Free Speech Zones Were Not Invented by Donald Trump

On Monday, [...] the preemptive removal of about two dozen black college students from a crowd waiting for the candidate at Valdosta State University in Georgia raised an obvious question: Why, exactly, did a local police force apparently obey orders from the Trump campaign to help screen his audience by removing dissenters?

The ejection of the students, who had tickets to the event, and their subsequent argument with officers from the city of Valdosta’s police department, who led them outside and directed them to a “designated protest zone” about a five-minute walk from the college gym, was extensively documented on video by participants and reporters.

[...]

[V]ideo recorded by one witness, Darian Harris, clearly shows a police officer telling the students the request came from the candidate’s staff. “All I know is, the Trump staff has asked — they’re the ones that rented the building today … and they’ve asked that you be removed from the property,” he said.

[...]

Brian Childress, the city’s police chief, told the Valdosta Daily Times that the students “were causing a disturbance.”

“They were removed because they were loud and disruptive and dropping the f-bomb,” he said.

[...]

“That violates Georgia law.”

[...]

The school’s president [noted] that “current federal law (H.R. 347) does not allow for protesting of any type in an area under protection by the Secret Service.”

  The Intercept

That's right. You can't blame Donald Trump for this one.

As journalist Dahlia Lithwick and First Amendment lawyer Raymond Vasvari observed in 2012, when the federal law on trespass was quietly amended by H.R. 347 — to make it a crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, “to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions” in locations guarded by the Secret Service, including places where individuals under Secret Service protection are temporarily located — the new statute made it “easier for the government to criminalize protest.”

[...]

That seems to be exactly what happened in Georgia on Monday. After the students were led out of the Trump rally, local police officers informed them that they were also banned from protesting outside the building — and directed them to “free speech zones” in a field shielded from the venue by a set of tennis courts, or outside a church about a quarter of a mile away.

Trump rallies are becoming notorious, however, for violence against protesters. Shades of Nazism. 

And, I don't know who all we have to thank for this...

Watch at the center, bottom of the video to see what happens to a reporter who stepped out of bounds to snap a picture, was confronted by a hopped-up Secret Service youngster to whom the reporter said, "Fuck you."

Up close...

Time magazine photographer Chris Morris told CNN that as he tried to exit the media pen, a Secret Service agent began choking him.

"I'm not pressing charges," Morris said Monday. "I stepped 18 inches out of the pen and he grabbed me by the neck and started choking me and then he slammed me to the ground."

[...]

The article also noted that a third video shows Morris kicking the agent trying to restrain him while on the ground and then putting his [hand] on the agent's neck.

"Morris said that he did so in order to demonstrate the choke hold he had just experienced," the magazine said in the article written by "Time Staff."

[...]

Before the incident, dozens of protesters interrupted Trump's rally, many of them linking arms and bringing the Republican presidential front-runner's stump speech temporarily to a halt.

The protest started after one activist interrupted Trump, to which he responded by asking the protester "Are you from Mexico?"

Some of the demonstrators chanted "Black Lives Matter," to which Trump responded with "All lives matter."

After initially resisting, the activists were escorted out of the event site.

  CNN

Expecting racism run rampant in the near future.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.