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solarbirdI kind of can't imagine what the rest of the day is going to be like, so let's go with this now.
----- 1 -----
Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide
By Matthew Dessem
31 May 2020
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/george-floyd-protests-police-violence.amp
The ongoing protests following the killing of George Floyd were caught up in violence again on Saturday, as police all over the country tear-gassed protesters, drove vehicles through crowds, opened fire with nonlethal rounds on journalists or people on their own property, and in at least one instance, pushed over an elderly man who was walking away with a cane. Here are some of the ways law enforcement officers escalated the national unrest.
----- 2 -----
Exclusive: The US Military Is Monitoring Protests in 7 States
A National Guard member says troops are ill-equipped to respond to civil unrest.
By Ken Klippenstein
30 May 2020
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/national-guard-defense-department-protests/
The US military is monitoring protests in at least seven states, according to Defense Department documents obtained exclusively by The Nation.
In addition to Minnesota, where a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, the military is tracking uprisings in New York, Ohio, Colorado, Arizona, Tennessee, and Kentucky, according to a Defense Department situation report. Notably, only Minnesota has requested National Guard support. The documents were originally stored on an unclassified server but were subsequently “elevated” to a classified system. While the documents reveal significant National Guard force capabilities in each of the seven states, one Minnesota Guard member expressed concerns about the troops’ lack of training in responding to civil unrest.
One document pertaining to the Minnesota National Guard, marked “For Official Use Only” (FOUO), describes one operation’s purpose: “Augment MN State Patrol Civil Disturbance Operations with a show of force.” Other operations are variously described as providing security for law enforcement agencies, defending the capitol building, and “maintaining governance.”
Another document about the protests in Minnesota, titled “MNNG Civil Disturbance Response Storybook,” is also marked FOUO and dated May 29. It states that National Guard members have been authorized for “weapon status red,” meaning magazines loaded but safety on. The document seems particularly concerned not just with harm to civilians but also potential damage to property, to which it refers several times. For example, the assessment line notes that the Guard will “ensure the safety of citizens and property.”
A situation report details “Protester Actions” and “National Guard Reaction Force Capabilities” in six cities: Denver, Memphis, Phoenix, Louisville, New York City, and Columbus. While troop capacities (labelled “PAX” in the document) range from 100 to 500 troops in each state, the document also reveals that there’s only enough riot gear (RG) for a fraction of these personnel.
Asked why they were generating intelligence reports for six states besides Minnesota, Lt. Col. Chris Mitchell, a spokesperson for the Defense Department, told The Nation that producing this information amounts to sensible preparation in the event these states require assistance: “Without such situational awareness, it would be more difficult for DOD to respond if it becomes necessary (if requested by the governors of those states).”
----- 3 -----
Max Berger
twitter.com/maxberger
31 May 2020
https://twitter.com/maxberger/status/1267131940660019202
If antifascists are terrorists, then those who enforce and uphold the law are fascists.
[THREAD, next entry]
The President of the United States just said he’s going to make it a crime to oppose fascism.
Just let that sink in for a second.
[NEXT]
It’s scary that Republicans are criminalizing antifascism, and Democrats aren’t willing to name fascism as a problem.
[NEXT]
Obviously antifa isn’t an organization, let alone a foreign one, and he’s not actually going to designate it as a terrorist organization.
But that’s not the point. He’s clearly stated his intention to kill protesters and criminalize dissent to his regime.
[NEXT]
If you want to criminalize antifascists, then you’re a fascist.
Trump is a fascist.
It’s that simple.
[THREAD CONTINUES]
----- 4 -----
Selena Adera
twitter.com/Selena_Adera
30 May 2020
https://twitter.com/Selena_Adera/status/1266707305158017029
After failing to appropriate the Black People's Party, entitled white kids appropriated our fight yesterday, and made it dirty.
Then they left us to deal with the police violence they stoked.
Listen to the Black Woman desperately begging them to stop.
[EMBEDDED VIDEO]
[THREAD]
----- 5 -----
ALT-immigration
twitter.com/ALT_uscis
31 May 2020
https://twitter.com/ALT_uscis/status/1267157811055800320
3/ pretending to be antifa boston on youtube, forgot to hide the confederate flag
[QUOTED TWEET]
ALT-immigration
twitter.com/ALT_uscis
Aug 17, 2017
https://twitter.com/ALT_uscis/status/898408214416445440
Here is a funny... from "antifa Boston" they posted a video on YouTube... check the flags behind the douche
[EMBEDDED IMAGE FROM VIDEO]
----- 6 -----
Jordan Peele
twitter.com/JordanPeele
31 May 2020
https://twitter.com/JordanPeele/status/1267126688732704771
The look on a cops face when they realize they’re being filmed says everything. Rage and fear. Their life flashes before their eyes. A glance at a partner; unsure if they should stop the assault they’re commiting or go get the camera.
For them accountability is violent.
----- 7 -----
Caught on camera, police explode in rage and violence across the US
America’s occupation by militarized police is in full view
By T.C. Sottek
May 31, 2020
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/31/21276044/police-violence-protest-george-floyd
Over the past 72 hours, people across the US have captured what may be the most comprehensive live picture of police brutality ever. Any one of the videos we’ve seen could have sparked a national discussion, with people picking apart their elements, searching for context to argue about, and digging through the pasts of everyone involved. But it’s not just one act of violence. It’s everywhere.
Here is just a short list of scenes from the past few days:
----- 8 -----
Kevin M. Kruse
twitter.com/KevinMKruse
31 May 2020
https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/1267109727256948736
As others have noted, this past week has felt like a replay of Chicago 1968 all across the nation.
But it goes much deeper than that.
[THREAD, many embedded images]
----- 9 -----
#BlackLivesMatter
twitter.com/doctorow
31 May 2020
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1267117154387689472
If you're following the wave of uprisings against racist police violence, you've probably heard that Derek Chauvin, the cop who murdered George Floyd, had a long history of criminal conduct, but was still carrying a gun, wearing a badge, and billing the taxpayer.
----- 10 -----
Monique O. Madan
twitter.com/MoniqueOMadan
31 May 2020
https://twitter.com/MoniqueOMadan/status/1267166443428290567
twitter.com/CBP is deploying officers and agents to cities nationwide in response to recent violent protests.
Sources close to the operation tell me they are responding to demonstrations today in Miami-Dade and Broward. twitter.com/MiamiHerald
[FROM THREAD]
It's unclear whether officers would be checking people's immigration status.
CBP agents, according to federal law, don’t need a warrant to “within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States."
The law defines a “reasonable distance” as 100 air miles from the coastal border — which covers the entire state of Florida.
CBP: “While most Border Patrol work is conducted in the immediate border area, agents have broad law enforcement authority and are not limited to a specific geography within the US. They have the authority to question individuals, make arrests, and take and consider evidence.”
----- 11 -----
Robert Faturechi
twitter.com/RobertFaturechi
30 May 2020
https://twitter.com/RobertFaturechi/status/1266970634170494976
I was texting with an old L.A. cop source. White, high-ranking, old school.
His take on the Minneapolis Police Department shocked me...
[EMBEDDED MESSAGE THREAD]
----- 12 -----
Seven Reasons Police Brutality Is Systemic, Not Anecdotal
July 2, 2014
Bonnie Kristian
The American Conservative
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/seven-reasons-police-brutality-is-systematic-not-anecdotal/
Darrin Manning’s unprovoked “stop and frisk” encounter with the Philadelphia police left him hospitalized with a ruptured testicle. Neykeyia Parker was violently dragged out of her car and aggressively arrested in front of her young child for “trespassing” at her own apartment complex in Houston. A Georgia toddler was burned when police threw a flash grenade into his playpen during a raid, and the manager of a Chicago tanning salon was confronted by a raiding police officer bellowing that he would kill her and her family, captured on the salon’s surveillance. An elderly man in Ohio was left in need of facial reconstructive surgery after police entered his home without a warrant to sort out a dispute about a trailer.
These stories are a small selection of recent police brutality reports, as police misconduct has become a fixture of the news cycle.
But the plural of anecdote is not data, and the media is inevitably drawn toward tales of conflict. Despite the increasing frequency with which we hear of misbehaving cops, many Americans maintain a default respect for the man in uniform. As an NYPD assistant chief put it, “We don’t want a few bad apples or a few rogue cops damaging” the police’s good name.
This is an attractive proposal, certainly, but unfortunately it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Here are seven reasons why police misconduct is a systemic problem, not “a few bad apples”:
----- 13 -----
Fire, pestilence and a country at war with itself: the Trump presidency is over
A pandemic unabated, an economy in meltdown, cities in chaos over police killings. All our supposed leader does is tweet
Robert Reich
31 May 2020
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/31/donald-trump-coronavirus-pandemic-george-floyd-minneapolis-tweets
You’d be forgiven if you hadn’t noticed. His verbal bombshells are louder than ever, but Donald J Trump is no longer president of the United States.
By having no constructive response to any of the monumental crises now convulsing America, Trump has abdicated his office.
He is not governing. He’s golfing, watching cable TV and tweeting.
How has Trump responded to the widespread unrest following the murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for minutes as he was handcuffed on the ground?
Trump called the protesters “thugs” and threatened to have them shot. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted, parroting a former Miami police chief whose words spurred race riots in the late 1960s.
On Saturday, he gloated about “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons” awaiting protesters outside the White House, should they ever break through Secret Service lines.
Trump’s response to the last three ghastly months of mounting disease and death has been just as heedless. Since claiming Covid-19 was a “Democratic hoax” and muzzling public health officials, he has punted management of the coronavirus to the states.
Governors have had to find ventilators to keep patients alive and protective equipment for hospital and other essential workers who lack it, often bidding against each other. They have had to decide how, when and where to reopen their economies.
Trump has claimed “no responsibility at all” for testing and contact-tracing – the keys to containing the virus. His new “plan” places responsibility on states to do their own testing and contact-tracing.
Trump is also awol in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
More than 41 million Americans are jobless. In the coming weeks temporary eviction moratoriums are set to end in half of the states. One-fifth of Americans missed rent payments this month. Extra unemployment benefits are set to expire at the end of July.
What is Trump’s response? Like Herbert Hoover, who in 1930 said “the worst is behind us” as thousands starved, Trump says the economy will improve and does nothing about the growing hardship. The Democratic-led House passed a $3tn relief package on 15 May. Mitch McConnell has recessed the Senate without taking action and Trump calls the bill dead on arrival.
----- 14 -----
Trump says he will designate antifa a terrorist organization
By Brandon Conradis and Justine Coleman - 05/31/20
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/500357-trump-says-he-will-designate-antifa-a-terrorist-organization
President Trump on Sunday tweeted that he was preparing to formally label anti-fascist activists known as antifa a terrorist organization, raising questions about how the designation would be implemented and whether he even had the legal authority to go through with it.
"The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization," Trump tweeted, as the nation reeled from another night of protests sweeping the country, from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., in response to the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis on Monday.
His announcement came the same day Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department would seek to identify "criminal organizers and instigators" amid the demonstrators.
Barr in his Sunday statement said the Department of Justice will work with its 56 regional FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces to focus on "apprehending and charging the violent radical agitators who have hijacked peaceful protest and are engaged in violations of federal law."
"Preventing reconciliation and driving us apart is the goal of these radical groups, and we cannot let them succeed," he said.
"The violence instigated and carried out by Antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly," Barr added.
----- 15 -----
Trump envisioned 'American carnage.' Now, he's got it.
Analysis: The president has met protests against state violence with calls for more of it.
31 May 2020
By Jonathan Allen
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-envisioned-american-carnage-now-he-s-got-it-n1220361
WASHINGTON — When Trump first addressed the nation as its president on Jan. 20, 2017, he depicted the nation's cities as domestic combat zones and declared "this American carnage stops right here and stops right now."
Back then, it was hyperbole at best. But it's become reality on his watch, and he has encouraged further violence.
More than 100,000 Americans have lost their lives, and another 40 million their livelihoods, amid a coronavirus pandemic to which Trump was slow to react. Against that backdrop, cities across the country are now combustible cauldrons of fear, anger, fire and tear gas as Trump has responded to the violence with threats and little evidence of understanding its cause.
Since the police killing of George Floyd, a black man, in Minneapolis last week, Trump has largely thrown rhetorical Molotov cocktails over the front lines of the national uprising from the safety of his White House bunker.
In other words, the president met protests against state violence with calls for more of it.
----- 16 -----
Black Protesters Who Want To Demonstrate Peacefully Are Calling Out White People Who Instigate Violence
"When we aren't asking people to destroy things in our name and people do it anyway, we know that this is something that's going to blow back on us," one black activist told BuzzFeed News.
Clarissa-Jan Lim
Posted on May 30, 2020
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/clarissajanlim/protesters-violence-george-floyd
Tay Anderson wanted Friday's protest against police brutality in Denver to be peaceful.
"We asked people throughout the day, please do not deface property, please do not destroy stuff, because we're not asking you to do that," Anderson, a Denver school board director and activist, told BuzzFeed News.
Still, with hundreds taking to the streets for the second day of demonstrations against the killing of George Floyd, a black man who died after a Minneapolis police officer put him in a neck chokehold, there was vandalism and clashes with Denver police, who fired tear gas and flash-bangs into the crowd.
In a video that has been shared online widely, Anderson, who is black, is seen confronting a white man with a cloth covering on his face after the man spray-paints "ACAB" — "all cops are bastards" — on public property.
Anderson said he was doing a news interview when he saw the man vandalizing, so he turned around and tried to stop him.
"I said, 'We asked allies to step back so that we can make sure that you're following what we're asking you to do,'" he recalled. "And he was like, 'I'm not your ally, you guys want to protect the status quo. I don't need to be here for you all.'"
Anderson said there were "several people" who were behaving like that at the protest, some of whom he believed are "right-wing conservative individuals who just don't give a damn about black and brown people, or want to make this movement look bad."
"It wasn't black and brown folks that were antagonizing police. It was white people throwing stuff at them," he said. "And then when they kept throwing bags of urine, cans, and water bottles, that's when the police snapped and they started tear-gassing innocent bystanders."
Denver police spokesperson Kurt Barnes told BuzzFeed News the department's tactics on crowd management "depends upon the severity of the response from the people in the crowd, and based on that it depends on whether the officers feel their lives are threatened."
----- 17 -----
Betsy DeVos Tells Connecticut: Ban Transgender Athletes, Or Say Goodbye To Your Federal Funding
Dawn EnnisContributor
Diversity & Inclusion
I report on the fight for transgender equality and other LGBTQ issues.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dawnstaceyennis/2020/05/29/betsy-devos-tells-connecticut-ban-transgender-athletes-or-say-goodbye-to-your-federal-funding/
Allowing transgender girls to compete in school sports with girls who are not transgender is a violation of federal law, and if it’s not stopped in 20 days, Connecticut risks losing federal education funding. That’s the ruling by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, made public Thursday in a report by the Associated Press.
Wrong, says the American Civil Liberties Union; one of its most fierce defenders of transgender Americans called the ruling nothing more than another example of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s politically-driven agenda of discrimination, specifically targeting trans girls, and trampling on their rights.
“Today’s finding, which is not a legal ruling, represents another attack from the Trump administration on transgender students,” said Chase Strangio Thursday in a statement. He’s the deputy director for trans justice, with the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project. “Since 2017, DeVos’ Department of Education has taken consistent aim at transgender students. Once again, the administration is wrong on the law and we will continue to defend transgender students under Title IX and the Constitution. Trans students belong in our schools, including on sports teams, and we will not back down from this fight.”
----- 18 -----
Bill de Blasio Needs to Resign. By Defending Police Violence, He Has Betrayed New Yorkers.
Medhi Hansan
31 May 2020
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/31/nyc-mayor-bill-de-blasio-should-resign/
Bill de Blasio is a moral and political disgrace.
In March, as the coronavirus spread through the nation’s biggest city, the mayor of New York City was proudly “telling people to not avoid restaurants, not avoid the normal things they would do” because “if you are not sick … you should be going about your life.” His advice may have contributed to the deaths of thousands of New Yorkers.
In April, he angrily singled out the “Jewish community” in a tweet, threatening a vulnerable minority with mass arrests for breaking social distancing rules — which he himself had violated just three days earlier.
Yet late on Saturday night, as mass protests against police brutality raged across New York City, the Democratic mayor crossed a new and grotesque line: He went on live television, on NY1, to defend and excuse police brutality against those protesters.
De Blasio needs to resign.
He should resign because his comments on Saturday night were brazen and disgusting lies. Two New York Police Department vehicles were filmed ramming into protesters behind a barricade. The mayor said the video was “upsetting” but claimed that it was “inappropriate for protesters to surround a police vehicle and threaten police officers,” adding that the officers had to “get out” of that “impossible” situation.
The police were surrounded? They had no other options? The (viral) video evidence suggests otherwise.
It is clear that neither police car was surrounded; both drivers could have reversed but chose instead to plough their vehicles into the crowd of people in front of them. So who should we believe? De Blasio or our own lying eyes?
He should resign because he is behaving less like a leader and more like a sociopath. “If those protestors had just gotten out of the way we wouldn’t be talking about this situation,” is an actual quote from the mayor of New York City, in his live broadcast on NY1. Got that? The unarmed people on the street run over by armed men in cars should … blame themselves for being run over!
He should resign because he is starting to sound like the far-right Republican president he once wanted to replace (until he had to end his presidential campaign last September because he was polling at less than 1 percent nationally.) This, I kid you not, is another astonishing quote from the mayor: “Any protester that tries to take the humanity away from a police officer and devalue them just because they are a public servant is no better than the racists who devalue people of color and particularly black men in America.”
To quote New York human rights lawyer Kumar Rao, “This is Bill de Blasio’s ‘very fine people on both sides’ moment.” (It is also worth noting here that the “very fine” white nationalist in Charlottesville, Virginia, who killed Heather Heyer did so by driving his car into a crowd of protesters!)
----- 19 -----
When American conservatism becomes un-American
By George F. Will
Columnist
May 29, 2020 at 4:00 a.m. PDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-american-conservatism-becomes-un-american/2020/05/28/336a953a-a0f6-11ea-b5c9-570a91917d8d_story.html
From Harvard Law School comes the latest conservative flirtation with authoritarianism. Professor Adrian Vermeule, a 2016 Catholic convert, is an “integralist” who regrets his academic specialty, the Constitution, and rejects the separation of church and state. His much-discussed recent Atlantic essay advocating a government that judges “the quality and moral worth of public speech” is unimportant as a practical political manifesto, but it is symptomatic of some conservatives’ fevers, despairs and temptations.
“Common-good capitalism,” a recent proposal by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), is capitalism minus the essence of capitalism — limited government respectful of society’s cumulative intelligence and preferences collaboratively revealed through market transactions. Vermeule’s “common-good constitutionalism” is Christian authoritarianism — muscular paternalism, with government enforcing social solidarity for religious reasons. This is the Constitution minus the Framers’ purpose: a regime respectful of individuals’ diverse notions of the life worth living. Such respect is, he says, “abominable.”
Vermeule would jettison “libertarian assumptions central to free-speech law and free-speech ideology.” And: “Libertarian conceptions of property rights and economic rights will also have to go, insofar as they bar the state from enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution of resources.” Who will define these duties? Integralists will, because they have an answer to this perennial puzzle: If the people are corrupt, how do you persuade them to accept the yoke of virtue-enforcers? The answer: Forget persuasion. Hierarchies must employ coercion.
- Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide
- Exclusive: The US Military Is Monitoring Protests in 7 States
- If antifascists are terrorists, then those who enforce and uphold the law are fascists.
- After failing to appropriate the Black People's Party, entitled white kids appropriated our fight yesterday, and made it dirty.
- White nationalist pretending to be antifa boston on youtube, forgot to hide the confederate flag
- The look on a cops face when they realize they’re being filmed says everything.
- Caught on camera, police explode in rage and violence across the US
- An historical thread on police violence
- Derek Chauvin, the cop who murdered George Floyd, had a long history of criminal conduct, but was still carrying a gun, wearing a badge, and billing the taxpayer.
- Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) deploying officers and agents to cities nationwide
- ProPublica reporter: I was texting with an old L.A. cop source. White, high-ranking, old school. His take on the Minneapolis Police Department shocked me...
- Seven Reasons Police Brutality Is Systemic, Not Anecdotal [From 2014, but still correct]
- Fire, pestilence and a country at war with itself: the Trump presidency is over
- Trump says he will designate antifa a terrorist organization
- Trump envisioned 'American carnage.' Now, he's got it.
- Black Protesters Who Want To Demonstrate Peacefully Are Calling Out White People Who Instigate Violence
- Betsy DeVos Tells Connecticut: Ban Transgender Athletes, Or Say Goodbye To Your Federal Funding
- Bill de Blasio Needs to Resign. By Defending Police Violence, He Has Betrayed New Yorkers.
- When American conservatism becomes un-American
----- 1 -----
Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide
By Matthew Dessem
31 May 2020
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/george-floyd-protests-police-violence.amp
The ongoing protests following the killing of George Floyd were caught up in violence again on Saturday, as police all over the country tear-gassed protesters, drove vehicles through crowds, opened fire with nonlethal rounds on journalists or people on their own property, and in at least one instance, pushed over an elderly man who was walking away with a cane. Here are some of the ways law enforcement officers escalated the national unrest.
----- 2 -----
Exclusive: The US Military Is Monitoring Protests in 7 States
A National Guard member says troops are ill-equipped to respond to civil unrest.
By Ken Klippenstein
30 May 2020
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/national-guard-defense-department-protests/
The US military is monitoring protests in at least seven states, according to Defense Department documents obtained exclusively by The Nation.
In addition to Minnesota, where a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, the military is tracking uprisings in New York, Ohio, Colorado, Arizona, Tennessee, and Kentucky, according to a Defense Department situation report. Notably, only Minnesota has requested National Guard support. The documents were originally stored on an unclassified server but were subsequently “elevated” to a classified system. While the documents reveal significant National Guard force capabilities in each of the seven states, one Minnesota Guard member expressed concerns about the troops’ lack of training in responding to civil unrest.
One document pertaining to the Minnesota National Guard, marked “For Official Use Only” (FOUO), describes one operation’s purpose: “Augment MN State Patrol Civil Disturbance Operations with a show of force.” Other operations are variously described as providing security for law enforcement agencies, defending the capitol building, and “maintaining governance.”
Another document about the protests in Minnesota, titled “MNNG Civil Disturbance Response Storybook,” is also marked FOUO and dated May 29. It states that National Guard members have been authorized for “weapon status red,” meaning magazines loaded but safety on. The document seems particularly concerned not just with harm to civilians but also potential damage to property, to which it refers several times. For example, the assessment line notes that the Guard will “ensure the safety of citizens and property.”
A situation report details “Protester Actions” and “National Guard Reaction Force Capabilities” in six cities: Denver, Memphis, Phoenix, Louisville, New York City, and Columbus. While troop capacities (labelled “PAX” in the document) range from 100 to 500 troops in each state, the document also reveals that there’s only enough riot gear (RG) for a fraction of these personnel.
Asked why they were generating intelligence reports for six states besides Minnesota, Lt. Col. Chris Mitchell, a spokesperson for the Defense Department, told The Nation that producing this information amounts to sensible preparation in the event these states require assistance: “Without such situational awareness, it would be more difficult for DOD to respond if it becomes necessary (if requested by the governors of those states).”
----- 3 -----
Max Berger
twitter.com/maxberger
31 May 2020
https://twitter.com/maxberger/status/1267131940660019202
If antifascists are terrorists, then those who enforce and uphold the law are fascists.
[THREAD, next entry]
The President of the United States just said he’s going to make it a crime to oppose fascism.
Just let that sink in for a second.
[NEXT]
It’s scary that Republicans are criminalizing antifascism, and Democrats aren’t willing to name fascism as a problem.
[NEXT]
Obviously antifa isn’t an organization, let alone a foreign one, and he’s not actually going to designate it as a terrorist organization.
But that’s not the point. He’s clearly stated his intention to kill protesters and criminalize dissent to his regime.
[NEXT]
If you want to criminalize antifascists, then you’re a fascist.
Trump is a fascist.
It’s that simple.
[THREAD CONTINUES]
----- 4 -----
Selena Adera
twitter.com/Selena_Adera
30 May 2020
https://twitter.com/Selena_Adera/status/1266707305158017029
After failing to appropriate the Black People's Party, entitled white kids appropriated our fight yesterday, and made it dirty.
Then they left us to deal with the police violence they stoked.
Listen to the Black Woman desperately begging them to stop.
[EMBEDDED VIDEO]
[THREAD]
----- 5 -----
ALT-immigration
twitter.com/ALT_uscis
31 May 2020
https://twitter.com/ALT_uscis/status/1267157811055800320
3/ pretending to be antifa boston on youtube, forgot to hide the confederate flag
[QUOTED TWEET]
ALT-immigration
twitter.com/ALT_uscis
Aug 17, 2017
https://twitter.com/ALT_uscis/status/898408214416445440
Here is a funny... from "antifa Boston" they posted a video on YouTube... check the flags behind the douche
[EMBEDDED IMAGE FROM VIDEO]
----- 6 -----
Jordan Peele
twitter.com/JordanPeele
31 May 2020
https://twitter.com/JordanPeele/status/1267126688732704771
The look on a cops face when they realize they’re being filmed says everything. Rage and fear. Their life flashes before their eyes. A glance at a partner; unsure if they should stop the assault they’re commiting or go get the camera.
For them accountability is violent.
----- 7 -----
Caught on camera, police explode in rage and violence across the US
America’s occupation by militarized police is in full view
By T.C. Sottek
May 31, 2020
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/31/21276044/police-violence-protest-george-floyd
Over the past 72 hours, people across the US have captured what may be the most comprehensive live picture of police brutality ever. Any one of the videos we’ve seen could have sparked a national discussion, with people picking apart their elements, searching for context to argue about, and digging through the pasts of everyone involved. But it’s not just one act of violence. It’s everywhere.
Here is just a short list of scenes from the past few days:
----- 8 -----
Kevin M. Kruse
twitter.com/KevinMKruse
31 May 2020
https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/1267109727256948736
As others have noted, this past week has felt like a replay of Chicago 1968 all across the nation.
But it goes much deeper than that.
[THREAD, many embedded images]
----- 9 -----
#BlackLivesMatter
twitter.com/doctorow
31 May 2020
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1267117154387689472
If you're following the wave of uprisings against racist police violence, you've probably heard that Derek Chauvin, the cop who murdered George Floyd, had a long history of criminal conduct, but was still carrying a gun, wearing a badge, and billing the taxpayer.
----- 10 -----
Monique O. Madan
twitter.com/MoniqueOMadan
31 May 2020
https://twitter.com/MoniqueOMadan/status/1267166443428290567
twitter.com/CBP is deploying officers and agents to cities nationwide in response to recent violent protests.
Sources close to the operation tell me they are responding to demonstrations today in Miami-Dade and Broward. twitter.com/MiamiHerald
[FROM THREAD]
It's unclear whether officers would be checking people's immigration status.
CBP agents, according to federal law, don’t need a warrant to “within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States."
The law defines a “reasonable distance” as 100 air miles from the coastal border — which covers the entire state of Florida.
CBP: “While most Border Patrol work is conducted in the immediate border area, agents have broad law enforcement authority and are not limited to a specific geography within the US. They have the authority to question individuals, make arrests, and take and consider evidence.”
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Robert Faturechi
twitter.com/RobertFaturechi
30 May 2020
https://twitter.com/RobertFaturechi/status/1266970634170494976
I was texting with an old L.A. cop source. White, high-ranking, old school.
His take on the Minneapolis Police Department shocked me...
[EMBEDDED MESSAGE THREAD]
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Seven Reasons Police Brutality Is Systemic, Not Anecdotal
July 2, 2014
Bonnie Kristian
The American Conservative
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/seven-reasons-police-brutality-is-systematic-not-anecdotal/
Darrin Manning’s unprovoked “stop and frisk” encounter with the Philadelphia police left him hospitalized with a ruptured testicle. Neykeyia Parker was violently dragged out of her car and aggressively arrested in front of her young child for “trespassing” at her own apartment complex in Houston. A Georgia toddler was burned when police threw a flash grenade into his playpen during a raid, and the manager of a Chicago tanning salon was confronted by a raiding police officer bellowing that he would kill her and her family, captured on the salon’s surveillance. An elderly man in Ohio was left in need of facial reconstructive surgery after police entered his home without a warrant to sort out a dispute about a trailer.
These stories are a small selection of recent police brutality reports, as police misconduct has become a fixture of the news cycle.
But the plural of anecdote is not data, and the media is inevitably drawn toward tales of conflict. Despite the increasing frequency with which we hear of misbehaving cops, many Americans maintain a default respect for the man in uniform. As an NYPD assistant chief put it, “We don’t want a few bad apples or a few rogue cops damaging” the police’s good name.
This is an attractive proposal, certainly, but unfortunately it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Here are seven reasons why police misconduct is a systemic problem, not “a few bad apples”:
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Fire, pestilence and a country at war with itself: the Trump presidency is over
A pandemic unabated, an economy in meltdown, cities in chaos over police killings. All our supposed leader does is tweet
Robert Reich
31 May 2020
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/31/donald-trump-coronavirus-pandemic-george-floyd-minneapolis-tweets
You’d be forgiven if you hadn’t noticed. His verbal bombshells are louder than ever, but Donald J Trump is no longer president of the United States.
By having no constructive response to any of the monumental crises now convulsing America, Trump has abdicated his office.
He is not governing. He’s golfing, watching cable TV and tweeting.
How has Trump responded to the widespread unrest following the murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for minutes as he was handcuffed on the ground?
Trump called the protesters “thugs” and threatened to have them shot. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted, parroting a former Miami police chief whose words spurred race riots in the late 1960s.
On Saturday, he gloated about “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons” awaiting protesters outside the White House, should they ever break through Secret Service lines.
Trump’s response to the last three ghastly months of mounting disease and death has been just as heedless. Since claiming Covid-19 was a “Democratic hoax” and muzzling public health officials, he has punted management of the coronavirus to the states.
Governors have had to find ventilators to keep patients alive and protective equipment for hospital and other essential workers who lack it, often bidding against each other. They have had to decide how, when and where to reopen their economies.
Trump has claimed “no responsibility at all” for testing and contact-tracing – the keys to containing the virus. His new “plan” places responsibility on states to do their own testing and contact-tracing.
Trump is also awol in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
More than 41 million Americans are jobless. In the coming weeks temporary eviction moratoriums are set to end in half of the states. One-fifth of Americans missed rent payments this month. Extra unemployment benefits are set to expire at the end of July.
What is Trump’s response? Like Herbert Hoover, who in 1930 said “the worst is behind us” as thousands starved, Trump says the economy will improve and does nothing about the growing hardship. The Democratic-led House passed a $3tn relief package on 15 May. Mitch McConnell has recessed the Senate without taking action and Trump calls the bill dead on arrival.
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Trump says he will designate antifa a terrorist organization
By Brandon Conradis and Justine Coleman - 05/31/20
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/500357-trump-says-he-will-designate-antifa-a-terrorist-organization
President Trump on Sunday tweeted that he was preparing to formally label anti-fascist activists known as antifa a terrorist organization, raising questions about how the designation would be implemented and whether he even had the legal authority to go through with it.
"The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization," Trump tweeted, as the nation reeled from another night of protests sweeping the country, from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., in response to the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis on Monday.
His announcement came the same day Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department would seek to identify "criminal organizers and instigators" amid the demonstrators.
Barr in his Sunday statement said the Department of Justice will work with its 56 regional FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces to focus on "apprehending and charging the violent radical agitators who have hijacked peaceful protest and are engaged in violations of federal law."
"Preventing reconciliation and driving us apart is the goal of these radical groups, and we cannot let them succeed," he said.
"The violence instigated and carried out by Antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly," Barr added.
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Trump envisioned 'American carnage.' Now, he's got it.
Analysis: The president has met protests against state violence with calls for more of it.
31 May 2020
By Jonathan Allen
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-envisioned-american-carnage-now-he-s-got-it-n1220361
WASHINGTON — When Trump first addressed the nation as its president on Jan. 20, 2017, he depicted the nation's cities as domestic combat zones and declared "this American carnage stops right here and stops right now."
Back then, it was hyperbole at best. But it's become reality on his watch, and he has encouraged further violence.
More than 100,000 Americans have lost their lives, and another 40 million their livelihoods, amid a coronavirus pandemic to which Trump was slow to react. Against that backdrop, cities across the country are now combustible cauldrons of fear, anger, fire and tear gas as Trump has responded to the violence with threats and little evidence of understanding its cause.
Since the police killing of George Floyd, a black man, in Minneapolis last week, Trump has largely thrown rhetorical Molotov cocktails over the front lines of the national uprising from the safety of his White House bunker.
In other words, the president met protests against state violence with calls for more of it.
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Black Protesters Who Want To Demonstrate Peacefully Are Calling Out White People Who Instigate Violence
"When we aren't asking people to destroy things in our name and people do it anyway, we know that this is something that's going to blow back on us," one black activist told BuzzFeed News.
Clarissa-Jan Lim
Posted on May 30, 2020
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/clarissajanlim/protesters-violence-george-floyd
Tay Anderson wanted Friday's protest against police brutality in Denver to be peaceful.
"We asked people throughout the day, please do not deface property, please do not destroy stuff, because we're not asking you to do that," Anderson, a Denver school board director and activist, told BuzzFeed News.
Still, with hundreds taking to the streets for the second day of demonstrations against the killing of George Floyd, a black man who died after a Minneapolis police officer put him in a neck chokehold, there was vandalism and clashes with Denver police, who fired tear gas and flash-bangs into the crowd.
In a video that has been shared online widely, Anderson, who is black, is seen confronting a white man with a cloth covering on his face after the man spray-paints "ACAB" — "all cops are bastards" — on public property.
Anderson said he was doing a news interview when he saw the man vandalizing, so he turned around and tried to stop him.
"I said, 'We asked allies to step back so that we can make sure that you're following what we're asking you to do,'" he recalled. "And he was like, 'I'm not your ally, you guys want to protect the status quo. I don't need to be here for you all.'"
Anderson said there were "several people" who were behaving like that at the protest, some of whom he believed are "right-wing conservative individuals who just don't give a damn about black and brown people, or want to make this movement look bad."
"It wasn't black and brown folks that were antagonizing police. It was white people throwing stuff at them," he said. "And then when they kept throwing bags of urine, cans, and water bottles, that's when the police snapped and they started tear-gassing innocent bystanders."
Denver police spokesperson Kurt Barnes told BuzzFeed News the department's tactics on crowd management "depends upon the severity of the response from the people in the crowd, and based on that it depends on whether the officers feel their lives are threatened."
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Betsy DeVos Tells Connecticut: Ban Transgender Athletes, Or Say Goodbye To Your Federal Funding
Dawn EnnisContributor
Diversity & Inclusion
I report on the fight for transgender equality and other LGBTQ issues.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dawnstaceyennis/2020/05/29/betsy-devos-tells-connecticut-ban-transgender-athletes-or-say-goodbye-to-your-federal-funding/
Allowing transgender girls to compete in school sports with girls who are not transgender is a violation of federal law, and if it’s not stopped in 20 days, Connecticut risks losing federal education funding. That’s the ruling by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, made public Thursday in a report by the Associated Press.
Wrong, says the American Civil Liberties Union; one of its most fierce defenders of transgender Americans called the ruling nothing more than another example of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s politically-driven agenda of discrimination, specifically targeting trans girls, and trampling on their rights.
“Today’s finding, which is not a legal ruling, represents another attack from the Trump administration on transgender students,” said Chase Strangio Thursday in a statement. He’s the deputy director for trans justice, with the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project. “Since 2017, DeVos’ Department of Education has taken consistent aim at transgender students. Once again, the administration is wrong on the law and we will continue to defend transgender students under Title IX and the Constitution. Trans students belong in our schools, including on sports teams, and we will not back down from this fight.”
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Bill de Blasio Needs to Resign. By Defending Police Violence, He Has Betrayed New Yorkers.
Medhi Hansan
31 May 2020
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/31/nyc-mayor-bill-de-blasio-should-resign/
Bill de Blasio is a moral and political disgrace.
In March, as the coronavirus spread through the nation’s biggest city, the mayor of New York City was proudly “telling people to not avoid restaurants, not avoid the normal things they would do” because “if you are not sick … you should be going about your life.” His advice may have contributed to the deaths of thousands of New Yorkers.
In April, he angrily singled out the “Jewish community” in a tweet, threatening a vulnerable minority with mass arrests for breaking social distancing rules — which he himself had violated just three days earlier.
Yet late on Saturday night, as mass protests against police brutality raged across New York City, the Democratic mayor crossed a new and grotesque line: He went on live television, on NY1, to defend and excuse police brutality against those protesters.
De Blasio needs to resign.
He should resign because his comments on Saturday night were brazen and disgusting lies. Two New York Police Department vehicles were filmed ramming into protesters behind a barricade. The mayor said the video was “upsetting” but claimed that it was “inappropriate for protesters to surround a police vehicle and threaten police officers,” adding that the officers had to “get out” of that “impossible” situation.
The police were surrounded? They had no other options? The (viral) video evidence suggests otherwise.
It is clear that neither police car was surrounded; both drivers could have reversed but chose instead to plough their vehicles into the crowd of people in front of them. So who should we believe? De Blasio or our own lying eyes?
He should resign because he is behaving less like a leader and more like a sociopath. “If those protestors had just gotten out of the way we wouldn’t be talking about this situation,” is an actual quote from the mayor of New York City, in his live broadcast on NY1. Got that? The unarmed people on the street run over by armed men in cars should … blame themselves for being run over!
He should resign because he is starting to sound like the far-right Republican president he once wanted to replace (until he had to end his presidential campaign last September because he was polling at less than 1 percent nationally.) This, I kid you not, is another astonishing quote from the mayor: “Any protester that tries to take the humanity away from a police officer and devalue them just because they are a public servant is no better than the racists who devalue people of color and particularly black men in America.”
To quote New York human rights lawyer Kumar Rao, “This is Bill de Blasio’s ‘very fine people on both sides’ moment.” (It is also worth noting here that the “very fine” white nationalist in Charlottesville, Virginia, who killed Heather Heyer did so by driving his car into a crowd of protesters!)
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When American conservatism becomes un-American
By George F. Will
Columnist
May 29, 2020 at 4:00 a.m. PDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-american-conservatism-becomes-un-american/2020/05/28/336a953a-a0f6-11ea-b5c9-570a91917d8d_story.html
From Harvard Law School comes the latest conservative flirtation with authoritarianism. Professor Adrian Vermeule, a 2016 Catholic convert, is an “integralist” who regrets his academic specialty, the Constitution, and rejects the separation of church and state. His much-discussed recent Atlantic essay advocating a government that judges “the quality and moral worth of public speech” is unimportant as a practical political manifesto, but it is symptomatic of some conservatives’ fevers, despairs and temptations.
“Common-good capitalism,” a recent proposal by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), is capitalism minus the essence of capitalism — limited government respectful of society’s cumulative intelligence and preferences collaboratively revealed through market transactions. Vermeule’s “common-good constitutionalism” is Christian authoritarianism — muscular paternalism, with government enforcing social solidarity for religious reasons. This is the Constitution minus the Framers’ purpose: a regime respectful of individuals’ diverse notions of the life worth living. Such respect is, he says, “abominable.”
Vermeule would jettison “libertarian assumptions central to free-speech law and free-speech ideology.” And: “Libertarian conceptions of property rights and economic rights will also have to go, insofar as they bar the state from enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution of resources.” Who will define these duties? Integralists will, because they have an answer to this perennial puzzle: If the people are corrupt, how do you persuade them to accept the yoke of virtue-enforcers? The answer: Forget persuasion. Hierarchies must employ coercion.
