By Ananya @ Adobe Stock
In the summer of 2020, radical progressive insurrectionists violently took control of fourteen blocks of the city of Seattle, declaring the area an “autonomous zone” known as CHAZ. Jordan Esrig reports in The New York Sun that the area is still a wasteland. Esrig writes:
Amidst the national protests spurred by the death of George Floyd, far-left protestors at Seattle, Washington, managed to take over 14 square blocks in June of 2020, declaring the zone “autonomous” from police, in what would be known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone — or CHAZ — and Capitol Hill Occupied Protest.
Four years later, the police are back, and the tents and free-living social justice warriors are gone, but the area is still living with the scars of the George Floyd racial reckoning.
The Autonomous Zone centered around Seattle’s Cal Anderson Park. What was named by Forbes in 2009 as one of America’s best city parks is now half-abandoned and heavily vandalized. Ornate, Gothic-style street lamps and lights dotting the park’s perimeter are toppled and missing. Graffiti covers every surface, particularly of the skate park that sits abandoned during most hours of the day.
Facilities, including a small Tudor-style clubhouse used for private gatherings known as the Cal Anderson shelter house, are now closed and fenced off, with signs posted by the city promising a “reimagining.” Children are pushed in strollers feet away from addicts encamped in tents openly using drugs, a symptom of the fentanyl crisis that’s hit Seattle badly.
The autonomous zone’s establishment was spurred by the 2020 so-called “racial reckoning” following the death of George Floyd at Minneapolis. Even though Seattle did not itself have any controversies related to police misconduct, far-left demonstrators directed their anger at the nearby East Precinct police station. Over the first weeks of June 2020, protestors, some of whom were affiliated with so-called “anti-fascist” and revolutionary communist organizations, fired at the station with tear gas, flashbangs, and pepper spray. They attempted to entrap police officers within the station while one activist, Isaiah Thomas Willougby, set fire to the building. Faced with the danger posed by far-left protestors and a city council that had voted to restrict the police force’s use of tear gas, the officers fled the station on June 8, returning on July 10.
Read more here.
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