#but perfect for our anti-tourist agenda

[jackredfieldwasmyjacob]

this tweet is so funny cause yeah the map is bad and terrible and xenophobic and awful, but then you go to the qrt's and it's divided between people condemning the map with serious commentary, people saying why isn't paris in dark red, and then people from spain saying the map is accurate please do not come here <3

[maghrabiyya]

A friend posted this and said it was OK to share the text but no attribution, so these words are not mine.

"READ EVERY SINGLE WORD:

—If you are livestreaming a protest, and you are recording yourself, or taking selfies, instead of documenting information: you are not an ally. You are a tourist.

—Cover your face. Cover your hair. Cover your tattoos. Wouldn’t want to have any surfaces exposed that could get coronavirus.

—Protect your identity. Obscure your face. There are bad actors on the internet that would love to identify you and track you down for participating in a peaceful protest. Want to feel paranoid? Read about the mysterious deaths of identified Ferguson protestors years later. If you are in the privileged majority, this might be your first time realizing that there are violent people out there who want to hunt you down and harm you for existing. Imagine how POC feel.

—Unless your phone is inside a faraday cage, or you have removed the battery, it can be tracked. Yes, even in airplane mode.

—Assume all information transmitted from your phone is being intercepted by the police at the protest. Including your livestream. Oakland once had one of the largest inventories of Stingray devices (communciations intercept towers) in the US. They used them extensively against Occupy.

—Friendly reminder, your license plate is being scanned and tracked most places you drive.

—Disable your fingerprint or facescan unlock. While it is theoretically true that a search warrant is required to search your phone, it is also theoretically illegal for the police to murder an unarmed and nonviolent citizen. Use a six digit or more passcode.

—Backups to the cloud. Things tend to get broken at protests.

—Do not publicly display your teargas neutralizing spray, or peperspray neutralizing spray. You might be targeted. Keep it discrete and ready for use.

—Document any people showing up in Hawaiian shirts. Document anyone suspected of being undercover cops. Document agent provocateurs. Document bad actors showing up just to destroy property.

—If you have an Iphone, learn how to use your emergency sos. You can set your Emergency SOS to notify your family you might be being arrested or kidnapped (if it is safe for you to activate this feature). You can also disable the call 911 feature in Emergency SOS. Activating this feature also locks your phone against anything but a passcode unlock. If your phone is also encrypted, it is very hard for someone to illegally break into your phone.

—Write your emergency contact on your body in sharpie, somewhere both out of view and where it will not sweat off. Or memorize it. You will not have access to your cellphone if you are arrested (whether wrongfully or not).

—Be careful, all kinds of bad actors can use a peaceful protest as an excuse for violence. Hot hands gloves, or Nomex flight gloves, can be used to pick up hot objects on the ground, if you need to throw a teargas grenade away from you.

—Highpowered lasers, not usually the pocket kind, can destroy the sensors on cameras. Be careful with your cameras out there.

—If your goggles have vents, they are vulnerable to teargas and pepperspray.

—Be careful, all kinds of bad actors can use a peaceful protest as an excuse for violence. A set of allen keys can sometimes unlock crowd control gates.

—Remember that Neonazis have driven cars into peaceful protests in the past. There is finally a use for all those lyft/lime/uber bikes and scooters. Bring them to the protest and use them to as roadblocks if necessary to prevent cars from driving into protestors or chasing them.

—Umbrellas can be useful in preventing bad actors from hitting you with some projectiles during an otherwise peaceful protest. They also help protect identity.

—If you are a white ally: listen. Don’t make the protests about you. There are already literal Nazis doing that.

—Be careful, all kinds of bad actors can use a peaceful protest as an excuse for violence. It has already been noted on multiple organizing boards for white supremacist groups that a protest they’ve whipped into a riot is the perfect place to murder someone with impunity, and even kidnap people. Read up on how to escape from zipties. Bring medical shears or small snips to cut them.

—If you are arrested, identify yourself. Have your ID. Do your best to show the officer that you are peaceful and not resisting arrest. Say nothing else at all without a lawyer present, unless it is to request your phone call. Assume anything said, including on phone call, is being documented and could be aggressively used against you. Innocent people can still go to jail.

—Be careful, all kinds of bad actors can use a peaceful protest as an excuse for violence. Assume you might get shot with a rubber bullet/sandbag. Wear protective gear so you can protest in peace. Being misidentified as a violent/illegal protestor by an officer could also mean being hit by a baton, which could break your bones. Protests can quickly turn chaotic, and often the official response to a peaceful protest can be indiscriminate in who gets injured. Don’t forget that photo of a 12 year old that was peppersprayed for being at a protest.

—Recognize that there are complex factors at play. Not everyone at the protest has the same agenda. Some are not peaceful. The Attorney General of the US noted yesterday that outside provacateurs are infiltrating peaceful protests to accelerate outside agendas unrelated to protesting in solidarity with Black Lives Matter/George Floyd/Police Brutality. The Mayor of Minneapolis noted many* violent protestors arrested were from out of state, and some had ties to white supremacist groups. Not all protestors are looters. Not all looters are protesting anything.

—If you are a white ally that acknowledges your privilege and wants to use that to support the protestors, go to the front of the protest. If you can tolerate having your identity known and you can be a peaceful human shield, do it. Just don’t steal the scene. Let the other POC speak. Leave your megaphone and microphone with someone else while you shield them.

—If you are a white ally in your comfortable home, stop deleting anyone that disagrees with you. Stop feeding the divisive algorithms that have helped shape this discourse into a hateful thing. Right now, you can be putting in the work talking to people and helping them understand that “All Lives Matter” is a way to avoid talking about Black Lives Matter. Don’t be combative. Listen. Ask Questions. Talk. Your POC friends don’t need to spend all their time educating—a huge part of our role as white allies is helping our other white circles understand and grow.

—Yes, all lives do matter. The problem is that some are treated like they matter less. And they are disproportionately affected by police violence in the United States. When you shout “All Lives Matter” in response to “Black Lives Matter,” all that is happening is you are silencing people trying to speak up about disproportionate treatment and unequal rights. If you are sharing that favtoid about how many white versus black lives are taken by police, without adjusting for population, you are ignorant of statistics and being willfully manipulative at worst. Do you really believe that all lives are treated and regarded equally?

—Silence is how this grew. Colorblindness is how this grew. Ignoring this is privilege. The status quo is broken. Racism is alive and well. Silence is violence.

—Your political affiliation does not matter in proving you aren’t racist. Living in a diverse and liberal area does not matter. Knowing a POC in your personal life proves nothing. Quoting one convenient MLK quote does not matter. Only being actively anti-racist matters.

—Human lives will always be worth more than property. Stop changing the subject. There will be an appropriate time to rebuild.

—Violence at a protest does not invalidate the point of the protest, even one intended to he peaceful. Focusing on violence is just a way to ignore the meaning of the protest. Stop changing the subject.

If you want to share this, copy and paste it without attribution. This is not about any one person. Not even George Floyd. It is a chain in which George Floyd is the one of the latest links. Like Alton Sterling. Like Sandra Bland. Like Michael Brown. Like Freddie Gray. The list is staggering. And every single one of those names on the list was a person who could still be with us today."

[daintydormouse]

Some notes for those protesting.

(Stolen from elsewhere on the internet. If you like, copy/paste and spread)

—If you are livestreaming a protest, and you are recording yourself, or taking selfies, instead of documenting information: you are not an ally. You are a tourist.

—Cover your face. Cover your hair. Cover your tattoos. Wouldn’t want to have any surfaces exposed that could get coronavirus.

—Protect your identity. Obscure your face. There are bad actors on the internet that would love to identify you and track you down for participating in a peaceful protest. Want to feel paranoid? Read about the mysterious deaths of identified Ferguson protestors years later. If you are in the privileged majority, this might be your first time realizing that there are violent people out there who want to hunt you down and harm you for existing. Imagine how POC feel.

—Unless your phone is inside a faraday cage, or you have removed the battery, it can be tracked. Yes, even in airplane mode.

—Assume all information transmitted from your phone is being intercepted by the police at the protest. Including your livestream. Oakland once had one of the largest inventories of Stingray devices (communciations intercept towers) in the US. They used them extensively against Occupy.

—Friendly reminder, your license plate is being scanned and tracked most places you drive.

—Disable your fingerprint or facescan unlock. While it is theoretically true that a search warrant is required to search your phone, it is also theoretically illegal for the police to murder an unarmed and nonviolent citizen. Use a six digit or more passcode.

—Backups to the cloud. Things tend to get broken at protests.

—Do not publicly display your teargas neutralizing spray, or peperspray neutralizing spray. You might be targeted. Keep it discrete and ready for use.

—Document any people showing up in Hawaiian shirts. Document anyone suspected of being undercover cops. Document agent provocateurs. Document bad actors showing up just to destroy property.

—If you have an Iphone, learn how to use your emergency sos. You can set your Emergency SOS to notify your family you might be being arrested or kidnapped (if it is safe for you to activate this feature). You can also disable the call 911 feature in Emergency SOS. Activating this feature also locks your phone against anything but a passcode unlock. If your phone is also encrypted, it is very hard for someone to illegally break into your phone.

—Write your emergency contact on your body in sharpie, somewhere both out of view and where it will not sweat off. Or memorize it. You will not have access to your cellphone if you are arrested (whether wrongfully or not).

—Be careful, all kinds of bad actors can use a peaceful protest as an excuse for violence. Hot hands gloves, or Nomex flight gloves, can be used to pick up hot objects on the ground, if you need to throw a teargas grenade away from you.

—Highpowered lasers, not usually the pocket kind, can destroy the sensors on cameras. Be careful with your cameras out there.

—If your goggles have vents, they are vulnerable to teargas and pepperspray.

—Be careful, all kinds of bad actors can use a peaceful protest as an excuse for violence. A set of allen keys can sometimes unlock crowd control gates.

—Remember that Neonazis have driven cars into peaceful protests in the past. There is finally a use for all those lyft/lime/uber bikes and scooters. Bring them to the protest and use them to as roadblocks if necessary to prevent cars from driving into protestors or chasing them.

—Umbrellas can be useful in preventing bad actors from hitting you with some projectiles during an otherwise peaceful protest. They also help protect identity.

—If you are a white ally: listen. Don’t make the protests about you. There are already literal Nazis doing that.

—Be careful, all kinds of bad actors can use a peaceful protest as an excuse for violence. It has already been noted on multiple organizing boards for white supremacist groups that a protest they’ve whipped into a riot is the perfect place to murder someone with impunity, and even kidnap people. Read up on how to escape from zipties. Bring medical shears or small snips to cut them. Replace your bootlaces with paracord, it can be used as a friction saw.

—If you are arrested, identify yourself. Have your ID. Do your best to show the officer that you are peaceful and not resisting arrest. Say nothing else at all without a lawyer present, unless it is to request your phone call. Assume anything said, including on phone call, is being documented and could be aggressively used against you. Innocent people can still go to jail.

—Be careful, all kinds of bad actors can use a peaceful protest as an excuse for violence. Assume you might get shot with a rubber bullet/sandbag. Wear protective gear so you can protest in peace. Being misidentified as a violent/illegal protestor by an officer could also mean being hit by a baton, which could break your bones. Protests can quickly turn chaotic, and often the official response to a peaceful protest can be indiscriminate in who gets injured. Don’t forget that photo of a 12 year old that was peppersprayed for being at a protest.

—Recognize that there are complex factors at play. Not everyone at the protest has the same agenda. Some are not peaceful. The Attorney General of the US noted yesterday that outside provacateurs are infiltrating peaceful protests to accelerate outside agendas unrelated to protesting in solidarity with Black Lives Matter/George Floyd/Police Brutality. The Mayor of Minneapolis noted many* violent protestors arrested were from out of state, and some had ties to white supremacist groups. Not all protestors are looters. Not all looters are protesting anything.

—If you are a white ally that acknowledges your privilege and wants to use that to support the protestors, go to the front of the protest. If you can tolerate having your identity known and you can be a peaceful human shield, do it. Just don’t steal the scene. Let the other POC speak. Leave your megaphone and microphone with someone else while you shield them.

—If you are a white ally in your comfortable home, stop deleting anyone that disagrees with you. Stop feeding the divisive algorithms that have helped shape this discourse into a hateful thing. Right now, you can be putting in the work talking to people and helping them understand that “All Lives Matter” is a way to avoid talking about Black Lives Matter. Don’t be combative. Listen. Ask Questions. Talk. Your POC friends don’t need to spend all their time educating—a huge part of our role as white allies is helping our other white circles understand and grow.

—Yes, all lives do matter. The problem is that some are treated like they matter less. And they are disproportionately affected by police violence in the United States. When you shout “All Lives Matter” in response to “Black Lives Matter,” all that is happening is you are silencing people trying to speak up about disproportionate treatment and unequal rights. If you are sharing that factoid about how many white versus black lives are taken by police, without adjusting for population, you are ignorant of statistics and being willfully manipulative at worst. Do you really believe that all lives are treated and regarded equally?

—Silence is how this grew. Colorblindness is how this grew. Ignoring this is privilege. The status quo is broken. Racism is alive and well. Silence is violence.

—Your political affiliation does not matter in proving you aren’t racist. Living in a diverse and liberal area does not matter. Knowing a POC in your personal life proves nothing. Quoting one convenient MLK quote does not matter. Only being actively anti-racist matters.

—Human lives will always be worth more than property. Stop changing the subject. There will be an appropriate time to rebuild.

—Violence at a protest does not invalidate the point of the protest, even one intended to he peaceful. Focusing on violence is just a way to ignore the meaning of the protest. Stop changing the subject.

If you want to share this, copy and paste it without attribution. This is not about any one person. Not even George Floyd. It is a chain in which George Floyd is one of the latest links. Like Alton Sterling. Like Sandra Bland. Like Michael Brown. Like Freddie Gray. The list is staggering. And every single one of those names on the list was a person who could still be with us today

[ramrodd]

Marco Rubio is the Poster Boy du jour for the Stupid Watergate

COMMENTARY:

The way to tell if a Republican was recruited by Newt Gingrich is that they are often very pretty, in a Barbie Doll kind of way, number one, like Marco Rubio and, two, in the final analysis, they were either dumber than dog shit before they were recruited and selected on than basis and/or, the process of becoming a Tea Party crypto-Nazi useful idiot, have become dumber than dog shit because they buy into the politics of Steve Bannon or they are really smart, like George Conway, but have found it expedient to pretend they are dumber than dog shit in order to make a lot of money.

Lindsey Graham falls into this category.

What about people like John McCain?  

I think, after the Keating 5, he was woke, in a #Blacklivesmatter kind of way. He didn't really understand how Supply-side economics works, but he has the typical Harvard religious faith in the theological righteousness of Capitalism, as opposed to the godless commie cocksuckers who embrace the economics of the Anti-Christ, Marxism. It was easy for him to connect the dots between the faces of the North Korean patriots who tortured him and Marxism. I feel his pain, but it's a connection he needed to undo, in “The Undoing Project” kind of way that Michael Lewis talks about. It's the business I am in, human high performance. Human peak performance is really outside my focus. I know how to coach for it, but its a bit too retail: my stuff is geared for a wholesale/community aspirational population. People who work their KSA's and burning desire to the point where they need coaching in peak performance began to focus on high performance as a state of being at the level of performance technology I offer. It's Ranger School stuff geared for small unit leadership in a purposeful community.

McCain is considered a RINO by the people in the MAGA hats. That's what those hats mean: you've bought into the Trump Program lock, stock and barrel and if you aren't letting asshole crypto-Nazis like Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh and Steve Bannon or asshole femi-Nazis like Kellyanne Conway, Laura Ingraham or Betsy Devos pull you around by your dick, then you are a RINO.

That the category McCain falls into in contrast to the House Freedom Caucus and asshole crypto-Nazi thugs like Jim Jordan and Stephen King and Newt Gingrich and Roger Stone. McCain wasn't afraid of anybody. Period. That's the thing that drew Lindsey Graham into his orbit: in a culture that operates like a Super Max captive audience, Tootsy Roll Graham sought out the baddest dog in the yard, because McCain had been there and done that. His problem was, he didn't know how to fix it.

I do. The final product is the Green New Deal, but there is a whole lot of undoing needs to be done by the American voter, regardless of ideological inclination before we can get to the Green New Deal in the 117 Congress. The 116th Congress is the Undoing Project and AOC is the way forward.

Here's the thing about Marco Rubio that demonstrates his core dumber-than-dogshit skill set required to work for Newt Gingrich, Steve Bannon and Mick Mulvaney. First of all, Mario is pretty in a Ricky Ricardo latin lover kind of way and he can be relied on to come out and promote the party line in some fairly predictable way. The party line is now turning against China because President Xi  isn't going to do a trade deal with Trump until he, Duck Ass Don, keeps his promise to Chairman Kim to get a GI haircut like Elvis as a personal performance surety to implement Lady Trump's Task Force Δ to her perfect satisfaction as a precondition to doing business. The GI hair cut. An outward sign that he, Trump, was engaged in the Memorandum of Understanding phase of a serious process of the zero-sum contracting you do with Marxists.

And Donald Duck Ass left Hanoi because he isn't about to get a GI haircut just to please his new girl friend: Kim Jung Un is no Delilah but Duck Ass Don is all Samson and intends to keep his super powers. He has a superstitious belief that he is invisible behind his hair and nobody can touch him.

So, any denuclearization and China Trade deal needs to wait to the 117 Congress, when the Green New Deal kicks in and Duck Ass Don is kicking those things to the curb and shifting his focus on invading Iran, which is the deal he made with Netanyahu at John Bolton's insistence. Bolton's relationship with the assassination of Kaddahfi is a big reason why Chairman Kim accelerated his nuke/ICBM programs during the Obama administration. Obama inherited Robert Kagan's “Liberal Interventionist” neo-con foreign policy and the Clinton State Department continued to implement regime change. Trump's connection to the Kremlin reassured Chairman Kim that he, Trump, wasn't going to implement's Obama's foreign policy, and Chairman Kim wants to do in the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea what Vietnam has done, in terms of modifying their original Soviet Marxism into a Free Market Marxism that works very much like Hong Kong: different from the PRC's Harvard Marxism and naturally entrepreneurial from their French heritage.

And that's why Marco put out this statement. They are scrambling to find anything to recover the leverage they had over Obama and Nancy Pelosi before the Mueller Report emerged in the mix. The hard-core MAGA hat crowd in Congress are a lot like the Nazi submariners after the Happy Times, soldiering on but being sunk, one by one, by their own embrace of dog shit stupidity as a political agenda. And China is now an enemy, especially since Putin has gone long on the Yuan and dumped the eurodollar/green back, the favorite currency to the vast right-wing conspiracy working out of the cesspool of the GOP Deep State. Putin did this to pop the Trump Bubble driving the Bull Market on the NYSE. He doesn't want Trump re-elected unless he keeps his promise to Chairman Kim.

But here is the important stupidity contained in Rubio's commentary: the Belt and Road Initiative and the Green New Deal are the same thing: President Xi wants to import the Green New Deal to upgrade his Harvard Marxism to Democratic Socialism because that actually what Marxism had in mind without realizing America was already the leading edge of the on-going social engineering of the US Constituion that was evolving the Democratic Socialism FDR stumbled into in 1933 and Eisenhower doubled down on with his 1956 Presidential Platform.

A difference between McCain and Eisenhower is that Eisenhower knew his accusations of socialism against Truman were pure right-wing dog whistles he needed to use to get elected while McCain really believed socialism was evil. It's was a difference between USNA and USMA before Ayn Rand spoke at USMA. Things seem to have gone a little sideways at the Point since 1974. But that's a different problem.

President Moon in the Republic of Korea and President Xi in the PRC want to introduce Green New Deal by way of the PRC's Belt and Road Initiative. The one very smart thing Chairman is doing is going everywhere by train. He's not afraid of flying: he's making the point of his design for connection the dots between Seoul and Bejing with mass transportation. America needs to do exactly the same thing: restore the rail-road right-of-ways to a strategic grade sufficient to move armor anywhere between our boarders, a serious Trails-to-Rails/Trails upgrade. It will be good for the tourist business, among other things, to provide extensive public transportation as well as heavy cargo in order to shift about 25% of the throughput load on the interstate system onto rails. The interstate system was never intended to replace the railroads, but to augment their capacities. For various reasons, this has been neglected since the 60's and purposefully ignored since Reagan began to replace the Democratic Socialism he inherited with the Tory Socialism Rubio Marco and John McCain both represented.

Marco earned his place in Newt Gingrich's crypto-Nazi All Stars line up by being able to deliver this sort of drivel without having to think about it. In fact, actually thing about it, and not parroting the party line coming out of the Oval Office, is how you can become identified as as RINO or a progressive socialist terrorist. Bolton and Pompeo are using the sanctions against the Iranian oil to punish President Moon's South Korea for not forcing Chairman Kim to make a deal, but President Moon backs Chairman Kim 100% and the 117th Congress is only 633 days away.

Here is the message the adult leadership in the GOP needs to hear from Adam Schiff: if Duck Ass Don is re-elected, he will be impeached by Labor Day 2021. There is no hurry on this: as an Eisenhower Republican, Bill Weld is the sort of adult leadership the GOP had when I was growing up and I'd vote for him, Otherwise, I like Jay Inslee, because he is already implementing the Green New Deal as governor of Washington.

Marco Rubio is the Poster Boy du jour for the Stupid Watergate .

Personally, it's a toss up as to whether the National Review or Breitbart is the journal of record for the Stupid Watergate. Of course, FOX News is the voice of the Stupid Watergate.

[gtpooh]

Passing things forward

READ EVERY SINGLE WORD:

—If you are livestreaming a protest, and you are recording yourself, or taking selfies, instead of documenting information: you are not an ally. You are a tourist.

—Cover your face. Cover your hair. Cover your tattoos. Wouldn’t want to have any surfaces exposed that could get coronavirus.

—Protect your identity. Obscure your face. There are bad actors on the internet that would love to identify you and track you down for participating in a peaceful protest. Want to feel paranoid? Read about the mysterious deaths of identified Ferguson protestors years later. If you are in the privileged majority, this might be your first time realizing that there are violent people out there who want to hunt you down and harm you for existing. Imagine how POC feel.

—Unless your phone is inside a faraday cage, or you have removed the battery, it can be tracked. Yes, even in airplane mode.

—Assume all information transmitted from your phone is being intercepted by the police at the protest. Including your livestream. Oakland once had one of the largest inventories of Stingray devices (communciations intercept towers) in the US. They used them extensively against Occupy.

—Friendly reminder, your license plate is being scanned and tracked most places you drive.

—Disable your fingerprint or facescan unlock. While it is theoretically true that a search warrant is required to search your phone, it is also theoretically illegal for the police to murder an unarmed and nonviolent citizen. Use a six digit or more passcode.

—Backups to the cloud. Things tend to get broken at protests.

—Do not publicly display your teargas neutralizing spray, or peperspray neutralizing spray. You might be targeted. Keep it discrete and ready for use.

—Document any people showing up in Hawaiian shirts. Document anyone suspected of being undercover cops. Document agent provocateurs. Document bad actors showing up just to destroy property.

—If you have an Iphone, learn how to use your emergency sos. You can set your Emergency SOS to notify your family you might be being arrested or kidnapped (if it is safe for you to activate this feature). You can also disable the call 911 feature in Emergency SOS. Activating this feature also locks your phone against anything but a passcode unlock. If your phone is also encrypted, it is very hard for someone to illegally break into your phone.

—Write your emergency contact on your body in sharpie, somewhere both out of view and where it will not sweat off. Or memorize it. You will not have access to your cellphone if you are arrested (whether wrongfully or not).

—Be careful, all kinds of bad actors can use a peaceful protest as an excuse for violence. Hot hands gloves, or Nomex flight gloves, can be used to pick up hot objects on the ground, if you need to throw a teargas grenade away from you.

—Highpowered lasers, not usually the pocket kind, can destroy the sensors on cameras. Be careful with your cameras out there.

—If your goggles have vents, they are vulnerable to teargas and pepperspray.

—Be careful, all kinds of bad actors can use a peaceful protest as an excuse for violence. A set of allen keys can sometimes unlock crowd control gates.

—Remember that Neonazis have driven cars into peaceful protests in the past. There is finally a use for all those lyft/lime/uber bikes and scooters. Bring them to the protest and use them to as roadblocks if necessary to prevent cars from driving into protestors or chasing them.

—Umbrellas can be useful in preventing bad actors from hitting you with some projectiles during an otherwise peaceful protest. They also help protect identity.

—If you are a white ally: listen. Don’t make the protests about you. There are already literal Nazis doing that.

—Be careful, all kinds of bad actors can use a peaceful protest as an excuse for violence. It has already been noted on multiple organizing boards for white supremacist groups that a protest they’ve whipped into a riot is the perfect place to murder someone with impunity, and even kidnap people. Read up on how to escape from zipties. Bring medical shears or small snips to cut them.

—If you are arrested, identify yourself. Have your ID. Do your best to show the officer that you are peaceful and not resisting arrest. Say nothing else at all without a lawyer present, unless it is to request your phone call. Assume anything said, including on phone call, is being documented and could be aggressively used against you. Innocent people can still go to jail.

—Be careful, all kinds of bad actors can use a peaceful protest as an excuse for violence. Assume you might get shot with a rubber bullet/sandbag. Wear protective gear so you can protest in peace. Being misidentified as a violent/illegal protestor by an officer could also mean being hit by a baton, which could break your bones. Protests can quickly turn chaotic, and often the official response to a peaceful protest can be indiscriminate in who gets injured. Don’t forget that photo of a 12 year old that was peppersprayed for being at a protest.

—Recognize that there are complex factors at play. Not everyone at the protest has the same agenda. Some are not peaceful. The Attorney General of the US noted yesterday that outside provacateurs are infiltrating peaceful protests to accelerate outside agendas unrelated to protesting in solidarity with Black Lives Matter/George Floyd/Police Brutality. The Mayor of Minneapolis noted many* violent protestors arrested were from out of state, and some had ties to white supremacist groups. Not all protestors are looters. Not all looters are protesting anything.

—If you are a white ally that acknowledges your privilege and wants to use that to support the protestors, go to the front of the protest. If you can tolerate having your identity known and you can be a peaceful human shield, do it. Just don’t steal the scene. Let the other POC speak. Leave your megaphone and microphone with someone else while you shield them.

—If you are a white ally in your comfortable home, stop deleting anyone that disagrees with you. Stop feeding the divisive algorithms that have helped shape this discourse into a hateful thing. Right now, you can be putting in the work talking to people and helping them understand that “All Lives Matter” is a way to avoid talking about Black Lives Matter. Don’t be combative. Listen. Ask Questions. Talk. Your POC friends don’t need to spend all their time educating—a huge part of our role as white allies is helping our other white circles understand and grow.

—Yes, all lives do matter. The problem is that some are treated like they matter less. And they are disproportionately affected by police violence in the United States. When you shout “All Lives Matter” in response to “Black Lives Matter,” all that is happening is you are silencing people trying to speak up about disproportionate treatment and unequal rights. If you are sharing that favtoid about how many white versus black lives are taken by police, without adjusting for population, you are ignorant of statistics and being willfully manipulative at worst. Do you really believe that all lives are treated and regarded equally?

—Silence is how this grew. Colorblindness is how this grew. Ignoring this is privilege. The status quo is broken. Racism is alive and well. Silence is violence.

—Your political affiliation does not matter in proving you aren’t racist. Living in a diverse and liberal area does not matter. Knowing a POC in your personal life proves nothing. Quoting one convenient MLK quote does not matter. Only being actively anti-racist matters.

—Human lives will always be worth more than property. Stop changing the subject. There will be an appropriate time to rebuild.

—Violence at a protest does not invalidate the point of the protest, even one intended to he peaceful. Focusing on violence is just a way to ignore the meaning of the protest. Stop changing the subject.

If you want to share this, copy and paste it without attribution. This is not about any one person. Not even George Floyd. It is a chain in which George Floyd is the one of the latest links. Like Alton Sterling. Like Sandra Bland. Like Michael Brown. Like Freddie Gray. The list is staggering. And every single one of those names on the list was a person who could still be with us today.