They should be fined, and maybe made to do some community service, that’s about it. The rest is not something that should be done in any decent country, but are things I’d expect from a Trump supporter.
There’s certainly no legal justification for donating confiscated property to a political campaign. The very idea is so un-American and un-democratic that I’m not even sure if you’re being serious.
I am serious that it should, in the sense that it would be a just punishment, and possibly a more effective deterrent. The minimum sentence should equal the cumulative amount of time that the people they blockaded were delayed.
If Trump supporters were blockading a road all militia style like this, and trapping thousands of Bernie supporters, the “progressive” press and their sycophants wouldn’t just demand confiscation of the vehicles, they would be calling for airstrikes and solitary confinement.
The magnitude of the double standard is staggering. It’s amazing that it was tolerated long enough to grow this absurd, amazing that it has taken so long to reach this tipping point.
If each of the protesters participating in these things stayed home and sent Trump $10,000 instead, he would not be able to begin to buy the kind of exposure that would get him the support that the steady stream of scenes like this are pulling for him.
. . . scarcely exists at all in this country, includes no daily newspapers or major media outlets, and is limited to magazines like The Nation and Mother Jones and radio networks like Pacifica, as you know.
There is no double standard. Trump’s supporters are free to also use non violent direct action to block access to Clinton and Sanders rallies. But let’s examine more closely, on one side we have supporters using actual violence, Trump supporters sucker punching people who disagree with them. On the other side, we have people using peaceful protest methods (blocking a road with cars).
Bzzt, sorry I have to say you’re full of shit.
Cite for violence at Trump rallies:
Nice to see all those Trump supporters falling over each other offering him a ride.
And MSNBC. And lot’s of propaganda produced by smaller outfits and distributed on social media. (random example)
And NPR doesn’t usually explicitly come to partisan conclusions, but they have an obvious far lefty bias. It shows up in their choices of subject matter, and in what they present as presumptions when framing their stories. They pretty blatantly put some effort into normalizing things that are often only normal to “progressives”. (random example)
This is the “i’m not touching you” argument.
I am sorry, that’s not how it works.
You are not “free” to block people’s movement down a public road. They are the ones who are free, they are free to move down the road and free to assemble and hear political speech that you disagree with. Blocking the road is a confiscation of public property in an attempt to deny these rights to them, and it is a crime.
I think they were all either walking themselves, or stuck three miles back behind the roadblock.
It is how it works and has for years and years. Google “non violent direct action” and educate yourself. Peaceful protest of this sort is at worse a misdemeanour , which the protestors knowingly accept as a risk of their action.
Punching someone because you disagree with them is a felony, a much more serious charge. There is no comparison, Trumps supporters use violence to silence voices they don’t want to hear, which makes them the nazi thug brownshirts.
They could have at least accompanied him. Seems he was only good for propaganda.
I also question how badly he’s disabled if he can walk three miles.
On a good day, I can manage a half mile with three or four breaks.
Reddit thread with claims of people shuttling others.
Of course, we all know what Trump thinks of the disabled.
It looks like someone was accompanying him, close enough to get a photo anyway. This opportunity for propaganda should not exist. People shouldn’t be blocking access to political rallies.
Sorry to hear that. 
Maybe he can walk functionally, but it’s very painful, some people are like that.
Again, they shouldn’t have to do this.
That they are fair game for roasting? Unless it’s very mean spirited, I don’t object to those who violating that taboo.
What Bernshirts? I don’t see, in your links, anything about Bernie Sanders or his supporters.
It’s just an assumption that is usually largely true, but I don’t have any evidence that it is in this case.
Hank Beecher, our History Teacher? Say it ain’t so. So we can all go home now?
“Educate myself”, huh? I am already aware that there are a bunch of self righteous boneheaded pricks that think they have the moral authority to go around blocking people in, surrounding police to keep them from leaving with people they have detained, occupying public spaces to the exclusion of the use that the public has agreed through democratic processes to use them for, and excluding journalists who are suspected of disagreeing with them.
It’s a whole bunch of misdemeanors, at least. And if the punishments are not enough to keep people from using “direct action” like this to deny voters the right to assemble for the purposes of communicating a political message, you can bet that both the reactions to and the penalties for this kind of crap is going to get a lot more serious very soon.
Those who purposely block others on roads and places they have the right to be should be jailed for a time no less than the cumulative time that the people they were blocking were effectively detained.
And if someone intentionally uses a vehicle to block a highway and back up traffic they should lose the vehicle.
There have been hundreds of thousands of people at Trump rallies and hundreds or thousands of protesters screaming insults. There shouldn’t be any surprise a few people got punched.
There is no right to go to someone else’s event to spread your message, when they have created the event with their time and money, for the explicit purpose of communicating their message to their supporters and others interested in hearing it. Those who try to blockade these events are are attempting to take something from the organizers and attendees, and should be treated like thieves, with an aggravating factor that the thing that is stolen is political freedom.
Walks like a Bernshirt, Quacks like a Bernshirt…
Trump is detested by a wide swath of Americans. Most of them are not Bernie supporters. Many of them are not Democrats.
I am not talking about most of the people who detest Trump or speak out against him, but the highly visible and regressive subset of them who take the time to seek out his rallies to blockade or disrupt them. This is, very generally speaking, part of the same movement trying to silence unpopular opinions on college campuses. Based on the makeup of the groups who organized in Chicago and Arizona they are generally far-lefty Occupy activist types that usually are the ones doing this stuff. And of course whoever they are raging against is always “a Nazi”.
In Chicago a big crowd of them was chanting “Bernie Bernie”. It’s true often enough to be an informal folk name shorthand for the species.
Outside of this…is it a “tweet”?..or posting?.. from this person (of whom I had never previously heard)…what else corroborates this story?
“Pics, or it didn’t happen” is a common figure of internet speech, but the existence of a pic doesn’t mean that it necessarily did happen.
Luckily you don’t make the law and are unlikely to be ever in the position to do so. Counter protests have a long history. Trump is spreading hate speech and encouraging violence. He is met with non violent direct action to block his message. Thats as it should be.