#protesters / demonstrators are taking down the confederate monuments

[marta-bee]

News of the Day 3/29/25: Making America Beautiful Again

Trump signed an executive order framed as making sure DC "showcase[s] beautiful, clean, and safe public spaces," and he's doing some pretty ugly stuff to do that. If he wanted to plant a few flower-beds or paint over some graffiti, he has every right to do that. Odd he wouldn't leave it to DC's mayor, but that's a battle every big city mayor has had to do.

A lot of the focus is on deporting immigrants in the city's limits, making sure DC isn't a sanctuary city, breaking up homeless camps on federal land, processing concealed-carry permits, cracking down on fare evasion on the city's subway, and making sure people arrested don't make bail before trial. He's got a whole task force planned. Honestly, he could have just built a few public toilets.

Oddly, it's the pushing back against "graffiti and other vandalism, unpermitted disturbances and demonstrations, noise, [and] trespassing" that caught my eye. It's such a small thing! But combine that with how the Congressional Republicans recently forced DC to remove a famous Black Lives Matter street mural (X), it does take on a different tenor. This isn't just about fighting crime and setting up some gardens. It's about painting over the experiences of certain kind of people. And it's being done in the name of beauty.

It's also one very small instance of a much bigger trend. Trump's ordering the Smithsonian to eliminate "un-American" exhibits. He's bringing back Confederacy statues. In the name of DEI, his Pentagon scrubbed Jackie Robinson, the Navajo code talkers, and (okay, this one made me laugh) the Enola Gay from their websites. He's dismissed the board of the Kennedy Center and increasingly deciding who gets to perform there. Oh, and he has Congress gunning for Frontline, Masterpiece Theater, and Sesame Street, too.

All in the name of beauty and truth. Hardly surprising, but still concerning. Stay woke, Shirelings. More details below the cut.

The Smithsonian

Text of the EO ordering the change.

Trump Orders Crackdown on ‘Improper Ideology’ at Smithsonian (X). JD Vance is in charge. (X)

How will Trump's executive order affect the Smithsonian?

Trump annoyed the Smithsonian isn’t promoting discredited racial ideas. New executive order slams museum for recognizing "race is not a biological reality." (X)

Critics see Trump attacks on the ‘Black Smithsonian’ as an effort to sanitize racism in US history

Trump Targets Smithsonian: What His “Improper Ideology” Order Is Really About (X)

Trump order launches Smithsonian and its visitors into confusion, dismay. (X)

Trump wants to reshape the Smithsonian. Who funds the vast institution? (X)

Public Statues

Trump Brings Back Confederate Statues in One of His Most Racist Orders (X)

Trump wants to restore statues and monuments. Will that happen?

He’s also re-instituted a plan to build a “National Park of American Heroes,” which isn’t a problem per se, but any Trump-appointed committee to identify specific Americans worthy of statues is sure to become interesting.

And just because it makes me smile, an oldie but goodie. It's not just D.C.: Satirical Trump statues are appearing in cities across the U.S.

The Kennedy Center

What’s going on with the Kennedy Center under Trump?

'Trump staged a putsch at the Kennedy Center, and he didn't choose this cultural jewel at random' (X)

Kennedy Center Lays Off Seven Social Impact Staffers. (X)

All the Kennedy Center Cancellations Under Trump. (X) In fairness, these are mostly groups cancelling in protests, not Trump monkeying around with the schedule. Predictably, Hamilton is among them.

During tour, Trump declares the Kennedy Center building is in 'tremendous disrepair' and likened it to the nation generally. So patriotic!

Trump Seeks More Sway in Picking Kennedy Center Honorees. The president, who recently had himself installed as the center’s chairman, has called a meeting of its board to approve changes that would give him more input in the process. (X)

Ex-Kennedy Center employee speaks on institution’s ‘toxicity’ after getting fired under Trump (X)

Trump has big dreams for the Kennedy Center but doesn't seem to know what it does. The president's hostile takeover of the Washington, D.C. cultural institution will probably chase away the very people who like to attend shows there. (X)

'Breathtaking drop in revenue': Kennedy Center finances questioned after Trump takeover (X) Critics have argued this only looks at ticket sales and the Kennedy Center like most arts institutions rely heavily on direct donations.

NPR and PBS

Trump urges Republicans to defund NPR, PBS.

Marjorie Taylor Greene attacks NPR and PBS as ‘communist,’ calls for funding to ‘end’ (X)

Elmo and Elon Musk Are Cited as G.O.P. Lawmakers Grill PBS and NPR. Dark pronouncements by Republicans about a “communist agenda” espoused by public media were intercut with lighter references to “Sesame Street” and “Curious George.” (X)

Trump Demands Congress Defund NPR and PBS ‘IMMEDIATELY’ in Late-Night Meltdown (X)

The Great Website Whitewashing

The Pentagon’s DEI purge: Officials describe a scramble to remove and then restore online content

Veterans say Pentagon’s anti-DEI overhaul could hurt recruitment efforts with minority groups (X)

‘My dad didn’t go to war for nothing’: Pentagon scrubs Native American heroes from website (X)

1st all-female veterans Honor Flight from Chicago photo pulled from Pentagon website after DEI order (X)

Pages about the Holocaust and 9/11 also got the ax. (X) So did the iconic flag-raising at Iwo Jima photo (X), because the description highlights how one of the flag-raisers was Native American.

Arlington Cemetery removed links about black and women veterans from its webpage, too. (X)

The Pentagon did eventually restore some (not all) pages but defended the order, blames AI. (X)

And finally, Joe Scarborough, Al Sharpton, and others on the Morning Joe MSNBC show discussed the Jackie Robinson removal specifically, and how his story was inspiring for people of all races, but minorities especially. It was interesting and genuinely moving.

Update on Trump’s move to defund the Voice of America

The Wall Street Journal argues it’s about a pull-back from the “war of ideas.” (X)

Czech Republic to rescue Radio Free Europe after Donald Trump funding cuts (X)

Exiled Russian journalists left ‘high and dry’ after US cuts radio funding

We Need the Voice of America Now More Than Ever: Cutting off independent media abroad leaves the United States vulnerable at home. (X)

Trump Could Hand China a ‘Strategic Victory’ by Silencing Voice of America. Generations of Chinese, including our columnist, turned to U.S. government-run outlets for an education in democracy, rights and the English language. (X)

And some good news! U.S. Judge Orders Halt to Trump’s Effort to Dismantle Voice of America. Voice of America journalists argued in a lawsuit that the administration’s actions violated their First Amendment rights. (X)

Things have been popping in the freedom of press corner of the newsosphere, too

2 months into Trump’s second administration, the news industry faces challenges from all directions

In Trump 2.0, many people are shaking up their media habits — or all but tuning out (X)

If You Can Keep It: Donald Trump and the future of press freedom (X)

Supreme Court Thwarts Trump Dream of ‘Opening Up’ Libel Laws (X)

Connecting the Dots: Trump’s Tightening Grip on Press Freedom (X) A good overview of all the ways Trump has pushed back against freedom of the press.

Taking a Broader View

'Professors are the enemy': Trump's war on higher education. (X)

American art is no place for partisan politics (X)

Trump’s Attacks on Press Freedom Are Paving the Way for Authoritarianism (X)

Immigrants and Freedom of Speech: President Trump is taking advantage of an unsettled aspect of the law. (X)

Trump Took Over the Kennedy Center, but Silencing the Arts Will Not Be So Easy (X) From their lips to Someone’s ears.

Trump also issued EO to eliminate Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent federal agency that distributes funding to libraries and museums. NPR discussed its impact, economically and culturally. Text of the EO.

[sadieawesome]

I was keeping up with the protests in my hometown of Birmingham via facebook live and some of the journalists filming the event got assaulted while streaming and tell you what i wasn’t tired before but now i am 100% in the not going to bed club.

[queersatanic]

Clear through lines between the summer 2020 uprisings and COINTELPRO in Little Rock, Ark.

There's a lot here that's worth taking stock of from the way that racial justice protesters are treated in contrast to Jan. 6 white supremacist insurrectionists, or how they are treated in contrast to fascist thugs in their own areas, or how Black protesters are treated in contrast to white and other people of color.

Also critical is how the modern surveillance state works, and how digital OpSec is critically important. They will use the weakest link to take down a whole network.

The heavy surveillance of the protesters ultimately caught up with Jeffrey—thanks in part to a T-shirt. One of her closest friends, Mujera Benjamin Lung’aho, was also at the July protest at the Capitol. The two first met in high school, where they played soccer together, and reconnected years later as the racial justice uprising in Ferguson, Mo., reverberated across the country. They eventually grew close enough that Jeffrey spoke at Lung’aho’s father’s funeral. At the Capitol clash, Lung’aho had worn a distinctive shirt. According to a warrant later filed to search his phone, a detective claimed to have recognized Lung’aho’s shirt and other specific features from surveillance video taken a few days earlier during a vandalism spree at a local Confederate cemetery, where several people were caught on camera destroying monuments. Officers showed up at Lung’aho’s residence and arrested him after a foot chase. “Under the current climate, I just was compelled to flee,” Lung’aho recalled in a conversation with us. When the police searched his phone, they found encrypted group chats and social media messages that they claim tied him to high-profile demonstrations in Little Rock throughout 2020. This turned out to be a key moment for law enforcement—and a big payoff after months of tracking Black activists.

COINTELPRO never stopped, and people acting for racial justice in the South are routinely targeted and crushed for their resistance, often in silence.

Please share this story with your networks, especially in and around Arkansas.

These are the people still being targeted by the state and awaiting sentencing.

Brittany Dawn Jeffrey

Mujera Benjamin Lung'aho

Renea Goddard

Loba Espinosa-Villegas

Emily Nowlin

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 2.21

452 or 453 – Severianus, Bishop of Scythopolis, is martyred in Palestine. 1245 – Thomas, the first known Bishop of Finland, is granted resignation after confessing to torture and forgery. 1440 – The Prussian Confederation is formed. 1613 – Mikhail I is unanimously elected Tsar by a national assembly, beginning the Romanov dynasty of Imperial Russia. 1797 – A force of 1,400 French soldiers invaded Britain at Fishguard in support of the Society of United Irishmen. They were defeated by 500 British reservists. 1804 – The first self-propelling steam locomotive makes its outing at the Pen-y-Darren Ironworks in Wales. 1808 – Without a previous declaration of war, Russian troops cross the border to Sweden at Abborfors in eastern Finland, thus beginning the Finnish War, in which Sweden will lose the eastern half of the country (i.e. Finland) to Russia. 1828 – Initial issue of the Cherokee Phoenix is the first periodical to use the Cherokee syllabary invented by Sequoyah. 1842 – John Greenough is granted the first U.S. patent for the sewing machine. 1848 – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto. 1862 – American Civil War: Battle of Valverde is fought near Fort Craig in New Mexico Territory. 1866 – Lucy Hobbs Taylor becomes the first American woman to graduate from dental school. 1874 – The Oakland Daily Tribune publishes its first edition. 1878 – The first telephone directory is issued in New Haven, Connecticut. 1885 – The newly completed Washington Monument is dedicated. 1896 – An Englishman raised in Australia, Bob Fitzsimmons, fought an Irishman, Peter Maher, in an American promoted event which technically took place in Mexico, winning the 1896 World Heavyweight Championship in boxing. 1913 – Ioannina is incorporated into the Greek state after the Balkan Wars. 1916 – World War I: In France, the Battle of Verdun begins. 1918 – The last Carolina parakeet dies in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo. 1919 – German socialist Kurt Eisner is assassinated. His death results in the establishment of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and parliament and government fleeing Munich, Germany. 1921 – Constituent Assembly of the Democratic Republic of Georgia adopts the country's first constitution. 1921 – Rezā Shāh takes control of Tehran during a successful coup. 1925 – The New Yorker publishes its first issue. 1929 – In the first battle of the Warlord Rebellion in northeastern Shandong against the Nationalist government of China, a 24,000-strong rebel force led by Zhang Zongchang was defeated at Zhifu by 7,000 NRA troops. 1934 – Augusto Sandino is executed. 1937 – The League of Nations bans foreign national "volunteers" in the Spanish Civil War. 1945 – World War II: During the Battle of Iwo Jima, Japanese kamikaze planes sink the escort carrier USS Bismarck Sea and damage the USS Saratoga. 1945 – World War II: the Brazilian Expeditionary Force defeat the German forces in the Battle of Monte Castello on the Italian front. 1947 – In New York City, Edwin Land demonstrates the first "instant camera", the Polaroid Land Camera, to a meeting of the Optical Society of America. 1948 – NASCAR is incorporated. 1952 – The British government, under Winston Churchill, abolishes identity cards in the UK to "set the people free". 1952 – The Bengali Language Movement protests occur at the University of Dhaka in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). 1958 – The CND symbol, aka peace symbol, commissioned by the Direct Action Committee in protest against the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, is designed and completed by Gerald Holtom. 1965 – Malcolm X is gunned down while giving a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. 1971 – The Convention on Psychotropic Substances is signed at Vienna. 1972 – United States President Richard Nixon visits China to normalize Sino-American relations. 1972 – The Soviet unmanned spaceship Luna 20 lands on the Moon. 1973 – Over the Sinai Desert, Israeli fighter aircraft shoot down Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114 jet killing 108 people. 1974 – The last Israeli soldiers leave the west bank of the Suez Canal pursuant to a truce with Egypt. 1975 – Watergate scandal: Former United States Attorney General John N. Mitchell and former White House aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman are sentenced to prison. 1994 – Aldrich Ames is arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for selling national secrets to the Soviet Union in Arlington County, Virginia. 1995 – Steve Fossett lands in Leader, Saskatchewan, Canada becoming the first person to make a solo flight across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon. 2013 – At least 17 people are killed and 119 injured following several bombings in the Indian city of Hyderabad. 2022 – In the Russo-Ukrainian crisis Russian President Vladimir Putin declares the Luhansk People's Republic and Donetsk People's Republic as independent from Ukraine, and moves troops into the region. The action is condemned by the United Nations.

[atlanticcanada]

Parliament resumes as trucker protest carries on in Ottawa

Parliament resumed Monday in the nation’s capital still beset by protesters, vehicles and trucks as the trucker convoy protest enters its third day.

Transport trucks and other personal vehicles are gridlocking parts of Ottawa surrounding Parliament Hill, and while the protest has largely been non-violent, Ottawa Police said in a statement Sunday evening that they have seen “multiple cases of disruptive, inappropriate and threatening behaviour from demonstrators.”

The Ottawa Paramedic Service confirmed to CTV News Monday that a rock was thrown at one of their trucks Sunday and that a racial slur was yelled targeting the paramedic in that vehicle.

There were at least two other incidents of projectiles thrown at paramedic vehicles, and the service had issues responding to calls in the downtown core where protesters were either slowing them down or intimidating paramedics, mostly on Saturday, a spokesperson said.

The spokesperson said the police will now be responding “at all times” with the paramedics for safety.

Authorities said residents should avoid travelling to the downtown core Monday and that those who are able to work from home should do so if possible.

“If your children attend school in the downtown area, please check with them to see if the school is open tomorrow,” the statement said.

Organizers of the “freedom convoy” said demonstrations are planned for Monday, including speeches in Confederation Park.

There was also a call out by the organizers for around 1,000 people to join in an attempt to shop without masks at a shopping centre. The Rideau Centre close to Parliament remained closed Monday.

It is unclear when the protest will end, but several protesters have said they had planned to stay “for months,” and “freedom convoy” organizer Tamara Lich said on Sunday to a gathering on Parliament Hill that the protest would not leave until “all of you and all of your kids are free.”

Parliament is set to resume in a hybrid format, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be working virtually after testing positive for COVID-19.

Trudeau will be delivering remarks and taking questions from reporters at 11:15 a.m. EST and will participate in Question Period.

Questions about MPs’ safety were addressed late Sunday night in a memo from the parliamentary Sergeant-at-Arms that detailed how those coming in person can access the House of Commons, with recognition that ongoing demonstrations “could make it difficult.”

MPs were given suggested routes and told there will be a continued presence of Ottawa Police and the Parliamentary Protective Service. 

Ontario Premier Doug Ford broke his silence on the protests in a brief statement issued Monday that said the “right to a peaceful protest is core to our Canadian identity,” but that he was “extremely disturbed” by the desecration of monuments and the waving of “swastikas and other symbols of hate and intolerance.”

“That has no place in Ontario or Canada. Not now. Not ever,” the statement reads. 

Read more: Recap of the trucker protest day two

Ottawa police had also announced earlier Sunday that there were “several” criminal investigations underway in relation to acts described by police as “desecration” to several monuments.

There was widespread condemnation of some of the protesters’ behaviour from Saturday, including adorning the statue of Terry Fox with Canada flags and anti-mandate signs, urinating on the War Memorial and jumping and dancing on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

On CTV News Channel Monday Ottawa mayor Jim Watson said the people of Ottawa have been “more than patient” with the protestors, adding that they hurt their own cause with some of their actions over the weekend.

“Going and taking free meals from the shepherds of good hope, the soup kitchen for the homeless, urinating on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, dancing on it, desecrating the Terry Fox monument with placards and so on, and really keeping people up 24 hours a day, honking their horns and keeping their diesel engines running and parking in residential areas,” he said.

Watson said the public are “fed up” with the constant noise, disruptions and harassment they are experiencing as a result of the convoy’s presence.

“The very fact that they’re threatening to intimidate retail workers – going in to try and shop without a mask – shows how out of touch these people are,” he continued. “These are individuals that are trying to make a decent wage, some them are working for minimum wage, some of them at fast food restaurants, some of them are17 to 18-years-old being harassed by middle-aged, mostly men, threatening them because they are challenged and told to wear a mask... it's really quite sad on the part of the truckers and its paints them all with the same brush unfortunately.”

Watson said it’s time for the truckers to move on and called for the organizers to condemn the “disgraceful behaviour” from some of their group. 

On Sunday, flowers had been laid at the memorials and some protesters were seen picking up trash and alcohol bottles, with other reports suggesting they were policing behaviour from their compatriots and had “set a watch” over the national monuments to avoid a repeat of the behaviour from the day before.

The presence of several hateful symbols at the rally over the weekend, including signs and flags with Nazi imagery, the Confederate flag, yellow stars, patches or clothing that belong to groups with extremist views, and flags and signs that said “F*** Trudeau” sparked widespread concern and public discourse.

Speaking on CTV’s Question Period Sunday, Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said the hateful images could not be ignored.

“Some of the images and the voices that we heard come out of that protest were alarming. Canadians saw for themselves. We had swastika flags, we had the Confederate flag, we had voices that called for the overthrow of the government. Canadians saw for themselves that some voices are really disturbing and unacceptable,” he said

“I understand that there are some people who are sympathetic to the protests for other reasons but we cannot look the other way.” 

Good morning from Parliament Hill. It appears that at some point last night one lane of Wellington Street was cleared or truckers left. Still many trucks stretching across blocks but now room for emergency vehicles. pic.twitter.com/g4WcUfKYdD

— Rachel Aiello (@rachaiello) January 31, 2022

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/gSEPG4NWe

[feelingbluepolitics]

"[t]rump’s unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination, crystallized by his harsh denunciation of the racial justice movement Friday night at Mount Rushmore, has unnerved Republicans who have long enabled him but now fear losing power and forever associating their party with his racial animus.

"Although amplifying racism and stoking culture wars have been mainstays of [t]rump’s public identity for decades, they have been particularly pronounced this summer as [trump] has reacted to the national reckoning over systemic discrimination by seeking to weaponize the anger and resentment of some white Americans for his own political gain.

..."[t]rump has left little doubt through his utterances the past few weeks that he sees himself not only as the Republican standard-bearer but as leader of a modern grievance movement animated by civic strife and marked by calls for 'white power,' the phrase chanted by one of his supporters in a video the president shared last weekend on Twitter. He later deleted the video but did not disavow its message.

..."[t]rump put his strategy to resuscitate his troubled reelection campaign by galvanizing white supporters on display Friday night under the chiseled granite gaze of four past presidents memorialized in the Black Hills of South Dakota. He celebrated Independence Day with a dystopian speech in which he excoriated racial justice protesters as 'evil' representatives of a 'new far-left fascism' whose ultimate goal is 'the end of America.'

..."'Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,' Trump said to boos from a packed crowd of supporters. 'Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.'

"Over the years, some Republicans have struggled to navigate [t]rump’s race baiting and, at times, outright racism, while others have rallied behind him. Bursts of indignation and frustration come and go but have never resulted in a complete GOP break with [trump]. [t]rump’s recent moves are again putting Republican officeholders onto risky political terrain.

"On Friday night at Mount Rushmore, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), a member of the party’s leadership, and other top Republicans were seen applauding as [t]rump spoke.

"[t]rump’s repeated championing of monuments, memorials and military bases honoring Confederate leaders has run up against the tide of modernity and a weary electorate that polls show overwhelmingly support the Black Lives Matter movement — a slogan that [t]rump said would be 'a symbol of hate' if painted on Fifth Avenue in New York.

"In Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, a massive statue of Stonewall Jackson was dismantled to the cheers of onlookers and the ringing of church bells in recent days, and even in Mississippi, the state legislature voted to remove the Confederate battle emblem from its state flag.

"On Capitol Hill, some Republicans fret — mostly privately, to avoid his wrath — that [t]rump’s fixation on racial and other cultural issues leaves their party running against the currents of change. Coupled with the coronavirus pandemic and related economic crisis, these Republicans fear he is not only seriously impairing his reelection chances but also jeopardizing the GOP Senate majority and its strength in the House.

..."[t]rump’s commentary of late has been dizzying and visceral. He has referred to the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, which originated in China, as the 'kung flu.' He has called racial justice demonstrators 'thugs.' He has attacked efforts to take down Confederate statues as an assault on 'our heritage.' And in an ominous hypothetical scenario, he described a 'very tough hombre' breaking into a young woman’s home while her husband was away.

"[t]rump’s Twitter feed, meanwhile, has become something of a crime blotter, with posts of grainy photos of suspected vandals [trump] labels anarchists and demands for lengthy prison sentences.

..."'They coddled this guy the whole time and now it’s like some rats are jumping off of the sinking ship. It’s just a little late,' Kasich said. 'It’s left this nation with a crescendo of hate not only between politicians but between citizens. . . . It started with Charlottesville and people remained silent then, and we find ourselves in this position now.'

..."[t]rump has banned travel from seven Muslim-majority countries; equivocated over the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville; questioned the intelligence of basketball star LeBron James and numerous other African American figures; attacked the national anthem protests of black football players; and demanded that four Democratic congresswomen of color 'go back' to the 'crime infested places from which they came,' among other actions and episodes.

..."[t]rump’s approach has deep roots in Republican politics. Beginning with the violent opposition among some white voters to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Richard Nixon and other Republican politicians appealed to white voters — especially in the South — with calls for 'law and order' and vows to defend states’ rights as the federal government enforced the new laws.

"The presidency of George W. Bush ushered in a period when the national party sought to grow its support among blacks and Hispanics. And following Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss to Obama, the GOP produced a so-called autopsy report arguing that the party would need to make serious inroads among minority voters to survive changing demographics.

"At the same time, however, [t]rump’s 'birther' campaign against Obama was gaining traction on the right, and he rode to victory in part on white grievance.

..."'Without white resentment, there is no rationale for [t]rump,' Belcher said. 'Without that, what reason do his supporters...have to be with [t]rump if he’s not going to be your tribal strong man? He started there and will end there.'"

The R's are racists. It does not matter that some of them understand that R's are the party serving the rich, and that racism serves them, with the base they have collected, to keep the focus on skin in preference to the vast wealth divides they have championed in this country. Tactical, or true like trump, and Jeff Sessions, and so many others, Republicon leadership is and has been racist.

Racists get fired from their jobs.

We are decades overdue to fire every Republicon in politics as the ring leaders of racism. Then we can shore up civil rights laws, and work to remove the rest of the racists in public service jobs, from police officers and DA's and judges to school administrators and teachers.

And we can tax the obscenely rich while we're at it, the Republicons' core clientele, who are the real beneficiaries of the racial divisiveness trump has laid bare.

[randomrainman]

american conservatism and the minds of people: a black man’s perspective.

Hi, it is I.

I often think long and hard about the mind states of the people around me, and my inevitable conclusion is that the vast majority of people are monumentally and irrevocably fucking stupid.  As it turns out, people have a really hard time letting go of things with which they have grown familiar or fond, and therein lies the basic principle of conservative thought.  

“But aren’t some things okay to keep?”

Well, obviously, not everything needs to be thrown out in order for improvement to occur.  In the Army, we have things labelled “sustains” and “improves”.  The two terms are pretty self-explanatory (as are most things in the military): sustains are the things that work, and the improves are the things you either completely nix or need to, erm, improve.  Of course, this begs a question: as it relates to a society of living, (mostly) breathing human beings, how does this apply?

"Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water,” it is commonly said.  I am not entirely sure who was throwing away bathing children, but that’s a discussion for a different time.  The baby in this idiomatic expression is whatever it is we are supposed to be maintaining.  Let’s start with an example: police.

Obviously, it is entirely infeasible to literally abolish police.  We absolutely need the police force as an institution, and good and effective policing is a pillar to a modern, functional society.  However, we can abolish unprofessional, unnecessarily violent, racist, or otherwise unbecoming behaviour from police departments, and also demonstrate that such things are intolerable and met with appropriate punishments every time these rules are broken.  NWA didn’t make “Fuck The Police” because they wanted to express interest in having thoroughly arresting cop sex; it exists because they don’t trust the police.

Above: An Autistic Swedish dude spitting shockingly accurate commentary-by-proxy about American society. Flames!

Due possibly in part to dubiously worded slogans such as “defund the police”, modern conservatives balk at the thought of changing anything of significance about how policing in many communities in the United States is conducted, even going as far as to label the reform for which we call as an attack on the very idea of police.

That said, historically, the very pillars of police forces in the United States have their foundations in slavery and post-slavery racist institutions, which means that, while much has changed on the surface, the way police implement policy reflects structural and societal racism.  As a result, simply attacking individual instances of misconduct will almost always fail to elicit any meaningful progress, which is why some do seek to dismantle police departments (an option I cannot fathom as being realistic, especially not in the short term). 

The lack of a centralised police organisation from which to implement policy certainly does not help, and while some police departments, to include the Department of Justice itself, have introduced implicit bias training, it would appear that change was difficult to measure. Additionally, many police departments have not addressed the more overt problem of explicit racism in law enforcement, which is a nigh-impossible thing to tackle expeditiously without a top-down structure to deal with it. It has improved steadily overall, however, but not without significant disapproval...

Pictured: “disapproval”.  A civil rights demonstrator is attacked by a police dog in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963. (Photo credit: AP)

The Origins

As I noted earlier, there is plenty of shit people want to keep, and most for relatively understandable reasons -- after all, those things provide a sense of familiarity.  “It’s always been this way -- why change it?” they ask.  One needs only to look at our, um, flowery history to see countless examples of things that required change...

The transatlantic slave trade transported up to 12 million forcibly enslaved Africans to the Americas, many of whom arrived in what is now the United States.  As unspeakably horrifying as the actual journey was, this was only the beginning of the tribulations that would befall the slaves and their descendants in the future.

While Europeans played a large part in introducing the idea of race-based caste systems into colonised lands, the American brand of discrimination is different in the fact that the idea that Blacks and Native Americans were genetically inferior to whites was endemic to our inception, and thus, formed the basis of the things enshrined into American democracy.

Photo credit: Alexander Gardner / Wikimedia Commons

Abraham Lincoln entered the chat.

Naturally, having someone even so much as threaten the idea of racial dominance after literal fucking centuries of treating Black people as property did not sit well with the slave-owning populace (even if Lincoln’s motives were not exactly altruistic).  While the Southern states did in fact operate an agrarian economy heavily dependent on chattel slavery, it was that notion of superiority combined with societal comfort they felt that ultimately catalysed the secession of the Southern states from the Union...

Pictured: Civil War reenactors (from the Confederate side) simulate the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest battle in US history.  Also, why the fuck is Civil War reenactment a popular thing to do? It’s deeply weird. (Photo credit: MPRNews.org)

...and then they decided to have the deadliest fucking war in American history over that comfort.  Spoiler alert: the Confederates lost both the war and their precious bullshit institution of slavery -- but even after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, many Southern slave owners did not even pass the news of freedom to their slaves for months.

In keeping with the preservationist and racist mindset which occupied most Southerners’ brains, any attempt to integrate Black people into society during the Reconstruction period was stymied at every turn.  To them, despite Black people being de jure full citizens in accordance with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, we were still subhuman.  Due to Jim Crow laws, Ku Klux Klan terrorism, and other assorted nonsense, we made virtually no progress toward equality until the Civil Rights Movement and resulting laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

“Well, you got what you wanted!  YOU’RE EQUAL!  Quit yer bitchin’!”

Ah, if only things worked that way in real life.  As previously noted, even if things are codified into law as changes, there are still people who try really hard to keep everything exactly the fucking same, so it does not end up happening in practice.  Things such as residual effects of redlining and continuing disproportionate and excessive imprisonment of minorities, amongst other issues, still affect people in the present day. In other areas, people exploit loopholes in order to lawfully discriminate against others they might deem “undeserving”.

Lots of things, especially when it comes to role of minorities in society, have historical precedents.  When arguing said precedents with conservative types, the conversation almost always leads to one of several (predictable) conclusions: the person believes that 1) negative historical events (e.g., slavery, Native American genocide, etc.) were not that bad; 2) those things did not happen at all; or 3) those things were bad, but somehow do not affect modern society.

Obviously, all three are emphatically wrong.  This is why typical conservative behaviour, even in this modern era in which information sharing is instantaneous, does not surprise me: often, the rhetoric is not rooted in reality, and often resorts to appeals to emotions to elicit a knee-jerk response.  This is not to say that this does not occur on liberal ends of the spectrum, but modern conservative rhetoric is rooted primarily in unjustified fear of change and anti-intellectualism.

Pictured: A screenshot I took of someone on a pro-President Biden post desperately trying to be oppressed.

This kind of shit is utterly exhausting.  Neoconservatism, in a nutshell, is people literally inventing problems and subsequently getting angry at their own creations.  It is the equivalent of setting up a bear trap, immediately stepping in it, and wondering why the fuck you’re stuck in said bear trap and your foot doesn’t work anymore. During the Obama administration, the only thing I would witness is people insisting (without any evidence, of course) that President Obama was the Antichrist and that he would usher in the New World Order and take everyone’s guns.  All zero of those things happened, of course, but when Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the rhetoric completely reversed, and he was named “God’s chosen" by evangelical figures, despite him having broken perhaps all of the Old Testament’s Ten Commandments.  Of course, as you can see with the above screenshot, clearly, they have returned to the Obama bitching method, but diminished, partially because President Biden is also an old, white male, and they don’t need to ask where he was born.

Pictured: what happens when you fuel millions of self-victimising people with QAnon conspiracy theories and possibly loads of Bang energy drinks.  Photo credit: ABC News

The hypocrisy is absolutely palpable amongst these types of people, and if I tried to sit here and continued to provide examples of conservative figures contradicting themselves, I would die either of old age or myocardial infarction, whichever happened first. The difference in the reaction to Black Lives Matter protests versus the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 makes the double standard quite transparent: justice and equality, while technically codified into law, are clearly are not administered equally in modern-day America.  We’re still not like the others.

Our brand of conservatism, by and large, is the enemy of those two very important American ideals.

|the kid|

[duhragonball]

On Twitter, there’s a new movement that started up on... Thursday, I guess, with the hashtag #SpeakingOut, where women were encouraged to call out instances of sexual abuse.     I’m not sure if it started with the pro wrestling community or not, because earlier in the week I saw some stuff about comic book pros like Warren Ellis and Cameron Stewart, but maybe that was a precursor.   All I know is that right now, I’ve been seeing all sorts of names being dropped in the pro wrestling business, each of them accused of being sexual predators, or covering up for the crimes of others.    Some of the names I don’t recognize, because they’re independent wrestlers from promotions I’m not familiar with, but I’ve seen some names I do know, and that’s pretty tough to take.   I’m going to discuss this here. 

Predictably, I’ve seen some backlash to #SpeakingOut, which reminds me of the same bullshit talking points used by the #IStandWithVic crowd last year.   In case you didn’t know, Vic Mignogna was a voice actor who worked for Funimation and provided the dub performances for Broly in DBZ, and Eward Elric in Fullmetal Alchemist.   I think those were his two most famous roles.   Over the decades, Vic garnered a reputation for being a sex pest, kissing and inappropriately touching women and teenage girls at conventions, and harassing his colleagues.  I assume the release of the “Dragon Ball Super: Broly” movie in the U.S. in 2019 precipitated a newfound interest in those allegations, and fans started objecting to his bookings at 2019 conventions.    By mid-year, Vic was fired from Funimation and RoosterTeeth, and he responded to this by starting an ill-advised defamation lawsuit.   

Vic’s defenders are, to put it mildly, idiots.    There were professional lawyers on Twitter who explained, very clearly, why this lawsuit was a bad idea.   The main reason being that it was done in Texas, which has a lot of laws designed to make it harder to sue people for defamation.    I think Vic’s goal was to find some way to punish his accusers for making him look bad and getting him fired.   Winning the lawsuit, was a way for him and his supporters to feel like they “cleared his name”, except that was never how it worked.   If he had been arrested and tried for sex pest crimes, the burden of proof would be on his accusers to show that he really did bad things.   But he was suing people for slander, so that means the burden of proof was on him to show that they really were saying things that were demonstrably false and damaging to his reputation.    The main problem with that is everyone had been talking about his sex pestery for years, so it doesn’t make sense to single a few people out in 2019 and blame them for reinforcing something everyone already believed.  But the ISWV crowd kept insisting that this distinction didn’t matter, and that it was wrong to ostracize or turn against Vic without “proof”.   I see the same demands for “proof” being tossed around for all these wrestling personalities.  

I think there’s a couple of things going on with this.   One is simple denial.   If you’re a fan of someone and you find out they did something terrible, you really don’t want to believe it.   I was never that into a lot of these guys, but I know I felt pretty low when I first heard about Vic’s shenanigans, because I liked his work.    And I’m feeling that way about Warren Ellis now.   Not a huge fan, but I liked some of his stuff, and now I feel a little guilty by association for ever liking that stuff in the first place.   It would be nice, I suppose, to just pretend that I hadn’t heard those accusations, or that they weren’t real.    Then I could just go back to the way things were before, without all the uncomfortableness.   I just can’t do that, but it seems like a lot of people can and will.   It’s not about “proof”, it’s about putting up some sort of barrier that will excuse them from confronting an unpleasant truth. 

I think this is why you see people going out of their way to defend Christopher Columbus and Confederate monuments.    They want to believe that there was something noble about that stuff, because the alternative is to admit that a lot of the things they learned in school aren’t true, and a lot of the “heritage” they cling to is built on white supremacy and slavery.    I don’t think anyone really cares about a Robert E. Lee statue, but I’ve seen people go out of their way to try to say Lee opposed slavery, like he’s one of the good Confederates, so he should get a pass.   Except he did own slaves, and even if he hadn’t, he still fought to defend a nation founded on slavery as a guiding principle.    Tearing down a statue of Lee is a tacit admission that Lee never deserved a statue in the first place, and everyone who admired him was wrong, and maybe the admiration was rooted in racism all along.   That’s a bitter pill for people to swallow, and a lot of them just refuse to swallow it.   So they deny and deflect, and do anything they can to make this about something else.   

The other side of it is just plain hatred.   I don’t know if Vic’s defenders were all misogynists to begin with, but it seems like they all got there, one way or another.   The train of thought always seemed to be “He didn’t do these things, but even if he did there’s nothing wrong with it.”   From what I saw, it really seemed like Vic’s backers were all fired up about defending a man’s right to creep on women in any way he sees fit.   “What, so kissing is illegal now?” No, jackass, but when you’re fifty-fucking-five and you kiss a seventeen-year-old girl who only wanted to take a picture with you, it’s pretty damn messed up.    When you use your celebrity status to try to mack on young fans, that’s messed up.   When you’re an established wrestler and you try to take advantage of up-and-coming wrestlers, that’s messed up.    And some of that behavior is totally illegal, but the sad reality is that most of these creeps will never get prosecuted for any of it.   That’s why the calls for “proof” are so hollow, because everyone knows it’ll never end up in a courtroom.  At best, some of these guys will get fired, and guess what?  “Innocent until proven guilty” doesn’t apply to employers.   I lost a job once because my “teamwork” wasn’t good enough, and that was the closest thing to an explanation I got.    Don’t bullshit me about “proof”.

I guess I should tie this train of thought in with Black Lives Matter while I’m at it.    I find it absurd that the police in this country are so out of touch that when there’s a nationwide protest against police brutality, their immediate response is... more brutality.   This, more than anything I’ve seen, is the reason to defund the police.    They appear to only have the one mode of conduct, and they don’t even know how to do things a different way.    If the situation is this bad, we may as well scrap the police as they are and start over.   If the cops wanted to fix this situation, all they have to do is treat people with respect and hold themselves accountable, but they can’t let go of their hatred for five fucking minutes and figure that out.   This is why you hear about those guys who make up stories about restaurants spitting in their food.   They’re paranoid that everyone’s out to get them because they know they deserve to face some consequences, so they’re constantly on guard for this sort of thing.  It’s sick. 

Somehow, people who support these guys end up supporting the very behavior they were supposed to be denying.    Maybe this is why Columbus is such a sticking point.   I never gave a shit about Columbus.   One of my high school yearbooks had a Columbus theme because it just happened to come out on the 500th anniversary of his first voyage to North America, but I never understood what that had to do with my high school.   I think there’s people that want to give him tons of credit, basically thank him for everything that’s happened in the Western Hemisphere since 1500, not in spite of his atrocities, but to retroactively justify them.   What I mean is, if you can convince society that Columbus was a great man, and that his achievements outweigh his wrongdoing, then you can also convince society that the wrongdoings aren’t actually that bad.    “The price of progress,” they can say.    It’s like the idea that Robert E. Lee is admired solely for his “brilliant” military mind.   His side lost the fucking war, so I never understood how he gets all this credit for being a great general.    The point is that if you can convince people that he was a noble man in spite of the slavery thing, then you can open the door to the idea that the Confederacy as a whole wasn’t That Bad, and that only opens the door to the idea that slavery wasn’t That Bad, and so on.  

Same deal with Roman Polansky and Woody Allen.    It amazes me that people will still try to defend those fucks, but it probably has a lot to do with all the other sex pests in Hollywood, who hope that everyone will stick up for them when they get exposed.   So you have this little chesnut about how “Yeah, they did bad things, but they sure made some good movies.”     The implication is that you have to accept a few sex crimes if you want good art.    And no, that’s not true, and even if it were true, it wouldn’t be worth it.   

I don’t know where things will end up with J.K. Rowling.   I’d like to think that one of these days, she’ll wake up and apologize for all this TERF rhetoric she’s been spouting.    That would probably be the best-case scenario.   More likely, she’ll cause an entire generation of Harry Potter fans to wrestle with their loyalty to her books.   There’s no job to fire her from, no laws to punish her, no government agency to step in.    She’s got no financial stake in repairing this PR damage.   There’s going to be an audience of bigots that will still kiss up to her no matter what she says, so her ego will be well-insulated.    Maybe a hundred years from now, people will be talking about tossing her statue in a river, as society admits that we don’t need to accept transphobia in exchange for YA literature.   

I don’t know, I think I went all over the place with this one, but I had a lot to get off my chest.   I think the overall lesson from this year is that we can’t put these people on pedestals.   Some of them are just hell-bent on letting us down, and it’s just a matter of time before their misdeeds are brought to light.   I see these dopes with Thin Blue Line flags and “I stand with [X]” hashtags and I’m like “Who are you supporting here?    What is it you’re standing for, exactly?   Why should they be worthy of your loyalty?”    And I think the answer is less about loyalty to a person or group, and more about sticking it to someone else.   Women, minorities, whoever.   They just want to stand by someone to spite someone else.    And that’s awful.   

[foreverlogical]

In the months since George Floyd died in Minneapolis while in police custody, protests have rippled across the United States, with hundreds of demonstrators rallying against systemic racism and calling for justice. Among some of the more prominent changes sparked by Floyd's death is the speedy removal and renaming of landmarks and monuments representing the Confederacy. Such symbols have come ...

VISIT WEBSITE

[theemperorsfeather]

Some good news!

... it didn't come down all through the Occupy protests nearly a decade ago and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of more recent years. It survived for nearly three more years after Mayor William Bell had a plywood box built around its base and painted black in 2017. He stopped short of having it removed because the state passed a law earlier that year aimed at keeping it and similarly fraught objects from being torn down.

But it couldn't survive for even a full day after a large-scale rally saw another racially divisive monument destroyed by protesters and a statue of Thomas Jefferson burned just feet away on Sunday. 

...

Only a few dozen protestors and interested folks showed up in the park on Monday afternoon and evening, but the force and scale of Sunday's events were enough to drive Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin to commit to bringing the memorial down by noon Tuesday.

Easily the most visible legacy of the young mayor's tenure to date is his decision to defy the state and bring a construction crew in to dismantle the monument and take it down piece by piece with a crane bearing a massive hook, the long chunks carted away on the back of a flatbed truck. On Jefferson Davis Day, no less.

[reading-writing-revolution]

Heather Cox Richardson:

June 10, 2020 (Wednesday)

“We’ve made every decision correctly,” the president said Friday about the coronavirus, “and now the trajectory is great.”

In fact, our Covid-19 numbers are up. They had begun to level off as hard-hit New York brought its infections under control, but now other hotspots are emerging. Arizona, Florida, and Texas, along with fifteen other states, are seeing increases in Covid-19 cases. Already, more than 112,000 Americans have died and more than 1.9 million are infected, and from now until July 4, epidemiologists predict 5,000 to 6,000 Americans a week will die from the disease.

The pandemic was not on the president’s mind today.

Today the Trump campaign delivered a cease and desist letter to CNN President Jeff Zucker demanding that CNN retract and apologize for its recent poll showing Trump 14 points behind presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. The letter says the poll is “designed to mislead American voters through a biased questionnaire and skewed sampling.”

This is clearly the work of Republican pollster John McLaughlin, whom Trump hired on Monday. McLaughlin’s career is based in the (false) concept that political polls showing Democrats ahead of Republicans are deliberately skewed toward Democrats in order to discourage Republicans from voting.

CNN’s lawyer responded to the letter by noting that this was the first time in its history that CNN had been threatened with legal action over a political poll, and that “to the extent we have received legal threats from political leaders in the past, they have typically come from countries like Venezuela or other regimes where there is little or no respect for a free and independent media.” He noted that McLaughlin had little credibility, and concluded: “Your letter is factually and legally baseless. It is yet another bad faith attempt by the campaign to threaten litigation to muzzle speech it does not want voters to read or hear. Your allegations and demands are rejected in their entirety.”

Virtually every reputable poll shows Biden leading Trump by double digits, so why is the Trump campaign picking this fight? The cease and desist letter might be a way to calm down the president, who is apparently on edge these days. But it might also be a way to try to rally the Republican base around the idea that, as recent fundraising has said, the “Trump Army” must fight off “the Liberal MOB.”

The campaign seems to be embracing military language as opposition to the president intensifies. Today the retired federal judge who was asked to examine the Justice Department’s unusual request to abandon the case against Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn-- after Flynn had pleaded guilty-- filed his report. Judge John Gleeson accused Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department of “a gross abuse of prosecutorial power, attempting to provide special treatment to a favored friend and political ally of the President of the United States. It has treated the case like no other, and in doing so has undermined the public’s confidence in the rule of law.”

More than 1,250 former members of the Department of Justice also wrote today of the need to defend the rule of law. They asked the DOJ’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, to look into Barr’s involvement in last week’s attack by law enforcement on the peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square before Trump’s walk to St. John’s Episcopal Church.

A rift between the administration and the military became clear last week when prominent military leaders opposed Trump’s use of force against demonstrators, supported the protesters’ concerns, and pointedly defended the Constitution. Trump deliberately widened that rift today, siding with white reactionaries rather than with current military leaders.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper and General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both of whom had been caught in Trump’s walk across Lafayette Square, are eager to unify their troops, 43% of whom are people of color rapidly becoming disaffected. The idea of renaming Army bases named for Confederate generals has been on the table for awhile, and they talked of actually doing it in this tense moment, even as protesters and city officials are pulling down Confederate monuments.

To historians, this is a no-brainer. Confederate leaders tried to destroy the United States and succeeded in killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, so the idea that we have any federal recognition of them is wild. And they were fighting to enshrine human enslavement in the laws of a new nation, and from there to spread it across the world, so for a country founded on the idea of human equality to honor these men seems particularly self-defeating. As General David Petraeus, the retired Army commander in Iraq and Afghanistan said, “The irony of training at bases named for those who took up arms against the United States, and for the right to enslave others, is inescapable to anyone paying attention.”

Politico reported that the military leaders thought the idea was an obvious move, but Trump shocked them with a series of tweets saying “These Monumental and very Powerful Bases have become part of a Great American Heritage, and a… history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom. The United States of America trained and deployed our HEROES on these Hallowed Grounds, and won two World Wars. Therefore, my Administration will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations… Our history as the Greatest Nation in the World will not be tampered with. Respect our Military!”

Trump was clearly siding with his base, which is quite keen on Confederate imagery, rather than with those calling for equal justice. But that base is apparently getting smaller. Within hours of his tweets, NASCAR had banned the Confederate flag from its races and its venues because it “runs contrary to our commitment to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all fans, our competitors and our industry,” NASCAR said.

The decision was announced before tonight’s race in Virginia, where Bubba Wallace, NASCAR’s only African American driver, was to compete in a Chevrolet with a #BlackLivesMatter paint job. Wallace, born in Alabama, had said there was no place for Confederate flags in the sport. Tonight he was wearing a black “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirt, and applauded the decision. “This is no doubt the biggest race of my career tonight,” he said. “There’s a lot of emotions on the race track.”

Not everyone approved. Helmet artist Jason Beam tweeted: “ignorance wins again, NASCAR you realize the North had slaves too, lol not just the South, you want to remove the American Flag as well, idiots.”

It seems that the lines of Trump’s election campaign are solidifying. Two days ago, the Washington Post reported that Trump was trying to figure out how to turn calls for racial justice into a fight over “LAW & ORDER”-- as he keeps tweeting-- but Republican Party leaders were trying to figure out how to keep that shift from turning into offensive race baiting. Trump’s announcement today that he is resuming his rallies makes that point now appear moot.

The first rally will take place in Tulsa, Oklahoma—where coronavirus cases are spiking—on June 19. This day is also known as “Juneteenth,” a day commemorating the end of slavery in America because it was that day in 1865 that African Americans in Texas finally learned they were free. Tulsa is also the site of the 1921 race massacre, in which white mobs destroyed the wealthy Black neighborhood of Greenwood (aided by firebombs dropped from private airplanes), murdered as many as 300 of their Black neighbors, injured hundreds more, and left 10,000 people homeless.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Richmond, Va.: Anti-racists target UDC’s 125th anniversary

By Phil Wilayto, The Virginia Defender

Nearly 40 anti-racist activists - Black, Latinx, Asian and white - gathered today in Richmond for a demonstration outside the national headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Their lead banner boldly proclaimed the reason for the protest: “UDC: Celebrating 125 Years of Racist Lies!”

The UDC, which is celebrating its 125th anniversary this weekend in Nashville, Tenn., is the organization most responsible for the creation of hundreds of Confederate monuments in some three dozen states around the country, including the massive tribute to Confederate President Jefferson Davis that stands at the intersection of North Davis and Monument avenues in Richmond.

Today the organization plays a leading role in opposing efforts to take down those monuments to white supremacy, and has carried out a decades-long campaign pressuring local school boards to reject history books explaining that slavery was the cause of the Civil War.

It also continues to promote the myth that the South only lost the war because the North had superior numbers and material resources. In reality, the real reasons for the Confederate collapse was the self-emancipation of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Black people, which deprived the South of the captive workforce it depended on for its existence, and the fact that some 200,000 of these formerly enslaved workers joined the Union army and navy, which became the major factor in turning the war in the Union’s favor.

The first three speakers at today’s protest were Jelane Schmidt, a professor at the University of Virginia, public historian and a leader in Charlettesville’s Black Live Matter; Heather Redding, a leader in the North Carolina movement to take down Confederate statues in that state; and Ayame, a leader in the Richmond chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

The mic was then opened to anyone who wanted to speak. Those included Jihad Abdulmumit, chairperson of the National Jericho Movement, which supports political prisoners; Dieyah Rasheed, a member of the Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality and a former member of the Richmond chapter of the Black Panther Party; and Chuck Richardson, who served 18 years on Richmond City Council and now is running again for the council’s 5th District seat.

Today’s protest, organized by DSA-Richmond and the Virginia Defenders, was the first coordinated regional effort by anti-monument activists in Charlottesville, site of the deadly August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally; North Carolina, where many armed white supremacist groups are active; and Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy and the city with perhaps the largest number of Confederate memorials.

At a post-protest potluck dinner, activists pledged to continue working together and to support each others’ efforts in the region.

Note: In a sign of the changing times, the street where the UDC headquarters is located recently has been renamed from simply "The Boulevard" to honor Richmond's famous native son who excelled both in the tennis world and in opposing South Africa's system of apartheid.

The UDC offices are now located at 328 North Arthur Ashe Boulevard.

[crimethinc]

Accounts from the Fall of Silent Sam–Featuring Maya Little

As the effects of the toppling of the Confederate statue at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill continue to ripple out, we’ve obtained two narratives of the night’s events. The first statement is from Maya Little, the Black graduate student who helped catalyze the revolt against the statue by participating in a sit-in against it and then, when that did not succeed, dousing it in paint and her own blood. The second is from another anonymous anarchist, who connects the victory in Chapel Hill with the events of “All Out August,” a month of resistance to fascism, prisons, police, and other manifestations of white supremacy and oppression.

Whose Streets? A Statement from Maya Little

On Monday night, August 20, 2018, students, workers, neighbors, and comrades reclaimed Chapel Hill in an ungovernable enactment of justice. We marched in our streets and the badged and unbadged racists moved out of the way. We looked out for each other and refused to yield when fascists and cops attacked our comrades. We memorialized and reawakened histories of resistance against the white supremacist institution and its followers and honored the martyred Black and Brown people in our area. People masked up in force rather than in isolation, limiting the power of fascists and police. Finally, the statue was pulled from its plinth and Silent Sam’s smirking face was buried in the dirt. For the first time, we stood taller than Silent Sam.

This victory, cathartic and much more collective than previous efforts, challenged sanitized historical production, directed the conflict against the racist university, and aligned intersections of resistance against the institution to demand action alongside the most marginalized in our community.

In focusing on reclaiming and recovering histories of Black and Brown resistance, unlike objectified, depersonalized, and passive academic histories, the protest chose targets that rendered explicit the commitments to white supremacy that UNC and Chapel Hill maintain to this day. The focus on physical spaces brought UNC’s shadowy behavior to light, challenging the university’s abuse of Black students and workers. By directing attention to the protected existence of monuments, buildings, and plaques produced specifically to honor oppressors, organizers connected these physical racist symbols to years of racist policing, gentrification, and abuse of Black and Brown workers, students, and community members. In recontextualizing these racist monuments, Black students expressed solidarity with Charlottesville and memorialized Sandra Bland and the countless people of color murdered in our area. The fact that these were physical targets also enabled activists to reimagine spaces through the recovery of resistance histories—for example, in the Hurston Hall movement, the plaques put up to honor Pauli Murray, and the planting of placards last spring detailing many of the acts of police brutality and protest in Silent Sam’s last 50 years.

Graduate students Jerry Wilson and Cortland Gilliam explain why they will wear nooses around their necks until the statue is removed.

At every step, the university opposed activists, confiscated materials, and used surveillance and harassment to stop the recovery and rejoicing in reclamation. It remains important for the university to portray resistance as an outlier, the unusual behavior of so-called “outside agitators.” This is why Monday’s 20-foot-tall banners memorializing the many murdered by white supremacy and honoring “Those who have fought against the white supremacy UNC upholds” were a critical element, helping to create an alternate campus that empowered and brought together anti-racist protestors without chancellors, police, or city officials.

The banners not only presented a different vision—they became our own plaques, our own memorials. Students, workers, and community members carried and protected the banners, using them to create a space that police and fascists could not take back. We carried them, fought for them, and worked together to put those banners up surrounding Silent Sam.

The violence that police demonstrated in response to our protecting the banners clarified their opposition to our freedom and united people in reclaiming the area. This demonstration did not involve marginalized people acting alone or demonstrators alienated from a sense of struggle. We were connected by our resistance to the united front of cops and Confederates.

Along with other Black students, I spoke about the pain and danger of being daily abused under Silent Sam’s gaze by our university and racist visitors. This time, instead of behaving like hesitant and elevated allies, white students, workers, and comrades acted as “supportive accomplices.” As people acted together, the banners were put up and the statue taken down. Backed into a corner and afraid of our power, the university has revealed that all it really knows how to do is to repress and seek revenge.

Their racist monument was taken down in an act of community power. Now UNC chancellor Carol Folt, the cops, and city and state officials in Raleigh are scared. Along with Harry Smith, Margaret Spellings, and Haywood Cochrane, Folt issued the boldest statement that I have ever seen from the Chancellor’s Office. They promised retribution for the toppling of the statue through the use of extensive university and state funds supported by the SBI. Direct action and confrontation with the university and its police has been the only way to draw the administrators and cops out of their usual equivocating and shadowy operations to show their real colors. White demonstrators witnessed the force that the university regularly uses to crush Black dissent.

The demonstration last year, the marking of the statue with blood, and the memorialization and toppling on Monday have forced the admins and cops into a corner and now they bare their teeth. That’s good. They fear the commitment to justice that we demonstrate; thereby, they make clear what they actually care about: money and maintaining white supremacy.

Fear was also present in the announcement of the expected results of the historical commission planned for Wednesday, August 22, a microcosm of every institution in this country and the obsessive need to compromise at the expense of Black lives. In this fear and in the aftermath of seeing what ungovernability can look like, in Raleigh we saw a show of force by the state in direct opposition to justice. Valerie Johnson, the sole Black commission member, quoted MLK in the minority vote in favor of monument removal: “American history is replete with compromise. The Missouri compromise that spread of slavery, Plessy v. Ferguson. Let’s not continue compromising.”

And yet they did—the reformists acted as they always do, choosing comforts over equality. They further insult the North Carolinian Black and Brown heroes by deciding to place their statues next to the massive, suffocating monuments dedicated to the racists who murdered them. Yet only two days after Silent Sam’s toppling, the institution again met resistance. One woman stood up to read a statement against the racist statues and was immediately mobbed by police and dragged to a vehicle outside. The mere hint of dissent is beginning to frighten them more and more.

The statue falls.

In every instance of action, whether it be the clever renaming of UNC buildings after Hitler and David Duke by students supporting Hurston Hall in 1999, the guerrilla history connecting resistances, or a crowd coming together to run off UNC police and topple a 105-year-old statue celebrating the Confederacy, we have seen clearly which side the university stands on. The university, its leadership, and its institutions do not stand with us. We want liberation, they want to push their brand. We topple white supremacy, they uphold it.

Moving forward, looking to the courageous rebellions taking place against white supremacy on a broader basis such as the national prison strike and the unrelenting demonstrations for Black lives in Chicago and Toledo, we can draw inspiration from the actions in Chapel Hill on Monday night. In recovering the histories of resistance, in taking direct action against racism, surveillance, neoliberalism, greed, and institutional power, we brought about a new togetherness and a demonstration of our own power.

All Out August: A Statement from an Anonymous Anarchist

The actions of August 20 in Chapel Hill took place against the backdrop of a tumultuous month many have taken to calling All Out August. Starting as a joint social media and poster campaign among several informal autonomous anti-fascist networks across the so-called US and Canada, the hashtag rapidly came to stand for more than just countering far-right rallies.

This campaign became a nationwide effort encompassing several different issues—a modest attempt to present a common narrative tying together many different demonstrations, including some supporting the prison strike that began on August 21. This seems to have succeeded in addressing people beyond established anarchist and antifascist networks, strengthening popular mobilizations against various forms of fascism from Portland and Austin to DC and Chapel Hill and blurring the lines between ordinary demonstrators and those sometimes called “militants.”

The following personal reflection on a few moments of joy and determination on the streets of a sleepy Southern university town aims to highlight how this happened.

By only a few minutes after 7 pm, the entire plaza was overflowing with protestors. The energy was already palpable—the tone serious, hundreds of people silently giving the speakers their full attention. Students of color spoke of how the statue functioned as a reminder that they were not welcome on this campus, that they were not safe. Two Black students vowed to wear nooses around their necks from that day until the statue’s removal as their own reminder of what Silent Sam represents to them. Thanks to a combination of luck, determination, and uncompromising direct action, they only had to follow through on their vow for a few hours.

After a rowdy and inspiring round of speeches below the backdrop of the twenty-foot-tall gray banners that would soon shroud Silent Sam forever, the crowd was invited to march across the street to the statue. As speakers finished, they openly expressed their support and solidarity for the people who would be masking up—in defiance of North Carolina’s mask law—to help protect their identities from far-right doxxing and state surveillance. Over the microphone, we were reminded that those who dedicate their lives to fighting racism and fascism must sometimes cover their faces to protect themselves.

We pulled the freshly printed Carolina blue bandanas across our faces: three arrows pointing down alongside the words “SAM MUST FALL.” Solidarity was written across our faces. More banners appeared out of nowhere. The electricity in the crowd grew.

As soon as we crossed the street, the 10 or so cops that had been hanging around the statue attempted a show of force by targeting those who were wearing masks. They walked into the crowd, taking their authority for granted, yelling at each demonstrator clad in Carolina blue, “Remove your mask! Take your mask off!” Some pulled their masks down temporarily; the police unsuccessfully attempted to rip masks off other comrades. The police thought they had an opportunity to separate the troublemakers from well-meaning non-confrontational student protestors and went in to arrest several masked individuals. They thought this show of power could weaken us, giving them the upper hand. Not this time. This time, we wouldn’t be stopped, we wouldn’t be scared. We were more powerful than them and we knew it.

The moment the cops went in to snatch several of our comrades, dozens more came to their aid. Banners appeared between the grabbing hands of the police and the fast-moving protestors; people held tight to those who were targeted. Smoke erupted, and a human tug of war ensued. A crowd surrounded the few visibly confused officers, chanting fiercely. Of the several people the officers tried to apprehend for covering their faces, they only successfully captured one. One very large officer covered the arrestee with his entire body, and the determined crowd was unable to remove his massive weight. (The arrestee didn’t report any injuries, and only was charged with two misdemeanors). Later, we learned that a police officer only a few feet away from the confrontation had reached for his gun.

The police were thoroughly distracted by the melee. The four gray banners were already almost entirely installed around the statue by the time they regained their bearings. Once the rowdy crowd realized it could do no more for this one comrade, people retreated to the statue, surrounded it with a ring of additional banners. During these chaotic initial moments, a lone white supremacist tried to intervene and succeeded in pulling down one of the gray banners encircling Silent Sam, but it was quickly reclaimed and the aggressor was ejected from the crowd. We were everywhere at once—unarresting our friends, removing fascists from our midst, putting up banners, chanting, moving, taking care of each other.

This moment defined the evening. The police had assumed that this crowd could be tamed. Yet as soon as we arrived at the plaza, we were a single defiant force with one goal clear before us, although none of us expected to accomplish it that very night. The students, teachers, alumni, anarchists, and community members of all kinds were together in this moment, tired of waiting for politicians to give us concessions. The crowd was diverse in age, race, and background, but that night there were none of the disagreements that have become so commonplace in demonstrations. There were no apologists demanding that we stop trying to rescue our comrades from the hands of the police. Confused by our unity and determination, the police stood back. They knew that any moves against any of us would be difficult and potentially dangerous.

Elated by our initial victory, we lost track of time surrounding the statue; it could have been moments or hours. No longer visible, Silent Sam was shrouded on all sides by a wall of gray. The words “For a world without white supremacy” waved valiantly over where Sam had stood as a threat to students of color for one hundred and five years. The other banners formed a line, creating a visual display of resistance. A few police and random fascists stood around the edges of the quad.

A distance opened, and those of us holding banners began to feel exposed to police and other attackers. At that moment, the crowd of joyous, uncompromising marchers encircled the monument, singing, dancing, chanting, and keeping our energy alive. This seemed to indicate that at least some of the demonstrators were aware that the police would target the people holding banners first in order to take out a line of defense. It would be harder to justify this if a crowd of “normal-looking” students surrounded this line with locked arms, chanting. It was becoming ever clearer that this time, no one was interested in the usual divisions around tactics that often hinder our activity.

We all stood around, unsure of our next move. We had made it to our goal quickly, surprising ourselves. We thought it was over and it seemed the crowd was about to thin out. As the night fell, the summer heat did not lift, and we were all hot and tired, yet ready for more. Some rowdy folks got on the microphone and led some new chants:

“How do you spell Nazi? “C-O-P”!” “Say no no to the po po!” “Nat Turner, John Brown, anti-racists run this town!”

Someone finally got a sound system working, playing loud political hip-hop. A small dance party ensued. Once we began to lift up our spirits again, the crowd began to move. We spilled out into the street; linking arms in a classic form of resistance and solidarity, we moved together down to the next intersection. Pink smoke rose from the crowd and we formed a ring around the intersection, still arm in arm. We all faced each other, joined together with our new friends. We stood a moment in rest, listening to the voices of students of color on the megaphone, calling out the names of the revolutionaries who came before us. There was a solidarity in the air that words can hardly describe—hundreds of strangers who had come together, done what we needed to, and now held each other up. The line between street action that is categorized as confrontational and action that is described as “non-violent” became blurred. We linked arms to hold space, to breathe and celebrate together.

As we marched, we refused to let the fascists who wanted to bait us into argument distract us; however, we did not compromise in pushing them from our ranks. This occurred over and over that night. While we would never shed tears for a bigot who got himself bloodied, the crowd was wise to use just enough force to expel these people from our ranks and no more. The straggling right-wingers didn’t pose much of an immediate physical threat; outnumbering them, screaming in their faces, and shoving them beyond an established perimeter held by banners did the trick without causing a brawl that could have distracted us from our goals. Even when it came to people deploying smoke bombs, those only seemed to appear at the right moments, to serve as a distraction or conceal activities. These tactical decisions were made in the moment, between friends and strangers alike. For a few rare hours, we knew our power.

Our celebratory moment in the street ended when shouts rang out that some people had stayed behind at the statue and were now facing harassment. There was no hesitation among the crowd to return to the site for our comrades. We came marching back, much to the surprise of the small line of police trying in vain to protect Silent Sam. They were soon surrounded by an angry crowd; some tossed empty water bottles at them. These served as warning shots, letting them know that we meant business. This was our moment, our place. Their laws and their violence meant nothing to us. They stood fast at first with fear and confusion visible on their faces. But as soon as the bottles flew, the police immediately tapped each other on the shoulder to back off in retreat.

A few lone right-wingers remained, insisting that they were “just bystanders.” In the moment, this was obvious code, as they refused to join in the protest or get out of the way. The crowd opened, offering them a path out. When they refused, they were pushed through this opening; they turned around, fists cocked, only to find a crowd of masked people confronting them, and banners quickly shutting behind to block their view of those who had just removed them. Like tattletales in elementary school, they ran to the police: “Mr. Officer! They shoved me!” Once again, we let the police know that they did not rule over us. The march down the block had renewed us and we were ready for anything.

The night was built of moments like this. Fascists repeatedly tried to stand among us to gather intelligence but were immediately identified and neutralized. We always began by telling them to leave; then people around them would begin to chant in hopes of driving them out with voices. If this was not enough, one quick push could get them out of the crowd. A banner would move into place between the fascists and the crowd, and we could shift our attention to other things. Everyone seemed to have a similar understanding that we would set our boundaries very clearly with both the police and the fascists but never let them distract us from our goal.

It must also be said that there were many other bystanders who came to watch; these people were more than welcome and some joined in. Those who had brought banners often passed them on to enthusiastic newcomers who had been observing how to use them as defensive tools against state surveillance and attacks. The media will always describe us as “an angry mob,” attempting to foment fear about the threat we supposedly pose to the community, but that’s just propaganda. The only people who were unsafe in this situation were the thinly-veiled fascists who support monuments to white supremacy and advocate for the genocide of Black people and other people of color. They should be afraid. On the night of August 20, even the police had nothing to fear as long as they didn’t try to arrest any of us. All genuine bystanders, community members, and future troublemakers are welcome to join us.

Once police and fascists were cleared from the statue, word spread that it was going to come down. A rope had materialized around Silent Sam’s neck. We all moved out of the way; despite the chancellor’s fear-mongering statement later that night, there was never any risk that the statue would fall onto any of us. We all stepped back together to see if it would fall. To be honest, for a moment, we didn’t believe it was possible. The chants that had filled the air fell silent as we all waited in anticipation.

After a few seconds of pulling to no avail, a deep metal grating noise rang out and we knew that Silent Sam would stand no more. We erupted in uninhibited joy and shrieks of delight as the statue lurched through the gray banners and fell into the dirt. All at once we were jumping, hugging, crying in disbelief. Immediately, multiple clouds of pink and orange smoke rose up; people began throwing dirt on the statue as it lay face down in the mud. Banners were unfurled once again as people danced together and embraced.

As our cheers died down and we pulled our masks from our smiling faces, the rain that had been forecast all evening finally began to fall. This perfect timing completed a night that already felt magical and surreal. It was as if the natural forces were working with us, aligned with us, and now we could cool off from the heat and begin to wash away all the pain that Silent Sam’s legacy has inflicted upon all our communities. Those struggles are far from over, but that moment was ours. The rain grew heavy; jubilant and still alight with adrenaline, we disappeared into the night.

For those of us who have dedicated ourselves to a life of struggle towards liberation from capitalism, the state, white supremacy, and oppression in all the other forms it assumes, it’s easy to become accustomed to losing. Over the centuries of our struggle and the years of our own lives, we have experienced so many losses that we dare not count them. The powers that be rip through our communities and try to break us, yet we keep going. We lick our wounds and continue forward because that is the only direction we know how to go.

When Silent Sam made his nosedive into the dirt of the university, we remembered what it was like to win. These tiny moments are a breath of fresh air; they are the fuel that keeps the fires within us burning. It is like falling in love again after heartbreak—we know that it may not last forever, but it is worth it. It is worth everything they will try to do to destroy us, because we know what it is like to feel alive.

The joy that we felt when the statue fell is the joy we feel when we take control of our own lives. We are raised to believe that someone else will solve our problems for us, that we must rely on the police or the state to change the conditions of our existence. In North Carolina, the state has don us a favor by literally barring politicians from removing the statue, leaving direct action the only option. Once we learn what it is like to taste freedom, we never forget. Felling the statue with our own hands provided the kind of catharsis that could actually heal some of the wounds that 500 years of colonization, slavery, and oppression have left on our collective psyche.

Imagine the statue being removed by the city at a designated time by people paid to wear yellow safety vests! Would we have felt that sense of victory in that moment? Or would we have just felt a muted satisfaction, perhaps even a touch of resentment at the officials smiling smugly for the photo op, proud to benefit from the one concession they have given to the same communities that their police officers murder with impunity, harass daily, and kidnap to fill their jails and prisons? Our elation in this moment of healing is so powerful because we took it for ourselves, because we worked together as a community to establish our autonomy and self-determination. We were effective because for a few hours, we did not fight with each other. We allowed people to be confrontational, militant, and assertive without policing each other, and we eschewed any unnecessary escalation that would have distracted from our goals.

There is an argument that our success was only possible because of a police force that was not heavily invested in protecting the statue. There may be truth in this, though the police will surely deny it; but in any case, we know that our success was our own. There was a palpable affinity amongst the crowd: though strangers, we came together with a single goal, and we learned quickly how to work together. This also attests to the organizers reading the situation correctly. If a police force is not able to muster the will to act, why not take advantage of their weakness to solve a longstanding problem? We struck a blow that will ring out for a long time.

At the same time, this brings up questions about how some of the authorities might try to use the outrage surrounding monuments to recuperate our struggles into more state-approved methods of so-called social change. How will “progressive” politicians latch on to the “people power” that took down statues in Durham and Chapel Hill to bolster electoral campaigns full of empty promises, that won’t actually shake the foundations of institutionalized white supremacy?

While All Out August still isn’t over, we can begin to see its success in a multitude of ways, as combative solidarity demonstrations have kicked off in multiple cities in support of the prison strike and there are rumors that another monument somewhere else in the South could be next. The so-called “Alt-Right” that attempted to regain its previous momentum has largely failed, with pitiful showings in every city this month besides Portland. Even there, their numbers were dwarfed by the anti-fascist opposition, and they were only able to march on account of extreme violence on the part of the Portland police, who nearly killed a protestor.

One lesson we might glean from all of this is that while it is absolutely necessary to oppose the far right when they attempt to build street power, we’ve been stuck in a reactive loop for the past year. Now we are regaining the initiative. If there is a monument to white supremacy in your town—and they aren’t all Confederate statues—why not take the offensive against it now? In some cities, it has appeared that people are waiting for a far right group to make the first move, but we can see clearly from Chapel Hill that a crowd that takes the initiative can accomplish far more than just impeding a far-right group from organizing.

We must also be thinking about what comes next. All Out August has been a first step towards connecting the legacy of the Confederacy and the enslavement of human beings to contemporary struggles against prisons and police. This is a huge first step, on a national scale, but there is a long way to go. How can we make these connections with even more clarity? Not just through posters and hashtags, but with actions on the ground, with real people? How do we increase our capacity to block ICE operations and to defend those actions against fascist intervention, while connecting the fight against ICE with the fight against colonial exploitation of the land? We’ve seen glimpses of these moments in the streets—through the clouds of smoke following the fall of a statue that came down with the complicity of people who might have called masked demonstrators “troublemakers” just a year ago.

As we desire for these actions to spread, we know that our victory in the streets of Chapel Hill was the product of creativity, flexibility, and uncompromising solidarity. It does not stand alone in the fabric of history, but rests on a foundation of decades of effort. We won because we refused to fight each other, because we set the terms of how we would take the space. We won because we seized the moment and learned to work together. We won because we took the opportunity to turn our desires into action. That moment reminded us that when we build collectively, look out for each other, and take control of our lives, even a small group of people can topple giants.

We saw that even something that seems permanent and inevitable might actually be nothing more than a hunk of cheap bronze shoddily attached to a pile of concrete. It doesn’t take that much to see it come crashing down.

Sic semper tyrannis, but for real.

[fantasyofmemory-blog]

French government threatens bloody crackdown on “yellow vest” protest

By Alex Lantier and Francis Dubois

8 December 2018

Ahead of today’s marches by “yellow vest” protesters against President Emmanuel Macron in Paris, the French government issued unprecedented threats of a bloody crackdown in the capital. Amid rising support for the “yellow vests” among students and workers, and mounting popular anger with Macron, top officials are warning that they will stop at nothing to intimidate and threaten protesters. Some 89,000 riot police and armored vehicles are to be deployed today.

Macron’s attempt to shut down the protest by first postponing and then ultimately canceling the fuel tax increase that first provoked the demonstrations has failed. Instead, the movement has continued to spread across France and internationally, to Belgium, the Netherlands, and as far as Iraq. Amid growing demands by “yellow vests” for large wage increases, taxes on the rich, and more social equality, which his government has no intention of fulfilling, Macron is preparing for a showdown.

Yesterday, as authorities closed monuments across Paris and shops boarded up storefront windows to prepare for rioting, spokesman Benjamin Griveaux spoke to Le Parisien to slander the “yellow vests” as cop killers. “They are coming to smash, burn, pillage, and attack with the intention of killing representatives of public order,” Griveaux said. Asked if he was telling protesters not to come to Paris, he replied: “That is the advice that I would give.”

Griveaux gave no evidence to support his charge that “yellow vests” intend to kill police. After three Saturdays of protests in which violent police charges led to four deaths and left hundreds injured, not a single policeman has died. He admitted that the government made “mistakes” and did not understand “the feeling that the government is abandoning some regions of France.” He also admitted that Macron, who denounced workers opposed to his austerity policies and tax cuts for the rich as “lazy,” is seen as arrogant: “Some things we said hurt. We know it very well.”

Nonetheless, Griveaux adopted what Le Parisien called a “deliberately alarmist” tone and implying that a crackdown using deadly force is imminent against anyone defying his order not to attend protests in Paris. “Those who are present in the protests do not allow the security forces to proceed to make arrests,” he complained. “Yellow vest protesters who are sincere should not function as human shields.”

Ahead of today’s marches by “yellow vest” protesters against President Emmanuel Macron in Paris, the French government issued unprecedented threats of a bloody crackdown in the capital. Amid rising support for the “yellow vests” among students and workers, and mounting popular anger with Macron, top officials are warning that they will stop at nothing to intimidate and threaten protesters. Some 89,000 riot police and armored vehicles are to be deployed today.

Macron’s attempt to shut down the protest by first postponing and then ultimately canceling the fuel tax increase that first provoked the demonstrations has failed. Instead, the movement has continued to spread across France and internationally, to Belgium, the Netherlands, and as far as Iraq. Amid growing demands by “yellow vests” for large wage increases, taxes on the rich, and more social equality, which his government has no intention of fulfilling, Macron is preparing for a showdown.

Yesterday, as authorities closed monuments across Paris and shops boarded up storefront windows to prepare for rioting, spokesman Benjamin Griveaux spoke to Le Parisien to slander the “yellow vests” as cop killers. “They are coming to smash, burn, pillage, and attack with the intention of killing representatives of public order,” Griveaux said. Asked if he was telling protesters not to come to Paris, he replied: “That is the advice that I would give.”

Griveaux gave no evidence to support his charge that “yellow vests” intend to kill police. After three Saturdays of protests in which violent police charges led to four deaths and left hundreds injured, not a single policeman has died. He admitted that the government made “mistakes” and did not understand “the feeling that the government is abandoning some regions of France.” He also admitted that Macron, who denounced workers opposed to his austerity policies and tax cuts for the rich as “lazy,” is seen as arrogant: “Some things we said hurt. We know it very well.”

Nonetheless, Griveaux adopted what Le Parisien called a “deliberately alarmist” tone and implying that a crackdown using deadly force is imminent against anyone defying his order not to attend protests in Paris. “Those who are present in the protests do not allow the security forces to proceed to make arrests,” he complained. “Yellow vest protesters who are sincere should not function as human shields.”

The video has been seen millions of times on social media, provoking shock and horror. Castaner brazenly defended the police forces, however: “This corresponds to standard practice before frisking someone.” Police are now investigating the identity of the person who shot the video in order to press charges.

Should the Macron government act today on the hysterical threats it made yesterday, it would lead to the most violent confrontation with the working class in France since bloody police assaults on workers and youth defending Sorbonne students provoked the 1968 general strike.

The growing radicalization of the working class underlying the protests emerged clearly in the “yellow vest” collective in Commercy, in eastern France, which issued a video “call for the formation of popular assemblies across France.”

It rejected the government’s call for protesters to designate representatives with whom Macron could negotiate: “It is not to understand our anger and our demands that the government wants representatives to talk with. It is to control and to bury us. Like the union leaderships, they seek intermediaries, people to talk to, to pressure to stop the eruption, whom they can then corrupt and convince to divide the movement so as to strangle it.”

They added that the “yellow vest” protests call for “a new order in which those who are nothing, and are spoken of with contempt, take back the power from all those who are stuffing themselves, from the rulers and the powers of money.”

Across France, strikes, “yellow vest” protests and student blockades are mounting as Macron continues to sink in the polls. Paris regional trains, Rennes and Le Havre mass transit, and vocational high schools are on strike, while the National Railways (SNCF) workers will protest and march at the “yellow vest” rallies tomorrow in Paris. Hundreds of gas stations across France are running out of fuel amid refinery strikes or blockades of fuel depots by “yellow vest” protesters. The National Farmers Union Federation (FNSEA) called its members to protest in the streets this coming week.

The Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT) union called off at the last minute a national truck drivers strike it had called to begin at the weekend, however. The CGT bureaucracy is vitriolically hostile to the “yellow vests,” and CGT boss Philippe Martinez, who previously said they were infiltrated by neo-fascists, gave another interview to Le Monde to denounce them. He insisted again that the CGT would not “come together” with the “yellow vest” protesters, saying that among them there are “people you can’t frequent.”

High school students continued to blockade hundreds of schools in cities across France including Paris, Bordeaux, Nantes, Toulouse, Tours, Montpellier, Lille, Lyon and beyond. They were joined by university students at the Censier and Tolbiac campuses of the University of Paris, protesting against the tuition hike for foreign students. Police violently charged protesting students at University of Lyon-III. The National Union of French Students (UNEF) is calling for a one-day protest against the tuition hikes for December 13.

“Yellow vest” protests are taking place in cities across France, in the face of unprecedented mobilizations of the security forces. Marseille authorities are preparing a large police deployment against multiple protest marches, as right-wing regional president Renaud Muselier launched yesterday his “Marseille declaration” warning that the “Republic is endangered” by “insurrection.” The police prefect in northern France has taken the unprecedented step of banning all “yellow vest” protests, as calls spread in Lille to occupy both train stations and blockade the entire city.

In Lyon, where “yellow vest” protesters occupied regional government headquarters yesterday, authorities are planning to block off Bellecour square, where the “yellow vests” will meet today. There, they will face an unprecedented police deployment reportedly including members of elite police assault squads trained to shoot and kill terror bombers.

(WSWS)

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 2.21

452 or 453 – Severianus, Bishop of Scythopolis, is martyred in Palestine. 1245 – Thomas, the first known Bishop of Finland, is granted resignation after confessing to torture and forgery. 1440 – The Prussian Confederation is formed. 1613 – Mikhail I is unanimously elected Tsar by a national assembly, beginning the Romanov dynasty of Imperial Russia. 1797 – A force of 1,400 French soldiers invaded Britain at Fishguard in support of the Society of United Irishmen. They were defeated by 500 British reservists. 1804 – The first self-propelling steam locomotive makes its outing at the Pen-y-Darren Ironworks in Wales. 1808 – Without a previous declaration of war, Russian troops cross the border to Sweden at Abborfors in eastern Finland, thus beginning the Finnish War, in which Sweden will lose the eastern half of the country (e.g. Finland) to Russia. 1828 – Initial issue of the Cherokee Phoenix is the first periodical to use the Cherokee syllabary invented by Sequoyah. 1842 – John Greenough is granted the first U.S. patent for the sewing machine. 1848 – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto. 1862 – American Civil War: Battle of Valverde is fought near Fort Craig in New Mexico Territory. 1866 – Lucy Hobbs Taylor becomes the first American woman to graduate from dental school. 1874 – The Oakland Daily Tribune publishes its first edition. 1878 – The first telephone directory is issued in New Haven, Connecticut. 1885 – The newly completed Washington Monument is dedicated. 1896 – An Englishman raised in Australia, Bob Fitzsimmons, fought an Irishman, Peter Maher, in an American promoted event which technically took place in Mexico, winning the 1896 World Heavyweight Championship in boxing. 1913 – Ioannina is incorporated into the Greek state after the Balkan Wars. 1916 – World War I: In France, the Battle of Verdun begins. 1918 – The last Carolina parakeet dies in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo. 1919 – German socialist Kurt Eisner is assassinated. His death results in the establishment of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and parliament and government fleeing Munich, Germany. 1921 – Constituent Assembly of the Democratic Republic of Georgia adopts the country's first constitution. 1921 – Rezā Shāh takes control of Tehran during a successful coup. 1925 – The New Yorker publishes its first issue. 1929 – In the first battle of the Warlord Rebellion in northeastern Shandong against the Nationalist government of China, a 24,000-strong rebel force led by Zhang Zongchang was defeated at Zhifu by 7,000 NRA troops. 1934 – Augusto Sandino is executed. 1937 – The League of Nations bans foreign national "volunteers" in the Spanish Civil War. 1945 – World War II: During the Battle of Iwo Jima, Japanese kamikaze planes sink the escort carrier USS Bismarck Sea and damage the USS Saratoga. 1945 – World War II: the Brazilian Expeditionary Force defeat the German forces in the Battle of Monte Castello on the Italian front. 1947 – In New York City, Edwin Land demonstrates the first "instant camera", the Polaroid Land Camera, to a meeting of the Optical Society of America. 1948 – NASCAR is incorporated. 1952 – The British government, under Winston Churchill, abolishes identity cards in the UK to "set the people free". 1952 – The Bengali Language Movement protests occur at the University of Dhaka in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). 1958 – The CND symbol, aka peace symbol, commissioned by the Direct Action Committee in protest against the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, is designed and completed by Gerald Holtom. 1965 – Malcolm X is assassinated while giving a talk at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. 1971 – The Convention on Psychotropic Substances is signed at Vienna. 1972 – United States President Richard Nixon visits China to normalize Sino-American relations. 1972 – The Soviet unmanned spaceship Luna 20 lands on the Moon. 1973 – Over the Sinai Desert, Israeli fighter aircraft shoot down Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114 jet killing 108 people. 1974 – The last Israeli soldiers leave the west bank of the Suez Canal pursuant to a truce with Egypt. 1975 – Watergate scandal: Former United States Attorney General John N. Mitchell and former White House aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman are sentenced to prison. 1995 – Steve Fossett lands in Leader, Saskatchewan, Canada becoming the first person to make a solo flight across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon. 2013 – At least 17 people are killed and 119 injured following several bombings in the Indian city of Hyderabad.

[your-dietician]

Why Police Have Been Quitting in Droves in the Last Year

New Post has been published on https://depression-md.com/why-police-have-been-quitting-in-droves-in-the-last-year/

Why Police Have Been Quitting in Droves in the Last Year

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — As protests surged across the country last year over the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police, Officer Lindsay C. Rose in Asheville, N.C., found her world capsized.

Various friends and relatives had stopped speaking to her because she was a cop. During a protest in June around Police Headquarters, a demonstrator lobbed an explosive charge that set her pants on fire and scorched her legs.

She said she was spit on. She was belittled. Members of the city’s gay community, an inclusive clan that had welcomed her in when she first settled in Asheville, stood near her at one event and chanted, “All gay cops are traitors,” she said.

By September, still deeply demoralized despite taking several months off to recuperate, Officer Rose decided that she was done. She quit the Police Department and posted a sometimes bitter, sometimes nostalgic essay online that attracted thousands of readers throughout the city and beyond.

“I’m walking away to exhale and inhale, I’m leaving because I don’t have any more left in me right now,” she wrote. “I’m drowning in this politically charged atmosphere of hate and destruction.”

Officer Rose was hardly alone. Thousands of police officers nationwide have headed for the exits in the past year.

A survey of almost 200 police departments indicated that retirements were up 45 percent and resignations rose by 18 percent in the year from April 2020 to April 2021 when compared with the previous 12 months, according to the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington policy institute.

New York City saw 2,600 officers retire in 2020 compared with 1,509 the year before. Resignations in Seattle increased to 123 from 34 and retirements to 96 from 43. Minneapolis, which had 912 uniformed officers in May 2019, is now down to 699. At the same time, many cities are contending with a rise in shootings and homicides.

Asheville was among the hardest hit proportionally, losing upward of 80 officers, more than one third of its 238-strong force.

The reason has partly to do with Asheville itself — a big blue dot amid a sea of red voters in western North Carolina. Residents often refer to the city, a tourist mecca of 90,000 people tucked into the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains, as the South’s version of Austin, Texas, or Portland, Ore.

Protests are commonplace, although none in recent memory had roiled the city quite like those prompted by the death of Mr. Floyd. Asheville has removed its three Confederate monuments, including the obelisk that dominated the central square for more than 100 years. In June, the City Council agreed to earmark an initial $2.1 million to pay reparations to the Black community of more than 10,000 residents.

The police already had come under criticism in recent years, churning through half a dozen chiefs in the past decade amid widespread complaints about overly harsh policing. Often cited is a case in 2019, when an officer pleaded guilty to assaulting a Black man after an argument over jaywalking — at night with few cars on the road.

The past year’s racial justice protests brought these long-simmering tensions swiftly back to the surface.

“There was a cloud over the building,” said Chief David Zack, 58, adding that younger officers were particularly traumatized by the events. “We knew we were going to be in trouble. I don’t think we ever anticipated getting to this level.”

The fact that the protests were directed at them pushed many officers to quit, he said. “They said that we have become the bad guys, and we did not get into this to become the bad guys.”

A sense that the city itself did not back its police was a key reason for the departures, according to officers themselves as well as police and city officials. Officers felt that they should have been praised rather than pilloried after struggling to contain chaotic protests.

Low pay deepened the frustration. With a starting salary around $37,000, few officers can afford houses in Asheville, where housing prices have sharply increased in recent years.

Finally, officers said they were asked to handle too much; they were constantly thrown at tangled societal problems like mental health breakdowns or drug overdoses, they said, for which they were ill-equipped — then blamed when things went wrong.

Officers who left said they endured a barrage of “good riddance” taunts on social media. Some said they were accused of leaving because the higher level of public scrutiny meant they could no longer beat up people of color with impunity.

One sergeant who quit after a decade on the force, who did not want his name published because of the aggressive verbal attacks online, said last summer had chipped away at his professional pride and personal health. He could not sleep and drank too much.

In September, somebody dropped a coffin laden with dirt and manure at the front door of Police Headquarters. “The message was taking a different turn,” Chief Zack said. “The message was not about police reform, but, ‘We endorse violence against police’.”

Of the more than 80 officers who left, about half found different professions and the other half different departments, Chief Zack said. New careers included industrial refrigeration, construction, real estate and pharmaceutical sales — anything far removed from policing.

Some officers decided that Asheville was the problem. Alec N. Dohmann, 30, a former Marine infantryman, could not afford a house in the city, and the rage directed at officers during the protests shocked his wife, who watched it live on Facebook. He took a police job in nearby Greenville, S.C., and bought a house.

“It is night and day,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ll be in uniform and someone comes up and shakes my hand, thanking me for what I do.”

The George Floyd protests in Asheville lasted just four or five nights, far less than in other cities, yet many activists said they remain alarmed by the degree of force police used against demonstrators.

Officers fired tear gas to disperse them, and in one widely criticized incident, the police ransacked a medical tent, chasing off the volunteers, slashing water bottles and destroying first aid supplies.

City officials seemed torn about how to respond. At first Chief Zack defended the officers over the medical tent episode, saying water bottles were constantly heaved at officers, but he apologized amid the subsequent uproar.

Mayor Esther Manheimer dropped into one daily police briefing, lauding the department’s efforts. The very next day, she publicly accused the police of mishandling events, several officers said.

Ms. Manheimer, mayor since 2013, said in an interview that the city was facing a “clash of cultures,” and that she had “obviously not perfected” her efforts to “thread the needle of supporting law enforcement employees, but at the same time demanding and calling for needed change.”

Calls for defunding the police have continued, with many Asheville residents saying the department’s problems started long before last year’s protests.

Rob Thomas of the Racial Justice Coalition grew up in what he described as a “drug house” in the now gentrified North Side. He said the Black community has long felt targeted, and he learned early that there was an unwritten rule among police officers that they would beat anyone who ran from them.

To him, the officers’ leaving is not a big concern.

“The ones who left are collateral damage of people advocating for change,” he said. “It is not these individual officers who are so bad or so wrong; the system itself is kind of messed up.”

Recruitment all over the country, given negative attitudes toward the police, has also become a slog, prompting Asheville to approve a modest salary increase. Several other cities, hearing about the mood among the police in Asheville, put up billboards there hoping to attract officers who were ready to move. It takes roughly a year to train new officers in Asheville, and of seven who started in December, six have already quit, Chief Zack said.

To make do, the A.P.D. has trimmed its services even as shootings and other violent crimes escalated, a trend that has been seen across the country and which many experts have connected to disruption from the pandemic. The police received about 650 calls for “shots fired” last year, Chief Zack said, and there were 10 homicides, compared with seven the year before. Aggravated assaults were also up.

The department shuttered a downtown satellite office, stopped bicycle patrols and is making fewer traffic stops. It published a list of 10 incidents to which it would no longer dispatch officers, including some vehicle thefts, and urged citizens to file simple complaints online rather than calling.

All but one of the seven officers who investigated domestic violence and sexual assault left, so the department is trying to get three officers up to speed on the skills needed.

“A lot of our experience is walking out the door,” Chief Zack said.

With a third of the police force gone, some activists and residents said they worried that the city would squander an opportunity for change, hiring replacements instead of exploring alternatives.

Justin Souther, the manager of Malaprop’s Bookstore, said that what he considered police overkill during the George Floyd protests renewed his conviction that Asheville should not be as reliant on law enforcement for dealing with issues like the homeless people who inhabit downtown. “People need help, not punishment,” he said.

Jill Coleman in the Spice & Tea Exchange echoed those sentiments, yet admitted that she was worried when she heard about rising violent crime.

“People might be feeling a little shaky with not seeing police around, but it is also exciting to think that change is coming,” she said.

Officer Rose, leaving the police after seven years, first worked for a moving company started by a fellow officer who had also quit. She felt angry, tired, disgruntled and like a failure all at once, she said. She slept badly and had no appetite.

“My story is not unique,” she said.

Some time in January, she decided she wanted to retrieve her badge, to give it to her grandfather, who had pinned it on her when she had completed her training.

She had to apply to Chief Zack to get it, she said. Leaving the police had been the hardest decision of her life, she said, and the chief dangled a job as a community liaison officer designed to make the department more transparent to the public.

Plus in an effort to “humanize the badge,” he had relaxed some of the rules. She could now wear short sleeves, for example, displaying the bursts of floral and other tattoos on her arms. Her wife, an Asheville native, endorsed her return as well.

She said yes.

Officer Rose said she still nourishes the idea first planted when she joined the police that she can make a difference in people’s lives, but she is more wary. “It was a rude awaking,” she said. “It’s like you are in a loving relationship, and then all of a sudden you are dumped and you don’t know why.”

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