Right now providing security must be a higher priority than law enforcement

This is the situation where we need government to win, not where we’d prefer for it to lose. If you are truly a peaceful protester, you grasp that — you don’t want to be running cover for violent radicals, regardless of your anger. Like every other law-abiding American with whom you agree or disagree, you have to understand that unless we have order, your rights, including your rights to assemble and protest, are illusory. It is said that the radicals are “hijacking” the protests, but that’s a cop-out. It couldn’t happen unless the protesters let it happen. Knowing that they are being exploited for violent ends, they continue, prioritizing their right to self-expression — which could be exercised many ways other than on the streets, alongside sociopaths — over our collective right to ordered liberty.

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That is why the government has to dominate the streets, including by deploying the National Guard and any other armed forces to the extent that is necessary to restore order. The understanding that mass violence and insurrection will not be tolerated has to be revived.

In this, as in most things, the niceties of law are subordinate to political reality. Legally, the president has all the authority he needs to deploy federal forces — law-enforcement and security forces — to quell the uprisings, with or without the consent of the governors. For their part, the governors have the authority they need to call in the National Guard to fortify their beleaguered police. But as a practical matter, we are doomed to failure unless the president and the governors cooperate, unless they get beyond heated partisan politics and present a united American front against anti-American violence.

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