Why do you keep holding on to the myth that UAL or any common carrier airline, has an absolute right to remove a passenger?
They do not. Everything they do with passengers must conform to the contract of carriage. Contracts of carriage are required by law and are between passengers and the common carrier airline. The federal law defines the minimum that has to be in the contract. When a common carrier airline violates its contract of carriage, it is violating federal law.
Here, as explained in numerous places on the internet, UAL did not adhere to its contract of carriage. At a minimum, their contract does not allowed UAL to randomly select passengers for involuntary denial of boarding.
I’ve always said they have limits. But this doesn’t run into their limits. They decided people needed to be bumped, they offered compensation, that is 100% within their rights, not enough people took the package, they went to lots, also 100% within their rights. He refused, he turned it into a situation that needed security, at that point he moved from being a bumped passenger deserving compensation to a risk passenger that needed to be removed for the safe operating of the plane.
Those are the facts, they were within their rights, he’s a child that screwed up, and you are wrong.