Baltimore Orioles' VP Perfectly Defends Protests

When protests in Baltimore began taking a violent turn on Saturday, a sports radio broadcaster took to Twitter to express how he believed the demonstrations were violating the basic freedoms of those not involved in the protest. Soon after, in a long succession of tweets, the Baltimore Orioles' chief operating officer John Angelos defended the Freddie Gray protestors in a thought-provoking response to WBAL broadcaster Brett Hollander lamenting the clashes.

Gray's death, caused by a broken spine sustained mysteriously while in police custody, sparked outrage across Baltimore as residents demanded accountability and justice for the 25-year-old. As the weeklong peaceful demonstrations began its violent turn on Saturday, Hollander tweeted that "People of a community should be able to commute, commerce should happen & citizens who want to go to a ballgame should be able to go," later adding that the protest's message was lost "when the rest of the community is disrupted."

Orioles COO Angelos responded to Hollander by agreeing that observance of the rule of law was important in any society, and that in a democracy, no official should be held responsible for actions it was not yet found guilty of. Angelos then unleashed a vivid defense of the protestors, citing the larger issue of the political elite's history of deliberately impoverishing the city and its people who also receive the brunt of injustice from an "ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state."

Here are his tweets, which are rather disjointed, but definitely worth going through.