Just like it’s hard to find someone willing to defend fired Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, few  would oppose the right to protest the death of George Floyd while he was in Chauvin’s custody. But the radical ideas and behavior of too many of the protestors diverge from the First Amendment’s protection of peaceable assembly.

That’s a problem.

Project 21 Co-Chairman Horace Cooper – who taught constitutional law at George Mason University – explained that there are very harmful implications of inappropriate protests. He said so during an appearance on former White House advisor Sebastian Gorka’s “America First” podcast.

Horace said that the “no justice, no peace” mentality is actually a demand for summary justice – mob justice. “It’s unconstitutional. It’s ahistorical,” Horace noted. “It throws out our system of government, our system of justice.”

In his introduction, Gorka said he is always “so excited” to have Horace on as a guest. And, at the end of the interview, he promised listeners that Horace would be invited back soon to do an entire commercial-free hour on the show.

To begin the discussion, they addressed how CNN host Chris Cuomo had asserted that protests don’t have to be “polite and peaceful.” He added that the “[p]olice are the ones required to be peaceful, to deescalate, to remain calm.”

Horace explained that a line is crossed when protests are conducted for the purpose of obtaining a desired outcome. This is a tactic that has historical examples that are not at all positive for civil rights and civil liberties:

What I’ve been witnessing, and what I’m hearing, sounds like hate. It’s hate rhetoric, and it is familiar. All you gotta do is look in your history books and you’ll see that – throughout segregation – you saw hate rhetoric.

Crowds gathered. They made demands. And they sought mob justice. They tried to influence cases, prosecutors. They intimidated elected leaders. And the result of it was a reign of terror on many, many black Americans.

Shame. Shame on Chris Cuomo and many other commentators like him for saying it’s OK to “demand justice” by intimidating elected officials, by intimidating prosecutors.

We should never let a decision as to who will be charged and who will not be charged be on the basis of riots outside. I don’t mean looting – I mean literally even marching and making demands.

• The Free Enterprise Project (FEP), the liberty movement’s only full-service shareholder and activism group that’s effective in pushing corporate America to the right;
• Project 21, the liberty movement’s only public relations agency for black conservatives and libertarians that has already created over 40,000 media opportunities;
• The Environment and Enterprise Institute (EEI), which counters misinformation being spread by the environmental left.