The left's 'crossing state lines' canard

 T.R. Clancy:

It seems the Left cares about borders after all, depending on the border and who crossed it.

Consider Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial and how the continuing progressive slanders about white supremacism and murder always include the unspeakable fact that he crossed the state line with a rifle.

Rittenhouse didn’t cross the state line with a rifle. And if he had, it wouldn’t have been illegal.

Yet when the prosecution’s case imploded, Ben & Jerry’s couldn’t resist tweeting, “How would this trial be going if he was a Black 17 yr old that crossed state lines illegally carrying an AR-15 and shot 3 white protesters?” Joy Reid broadcast her wildly uninformed description of Rittenhouse as a member of the Proud Boys and a vigilante who held an unlawful belief (unlawful in Reid’s view) “that he had the perfect right to cross state lines and protect property with the AR-15 he got because he thought it was cool.” Moments after Rittenhouse’s acquittal, New York mayor Bill DeBlasio was repeating the libel that the teenager “chose to take a gun across state lines and start shooting people.”

Now consider that last week, ten FBI agents with a battering ram showed up before dawn to handcuff the underwear-clad Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and search his house and cell phone, after having done the same to his fellow journalists. The pretext was a search for Ashley Biden’s diary, but the FBI already knew O’Keefe didn’t have it or have anything to do with its disappearance. Besides, since when does a petty-larceny case local police would manage with a stolen-property report rate a federal investigation?

Glenn Greenwald frames it as an undisguised authoritarian tactic meant “to aggressively target an organization devoted to obtaining and reporting incriminating information about Democratic Party leaders and their liberal allies.” Interestingly, he reports “a cryptic reference in the search warrant to transmitting stolen material across state lines.” (My italics).

Just before the Project Veritas operation, Attorney General Merrick Garland sicced his FBI on uppity parents who dared to question the hive-mind wisdom of school boards. In what has now been exposed as the product of collusion between the White House and the progressive National School Boards Association, the NSBA sent a letter to Biden claiming the nationwide upsurge in angry parents showing up at school-board meetings made the parents domestic terrorists, requiring an aggressive Security State to stop them.

This triggered a memo from Garland to the FBI and his US Attorneys ordering them to deploy national security resources “to discourage these threats, identify them…and prosecute them when appropriate.” All this quickly backfired, but not before Garland lied about it to a Senate committee, and the NSBA apologized for its hysterical letter. Now a whistleblower has revealed that the FBI was already industriously putting the same “threat tags” on parents they use for “tracking everything from drug trafficking to human trafficking.”

Unfortunately, instances of Biden authoritarianism have become commonplace. Still, it’s notable how the NSBA letter, which was drafted with White House help, opens with an allegation that school officials are at risk of “acts of violence affecting interstate commerce because of threats to their districts, families, and personal safety.” How, exactly, is public K-12 education—an exclusive state interest from its inception and the epitome of local citizen involvement—an issue of interstate commerce? Particularly when the Constitution’s commerce clause, per the Supreme Court, defines “commerce” as “the production, distribution, and consumption of commodities”?

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"Crossing state lines" is the excuse Biden's Gestapo use to deal with political enemies who oppose their terrible policies. It is lawyer-speak and considered the use of jurisdictional means for federal involvement in a case.