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#George Floyd Protests

wilwheaton · 10 months

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The true history of Mount Rushmore is appalling. In a nation that is awash in the blood of innocent humans who were murdered by colonizers, that refuses to reckon with its white supremacist history, Mount Rushmore stands out as a glaring example of the cruelty and violence of America’s brutality.

“The Lakota considered the carving of the four presidents' faces on what was once Six Grandfathers, a defacement of their sacred site, especially as "those four people had a lot to do with destroying our people's land base," Douville said. Indeed, Washington waged war against Native American tribes, Jefferson was considered the architect of policies that would result in the removal of Native Americans from their lands, Lincoln ordered the execution of 38 Dakota Native American rebels, the largest mass execution in American history, and Roosevelt systematically removed Native Americans from their lands.”

“We found the monument had a dark history of ties to the KKK, an illegal war, and the violent suppression of the Native American Lakota (also known as Sioux) people. We looked at each claim in the meme, starting with the history of the region before Mount Rushmore was built, followed by an investigation into its creation and alleged KKK funding.“

If you don’t know the truth about this monument to hate and genocide, please look into it, and encourage others to do the same.

#george floyd protests #mount rushmore #american history #white supremecy #american genocide #native american

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wakandan-goddess · 10 months

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Here we go again with the “I wish Americans protested like the French” shit again.

I don’t know if some of y’all have memory loss but we did protest “like the French” in 2020 (George Floyd Protests) and got shit on and called thugs by the public,the media and politicians. People were seriously injured by police and other random people who wanted to be violent. We were told that peoples property was worth more than justice for a wrongfully taken like. So don’t bring that shit over here. Y’all just like the idea and look of protest but let it inconvenience or the message calls you out then then it’s not the right way to protest.

Just say what you really mean with your chest.

#black lives matter #french protests #george floyd protests

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queersatanic · 1 year

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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

#COINTELPRO #Little Rock #George Floyd Protests #Arkansas #brittany dawn jeffrey #Mujera Benjamin Lung'aho #Renea Goddard #Loba Espinosa-Villegas #Emily Nowlin #FreeDawnJeffrey

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 1 year

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The Department of Homeland Security launched a failed operation that ensnared hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. protesters in what new documents show was as a sweeping, power-hungry effort before the 2020 election to bolster President Donald Trump’s spurious claims about a “terrorist organization” he accused his Democratic rivals of supporting.

An internal investigative report, made public this month by Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon, details the findings of DHS lawyers concerning a previously undisclosed effort by Trump’s acting-Secretary of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, to amass secret dossiers on Americans in Portland attending anti-racism protests in summer 2020 sparked by the police murder of Minneapolis father George Floyd.

The report describes attempts by top officials to link protesters to an imaginary terrorist plot in an apparent effort to boost Trump’s reelection odds, raising concerns now about the ability of a sitting president to co-opt billions of dollars’ worth of domestic intelligence assets for their own political gain. DHS analysts recounted orders to generate evidence of financial ties between protesters in custody; an effort that, had they not failed, would have seemingly served to legitimize President Trump’s false claims about “Antifa,” an “organization” that even his most loyal intelligence officers failed to drum up proof ever existed.

“DID NOT FIND ANY EVIDENCE THAT ASSERTION WAS TRUE”

The DHS report offers a full accounting of the intelligence activities happening behind the scenes of officers’ protest containment; “twisted efforts,” Wyden said, of Trump administration officials promoting “baseless conspiracy theories” to manufacture of a domestic terrorist threat for the president’s “political gain.” The report describes the dossiers generated by DHS as having detailed the past whereabouts and the “friends and followers of the subjects, as well as their interests” — up to and including “First Amendment speech activity.” Intelligence analysts had internally raised concerns about the decision to accuse anyone caught in the streets by default of being an “anarchist extremist” specifically because “sufficient facts” were never found “to support such a characterization.”

One field operations analyst told interviewers that the charts were hastily “thrown together,” adding they “didn’t even know why some of the people were arrested.” In some cases, it was unclear whether the arrests were made by police or by one of the several federal agencies on the ground. The analysts were never provided arrest affidavits or paperwork, a witness told investigators, adding that they “just worked off the assumption that everyone on the list was arrested.” Lawyers who reviewed 43 of the dossiers found it “concerning,” the report says, that 13 of them stemmed from “nonviolent crimes.” These included trespassing, though it was unclear to analysts and investigators whether the cases had “any relationship to federal property,” the report says.

A footnote in the report states that “at least one witness” told investigators that dossiers had been requested on people who were “not arrested” but merely accused of threats. Another, citing emails exchanged between top intelligence officials, states dossiers were created “on persons arrested having nothing to do with homeland security or threats to officers.”

Questioned by investigators, the agency’s chief intelligence officer acknowledged fielding requests by Wolf and his acting deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, to create dossiers “against everyone participating in the Portland protest,” regardless of whether they’d been accused of any crime, the report says. That officer, Brian Murphy, then head of the agency’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A), told interviewers that he’d rejected the idea, informing his bosses that he could only “look at people who were arrested,” and adding that it was something his office had done “thousands” of times before.

The DHS report, finalized more than a year ago, includes descriptions of orders handed down to “senior leadership” instructing them to broadly apply the label “violent antifa anarchists inspired” to Portland protesters unless they had intel showing “something different.”

Once the dossiers were received by the agency’s emerging threat center, it became clear that DHS had no real way to tie the protesters to any terrorist activities, neither at home nor abroad. Efforts to drum up evidence to support the administration’s claim that a “larger network was directing or financing” the protesters — a task assigned to another unit, known as the Homeland Identities, Targeting and Exploitation Center, diverted away from its usual work of analyzing national security threats — “did not find any evidence that assertion was true,” the report says.

A TRUMPED-UP THREAT, A TRUMPED-UP HOMELAND SECURITY DEPARTMENT

Fears of political toadies occupying key intelligence roles had been aired publicly by former intelligence community members during the Trump administration’s early years, but their concerns were all but ignored by Senate Republicans during confirmation hearings that would ultimately inflict serious reputational damage on a number of agencies that, for their own survival, had long avoided partisan leanings.

The report is based on interviews with approximately 80 employees conducted by attorneys drawn from various agency components, including U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Coast Guard. The investigation began in response to leaks of internal DHS emails in July 2020 that prompted questions from lawmakers about potential intelligence abuses, including the monitoring of journalists’ activities online and the liberal application of terrorism-related language to describe Americans engaged in protest.

I&A is one of the nation’s 17 intelligence community members overseen by the nation’s “top spy,” the Director of National Intelligence, whose office drafts daily top-secret briefings for the President. The directorship was held throughout the protests by John Ratcliffe, a Republican of Texas and renowned Trump loyalist, whose nomination to the post was withdrawn initially in 2019 over qualifications concerns raised by lawmakers and career intelligence officials.

The dossiers, known as Operational Background Reports, or OBRs, are known colloquially within the agency as “baseball cards,” the report says. The task of creating them was handed, “with little to no guidance on execution,” to the agency’s Current and Emerging Threats Center, an analysis unit whose “actionable intelligence” is distributed widely throughout the government. According to the report, the dossiers would’ve been shared with, among others, the agency’s Field Operations Division, which works closely with House and Senate committee staffers, and the Federal Protection Service, whose core mission is securing some 9,000 federal facilities across the country. The extent to which entities outside the federal government were meant to be involved is unclear; however, the report indicates that DHS state and local partners, which would naturally include law enforcement, but also potentially organizations like National Governors Association, could have also been in the loop.

Funded to the tune of $1.5 billion, the Federal Protective Service (FPS) is comprised of thousands of security officers drawn from private contractors such as Triple Canopy, a firm merged in 2014 with another contractor called Academi, previously known as Blackwater. Its staff notoriously included elite warfighters recruited from among the Navy SEALS, the Army Rangers, and the Marines expeditionary force MARSOC.

Activated to engage protesters targeting federal buildings in Portland — including the well-vandalized Hatfield Federal Courthouse — FPS personnel were eventually joined by officers hailing from across the federal government, including some on loan by the U.S. Marshals Service tactical unit normally tasked with making the arrests of the nation’s most violent fugitives. They converged for a mission dubbed “Operation Diligent Valor,” authorized under Executive Order 13933, purportedly to apprehend “anarchists and left-wing extremists” who’d been driven by Floyd’s murder to target U.S. monuments commemorating slave owners and Confederate traitors — dangerous individuals, Trump said, advancing a “fringe ideology” painting the U.S. government as “fundamentally unjust.”

Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, convicted of murder and sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison in 2021, sparked more than 100 days of continuous marches in Portland. Sporadic protests continued well into the next spring, frequently marked by nightly standoffs between protesters toting bottles, fruit, and fireworks and riot-control squads armed with nightsticks, pepperspray, and “kinetic impact munitions” designed to irritate, disorient, and compel compliance through pain.

Police would eventually rack up an unprecedented 6,000 documented use-of-force cases against the demonstrators, who in turn reportedly inflicted more than $2.3 million in damage to federal buildings alone. Police ran off legal observers and physically beat journalist who suffered injuries at the hands of federal agents armed with crowd control weapons as well. In response to the bad press, Justice Department lawyers filed a successful motion in court giving police the power to force reporters off the streets.

Reports began surfacing, meanwhile, of protesters being abducted near demonstrations by men jumping out of unmarked vans in military fatigues. After widely circulated footage confirmed the accounts, DHS acknowledged the abductions, as well as the fact that agents had taken intentional steps to ensure their identities remained secret.

Analysts would feed protesters’ names into an array of databases, including LexisNexis, a tool used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to hunt undocumented immigrants. Another tool, referred to as “Tangles” — a likely reference to the now-defunct Facebook app CrowdTangle — was used to “[compile] information from the subject’s available social media profiles.”

The report also states that dossiers were requested on multiple journalists, including Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare.

Wittes was targeted for publishing unclassified DHS materials, including the initial leak that set off the investigation. Wittes had coauthored an article at Lawfare with Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor, in July 2020, which included leaked guidance — known as a “job aid” — disclosing DHS plans to act on Trump’s executive order. The document, Lawfare reported, implicated “at least parts of the intelligence community” in the “monitoring and collecting information on some protest activities.” Later leaks obtained by the New York Times included a DHS memo that, among other things, summarized tweets that had been published by Wittes.

One tweet, published on July 26 — a week after Lawfare published the guidance document — included a leaked email by DHS’s acting-Chief Intelligence Officer, relaying orders to begin referring to all violence in Portland as the work of “Antifa.”

As the summer nights grew longer and the 2020 elections near, the media spent less time focused on the cause of the demonstrations — the suffocation of a Black father of five by a white Minneapolis police officer who was outwardly unmoved by Floyd’s desperate pleas for air, or the heartrending cries for his mother. Headlines shifted instead, as if on cue, to focus on the narrative crafted by the president’s flailing reelection campaign; a pre-packed delusion designed to strike fear in voters’ imaginations and tether Democrats to a fictitious terrorist threat.

Nothing could dissuade Trump from continuing to propagate the claims, which his supporters — most to this day — continue to blindly believe. “In my book it’s virtually a part of their campaign, Antifa,” Trump said in the final months before the election. “The Democrats act like, gee, I don’t know exactly what that is.”

Trump’s highest ranking intelligence crony, John Ratcliffe, meanwhile, would go on to play the only card left with a little help from Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Shocking and alarming career intelligence officials, Graham posted a letter online ahead of the election’s final debate. It contained a batch of Russian disinformation that a Republican-led committee had disregarded as bogus four years earlier. Apparently, it focused on the only Democrat left on whom they could find any material with which to smear: Hillary Clinton, who had no election to lose.

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cyarskaren52 · 11 months

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Biiiiiiiitch What? Thousands of people were dying a day in NYC, emergency rooms were overflowing. The maskless were perfecting fine with spreading Covid, and I practically had an anxiety attack every time I went to the store. And there’s outrage over the police in Minnesota killing black men in front of perma traumatized children and teenagers. The teenager who filmed the murder still traumatized from seeing the wickedness in front of her. This is what you wanna go back to ? Three years later? Biiiiiiiittttttttttcccccvh what?????

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saywhat-politics · 2 years

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Fox News host Ainsley Earnhardt said the morning after the latest hearing investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection that Congress should also probe the riots that broke out during protests for racial justice across the country during the summer of 2020.

“There’s never an excuse for a riot, but remember the summer of 2020 when there were all those riots?” Earnhardt asked on Friday on “Fox and Friends.” “Where are the hearings for all those riots? For people burning buildings and burning businesses. You can’t pick and choose which riot is the good one and which is the bad one. They’re all bad.”

During Thursday night’s prime-time hearing on the events of Jan. 6, the last scheduled for July, several members of former President Trump’s inner circle at the time described the feelings and activities inside the White House during the Capitol attack, particularly Trump’s failure to act.

The testimony and exhibits painted a picture of Trump resisting telling the rioters to go home and his stubborn refusal to say publicly that the election was over.

“Everyone in that room, they’re all against Trump,” Earnhardt said. “They’re all anti-Trumpers. Every single one voted to impeach him.”

#fox news #ainsley earnhardt #u.s. capitol riot #january 6 2021 #george floyd protests

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wartakes · 9 months

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Some thoughts for today, May 25th, 2022 (OLD ESSAY)

This essay was originally posted on May 25th, 2022 (duh).

This was one of those ones I really struggled on a topic for, so I decided to reflect on the George Floyd uprisings and the state of things in the country through my personal and professional lens.

(Full essay below the cut)

Not gonna lie to you folks, I was really struggling with this one.

I truly had no idea what I was going to write about for this month’s essay – and I’ve been trying to think of a topic since the beginning of the month and been coming up short. Doesn’t help that I’ve been in a bit of a slump. As a warning up front: this may end up being one of my more emotional and wandering pieces, in addition to being less analytically rigorous than they usually are – but I still thought this one was worth writing and sharing with you all today.

I knew I wanted to write about something other than Ukraine. While that war is still very much active and very important, it’s entered a phase where the shift in the frontlines and fortunes of war are simultaneously relatively contained but constantly shifting day to day (I may do a check-in on where things are at in a future piece). I also knew I didn’t feel like doing a new entry in my “What Should it Look Like?” series right at this moment. In general, I’ve been in somewhat of a low ebb with my personal and creative endeavors the last few weeks, due to a variety of reasons – both in my personal life in events at the local, national, and international level. I’ve just felt drained and frustrated – as many of us have, I know.

It was when I was pacing the room trying to think of something that I really felt motivated to write about, it occurred to me that I was thinking about this all right around an important anniversary. If my timing works out, this essay should be released on May 25th: the day on which George Floyd – an unarmed black man – murdered by Minneapolis Police officers in 2020, kicking off a nation-wide uprising against police violence and impunity. Its also happening close to Memorial Day, and though the reflections I’m offering here aren’t exactly what Memorial Day was intended for, I think they still seem to fit the overall spirit of the idea.

Aside from the obvious reason why George Floyd’s murder and what followed matters to many people, it matters to me because that act and the response to it by so many people in the United States, and the response of the police and the state to them in turn, was what finally opened my eyes to what the country I lived in was really like. It made me come to terms with both that, and my true ideological tilt. It finally forced me to look at things in a new way after years of internal doubts about what I had thought I’d believed up until that point. It compelled me to question all my pre-existing beliefs, discard many, modify others, and double down on some. It was a personal watershed for me, much like it was a national one.

Two years after George Floyd’s death and the uprising that followed, we’ve experienced a LOT more history. The continuing COVID-19 pandemic (and our government’s – and other’s – failure to react to it), the 2020 election’s drama and the January 6th insurrection, systemic efforts to attack trans people, more and more mass shootings, consistently rising inflation and economic strife, and now the looming specter of Roe v. Wade being overturned and millions of women across the country losing their reproductive rights – and those are just all the events going on here in the United States. We’ve also witnessed America’s twenty-year war in Afghanistan end in failure, with the Afghan people themselves suffering immensely on top of all the other suffering they’ve already experienced. We saw Israel’s most recent major attempt to cull the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. Now, we see Russia’s blatant attempts at imperialism in Ukraine flounder – killing and maiming thousands even as its campaign falters.

Obviously, the aforementioned list of events is not all-inclusive – either nationally or internationally – but you get the idea and I don’t want to drown you in even more sorrow. We’ve all been through a great deal the last couple years. It was with that in mind as I sat here with that anniversary approaching, with May 2022 alone being packed with soul crushing news – let alone the rest of the past two years: how do I feel? Two years on from “coming out of the closet” with my ideological beliefs, how do I feel about those beliefs, about the state of my country, about the state of the world, about the future, and more? Do I feel better about everything? Worse? So-so?

This may seem like something of a cop out, but compared to two years ago, I feel simultaneously better and worse about the future. On one hand, I feel more apprehensive about the immediate future and the challenges and horrors it has in store. Yet, when it comes to looking at things in the long run, I still maintain hope. Admittedly, part of this hope is fueled just by wanting to spite doomers and doomerism in general because I absolutely despise that outlook, but I do have some genuine reasons to be hopeful in the long run and I will be sharing those momentarily.

To be brutally honest, in the short term: I’m worried and discouraged. I see forces of reaction continuing to amass power in the United States while the supposed official opposition seems content to wring their hands, clutch their pearls and cry about “the rules” while the right-wing death cult is more than happy to circumvent said rules or outright break them without a second though or suffering consequences. Overseas, I’m also pessimistic. For example: while Ukrainians hold the line in their own country, I feel that Russia’s actions there may create far-reaching shockwaves that will cause additional crisis and conflict in their wake. Even as Russia’s efforts falter, I worry Putin’s invasion of Ukraine may potentially only be the first of a new wave of revanchism and attempts at conquest in the years to come, with existing conflicts still raging on in the background as well.

This is part of why I was struggling to write an essay this month – and also struggling with some of my other creative endeavors as well. It’s simply been hard to imagine a better world, when we’re living in an era of constant crisis, crumbling, and collapse. I frame many of these essays from the perspective of a United States – combined with other allies and partners – that have a more positive, constructive ideological bent. In the past few weeks, between all the events happening here in the United States alone, it’s been very hard to envision a better country, let alone a better world. It’s been next to impossible to contemplate that possibility lately.

But, again, I haven’t given up. As much as I’ve felt my soul has been trodden on in the past weeks, months, and years, I’ve still seen things that give me hope. That despite that constant feeling that we’re being pulverized into dust, people continue to fight for their most basic rights. Workers continuing to fight for their labor rights against mega corporations like Amazon and Starbucks – and winning crucial victories. More Progressive and Leftist voices gaining ground against the moribund establishment. Overseas, we see people fighting for themselves and their neighbors both against fascist invaders in the case of Ukraine, but also against fascist forces that have usurped power in Burma. While it doesn’t mean we can sit on our laurels, seeing these pockets of resistance and hope give us a reason to keep fighting ourselves.

In some of my darker moments over the past few years, I’ve openly wished I still had political blinders on, or that I could put them back on. That I was still ensconced in a snug, warm social liberal cocoon, inside of which I would maintain my blind faith that the system as it was would eventually right itself and everything would go “back to normal” and we’d all live happily ever after. A world that works just like it does on the West Wing or in Marvel movies (oh God, that made me think of an Aaron Sorkin Marvel movie and that is truly a cursed thought. Jesus).

But that’s impossible. Even if I really truly wanted to go back to living a lie (and I don’t think I do), Pandora’s Box has been opened in my brain and the brain of many others. I’ve been cursed with knowledge and now I must live with it; there’s no putting it back where it came from. But more importantly, that wouldn’t solve or help anything. Reverting back to my previous stage of delusion and denial as fascists continue to consolidate power both at home and abroad would be about as useful as being a doomer and just accepting that everything is written in stone and there is nothing we can do to stop it. So, much like with doomerism, even if I could wipe my brain clean and go back to my previous ignorance, I refuse to do so if only on principal.

The drawback to the world not being set in stone as doomers try to convince it is, is that we can never really know where its headed or what may happen next. We can make educated guesses, and sometimes we may even be right (even when we’d rather be wrong), but the only thing we can be sure of is that nothing is sure. This reality comes with its benefits and drawbacks: it is liberating that history is not actually written in stone because it means we still have the means to influence it and try and make a better world for ourselves, but also terrifying in that this means things could get even worse than they might already be if it was written in stone.

Being stuck in this tenuous position is also an exhausting one, physically and mentally. We are constantly trying to maintain that hope for the future and take inspiration and solace from the victories we do achieve, all while remaining on guard for the next bullshit that may come our way. All of this, of course, occurs as we’ve being battered (sometimes quite literally) by whatever bullshit has been dumped on us this particular day. I’ve seen friends and loved ones struggle to keep their heads above the proverbial water while dealing with life under these circumstances. I’ve struggled myself. We all have to various degrees and we all will continue to.

But (to bring you up from that previous, dour note), even as we struggle, we’re still here. We are still here, and we are still fighting, and so are billions of others across the world. One major thing that gives me hope is despite being worn down, despite being tired, anxious, and depressed on many days, I still feel a fire in my belly. I still feel anger: anger that it has to be this way. Anger that so many people I care about, that so many people in general, have to struggle just to exist in this day and age. I still feel anger at the inaction the powers that be exhibit in dealing with these issues, or anger at them actively working to prevent any change for the better. Despite everything, I still feel a drive to do something. I still want things to be different. That hasn’t been crushed out of me yet, nor has it been crushed out of others, and that gives me hope. The fact that despite being given so many reasons to, we all haven’t given up, gives me renewed hope.

We’re only just approaching the half-way point in 2022 and I feel we’re going to have a lot more bullshit to deal with here and abroad. I don’t have any specific or particular advice to give you on how to deal with everything going on (I wish I did), but I do have some general advice that I hope does something. First, make sure you’re taking care of yourself and those you immediately depend on. Do what you have to in order to make sure you’re as safe and secure as possible in regards to your basic needs and safety. Obviously, you absolutely should help your broader community as you’re able to do so, but make sure that you take care of yourself and keep on existing. Do that because A.) your life matters and you matter to people; and B.) because you’re no good to others who depend on you otherwise. This includes taking occasional breaks to “unplug” from the news and current events (something I’m trying to be better at). Obviously, you shouldn’t completely disconnect and go into grillpilled mode, but know when you need to log off for a bit and just not think about the world for a while and do it when necessary.

Second piece of broad advice: just do what you can, with the understanding that it may not always be a lot but that it still contributes in some fashion. Whether its dealing with the threat of Roe v. Wade being overturned here at home, or its Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s hard to imagine what we can do to affect these things. There are things we can do, however small they might be, to help in some way. Do what you can to help but try not to beat yourself up over not being able to do more. Take a realistic view of your role in current events. Don’t let yourself succumb to despair thinking that there’s nothing you can do. If anything, harness any feelings of impotent rage to motivate yourself to do the things are you able of, and when you feel frustrated that there’s not more you can do, remember that we’re all in this for the long haul and that another chance will come for you to act. This will be a long war with many battles.

Alright, I think I’ve rambled about enough. I promise for the next essay I’ll try to do something that’s closer to my usual bread and butter of analysis on IR and war, but this was just something I felt compelled to write and get off my chest (especially as I was struggling for motivation on any other ideas currently). I hope maybe these thoughts and reflections are of some use to anyone who reads them. The last few years have been rough, but in a lot of ways I’m also very proud of myself and others for how we’ve dealt with it and that too gives me hope for the future. With that, before I talk too much more and find a reason to be a downer, I will leave you for now. Stay safe and stay motivated. One day, someday, we will make things better. I haven’t given up on that dream yet and I really hope you haven’t either.

#essay #War Takes #War Takes essay #socialism #leftism #democratic socialism #far-right #authoritarianism #anti-authoritarianism #george floyd #george floyd uprising #george floyd uprisings #george floyd protests

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vaguely-problematic · 2 years

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youtube

in june 2020, amber ruffin gave context to the george floyd protests by sharing stories about her personal encounters with the police

y'all i am about as white as you can get but i have also had totally uncalled-for encounters with the police. they were not nearly as aggressive with me; i've not had a gun pulled on me. but i also had police stop me in my own yard, while i'm standing there with my baby, and interrogate me as to whether or not i really lived there. out of nowhere?

once other white people called the cops on me while i was at the park with my daughter- for allegedly trying to kidnap my her because they did not believe i was her mom? absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened but apparently i looked like a delinquent?

even *i* am not allowed to exist in peace and black americans certainly aren't -STILL aren't. there is still so much work to be done

#black lives matter #this dystopian nightmare of a country #police brutality #george floyd protests #living in the u.s.a.#u.s. politics #2 years ago #amber ruffin #systemic racism #acab #Youtube

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playitagin · 11 months

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2020–George Floyd protests

Protests triggered by the murder of George Floyd erupt in Minneapolis–Saint Paul, before becoming widespread across the United States and around the world.

#May.26.2020 #George Floyd protests #gif

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lightdancer1 · 1 year

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Ending today with two articles noting the Long Civil Rights Movement is still a clear and present reality:

#lightdancer comments on history #current events #george floyd protests #black lives matter movement

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reportwire · 2 years

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David Dorn's Killer Guilty on All Counts | St. Louis Metro News | St. Louis

David Dorn’s Killer Guilty on All Counts | St. Louis Metro News | St. Louis

click to enlarge Ann Dorn speaking to media after a jury declared Stephan Cannon guilty of murdering her husband, David Dorn. After three days of testimony, Stephan Cannon was found guilty of first-degree murder for the shooting death of retired police captain David Dorn in June 2020. Emotions ran high in the courtroom. After the verdict was read, one woman stormed out, muttering “ya’ll…

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#Arts #Concerts #Culture #David Dorn #Elections #Events #George Floyd protests #Missouri #Missouri News #murder #Restaurants #RFT #Riverfront Times #St. Louis #St. Louis News #St. Louis Riverfront Times #Things to Do in St. Louis

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trumpbites · 2 years

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Maine Gov. Thought Trump Was Having 'Nervous Breakdown' During Call: Book - Business Insider

Maine Gov. Thought Trump Was Having ‘Nervous Breakdown’ During Call: Book – Business Insider

Trump was not keen on the protests surrounding Floyd’s death, and in a phone call with governors stressed that they needed to display a show of force against the activism that was increasingly becoming a part of the national conversation, according to a forthcoming book by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns. In the book, “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle…