One of the characters in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, Mr. Dick, was trying to write a memoir, but no matter what he tried to write, it ended up being about King Charles I’s head, which the Puritans had severed in 1649. That image was so strong that it became a literary shorthand for an obsession that intruded in all other matters.

Seattle’s Mayor, Jenny Durkan, could be rechristened “Ms. Dick” because she suffers badly from King Charles’s Head syndrome. No matter what is happening in her beleaguered city, she returns obsessively to Trump, whom she views as so all-powerful that he is responsible for everything.

While people have been focused on the running nighttime street battle in Portland, where Antifa anarcho-terrorists have sought to invade or, failing that, incinerate the federal courthouse, Seattle’s been seeing its own mobs at work. CHAD (or was it CHOP?) may be gone, but the memory lingers on in the form of Seattle’s Antifa terrorists amassing explosives and other dangerous projectiles:

On Wednesday, [Police Chief Carmen] Best told reporters that officers saw a van following a group of protesters around 4:30 p.m. Saturday, before it stopped outside the East Precinct. At about the same time, she said, explosions started going off outside the precinct.

Best said a witness later told police they had seen baseball bats and explosives inside the same van earlier in the day.

Police later impounded the van and, after obtaining a search warrant, discovered firework pyrotechnics, smoke bombs, stun guns, bear and pepper spray, makeshift spike strips and gas masks, Best said.

No arrests have been made in connection to the explosives in the van, she said.

But she called what was found in the van “evidence that not everyone who comes to these protests are peaceful. Peaceful protesters do not show up in a van full of … explosives.”

The terrorists’ had more explosives than were found in that van:

Best said over the weekend that officers used blast balls, pepper spray and 40mm sponge-tip rounds, while some in the crowd of protesters broke windows and started fires. At one point, she said, someone threw an explosive that blew an 8-inch hole through a wall of the Police Department’s East Precinct.

People with a limited understanding of the world might look at what’s happening in Seattle and think, “Gee, these aimless young people who have allied themselves with an avowed anarcho-Marxist terrorist organization sure are dangerous. There’s no room in civil society or a functioning democratic republic for domestic terrorism. The local government needs to shut them down, which should be easy, considering all the available video footage and the myriad criminal charges that can be leveled against them.”

That’s a simplistic view. Mayor Jenny “Ms. Dick” Durkan understands what’s going on. According to PJ Media’s Tyler O’Neil:

Durkan focused her ire on Trump.

“I hate to say it, but it looks like this president is doing a dress rehearsal for martial law, sending in federal forces to take over police duties in city after city for political purposes,” the mayor told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Monday. “It is frightening and it’s making things worse. It has not improved public safety, it has decreased public safety.”

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan: "I hate to say it, but it looks like this president is doing a dress rehearsal for martial law." pic.twitter.com/AUHkb82wPC

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) July 28, 2020

Showing that this talk of martial law is pure demagoguery and that Seattle’s management doesn’t believe a word of it, the city government voted to abolish the Seattle Police Department and to replace it with a group of people dedicated to counseling and violence prevention. This might work well in concert with policing but it’s not going to touch the human predators who resist counseling and revel in violence – kind of like the Antifa protesters.

Durkan’s not the only “Dick” around when it comes to claiming that Trump is trying to impose martial law in America. Sen. Ron Wyden (D. Oregon) stated that America is “staring down the barrel of martial law.” When federal marshals started arresting Portland’s Antifa terrorists, CNN published an article entitled “Trump’s ‘law and order’ is starting to look like martial law.” The article is the stuff of teenage dystopian literature, right down to the awkward phrase that the DHS is engaged in “dark-of-night dystopian stuff.”

This false narrative is dangerous. What’s happening here not martial law. If it really were martial law, the politicians and journalists pushing this narrative would be imprisoned and the protesters, with their explosives, lasers, and heavy projectiles, would be dead. This is martial law (warning: deeply disturbing content):

However, when anarchists in Portland freely burning a pigs head with a police hat, that is not martial law:

Image: YouTube screengrab