Tag: michael brown
black lives matter protest

GOP State Officials Threaten Violent ‘War’ Against Black Lives Matter

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

This week, two local Republican leaders published and then deleted social media posts which threatened violence in an imminent right-wing clash against Black Lives Matter and Antifa (anti-fascist) activists.

First, Iron County, Utah commissioner Paul Cozzens published a now-deleted picture showing a soldier with a gun and the words: "Warning to BLM & Antifa—Once you've managed to defund & eliminate the police, there's nobody protecting you from us. Remember that."

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warrior cops

America’s Forever Wars Have Come Home

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch

From their front porches, regular citizens watched a cordon of cops sweep down their peaceful street in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Rankled at being filmed, the cops exceeded their authority and demanded that people go inside their houses. When some of them didn't obey quickly enough, the order -- one heard so many times in the streets of Iraqi cities and in the villages of Afghanistan -- was issued: "Light 'em up." And so "disobedient" Americans found themselves on the receiving end of non-lethal rounds for the "crime" of watching the police from those porches.

It's taken years from Ferguson to this moment, but America's cops have now officially joined the military as "professional" warriors. In the wake of George Floyd's murder on May 25th, those warrior-cops have taken to the streets across the country wearing combat gear and with attitudes to match. They see protesters, as well as the reporters covering them, as the enemy and themselves as the "thin blue line" of law and order.

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Tell No More Racial Fables About Ferguson

Tell No More Racial Fables About Ferguson

 I have this odd, puritanical quirk. I don’t think people should run for president by pitching racially inflammatory fables to voters. Republicans or Democrats.

And no, I’m not talking about Donald J. Trump, although these days, racial arson is pretty much his stock-in-trade, along with crackpot conspiracy theories. This week it’s Google, the Federal Reserve, and Fox News. Before that, it was the rat and vermin “infested” city of Baltimore and its African-American congressman Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD).

A friend recently directed me to an astonishingly disingenuous Wall Street Journal op-ed by Heather Mac Donald titled “Trump Isn’t the One Dividing Us by Race.” The president, she writes, “rarely uses racial categories in his speech or his tweets.”

Jonathan Chait comments: “Given that historically, American presidents never use racial categories in their public remarks, this is a bit like saying O.J. Simpson rarely murders anybody.”

That said, I might buy Mac Donald’s argument if it read “Trump isn’t the only one dividing us by race.” He’s clearly persuaded lots of white people that they’re the real victims. At intervals, some lone demento picks up an AR-15 and massacres his imagined race enemies.

Mac Donald blames “the academic left and its imitators in politics and mass media.”

Seriously. That’s what she says.

That’s not to say we wouldn’t be better off purging the “r-word” from our political vocabularies. Calling somebody racist never leads to anything useful. It’s the contemporary equivalent of accusing them of blasphemy or the Manichean heresy—not the beginning, but the end of a conversation.

That said, what I’m about to say will result in many emails calling me exactly that. Comes with the territory.

Because sometimes Democrats definitely do contribute to the problem. I’m thinking about presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren indulging in demagogic rhetoric regarding the tragic events in Ferguson, Missouri five years ago. Sen. Harris got things started with a tweet stating that “Michael Brown’s murder forever changed Ferguson and America.”

Not to be outdone, Warren doubled down: “5 years ago Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Michael was unarmed yet he was shot 6 times.”

Yes, Michael was unarmed. He was also 6-5, 289 pounds, and had just committed a strong-arm robbery and assaulted Officer Darren Wilson in his patrol car. He’d come perilously close to taking away Wilson’s gun, and, contrary to popular myth, neither had his hands in the air signaling surrender, nor yelling “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Those things never happened.

Instead, Brown bull-rushed the cop—who had no backup—basically giving him just two choices: shoot, or turn and run.

How I know these things is that the Obama Justice Department did a full-scale investigation, interviewing 40 witnesses and examining the forensic evidence before concluding that “there is no credible evidence that Wilson willfully shot Brown as he was attempting to surrender.”

Wilson’s chances of subduing the powerful young man were essentially nil. The report further concluded: “There is no credible evidence to refute Wilson’s stated subjective belief that he was acting in self-defense.”

Repeat: “no credible evidence” for the “Hands up, don’t shoot” scenario that became the inspirational slogan for the otherwise admirable Black Lives Matter movement. It was based upon the oft-broadcast false testimony of Brown’s friend, who’d hidden behind a parked car where other eyewitnesses—the tragedy went down in broad daylight in a largely African-American apartment complex—said he couldn’t possibly have seen what happened.

As a former prosecutor and attorney general of California, Kamala Harris surely knows these things, just as she probably remembers US Attorney General Eric Holder’s press conference announcing the report’s release. Elizabeth Warren also has no excuse. Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler awarded them the maximum “Four Pinocchios.” They probably deserved eight.

Corey Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand managed to commemorate the tragedy without using the inflammatory word “murder.”

Alas, Ferguson soon morphed into a partisan loyalty test. It became just as important for some to see poor Michael Brown as the innocent victim of a bigoted white cop as for others to depict him as a marauding black thug.

Neither stereotype fits the facts. Wilson’s no KKK man, while all accounts depict Brown as a gentle giant who’d begun experiencing messianic delusions: reporting visions of Satan fighting angels in the sky, and wandering heedless in heavy traffic in the seeming belief that he couldn’t be hurt.

“Do you know who I am?” he demanded of the shopkeeper he bullied. The answer he sought probably wasn’t “Michael Brown.”

If he’d been a white suburban kid, he’d likelier have encountered a psychiatrist than a cop. It’s just a damn shame.

As for law and order, I agree with the estimable Ta-Nehisi Coates. “I do not favor lowering the standard of justice offered Officer Wilson,” he wrote. “I favor raising the standard of justice offered to the rest of us.”

IMAGE: Police hold a protester who was detained in Ferguson, Missouri, August 10, 2015. REUTERS/Rick Wilking

Darren Seals: Ferguson Activist Found Dead In Burning Car With Gunshot Wound

Darren Seals: Ferguson Activist Found Dead In Burning Car With Gunshot Wound

(Reuters) – Missouri detectives have not determined a motive or identified any witnesses in an investigation into the death of a man who led protests in the city of Ferguson following the fatal 2014 shooting of Michael Brown by a law enforcement officer, police said on Wednesday.

Protest leader Darren Seals, 29, was found shot inside a burning car in the village of Riverview, about five miles east of Ferguson, early on Tuesday, St. Louis County Police said in a statement.

Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, gained national attention because of rioting after the August 2014 shooting of Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, by white police officer Darren Wilson. Most protests were peaceful, but violence erupted again when a grand jury decided not to bring charges against Wilson.

A federal investigation later found patterns of racial discrimination by Ferguson police.

The demonstrations helped to coalesce the civil rights movement Black Lives Matter.

“I don’t recall anyone having a longer protest, a more productive protest, a more creative protest than what we did,” Seals said in an interview with MTV released in November 2014. “I don’t think people will ever really appreciate what we did until years from now.”

Hours before Seals‘ death, he posted on Twitter about Colin Kaepernick, a San Francisco 49ers National Football League quarterback who protested racial injustice and police brutality by declining to stand for the national anthem, and the U.S. presidential election. In his Twitter profile, Seals described himself as a “businessman, revolutionary, activist, unapologetically BLACK, Afrikan in AmeriKKKa, fighter, leader.”

Police have not determined a motive for the crime or identified any witnesses, Sergeant Shawn McGuire said. McGuire declined to say in which part of Seals‘ body he was shot.

County police said officers were first called to investigate a burning vehicle in Riverview. “When the fire was extinguished, a deceased male subject was located inside of the vehicle,” the department said in a statement.

Seals, whose last-known address was in St. Louis, was identified as the victim.

(Reporting by Laila Kearney in New York; editing by Grant McCool)

Photo: An undated photo of Darren Seals from his facebook account. Darren Seals via Facebook/Handout via REUTERS