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seriousbusinessforhumans · 4 years ago

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Jan. 14, 2021

Dozens of people on a terrorist watch list were in Washington for pro-Trump events Jan. 6, a day that ended in a chaotic crime rampage when a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, according to people familiar with evidence gathered in the FBI’s investigation.

The majority of the watch-listed individuals in Washington that day are suspected white supremacists whose past conduct so alarmed investigators that their names had been previously entered into the national Terrorist Screening Database, or TSDB, a massive set of names flagged as potential security risks, these people said. The watch list is larger and separate from the “no-fly” list the government maintains to prevent terrorism suspects from boarding airplanes, and those listed are not automatically barred from any public or commercial spaces, current and former officials said.

The presence of so many watch-listed individuals in one place — without more robust security measures to protect the public — is another example of the intelligence failures preceding last week’s fatal assault that sent lawmakers running for their lives, some current and former law enforcement officials argued. The revelation follows a Washington Post report earlier this week detailing the FBI’s failure to act aggressively on an internal intelligence report of Internet discussions about plans to attack Congress, smash windows, break down doors and “get violent . . . go there ready for war.”

Since its creation, the terrorist watch list, which is maintained by the FBI, has grown to include hundreds of thousands of names. Placing someone’s name on the watch list does not mean they will be watched all of the time, or even much of the time, for reasons of both practicality and fairness, but it can alert different parts of the government, such as border agents or state police, to look more closely at certain individuals they encounter.

Several law enforcement officials said they are shocked by the backgrounds of some individuals under investigation in connection with the Capitol riot, a pool of suspects that includes current and former law enforcement and military personnel as well as senior business executives and middle-aged business owners.

The TSDB, often referred to within government as simply “the watch list,” is overseen by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, which was created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks carried out by al-Qaeda. The watch list can be used as both an investigative and early-warning tool, but its primary purpose is to help various government agencies keep abreast of what individuals seen as potential risks are doing and where they travel, according to people familiar with the work.

Before the Jan. 6 gathering of pro-Trump protesters, FBI agents visited a number of suspected extremists and advised them against traveling to the nation’s capital. Many complied, but according to people familiar with the sprawling investigation, dozens of others whose names appear in the terrorist watch list apparently attended, based on information reviewed by the FBI.

FBI investigating whether some rioters aimed to kill or capture lawmakers

Separately, while the FBI is hunting hundreds of rioting suspects who have dispersed back to their hometowns, federal agents are increasingly focused on alleged leaders, members and supporters of the Proud Boys, a male-chauvinist group with ties to white nationalism, these people said. Proud Boys members participated in last week’s protests, and FBI agents are taking a close look at what roles, if any, the group’s adherents may have had in organizing, directing or carrying out violence, according to people familiar with the matter.

The group’s chairman, Enrique Tarrio, had planned to attend Trump’s Jan. 6 rally but was arrested when he arrived in D.C. and charged with misdemeanor destruction of property in connection with the burning of a Black Lives Matter banner taken from a Black church during an earlier protest in Washington. He is also accused of felony possession of two extended gun magazines. Tarrio told The Post on Wednesday that his group did not organize the Capitol siege.

Tarrio said he’s actively discouraging members from attending planned armed marches scheduled Sunday, and the Million Militia March next week when Biden is inaugurated. Proud Boys, he said, are on a “rally freeze and will not be organizing any events for the next month or so.”

It is unclear how many Proud Boys devotees will abide by the freeze, or if such a shutdown might lessen the FBI’s interest in the group. Even before the Jan. 6 riot, federal and local investigators were working to understand the group’s plans, goals and activities. Privately, some federal law enforcement officials have described the group as roughly equivalent to a nascent street gang that has garnered an unusual degree of national attention, in part because Trump mentioned them specifically during one of his televised debates with Biden during the campaign. Other officials have expressed concern that the group may be growing rapidly into something more dangerous and directed.

The FBI has already arrested dozens of accused rioters, and officials have pledged that in cases of the most egregious conduct, they will seek to file tough, rarely used charges such as seditious conspiracy, which carries a potential 20-year prison sentence.

The bureau continues to face blowback over its handling of a Jan. 5 internal report warning of discussions of violence at Congress the next day. Steven M. D’Antuono, the head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, claimed in the days after the riot that the bureau did not have intelligence ahead of time indicating the rally would be anything other than a peaceful demonstration.

The Jan. 5 FBI report, written by the bureau’s office in Norfolk, and reviewed by The Post, shows that was not the case, and the Justice Department took other steps indicating officials were at least somewhat concerned about possible violence the next day. The Bureau of Prisons sent 100 officers to D.C. to supplement security at the Justice Department building, an unusual move similar to what the department did in June to respond to civil unrest stemming from racial-justice protests.

Mindful of the criticism that law enforcement took a heavy-handed, all-hands-on-deck approach to Black Lives Matters protests in D.C. in the spring and summer, Justice Department officials deferred to the Capitol Police to defend their building and lawmakers. Some former officials have questioned whether the FBI and Justice Department should have done more.

“It would not have been enough for the bureau simply to share information, if it did so, with state and local law enforcement or federal partner agencies,” said David Laufman, a former Justice Department national security official. “It was the bureau’s responsibility to quarterback a coordinated federal response as the crisis was unfolding and in the days thereafter. And it’s presently not clear to what extent the FBI asserted itself in that fashion during the exigencies of January 6 and in the immediate aftermath.”

(selected segments of the article)

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kirstymcneill · 4 years ago

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Effective Activism in a Time of Coronavirus: what are we learning six months in?

This post first appeared on Global Dashboard on the 8th of July 2020.

Nothing I’ve read has captured our times and our task better than this essay from Western States Center ED Eric K. Ward: “leading in easy times is, well, easy. But these times are not them”. Leading in difficult times is unbelievably hard, but we will all be better at it if we share what we’re learning and invite others to challenge our thinking and contribute their own. In that spirit, here are the four things that I think are emerging as lessons about effective activism in a time of coronavirus.

In a fight between a rewind and a revolution, revolution’s gonna lose

My timeline is still going nuts for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s powerful “Message from the Future”. The bit that gives me pause comes in at the 3 minutes mark, “the world’s leading climate scientists told us we had 12 years left to cut our emissions in half, 12 years to change everything”. It was released, of course, before the coronavirus crisis, but the pandemic has given prominence to a similar rhetoric elsewhere.

Here in the UK, for example, the Build Back Better coalition argue we are in a similarly transformative moment: “let’s not go back to normal … what we do next could change everything”. And the crisis has seen a new lease of life for the slogan “we won’t go back to normal when normal was the problem”, first used in protests in Chile towards the end of 2019 but now turning up everywhere from graffiti in Hong Kong to the fridge doors of activists to university research programmes.

That positioning is understandable – many of our missions face an existential threat from climate change and the need to dismantle white supremacy and racism could hardly be more urgent. But it is precisely because the stakes are so high that we have to focus on winning big rather than talking big.

How should we respond to the evidence that many people are absolutely desperate for a “return to normal” and not sure if they’d like to change very much, never mind “everything”? Roger Harding’s essay here charts that the crisis has seen a big spike in demand for nostalgic television and music, and it may not be an accident that the BBC’s coming of age drama Normal People is the breakout success of lockdown. If what’s happening in popular culture is any guide, people want to look back before they move forward. We need to accept that in a fight between a rewind and a revolution, revolution’s gonna lose.

Likewise, publics may not recognise the two separate worlds that Arundhati Roy charts so beautifully in her “The Pandemic is a Portal” essay. In Roy’s telling, we are faced with “a gateway between one world and the next” and the choice before us is whether we “choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us” or whether we “walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it”.

I wonder how many people see the pandemic in quite this way, with a clear delineation between the old world ‘yesterday’, the crisis ‘today’ and the recovery ‘tomorrow’. Some may also see today’s pandemic as merely what journalist Ros Wynne-Jones called “a grim dress-rehearsal” for the emergencies to come. For that constituency there will be a real premium on immediate strategies for securing recent gains, starting with the list George Graham lays out here.

Fighting campaigns that can deliver immediate and tangible change isn’t a substitute for bolder transformation, but it is a necessary precursor to it, because strategies which confuse a public appetite to build back better with one to build back completely different just aren’t going to attract a big enough base. As one union organiser told me, “there’s no point asking people to trust you to organise a revolution if you can’t get a microwave in the staff canteen”.

‘Don’t mourn, organise’ is the wrong mantra for our times. We need to do both

I’ve written before about the work we’ve been doing to defend aid and development in the UK. It’s good work – innovative, strategic and delivered with discipline. I’m proud of it, and of our success in defying political gravity to maintain support for aid in the face of sustained attacks. We have, however, just suffered a huge defeat, with the Prime Minister choosing to abolish our world-leading development department in the middle of the biggest humanitarian crisis for 100 years and on the eve of the 15th anniversary of the “great generation’s” Make Poverty History campaign.

It isn’t hard to see what is going on here. A ‘new front in the culture war’ is opening and it’s increasingly clear that “retoxification” is not a by-product of the strategy, it is the strategy. At the end of 2019 I felt that identifying models that could galvanise but not polarise was the core strategic campaigning question of the decade, but I now feel it’s a much more insistent one that should dominate our summer.

Professor Tim Bale’s excellent research into the divergent attitudes of voters, activists and political leaders shows where we are headed, at least in the UK. The voters who have ‘lent’ their votes to the government on the basis of values alignment and economic competence are going to start peeling off fast as soon as furlough ends, unemployment climbs and the government’s reputation for economic competence takes a battering. At that point, this research implies, there’s no strategy available to the government other than dialling up the cultural campaign. We can expect to see more, and not less, of “the war on woke” and an increased push from the ‘Britannia Unchained’ generation in the cabinet to do away with regulations and protections.

If that analysis is right, activists have a strategic choice to make and only a matter of weeks to make it: are we here to win a culture war, or to end one?

Of course we need to spend this period re-strategising, including asking ourselves the question campaigners most hate to answer, but need to: if you’re so smart, how come you’re getting beaten so badly? But more than that, we need to give ourselves the time to mourn what we have lost.

We have literal grieving to do – for all the people who have died before their time, the pain compounded by the knowledge that structural racism and poverty have done as much damage as biology here. And we have grieving of the more abstract sort to do too – the kind of coming to terms with loss we all need to do when something we truly value, not just desire, has gone.

The Collective Pyschology Project’s “This Too Shall Pass” report gives us a toolkit for how to grieve but it is actually earlier work by its founder Alex Evans that tells us why activists have to learn to grieve. If we don’t work through denial, anger, bargaining and depression properly, we’ve no hope of getting to acceptance and, therefore, to a place where we can see clearly what our next move should be.

I’ve written elsewhere about the power of Andrew Tenzer’s “The Empathy Delusion” report but his latest research, “The Aspiration Window” should also give activists pause for thought. If we, like our colleagues in communications, also score highly on a sense of personal agency, that can be a tremendous source of resilience and optimism in normal times. It is, however, a recipe for burn-out and guilt in these times. We have to accept we can’t campaign our way out of a pandemic, and we can’t always beat overwhelming political odds.

“Don’t mourn, organise” is the wrong mantra for now. Let’s do both.

Think global, act local has come of age – but we need to buttress it

Many of us have spent many years desperately trying to generate a sense of global citizenship, recognising that global problems need global solutions, but global solutions need global constituencies to push for them. The pandemic has helped illuminate that like nothing else in our lifetime – and events like the Global Citizen #TogetherAtHome concert have given our sense of interconnectedness a public expression.

While some governments have pushed a sense of national exceptionalism (and certainly benefitted in the short term from a ‘rally around the flag’ effect), there’s actually limited evidence that people are identifying particularly fervently with the nation state, despite its prominence in everything from paying our wages to dictating when we can get a haircut.

Instead, counter-intuitively, we seem to be feeling simultaneously more local and more global than ever before. This will be welcome news for community organisers and internationalists alike, but we shouldn’t take it for granted that this feeling will be permanent.

Here in the UK, British Future’s Sunder Katwala’s careful reading of the polls throughout the crisis gives him a cautious optimism – we feel that we are likely to come out of this crisis more connected and kinder than we went into it, but this effect is much more pronounced about people with whom we have direct social contact. The more we know people, the more we trust them, and the street or estate where we live is now full of people we newly know.

Likewise, findings from the team at the Neighbourly Lab suggest a new sense of connection is powerful at a micro-local level, but it will need permanent infrastructure to be instituted quickly if the new neighbourliness is to be maintained. “The Moment We Noticed”, from the Relationships Observatory, makes a similar case, pointing to how “ten million willing citizens have chosen to spend at least 3 hours a week caring for one another” and inviting us to consider what we can do together to sustain new relationships into the future.

Both reports also contain some interesting watch-outs about what might happen when we move from the ‘honeymoon’ to the ‘disillusionment’ phase that is often seen in the aftermath of an emergency, and encourage us to recognise that communitarian feeling is often rather fragile and dependent on a sense that others are doing their bit.

Certainly our thinking when we put together the “#OurOtherNationalDebt” essay collection was that a focus on repaying those who’ve made an outsized contribution (or paid an outsized price) at this particular time was more likely to command sustained public support than anything that felt like a reheat of long-held pre-pandemic positions. Society might have changed a bit but in general it’s still the case that we quite like the people we’ve got to know, but we’re also alert to any signs of free-riding or, worst of all, queue-jumping.

Elsewhere in Europe, the European Council on Foreign Relations call both the idea that there has been a sudden surge in belief in an expanded role for the state and one in nationalism “illusions that could lead European governments to fall foul of public opinion as they plan the recovery”. Instead, they show “that the overwhelming majority of people want more EU cooperation”, but recognise that this is motivated more by a sense of wanting collective insurance than a rejuvenation of a sense of common ideals.

At the same time, the OECD predict that it’s at least possible that global aid flows will be maintained or even increase in coming years, pointing to some successes in securing debt relief, multilateral funding for Gavi and an increase in support for humanitarian efforts.

Part of what is going on here is the public’s sophisticated understanding of the coronavirus – that the experience might be universal, but it is it not uniform. We understand that there are people in precarious employment in every country, parents struggling to put food on the table in every country, children trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide in every country. Lockdown and school closures in particular have been near-universal experiences, but their effects have been far from uniform between countries or inside them. People get that both local neighbourliness and multilateralism can provide particular protections, mitigating catastrophe and smoothing out vulnerabilities a bit.

Support for both local mutual aid efforts and international solidarity efforts is, in other words, conditional. We instinctively feel the local and the global are the right levels to deal with different elements of the pandemic and its effects, but we want to be sure everyone is pulling their weight, and we’re getting enough out of it for what we’re willing to put in.

That means we need to be planning now for campaigning infrastructure that can turn the new neighbourliness into the new normal, while helping people draw connections between their new local involvement and the need for active citizenship at a national and global level.

The Dignity’s Project’s research on the mutual aid movement suggests there are foundations already in place, but activists will need to be careful not to over-interpret the data, with 57% of respondents saying “mutual aid groups like mine have nothing to do with politics”.

So if we want people to move towards more active civic involvement, to make what the New Citizenship Project calls the big shift “from consumer to citizen”, we need to introduce the idea of political activism as something that sits in service of, and not in a separate realm to, people’s individual moral choices and willingness to muck-in locally.

The new National Health Team is one attempt to operate at these three levels – individual, local and political. The coming months are likely to see a flowering of these kinds of efforts, as we increasingly recognise that none of individual behaviour change, local volunteering or traditional advocacy-led campaigning will be enough on their own.

An imperfect message that gets heard is better than a perfect one that doesn’t

The social change sector globally is currently producing a large number of really superb messaging guides around coronavirus and there are some brilliant research projects on the go about attitudes about everything from climate change to regulation to social security. The challenge for our movements is whether we can do enough with the insights once we have them.

Two barriers present themselves. The first is that research which shows how to communicate for one purpose (for example, to shore up support for aid, in the case of our Public Insight 2020 project) will not necessarily be widely adopted by people with a brief to communicate for another important purpose (for example, recruiting donors or promoting an organisation’s brand). That’s not just the case for international issues – the tension plays out around storytelling efforts on domestic poverty too. Organisations with enough marketing budget or media reach to make a dent in public opinion are, almost by definition, also likely to be delivering frontline services under the extraordinary pressure of rising demand and falling income.

Meanwhile, many of the organisations which are nimble enough to internalise the insight lack the reach to make it count. Across our fields we’ve got a lot of money being spent crafting narratives no-one is going to hear. It’s time to get much more serious about thinking about our routes to market when we embark on insight work and we need to be willing to pay for the distribution as well as the design of the messages.

Serious strategic communications efforts cost money – and mobilisation efforts which can actually leverage the latent political power of the people who agree with your message even more so. At Save the Children we’ve introduced a strong organising flavour into our campaigning work (as Tom Baker lays out here) and in the Aid Campaign we’ve focused on building local ‘power postcodes’ groups in the places that matter most. We will be spending the summer thinking about how to scale that work.

While it’s massively welcome that we’ve seen a big uptick in the amount of insight work big NGOs and funders are investing in, it’s all pretty academic if we’re not overlaying it with an understanding of political geography and overlaying that in turn with investment in local power.

We are only six months into the coronavirus crisis and don’t yet know when – or how – it will end. What we do know is that activism is unlikely to be what speeds our exit from the crisis, but it is the single biggest determinant of whether that exit is equitable. This moment demands our best ever work and we won’t do it without plans to deal with the biggest strategic challenges in front of us. This list of four may be incomplete, but it’s where I think we should begin.

#activism #campaigning #polarisation #strategy

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quakerjoe · 7 years ago

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We keep hearing about “both sides” and “duelling rallies” in the news as though Charlottesville’ s about whether we prefer Coke or Pepsi. This is clearly false equivalence.

Yes, we have two sides. But make no mistake: One “side” wants monuments to slavery and racism taken down from their places of honor and put in museums where they belong. The other “side” uses threats, violence, and terror to put blacks, people of color, Jews, women, LGBT people, and their allies “back in their place.” Whether that “place” is in slave quarters, reservations, concentration camps, the kitchen, the closet, or out of politics, no one should have been put in those places to begin with.

Vox had a reporter in Charlottesville chatting up “both sides” during last week’s “Unite the Right Rally.” Her harrowing video report should set any all doubts about the major threat posed by the so-called “Alt-Right” to rest. And now, there’s a Facebook post from a Charlottesville resident who helped provide medical treatment to those injured. This person also knows some of the counter-protesters and their families. It turns out that while Saturday’s events were horrific, the days leading up to it were scary as well.

Medic on the scene tells us what they saw Charlottesville.

While the poster doesn’t want their name published, they’ve given American News X permission to repost it. The following has been lightly edited for clarity.

“I rarely post politics or anything else on Facebook … But let me be clear. I was acting as a medic in Charlottesville. “Both sides”-ing about it is absolutely unacceptable. Content note: I’m going to get quite graphic here because while I understand that there’s quite a range of political viewpoints among my Facebook friends, I want to get this point through to everyone whatever your politics.

In the run-up to that weekend, some local counter-protest organizers’ families were forced to flee their homes because of violent threats. Some of them had “bodyguards” – friends escorting them everywhere they went that week, even to the grocery store, work, all the mundane places that people go in their normal lives.

On Friday night, a torch-wielding mob chanting Nazi and other racist slogans (e.g. “blood and soil,” and “Jews will not replace us”), some doing Nazi salutes. They then surrounded a small group of college student counter-protesters who held a banner and stood with linked arms around a statue [of Thomas Jefferson] and screamed, “White lives matter” and “anti-white” at them. who had linked arms around a statue and held a banner. They threw fuel at the students, beat them with lit torches, pepper-sprayed them, and punched them (including pepper-spraying a girl in a wheelchair). The police mostly stood by until the Nazis were gone.

Later that night, a medic who was wearing a kippah (a Jewish skullcap) was followed in the dark by one of the Nazis and took it off after that so as not to be targeted. A university librarian who joined the students to try to protect them has now had a stroke. At some point that evening, the torch-wielders also surrounded a black church while chanting racist slogans. All of this not only hurt people that night but set expectations for how these white nationalists would behave the next day.

On Saturday morning, a line of clergy, along with a gradually growing group of other protesters, showed up outside the Nazi rally, facing militia movement members who were carrying assault rifles. Given the iconography, which included swastikas, the Black Sun, and fasces, an ancient Roman symbol of authority and the chants, of involved groups, I don’t have a problem using that word. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking these were mainstream conservative groups that are being described hyperbolically. There was shouting back and forth, and a small early fist fight where a Nazi punched a nearby counter-protester who spilled coffee on him. Nazis were screaming anti-Semitic things at rabbis in the clergy line, and chanting “blood and soil” in response to the clergy singing “This little light of mine.” Eventually, they cleared both sides out of the area.

At one point, some clergy did a peaceful blockade of one of the park entrances, which was forcibly broken by an incoming white nationalist group with skulls painted on their shields. The heavy bi-directional fighting, though, mostly got going after a group of counter-protesters nonviolently blocked the way of an oncoming group of white nationalists, who broke through the blockade with clubs and heavy shields. Some people defended themselves as the white nationalists kept charging and swinging clubs.

After that, there were fistfights and club-fights breaking out all around, Nazis pepper-spraying and tear-gassing counter-protest crowds, plastic water bottles thrown in both directions. A Nazi group that didn’t know where the entrance to the park was added to the street fights. Some clergy ran to shield vulnerable people with their bodies, and those clergies were protected by Antifa-associated counter-protesters — multiple clergy/theologians have said that they would have been “crushed” and maybe killed if Antifa had not protected them. This went on for a long time. For most of this, the police stood around. Eventually, they cleared both sides out of the area.

The town’s synagogue is a short distance from the park. Throughout the day, Nazis paraded by it doing the Nazi salute and shouting antisemitic slurs. The police had refused to provide a guard to the synagogue for some reason, so it had hired its own armed guard. There were threats of burning it down coming in. It had to cancel a Havdalah service at a congregant’s house that evening out of fear of attack.

The march that was attacked by James Fields and a caravan of cars was that afternoon. What street fighting had happened was long-since over by then. It was a happy march, it was not fighting anyone. The car attack came out of nowhere and the aftermath looked like a war zone. It hit the front of the march as the march was going around a corner, and many people weren’t sure what had happened at first, people were screaming about a bomb. In addition to the woman who died, many people had serious injuries.

A medic who was hit had to have emergency surgery to not lose her leg. A 13-year-old girl and her mom were among the injured. The street was covered in blood. The firefighters and paramedics were great. The police, on the other hand, rolled in an armored vehicle and threatened the crowd of survivors with a tear gas launcher. Police officers ordered the medics who were performing CPR on the woman who died to leave her and clear the area. They refused, and bystanders negotiated with the police to leave them alone.

There were several other incidents throughout the afternoon where white nationalists/Nazis/whatever were menacing small groups of wandering counter-protesters with their cars, swerving toward them on the sidewalk like they were going to hit them, that kind of thing, including after the car attack. At one point my medic buddy and I were about 50 feet ahead of such a group and heard screeching car sounds and screams, and ran back, thinking for a second that there had been another terrorist attack and that this time we were the only medics on-site, but fortunately it was just a scare – the driver then “rolled coal” (intentionally emitting a dark cloud of exhaust) at the people on the sidewalk before driving away. There was also an incident at some point where a young black man was badly beaten by white nationalists in a parking garage.

There is no “both sides” here. I mean, first of all, there is no moral “both sides” because anti-fascists and Nazis aren’t morally the same, period. Disrupting Nazis isn’t the same as being one, period. But there was also no “both sides” even beyond that. Mutual street fighting primarily kicked off by an attack from the opposing side, doesn’t compare to mowing people down with a car, to threatening a synagogue and a black church, to stalking someone for being visibly Jewish, to being part of a Nazi-slogan-screaming mob that surrounds and attacks peaceful college kids and could have easily killed one of them if the fuel thrown on a couple of them had been lit by one of the many thrown or swung torches.

Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking the Saturday rally was starting out just a rally like others, but with racist assholes. The people organizing counter protests, whose families had to flee town, would probably take issue with that. The black church and the synagogue, the synagogue congregant who had to cancel a religious/cultural ceremony out of fear, and the ones who had to leave the building in groups out the back entrance to avoid attack, would probably take issue with that. The people who were physically attacked, on Friday night, by those in town for the Saturday rally, would probably take issue with that.

Don’t elide the difference in the questions of whether hate speech should be criminalized, and how communities and their supporters should protect themselves when people who are already threatening to kill them roll into town to rally and then physically attack community members before their rally while the police don’t stop it. Don’t invoke the Civil Rights Movement to elide it, or tsk-tsk people who were on the ground in Cville. The Civil Rights Movement had its Deacons for Defense and Justice, and similar groups. Just as importantly, many of the leading lights of the Civil Rights Movement were murdered. If you think the only valid kind of activism in response to racist hate is martyrdom, you need to at least think through the implications of that belief.

I did not have a good weekend and I have no interest in hearing comments about how, despite everything I saw and everything I said here, you think this is a “both sides” thing. If you find my activism unacceptable you are welcome to unfriend me.

“VICE News Tonight” correspondent Elle Reeves interviewed white supremacists and counter-protesters in Charlottesville and was also on the scene when James Fields’ car smashed into the crowd. This video is 22 minutes long and has been viewed by over 5 million people because it’s well worth watching. Here is your obligatory warning about graphic language and footage.”

https://youtu.be/P54sP0Nlngg

#virginia

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skirmiche · 7 years ago

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Unorganized notes on Charlottesville

CW for violence, racism, anti-Semitism, graphic imagery

Some notes on what happened from someone who was there. Putting behind a cut because this got long (and obviously it’s pretty triggery).

We showed up around 10 AM and started walking to the park. Along the way, we met up with a group of people (mostly students, some older folks) who were there to counter-protest as well. Together, we all practiced some chants, took advantage of having a public restroom easily available (after an hour drive & too much coffee, we needed it!), and started walking.

The first few minutes of the walk were pretty uneventful. After that, we walked past a line of cops in full riot gear. A helicopter flew low overhead, the sound of it bouncing off the buildings and mixing with our chants. At one point on the way to the park, we walked through a parking lot and there was a man in a truck clearly giving us the stinkeye. I remember keeping an eye on him, worried he was going to hit us.

We were only at the actual protest an hour or so. It got nasty very, very fast. We were up by the front, near...what I think was supposed to be a barricade? It might as well have been made out of tissue paper. I was hit with several water bottles (some were being thrown up high, some were being thrown directly at people near the front lines). Someone was holding a sign about the Jewish media. There was a man standing at the top of the steps with a billy club and a riot shield, shaking it at us, shouting slurs and laughing.

I think that’s the thing that sticks with me the most: how many of them were having fun. There were people standing there in pseudo-military gear next to somebody waving a Nazi flag, smiling and laughing like it was a music festival.

After we’d been there for twenty or thirty minutes, they pushed over the barricade. They pepper sprayed us and threw tear gas canisters. I looked behind me as I was running and saw one hit the top of the nearby tent, throwing off sparks, and hoped the tent wouldn’t catch on fire. I grabbed my friend, who was screaming that she’d been sprayed, and took her to a nearby patch of grass. My other friend and I spent the next thirty minutes trying to take care of her — she’d been sprayed directly in the eyes at point blank rage.

(what it looks like when you use your arms to shield from pepper spray, an hour or two after the fact)

Throughout all of this, the police were entirely absent. We passed cops in full riot gear on the way there, there was a helicopter clearly watching the whole thing, and there was an empty cop car right there by the “barricade,” but actual police presence was eerily absent.

As I was washing pepper spray out of my friend’s eyes, she asked through tears, “Where are the police? Why aren’t they trying to stop this?”

(Turns out, the police stayed out of it because — well, you know why — but also because they were afraid of the people with semiautomatic weapons. That sets a great precedent. Good thing they didn’t have something really dangerous, like loose cigarettes.)

Let me make this clear: there is no “both sides” argument to be had here. There were neo-Nazis with guns trying to break into churches used for first-aid stations and beating up clergy. Per Doctor Cornel West: “if it hadn’t been for the anti-fascists protecting us from the neo-fascists, we would have been crushed like cockroaches.”

On Friday, they attacked a group of students, most of whom were younger than twenty, and marched on a black church while carrying torches. They stood by and smirked as a young black man was beaten almost to death (right by the police station — but it was his friends who saved his life & not the cops). And that doesn't even touch on Heather Heyer, the woman who was murdered.

On our side, I saw one person carrying a baseball bat, out of probably a hundred people. On their side, I would say at least one in three (if not closer to 50-75%) was visibly armed (knives, clubs, guns) and wearing helmets, carrying riot shields (or wannabe-SCA wooden ones), shin guards, etc. They came with the intention of hurting people, whatever they will tell you now in the aftermath.

No, both sides are not just as extreme or bad or equally at fault.

As we sat there taking care of our friend, multiple people stopped to check on us, make sure we were doing first aid correctly, and help us out. A clergy member of some kind (I think Lutheran?) checked on us, then looked around and said, “I was protesting the same stuff forty years ago.”

It could easily be a trick of memory, but both my friend and I recognized Heather from the photos and think that she was one of the people who stopped to help us. She walked down to a corner store to get milk for my friend’s eyes (because we were running out) and then laughed with us about how silly we all looked dousing ourselves in milk.

At some point, there was a loud “pop” and everyone flinched and hit the ground, waiting for more gunfire. I’m still not sure what that was.

Around noon, the police dispersed the rally, telling everyone to leave or they’d fire a sound cannon. My friend was still not in great shape, so we prepared to head back to Richmond.

As we walked to the car, a parade of camouflaged men marched by. Someone asked if they were the National Guard, and one of them said yes (come to find out, it might have been a white supremacist militia masquerading as National Guard).

A local couple, who lived less than a block away, overheard us talking about trying to find a public restroom to clean up in (all of us were filthy at this point, covered in grass, milk, pepto bismol, and the sprays/gasses) and offered to let us use their shower. We did, thanked them profusely, and continued to the car. About ten or fifteen minutes after we were in the car on the way back to Richmond, the news about the car attack broke.

It wasn’t until I got home and saw video that I realized that had happened on the same street we’d been on, not thirty minutes beforehand.

I took another shower, trying to wash the smell and taste of pepper spray and tear gas off of me, mostly unsuccessfully. I was still coughing when I went to bed that night, and even though the redness and swelling went down after three or four hours, my hands wouldn’t stop burning.

I was already onboard the punching Nazis train, but this cemented it. Polite dialogue is not the proper response to people who show up to a protest carrying Nazi flags, clad in KKK regalia, with riot-shields and guns.

I am not writing this because I expect cookies for going (because I consider showing up to protest Nazis & the KKK literally the least I can do as an able-bodied white person). I am writing this because I think first-hand accounts are important to balance out some of the media narratives that are already taking place (even given the horrific events of Saturday) and because I don’t ever want to forget.

I am also writing this because I know that there are probably people who will read this and understand it because it came from a white person. To anyone who is finding this account making sense, while they felt that people of color were being angry, hysterical, and irrational, I say: please take this opportunity to examine yourself. Don’t get defensive, just think about it.

White people, we have to do better. These people are not fucking around. They showed up on Saturday intending to hurt people. They stood by and smirked as their buddies beat a 20 year old black man almost to death. They later cheered on someone driving a car into a crowd of unarmed protesters (and are fine with violence, whatever they’ll say in public). If there is one thing you take away from this, please let it be that we have to stand up to these people.

It was never the time to sit on the sidelines, but now is especially not the time for silence, inaction, or hand-wringing about white supremacists experiencing consequences of their free speech. Your energy is needed elsewhere. Show up. Give money. Speak out.

Take action:

Show up to a protest or counter protest. Tap into your local Black Lives Matter group and see what’s going on near you. There are already similar events planned for Texas A&M on 9/11 and Richmond VA next month, but your local chapters can give you more information about anything planned near you.

Ana Mardoll has some scripts/tips on talking to your white family members about racism.

Look at your workplaces and friend groups. Notice where people of color are absent, probably because they’re being shut out. Notice where they’re being talked over. Say something.

Donate to the GoFundMes of people who were injured there and the organizers who made the counterprotest possible. (Deandre Harris, Natalie Harris, group fund for victim relief, legal fund for Solidarity Cville)

Resources & reading:

Read as many firsthand accounts as you can get:

Someone who was there & hit by the car

Comments from another person who was there

“He saved me, then he was under the car”

Interview with Deandre Harris (please donate to his GoFundMe if you can)

24 hours of anarchy in Charlottesville, through the eyes of one protester

Here’s what really happened in Charlottesville

Fascism has already come to America (Please educate yourself on the historicity of groups like these and their context here. Historically, self-defense is one of the only things that has deterred the Klan. They didn’t just go away after being ignored. More about the Klan here.)

Thread on “anti-PC” culture as relates to current events

Thread on why #ThisIsNotUs is the white people version of #NotAllMen

Thread on radicalization of young white men (Mikki also has a Patreon & PayPal tip jar, if you found her writing helpful)

Read about the Paradox of Tolerance

White Feelings: 0-60 for Charlottesville

Why privilege is white-washed supremacy

Tolerance is not a moral precept (“It is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact.”)

This essay is not specifically about white supremacists, but is extremely relevant:

What makes the Googler's speech dangerous (as opposed to just distasteful) is that he's in a class of people that is accorded social power to use other people to satisfy their wishes: white men. So he's not just expressing an opinion. He's doing something. He's committing a speech act that has the functions of either controlling and intimidating us, or marking territory as unsafe so we leave. It’s disingenuous to say “it’s fine if people say that as long as they don’t act on it”, because saying it is acting on it.

More resources will be added as I come across them, this is by no means complete (and feel free to send suggestions).

#Charlottesville #Black Lives Matter #Racism

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mykidsgay · 8 years ago

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How Do I Talk to My Students and Co-Workers About Trump?

"I'm a middle school teacher in a suburban, mostly white area. I am "out" on a need-to-know basis, but everyone is very supportive and accepting. Everything that has been going on politically since the election has had a profound effect on me personally, and I have been struggling with how, or if I should even try, to talk about this stuff with co-workers and students. Any ideas on an appropriate way to bring it up?"

Question Submitted Anonymously Answered by Sara Kost

—

Sara Says:

Hello, fellow teacher.

Thank you for your question! I completely understand and share the same feelings around how this election and the resulting current Administration has affected us as queer teachers. I know for me personally, I’m lucky to have found comfort and solidarity with colleagues at work. I’ve also found a place to detach from the emotional stress of the news and just be in the moment with my students.

Many people in the education profession are feeling frustrated, sad, and fearful every time a new news report comes out. With the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education (*shudders*), the rollback of protections for trans+ students, and the overall political climate as of late, we educators have a lot to be stressed about. We want to advocate for ourselves, our profession, and our students. We want to scream from the roof of our schools about how important free, public education really is to our country and our society. But most of all, we want to share our thoughts and feelings with our co-workers and students.

Talking with co-workers and talking with students are two very different situations, so let’s tackle co-workers first. Depending on how friendly you are with your co-workers, there have probably been times where you’ve had the opportunity to talk with them about a wide variety of topics. Lunchtime conversation topics in the teacher’s lounge may vary from personal life, to students, to curriculum, to current events and politics, to cool deals at Target, and more! Whenever current events and politics come up, you can absolutely add your opinion to the conversation. Of course, time and place matter. Talking politics while on hallway duty or bus duty or during a team meeting might not be the best time. Before school, after school, or during lunch when students aren’t around would be appropriate times to chat with co-workers about the state of our union.

You may find that your co-workers have differing opinions from you, or you may find that you share similar values. Respect your co-workers differing opinions, while challenging racism, sexism, homophobia, and overt falsehoods. One easy way to do this is by asking where your co-workers are getting their information from. Fact checking and exposing fake news is easy to do, and it’s one way to remind your co-workers that, as teachers, we need to be able to think critically about the news we are getting. Of course it’s important to teach students how to fact check, but it’s just as important for adults to do the same!

Additionally, you can steer your conversation topics to how current events have affected your students, students’ families, and their community, which may feel more relevant than broader election topics. You can ask how the election has affected your co-workers and their families, and you can also bring up how the election has affected you personally as a queer person. As we found out during the fight for same-sex marriage, knowing someone who is gay or lesbian affects how people view LGBT issues and, in turn, can affect how people vote. The more out, open, and honest we can be with our families and friends, the more likely they are to think about us when they go vote. Making that connection between their own lives and our lives is important because it humanizes us.

In addition, have you thought about checking in with your union or becoming a union steward for your building? Public education is a target of the current Administration; Rallying your co-workers around cuts to Education, either federally or in your state, is a good way to build coalition and community around resistance. Find like-minded staff in your building, and plan a time to meet up after school to write or call your representatives. Your resistance can and should be multidimensional and intersectional, and focusing on Education issues as well as LGBTQ+ issues is a great way to validate two very important parts of your identity.

As far as bringing up current political events with your students, there are a few things to consider. First, did your District or Admin provide any guidelines from which to work? For example, my District and Admin team sent out a few different emails right after the election with guidelines and tips to have these tough conversations with students. See if there’s a framework or any considerations your superiors have laid out for you first. Tread carefully: politics in the classroom can get and has gotten teachers in trouble.

With that in mind, some small ways you can show your support for your students might be to wear a safety pin, a rainbow pin, or another small token as a non-verbal signal that you are a safe and supporting adult in the building. You could also put up a safe space sticker or poster in your classroom, put up posters of diverse important people for your subject area, or make a poster with any number of supportive quotes that are going around social media right now, like #RESIST. I saw a quote from a teacher on the internet a while ago that started out “Dear Undocumented Students… Dear Black Students… Dear Muslim Students…” which I really liked.

You could also try to incorporate these topics into the curriculum! This may look different depending on what subject you teach. For example, current events in Social Studies are easy to fit in. Reading news articles, practicing non-fiction reading, and examining fallacy in arguments is good for English Language Arts. A Fine Arts class can examine forms of protest art. A Math class could look at the Elector count or the budget. There are ways to be creative and work these topics into your classroom, regardless of what subject you teach.

If your school permits it, you might also think about starting an after-school club for community service to turn your student’s post-election energy into action. The club doesn’t need to have a partisan lean to address important topics. Your students can design community service projects for local community problems, learn about community issues, and feel like they can change the world one small step at a time.

I believe the most important thing to help youth feel less frightened and more powerful is to encourage them to take action. As a community, LGBTQ+ people have been traumatized by the aftermath of the 2016 election, along with many other marginalized communities. Every day we reexperience some of that trauma anew with whatever recent screwed up thing is in the headlines now. It’s exhausting. Depending on the amount of energy you already spend in your daily life outside of school, it may feel good to spend some energy on your students, encouraging them to write letters to the editor, organizing an after-school community service/action club, or helping them find resources or information about participating in the political process at their age. Good luck!

***

Click here to read about our brilliant contributors!

#my kid is gay #lgbt #lgbtq #lgbtqia #teachers #lgbt teachers #election #election 2016 #post election #sara kost #teacher advice

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leftpress · 8 years ago

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Everybody Hates the Berkeley College Republicans

Anonymous Contributor | February 12, 2017

It’s been just over a week since a successful demonstration outside of UC Berkeley’s Pauley Ballroom shut down Milo Yiannopoulos and the alt-right on February 1st. In the aftermath of the Berkeley College Republicans’ defeat, we’ve seen an increase of interest in radical anti-fascist politics taking hold throughout the campus. Students saw a stark contrast between the out of touch administration at UC Berkeley, which sought to protect Milo as he planned to out undocumented students, and the black bloc that helped shut the event down and kick far-Right scum off the streets. We think it is important to discuss what else has happened in the week following that demo because it is relevant to discussions about the role and efficacy of militant anti-fascism in the context of a growing far-Right movement that is itching to get off the internet and into the real world.

An Increasingly Toxic Group

On the morning of February 1st, the Berkeley College Republicans must have been feeling extra good about themselves. Confident that opponents would fail to significantly disrupt their event planned for later that evening and not content to let Milo have all the fun, members of BCR planned to troll protesters by giving plastic snowflakes to them outside the Pauley Ballroom. However, by all accounts it was BCR who really couldn’t take the heat that night. Although BCR paid several thousand dollars for event security, their event was shut down and their associates were sent packing. Guess you don’t always get what you pay for!

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Mike Wright , Strategic Director for BCR, about to piss his pants on live TV

On February 2nd, not even twenty-four hours after the riotous actions of the night before, Jack Palkovic of BCR was confronted by two men and punched in the face as he was giving an interview to media. In video that captured the incident, one of the men yells out “fuck you, fascist!” as he waves Jack’s stolen MAGA hat in his hand. This isn’t the first time Jack’s politics have been accurately assessed, and it was at least the second time he’s been punched in the face because of it. That evening campus police were stationed outside in the hallway to protect BCR’s general meeting. University police have since offered to have a cop posted nearby when BCR is tabling and are currently working together with BCR on safety protocols.

UCPD outside BCR meeting

Before February 1st, the students in BCR were able to infiltrate an anti-Milo meeting nearly undetected. Now they are so recognizable and hated that the community is punching them in the face on sight. Club leadership has begun advising members to put away their MAGA hats and attempt to be more conspicuous. As the student body and Bay Area community become increasingly aware of the connections BCR is making to fascist and white nationalist organizations, it’s getting harder and harder for BCR to operate and recruit without a bit of trouble coming their way.

Troy Worden (left) and Naweed Tahmas (right) of BCR attempt to crash an anti-Milo meeting on January 24. Naweed claimed at the time that he wasn’t involved in organizing the Milo event and was indifferent about the whole thing. On January 20th, Naweed was also featured in a livestream interview with Nathan Damigo, a neo-Nazi organizer with Identity Evropa.

For instance, the incompetent Republican group allowed the security of new members’ information to be compromised last week. Their new recruits are also getting called out now as a result. It’s still unclear exactly how this happened. The journalist that published the names and email addresses from BCR’s sign-up sheet claims that the Republicans left the sheet unattended at their Milo event while a fellow journalist was able to grab a photo and forward it. The students of BCR claim a man on a bicycle rode by their table and stole the list on February 2, taking a photo before the club could retrieve it. In any case, it’s clear that BCR is incapable of protecting themselves or those peripherally interested in the club’s politics, physically or digitally. This is the second time that members’ information was left open for the public to see, and no doubt the public is watching. New recruits beware!

Outcasts on Campus

The mainstream media has wasted no time weighing in on the protests that shut down BCR and Yiannopoulos, choosing to focus (of course) on free speech over white supremacy and fascism. The school administration and police department continue to assume that it’s impossible for Berkeley students to have shown up to a protest wearing black clothes. UC Berkeley professor Robert Reich took things a step further by peddling a conspiracy theory that claims the protestors in black were paid by Milo and Breitbart. But what really matters the most is what the students on campus are saying, and they’re saying a lot!

By Tuesday February 7 the UC Berkeley student newspaper, The Daily Californian, published several op-eds from students supporting the protest against BCR and Yiannopoulos. Under the heading “Violence as self-defense,” the op-eds from undergrads, grad students, and alumni understood the destruction of property as a justified use of force by the community. Students with similar views also had op-eds published in other local papers. This prompted UC Berkeley Chancellor Dirks to respond, stating that he’s “horrified by the call to embrace the use of violence to contest views with which we may disagree.”

The Berkeley College Republicans have themselves made numerous media appearances over the past week. Still, BCR has been unable to influence popular opinion where it counts. On February 2nd, a Facebook page called “UCB Free Speech” was created. The page immediately set up an event for what it called “UC Berkeley Free Speech Rally 2/8/17” that was scheduled to happen in Sproul Plaza on February 8th. This was a desperate attempt to reach out to anyone on campus that “believes in free speech and is appalled at what happened last week.”

UCB Free Speech never took off, plateauing at around 25 likes. From the beginning, it was questioned relentlessly by fellow UC Berkeley students as being a front for the Republicans. Whether or not this claim is true (it most likely is), just the possibility that this page could be associated with BCR was enough to limit the amount of attention it got. The backlash was overwhelming. The Facebook page UCB Free Speech and it’s event “UC Berkeley Free Speech Rally 2/8/17” were both deleted on February 8th because virtually nobody was sincerely interested in them.

BCR’s Friends are Using Them

Yiannopoulos appeared on Fox News recently to discuss the events of February 1st, including Trump’s tweet about cutting federal funding to UC Berkeley as punishment for not protecting free speech. Milo agreed and defended this stance on the cuts, even going as far as to say that “all of this goes into liberal arts studies that don’t produce real jobs.” Well, maybe he should have warned Troy Worden, member of BCR and organizer of BCR’s Milo event. Troy studies English and Philosophy at UC Berkeley, two liberal arts studies that could be severely impacted if Milo is being honest and gets what he wants. At the same time that Milo is cashing in on his college tour and signing book deals, he proposes the destruction of his fan’s education and dismisses it as worthless.

Milo having a horrible time with Naweed Tahmas

Milo isn’t the only friend of BCR threatening their future, however. The Republicans at Berkeley have recently been getting cozy with Nathan Damigo and his organization Identity Evropa, which recruits college students into white supremacist “activism.” Damigo was spotted standing next to Troy Worden at BCR’s table at Sproul Plaza on January 20th and at some point that day Damigo interviewed Naweed Tahmas of BCR for neo-Nazi media outlet Red Ice TV. Nathan Damigo has already spent time in prison for being a violent racist, and a member of his organization was just revealed as a long-time Bay Area neo-Nazi once arrested for assault and possession of bomb-making materials.

Good luck getting jobs with company like this, BCR!

Round 2?

There are many lessons to draw from this for others wishing to stop the far-Right looking to do more than make memes. Anti-fascist activism is winning in the Bay Area. The fascist Berkeley College Republicans have been shut down and are consistently finding it hard to get support in the community.

On February 8th, Milo Yiannopoulos appeared on the Alex Jones radio show and mentioned plans to return. Yiannopoulos claims to be coming back to UC Berkeley a week after he gives a speech in Washington DC at the end of February. Some have suspected the date could be March 8, International Women’s Day. Activists should begin discussing now how they will respond when Milo comes back around, and how to take down BCR and stop their activities and relationships with neo-Nazi organizations.

This submission came to It's Going Down anonymously through itsgoingdown.org/contribute. IGD is not the author of this post.