Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is assaulted by a protester during her first town hall meeting in her district of Minneapolis amid ongoing tension and protest of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations. The protester jumps out of his seat and charges the representative before reportedly throwing a substance on her. This came following her call on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign.
It’s going to keep escalating. Wonder when this will mirror the Caning of Charles Sumner.
Yeah… but on the other hand I can see this becoming a common tactic to prevent people from speaking: spray them with water so they have to leave the event to get checked out, while the perpetrator faces relatively light charges because it wasn’t actually dangerous.
Wouldn’t work. Bring a fake bomb strapped to your chest to a town hall and you don’t get a lighter sentence just because it wasn’t a real bomb. Pretend terrorism is treated the same as real terrorism.
Because that’s an explicit threat. Spraying water is—at least on the face of it—a step below throwing rotten fruit or creme pies or fake blood: you can always claim it was meant to be symbolic.
Edit for clarification: The point is, you can deliberately make it as non-threatening as possible, and it may be obvious to everyone that it’s not a threat—but if there’s a protocol to always check anyway, you’re shutting the speaker down by exploiting the protocol rather than the threat.