The emails played to fear. âEntire police departments are being overwhelmed by mobs of criminals bent on violence, robbery, arson, and more,â read one sent in June, as demonstrations against police brutality rocked the country. âMinnesotans have seen our peaceful streets turn violent overnight with riotous mobs,â read another, sent not long after the burning of Minneapolisâs Third Precinct. âRadical leftists ⦠are looting in our streets, lighting buildings on fire, terrifying citizens, and murdering cops,â intoned a third. Antifa is in the streets, coming for your guns, and did you know that Nickelodeon is removing the police dog character from the hit toddler show âPaw Patrol?â (It isnât.)
For right-wing fringe activist Ben Dorr, who sent the emails, outrage about Black Lives Matter was an easy pivot from another cause heâd been promoting. With his brothers Aaron, Chris, and Matthew, Ben Dorr helped launch protests to reopen states across the country shut down amid the coronavirus pandemic this spring. Alone or together, the four Dorr brothers started a slew of Facebook groups, joined by hundreds of thousands of members, that have helped to fuel skepticism about health precautions and pushed for states to open prematurely. In a country where the simple act of wearing a mask has become a political statement, the people who organize against masks are worth watching.
The Dorr brothers, who range in age from 29 to 40, have ties to tea party figures like Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul and have been dismissed by people on both the right and the left as astroturfinghucksters who are more interested in profit than policy. Even the National Rifle Association has denounced them as scammers. Before they began railing against public health measures, the brothers started gun rights and anti-abortion groups in multiple states, registering them as nonprofits and then paying out some of the money that they raise from donations to a for-profit direct mail company that they themselves control, according to IRS tax forms required to be filed by nonprofits. (...)
On May 29, two federal security officers guarding a courthouse in Oakland, California, were ambushed by machine-gun fire as elsewhere in the city demonstrators marched peacefully to protest the killing of George Floyd. One of the guards, David Patrick Underwood, died as a result of the attack, and the other was wounded. For days, conservative news broadcasters pinned the blame on âantifa,â the loosely affiliated group of anti-fascist anarchists known to attack property and far-right demonstrators at protests. But the alleged culprit, apprehended a week later, turned out to be a 32-year-old Air Force sergeant named Steven Carrillo, the head of a squadron called the Phoenix Ravens, which guards military installations from terrorist attacks.
According to prosecutors, Carrillo and an accomplice, 30-year-old Robert A. Justus Jr., were part of the âboogalooâ movement, a patchwork of right-leaning anti-government libertarians, Second Amendment advocates, and gun enthusiasts all preparing for another American civil war.
Authorities say that when they went to apprehend Carrillo at his residence, he attacked them with pipe bombs, killing a police sergeant named Damon Gutzwiller. Investigators found a boogaloo-themed patch in a vehicle used by Carrillo. And Carrillo had scrawled boog, along with various boogaloo slogans, in his own blood on the hood of a car.
The boogaloo movement originally grew from the weapons discussion section (â/k/â) of the anarchic anonymous message board 4chan over the past several years. By 2019, its culture had disseminated across social media into a mix of online groups and chat servers where users shared libertarian political memes. In the past six months, this all began to manifest in real life, as users from the groups emerged at protests in what became their signature uniform: aloha shirts and combat gear. As nationwide unrest intensified at the start of the summer, many boogaloo adherents interpreted this as a cue to realize the groupâs central fantasyâarmed revolt against the U.S. government. (...)
Seattle property values along with property & business tax revenues are on the verge of plummeting! Can you imagine what that means?!
What? You don't think a major disruption to the mechanisms keeping your citizenry safe from the dregs of society won't have any significant consequences?
I actually welcome this to quote Brian Eno; "is necessary for the learning." It will be a tough lesson for some, but there are many who have very tough lives already and I welcome the hardship to be shifted a bit to wealthy white people who really have no idea what life is like on the streets with no protection. I have heard some BLM activist say the same thing and I agree with them is all. The experience of going too far the other way will promote more understanding for what else the police does for their communities other than beat the shit out of them, an act of which is usually seen at the end of a an incident and out of context. Don't get me wrong, Libertarians have been watching, realizing and warning others of the militarization, over aggression and relationship breakdown between law enforcement and their citizens for some time. However their is another side to this story and that is there are a lot of really bad, angry and desperate people out there who commit heinous acts and the police are the only ones who actively investigate, pursue and defend us against them and that story will be unleashed into the foray and hopefully perpetuate a good faith relationship between social justice advocates and the police and their unions that does not come to the table with a movement whose very name means to exterminate their jobs or to take a lot of their money away and expect them to bow down and accept their fate. In the meantime, oh there will be pain.........
de·fund/dÄËfÉnd/ Learn to pronounce verbUSverb: defund; 3rd person present: defunds; past tense: defunded; past participle: defunded; gerund or present participle: defunding; verb: de-fund; 3rd person present: de-funds; past tense: de-funded; past participle: de-funded; gerund or present participle: de-funding
prevent from continuing to receive funds."the California Legislature has defunded the Industrial Welfare Commission"
a·bol·ish/ÉËbäliSH/ Learn to pronounce verbverb: abolish; 3rd person present: abolishes; past tense: abolished; past participle: abolished; gerund or present participle: abolishing
formally put an end to (a system, practice, or institution)."the tax was abolished in 1977"
Seattle property values along with property & business tax revenues are on the verge of plummeting! Can you imagine what that means?!
What? You don't think a major disruption to the mechanisms keeping your citizenry safe from the dregs of society won't have any significant consequences?
We have a dead person by way of a protest under police supervision.
Did the driver hit the protesters because of some animus he held towards the Black Femme Movement? Or was this a case of a reckless driver who ignored barricades and unintentionally killed a woman through his negligence?
My hunch is the latter situation, but we don't know enough now to make a firm judgment. In my opinion, this is not a replay of the killing in Charlottesville, VA in 2017.
Black driver in a Jag is your killer.
From the sounds of it, he was in a hurry for something.
Best try the Seattle papers for details.
"Kelete was the owner of the Jaguar XJL and was alone in the car, according to the state patrol.
A security camera on the REI building captured Kelete's car driving the wrong way up the Stewart Street I-5 exit ramp, past numerous warning signs that said âWrong Way,â according to the charging document. Since it was an exit ramp, âa driver must make a deliberate and sharp right U-turn in order to drive southbound on I-5,â the document said.
He was traveling at freeway speeds when he first noticed the demonstrators, the document said."
I offered up that same thought when I initially brought this up and the very first reaction to my thought was by our friend the dragon and he said in no uncertain terms that is was deliberate and outright murder and just like Charlottesville. And there was a second thought supporting that. It kinda got me leaning that way based on their certainty and information presented. It involves a BLM ish protest group and the police. So how could this not be something deliberate, an outright act of murder ?
Now I have you agreeing with my original thought. How can that be ?
I give up. Go backscroll and look at the beginning. You're all on the same side of the political aisle. Y'all have to get your stories straight.
"Y'all have to get your stories straight."
You really need to work on your attitude.
It's not surprising that people are doing hot takes on this incident before all the details come out. The collision occurred during a BLM-related protest. Someone did intentionally drive their car into protesters in Charlotte VA in 2017. Similar collisions occurred this year during protests IIRC People in this forum and the US are very worked up.
But people don't have to have the same opinion about an incident just because they share political opinions. This is not the USSR. Maybe things work differently in Trumpworld.
I have to think, though, that the driver was depraved, mentally ill, or panicking when he kept driving after hitting those two women. There's no way he could have not noticed the collision. It's just not clear to me that he could have known for sure that the people on the freeway were protesters. It's possible that he assumed they were because the freeway had been closed for 19 straight days due to the BLM protests in Seattle.
Insufficient information to form a firm opinion. We'll find out more soon enough.
We have a dead person by way of a protest under police supervision.
Did the driver hit the protesters because of some animus he held towards the Black Femme Movement? Or was this a case of a reckless driver who ignored barricades and unintentionally killed a woman through his negligence?
My hunch is the latter situation, but we don't know enough now to make a firm judgment. In my opinion, this is not a replay of the killing in Charlottesville, VA in 2017.
I offered up that same thought when I initially brought this up and the very first reaction to my thought was by our friend the dragon and he said in no uncertain terms that is was deliberate and outright murder and just like Charlottesville. And there was a second thought supporting that. It kinda got me leaning that way based on their certainty and information presented. It involves a BLM ish protest group and the police. So how could this not be something deliberate, an outright act of murder ?
Now I have you agreeing with my original thought. How can that be ?
I give up. Go backscroll and look at the beginning. You're all on the same side of the political aisle. Y'all have to get your stories straight.
We have a dead person by way of a protest under police supervision.
Did the driver hit the protesters because of some animus he held towards the Black Femme Movement? Or was this a case of a reckless driver who ignored barricades and unintentionally killed a woman through his negligence?
My hunch is the latter situation, but we don't know enough now to make a firm judgment. In my opinion, this is not a replay of the killing in Charlottesville, VA in 2017.
Learn to pronounce 
