Five years have passed since protesters occupied deep blue Seattle’s police-free CHOP (Capitol Hill Occupied Protest) zone following George Floyd’s death, sending the area into a state of lawlessness and disarray.
Now Fox Nation is offering a flashback to the 2020 “Summer of Love” or, rather, the “Summer of Chaos.”
Fox News Seattle-based correspondent Dan Springer hosts the multipart special, which debuted Monday on the streaming platform.
He previewed the flashback on “Fox & Friends” the same day.
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“It was supposed to be the summer of love. At least that’s what Mayor Jenny Durkin was calling it when a group of protesters, unlike any I’ve ever seen, actually took over a part of the city, mainly because the police department left the precinct,” he recalled, speaking to co-hosts Ainsley Earhardt, Lawrence Jones and Brian Kilmeade.
“There were nightly protests… around the east precinct of Seattle, and there were clashes every single night, and the city, the mayor, and the police chief decided just to walk away. And what happened was the CHOP, and so we are looking back on the chop five years later.”
At the time, business leaders, residents and law enforcement were disrupted by the six blocks seized by protesters who were outraged over perceived police brutality and racial injustice in the wake of Floyd’s May 2020 death in police custody.
Initially branded the CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone), the area underwent a renaming when some protesters insisted the zone wasn’t an attempt to secede from the United States, as the previous name implied.
The entire ordeal, however, drew ire from President Donald Trump, who, during his first administration, condemned local officials for handing the area over to “anarchists.”
Springer said evidence of law enforcement’s absence was shown in the violence that took place in the area, which resulted in the deaths of two young males, shootings, arson and a number of alleged sexual assaults.
“It was chaos,” he recalled.
“Two young men died. The police were nowhere to be seen until shots were fired inside, and then they would go in and then leave quickly. They turned over a portion of the city. We saw the experiment of what happens when you defund the police, when you move the police outside a part of the city. Chaos ensues, and that’s what the special’s all about.”
“Summer of Chaos” debuted Monday on the Fox Nation platform in two episodes running approximately 25 minutes apiece.
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