Growing up in Fort Collins, I sometimes indulged a morbid fascination with the dark side of Colorado’s history, including its vigilantism during the frontier/territorial period, when there was no widespread professional police presence. Colorado experienced a population influx after the Civil War as people came west to work in the mining industry. Mining camps (being camps) were hastily constructed, impermanent, and lacking the basic components of civilized life, including a justice system, and so there was little in the way of due process. Consequently, expeditious public hangings (lynchings) were common. Few of these lynchings were racially motivated, if only because Colorado’s population was mostly of European ancestry in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The only lynching victim in the history of Fort Collins was James Howe, a problem drinker who cut his wife’s throat with a pocket knife on April 4th, 1888 in broad daylight and in front of numerous witnesses. Howe was arrested and confined to the “calaboose” (around Walnut Street and Mountain Avenue, now in Old Town) to await trial, possibly out of town as the local courthouse was then still under construction. But the next morning, locals “found” Howe’s body swinging by the neck from a crane, ironically at the unfinished courthouse construction site. Evidently, outraged townsfolk who’d witnessed the murder didn’t see much point in the pretense of a trial by jury, so they broke into the jail and hanged Howe that previous night. As far as I know, there was no formal investigation, and no one was charged with any crime.
I’ve been thinking more and more lately about how the decay of civil order–which I think is unfortunately inevitable for western civilization at this point–will play out, and history offers the most plausible (and disturbing) picture. Certain activist groups are exploiting recent racially charged murders and calling for the abolition of law enforcement entirely, even as their members condone and even participate in criminal activity (assault, looting, vandalism, etc.). If they have their way, we can only expect a lot more of what happened on February 23 this year, when Ahmaud Arbery was murdered–by vigilantes–while jogging in Georgia, only without the killers being held accountable. Whatever your local police department’s flaws, it’s the only alternative to vigilante savagery.
There’s an old dictum about the futility of arguing with anyone on the radical Left: The “issue” is never the issue; the issue is always the outcome of The Revolution. Radical left-wing groups like Antifa will leverage any “issue” (racism, poverty, etc.), whether real or imagined, to further their cause. Right now they’re leveraging racial unrest to divert our attention while they deliberately dismantle civilization with practiced skill. But history has shown that they’re at best incompetent at building whatever paradise they promise (and usually ferociously unjust and evil). The murderous French Jacobin Maximilian Robespierre famously quipped “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” (“On ne saurait faire une omelette sans casser des oeufs”), but what followed was certainly no omelette.
Don’t be deceived. There’s never an omelette.