{"id":22534,"date":"2017-01-22T16:53:09","date_gmt":"2017-01-22T21:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22534"},"modified":"2017-01-22T16:53:09","modified_gmt":"2017-01-22T21:53:09","slug":"as-trump-takes-power-politicians-around-the-us-move-to-make-protesting-illegal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22534","title":{"rendered":"As Trump Takes Power, Politicians Around the US Move to Make Protesting Illegal"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As Trump Takes Power, Politicians Around the US Move to Make Protesting Illegal<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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(<\/b>ANTIMEDIA<\/b><\/a>)\u00a0<\/b>Indiana passed a\u00a0bill<\/a>\u00a0on Wednesday that authorizes police officers to shut down highway protesting \u201cby any means necessary.\u201d\u00a0S.B. 285<\/a>, as it is known, obliges a public official to dispatch all available officers within 15 minutes of discovering any assembly of 10 or more people who are obstructing vehicle traffic.<\/p>\n

The bill then authorizes the responding officers to clear roads \u201cby any means necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Critics are\u00a0calling it<\/a>\u00a0the \u201cBlock Traffic and You Die\u201d bill, an apt name for a bill that has co-opted the phrase \u201cany means necessary,\u201d used famously in\u00a0speech<\/a>\u00a0delivered by Malcolm X during the Civil Rights movement, turning it into a threat against government dissent (with no apparent awareness of the irony).<\/div>\n

S.B. 285 is among a collection of increasingly hostile \u2018anti-obstruction\u2019 laws that have been quietly submitted in states around the nation over the past few months. A report by\u00a0The Intercept\u00a0<\/i>published<\/a>\u00a0Wednesday tracked five such anti-protest laws introduced by Republican lawmakers in different states, four of which are currently pending.<\/p>\n

One of the most disturbing among them is\u00a0House Bill N. 1203<\/a>, a bill introduced earlier this month by North Dakota lawmaker Keith Kempenich\u00a0in response to<\/a>\u00a0the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests. The bill would exempt motorists who hit demonstrators with their cars from any liability in cases where the victims were \u201cobstructing vehicular traffic on a public road, street, or highway<\/i>.\u201d This twisted take on protest criminalization comes short of condoning manslaughter as a viable means of crowd control.<\/p>\n

Also this month, Minnesota State Representative Kathy Lohmer led the effort on submitting\u00a0H.F. 322<\/a>, a bill that would re-classify obstructing highway traffic from a misdemeanor to a \u201cgross misdemeanor\u201d and would authorize government units to sue protesters for \u201cpublic safety response costs related to unlawful assemblies<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n

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…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

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As Trump Takes Power, Politicians Around the US Move to Make Protesting Illegal (ANTIMEDIA)\u00a0Indiana passed a\u00a0bill\u00a0on Wednesday that authorizes police officers to shut down highway protesting \u201cby any means necessary.\u201d\u00a0S.B. 285, as it is known, obliges a public official to dispatch all available officers within 15 minutes of discovering any assembly of 10 or more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8803,7844,657,14703,827],"class_list":["post-22534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-antimedia","tag-donald-trump","tag-protests","tag-sarah-cronin","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22534"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22535,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22534\/revisions\/22535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}