Put aside whether a resolution by the Bakersfield City Council is consequential or performative crap. It’s obviously the latter, as it serves no meaningful purpose other than to reflect its acquiescence to the demands of the woke. But to 28-year-old Riddhi Patel, it mattered no matter how silly it may be. It mattered a lot.
This anti-Israel protestor rants about how the security at the meeting is unnecessary and just meant to intimidate right before she threatens to murder the Bakersfield City Council members in their homes.
She is now facing 16 felony charges. pic.twitter.com/4ZzXJ7lWVq
— AG (@AGHamilton29) April 12, 2024
Who is Patel? According to Eugene Volokh, she is or was an economic development coordinator with the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment (CRPE).
[H]ere’s her biography blurb from the CRPE site:
Riddhi joined the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment in September of 2020. She was born and raised in Bakersfield, CA and attended Stockdale High School. She then went on to achieve a Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience from Saint Louis University in 2017. After returning to Bakersfield in 2019, she began volunteering for the Bernie 2020 campaign where she found organizing. After the campaign ended, she quickly found a home in the Sunrise Movement, co-founding the local Sunrise Movement hub in Kern County with other local organizers.
Through her advocacy for common sense statewide setbacks to protect frontline communities across the state, she found CRPE in the fall of 2020. She prioritizes highlighting the intersectionality that comes with the environmental justice movement to achieve collective liberation for all oppressed communities. In her spare time, she enjoys holding elected officials accountable, watching endless amounts of movies, television series and sports, and enjoying time outdoors with her family and friends.
This time, however, she didn’t enjoy “holding elected officials accountable” as much as she otherwise might have.
Riddhi Patel crying in court after being charged with 16 felony counts over threatening to murder city councillors in Bakersfield unless they voted to endorse a ceasefire in Gaza.
🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️ pic.twitter.com/tkX7hKzgE2
— John Aziz (@aziz0nomics) April 13, 2024
Was her threat to murder city councillors serious? Was this a true threat? While it can’t be said with certainty that it wasn’t, it seems far more likely that Patel’s threats reflect the disinhibition of the unduly passionate from engaging in extreme hyperbole with the sense of impunity, that one can say and threaten anything without any concern of recourse. It’s not that she actually meant to do harm to anyone, but that she could say so, use threats to get her way and make her point, and then walk away.
Perhaps she thought this would make her a hero of the cause. Perhaps to some it does, as many zealots similarly believe that they can and should say anything to achieve their ends because their ends must be achieved by any means necessary, threats included.
The members of the Bakersfield City Council didn’t sign up to be told by anyone, even Riddhi Patel, who identifies as non-binary, that “We’ll see you at your house. We’ll murder you.” Even if was a completely empty threat, it’s not part of the gig of city councillors, or any other government official.
The reality of what she did struck home as she stood before the court in a jail jumpsuit, arraigned on 18 felony counts, and held in lieu of $2 million bail. Of course she cried. Many would, even those who truly believed that they were the good guys on the right side of history doing what they believed necessary by any means necessary.
Kind of reminds me of this. I honestly feel bad for this generation. They have been absolutely let down by the adults in their lives. Went off to college and were convinced in their college bubbles they could make a living LARPING as revolutionaries or slaying imaginary dragons. Nobody took them aside and said “you need to be a productive human being to make your way in life.” [Ed. Note: Link deleted per rules.]
Sorry, somehow I forgot no links. But it was to the story of the Harvard 2020 grad who threatened to stab people who said All Lives Matter people on TikTok. She then lost an internship at Deloitte. She was on full financial aid so at least one opportunity to rise up socio economically was gone.
The only thing I get from that word salad of a bio is that she’s a communist. And while I’ll admit it’s an unprincipled response, I don’t much care whether it’s a true threat or just an instance of FAFO. Maybe if people see that there are real-world consequences, for them, of their temper tantrums, they’ll learn a bit of self-control.
Such bloviations are always empty threats.
Until they aren’t.
Some people have a saying: “When people tell you who they are, believe them.”
The government doesn’t like to wait around to see if you’re just being verklempt. Few would bat an eye at overcharging if she said it to Biden’s face at a campaign stop. If anything, the concerns at the city council level seem more pragmatic and severe. And the next zealot would push that envelope more.
It’s such a fine line between social justice and homicidal hatred.
“…But I arouse in Man the demon and the brute,
I plant black hatred in his heart and red revenge.
From the summit of fifty thousand years of climb
I haul him down to the level of the start, back to the wolf.
I give him claws.
I set his teeth into his brother’s throat.
I make him drunk with his brother’s blood.
And I laugh ho! ho! while he destroys himself…”
-James Weldon Johnson, “And The Greatest Of These Is War”
My first thought was that a misdemeanor and 6 months would be more than sufficient to address this conduct. But then it occurred to me that there will be people who turn her into a hero and martyr, and when she gets out, she will speak at college after college to inspire students to engage in similar conduct, if not actually carry out the threats.
I don’t know what to do about this. Either way, it’s bad.
My first thought after looking at this is what an idiot, my second thought is make an example of her and hope she spends several years in prison. Hopefully no nip some of this crap in the bud.
While general deterrence is certainly one of the goals of sentencing, I think it is important not to forget that Patel is a human being worthy of compassion. It seems quite likely that the threats were uttered out of passion about the situation in the Middle East rather than out of a genuine desire to commit harm to the councillors, based on first impressions. This is not to say that a conviction or even a custodial sentence is unwarranted, but that it is important to show leniency and mercy to people even if we disagree with what they did or their reasons for doing it.
> I think it is important not to forget that Patel is a human being worthy of compassion
Fair enough.. but so, then, where the people whose lives she threatened. As are their families who are currently living with the threats Ms. Patel made. Ms. Patel also stated that “we” will murder you, so her current lack of bail is not necessarily a comfort to those she threatened.
>It seems quite likely that the threats were uttered out of passion about the situation in the Middle East rather than out of a genuine desire to commit harm to the councillors[sic], based on first impressions.
Probably, but Ms. Patel’s grievances were not limited to the Middle Eastern situation but also recent included local evictions and alleged lack of response to constituent concerns by the councilors. As for a desire to commit harm, if you want to claim your threats are rhetorical, it would probably be better to not first mention the security measures present in the building and make your threats in the context of those present not having said security measures in their homes.
I grew up in Bakersfield. Stockdale High is in the old money country club part of town. She is guaranteed entitled and pampered.
But . . . but . . . but she has “a couple of years of experience”!
BTW, she spokr of the ‘globsl south’. India is 100% north of the equator.
16 felonies seems a tad steep. But I give her props for using Guillotine. Shows some knowledge of European history.
Apropos nothing, but Robert Badinter, former lawyer & French Minister of Justice (and the man who got the death penalty & Guillotine banned in France) just recently died.
Free speech can be extraordinarily expensive, as Ms Patel learned to her dismay.
She wanted her words to be consequential, and was surprised when they actually were, but she had to face the consequences. Consequences were only for bad people when she lashed out, and maybe she was right about that, but she was convinced that she was the good-est person in the room.
She’s typical of the extreme end of the socialization over education, while maintaining the image that they’re dedicated to education by going through the educational motions. This should be her wake-up call, but she’ll just hit snooze, and be pissed about the alarm. What’s “woke”, again?