agents on Thursday in Minneapolis.

BY contributing writer Josh Hammer's logic, Americans taking to the streets to protest injustice, a right sanctified by the 1st Amendment, is an example of “mob rule.”

He would, apparently, have citizens stand by silently accepting as lawful every action of our state and its agents, no matter how transparently illegal.

He takes offense at the Democratic Party’s completely factual social media post: “ICE shot and killed a woman on camera.” This is literally what happened. Hammer calls this barebones statement of fact “irresponsible fear-mongering.” Now stating facts is “irresponsible”? I shudder to conceive of the sort of world in which Hammer would have Americans live.

A woman is killed in her car after dropping off her child at school and Hammer's biggest concern is the resulting protests.

Hammer blames Renee Nicole Good's death at the hands of an ICE agent on the Biden administration's immigration policy. The idea that the killing of an American is a normal price to pay for a previous administration's decisions is at best irrational and, at worst, monstrous.

Protest is not "mob rule."

It is what this country was founded on and for many of us right now, the only recourse we have left.

I carefully read Hammer's oped, which cites Abraham Lincoln's apt words: “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” I nodded in approval at Hammer’s sage observations that “rule of law cannot be held hostage to the histrionic temper tantrums of a radical ideological flank” and that when some take matters into their own hands, it leads to “personal and national ruination.”