https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/15/dont-listen-to-fox-heres-whats-really-going-on-in-seattles-protest-zone-321507
It seems I live
in a city undergoing a “totalitarian takeover” that will lead to
“fascist outcomes” and could “metastasize across the country.” Its
government “has handed over an entire portion of the city to domestic
terrorists.” This “group of rogue protesters” is attempting “to get a
stranglehold on the city.” This radical “army” of “conquistadors” has
“rolled over the police like Cortez rolling over the Aztecs.”
Welcome to our world, out here in
Seattle—at least according to the hosts and commentators of Fox News.
Lesser voices on the digital right have announced even
more dire supposed developments: “Rapper-turned-warlord rules commune
streets with the iron fist of a privatized police force.” But it’s Fox
that has been all over the story of the so-called Capitol Hill
Autonomous Zone or CHAZ (which its Black Lives Matter organizers on
Saturday renamed
the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, CHOP): four-plus blocks of street
and sidewalk in Seattle’s traditional gay and bohemian nightlife
district, surrounding a boarded-up police precinct headquarters that the
mayor ordered vacated last Monday to dampen a week-and-a-half of
escalating confrontations between police and protesters. From there, the
fluid protests, spearheaded by BLM but involving a wide spectrum of
activists and ordinary citizens, coalesced with surprising rapidity into
something like a provisional government.
