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June 14, 2020

CHAZ offers useful insights into the practical realities of revolutionary communes

By Andrea Widburg

It appears that someone has prevailed upon Seattle Mayor Jenny “Summer of Love” Durkan to bring to an end the glorious revolutionary commune that is Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (aka CHAZ). Many of us would have liked to see this race-based, criminal-friendly, socialist experiment last a little longer. Still, even during its short time as an independent nation within America, CHAZ provided useful insights into what happens when you abandon both the framework of civil society and the free market.

Here’s the sad news for those of us enjoying Seattle’s “Revolutionary Commune Reality Show”: The Seattle Police Department has announced that it intends to reclaim the Capitol Hill neighborhood that Black Lives Matter had claimed for its own just a few days ago:

Sundance notes the irony in Mayor Jenny’s response to this plan:

However, it’s more than a little funny to see Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan saying her administration is determining “when it would be safe for the Seattle Police to move in there” considering she was just claiming last night on CNN the occupation was merely a small group of festive citizens having “a block party”.

CHAZ, we hardly knew ye! So, before it goes, let this post stand as a retrospective to the wonder that was CHAZ.

Who can forget the walls, identity checkpoints, and race-based deportations that CHAZ’s free citizens put in place?

 

 

It seems as if it was just yesterday that the same political cohort behind CHAZ insisted that walls are immoral, that checking people’s identity is racist, and that no person should ever be deported.

We also shouldn't forget CHAZ’s progressive embrace of overt segregation. It’s fitting considering that Woodrow Wilson, who segregated the federal workforce, was also a progressive Democrat. Still, I have to say that it’s still weird for the BLM crowd to be just as dogmatic about segregation as the KKK, also known as the Democrat party’s paramilitary arm, ever was:

It was brave of CHAZ’s citizens – truly brave – to reject entirely the sordid capitalism that underlies the American way. Still, as Dan Crenshaw pointed out, they did seem a little unclear on the fact that the opposite of capitalism isn’t begging:

Some of us, I admit, were a little troubled when the new nation’s denizens used chokeholds – you know, the kind of thing that killed George Floyd – to silence a religious voice. However, CHAZ made it clear that a revolutionary new nation has no time for all that God talk about morality, individual worth, and all people being made in God’s image. Pfui!

 

And those “do it yourself” reparations, where white people are required to hand over random sums of money to black people? That’s great, as long as you ensure that every white person who never had anything to do with slavery is on board with having his or her money forcibly taken by black people who also never had anything to do with slavery. The Second Amendment might factor into the white response:

Speaking of guns, did you happen to notice how quickly the people with guns managed to gain power? While the Antifa types have always been about violence, it might occur to the peaceniks that guns spread throughout a free population can be a bulwark against tyranny. It’s certainly something for them to think about:

Considering all we have learned from this little experiment, it seems a shame that the Tennessee governor has vowed to prevent any autonomous zones and that the police instantly dismantled an attempt to create an autonomous zone in Asheville, North Carolina. I, for one, always enjoy seeing people choke on their own misguided (and, in the case of Marxism, downright evil) principles.

P.S. Some citizens of CHAZ might want to start looking over their shoulders when they leave their utopia. Word on the streets is that the Department of Justice is on the move, having arrested over 80 people for violent conduct during the past week’s riots.

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