‘I’ve got news for you: It is time to disobey the governor en masse…’
Note: Article contains mild profanity
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Civil-liberties advocate Mike Adams told a crowd at Tuesday’s ReOpen NC rally that the time for civil disobedience against North Carolina’s Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper had arrived.
“I’ve got news for you: It is time to disobey the governor en masse,” he said at the anti-lockdown protest in downtown Raleigh, the state capital.
“Open up your business. Defy him,” Adams continued. “Open up your church. Defy him. ’Cause I happen to know some lawyers who have kicked Roy Cooper’s ass before, and we will kick his ass again.”
Adams, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, is also a contributor to right-wing media outlets like Townhall and the Daily Wire.
He opened with a personal story about his fight against then-state Attorney General Cooper, who astoundingly chose to defend UNCW after it tried to deny Adams a promotion due to his public advocacy.
“He decided to defend the university’s unconstitutional attacks on my point of view,” Adams recalled. “And he went to the extreme of saying that the university could engage in viewpoint discrimination against professors who wrote private columns on their own time.”
Eventually, with the support of watchdog groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, Adams prevailed in his lawsuit, taking his case to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
“After seven years of fighting Roy Cooper, I went in front of a federal jury … and it took that jury less than two hours for us to kick Roy Cooper’s ass,” he said.
Adams said he spent most of the $50,000 in back pay he received buying handguns and shotguns at Bass Pro Shops “cause I love the Second Amendment as much as I love the First.”
The state-funded school also paid more than $700,000 in legal fees to Adams’ attorneys, he said.
“And somehow, after kicking Roy Cooper’s ass, that son of a bitch got elected governor,” he added. “How did that happen?”
A Growing Movement
Tuesday’s event went on with an enthusiastic turnout despite an announcement from one of the group organizers, Audrey Whitlock, that she had just completed a two-week quarantine after testing positive for the coronavirus.
Whitlock noted that she was asymptomatic during her entire bout with the virus and that she had not attended any of the prior rallies.
Increasingly, scientific consensus—based on random testing in New York, Boston and other areas—has embraced the theory that a far larger swath of the population than initially projected may already have contracted the contagious virus and may be helping the natural process of developing “herd immunity” against it.
Nonetheless, Whitlock’s announcement became a focal point for left-wing media, dripping with schadenfreude—including the newly left-wing Drudge Report, which prominently placed the item at the top of its home page Monday night.
The ReOpen NC group has organized at least two prior events, one of which resulted in the arrest of a demonstrator, prompting Raleigh police to offer a tweeted explanation that went viral, helping fuel the growing resistance movement.
Protesting is a non-essential activity.
— Raleigh Police (@raleighpolice) April 14, 2020
Cooper and the law-enforcement authorities appear to have since dialed back their suppression of the demonstrations. Last week’s event was attended by prominent US Rep. Dan Bishop, a Republican who represents the state’s 9th District.
Other states have followed suit, adding pressure to both red- and blue-state governors to start dialing back their shelter-in-place restriction as economic fallout in most parts of the country threatens to eclipse the suffering caused by the pandemic itself.