“But here I am now, [and] it’s odd. I mean, I’m still, I can vote for centrist Democrats, but I’m too right of center. I’m definitely not progressive, but, I mean, there’s always overlap. I’ve always thought that the militarization of police has been a bad idea. The drug war has been catastrophic, as far as I can see. I think if states want to legalize [drugs], that’s up to them. I wouldn’t do it, but I’d even say psychedelics should be legal now. But it was weird because when I was at VMI, to [Republicans], I was a libertarian and then I worked with libertarians, and to them I was a statist cuck. You probably get this if you’ve been paying attention to right-wing stuff, but every libertarian agrees on two things: that there’s only one libertarian and it’s them.”
“At demonstration after demonstration, officers have met peaceful protesters, who are condemning the police killing of George Floyd — and police violence more broadly — with disproportionate and brutal force, often for no reason but to “disperse” a crowd. It’s an approach that’s only illustrated how quick police can be to use violent tactics, particularly against black individuals.”
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“Vox spoke with 10 protesters in seven different cities — and nearly all of them had either directly witnessed or been subject to police violence while participating in marches and rallies in recent weeks.”
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“During a peaceful protest in Toledo, Ohio, 29-year-old attorney Matthew Ahn saw police shooting wooden bullets directly at people’s bodies, severely injuring at least two individuals.”
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“In Los Angeles, Abdullah described watching a state highway patrol car plow into a crowd of protesters and knock a man out in the process.”
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“Such acts of police violence have contributed to a number of injuries — rubber bullets have blinded multiple individuals, while beatings have resulted in broken bones — and one death. In Louisville, Kentucky, where officers still haven’t been charged in the shooting death of Breonna Taylor, police shot and killed David McAtee near his business when he was out past curfew in early June.”
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“At the marches where law enforcement has taken a more aggressive approach, the escalation by police often came with little warning, protesters say. It can be chaotic, frightening, and overwhelming.”
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“There is legal recourse for protesters who have suffered injuries at the hands of police, but there have historically been some pretty big obstacles to getting accountability.
Such barriers are largely due to the protections that police have in the case of civil lawsuits because of a legal doctrine known as qualified immunity: In order to even go to trial with an allegation of police misconduct, an individual needs to show not only that it was a violation of their civil rights, but also that there’s precedent for that same action being considered unlawful in prior cases.
This shield has enabled police officers to avoid liability on many acts of misconduct in the past, including shootings, theft and property damage.
Still, experts tell Vox that protesters have plenty of grounds to pursue legal action — and already, there’s been multiple cases in the last month where the officer involved faces criminal charges.”
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“Protesters have three avenues they can take, Futterman notes: They can file a civil lawsuit against a specific officer for violating their constitutional rights, they can register a complaint with the city or police station involved, or they can report the incident to a district attorney, who could then file a criminal lawsuit.”
“Since taking over the State Department in April 2018, Pompeo has relied upon a tight-knit group of official and unofficial advisers, some of whom he’s known for many years, and one of whom also is his wife, Susan. President Donald Trump fired Linick last month on Pompeo’s recommendation, and the storm of controversy that has ensued since has focused attention on this inner circle.”
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“At times, the aide, Undersecretary of State for Management Brian Bulatao, would act in a “professional” manner, Linick told congressional investigators. “At other times,” Linick recalled, “he tried to bully me.”
Bulatao isn’t just any colleague of the secretary of State. He is one of Pompeo’s best friends, dating back to when they met at West Point as members of the class of 1986. The two have been business partners. And when Pompeo went to lead the CIA, then later jumped to State, he gave Bulatao top positions at both institutions.
In the months since joining State, Bulatao appears to have emerged as an enforcer and a shield for Pompeo in ways that are now drawing attention from Democrats probing Linick’s mid-May firing.”
“A former judge selected to advise on a path forward in the criminal case against Michael Flynn is accusing the Justice Department of exercising a “gross abuse of prosecutorial power” to protect an ally of President Donald Trump, distorting known facts and legal principles to shield Flynn from a jail sentence.
The former federal judge, John Gleeson, skewered Attorney General Bill Barr’s handling of the case, describing it as an “irregular” effort that courts would “scoff” at were the subject anyone other than an ally of Trump. The 82-page excoriation featured a painstaking reconstruction of the Flynn case and accused DOJ of contradicting its own arguments and precedents to justify dropping the case against Flynn.
“Even recognizing that the Government is entitled to deference in assessing the strength of its case, these claims are not credible,” Gleeson wrote. “Indeed, they are preposterous.””
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/07/us-army-demonstrations-washington-305913
“if Barr—or Trump, Cotton, or anyone else—think active duty military played an important role in restoring order to Los Angeles, they’re misremembering history. In fact, the L.A. riots offer cautionary lessons about the limits and perils of using military force to restore order and protect lawful protest. Although the National Guard played a critical role in restoring and keeping the peace, the same can’t be said for active-duty Marines and soldiers.”
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“The arrival of the guard was desperately anticipated in Los Angeles, where looting and fires spread overnight and left the city smoldering by daybreak on April 30. That morning, I waited outside the Los Angeles Coliseum, where guard units had deployed. But even as the day heated up, the guard troops remained frustratingly cabined inside their armories.
The trouble: Guard soldiers had made it to Los Angeles overnight, but devices to convert their automatic weapons into semiautomatics had not. When he learned of the holdup, Wilson ordered the guard soldiers to hit the streets with one bullet each, and by late afternoon, about 24 hours after violence first erupted, the guard finally began deploying from Exposition Park, home of the Coliseum.
One guardsman marched across the street to where I was standing, and as he and I took in the scene, a man pulled up in his pickup truck and began videotaping the melee. A rioter casually walked over, shot the man in the arm and grabbed his camera. Spotting the guard soldier, the shooter fled; the victim lived.
By the time guard units were fully at work, more than 25 people had died, nearly 600 were wounded and roughly 1,000 fires were burning or had burned.
The guard units were applauded, sometimes literally, as they made their way to ravaged sections of the city. I watched looters thumb their noses at police and then, moments later, melt away when they spotted guard soldiers rolling up to the scene; something about the military’s presence was both intimidating and soothing. In neighborhood after neighborhood, the arrival of the guard meant the diminishment of violence. “They were reassuring to the people who wanted their presence,” Wilson said.”
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“But by the time soldiers and Marines were in position, the violence was already subsiding, so their mission was muddied from the start: Authorized to “restore law and order,” they were not empowered to “maintain law and order.” Some military leaders concluded that their authorization thus was no longer valid.”
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“In some cases, the cultures and practices of police and soldiers clashed, with dangerous implications. When one pair of LAPD officers, for instance, was preparing to enter a home in response to a report of a domestic dispute, the officers were accompanied by a contingent of Marines. The Marines held back as the officers approached the front door and were greeted with a blast of birdshot. The officers dropped to the ground and one called out, “cover me,” thinking the Marines would point their weapons at the house and be alert for any additional threat. Instead, the Marines opened fire, pummeling the home and its occupants, which included children, with more than 200 rounds. Amazingly, no one was hurt.”
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“The Los Angeles riots were extraordinarily violent, but mercifully short-lived, in large measure because of the decisive actions taken by Wilson. They do not, however, stand for the principle that active duty military are the most effective means of suppressing urban violence. In Los Angeles, police and local leadership failed at the outset, to be rescued by state coordination and the National Guard. The Army and Marines came too late to make a difference but just in time to sow confusion and concern.
The history in Los Angeles suggests that solid coordination between the state and federal governments, along with decisive use of the National Guard, can save lives and protect property. It argues against employment of active-duty forces, certainly without consultation and consent of the states. In the current crisis”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/10/the-simple-way-congress-can-stop-federal-officials-from-abusing-protesters-309959
“For Europeans watching events unfold across the Atlantic — as thousands took to the streets across the U.S. — it was the massive, and seemingly effective, response that followed George Floyd’s death as much as the brutality of his killing that spurred them to action. At a time when U.S. President Donald Trump has tarnished the national brand in the eyes of many in Europe, activists took cues and borrowed slogans from a civil rights movement that has inspired people on both sides of the Atlantic for decades.
In Belgium, some 10,000 people gathered in front of Brussels’ Palais de Justice for a protest organized by the Belgian Network for Black Lives. In a sea of hand-drawn “Black Lives Matter” and “No justice, no peace” placards, people held up signs calling out the country’s history of racism — “Belgium, too” and “We need to talk about Leopold II and Belgian colonies” — and the names of recent victims of police violence.
A planned protest last week organized by families of victims of police brutality in France — including Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old black man who died in police custody in 2016 — drew record numbers of people in Paris. In cities across Germany, Spain, the U.K. and the Netherlands, protesters also flouted lockdown rules to flood public squares to demand justice for the people of color who died in police custody in their own countries. They filled streets in Dublin, Copenhagen and Milan. In Bristol, in the U.K., protesters tore down the statue of a 17th-century slave trader, dragged it through the streets and threw it in the harbor.”
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“Europe’s history with race relations is so different from that of the U.S. There was no large-scale system of slavery in modern Europe; it largely “exported” its racism to its colonies, which it plundered for wealth and cheap labor. Most migration from Africa to Europe is relatively recent, starting in the 1960s. In most European countries, there are people who remember when large numbers of migrants first arrived.
Colonialism is still a touchy subject in a number of countries, particularly in France and Belgium, which have largely failed to grapple with their bloody legacies. There is a “selective amnesia” in Europe about its imperial legacy and a “toxic nostalgia that to this day taints their misunderstanding of that history,” the British journalist Gary Younge wrote in a piece for the New York Review of Books.”
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“Although most of Europe, unlike the U.S., has never put in place a system of legal discrimination explicitly targeting people of color, like the Jim Crow laws, the daily racism experienced by Europeans is no less shocking. In some cases, it’s more so.
“Levels of incarceration, unemployment, deprivation and poverty are all higher for black Europeans,” according to Younge. “Perhaps only because the Continent is not blighted by the gun culture of the U.S., racism here is less lethal.”
Being a black or brown person in Europe means being confronted from a young age with teachings that paint colonialism as a worthy enterprise. It means you’re more likely to live in poorer, heavily policed neighborhoods. It means your job applications will often go unanswered and you will have a hard time renting property or buying a house.
You’ll have seen people black up their faces and dress up as Zwarte Piet every year in early December. You’ll have watched far-right parties rise in the polls on openly racist platforms and loose language comparing migrants to vermin. You’ll have seen footage of football fans throwing banana skins at black players. And you’ll have seen politicians, most of whom do not look like you, stay silent.”
“It would be “wiser…not to keep open the sores of war,” said the former Confederate general Robert E. Lee in 1869, “but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.” Lee wrote those remarks as he rejected an invitation to enshrine Confederate memorials for fallen soldiers.”
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“the erstwhile general may finally be getting his wish. In the wake of protests across the country, set in motion after a Minneapolis cop killed George Floyd, an unarmed black man, numerous communities have seen a reinvigorated push to remove local homages to Confederate soldiers—the likes of which amount to little more than grand participation trophies that celebrate the most racially fraught time in U.S. history
There’s a rich irony to the fact that Lee, who recognized the ill-conceived nature of the idea, would become the unwitting mascot for those who support those memorials.”
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“Supporters of Confederate monuments often argue that the stone exaltations preserve heritage. Memorials inherently celebrate a particular time and place—it’s right there in the name. But what good does it do if the heritage preserved and celebrated is an inherently racist one?
The bulk of these Confederate memorials were erected between 1900-1930 during the era of Jim Crow, long after the Civil War’s conclusion. Behind their enshrinement was the very same racial animus that the country is currently attempting to grapple with. The 1924 reception for Lee’s statue provides an adequate anecdote. As I’ve written previously:
Over in Charlottesville, the Ku Klux Klan commemorated the May 21 unveiling of Lee’s statue with a public cross burning on May 16 and a two-hour parade on May 18 attended by “thousands,” according to archives from The Daily Progress, the Charlottesville newspaper that’s been publishing since 1892. The throngs of people “equaled those usually seen here to witness the parade of the large circuses,” the paper wrote. “The march of the white-robed figures was impressive, and directed attention to the presence of the organization in the community.”
That wasn’t the exception but rather the rule. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the industrialist Julian Carr introduced the now-toppled Silent Sam statue in 1913 with a speech on the merits of preserving white supremacy. “One hundred yards from where we stand,” he noted, “less than 90 days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench, until her skirts hung in shreds.” New Orleans’ 1911 celebration of the monument of Confederate President Jefferson Davis—a fierce defender of slavery—had a Stars and Bars formation singing “Dixie” at a ‘Whites Only’ ceremony. The list goes on.”
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“that heritage incontrovertibly hinges on a legacy of slavery and racial terrorism, whether some like to admit it or not. Those who fought for the Confederacy should never be forgotten—but put them in a museum, keep them in the history books, and so on. Don’t give them a reception fit only for history’s best heroes.”
“Watching things like that should help me sympathize with the people rioting last night.
So should my friend Fabian’s experience. When Fabian was 20, he bought his first car, a luxury edition Infiniti J30 Sedan. He’d saved up for it working as an airplane technician, transporting U.S. soldiers to war zones around the world.
Then, while pumping gas back in NYC, police officers approached him, demanding his license and registration.
He produced the documents and showed them that the car was registered in his name. But Fabian is black, and the police would not believe that the car belonged to him. They arrested him and charged him with grand theft auto.
He sat in jail for two days.
Finally, a judge dismissed the case—using the same documentation Fabian had showed the police. They released him—without any apology.
The trauma still haunts him. Fabian says it evokes a sense of helplessness—a fear that “anytime there’s an encounter with law enforcement, getting arrested or even death could be the outcome.”
Yet, as I watch protesters (even two lawyers were arrested) throwing Molotov cocktails at police officers, and I see opportunistic young people looting stores, and my privileged left-wing white friends say things like, “the looting of our society by unrestrained capitalism is worse!” I get even more furious.
This country, and capitalism, has done more good things for disadvantaged people of all races than any society, ever.
Fabian, despite his terrible experience, says that living as a black man in America is a gift. He came here as a teen from Jamaica. America, he says, gave him opportunity he would never have had elsewhere.
Now, he’s a capitalist who owns things.”