There was no harm, no foul,

[ancianita]

only the threat of arrest -- based on uniformed and uninformed whites' fear of harm or foul -- is what forced them to run for their lives @ 1:30 am.

They were going their way.

If I were them I would not have felt free to go my way, either.

If I were them, I would not trust liberals to fight for my rights to "life, liberty and property," or to just let me go my way, or just leave me alone, either.

Yet that is what white extremists enjoy in the same situation 24/7. Nazis, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, White Supremacist Militias, and every hate group SPLC lists. Except for the black ones. The black hate groups are special, aren't they.

As I watch Barry Jenkins' Underground Railroad series, I'm reminded of what I'd learned about cross-generational experience of trauma as I interacted with my black students. Their effects of elders' trauma are far older and more complex than "hurt people hurt people."

Racial trauma or race-based traumatic stress, is the cumulative effects of racism on an individual’s mental and physical health.[1] It has been linked to feelings of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation, as well as other physical health issues.[2]

Racial trauma is not included in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), since it does not meet the current criteria. However, researchers such as Robert T. Carter, Thema Bryant-Davis, and Carlota Ocampo have lobbied for its addition. According to them, racial trauma evokes symptoms similar to that of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), hence the push for its recognition as a viable mental health concern.[1][3] The effects race-based traumatic stress have on individuals depend on their experiences, and the ways in which it can manifest itself can vary significantly as well.[4] Individuals who are exposed to race-based trauma or stress may experience dissociative symptoms following the event.[5]Dissociative symptoms include depersonalization, in which an individual feels disconnected from their body or mind, and derealization, in which an individual has unreal or distorted sense of experiences.

They can put on whites' clothes and talk whites' talk every day, but that doesn’t mean their scars will fade.
In these days of living while black, black defenders are the babies that get get thrown out with dirty white supremacist bath water. A kind of both sides do it false analogy.
White Ammon Bundys get probation, therapy for their traumas and carry on their lives for their cause. Black Ammon Bundys get jail, more chronic post traumatic stress and resist their votes suppressed, and lives depressed unto death.

How easy it is to believe, in Wakefield, MA or anywhere else, that equal legal treatment makes historical unequals equal. That black men in jail is equal to white men on probation is easier to think, than ways that the Dred Scott decision lives on with or without Taney's bust.

There is no liberal or good false equivalency of equal legal treatment that can make historical unequals equal -- it is a chronic tyranny; it hides the traumas that women and black people know well.
Equal treatment of unequals anywhere is equal treatment of unequals everywhere.

I want to believe that these men -- no harm, no foul, just belonging to a church -- did what they did to force enough fear of a black planet to get legislated, signed laws that require background checks of traumatized white men with guns -- for the long term betterment of the traumatized lives of black people.
And if they had no such intent? There was still no harm, no foul.

On another note...

The Ammon Bundy mortgage rule might hold here.

"... “Their self-professed leader wanted very much known their ideology is not anti-government,” the colonel said. “Our investigation will provide us more insight into what their motivation, what their ideology is.”

He said that the group was making its way from Rhode Island to Maine for “training.”

“We are not anti-government,” a man said early Saturday morning on a livestream on the group’s YouTube channel. The man, who was wearing military-style gear, went on to explain that the group had pulled over to fuel up their cars with gas cans to avoid “making any unnecessary stops” while carrying firearms. The man also said they were traveling to “their private land.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/us/wakefield-ma-lockdown-rise-of-the-moors.html