Brave Glenn. I have been disturbed by the constant use of the term "insurrectionists" when this has never been proven. Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes - this has just become a normal way to refer to PROTESTERS. There is a word for them - they are protesters. Did they disrupt violently? Yes. Have Democrats? YES. That is what you do in America. If the media tried to destroy Trump and them - lying about them being racists, etc. then they have every right to show their anger by protesting. Not violently but until they condemn the left's very violent protests how can they say this too is not allowed? And yet here we are. A propaganda driven state and an entire political party that used to stand up for civil liberties in full support.
I see the 1/6 protesters as mainly a bunch of yahoos who interrupted a hearing (of overfed multi-millionaires) for two hours. I see the Leftists, who rampaged through hundreds of American cities throughout the spring and summer of 2020, killing multiple people including children, injuring many more, vandalizing, looting, committing arson, and doing 20 billion dollars of damage, often destroying the lifework and means of supporting their families of thousands of Americans. as insurrectionists.
Maybe if you'd lived with the police unjustly targeting, threatening, terrorizing, and falsley charging and imprisoning you and your community you'd understand. They murder us weekly and more, 99.999% of the time it isn't even questioned let alone properly investigated. Your color/medical status and/or your money won't protect you forever.
Police terror will be your problem one day too, I can promise you that much.
Yes this govt is waiting for you to demand they come inand help. That's why it is going on now. When you do the police wont be there so the federal teroops will come in AND STRAY THERE. You will have been suckered once again.
Yes this is drug cartel revenge shooting. Didn't anyone see Chi-Raq. It will get worse as cartels move north from this open border. Then the black cartels will be up against the Mexican ones. Good luck there.
Some of us have been fighting for police reform for years and years. Burning cities to the ground is not how you get it. The entire movement has been set back decades.
Private security services are now a growth industry in the US. I'm sure that private security services will endeavor to provide much needed transparency and equity in how they safeguard their wealthy clients.
> They murder us weekly and more, 99.999% of the time it isn't even questioned let alone properly investigated.
Hyperbole much? Why resolve to hyperbole and lies if facts were on your side?
If you had only mentioned "failed war on drugs" which caused many blacks in prison, then I would have agreed with you and asked why are people still supporting the current Democrat party which played the major role in that war on drugs (Biden, Kamala) and still are by banning menthol cigarettes (preferred by 86% of blacks and 46% of hispanics). But you didn't. You went with the hyperbole lie version - "They murder us weekly and more".
Full disclosure, I am not the "back the blue" types as I believe spineless cops who only listen to what their boss tells them instead of upholding the constitution are the same ones who will probably one day arrive at your door step to disarm you to take away your guns - just like they did with arresting innocent business owners who just tried to make a living over the last year. You could hold a back the blue rally and police would stand by and watch as Antifa decapitates you and then curbstomp your severed head because it doesn’t have a mask on it. They would arrest you for going to church during "lockdowns" or for defending yourself against rioters.
With that said, claiming "they murder us weekly and more" is silly and hard to take seriously.
I researched this in 2020. These are also sourced from WaPo - as left leaning as they come. WaPo has logged all fatal police shootings since 2015 in this database:
Despite their headline, the data tells you a different story. In 2019 there were a total of 999 killings. 858 shootings in which the race was noted. 405 killed were white, 249 were black. Blacks were significantly more likely to have a deadly weapon than a white suspect. Yet more white suspects were killed. There were ONLY 12 cases where the blacks were unarmed - 11 men and 1 women. 7 of these cases - the suspect attacked the cop with eyewitness or camera footage corroboration confirming it. Out of the rest - 1 was an apparent accident. 2 cases - the cop was charged. The others were ongoing investigation when I researched this last year. So simply saying "they murder us weekly and more" doesn't mean anything when vast majority of them were armed or attacked the cop visible on camera and witnesses. These are hard facts which media won't tell you.
So despite being 13% population, in 2016 blacks committed 53% of murders, 54% robberies, 43% weapons offences, 38% of all violent crimes. Should the demographic committing 53% of murders not get expected to get shot? Should cops simply not shoot and get shot instead when the other person is armed or attacks them? Should Jacob Blake or Ricardo Munoz have not been shot when both were about to attack the cops with a knife?
This isn't even about racism as shown here that whites are arrested 71.0% for "Drug abuse violations" vs 26.7% for blacks, whites commit more rapes at 67.6% vs 29.1% for blacks:
If this was about numbers lying because of some bias, why won't they also lie about whites commiting significantly more rapes and drugs? Obviously murder is a much worse crime than rape or drug and therefore more shootings for that demographic.
Also if we look at a diverse city like Philadelphia - residents are 44.1 percent black, 35.8 percent white, 13.6 percent Latino and 7.2 percent Asian.
Hispanics and then black officers are more likely to shoot an unarmed black suspect as compared to a white officer.
Definition of OIS (Officer involved shooting) is on page 17
Definition of TPFs (threat perception failures) is on page 30
TPF of white officer against black suspect is 6.8
TPF of black officer against black suspect is 11.4
TPF of hispanic officer against black suspect is 16.7
Aka Hispanics and then black officers are more likely to shoot an unarmed black suspect. The claim that white officers are more likely to kill black suspects because of racism is complete bullshit. White cops are the least likely to kill unarmed blacks. (Stats for asian cops isn't available as it's negligible.)
As I have stated before, this is not about race - I am simply stating them because that's usually what talking points care about. We can complain about police brutality all we want but until we fix the root cause of the problem, nothing will change. When you have over 50 people shooting each other in Chicago over a weekend, you probably shouldn't be complaining about police brutality.
Blacks realize this and that's why eighty-one percent (81%) of black Americans and eight-three percent (83%) of Hispanic Americans want either the police presence to remain the same (a majority) or to be increased (opposite of what their often white "liberal saviors" want):
One more thing - to get rid of bad cops - we should be doing exact opposite of what democrat policies encourage. Aka we should maybe look at removing police unions which are the reason bad cops stay protected. Same with teachers unions which let bad teachers stay around.
In summary, criticizing war on drugs causing blacks to end up in prison and this destroying families which leads to kids growing without fathers is a good step and we should push politicians to stop the stupid war on drugs and give full pardons to those who got caught with drugs (as long as not dealing drugs). But creating lies about "they murder us weekly and more" hurts your movement more than help it.
The way Democrats structured welfare was responsible for the destruction of millions of Black families. Democrat Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned his Party that this would happen, and was thoroughly castigated by the Democrats for his efforts.
Yup. See “What Killed Michael Brown” by Shelby Steele and his son. Or read anything written by Jason Riley of the WSJ and Manhattan Institute. Before liberals started trying to help black Americans they were in far better shape. Since the advent of the Great Society households without the father present have gone from 20% to 70% or more. There is systemic racism in this country and it’s called the Democratic Party.
Yep. Welfare and the failed war on drugs caused the biggest destruction of black (and white) families. Result has been 78% black kids born outside of wedlock as compares to 25% back in 1960s. The white numbers have gone up too from 5% to 25% now.
Its called 'Officers Down Memorial Page' (www.odmp.org), and I first encountered it back in 2013, when I began actively researching media reports of "Cops shooting unarmed Black suspects." I wanted to find out if there was any truth to the alleged "systemic white-racism" narrative which Obama was actively promoting at the time.
In 2020, 366 cops died in the line-of-duty, 238 of COVID19, an occupational hazard. Most years, the average is usually 1 or 2 a week. Far more Black officers die every year attempting to arrest criminals, than 'unarmed Black men' killed by cops during an arrest. And almost without exception, those suspects were resisting arrest, which is the single biggest risk to the life of a police officer.
I wish these cop-haters could be required to sit down and read through the bios of the cops who have died doing their jobs. Ever heard the expression: "Suicide by Cop"? How does any cop know that's what they're dealing with before its too late?
I can't find the link, but I think it was in 2019, a police-woman responded to a call where a woman was standing on a bridge, contemplating suicide. The officer had managed to get close enough to talk to her, and was calmly trying to persuade her to come back off the bridge. Unfortunately, the woman decided to jump anyway. The police officer went in after her, tried to save her, and ended up drowning as well. By the way, that officer was Black. But her life didn't matter enough for any but the local media to report what happened.
Bottom-line: these 'Social Justice Haters' have no clue how dangerous and difficult it is to do the job our Police are asked to do. Just researching the subject and reviewing the real-life accounts of KIA officers is gut-wrenching. And yet, we're required sit by and watch these intellectually indolent adolescents tear down this country, at a time when the entire Free World needs 'The USA -- Original Recipe' more than ever.
All well said. Being a civil libertarian I have my own issues with police abuse of power, as well as prosecutorial abuse and a set of war on drug laws that has created a massive over incarceration problem. But the movement in 2020 was bull shit. Lie after lie after lie. Mostly by people who worked hard to elect one of the guys who created the very laws that created the incarceration culture, and his “top cop” running mate who did the dirty work. In that sense, BLM was one of the most effective psy-ops of all time. Incredible how utterly easy it is to dupe americans.
The poster you responded to is probably a plant practices in rhetoric
The job was to connect any meaningful law enforcement reform with unhinged radicals. It worked. Idiots like back the blue also rose up to blindly defend police who are nothing but agents of the state.
Yep, and unfortunately, a disappointingly large fraction of right-wing commenters here fit that description - willfully ignorant. (Many are simply propaganda / echo chamber victims, but in this day and age, isn't that willful?)
Despite all of this evidence of repeated lies for no reason other than to harm their enemies politically, you still believe the media and the DNC when they talk about their enemies politically?
There's the patented Art Brock-like dumping of anti-conservative rhetoric in an article showing the DNC and FBI working together.
While I agree a lot of right wingers ignore facts, the vast majority of people who vote DNC have been willfully ignorant of the lies they have peddled for decades, that thankfully Glenn has been writing about.
Its been at least 12 years since he was pointing out the web of media lies the DNC spins, you still think they are pure and just? Wow. You still think they are a party to be trusted more than the RNC? You don't by now know they are both the same group of fucking shitlords just pretending they are enemies? Well I guess there is hope for you to get it in the next life, then.
Shaw3na, speaking as one who's studied the statistics, and more to the point, literally thousands of hours of real-world video of these alleged 'racist cops in action', I can tell you: the BLM mantra is the biggest, most Orwellian lie in the history of electronic media. Orwell called these reverse-polarity-truths 'Double Speak', and the irony of it? He published 'Nineteen Eighty Four' in June of 1949, literally at the dawn of the electronic media age. Six months later he was dead, never knowing how perfectly prescient his final masterpiece would turn out to be.
Yes it is. Fool me once sdhame on you. Fool me twice shame on me. But over and over and over decade after decaded and the black community NEVER GETS IT. And when a few do they get assassinated.
Oh, but now there's a federal holiday to try and smooth that over. No, nothing has changed in the communities affected by this prison-slave-labor harvest and they've just handed D.C. police a $1.9 billion dollar package.
Prison slave labor? Rotflmao. The "victims" in those communities have reelected leftist regimes and politicians since the death of MLK. LBJ promised to make blacks dependent on the dhimmicrat party. He succeeded. Keep voting for those that want victims.
There's no signs of them stopping it anytime soon because Democrats are working on the racism problem overtime. If I was a real white supremacist, I would keep voting for the same party again and again because this party has single handedly given the best gift to white supremacists by letting blacks shoot each other. It has kept Chicago so peaceful that they have a dedicated website to tracking shootings per day:
Looks like 275 shootings in 18 days this month. Democrats must be curing the racism problem very very soon. I guess it must be all those gun laws they must not have - oh wait - they have the strictest gun laws. Must be the guns from other places? Oh wait, those other places don't have the shooting problem. Ah, lets put more gun laws. 90 years of Democrat ruling must be coming to fruition very very soon. Or maybe, just maybe, Democrat politicians must be loving blacks getting killed - not surprising based on the history of the party.
I agree with you, but 90% (me just guessing) of the damage and looting was perpetrated by bored, privileged, White middleclass children who are NOT or never were threatened by law enforcement.
I see black and white anarchists. The black I understand in the sense that they are disaffected. Mostly by flawed policy than anything else. The white kids doing this are sadly the product of indoctrination from our schools, public and private (see Dalton School madness). And these white kids have been taught to find a way to see themselves as victims somehow. We have reached a point of such affluence and convenience that kids have no sense of what real adversity is. Throw in a loss of the role of faith and they have a spiritual void to fill. Sadly I can see all these factors but I don’t see a simple set of actions to reverse it. To right the ship. Is beyond discouraging.
Last summer, on at least 5 different occasions, I walked down to 'Antifa/BLM' protest-square here in Portland, early in the evening, just to get an idea of who these people were, and why they kept coming out night after night. Vast majority where white-kids. The driving force seemed far more recreational than ideological. It reminded me of 'Prom Night', or 'Big Game Night' back when I was that age (late '60's).
Lots of 'young-couples', or young-couple wannabes. Quite a few worried parents tagging along. Dressing up as Antifa-Storm-Trooper looked like a good strategy for 'getting laid after the riot...'
Bottom-line: most of these kids have no clue how or why they happened to be 'born at the top of the World', not to mention the price their long-dead grandparents paid to put them there. (Which is not surprising, since most of their parent's don't either.) They live in an electronic world comprised of memes, 'Likes', viral-videos, and no consequences.
Mother-nature has a tried-and-true solution for species that take their survival for granted.
I don’t think you understand the actual principles of anarchy. It doesn’t mean lawlessness. But of course they don’t teach philosophy in school because it would lead to revolution.
I understand what anarchy means. I am looking past the riots and seeing what their purpose is is to dismantle the American system. Replace it something else. Totalitarian.
You play with words. Anarchy has one principle: no objectively stated and enforced laws, i.e. "lawlessness." It is the right endpoint of the political spectrum (100% individual license, 0% gov't.).
There is one other point on the axis that has lawlessness, in effect:
"L'etat, C'est moi." The "law" is whatever the Totalitarian says it is at any given moment.
I used to be more scared of the former. I'll never make that mistake again.
Kinda nuts, wanted felon shot, and we have protest. Cop shoots black girl with a knife, arm raised to stab another black girl, riots and protest. Including from noted societal observer Lebron James who continues to ignore the advice to shut up and dribble. It’s not our best hour. I think we are rapidly becoming the laughingstock of the world.
I live in Ohio. There were no riots. Most people thought she deserved to get blasted. Again you can’t rely on the media to tell you the truth. They will turn one block into a city wide riot. And it’s also usually aimless whites kids who are the most passionate about this stuff. The locals are only there to get a free TV that might accidentally walk out of a store.
What makes you think the police only do that to blacks?
The Watts riots in 1965 were started when a police officer towed a mans car that was legally parked. I've had an identical experience in suburban america without a minority anywhere in sight. Some of the police will fuck anyone they think they can get away with fucking. For hundreds of years that was minorities. That didnt however mean they were only fucking over minorities.
Not everyone plays the race card when they get fucked over by the man. Its not always racism, often times its simply "I have power and you dont".
While we are pointing this racist finger, do you think the African American mayor of Chicago Lori Lightfoot and the African American DA Kim Foxx and the African American Chief of Police Eddie Johnson were racist in allowing African American Jussie Smollet to go uncharged after his false hate crime allegations?
For hundreds of years, that was minorities (including Irish, Jews, Italians, Catholics, slavs, the poor, and a whole bunch of other "white-passing" people).
You implied it. Now you dissemble. instead of acknowledging the meaning that you KNOW most readers of your post would think you meant (and which I claim you DID mean).
Go look up Tony Timpa. In august of 2016, he called the cops for help because he had schizophrenia and was off his meds. He was afraid he might do something crazy.
Five cops ended up pinning him, George Floyd style, for more than 14 minutes. When he stopped squirming and yelling, "you're gonna kill me!", they didn't stop pinning him until the ambulance arrived.
They claimed they pinned him because he was aggressive. They also claimed they stayed on top of him to prevent him from rolling or squirming out into the road.
The autopsy said he died of heart attack due to a combination of cocaine and the stress of the situation.
It took more than 3 years (2019) for Timpa's mother to pry the body cam footage out of the police department's kung fu grip, and she had to do it through a lawsuit.
The footage contradicted what the cops had claimed. Timpa was not aggressive, and he was very clearly unconscious after several minutes, and they continued to pin him. Once he fell unconscious, they started joking about him having fallen asleep.
On July 7, 2020, even after the body cam footage was revealed, a federal judge tossed out Timpa's mother's excessive force lawsuit.
Last I checked (which was January 2021), four of the cops were still on active duty with the same department, and the fifth had retired and is collecting a full pension. Meaning, none of them were even fired, let alone prosecuted.
Oh, and by the way, Timpa was a wealthy, white businessman. You can hear the cops mocking him (about yachts and country clubs) when checking his ID and noticing his upscale address.
I have worked in the hospital and we had to subdue people 100x crazier than Floyd and Timpa. Nobody died. Police really have no excuse for these murders. It makes me sick when people defend the cops and then try to claim I don’t know what it’s like.
That doesn't mean we should be sending social workers to calls about drunk driving / drugs driving / fake currency etc. Floyd also had 9 prior prison sentences along with one where he held a pregnant woman on gun point. A social worker wouldn't be able to do much other than get shot/stabbed.
We had our own fully deputized police department. They were allowed to hold people down, but only we could apply restrains, give drugs. We'd usually start off with haldol and soft restraints. Crazier people we could restrain all limbs(4-point). Then if they are still crazy we can give precedex which will usually put you to sleep. But one person needed about 11 police and staff to subdue. He was able to break out of 4 point restraints. He was a danger to himself so we had to intubate and sedate him, which means we gave him fentanyl and propofol and put him on a ventilator. Nobody died because we were trained about prone position or forcing someone up against a wall. Hitting someone was unacceptable. I've been punched, spit on and pissed on. The we had strict protocol for checking on restrained people, offer toileting hourly, assess for injuries etc.
Every shitbag who wishes that people would obey them and/or have no human decency - the police force is where they go. Ruins the reputations of officers who don't have these character flaws.
Sure. Same with pedophiles and teaching, coaching, boy scout leaders, etc.
Here in Canada, we have psychological screening that attempts to keep those people out.
I know, because I had a (shitbag) boss who failed the psych test to get into the police academy. He had a bachelor of criminal justice, AND he was Chinese and fluent and the Vancouver Police were actively seeking people just like him. They have a huge Chinese population there. Being fluent AND being Chinese (looking the part) were MAJOR points in his favor.
"Ruins the reputations of officers who don't have these character flaws."
Those officers who have their reputations sullied in this way did it to themselves by NOT turning in / reporting, ensuring firings happen of those who shouldn't be wearing the badge.
When they fail to help get rid of the "bad apples", they become bad apples themselves.
The whole apple cart is rotten. Time to start over.
There are by far more blacks killed by other blacks, than blacks killed by white police officers.
Your personal subjective opinion presented as objective empirical fact is going to cause a lot of backlash by others who really do understand what is going on.
What community is that? I hope you don't mean the "black community" because that community kills more blacks in one year than any other does in decades.
Blacks dont like to think that blacks kill more of them than whites do. They are in denial about their brothers. I used to do therapy at HELP Inc in Philly and I saw a lot of drug dealers on probation forced into therapy. I used to harangue them for addiciting their brothers and well all that goes with that. I wasn't about helping them feel better I was attacking their integrity, their willingness to "kill" imprison their own. I made them read Fanon and if they wouldn't I read it to them. The Black. community does not know their own history and getting the schools to teach it is more worthless than worthless.
Ad hominem attacks are not helpful to the dialogue. My dad was a cop in a large urban city during the 1960s and corroborates the sort of reaction Janet is describing. Not that I have a solution, but not very productive to dismiss someone's life experience out of hand simply because it may not fit your personal narrative.
Ok your other comments were mostly sane but this one is silly.
From AZCENTRAL, as of 2014: "On a national level, this equates to 2.5 million contacts per day, 75 million contacts per month and 900 million contacts per year.
The vast majority of police-citizen contacts are handled without incident and when force must be used to gain compliance, it involves minimal to no injury in most cases. Is it a far stretch to think that out of 2.5 million contacts in one day, maybe 10,000 of those contacts involved cops who went the extra mile to ensure a positive outcome?"
Considering there's been less than 50 unarmed people in total (of all races) who died from cop shooting each year out of 900 million contacts, I would say most police are doing a pretty decent job.
This is why last year, despite the propaganda, eighty-one percent (81%) of black Americans and eight-three percent (83%) of Hispanic Americans want either the police presence to remain the same (a majority) or to be increased:
Btw, I have shared stats in a prior comment and also made it cleae that I am not "back the blue" type but I also don't think we should be lying about objective facts.
David, I may be the only person here that wants to know what you think. What are the better solutions? I don't mind cutting police overtime to save tax dollars, if there is a better way. I have an open mind to this.
Currently police are nothing but agents of the state. They don’t work for us. That’s a lie. They only are only accountable to the State and don’t protect us. They will come collect your body though after you get killed so I guess that’s a start. They don’t stop your car from getting stolen either. When you leave things to the state, there’s no sense of community. Nobody watches out for each other. We’re not allowed to defend ourselves. To start you can beta test non state police in small high crime areas. The people elect and manage all safety officers who would come from the local community. The community would also vote on which laws they want enforced, mostly violent crime and theft. No more random stops and searches. Instead police would cruise the neighborhood actually serving rather than “policing” and enforcing stupid laws that lead to confrontations. Some idiot drinking too much or a hot head might need to go somewhere to dry out. Local people will know if the situation needs to be escalated or if people need time to cool down. Since I prefer a community that values labor rather than production of consumable goods for a big corporation you could hire more safety officers. Blockchain tech would also allow people to safely leave anonymous yet verifiable tips to give the local safety guys heads up to potential problems so they can be prevented rather than just responded to. Sometimes just being visible prevents problems. When people care and don’t seem like an extension of big brother things get better. People are products of their environment.
I've walked a thousand miles in these shoes and been put in the slammer. Vietnam resistance was no picnic but not as deadly as it would be today. Now they throw you in with Covid positives to make you sick. I was dumped out at 3 am in North Philly with no car, no ride, no taxis no nuttin. Just my two. feet in the dark silent streets of Black America gettoland and I am little and white and a woman asking to be accosted and raped. So that's how they punish you.
Be 4'11" white young girl dumped out in North Philly at 3 am and feel how safe you feel with no way to get home to west philly just BECAUSE YOU BOUGHT A MOVE T-SHIRT (as a protest) and got arrested for it. RJF I bet you would have just driven by.
Ok, got ya ,I believe you, terrifying and done on purpose by the police, you are saying they put your life at risk. I’m just saying those words together in a single sentence are deeply dangerous for you, forbidden and incendiary, you might want to proactively apologize.
I had no idea until today how much that time and my anger about it was lying inside me festering. HOw Wilson Goode the first black Philly mayor and a contender for high office in the making was set up by local and state govt and police to DROP A BOMB on MOVE on Osage Street then that blew them up killing men women and children - a few suirvivors have written about it and BLEW UP THE ENTIRE BLOCK OF A BLACK COMMUNITY and everybody has forgotten it. And Wilson Goode was archived into nobody land after that. Completely ruined as he was blamed for letting them bomb OSAGE STREET in west Philly. dont get me started. I know so much more about this.
Antifa is still protesting every night in Portland, trying to burn down police stations with people inside and federal courthouses with no blowback from the federal government. But it's never covered by MSM.
The BLM violence is being used to get the Black communities to beg for help. When enough of them organize and ask the govt to intervene the SWAT teams will come in, martial law may be declared. The police force is beinbg decimated so federal law enforcement can be the rule of the day. Like Hitler's storm troopers began taking over on Kristalnight smashing windows. This govt wants total control over us. No more chance for a poulist president again.
Yes. BLM is a "floating sign" on this. Weaiken the police and blacks will scream for help and "here come the saviors in federal attire and we will be under federal police, all of us."
Except for crime was nearly double in the 1980s and 90s. Actual black people will not cry for help, the clown politicians will. If CNN is fake news, why do you believe everything they tell you about blacks and what we supposedly think? LeBron, celebrities and everyone on CNN lives in white communities.
"LeBron, celebrities and everyone on CNN lives in white communities."
Those EVIL a-little-bit-less-white-today communities! Boy, that Constitutional freedom-of-association thing sure does get in the way of anti-racism, doesn't it?
Well yes for decades, what do you think all the investigations and “Consent Decrees” are about? Consent decrees mean the locals or state pay for the Feds to undermine them - bypasses any appeal to Congress since the funding is not Federal.
Cute ha?
Politics is Power.
The Feds of course are jealous of the plenary policing powers which are local. They naturally seek them for themselves, so undermine the locals and make them pay for the abuse.
The Feds don’t suffer the consequences, the locals do.
A couple of years ago the Dem mayor of New Orleans got into trouble when he found out who pays - and the City Council did not want to pay. Instantly an entire series of media stories appear on NO police brutality.
NJ on the other hand caved early in 1997 and got the Platinum package- the cops can knock heads and not worry about bad press. Sometimes submission works, but you have to time it.
It still amazes me there are still people in the developed world who think when some young “exciting” marxist comes out clamoring for helping the poor that it’s about anything other than power. The young marxist is sitting around with his advisors with a shit eating grin saying “works every time”
The entire apparatus, whose participants common skill is pathological lying and manipulation, repeatedly con most of Socieity into think they are needed.
You're definitely zeroing in the problem. The label-soup props up the notion we're discussing ideology, when in fact, we're just talking about mentally aberrant mediocrities, trying to punch above their weight-class. A more scientific diagnosis: Narcissistic control-freaks & sociopaths. (I wish I could put a finer point on it, but that's the best I can do at the moment.)
I live in a black community. You're living in a fantasy world because nothing you said is true. BLM is designed to agitate white people like yourself, so that you get distracted from the real issues. Nobody gives a shit about BLM in my area. White people and the indoctrinated sanctioned "black" people the media trot out to say inflammatory things to get you riled up, are the only ones who care about BLM. And it's apparently working since you guys wasted pages on a pointless argument.
The greatest victims of the BLM movement will be blacks. As usual they are being scammed. The DNC has been scamming them for votes and support for decades.
Now you have a downright sinister Marxist movement who is looking to turn enlightenment principles upside down and race is just a false cover. Wake up you were being used like a pawn
You aren’t black and don’t live in a black community. You just copy and paste the same drivel. Nobody gives a shit about BLM in the actual communities. Nobody even votes in the poorest neighborhoods because it’s pointless. Do you see any black people from the hood on here debating? No I see a bunch of angry white people ranting about Marxism. I tutor in my neighborhood. They don’t know who tf Marx is and they don’t care. BLM is just another tactic to distract white people who can’t seem to understand that the federal government does more harm than good. I see nothing but partisan bickering which leads to no solutions and perpetuation of the status quo. The government doesn’t care about your partisan BS. They play both sides. To them you’re no better than the negro in the poorest neighborhood. You’re dirt under their boots. But but just vote in the right people they say. Yeah how’s politics working? Positive change will not come through the ballot box, so I suggest you actually get out and get involved in your community and start changing things. Change never comes from the top. It comes from the bottom up.
That's usually how it is. 95% of the population usually doesn't give a shit. It's the vocal minority 5% on twitter which is driving the culture war. The woke 5% twitter mob which is followed by 97% of the registered democrat run media. Media uses this woke mob as if that's the regular majority but it isn't. They just use each other as useful idiots.
The rest of the 95% which is mostly ignorant and also spineless cowards don't push back against this woke mob. They are too afraid to get cancelled, so they follow whatever they are told. And that's how a society deteriorates. The 5% woke mob is winning the culture wars which in turn leads to teaching critical race theory nonsense in academia. That leads to universities becoming indoctrination camps causing "scientists" to chase social justice instead of actual science (calling lab leak a conspiracy theory was perfect example, 1200 scientists writing letters about how white supremacy is a public health crisis and therefore protests during COVID lockdowns is okay but anti-lockdown protests is not okay). Woke universities leads to graduates who go to big tech companies, media and other corporations which censor anyone who speaks against their woke nonsense. Hollywood and arts get filled with these wokesters who go on late night TV shows and spout the same nonsense. Ever wonder how 100% of the late night TV hosts all supported the Hillary? Since the sane people are now censored, wokesters are running 97% of the media, your elections become a farce because one side has no voice. When elections become a farce, politicians become even more corrupt. And thus the country falls.
It's all related. This is how you get things like the russiagate hoax, russian bounty hoax, you get scientists who waste 1.5 years calling everyone with a logical conclusion a conspiracy theory.
"A substantial group of scientists have now admitted they refrained from publicly acknowledging the evidence that the virus may have been engineered in the Wuhan lab. Alina Chan was one of those scientists. This is what she now says: "... it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins."
Media trust by Democrats is at an all time high of 73-76%. Independents is at 35% and Republicans is at the lowest 10%. Aka Democrats are buying whatever propaganda media is selling.
So unless that 5% woke mob isn't dealt with, no amount of "Change never comes from the top. It comes from the bottom up." is going to work.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Note that I don't disagree with you. I am saying that you are severely underestimating the power BLM and wokesters have.
That poor argument “you’re nit black” isn’t going to work. It’s bull shit. The pigmentation in my skin neither validates nor invalidates an argument
As for the rest, you literally processed nothing. The BLM movement is what it is. They are OPENLY marxist and openly looking to turn the US upside down.
The fact that you concede that the same people who have plastered BLM all over everything and posted the signs all over the place - don’t know what the movement is really about - well that pretty much was my point. Processing yet?
"...just another tactic to distract white people who can’t seem to understand that the federal government does more harm than good."
That attributes active will to a tool, as if blaming a hammer for driving a nail in the wrong place.
No, what's happening, and has been happening since time immemorial, is that because government is the only tool that can restrain the impulses of the ultra-rich (ultra-powerful if you prefer), they actively work to "capture" and control government and set it to their own aims.
This is the whole idea behind democracy, which we do not genuinely have in the USA; if The People are in control, the many, then they can constrain the ultra-rich from inflicting the harms that they always seem to produce - which you note yourself with your "more harm than good."
What we have here is a "representative republic", in which the ultra-rich control who the representatives are and in that way retain control.
What we have to do to prevent or even undo the harms the ultra-rich create is take control of government ourselves, not tear down government itself; tearing down government itself serves the interests of the ultra-rich since that's exactly what they want - no constraints at all.
Just an observation. I live in a gentrified yuppie scum neighborhood in Philadelphia adjacent to a neighborhood that has been home to working class black families since the 1950s. All the BLM signs are in the yuppie windows in my neighborhood. I don't think I've seen more than one or two in the black neighborhood. I don't know what people think, but I see the signs.
Agreed, BLM is a win-win for the DNC. They rally the extremists in their base and when the extremists on the right oppose it, they label the entire right as racist for it.
On top of this the DNC then does nothing for minority communities and uses this same tactic every few decades. I mean name a single DNC-run city that has had good results. Real question. Why haven't we ever duplicated the success Tulsa had before their race riots?
The idea is to keep the black community from being a black culture. The ideology of colonialism is established here. Do not let any culture remain. They must be fragmented. Do you really think if the Black. Panthers were active now that they would be allowed with their programs. When they spoke to groups they were enthralling. When they led adolescent groups you were astonished listening to how they did it and wished you had those skills. Walter Palmer of Philly was not a member but he was influenced by them and when he defused a bad situation where teens wanted to openly revolt at a negotiation compromise our lawyers had made with the city about the homes, Walter Palmer spoke to them with such force and verbiage to ensure they understood that the SWAT teams would take care of them for good. This was after the Panthers had been ambushed in their beds pre dawn and assassinated. They had been a major force to be reckoned with. I dont see anything even close with BLM. I do see hidden auithority in creating safe zones in the streets. And I can understand smashing and burning institutional. buildings. And I understand the looting so I am cursed with seeing the points of both sides and how riots can be manipulated depending on who manipulates them. They put Trump in a catch-22. He couldn't send in federal troops without antagonizing and losing the black vote completely and inspiring hate. and he couldn't just let it go on and. on without losing the confidencr of middle class blacks. That was a nice strategy to turn the hate on Trump. Really good strategy.
I've lived in a mixed community in West Philly. That is just my reading of it that's all. I do think that's what will be the outcome. I may not be correct.b Just understand there is no right/wrong reading to all this. If we can get out of the Binary Discourse we will be way ahead of our game now.
They have started a war of liberal aggression. Of course you can't find this in history book but Union soldiers circa 1859ish often looted southern plantations. Deflowering debutantes at an alarming rate
I am a descendant of a deflowered debutante. Billy Yank apparently used the old "Hey you want see my horse" bit on her. I was told that we were slightly scorned during reconstruction. My great-great grandpa was not allowed to join up with Nathan Bedford Forrest due to trust issues concerning yankee bastards. Based on the stories of his life there was really no reason not to trust him. He was a strong christian white man if you know what i mean.
Nope. Soldiers were on the same side for the most part in 1859. Northern soldiers stationed near plantations were responsible for this carnage. The southern gentlemen that would later become Johnny Rebs were typically not allowed to attend Cotillions due to class issues. And they knew better than to lurch around outside at these functions. Most northern boys didn't understand the repercussions for sullying an impeccable lineage.
i believe your timeline and my branch of the family don't quite jive. my 5 year old great-great grandpa attempted to purchase a fishing buddy in 1864. He slapped that cash down on the barrelhead but the men at the market just laughed at him. And my great-great-great grandma, the deflowered debutante, was hardly a debutante. Dixie fuckin trash that did not give a fuck. Family had no slaves but they sure helped her out with her new invention. Hairspray. She had stolen a fancy dress from a clothesline 2 towns over and crashed the Cotillion. The other girls were either getting suspicious or jealous so she slipped out in the parlor to smoke. That's when it happened.
A quick glance at the clothes and shoes we wear shows we are ALL slave owners. This whole word "slave" has become meaningless because almost everything NOW depends and originates from slaves.
Even fair trade products, lovely though they are, depend on stolen resources and big oil and slave made computers and phones to be purchased and delivered. Can we get real just for a change????
I believe it was the leftists destroying the cities last summer. I keep losing the line that links to the original comment. I should have used "those people" instead
While I unequivocally condemn the violence that did occur -- whether initiated by protestors, counter-protestors, or police -- you are substantially overstating it. The protests were mostly peaceful. I can find no reports of children being killed.
The "mostly peaceful" protests led to weak-willed elected officials taking anti-law enforcement actions that have resulted in an explosion of violent crime across the U.S., taking the lives of multiple children. It is easily detected by those not willfully blind.
But the comment I replied to claimed that the protestors themselves killed children, not that the protests indirectly allowed them to be killed by other people.
Glenn always seems to be arguing for the importance of the truth even when it fails to support our preferred narratives. It is interesting to me that so few of the commentors in here seem to take that message seriously.
I read both the comment to which you replied and your response. I stand by my comment. When the cue ball hits the six ball, causing it to impact the two ball and put it in a pocket, it counts.
Well, the world is a little more complicated than a pool table. Anyway, I'm not saying the protestors bear no responsibility for these deaths; they were a predictable, albeit unintended, consequence of the protests. But they weren't _part_ of the protests; they weren't committed in protest of anything. They're just ordinary murders, committed by people who calculated, probably correctly, that they were more likely to be able to get away with them since the protests had the police on the defensive. To count them as part of an "insurrection" doesn't make any sense.
But I don't think the Jan. 6 riot counts as an insurrection either.
This is my first day commenting, and i saw most people here just want Glenn to confirm their biases rather than challenge their beliefs. Glenn is seasoned enough to see through the partisan noise and realize government is all the same.
Welcome to the forum, M. David. I have been enjoying your well-put opinions, and I hope I did not offend earlier when I called you an anarchist. I think I was wrong, and I rescind the charge. In any case, you get to define yourself, of course.
About your point here concerning what I believe most refer to as "confirmation bias," I have found that to be natural and common on most all forums attached to expository journalism. I have found substack forums to be much, much better at posters recognizing that most all is opinion, and therefore to disagree, even very strongly, with "agree-ability" and substance, as opposed to ad hominem. I think you fit right in!
From left leaning source WaPo and TheHill: "Over 90 percent of protests this summer were peaceful, report shows"
So 10% were not peaceful. 10% is a VERY BIG number. Especially considering only 12 anarmed blacks died from cop shootings out of millions of positive interactions with cops. Or considering the number of gun related deaths is negligible compared to over 400 million lawful guns in America.
Very, very big number. Consider that the Floyd protests were the largest in US history so that even suburban folks were marching their streets. All those folks went home. But in our largest cities, where protesters easily outnumbered enforcement, as soon as the sun went down those protests became riots. Damn near every large city took a hit.
But very unevenly - fun fact: Nordstrom in downtown Seattle saw methodical liberation of the merchandise (broken in, looted, vandalized), while the Amazon headquarters - 4 blocks away didn't even see its carefully manicured native plant landscaping trampled. It would be Russian/Iranian/Venezuelan/Cuban/Chinese/North Korean propaganda from me to suggest maybe there is a "follow the money" reason to it?
That's because you're a partisan, which is stupid. Both examples are people driven to protest by whatever BS prevailed at the time, and some, in each camp, got out of hand, as individuals in mobs often do. That's it. Sometimes a banana is just a banana.
Maybe some irony here but banana republics are called just that because of the creation of actual... banana-producing puppet-governments.
United Fruit comes to mind.
Are these protests being fueled by and used by our own government? I mean, it IS their calling card around the world, you know.
What does that have to do with partisanship?
If it affects people across voting lines, religious lines and ethical lines... well it's by definition a universal issue.
I would think that federal agencies creating bogus events and directly manipulating information presented as "news" to wrestle power out of peoples' hands would be called treasonous.
The only violent death on 1/6 was the murder of an unarmed white female protestor. You don't care about the because she was white and female. But the murders of black cops throughout 2020 in city after city are somehow equivalent? We see you dishonesty.
Certainly a huge fraction of the people who comment under Glenn Greenwald articles are clueless about what is "left" and conflate it to mean liberals and neo-liberals.
Oh maybe you didn’t get the latest. Including articles from GG on this very topic. The MSM falsified virtually everything about the Jan 6 clown show.
Even if a single cop was beaten, it wouldn’t make it an insurrection or anything even remotely close. Don’t be part of the lies. Don’t falsify to push your narrative
I’m not a trump supporter, didn’t vote for him, didn’t care for him. That doesn’t mean i go along with lies
You know what I see people missing is at least on January 6th they went to the seat of our federal government to protest what they saw as the font of their concerns over government overreach, deep state. The BLM/ANTIFA riots were in communities, damaging innocent businesses and injuring innocent bystanders. There is a difference.
With the exception of the clowns who paraded through the capitol with no particular objective - everyone else was protesting an out of control, corrupt, lying, parasitic state. Not only is that peaceful it was people with integrity do. They defend themselves from the state that is taking over their lives.
No police were beaten. One died from a stroke that evening, Sicknick. He was not hit with anything, nor was he beaten. Don't lie. We see your propaganda for what it is.
Actually Sicknick died the next day. Had texted his brother the night of Jan. 6 to say he was ok. How long did it take for the govt to actually tell us what he died from allowing the BS claim that he was hit with a fire extinguisher by a protestor go on and on and on and on. Disgusting!
Really people should be peacefully protesting, but I agree with you entirely otherwise. The impression that over 600 violent protests and a good handful of attacks on federal buildings was overlooked for much of 2019 and even described by the media as "mostly peaceful" but that the Jan. 6th riot was an "insurrection" is unforgivable.
So.. they make a federal holiday called Juneteenth and pat themselves on the backs for moving ever-forward toward Utopia. While people see that, they're passing $1.9B law enforcement packages so they can crack heads.
Meanwhile... the cities are still prison-labor farms rife with despair. I'm not buying it any more. I do hope that more people stop buying it as well.
Protestors interrupting congressional proceedings is a common occurrence. They're usually from the Left, actually. In this case they were let in by Capitol police. If we want to talk about genuine threats to elected officials, we should be talking about James Hodgkinson shooting at the softball practice. Yet we did not hear much talk of blaming all Democrats or the politicians who egged him on after he tried to murder numerous congressional Republicans.
All of the BLM rationales apply. It was only a very small percentage of overall protestors who did anything, yet what was not representative of BLM protestors was suddenly defining of Trump supporters. Trespassing and property destruction became insurrection, even as BLM's declarations of autonomous zones was not.
I believe it was WaPo of all sources that recently printed a reminder of the Democratic protestor invasion of Wisconsin's state capitol in 2011 - an event in which thousands flooded the building and congress was forced to evacuate through tunnels, preventing a vote. Efforts to murder politicians were plainly spoken then, and the media only celebrated them as heroes. This precedent, like so many others that led Trump's supporters to feel justified in reciprocating, has been memory-holed.
BLM violence has frequently been justified by the good intentions of the rioters. Even left-wing people I know personally have said that the difference between BLM and January 6 was the righteousness of the cause, which to them makes the former noble and the latter treasonous. But to a person on the other side of the aisle, precisely the opposite is true. Which side is correct is not a "settled science" that we can adjudicate with. Then again, given the bastardization of the term "settled science", maybe that's exactly what it is!
A BLM "protestor" has recently been hunting random white men.
The names are part of the same process. Before you can persuade people to slaughter other people you first de-humanise & demonise the targets. You're right about the state but you're not yet quite up to speed with what they're doing.
You desensitize them to horror with words and images and then they can watch with indifference. Or participate with indifference. Hitler and Goebbels showed us how. Easy.
Goebbels's propaganda machine was terrifying. I still find it hard to believe how easily he created and enforced his information blackout, and combined it with disturbingly effective propaganda saturation. When the Wehrmacht rolled into Poland, the troops really believed that they were there to save ethnic Germans from the murderous Poles and that they had just been attacked.
The belief levels can be overstated. The Nazis themselves knew there was significant grumbling and anti-government jokes circulating even during times like the invasion of Poland.
Ah but the trick is that even if some people believe all of it, many people believe some of it, and a few people believe none of it, everything is going to plan. Sure a lot of Germans were skeptical of a lot of the things they were hearing, but they probably did not expect every single thing they heard to be an outright fabrication. There is a difference in thinking things are exaggerated and realizing they are complete bullshit.
I've done a lot of reading on this topic recently; area of interest for me, my grandfather dropped a ton of books on the topic on me back in the 70s when I was just a kid (along with a dog-eared copy of "The Campaigns of Napoleon", but I digress). Anyway, the latest scholarship on this has changed quite a bit over the years. Immediately postwar, the interest of most accounts was in making all the servicemen feel better about what they'd done by making the Nazis out as evil in all regards. Goebbels as purveyor of lies comes from this era. My grandfather was one of those servicemen in Europe in WWII. Though he would have been open to a reinterpretation of Goebbels.
The truth is a lot more complex. Goebbels was very interested in having his propaganda be effective. About the only thing he was more interested in than that was having Hitler give him the adoration he craved. He was the only intellectual amongst the Nazis, making him more interesting than the rest. He also left behind a daily diary he kept from the early 1920s on. Some events we have no corroboration for but Goebbels' diary.
He realized that being inaccurate and being caught in it was corrosive to the efficacy of his propaganda. So he insisted on accurately representing factual things such as where attacks happened, rough casualty amounts, and the result (as in retreat or advance). He insisted on reporting these first, before the Allies. His logic was that he wanted to present it first, in his own context, before the Allies could. He might suggest that the brave soldiers who were lost in Tunisia in mid-1943 were German heroes and their sacrifice would assure German victory in the long run (he actually did say pretty much just that). That was his wartime definition of propaganda success. And looking at his press dispatches, you can get an accurate enough account of how the war was going, at least up until the very end.
The thing was, even with all the care he took with presenting accurate reports, many people disbelieved even the accurate portions of the reports. Old SPD and KPD members, and people who had just tired of all the bullshit. He blamed the Jews for a lot of stuff and while it varied by week and month, it got tiresome i'm sure, especially since most Germans couldn't figure out how the Jews were doing all this horrible stuff to them. They'd been divested of their wealth and turned into pariahs and most knew they were being killed off in the East...
Anyway, I recommend the Evans trilogy and Longerich's biography of Goebbels for more information. He's really an interesting person, far more interesting than Stalin or Hitler, really.
No cell phones, no internet, no modern transport, no free journalists. Peoples were MUCH more isolated then. Germany was raped by her Western sisters, her population was made easy prey.
Hopefully we give the Statists a harder time creating their "Fourth Reich." (Unless you count USSR/Putin)
Yes, I thought of pointing that out. It seems to me that a Totalitarian State SHOULD have a tougher time getting so powerful today, which makes the CCP's success so much more the scarier.
Auschwitz Memorial tweet: | Nov 26, 2018: When we look at Auschwitz we see the end of the process. It's important to remember that the Holocaust actually did not start from gas chambers. This hatred gradually developed from words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanisation & escalating violence.
Gina Carano got cancelled for saying something similar by people who have forgotten history.
I remember when I visited Dachau. It left a profound impression on me. The sign above the entrance saying "work sets you free" was a kind of disturbing I cannot describe. Of course it still did not prepare me for when the 16 year old me stumbled across a copy of "The Rape of Nanking" in a local library. As I grew older and read more history, I learned that crimes against humanity were not the rare events we like to think of them as. The Holodomor, the Armenian Genocide, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the list really goes on and on. It is stupefying dangerous to pretend that only one group and one ideology was capable of it.
Very few people know of these things. The massacre in Rhawanda was sparked this way. And the ignorance of this history opens the gate wide open for it to happen again..we are seeing it coming now with the convergence of 1 party, police power, and media propagandists.
The Rwandan thing did not end there. I would suggest you look up the Great African War or sometimes called the Second Congo War. Hardly anyone knows about it, but it was the deadliest conflict since the Second World War. Hell, while we are at it, the Taiping Rebellion killed more people than the First World War. Yes, you read that right. Hardly anyone has even heard of the deadliest conflicts before and after the Second World War.
The Mongols killed a lot of people too, including razing and depopulating (murder) a city with over a million inhabitants at least once. Localized conflicts usually don't get much press, and the Taiping Rebellion was a purely Chinese phenomenon.
That said, the fact that the Taiping leader stated he was the brother of Jesus Christ is quite interesting.
The contemporary media have learned all of Goebbels' tricks. That said, even Goebbels himself realized that his propaganda had diminishing returns after a while. People box their ears at propaganda eventually regardless of how you couch it. His refrain to the German press was to "stop being stupid" and write more interesting entertainment articles to counteract the people tuning out. But no amount of "interesting" material makes a constant diet of propaganda palatable.
"Work sets you free" is a poor translation. The verb is macht, to make. And the sentence is shorter - it's not "Arbeit macht sie frei", which would be "work makes you free", it's "Arbeit macht frei", which, without interpretation translates exactly as "work makes free,"
In German, which is a fluid language, just as English and all other languages are, I think a better translation is "work makes freedom", where the verb, makes, can be understood in multiple ways simultaneously, from "create" to "transform" - you get the basic idea here.
Anyway, a sick joke? Surely sick. A joke? I'm not so sure! As you say, they worked them to death, and that was the only way out, so in a certain way of looking at it, death was freedom from the horrific life the camp inmates suffered through. So in a sense it was literally true - call it a prediction, or maybe a promise.
It depends how you classify people, but over 50% of the "admitted" prisoners at the Nazi KL were ultimately released back into German society. Until mid-1941, even Jewish people could obtain release.
That said, there are caveats. Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec were not KL, they were extermination camps (not run by the SS, strangely) where everyone sent there died. The three camps probably killed over 2 million people amongst themselves. Auschwitz killed 1.7 million, mostly exterminated without being "admitted" to the camp itself.
Auschwitz was originally built to intimidate Poles in the vicinity with short-term forced labor. "Arbeit Macht Frei" should be considered in that context, rather than what it later became.
Actually I try not to get involved with CONTEBNT in order to stick with the MESSAGE. It is far worse than anyone thinks at this time and I am really afraid.
Within minutes of the siege all the networks, save one, had labeled the incident an insurrection. All of em, at the same time. And before the incident occurred all the conversations were uncomfortable discussions about the massive losses the Dems had taken in the house and in state legislatures. The siege was a gift to the Democrats. The narrative was suddenly turned from Dem failure to fear mongering over the siege. And we’re also supposed to believer that the FBI can’t figure out how tall the supposed pipe bomber is, and that he magically disappeared. Something doesn’t smell right.
Trump and his supporters lobbied hard for senators to join house members in the planned objections to the electoral votes of 6 states. One house member and one senator objecting means 2 hours of debate on the floor of each chamber.
That would have been a total of 24 hours of reading the arguments and the evidence of election irregularities into the public record directly in front of the American public.
The Capitol was evacuated 20 minutes into the first debate (Arizona). When the joint session reconvened, all the senators rescinded their support for the objections, and that was that.
On top of that brilliant "stroke of luck" for the Democrats, the "insurrection incited by Trump" gave them another run at impeachment.
It also gave the "new boss" the justification to purity test the military for "radical right wing Trumpists" and other undesirables (read: conservatives), and to mobilize a "war on domestic right wing white supremacist possible terrorists."
Which basically means surveillance and potential prosecution of anyone who openly supports Trump, the Republican party or any "far right" group, such as Patriot Prayer or the Tea Party.
The plot against Gretchen Whitmer was foiled before it could be realized, which is what these operations are supposed to do.
But this plot? Yeah, the undercover agents and confidential informants just let it go ahead as planned. There were no sting operations on Jan 4, rounding up the conspirators before they could launch their assaults on the Capitol. There were undercover agents and confidential informants AMONG THE "INSURRECTIONISTS" WHO BREACHED THE CAPITOL.
They let it happen because they wanted it to happen. Because if it happened, all their problems would be solved.
Sounds totally logical to me. I honestly immediately wondered what Dems knew the minute they moved like lightening without any questions or investigations what so ever! Too crazy!
Glad everyone has picked up on insurrectionist AT LAST! That's how they do it. Notice how "stealing the election" got ytou bvanned from twitter and facebook PRONTO!
I had to stop watching the one video when the guy started talking about "violently breaking through police lines". As in what?! You're supposed to, as a protestor, walk up to the line and ask nicely if you can get through? Is that how protestors can avoid being shot in the face?!!
And yes, they were and are protestors! They were protesting the bullshit our gov does every damn day. In fact for 4 years THEY TOLD US our elections weren't straight. They told us! But then the second they barely "win" suddenly anyone who questioned the results was crazy?! 4 years of questioning the elections and suddenly anyone who does is a threat to our democracy?!! WTF?! And what blows my freaking mind is the idiots "don't think, just do what we tell you and vote this way" who are all happy about watching these people be destroyed as terrorists. They're maniacly laughing and righteously feeling themselves as their next door neighbor's house gets napalmed. Wait till the winds shift directions. Which THEY ALWAYS DO!
Agreed regarding the term "insurrection." A bunch of people dressed like Vikings, the Statue of Liberty, and clowns, brandishing few or no weapons, do not constitute the Roman Legions. Insurrectionists don't take selfies of themselves cackling like hyenas and put them on social media. The mob on January 6th entered the Capitol, then wandering about, dazed and confused. They had no plan to take over the government and continue government functions. MSNBC, the late night shows, etc, use "insurrection" as a canard to garner support for rapacious corporate Democrats who pay their salaries.
Lableing cannot be proven one way or the other. It is a strategy to label it the way they want it to be interpreted. Just refuse to use their word-s- and use the one you want to use. Riot is good, protest is better. I knew at this time the election was stolen (Italy) and did expect Pence to invalidate the confirmation until it was investigated. He didn't. He did not have the courage to do that. What was the rush anyway. Well the rush was to get Trump out fast to instrument SPEED. It worked. But US people are not the only ones who think it was a fake election. All of Europe and Asia knows it also. Biden is not perceived as an honestly elected president and never will be. Even if he was legally elected he would be perceived as illigitimate. He is a moron. Mentally challenged if you will. But he has always been linguistically challenged as you can see by watching the youtube of him interrogating Sowell who is defending Reagan's choice of Bork as Supreme Court Justice nominee versus Biden who is challenging him in a meaningless mashing of language incompetence.
Insurrectionists is deliberate. It changes the narrative to make it frightening, politically dangerous. Why they keep using it. So we must always use the word protestors. Riot at the worst.
"Uprising" is a better word than "protest" or "insurrection". "Protest" doesn't do as well in conveying the violent element, while "insurrection" suggests an emphasis on stuff like a contest between the maintenance of state authority and a violent rebellion against the state.
Some of those involved in the 1/6 uprising might have seen themselves as engaged in an attempt to coerce Congress, by violence or other pressure, to reject the orthodox vote counts from the states. When this attempt comes from people who are outside the normal governmental process of establishing the election result, and it involves trying to coerce a desired outcome of the presidential election, you might say that it counts as an attempted coup, particularly if they intended to use violence. But I usually call it an uprising.
Well the problem is that the protesters that came to DC with Trump were not there to bust into the Capitol. They were there to support those in congress arguing Trump's case at great cost to their political careers. Why on earth would Trump or his supporters wanted to bust that up? They didn't. So whomever did that would not have been connected to the larger group there protesting. These facts continue to bother me because journalists have become lazy reporting what actually happened. It was horrific, what happened, no doubt about it. But they weren't there to "overthrow" the government.
Totally agree. And I feel in my heart some of those people just got swept up in a mob action (Trump supporters) and entered the Capitol only to suddenly realize they made a very stiupid decision. But what do I know? There were thugs no doubt, but not all of them.
Seeing the videos of some old dudes like me looking up at the chamber reminded me of tourists who just happened along. Many just wanting to see what was going on. We await their court hearings.
I don't find your post logical or convincing. Although you claim that the Republicans in Congress who argued Trump's case experienced "great cost to their political careers", the actual pattern for years has been that those Republican politicians who argue Trump's case do better in their political careers (as far as getting support from voters in the Republican and Republican-leaning parts of the spectrum) than those Republicans who reject Trump's case. The Republicans who actually got "great cost to their political careers" are those who voted to impeach Trump over 1/6, not those who sided with Trump on that day. There are times when politicians have to choose who to alienate so as to optimize their chances of succeeding with their party's voters. So in this case, Republican politicians who found a way to express sympathy for Trump's case have political prospects that are at least as bright as their fellow Republican politicians who expressed no sympathy for Trump on that day, at least if we're talking about politicians who come from Republican-leaning areas. The Trump-supporting politicians may have alienated some donors but they made the calculation that their standing with Republican voters was more important.
Your account of 1/6 isn't realistic. Although there were indeed a lot of protesters who came to DC to aid Trump on 1/6 and who didn't come for an uprising, you are off-base in saying that these people "were there to support those in Congress arguing Trump's case". I remember the days before 1/6 and it was pretty clear in advance that Congress was not disposed to do what Trump wanted in rejecting the orthodox electoral results; clearly if Trump supporters wanted to change that they would have to find some way to shake things up. You say the protest was to support legislators arguing Trump's case, but major protests are almost never just about supporting politicians. They're called protests because part of their message is against people in power, not merely about supporting people in power. In this case, a large aim of the protests was to pressure politicians, including the wavering ones, to support Trump's case. It is not surprising that many who came to DC that day thought that this pressuring could be done more effectively from within the Capitol. Although I think we may have to have uprisings from time to time from different parts of the political spectrum, 1/6 was the kind of situation where some of those who came to oppose Congress's acceptance of the orthodox vote totals would naturally be attracted to some kind of uprising. But in general, I don't find your post logical or convincing, so I'll move on.
We're looking at it from two different sides. But you're right that I should not have said "political careers" as they will do better with the current populist movement on the right.
This is a very well-documented article. The questions from Revolver News are addressing the strangeness of the entire FBI and DOJ response to the January 6 protests. This one is the most troubling to me: "• Why are low-level protesters being charged with major crimes while the alleged organizers of this riot and the leaders of these groups have not been?"
How can the holding of those who did minor crimes for five+ months be justified? That's longer than the time in prison that their listed crimes would warrant.
I predicted that when Biden would bring up the Navalny imprisonment to Putin during the summitt, Putin would allude to the political prisoners of 1/6,held without due process, to call Biden a hypocrite. Instead Putin brought it up during an NBC interview BEFORE the summit. Beat me to the punch.
To me, this is akin to the coverup of the death of Ashli Babbitt. I have watched the video of her shooting repeatedly concluding that it was clearly murder. She posed no risk of death or great bodily harm at the time she was killed. Yet the DOJ pronounced they would not prosecute the shooter as he had ample reason to kill her and he was even referred to as as a "hero". Moreover, the name of the shooter has not even been revealed even though I wrote my US Senator asking him to identify the shooter. Low level protestors indicted for serious felonies and the killer of Ashli Babbitt was and is even praised. My heads like Linda Blair's in The Exorcist.
"She posed no risk of death or great bodily harm at the time she was killed."
I've never understood that argument. She was climbing through the broken window of a door that presumably separated a violent crowd from members of Congress. If she had gotten through, she might have opened the doors to let the crowd in. The agents on the other side couldn't know if she was armed. It's not surprising that the Capitol police or federal agents would use deadly force in such circumstances.
I believe she got caught up in the heat of the moment and made a foolish decision, and I consider her death tragic for her and her family and friends, but I don't see why some people are surprised that she was shot.
If it was a black male who was killed instead of a white woman, would you make such a ridiculous assertion?
Climbing through a broken window that presumably separated a violent crowd from members of Congress? And you think shooting to kill is the only way they could have stopped her from unlocking the doors?
Finally, "the agents on the other side couldn't know if she was armed?" Isn't that the case every time the po-po walks up to a driver's window and asks to see license and insurance? Every single time?
Can you name ANY other time a law officer shot and killed someone but he remained un-named?
This wasn't a traffic stop - there was an angry, violent crowd breaking windows in doors that separated the crowd from government officials whom the agents were there to protect. There were suggestions that the Vice President may have been nearby. Ms. Babbitt was climbing through the window. Expecting the agents to use minimal force in such a situation seems very naive to me.
The question of why the government has not released the name of the agent who shot Ms. Babbitt is a separate issue. I agree that it raises important questions.
I have no idea what you find hypocritical about my statements.
Don't use the word "naive" in response to those who would have wanted more justice for Ashli Babbitt. When we say it was wrong to kill her, you irrelevantly respond that it's naive to think she wouldn't be killed. But we are making a point about ethics: it is ethically wrong to kill her regardless of whether it was naive to think she wouldn't be killed. Even if you could show that it was naive to expect agents not to kill her, that fails to negate our point that she shouldn't have been killed. We are saying that agents who killed her should not have behaved that way even if any reasonably well-informed person would know that they do behave that way.
You say "the Vice President may have been nearby" as if that justifies killing her then and there. The frequency with which you invoke the high rank of these officials (the Vice President! members of Congress!) suggests that you think their high rank makes it more justified to killing her then and there than if it had been some janitors instead of high officials. Again, we all know that federal agents do act in these homicidal ways when high officials are involved, but the point is that it is not right to be so immediately homicidal just because those nearby are high officials.
Ashli Babbitt's life does not matter less than the life of a member of Congress. She happened to work at what most people would say is a more honest trade than being a politician, but that does not make one person's life more or less valuable than another's.
In case you cannot understand, I'll spell it out further. The decision to shoot Ashli Babbitt at that moment destroyed the life of a person who had done little or no harm. No warning was given before shooting; her killer's lawyer claims that the killer issued orders to stay back, but that falls short of being a warning. There are alternative paths that could have been taken, such as giving a warning before shooting (perhaps even giving more than one warning and making sure it can be heard), or to look for ways to protect officials without rushing so immediately to use lethal force. It appears that these alternative paths would lead to at most a tiny amount of increased risk that an official would die, and make it much more likely that someone like Ashli Babbitt would live. Unless you think that her life matters less than a tiny risk of death for officials, the better course would have been what many decent people would have done in that situation: to refrain from shooting right away. It is not surprising that agents defending powerful officials do not act as decent people do, but that does not make it right.
One way to give warning would be not hiding in a closet like a coward when there was no evidence of the breachers having missile weapons. Stand out there like a man and point your weapon as fair warning, give loud verbal orders.
I wasn't there, so I can't be sure what warnings, if any were given, what government officials if any were nearby, etc.. But as I mentioned in another reply, the protester in the video linked below claims that the police and Secret Service agents did give verbal warnings. I think Ms. Babbitt's decision to climb through the window was a tragic mistake.
Randall: I didn't argue that Ashli Babbitt's killing was ethically justified (or that it wasn't). I said that I've never understood claims such as Mark B.'s that "She posed no risk of death or great bodily harm at the time she was killed." Given the circumstances, I think it was reasonable for the police and agents to conclude that by attempting to climb through the broken window into the hallway, she posed a clear risk. As I see it, the question whether shooting her was justified is a separate issue.
I do not consider the life of a politician, or any authority, to be more valuable than others' lives. I generally have a very low opinion of politicians, with just a few exceptions, but I consider all life sacred, and as I said, I consider Ms. Babbitt's death tragic.
Regarding warnings, the protester in the video linked below claims that the police and secret service did warn the crowd to stay back, but Ms. Babbitt "didn't heed the call".
In terms of how the law should be written in the future - I would be in favor of something similar to the "Castle Doctrine" for the US Capitol. Anyone not obeying the lawful orders of US Capitol police while advancing on the Capitol, or violently accessing the Capitol, can be subjected to deadly force. With the presumption of legal action favoring law enforcement, just as a homeowner gets the benefit of the doubt if you enter their domicile by force or breaking and entering.
Would you reach the same conclusion if a BLM insurrectionist was shot by police? I'm going to take a wild guess and say you would conclude that to be felonious abuse of police power.
Again, Babbitt didn't threaten anyone's life or safety. Yeah, she stepped through a broken window*. You tack on a couple of hypotheticals - she could have been armed... she could have unlocked the doors. Coulda? Nowhere close to justification for use of deadly force. There wasn't any reason to think she was armed (notice how the word "armed" has disappeared from "armed insurrection"). The Capital Police couldn't physically stop her from unlocking thee doors?
I've had this discussion before here on Substack. Some, like you, seem to think the fact that it was government officials on the other side of the doors is some kind of justification for using deadly force.
I don't agree. Please tell us, where is that written?
*broken by John Sullivan, a member of BLM who has so far escaped detention. (BLM disavows Sullivan as a member, but his social media history says otherwise).
Evil: I explained why I don't agree that Ms. Babbitt "didn't threaten anyone's life or safety." She presumably didn't explicitly threaten anyone in the moment, but given the circumstances, her intentions were unknown (to the police and Secret Service) and her actions posed a threat.
I think there's room for a discussion of whether deadly force was justified, but I also think it's hard to judge in this case given the unknowns.
The Secret Service and U.S. Capitol Police do have the responsibility of protecting the President, Vice President, and members of Congress, and just as with local police, there are circumstances in which they are authorized to used lethal force. As I just said, the question of whether or not it was justified with Ms. Babbitt is a separate issue, and it's frankly not very clear to me (in terms of U.S. society's laws and ethical norms, such as they are).
I don't see the relevance of who broke the window(s), particularly since the agents on the other side of the door were not likely to know the identities of the people in the crowd.
We both agree, the authorities didn't know her intentions. Not knowing is NEVER a valid justification for using deadly force. I can't think of any case where a law officer was able to justify killing someone with the excuse, "I didn't know his/her intentions." Can you?
We both agree, she stepped through a broken window. Even if there is a violent mob behind her, we'll never be able to agree that what she did posed the kind of threat that justified use of deadly force. You can spin all the hypotheticals you want about what might have followed. There must be an IMMINENT threat to someone's life or safety to justify deadly force. I really can't see how you can think that stepping through a broken window posed that kind of imminent threat.
You are correct- the police didn't know who broke the window. My reason for mentioning it is to show that the whole tragic mess, including the unprecedented withholding of the shooter's identity, is rife with oddities that point to a failure by the government to apply justice evenly and fairly.
Add to it the point of Greenwald's piece - there is justifiable reason the think the FBI may have done things that promoted the "mostly peaceful protest", which, for once, was actually that.
You want to pull each little piece of the thing apart and look at it in isolation.
I think the only way to fairly understand what happened is to look at it altogether as a whole picture.
Mr. Mitchell- so would it have been acceptable to clear the area around the White House in 2020 with gunfire? Or not. Certainly all your conditions were met there as well? Along with a NFAC Legit insurrection.
Long Warred: Of course not. If you're referring to protestors outside the White House, that's not at all the same conditions as Ms. Babbitt climbing through a "shattered window in a barricaded door" to get to a hallway "that led to the Speaker's Lobby" (1), where one or more government officials may have been located. Mark B. claimed that Ms. Babbitt "posed no risk of death or great bodily harm at the time she was killed", but it seems counter to common sense to expect the police and agents on the other side of the door to assume that someone climbing through the broken window into the hallway posed no great risk in such a volatile situation. That situation was clearly different from, say, the crowd of protestors strolling through the entrance to the Capitol, or even to the Viking dude sitting in the Speaker's chair.
People ignoring 2020 doesn’t mean we have forgotten 2020, Burn, Loot, Murder. 😂
Having said that if black men and black women had been shot during protests for breaking windows - or hurling Molotov Cocktails, by design lethal to TANKS never mind people - if blacks or the other Dem street soldiers had been shot as policy then I would say fair is fair.
But it didn’t happen.
If we’re going to make it legal to shoot rioters then we shoot all rioters. Not just White Republican rioters.
And whoever did that was a coward, and still is a coward.
I didn't in any way say or even remotely imply that the woman deserved to be shot or that it was justified or that black rioters should get a pass when they commit violent acts. They shouldn't. But I've read countless comments blasting BLM protesters while cutting the Capitol attackers slack.
From all the news and video sources, how could anyone equate BLM "protesters" to Jan. 6 trespassers?
The former are the insurrectionists, the latter just fools. The ONLY similarity is both are used to further the interests of the growing security State.
Capitol "attackers"? Lol. 99% of the January 6 crowd protested and went home. A few hundred trespassers entered the Capitol Building after being let in by Capitol Police. It's on video for God's sake. Yet even now you make up your own fantasy.
Yeah, why did you play the race card? You're intimating that Mitchell is some liberal woke warrior with double standards. And my turning your own question back on you is simply responding to your own assumptions about Mitchell. You're the one who brought race into it.
You're so clever. You turned it back on me. Oh my.
No, John didn't personally mention the two ends of the spectrum. But lefties as a group practice it all the time.
All I did was ask a question. If you want to say I'm playing the race card, I'm OK with that. Y'all think you can cow us into staying silent by making us afraid of being accused of being racists, or something else awful. Those accusations have been so over-used, they've lost their meaning.
I'm calling bullshit on that John. To have the right to shoot her, legally he must be in fear of his or others lives via an imminent risk of death or great bodily harm. That is called " self defense". She was climbing through a window when she was shoot. No evidence of a weapon. No threat at the time she was shot. . "She might have opened the doors"? So ? Its like Don Meredith used to say " If "ifs and buts" were candy and nuts, we would all have a Merry Christmas". In short, legally speaking you are light years off base.
Mack B: I wasn't trying to make a legal argument. I was arguing that it shouldn't be surprising that she was shot, given the circumstances.
You say that she was not a threat to the agent who shot her and that there was no evidence she had a weapon. It's not just a question of the agent's personal safety - the police and other agents were there to protect government officials. How could the agent know if a woman who had been on the other side of a door and was now climbing through a broken window was armed, or otherwise a threat? Her actions were obviously not innocuous.
In short, the law requires "great fear of imminent bodily harm" before you can use deadly force. I repeat I was a trial lawyer for 30+ years. I am no neophyte. Accept it or not, he had no legal standing to kill her. Period.
Mack B.: There was an angry crowd pressing against the doors, and they had smashed the windows. Ms. Babbitt was wearing a backpack (possibly with weapons), and was climbing through the window, reportedly after being warned to stay back. If, for example, the U.S. vice president was nearby (down the hallway), is it really so clear-cut to you that Ms. Babbitt was not potentially an imminent threat to him? It's not clear to me, and that was the point of my first reply to you. I do think the public deserves to know the details, including the name of the officer who killed her.
Regardless of such questions, I am sincere in saying that I consider her death tragic.
He was lucky not to hit the cops standing behind her.
Look he had his chance to shoot someone and he took it. Happens to be a common problem among middle aged men in their first gunfight. He was hiding behind a door, couldn’t see (like the cops standing behind her) got all amped up , came out shooting.
I think it might have been easier to just grab her and handcuff her. If everyone who trespassed sere shot we would have streets covered in bodies. Oh yeah there were few if any Congress persons still in the building. This was a covered-up murder by an incompetent and frightened mouse with a gun. What a crock of made up lies and B.S.
I actually now think it was ALL planned. The planners decided they needed some gunshot and some blood to complete the ruse. Shooter has been hidden now because he wasn't supposed to kill her. That also means they knew the trespassers (who were invited in; and who broke the window she entered through?) would be un-armed, which they were.
Jan. 6 was an intel operation by the State to stop the debate concerning whether the vote would be accepted. If the vote had been investigated then, the fraud and cheating would have been revealed.
Right? If she was such a danger what the hell are the cops behind her standing there for? It's absolutely absurd that they were standing behind her doing nothing if she was an immediate threat. Who didn't do their job in this case? Ridiculous if not so tragic.
Not Me$: It would certainly have been a better outcome if Ms. Babbitt had not been killed. I don't think it's at all accurate, though, to call what she did merely "trespassing" or to claim, as Mark B. did, that she posed no great threat. I don't know, and presumably none of us know, what government officials the Capitol Police and Secret Service may have known were nearby, and the situation was extremely volatile.
Given this lack of knowledge, I find it hard to judge what level of force was justified (in terms of U.S. laws). The video below illustrates the danger that's present whenever firearms are present. I do think the public has a right to know which officer killed Ms. Babbitt and to hear more about his presumed justification.
I'm all for shooting the first person over the barricade to make the point and stop the emergent problem.
However, in this instance, the legal standard for whether or not the deadly force was reasonable was what a reasonable officer would do, and there were six other officers on Babbit's side of the door not making any attempt to pull people back using any force at all, never mind drawing weapons.
The casual behavior of some of the police officers was bizarre. Perhaps they sided with the protesters, or perhaps there's another explanation. We don't know what agents were in the hallway, or who shot Ms. Babbitt. It may have been a Secrete Service agent charged with protecting a government official who was nearby, for example. It's not clear to me that the behavior of the police on the side of the door with the protesters serves as a standard for the agents on the other side. There's a lot about that particular situation that's not clear, partly because the government has not been forthcoming about the killing.
Not clear to me either, but as a juror I would weigh it. I would need to hear from them to know if other factors weighed in, such as: did they perceive a serious threat to health and safety of those beyond the door? if so, why not act - did they fear for their own safety if they acted?
There are plenty of highly effective deterrents in our legal system that may be a bit harsh to the individual concerned - but serve a much larger purpose. It's not so humane or just for an individual to go to jail for 15 years for stealing a few pieces of mail - but how often does your mail get stolen?
Yes, and it's a decision. Is Singapore's justice system "insane" or just different? Your own justice system has these features in certain instances as well. The CAstle doctrine results in many "unjust" situations where someone gets shot by a homeowner when they were not there for a violent reason. But it also probably prevents hundreds of thousands of home invasions, and maybe many more deaths than occur today, because the criminal is deterred effectively from attempting the act.
I didn't defend it as "just", only effective. Anything that has the effect of reducing deaths overall can be moral, even if unjust to the individual criminal who dies as a result of the harsh system.
Why do you think criminals in this country don't carry automatic weapons? They clearly can buy them. It's because it's 25 years in jail without question if you have one. Is that just? I don't think so, personally. But there would be a lot more deaths if they went around carrying them, so it's a good system even though overly harsh to the individual sentenced.
The Capitol gift shop had a 50% off flash sale for due process and equal justice under the law just before the riot broke out. Unfortunately, they had a limited supply and Ashli Babbitt missed out on the chance of a lifetime.
I understand your point, but I think there were alternatives to deadly force. Presumably people in the other side of the door could have dealt with her.
I am a former prosecutor and her shooting looks unjustified to me.
Hugh: I tried to clarify my position in a reply to "Evil Incarnate". It may well be that non-lethal force could have been used to protect whomever the police and Secret Service were protecting. I don't think I know enough to form a firm opinion on that point. There's a separate question of whether it was reasonable to view Ms. Babbitt as a threat. That's the question I was trying to focus on.
Very good point. I don't know the facts well enough either. Congress has kept the record secret. We need a public airing of the facts so we can look at the facts.
Timothy: Note that both Hugh and I agreed that the public should know more about whether Ms. Babbitt's killing was justified, and we also agree that the government has not be transparent about this issue.
Agreed. I just wanted to emphasize that in cases of public vs. private, the burden should be on the public. Innocent until proven guilty applies to the individual only, not the gov't.
Exactly. But she didn't make a "foolish" choice. She figured she was a white lady and her sense of entitlement led her to believe they'd never fire on her. It's a good lesson for the rest of the MAGATS.
What purpose does it serve to call those with which you disagree maggots? Do you actually believe it will change minds? Further your cause? Win hearts and minds?
Aren't you having a "deplorables" moment? Are you Hillary Clinton?
I can see this issue from both sides. Was Ashli Babbitt herself a heinous individual whose specific, individual actions were so comparatively dangerous and threatening that they justified the use of deadly force? Definitely not. She was just one member of a much, much larger mob. The fact that she died and others didn't was pure luck, random chance.
But realistically, every member of that mob should have recognized that they were taking their lives in their hands when they breached the Capitol boundaries during an extremely tense time while congress was in session. I used to live in Washington, DC. I went to George Washington University during the Clinton years. When my friends and I would set out from the dorms at night, the White House was often an obstacle to our progress: it interrupts the perfectly mathematical grid system of streets. And as I spent many an evening walking the length of the White House fence, I imagined how this perfectly peaceful night could be marred forever if I just jumped the fence and started running towards the White House. Even though I was just a dumb 18-year-old asshole living in that groovy time before 9/11 where it seemed like nothing THAT bad could ever really happen, I took it as a given that if I tried to run at the White House, I'd be shot dead before I touched the front door.
If Glenn's right that American intelligence agencies were complicit in or responsible for 1/6, I'd agree that Ashli's blood is on their hands. But I can't fault the individual cop who shot her. When a large group of cops is trying to defend your nation's entire legislative branch against an out-of-control mob whose parameters you have no way of understanding in the moment, there's going to be a certain amount of shooting at what moves. As ridiculous as they might have ended up being, and whoever might have been pulling their strings, I don't think we're that far off from the reality where they hanged Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. And even though I'm having trouble articulating what exactly would be the downside of that reality, it probably wouldn't be the best precedent to set.
I have a state of the art sound lab in my basement. I have spent the past few months pouring over the audio. Magnifying this, softening something else. Never was able to match it with a person through enhanced lip reading techniques but here it is.
"Go Ashley
Go Ashley
It's your birthday
Go Ashley"
Chilling, I know. But I think this was more of a by-product of a group that really was all about giving people that believe the exact same thing a helping hand. The MSM has really ignored the fact that this was a supportive group. I saw countless people helping others climb thru windows and whatnot. How bout when the crowd parted to let that women led (YAY women!) camo-armored group up the stairs? Moses himself would have been proud.
It's sad but many times when a young woman is killed the husband is often the culprit.
OMG! Was the husband the FBI plant? He could have been planting crazy ideas in her head throughout the entire pandemic. Or even over the last 4 years. Good grief! Back to the basement for me. Looks like my work is not done
I'm not giving a legal opinion, Mack. I'm giving a visceral, political, and emotional "fuck you" position. That said, your "legal" opinion is full of crap. You're saying the shooter did not fear for his life or others? When did your "law degree" give you the ability to read minds? And as for IDing him -- why? So you and other right wingers can harrass him and threaten his life? The man IS a hero and Babbit a casualty of a failed insurrection.
Finally, the truth comes out. A "visceral, political, and emotional "fuck you" position." At least now everyone knows you are as full of shit as a Christmas turkey. Ive seen swiss cheese that had less holes in it than your moronic, ill-informed diatribe. Thus, I sign off with you. Cannot rationally speak to a fool.
Lol, Mack. I wasn't hiding my disdain for you right wing assholes. And you're calling me irrational? The same guy who thinks Ashley Babbit didn't deserve her bullett? You're the moron, Mack. Climb back under your rock.
> "The man IS a hero and Babbit a casualty of a failed insurrection. And as for IDing him -- why?"
Insurrection eh? Those insurrectionists that stay in single line inside velvet ropes are the worst! 🙄
Was it an insurrection when Democrats encouraged by Pelosi, AOC stormed the capitol, senate chambers 2 years ago during the anti-kavanaugh protest? And how about the "peaceful protests" last year? How about the leftists burning down federal courthouse in Portland? And can't forget "CHAZ". But I guess all that is just "whataboutism" because you don't actually care about people getting hurt or violence - you are totally okay with it and encourage it as long as it's for your political advantage. You created the monster which you only complain about when it fits your narrative.
That's why cops who justifiably shoot get instantly ID'd by Lebron James to millions of his followers while a white trump supporter getting shot by a cop gets forgotten. And then you cry about muh "systemic racism" and "police brutality".
This guy "Radical Normal" illustrates how you can find bad people in any part of the political spectrum; he happens to be left like me, but that doesn't excuse him for being evil.
Not long ago, I was a vocal supporter of the security state. I used to laugh at the idea that there was a deep state. Then, Trump was elected and every imaginable horror crawled out from under the rocks in DC for everyone to see. Now, I just feel like a tool and an idiot. But at least I'm no longer ignorant. That is something I guess.
We can add all of the other alphabet agencies to this. We have an agency for alcohol, tobacco and firearms. Three things that are completely legal and one that is in the bill of rights. It should have been pretty obvious that the alphabet agencies were out of control when the ATF came into being.
How many remember that Janet Reno's ATF agents murdered all those women and children at Waco.... which led directly to Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. No wonder Biden is convinced that "white supremacists" are dangerous. We might finally stand up to the terrorists in charge of our nation.
They had successfully duped half of the US population into believing their propaganda without question. This was a rich conservative tradition that went back for decades.
Then, they decided to openly attack the duly elected president of the United States and the people who supported him. I realize that he was threatening to them but that does seem like a bit of an overreaction.
Now, they have completely burned their credibility with me. It took years for that to sink in. Now that it has, I cannot unsee it. That is quite the accomplishment. I would support any legislation that strips them of their power.
When you have a government which is illegitimate in a way we haven't seen since 1876, and the whole thing is swept under the rug and 30k troops surround the federal government buildings for months...what do you expect?
In 1876, the two parties negotiated out a solution which made neither happy but there was some give and take. Contrast that to now. This government is not working for the people. It's working for itself.
What a bunch of malarkey. You don't negotiate with terrorists. Besides, we had a free and fair election, and if you don't like the outcome, just wait, there's another one right around the corner. It's called constitutional democracy. Too bad the GOP has forgotten what that means.
I did not vote for Trump but You clearly haven’t been following all of the audits and what’s being uncovered in the states of Georgia Michigan and Arizona. Even the Democrats had joined bipartisan committees to hold hearings (Widen and Klobuchar) several years ago raising concerns about black box voting, problems with mail in ballots, voting systems that were owned by foreign shell companies. There are election integrity experts who have been digging into this since 2009. And if you don’t know their names you don’t know what you’re talking about. Dems were all conspicuously silent though this time around since they benefited. Keep drinking that Kool-Aid. I actually blame the media because of course they are not reporting any of this. You have to find it at the local level with investigative reporters. But it takes effort
Project much? You're the Trumper, which means you're the totalitarian. I believe in elections. You believe in insurrections. I have a brain. You have, maybe, half?
Your Reichstag Fire redux shows how much of a totalitarian you and your shitbag uniparty buddies are. Try your bullshit on someone who doesn't see right through you.
They have to keep the lie of the insurrection up for control and power. Their news media fan boys need to keep it up to carry water for the elites. This January 6 story doesn't get better with age just unravels.
My questions are when did our government start hating it citizens this much? And when does it stop?
Well there were hordes of German who loved what Hitler was doing. A few got it early. Some escaped. I read of a Jewish boy going to the seashore with his graduating classmates and being told. he couldn't swim in the same area as they were. He was distraught and came home and told his parents about it saying he did not live in a country that thought he was too "dirty" to swim with them. They aided him in immigrating to the US to live with relatives. His family all perished during the Holocaust. That is the kind of perception you need to save yourself. It is here today all around us. Can you see it. Only now with globalization there is no space to go to. Time is instantaneous and space is condensed into nothing. Ask the animals. The birds migrating. Ask ASK ASK!
Family legend has it that my great grandfather (who immigrated to the US from Italy) was going to return to Italy to retire. He went for a short visit in the 1930s, and came right back to California. "Nobody is criticizing the government in Italy. I can't live there" was the reason he gave for changing his retirement plans.
While I enjoy all the give-and-take, here, and agree heartily with some of the commentators, I think you are a mystic, Janet Abbey. Even though it is futile, we must resist.
Yes of course we must resist. I am just following Virilio BTW. He is a phenomenology person in French intellectual circles. We are now occupied #TheAdministrationofFear (Virilio again) and that has turned all of us into collaborators or resisters. We cannot know who the collaborators really are.
What has always impressed me was how many psaychoanalysts got out in time.Many taught at The News School in NYC. What a time to have. been there to study.
You want a revolution without a revolution? This govt will never stop, never give up their goodies, never fix it, never never never. They will destroy our world first and you got it first hand during the lockdowns. A nice taste. Chew on it. Change will deprive them of all their possessions and obsessions.
It is a matter of how they can manipulate the VELOCITY of this "incurrection" message. Can they gather enough globalization emotional reaction hysteria to be synchronized globally. I dont think so. It is fizzling out. It is yesterdays news and the fish in it are smelling bad. It is not a pandemic like Covid armed with lockdowns and masks and biz closures and FEAR FEAR FEAR OF DEATHI! They need something more flamboyant and sizzling!
That is a great question. The fatal steps were probably the security state. The FBI AND CIA. They both need constant enemies to pursue to justify their existence. These enemies can be foreign OR DOMESTIC.
They are ind8ifferenbt to us. Just the way many of us are indifferent to the animals who suffer all their lives so we can eat them. We are commodities for them. That's all.
What the hell are you talking about? The entire world watched the insurrection unfold on live TV. And now you claim "the story" is "unraveling?" That we didn't see the truth with our own eyes? You MAGATS take the cake. When did the GOP start hating our democracy so much?
What makes you think anyone here is a Trumper or GOP? I know that doesn’t describe myself but i can only speak for myself. But I believe this is a collective of people who think for themselves and do not believe what the media or government tell us, which is self serving and used to makes us hate each other. If you are interested in learning more than what Chris Cuomo has to say read along. If not move along.
To me one of the most damning facts about our vaunted corporate media is their utter lack of curiosity concerning events when the answers to normal journalistic probing questions might reflect badly upon the agreed group think narrative. They are media, but they are certainly not journalists.
Revolver News is an upstart, having been in existence for just over a year. Yet reading their story, referenced/linked by Glenn, they appear much more capable than ANY corporate media outlet at asking the questions that should be asked. How weird is it that they now do the work that NYT, WaPo, WSJ, etc., USED to do. I wonder whether an industry has EVER self-destructed in less time than the MSM. I can't think of any. They will hang on by telling their minion readers what they want to hear, but they will never be anything but Dem/IC/radical left lackeys again.
MSM doesn't support even non-radical, real left. Recall the time when Bernie wasn't a spineless weasel yet. He was practically blacklisted.
MSM supports the monied elites of this country, to the best of its ability to earn money the said elites are willing to spend to propagate their agenda.
Sometimes said agenda coincides with what is a leftist position (like equal rights for everybody). That's how we get Blackrock with a rainbow flag on its logo.
When I see Professor Richard Wolff on MSNBC at least once a week, I will reconsider this answer.
I suspect what you call radical left and what is a radical left may be two different things.
But the elites and their captured MSM only have power by co-opting the massive power we have allowed the State to amass, thanks to those who vote to move further LEFT on the political spectrum, whose left endpoint is 100% State control (Fascism, Soviet/Chinese communism). Moving right on the spectrum, towards LESS State power and more individual freedom, would solve the problem of the elites/MSM/woke/crony-Capitalists having ANY ability to be powerful.
I don't see how the State is moving to the left. If anything, it is more right than ever before. Today, I suspect even St. Reagan would be considered a pinko-commie.
OK, but there is a bunch of nonsense in that Revolver story about the way federal prosecutions work. I think we're all quite aware that sometimes undercover law enforcement or law enforcement cooperators occasionally do more than simply dutifully record what defendants were already going to do. But stating that large numbers of uncharged people identified as person 2, person 3, person 4 etc. must be FBI or FBI cooperators is just something that any defense lawyer knows is wrong. It is far more likely that, for example, person [ ] is someone that discussed joining, but never attended, or someone that attended but didn't enter the building, someone that become a cooperator on Jan. 7, someone they haven't yet identified, someone they intend to charge in a separate case for the same thing...the list goes on. I don't particularly doubt that there were undercover FBI officers present in the crowd. If you are in a room with 5 right-wing miltia members, probably one them is an undercover FBI officer and if you're in a room with 3 white supremacists, you are the only one that isn't an undercover FBI officer. But the evidence touted by that Revolver story is mostly evidence that the author has no understanding of how federal prosecutors go about their work.
The Revolver story described some of the PersonX people not as bystanders, but as people who appeared in a webcast, telling the audience of people who tuned in to hear the plans for the Jan 6 events, "you take your orders from US - the people you see on your screen now." (I'm paraphrasing- don't have the verbatim quote in front of me).
So tell us again, you who know how federal prosecutions work, IS that how they work?
Generally, they find a low level person and threaten them with doom so they will give up someone higher in the chain in exchange for immunity or more likely a reduced sentence. They don't come looking for the ultimate target of the investigation until they have a modicum of a case.
That said, this is all in the realm of prosecutorial discretion. They can choose to pursue people strategically if there are good reasons to not prosecute (bc a person is a CI). It'll take a change of administration and a cleanout of the federal security apparatus to get this investigated properly. Meaning, probably never.
The ignored, but most relevant fact, is the derailing of the Congressional discussion of voter fraud. This was the only national exposure to the evidence of voter fraud, and it was being presented in both the Senate and the House. I was watching those proceedings on CSPAN which had just started. The anchors shifted from those proceedings to the protestors outside of the capitol. One of them remarked that the Capital Police had been told not to engage with the protestors, the was some conversation as to why that might be. I only know that once the incursion happened that the discussion of voter fraud swiftly ended, never to be resumed. In fact it seemed that to bring that subject up was to be complicit with the "armed" insurrectionists. A term of art which has specific and drastic legal consequences.
No it won't. The election system was already compromised such that evidence of the validity of ballots doesn't exist. One can't prove fraud OR non-fraud now.
I don't think the situation was different on January 5th or any time before that, either. The election system absent firm ID is entirely unverifiable. You can make suppositions and deductions "more votes than # of registered voters in this precinct" but not much else. Signature matching is a joke. The ability to compare machines for spurious results is there, but an argument can be made that machines that weren't at the same location wouldn't have the same results anyway.
Anyone who believes in the system is the problem at this point. We don't have elections. We have dog and pony shows called elections.
The FBI is the leading purveyor of child porn. The FBI is probably the leading purveyor of terrorist plots. The CIA was heavily involved in cocaine distribution. The ATF runs guns.
I’m beginning to think the agencies in DC don’t have our best interests in mind.
"But now, reverence for security state agencies reigns."
My instant response to that is:
"Only in the twisted minds of the ultra-rich's propagandists."
Seriously, I think whatever "reverence" may have existed for "security state agencies", that's been waining since the start of the Iraq war and is probably now at an all time low among the general population. Simply, we, collectively, just aren't that stupid, and we're better informed now (thanks in large part to people like Snowden, Assange, and, yes, Glenn).
From my personal experience, I agree with Glenn. The Democrats/Fake Resistance Left just can't get enough of the spooks (former or otherwise) on the TV. WIth the rise of Russiagate, the alphabet agencies have been elevated to the status of reverence never seen before.
Now, Is there a connection between Alphabet the company and the alphabet agencies. Are they telling us exactly what that company is? <g>
The important thing to note here is the complete absence of the worlds largest known hostile actor, the united states federal government, from all of "googles" findings.
The prefect absence of any mention at all of the ongoing global cyberwar started and led by the deep state and all their five part appendages.
The filtered by alphabet for content before their "TAG" team publishing anything publicly for propaganda channels consumption cone of silence is extremely telling if you know where to look.
WTF is that list? Terminating accounts because they post something about something? Man, this is just crazy. Well, YT CEO bragged about suppressing the non-official channels, so not too surprising.
It is the express purpose of a collegiate intelligentsia to pervert their society to serve only them, creating two classes: the class of degreed experts who cannot be questioned, and the slave caste who doesnt know what they are.
Half of the nation, not only listened to all the Russiagate garbage, but they willingly embraced it, even after Mueller and Horowitz said it was all a tall tale. Glen is right. Certain segments of the population embrace whatever the IC tells them.
I am getting at this in my newsletter FOCUSFREE as #Virilio goes into it thoroughly. It is because of globalization and instantaneous communication of video-audio. The media can pump it up world wide into an emotional reaction of simultaneous emotional hysteria. It is not about feelings, it is about REACTION and it is total. Anyone who was aware of the TWILIGHT movies and the sex idol RobertPattinson and the hordes of women sleeping out to be in line first to get a ticket to see the opening of the next film in the series knows this completely.
Meh, I think the Pandemic behavior, BLM behavior, amongst a long list of other post event behavior by the vast majority of Americans- argues otherwise than what you are saying. They continue to bite on everything hook, line, and sinker.
I wish you were right, but I fear that traditional Dems, misled by the DNC and media, have been so throughly propagandized that they embrace the security agencies.
Unfortunately the traditional Repubs, misled by the RNC and media, have been reinforced by the propaganda in their innate trust in the security agencies.
Unfortunately, there's ample reason for people to have been skeptical about the vaccine - and the virus.
I think that as the numbers of vaccinated people in the western world crosses into the hundreds of millions category, "what we know" about the vaccine's safety can move into the pretty well undeniable stage, though some will, I'm sure, believe media is covering up serious problems.
1. It's not a vaccine. The media, the people you imply are not "covering up serious problems" redefined the term (like they did with torture (right, Glenn?)) to include an experimental gene therapy.
2. The WHO says that the clinical trials for this not-vaccine will be completed in 2023. So not even they know anything worth knowing about its safety. Anyone who tells you it is safe is lying to you, because nobody knows.
3. Well, it's not like the media have ever lied about anything before, is it?
4. You missed the point; half the western world have taken it because their TV (i.e. "the media") told them it is safe and they'll be killing grandma if they don't. They told them they'd not be allowed to travel if they didn't. They told them they'd not be allowed to send their kids to school if they didn't. They told them they'd not be allowed to go to work if they didn't. They told them they'd not be allowed to go to church, to a movie, to a concert or a play, or a funeral, if they didn't. Is this the vaunted freedom our troops are killing random Aghanis, Syrians, and Iraqis to protect? I hate to say anything negative but I'm starting to doubt your claims to being better informed.
We are "doing the experiment" in real-time; hundreds of millions have taken the vaccine, it's orders of magnitude larger than any clinical trials ever done, and therefore we can and are learning faster than, and better than, any trial.
By now we know; at least the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are safe and very effective, work against most of the currently know variants, might work against the remaining known variants - we're still looking at emerging data on that - and the complications are super-rare, well understood, and not life threatening.
As a scientist, I don't look to the media for information... Non-scientists can look to real science too. Trouble is, some of us, like Janet here, just aren't prepared to understand it all, and instead of looking deeper to understand it, she just presumes she knows and jumps to the wrong conclusions - as illustrated by her comments here. So maybe not all of us can really look to the actual science itself. But perhaps looking to actual scientists can be helpful.
So, "as a scientist" you'll not only be well-informed about, but keen to inform the other commenters here about the current crisis of reproducibility in science.
"as a scientist" you'll know that we hanged people after World War two for doing experiments on human subjects "in real-time" and you'll be extremely careful not to venture onto that territory ever again.
"as a scientist" you'll know that being a scientist does not relieve you of all the ills that flesh is heir to, being wrong, greedy, corrupt, short-sighted or stupid, remaining among those ills to which scientists are not immune.
Your whole position in this thread, hosted on a venue where the primary purpose of this column is to illustrate all the many and varied manners in which no authority can ever be trusted with anything, not even the most basic things such as "what actually happened?", has been to encourage people to trust the authorities. I'd accuse you of being a fed bot except that I perceive you actually believe what you are saying. I've little doubt you consider yourself a liberal but for some odd reason you do remind me of Britney Spears.
"Your whole position in this thread [...] has been to encourage people to trust the authorities."
Your reading comprehension is in the toilet.
It's been said "right wingers don't do nuance and don't have time for detail," so I suppose they have a point.
Firstly, I don't have a single overall point, I have simply commented on individual issues one at a time. And secondly, if there is any overall point, it's to look at evidence and don't be an idiot - that "don't be an idiot" part can also be less succinctly said as "pay attention to what you're consuming and in analysis, if you don't already know the subject well, educate yourself, but as you educate yourself beware of what you don't know you don't know because that way lie dragons." (Case in point, Janet here confusing and conflating the Moderna vaccine with their treatment for those who already have caught Covid-19 - she didn't know they had a treatment and therefore thought all the discussion was about a vaccine - oops!)
Right. It is not a vaccination. The other lie is asymptomatic contageous is erroneous. There is no such thing as having a positive and being asymptomatic. If you are sick that is defined by symptoms.If you are not at home groaning in bed but walking around YOU ARE NOT SICK and need not wear a mask or practice social distancing. All that theater was about OBEDIENCE, identifying who obeys and who does not. Some are still masking they are so brainwashed.
Yes. I have ewondered for a long time if vaccinated people can carry a virus. I saw the Jane Goodall documentary that came out a few years ago. Students started coming to Gombe to study the chimps with her and started experimenting wildly with the chimps creating all. sorts of "accidents." The chimps suddenly got polio and it was terrible. Of course all the students had been innoculated but tht was what made me wonder as so many chimps died and were paralyzed and crippled.
Asymptomatic spread is not a driving force behind pandemics and there are studies that show this. Scientists have conflicts of interest as much as any other profession. Big pharma and government linked people sits on the board of most major publications. What gets published is controlled by a few people. Who gets research grants is controlled by a few people.
I was just about to end my break and get back to work when this popped up.
I haven't time to respond to more but just this one bit:
"1. It's not a vaccine. The media, the people you imply are not "covering up serious problems" redefined the term (like they did with torture (right, Glenn?)) to include an experimental gene therapy."
I don't have any idea where you got that one from but it's not based in fact. If I had the time I could explain to you how the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines actually work - there's no "gene therapy" going on there whatsoever.
Scuzza, there's no change to DNA which is what a gene therapy would be. Think of it this way... making a protein in your body takes three steps, DNA, mRNA, and then the "protein translation" - making a new strand of amino acids. They are roughly equivalent to a recipe (DNA), gathering the ingredients (mRNA), and cooking the meal (protein translation). These vaccines don't change the recipe or change DNA in any way.
What they do is lay out the ingredients (mRNA) for your body to make something that looks like part of the spike protein. After the protein translation "cooks" up the small, inactive part of the spike protein, it is recognized as foreign by your immune system and it creates antibodies against it. Those antibodies cross over to attack spike protein on live coronavirus.
So they don't change DNA, they hijack the protein production apparatus in a short term way. Which is not to say it's zero risk, who knows, we haven't done it that often before. I do take some reassurance that there have been a fair number of clinical trials of other mRNA vaccines (like Zika) with some patients approaching a decade and no wacky safety issues reported in them.
Yeah, they've been mocking Lamarck for two centuries and claiming that nurture cannot change DNA, too, but we know now that it does affect genetic expression. You want to be part of their experiment then fine, you go right ahead. I won't try to stop you, I wont try to persuade you, and sure as hell I won't coerce or force you either way. But I'll take my chances with the WuFlu and we'll see who laughs last.
What we know about the vaccine's ten year safety will remain zero until ten years have passed, which is highly relevant in the context of whether or not to vaccinate an eleven year old who had almost no risk in January before we vaccinated the rest - and not has practially zero risk given that we're approaching 75% vaccination rate.
Moving forward in a recent future where kids are going back to school, children will be, as they always have been, the singularly most active vector of society for transmissible viruses of all sorts, including any then extant strains circulating. And, given the new variants that are both far more contageous than the original SARS-CoV-2 strain that launched the pandemic and reportedly also more damaging, AND given the many documented examples of seriously negative outcomes that sometimes arise in children, from permanent dysfunctions and even death, it's truly nuts to be so dismissive of vaccination for them.
Do we know as much as we'd like to before making such a decision? In medicine we never really know as much as we'd like. Is this a good call now given what we do know? I don't know the answer to that but I suspect it is.
Remember, FAR too many of us are focused exclusively on defining a "risk" of pandemic virus being death while forgetting / overlooking / being dismissive or ignorant of all the myriad other harms it causes, including permanent loss of taste, permanent heart damage, permanent lung damage, etc. ... You seem to be one of those people.
Who you calling nuts - apparently, someone who was "dismissive of vaccination for them", which wasn't me.
However, if cases are near zero, risk is near zero, full stop. In the further context of about 10 deaths per million total versus the 200 times worse adult death rate, a clear answer starts to form.
In contrast to this review of data, everything you say is conjectural. I thought we were supposed to follow the science, not predict stuff out the thin air of the many many things we can choose to fear?
If there were "no risk" then all of them would not have been so demanding that THEY WILL NOT BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE. No legal lawsuits can be filed against them. THEY ARE IMMUNE! You are not.
The accountability stuff was asked for at the beginning, before much else was known, and it was a suitable request, though it should have been reworeded to be a bit more temporary.
A CDC advisory panel says there is a "likely" connection between mRNA coronavirus vaccines and rare cases of heart inflammation. But as Omar Villafranca reports, health officials say the benefits still outweigh the risks and are urging young people to roll up their sleeves.
But weren't they safe and effective a week ago? If you said otherwise you were a conspiracy theorist. Who is Omar to determine which risks I should take? Our public health officials have violated the principle of informed consent.
The doctors and research scientists of integrity and critical pointsnof view that have been CENSORED advised that onlyb old people with underlying morbitities should get vaccinated. Perhaps younger people with medical issues. But not healthy people. They have been shut up by the media, their respective universities and fear of losing grant money for research. End of career that.
It is a Virilio ACCIDENT waiting to happen. We have no idea what this for sure accident will be. Or even if it will be multiple. We cant know. But bet the farm on the fact that it is coming.
Don't bet the farm. Plenty of things have some risk without being fated to tragedy. Even vaccine "failures" only cause like 1 in 10,000 cases of bad things, usually. LIke the H1N1 vaccine that caused 1 in 10,000 cases of debilitating narcolepsy. That is bad, but like COVID it is also not the end of the world.
That is the strategy. Change the labeling to vaccination and people believe the label, the image, not the REAL. Like fake boobs it is just the same. The plastic ones are much prettier.
Right it is not. But it does coagulate the blood. So if you are on blood thinners you are at risk. If you are not on blood thinners who knows if you should be or at least eating lots of garlic that will keep you unemployable. Or you might be borderline. Are you? Your age? Your physical health? Dont know? Go do a mile on a tilted treadmill. If you are doing it easily I wouldn't worry. If you get out of breath I would worry about the J@J one. Russia's and China's seem safe.
A US military doctor asked in the flu epidemic of 1918 "What if our boys had not had so many vaccinations for diseases that were not fatal, would their immunity have been better?" Good question. Now children cant get childhood diseases. No measles, mumps, chicken pox, etc. We were so happy to get them and stay home for 2 weeks. The doctor came, diagnosed us, put a poster on the front door to quarantine us and we were happy. We even ran toexpose ourselves when our first friend in the neighborhood got sick.
Tends to work the other way. The entire developing world had resistance to early COVID, likely because of BCG vaccine for tuberculosis. You tend to get better immunity against random things from more vaccination, not worse.
Considering the SPEED with which it was developed I have serious doubts about it. No human trials which I have done in the past and have little respect for but still......This "vaccine" is a Virilian ACCIDENT waiting to happen. And it may take a very long time. After all I smoked cigarettes from age 16 to 26. I am 87 and still feeling the effects of it even more now than at any time in the past few decades. I know now the consequences will be with me the rest of my life as far as respiration is concerned and who knows what else. When you reach a certain age almost everything that makes you feel old, sick, etc can be brushed off asb "What do you expect at your age?" When you rationalize that way you throw away your chances at getting better and probably take meds for the symptoms. They are seductive and you do feel like taking them. DO NOT TAKE THEM!
I have taken some computing technology I designed and built for NASA and applied it to a few fields in the life sciences, but I'm not in that industry.
However, as pertains to this discussion, is: I am not a media influenced idiot, and I am educated enough to understand the science involved.
You sound self-educated. I admire that. And, by your own (constant) admission, you have educated well. So well, it seems you have self-arrived at that high plateau of 100% accuracy in your knowledge, so that all that is left for you in life is to educate others (and mentor journalists), especially those "media influenced idiots,' you know, the ones who deign to disagree with you, here or there.
Btw, doesn't "earth scientist" describe every adolescent?
Lol whats an earth scientist? Geologist? I work in healthcare and I'm not taking the vaccine. Most of the medical industry is a racket and COVID-19 is a racket that would make the mafia proud. Drug companies are convicted felons, but you must believe their data. They took no risk(they have no liability, got paid for R&D, used tech developed by universities, name their own price and get reimbursed), the consumer assumes all risk, free advertising and artificial market due to mandates. Nothing but a scam.
Again, sorry for my mis-use of the completely unsubstantive word, "evil." I destroyed my own purpose in asking M. Art to tell me what to think about those who are (a lot) wealthier than I, and how many of them I need to watch out for.
It makes them not poor, which leads to a better life in many ways. Even Chairman Mao, at the end, saw the light: "To grow rich is glorious." We should celebrate the savers of capital. They will save the world from State-caused mass poverty.
You know wealthy is not the same as the former wealthy aristocratic class we had at one time as we mimicked Europe. There were all kinds in that class and at the same time there was an invisible demand on them to do things that would benefit the poor. Dante's Beatrice's father built a hospital and that was an example for her and all those who knew and respected her father. Others imitated. For whatever motivations the aritocratic class was not all made up of playboys. Today the wealthy donate to accepted charities, the non-profits, and certain good benefits come out of that. They are tax write-offs and that contaminates the giving of the gift.
Depends if you are measuring those who act visibly, those who act invisibly, those who are indifferent, those who are asleep, those who are.................
Yes, my use of "evil" was hyperbolic, confusing, and unnecessary, or so I thought would be obvious. (But M. Art considers the "ultra-rich" to be so, I suspect, as if wealth itself is the problem. We ALL know the solution to that!)
You have already been doing a wonderful job of teaching me to "see the invisible."
EVIL is invisible. Baudrillard has written a wonderful short book on #TheTransparencyofEvil. Me? I consider this Biden administration EVIL. Trump was the bull in the China Shop. Not a totalitarian or fascist. But they are and they do it invisibly with friendly caring words that mask the REAL. Once you see invisibility you cant unsee it and your daily life gets ruined as you noticre it in all sorts of ways you ignored before you learned to do it. Think Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri shot for walking in the street instead of on the sidewalk. Obviously the cop just didn't like him. But what was EVIL? I saw EVIL just leaving his dead body in the street like road kill. If an ambulance had come right away, pretended to try to help him but could not, and he was taken to emergency and pronounced dead I dont think it would have started a riot. Maybe I'm wrong but that's my feeling. It was just the sick way of leaving his dead body in the street on a blistering hot summer day for THREE FUGGIN HOURS that was intolerable to me and obviously everyone else whether they consciously knew that or not. That complete contampt for George, that I would hate if it were a dog or cat left like that, but a young man. Just Road Kill. Mexicans have been doing this for 30 years now to kidnapped young girls, gang banged on video strangled and left like road kill a little ways off the road in the desert. Hundreds and hundreds of them turned into snuff films. That is EVIL. BLM did nothing EVIL in their riots. Neither did anyone on Jan 6.
You know better; that "reverence" is coming mostly from neo-liberals and a few old-school liberals.
As for percentages of the ultra-rich who are "evil", that would surely vary by how one defines who is among the ultra-rich. Is it those who are within the richest 0.1% (defined in 2018 as those with $50M of wealth and above), or does one need to be a billionaire? Etc. And, it depends on how we define "evil."
I'd love to lead - or even participate in - a study to figure that out. ... Got any funding?
Yes all that fake fluffy reverance. Now Juneteenth another National Holiday to placate. MLK instead of Malcolm. Now we have sdo many National Holidays that none of them matter at all anymore. Like a car full of candy. Who cares.
You dissemble. You know better what I am asking you. I will rephrase the question for our audience:
You constantly denigrate the "ultra-rich." You must have some sense that not ALL wealthy are....out to violate the rights of the less wealthy. Some wealthy are good people who do NOT use ther wealth to hold others down, right? You must have some sense, some idea in your head of the "scope" of the problem, i.e. what percentage of "ultra-rich" (however YOU choose to define the cut-off) do you ESTIMATE (in your obviously vast knowledge of...well, everything) is close to reality?
People building wealth these days are really interested in the multiplication of numbers ( read money) and not so much in what they can buy with it. Trump has shown us how boring it is. He had so much. But enough was not enough and he realized that and did reality shows. Then ran for pres and won. Then he saw how all his money couldn't help him AT ALL. Just useless after a certain amount for comfort and pleasure. So he sees that MONEY is irrelevant. What good is it if you live in a corrupt world where everyone is kept down. No one can fully live if they are only surviving. That is what the Biden administration will go after. Survival. Not LIVING.None of them know the difference between these two words. Biden knows he is just a cardboard paper doll. He knows. He has allowed it. He knows that too. What a terrible end for him. Gates and Soros and Schwab are pulling the puppet's strings and Schumer is enabling it. I think Pelosi is aghast. And AOC is being groomed to replace the aging tired old Bernie. I dont think she knows it.
Ahem!! Is not the decades of failed Chicago School Friedmannian Reagan popularized "trickle-down" "free-market" BS and feckless "blind faith" been trumpeted long enough? Think about the lately provided added economically global horrors by our boy Larry Summers' addition of pre-planned austerity implemented through the fine offices of our appointed Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin (the champion of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall law) , after his tenure at the IMF, and its benefactor The World Bank, while getting the bugs out of his austerity concept experiments; the ones that intentionally destabilized the economic infrastructures of Central and South American societies with bogus financial aid loan programs designed to force liquidation and privatization of their public utilities to the highest bidder in an international auction. You guys, and especially girls, should all have Sir Lawrence Summers' name burned into your patriotic memories. Prior to the aforementioned deeds, he was the Dean of Harvard U.; the guy who made very disparaging public remarks about the inferiority of female intelligence.
Anyway, that's my rant for the day, and I hope no-one's offended.
Yes. The FBI is an IDEOLOGICAL STATE APPARATUS FOR THE PURPOSE OF REPRODUCING THE IDEOLOGY OF THE RULING CLASS. Read Althusser - pdf on this - the great reader of Marx for the 20th century.
Remember the first "controversial" article from Revolver? They pointed out that Officer Sicknick was not murdered and there were several other inconstancies. The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, et all wrote a fantastical account of a great "insurrection." Tellingly, only one of them has had to issue retractions so far.
The questions being posed by yourself and Carlson, etc. are reasonable questions. The fact that the media are protecting the FBI should concern everybody regardless the scenario. These last few years have convinced me that our DOJ and FBI are a fully politicized, wholly corrupt deep state which will do ANYTHING to protect themselves including leaking to the media, disappearing emails and text messages, altering evidence and arresting/intimidating political enemies. Clapper lied to congress and he's a left media hero but Roger Stone had his door kicked in at 5am with a SWAT team and a CNN news crew. Welcome to Brazil.
Prior to Trump, I had resigned myself to the fact that politicians and prestige media were thoroughly corrupt. Now I have to toss in the federales, too! What truly surprises me is how vicious, immoral, and conscienceless these groups are. They will lie, defame, and misrepresent to destroy anyone who could threaten their grip on power. Truly, we are dealing with sociopaths.
Brave Glenn. I have been disturbed by the constant use of the term "insurrectionists" when this has never been proven. Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes - this has just become a normal way to refer to PROTESTERS. There is a word for them - they are protesters. Did they disrupt violently? Yes. Have Democrats? YES. That is what you do in America. If the media tried to destroy Trump and them - lying about them being racists, etc. then they have every right to show their anger by protesting. Not violently but until they condemn the left's very violent protests how can they say this too is not allowed? And yet here we are. A propaganda driven state and an entire political party that used to stand up for civil liberties in full support.
I see the 1/6 protesters as mainly a bunch of yahoos who interrupted a hearing (of overfed multi-millionaires) for two hours. I see the Leftists, who rampaged through hundreds of American cities throughout the spring and summer of 2020, killing multiple people including children, injuring many more, vandalizing, looting, committing arson, and doing 20 billion dollars of damage, often destroying the lifework and means of supporting their families of thousands of Americans. as insurrectionists.
Maybe if you'd lived with the police unjustly targeting, threatening, terrorizing, and falsley charging and imprisoning you and your community you'd understand. They murder us weekly and more, 99.999% of the time it isn't even questioned let alone properly investigated. Your color/medical status and/or your money won't protect you forever.
Police terror will be your problem one day too, I can promise you that much.
my terror Shaw3na, is getting shot in Chicago in broad daylight.Not by the police but by the gangs.
25 people were shot in a period of 10 hours here last week.. And the neighborhoods that are victimized by these black shooters are black.
But look the other way, Shaw3na.
Sick of this.
Anna, you don't want to be one of the lucky 1721 people who were saved from "white supremacy" and the "Russians" and got shot in Chicago this year?
Chicago has solved the racism and police brutality problem so well that they have a dedicated website tracking each shooting per day/week/month/year:
https://heyjackass.com
Yes this govt is waiting for you to demand they come inand help. That's why it is going on now. When you do the police wont be there so the federal teroops will come in AND STRAY THERE. You will have been suckered once again.
Yes this is drug cartel revenge shooting. Didn't anyone see Chi-Raq. It will get worse as cartels move north from this open border. Then the black cartels will be up against the Mexican ones. Good luck there.
Some of us have been fighting for police reform for years and years. Burning cities to the ground is not how you get it. The entire movement has been set back decades.
Private security services are now a growth industry in the US. I'm sure that private security services will endeavor to provide much needed transparency and equity in how they safeguard their wealthy clients.
Wealthy elites and politicians: Defund the police, disarm the population!
Meanwhile hiring private security, armed body guards and military fencing around the capitol while giving more funding to the capitol police:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-squad-enables-pelosis-massive
The Brazilian / Colombian model
And it is more than likely that the true aggressors and instigators aren't even civilians!
Well, most State employees are civilians. Do you mean the aggressors aren't in the private sector?
Agreed. Now even minor, common sense reforms are probably off of the table.
Same sort of drivel that the Mattachine Society spewed after the Stonewall riots opposing thug policing. If “pretty please?” works…fine. If not?
The Founding of the USA contradicts your theory.
Don't you hate it when your drivel is ignored, Pete? Here: I'll give you the attention you crave. But this is the last time.
> They murder us weekly and more, 99.999% of the time it isn't even questioned let alone properly investigated.
Hyperbole much? Why resolve to hyperbole and lies if facts were on your side?
If you had only mentioned "failed war on drugs" which caused many blacks in prison, then I would have agreed with you and asked why are people still supporting the current Democrat party which played the major role in that war on drugs (Biden, Kamala) and still are by banning menthol cigarettes (preferred by 86% of blacks and 46% of hispanics). But you didn't. You went with the hyperbole lie version - "They murder us weekly and more".
Full disclosure, I am not the "back the blue" types as I believe spineless cops who only listen to what their boss tells them instead of upholding the constitution are the same ones who will probably one day arrive at your door step to disarm you to take away your guns - just like they did with arresting innocent business owners who just tried to make a living over the last year. You could hold a back the blue rally and police would stand by and watch as Antifa decapitates you and then curbstomp your severed head because it doesn’t have a mask on it. They would arrest you for going to church during "lockdowns" or for defending yourself against rioters.
With that said, claiming "they murder us weekly and more" is silly and hard to take seriously.
I researched this in 2020. These are also sourced from WaPo - as left leaning as they come. WaPo has logged all fatal police shootings since 2015 in this database:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police-shootings-2019/
Despite their headline, the data tells you a different story. In 2019 there were a total of 999 killings. 858 shootings in which the race was noted. 405 killed were white, 249 were black. Blacks were significantly more likely to have a deadly weapon than a white suspect. Yet more white suspects were killed. There were ONLY 12 cases where the blacks were unarmed - 11 men and 1 women. 7 of these cases - the suspect attacked the cop with eyewitness or camera footage corroboration confirming it. Out of the rest - 1 was an apparent accident. 2 cases - the cop was charged. The others were ongoing investigation when I researched this last year. So simply saying "they murder us weekly and more" doesn't mean anything when vast majority of them were armed or attacked the cop visible on camera and witnesses. These are hard facts which media won't tell you.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/topic-pages/tables/table-21
So despite being 13% population, in 2016 blacks committed 53% of murders, 54% robberies, 43% weapons offences, 38% of all violent crimes. Should the demographic committing 53% of murders not get expected to get shot? Should cops simply not shoot and get shot instead when the other person is armed or attacks them? Should Jacob Blake or Ricardo Munoz have not been shot when both were about to attack the cops with a knife?
This isn't even about racism as shown here that whites are arrested 71.0% for "Drug abuse violations" vs 26.7% for blacks, whites commit more rapes at 67.6% vs 29.1% for blacks:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/topic-pages/tables/table-21
If this was about numbers lying because of some bias, why won't they also lie about whites commiting significantly more rapes and drugs? Obviously murder is a much worse crime than rape or drug and therefore more shootings for that demographic.
Also if we look at a diverse city like Philadelphia - residents are 44.1 percent black, 35.8 percent white, 13.6 percent Latino and 7.2 percent Asian.
Hispanics and then black officers are more likely to shoot an unarmed black suspect as compared to a white officer.
Stats for unarmed blacks shot by cops:
https://www.phillypolice.com/assets/directives/cops-w0753-pub.pdf
Page 32
Definition of OIS (Officer involved shooting) is on page 17
Definition of TPFs (threat perception failures) is on page 30
TPF of white officer against black suspect is 6.8
TPF of black officer against black suspect is 11.4
TPF of hispanic officer against black suspect is 16.7
Aka Hispanics and then black officers are more likely to shoot an unarmed black suspect. The claim that white officers are more likely to kill black suspects because of racism is complete bullshit. White cops are the least likely to kill unarmed blacks. (Stats for asian cops isn't available as it's negligible.)
As I have stated before, this is not about race - I am simply stating them because that's usually what talking points care about. We can complain about police brutality all we want but until we fix the root cause of the problem, nothing will change. When you have over 50 people shooting each other in Chicago over a weekend, you probably shouldn't be complaining about police brutality.
Blacks realize this and that's why eighty-one percent (81%) of black Americans and eight-three percent (83%) of Hispanic Americans want either the police presence to remain the same (a majority) or to be increased (opposite of what their often white "liberal saviors" want):
https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-retain-local-presence.aspx
One more thing - to get rid of bad cops - we should be doing exact opposite of what democrat policies encourage. Aka we should maybe look at removing police unions which are the reason bad cops stay protected. Same with teachers unions which let bad teachers stay around.
In summary, criticizing war on drugs causing blacks to end up in prison and this destroying families which leads to kids growing without fathers is a good step and we should push politicians to stop the stupid war on drugs and give full pardons to those who got caught with drugs (as long as not dealing drugs). But creating lies about "they murder us weekly and more" hurts your movement more than help it.
Here's more.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/
For 2020:
18 unarmed blacks were shot and killed.
26 unarmed whites were shot and killed.
10 unarmed hispanics were shot and killed.
For 2021:
4 unarmed blacks were shot and killed.
6 unarmed whites were shot and killed.
2 unarmed hispanics were shot and killed.
These numbers don't align with the narrative of "they murder us weekly and more".
The way Democrats structured welfare was responsible for the destruction of millions of Black families. Democrat Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned his Party that this would happen, and was thoroughly castigated by the Democrats for his efforts.
Yup. See “What Killed Michael Brown” by Shelby Steele and his son. Or read anything written by Jason Riley of the WSJ and Manhattan Institute. Before liberals started trying to help black Americans they were in far better shape. Since the advent of the Great Society households without the father present have gone from 20% to 70% or more. There is systemic racism in this country and it’s called the Democratic Party.
Yep. Welfare and the failed war on drugs caused the biggest destruction of black (and white) families. Result has been 78% black kids born outside of wedlock as compares to 25% back in 1960s. The white numbers have gone up too from 5% to 25% now.
Thanks for investing your time in the thankless job of collating statistics. Here's one more source very few 'civilians' (like me) know exists:
https://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2020
Its called 'Officers Down Memorial Page' (www.odmp.org), and I first encountered it back in 2013, when I began actively researching media reports of "Cops shooting unarmed Black suspects." I wanted to find out if there was any truth to the alleged "systemic white-racism" narrative which Obama was actively promoting at the time.
In 2020, 366 cops died in the line-of-duty, 238 of COVID19, an occupational hazard. Most years, the average is usually 1 or 2 a week. Far more Black officers die every year attempting to arrest criminals, than 'unarmed Black men' killed by cops during an arrest. And almost without exception, those suspects were resisting arrest, which is the single biggest risk to the life of a police officer.
I wish these cop-haters could be required to sit down and read through the bios of the cops who have died doing their jobs. Ever heard the expression: "Suicide by Cop"? How does any cop know that's what they're dealing with before its too late?
I can't find the link, but I think it was in 2019, a police-woman responded to a call where a woman was standing on a bridge, contemplating suicide. The officer had managed to get close enough to talk to her, and was calmly trying to persuade her to come back off the bridge. Unfortunately, the woman decided to jump anyway. The police officer went in after her, tried to save her, and ended up drowning as well. By the way, that officer was Black. But her life didn't matter enough for any but the local media to report what happened.
Bottom-line: these 'Social Justice Haters' have no clue how dangerous and difficult it is to do the job our Police are asked to do. Just researching the subject and reviewing the real-life accounts of KIA officers is gut-wrenching. And yet, we're required sit by and watch these intellectually indolent adolescents tear down this country, at a time when the entire Free World needs 'The USA -- Original Recipe' more than ever.
> "intellectually indolent adolescents"
pretty much.
Thank you for sharing that Officers Down Memorial Page. I will add it to my knowledge base. I am working on an article which I might include it in.
What did you mean by "KIA officers" towards the end? Is that a typo?
Thats less blacks than were killed in a weekend in Chicago.
Which has all african american leadership. Just like Baltimore, Just like St. Louis, just like Detroit.
Notice a trend? These are all the DNC run cities in America that are on this list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate
All well said. Being a civil libertarian I have my own issues with police abuse of power, as well as prosecutorial abuse and a set of war on drug laws that has created a massive over incarceration problem. But the movement in 2020 was bull shit. Lie after lie after lie. Mostly by people who worked hard to elect one of the guys who created the very laws that created the incarceration culture, and his “top cop” running mate who did the dirty work. In that sense, BLM was one of the most effective psy-ops of all time. Incredible how utterly easy it is to dupe americans.
The poster you responded to is probably a plant practices in rhetoric
Remember Glenn has an article pointing out that it is the same people who empower the police they are criticizing.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-squad-enables-pelosis-massive
The job was to connect any meaningful law enforcement reform with unhinged radicals. It worked. Idiots like back the blue also rose up to blindly defend police who are nothing but agents of the state.
That's why I criticized "back the blue" types in the beginning of my comment while also stating that "defund the police" are a bunch of scam artists.
How about this - we defund the police as long as:
1. Remove ALL gun/magazine/ammo control laws.
2. Elite politicians and celebrities don't get armed body guards either.
3. Politicians don't get to erect the military and fencing around the capitol.
4. Self defence, castle doctrine/stand-your-ground law fully enforced.
5. Duty to retreat is gotten rid of.
6. All tax payer money which is used for law enforcement is refunded to the people.
Then I will be okay with "defund the police".
The wilfully ignorant are apparently immune to logic, facts, rational dialogue, or anything else.
Yep, and unfortunately, a disappointingly large fraction of right-wing commenters here fit that description - willfully ignorant. (Many are simply propaganda / echo chamber victims, but in this day and age, isn't that willful?)
Trans-alaskan pipeline will be ecological doom! LIE.
Bill Clinton did not have sex with that woman. LIE.
Trump is a Russian asset! LIE. SPIED ON DURING ELECTIONS.
Trump is a Russian asset! LIE. PROVEN IN COURT.
Donald Trump Jr. knew about the DNC Wiklieaks leak before anyone! LIE.
The Russians are paying bounties because of Trump! LIE.
Jussie Smollett is a victim of a hate crime! LIE.
Trump cleared Washington square for photo-op. LIE.
Officer Brian Sicknick was killed by Trump protesters! LIE.
Glenn has written extensively about this.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/corporate-news-outlets-again-confirm
Despite all of this evidence of repeated lies for no reason other than to harm their enemies politically, you still believe the media and the DNC when they talk about their enemies politically?
ARE YOU ACTUALLY SAYING THAT?
There's the patented Art Brock-like dumping of anti-conservative rhetoric in an article showing the DNC and FBI working together.
While I agree a lot of right wingers ignore facts, the vast majority of people who vote DNC have been willfully ignorant of the lies they have peddled for decades, that thankfully Glenn has been writing about.
Its been at least 12 years since he was pointing out the web of media lies the DNC spins, you still think they are pure and just? Wow. You still think they are a party to be trusted more than the RNC? You don't by now know they are both the same group of fucking shitlords just pretending they are enemies? Well I guess there is hope for you to get it in the next life, then.
You are a censor.
Shaw3na, speaking as one who's studied the statistics, and more to the point, literally thousands of hours of real-world video of these alleged 'racist cops in action', I can tell you: the BLM mantra is the biggest, most Orwellian lie in the history of electronic media. Orwell called these reverse-polarity-truths 'Double Speak', and the irony of it? He published 'Nineteen Eighty Four' in June of 1949, literally at the dawn of the electronic media age. Six months later he was dead, never knowing how perfectly prescient his final masterpiece would turn out to be.
Yes it is. Fool me once sdhame on you. Fool me twice shame on me. But over and over and over decade after decaded and the black community NEVER GETS IT. And when a few do they get assassinated.
They murder you weekly? No, they don't. Everyone in the country knows that doesn't actually happen. Move to Somalia. No cops.
Oh, but now there's a federal holiday to try and smooth that over. No, nothing has changed in the communities affected by this prison-slave-labor harvest and they've just handed D.C. police a $1.9 billion dollar package.
It's fucking clown world.
Prison slave labor? Rotflmao. The "victims" in those communities have reelected leftist regimes and politicians since the death of MLK. LBJ promised to make blacks dependent on the dhimmicrat party. He succeeded. Keep voting for those that want victims.
The Democrat utopia, known for curing racism and everyone living happily ever after peacefully and prosperously has been run by Democrats since 1931:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayor_of_Chicago
There's no signs of them stopping it anytime soon because Democrats are working on the racism problem overtime. If I was a real white supremacist, I would keep voting for the same party again and again because this party has single handedly given the best gift to white supremacists by letting blacks shoot each other. It has kept Chicago so peaceful that they have a dedicated website to tracking shootings per day:
https://heyjackass.com
Looks like 275 shootings in 18 days this month. Democrats must be curing the racism problem very very soon. I guess it must be all those gun laws they must not have - oh wait - they have the strictest gun laws. Must be the guns from other places? Oh wait, those other places don't have the shooting problem. Ah, lets put more gun laws. 90 years of Democrat ruling must be coming to fruition very very soon. Or maybe, just maybe, Democrat politicians must be loving blacks getting killed - not surprising based on the history of the party.
The nice thing about writing another useless gun control law is that you get to pretend to care and you do not have to do any actual work.
I agree with you, but 90% (me just guessing) of the damage and looting was perpetrated by bored, privileged, White middleclass children who are NOT or never were threatened by law enforcement.
not in chicago
I see black and white anarchists. The black I understand in the sense that they are disaffected. Mostly by flawed policy than anything else. The white kids doing this are sadly the product of indoctrination from our schools, public and private (see Dalton School madness). And these white kids have been taught to find a way to see themselves as victims somehow. We have reached a point of such affluence and convenience that kids have no sense of what real adversity is. Throw in a loss of the role of faith and they have a spiritual void to fill. Sadly I can see all these factors but I don’t see a simple set of actions to reverse it. To right the ship. Is beyond discouraging.
Last summer, on at least 5 different occasions, I walked down to 'Antifa/BLM' protest-square here in Portland, early in the evening, just to get an idea of who these people were, and why they kept coming out night after night. Vast majority where white-kids. The driving force seemed far more recreational than ideological. It reminded me of 'Prom Night', or 'Big Game Night' back when I was that age (late '60's).
Lots of 'young-couples', or young-couple wannabes. Quite a few worried parents tagging along. Dressing up as Antifa-Storm-Trooper looked like a good strategy for 'getting laid after the riot...'
Bottom-line: most of these kids have no clue how or why they happened to be 'born at the top of the World', not to mention the price their long-dead grandparents paid to put them there. (Which is not surprising, since most of their parent's don't either.) They live in an electronic world comprised of memes, 'Likes', viral-videos, and no consequences.
Mother-nature has a tried-and-true solution for species that take their survival for granted.
I don’t think you understand the actual principles of anarchy. It doesn’t mean lawlessness. But of course they don’t teach philosophy in school because it would lead to revolution.
I understand what anarchy means. I am looking past the riots and seeing what their purpose is is to dismantle the American system. Replace it something else. Totalitarian.
You play with words. Anarchy has one principle: no objectively stated and enforced laws, i.e. "lawlessness." It is the right endpoint of the political spectrum (100% individual license, 0% gov't.).
There is one other point on the axis that has lawlessness, in effect:
"L'etat, C'est moi." The "law" is whatever the Totalitarian says it is at any given moment.
I used to be more scared of the former. I'll never make that mistake again.
You might enjoy this video of Michael Malice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSNLF3F7mlI
And another of Malice with Jordan Peterson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9HqHzA3atQ
Not in Minneapolis. From last week: Riots After Wanted Felon Shoots at Cops and Gets Shot Dead:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIyDRBYC6HY
Kinda nuts, wanted felon shot, and we have protest. Cop shoots black girl with a knife, arm raised to stab another black girl, riots and protest. Including from noted societal observer Lebron James who continues to ignore the advice to shut up and dribble. It’s not our best hour. I think we are rapidly becoming the laughingstock of the world.
I live in Ohio. There were no riots. Most people thought she deserved to get blasted. Again you can’t rely on the media to tell you the truth. They will turn one block into a city wide riot. And it’s also usually aimless whites kids who are the most passionate about this stuff. The locals are only there to get a free TV that might accidentally walk out of a store.
Videos of the nationwide looting show that most of the looters were black.
What makes you think the police only do that to blacks?
The Watts riots in 1965 were started when a police officer towed a mans car that was legally parked. I've had an identical experience in suburban america without a minority anywhere in sight. Some of the police will fuck anyone they think they can get away with fucking. For hundreds of years that was minorities. That didnt however mean they were only fucking over minorities.
Not everyone plays the race card when they get fucked over by the man. Its not always racism, often times its simply "I have power and you dont".
While we are pointing this racist finger, do you think the African American mayor of Chicago Lori Lightfoot and the African American DA Kim Foxx and the African American Chief of Police Eddie Johnson were racist in allowing African American Jussie Smollet to go uncharged after his false hate crime allegations?
"For hundreds of years that was minorities."
For hundreds of years, that was minorities (including Irish, Jews, Italians, Catholics, slavs, the poor, and a whole bunch of other "white-passing" people).
I didn't write that.
You implied it. Now you dissemble. instead of acknowledging the meaning that you KNOW most readers of your post would think you meant (and which I claim you DID mean).
Go look up Tony Timpa. In august of 2016, he called the cops for help because he had schizophrenia and was off his meds. He was afraid he might do something crazy.
Five cops ended up pinning him, George Floyd style, for more than 14 minutes. When he stopped squirming and yelling, "you're gonna kill me!", they didn't stop pinning him until the ambulance arrived.
They claimed they pinned him because he was aggressive. They also claimed they stayed on top of him to prevent him from rolling or squirming out into the road.
The autopsy said he died of heart attack due to a combination of cocaine and the stress of the situation.
It took more than 3 years (2019) for Timpa's mother to pry the body cam footage out of the police department's kung fu grip, and she had to do it through a lawsuit.
The footage contradicted what the cops had claimed. Timpa was not aggressive, and he was very clearly unconscious after several minutes, and they continued to pin him. Once he fell unconscious, they started joking about him having fallen asleep.
On July 7, 2020, even after the body cam footage was revealed, a federal judge tossed out Timpa's mother's excessive force lawsuit.
Last I checked (which was January 2021), four of the cops were still on active duty with the same department, and the fifth had retired and is collecting a full pension. Meaning, none of them were even fired, let alone prosecuted.
Oh, and by the way, Timpa was a wealthy, white businessman. You can hear the cops mocking him (about yachts and country clubs) when checking his ID and noticing his upscale address.
I have worked in the hospital and we had to subdue people 100x crazier than Floyd and Timpa. Nobody died. Police really have no excuse for these murders. It makes me sick when people defend the cops and then try to claim I don’t know what it’s like.
That doesn't mean we should be sending social workers to calls about drunk driving / drugs driving / fake currency etc. Floyd also had 9 prior prison sentences along with one where he held a pregnant woman on gun point. A social worker wouldn't be able to do much other than get shot/stabbed.
Did you subdue them with force? Or drugs? Or hospital security?
Can the police be trusted with tranquilizer guns?
We had our own fully deputized police department. They were allowed to hold people down, but only we could apply restrains, give drugs. We'd usually start off with haldol and soft restraints. Crazier people we could restrain all limbs(4-point). Then if they are still crazy we can give precedex which will usually put you to sleep. But one person needed about 11 police and staff to subdue. He was able to break out of 4 point restraints. He was a danger to himself so we had to intubate and sedate him, which means we gave him fentanyl and propofol and put him on a ventilator. Nobody died because we were trained about prone position or forcing someone up against a wall. Hitting someone was unacceptable. I've been punched, spit on and pissed on. The we had strict protocol for checking on restrained people, offer toileting hourly, assess for injuries etc.
Minor correction--almost 14 minutes, not more than.
Every shitbag who wishes that people would obey them and/or have no human decency - the police force is where they go. Ruins the reputations of officers who don't have these character flaws.
Sure. Same with pedophiles and teaching, coaching, boy scout leaders, etc.
Here in Canada, we have psychological screening that attempts to keep those people out.
I know, because I had a (shitbag) boss who failed the psych test to get into the police academy. He had a bachelor of criminal justice, AND he was Chinese and fluent and the Vancouver Police were actively seeking people just like him. They have a huge Chinese population there. Being fluent AND being Chinese (looking the part) were MAJOR points in his favor.
His personality? They said "no thanks."
"Ruins the reputations of officers who don't have these character flaws."
Those officers who have their reputations sullied in this way did it to themselves by NOT turning in / reporting, ensuring firings happen of those who shouldn't be wearing the badge.
When they fail to help get rid of the "bad apples", they become bad apples themselves.
The whole apple cart is rotten. Time to start over.
"They murder us weekly..."
"They" and "us" are Blacks, not police.
I think you’re a crime stats to prove what you say is completely wrong.
Shaw3na,
There are by far more blacks killed by other blacks, than blacks killed by white police officers.
Your personal subjective opinion presented as objective empirical fact is going to cause a lot of backlash by others who really do understand what is going on.
I have. It is not pleasant and can be very dangerous to your health
What community is that? I hope you don't mean the "black community" because that community kills more blacks in one year than any other does in decades.
Blacks dont like to think that blacks kill more of them than whites do. They are in denial about their brothers. I used to do therapy at HELP Inc in Philly and I saw a lot of drug dealers on probation forced into therapy. I used to harangue them for addiciting their brothers and well all that goes with that. I wasn't about helping them feel better I was attacking their integrity, their willingness to "kill" imprison their own. I made them read Fanon and if they wouldn't I read it to them. The Black. community does not know their own history and getting the schools to teach it is more worthless than worthless.
And here’s Janet…the Great White Saviourette.
Ad hominem attacks are not helpful to the dialogue. My dad was a cop in a large urban city during the 1960s and corroborates the sort of reaction Janet is describing. Not that I have a solution, but not very productive to dismiss someone's life experience out of hand simply because it may not fit your personal narrative.
She is saving many more than your nihilism is, M. Pete Needham.
Am assuming you were too young to even watch. But what are you doing now? That is whgat is important today ot typing snide comments
Fair enough. Would you prefer no police at all? Honest question.
I would be okay with defunding the police as long as:
1. Remove ALL gun/magazine/ammo control laws.
2. Elite politicians and celebrities don't get armed body guards, private security either.
3. Politicians don't get to erect the military and fencing around the capitol. They also don't get capitol police.
4. Self defence, castle doctrine/stand-your-ground law fully enforced.
5. Duty to retreat is gotten rid of.
6. All tax payer money which is used for law enforcement is refunded to the people.
Then I will be okay with "defund the police".
Police aren’t even good at their jobs. There are better solutions.
Ok your other comments were mostly sane but this one is silly.
From AZCENTRAL, as of 2014: "On a national level, this equates to 2.5 million contacts per day, 75 million contacts per month and 900 million contacts per year.
The vast majority of police-citizen contacts are handled without incident and when force must be used to gain compliance, it involves minimal to no injury in most cases. Is it a far stretch to think that out of 2.5 million contacts in one day, maybe 10,000 of those contacts involved cops who went the extra mile to ensure a positive outcome?"
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2016/08/12/police-officers-positive-work-crane/88410664/
Considering there's been less than 50 unarmed people in total (of all races) who died from cop shooting each year out of 900 million contacts, I would say most police are doing a pretty decent job.
This is why last year, despite the propaganda, eighty-one percent (81%) of black Americans and eight-three percent (83%) of Hispanic Americans want either the police presence to remain the same (a majority) or to be increased:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-retain-local-presence.aspx
Btw, I have shared stats in a prior comment and also made it cleae that I am not "back the blue" type but I also don't think we should be lying about objective facts.
David, I may be the only person here that wants to know what you think. What are the better solutions? I don't mind cutting police overtime to save tax dollars, if there is a better way. I have an open mind to this.
Currently police are nothing but agents of the state. They don’t work for us. That’s a lie. They only are only accountable to the State and don’t protect us. They will come collect your body though after you get killed so I guess that’s a start. They don’t stop your car from getting stolen either. When you leave things to the state, there’s no sense of community. Nobody watches out for each other. We’re not allowed to defend ourselves. To start you can beta test non state police in small high crime areas. The people elect and manage all safety officers who would come from the local community. The community would also vote on which laws they want enforced, mostly violent crime and theft. No more random stops and searches. Instead police would cruise the neighborhood actually serving rather than “policing” and enforcing stupid laws that lead to confrontations. Some idiot drinking too much or a hot head might need to go somewhere to dry out. Local people will know if the situation needs to be escalated or if people need time to cool down. Since I prefer a community that values labor rather than production of consumable goods for a big corporation you could hire more safety officers. Blockchain tech would also allow people to safely leave anonymous yet verifiable tips to give the local safety guys heads up to potential problems so they can be prevented rather than just responded to. Sometimes just being visible prevents problems. When people care and don’t seem like an extension of big brother things get better. People are products of their environment.
You dodge the question, anarchist.
Amy, it's time to flip the script on them and expose their hypocrisy by calling out the bluff: I would be okay with defunding the police as long as:
1. Remove ALL gun/magazine/ammo control laws.
2. Elite politicians and celebrities don't get armed body guards, private security either.
3. Politicians don't get to erect the military and fencing around the capitol. They also don't get capitol police.
4. Self defence, castle doctrine/stand-your-ground law fully enforced.
5. Duty to retreat is gotten rid of.
6. All tax payer money which is used for law enforcement is refunded to the people.
Then I will be okay with "defund the police".
Exactly: If police are NOT part of State, then every individual must be their own police. Hmm...sounds like anarchy.
I've walked a thousand miles in these shoes and been put in the slammer. Vietnam resistance was no picnic but not as deadly as it would be today. Now they throw you in with Covid positives to make you sick. I was dumped out at 3 am in North Philly with no car, no ride, no taxis no nuttin. Just my two. feet in the dark silent streets of Black America gettoland and I am little and white and a woman asking to be accosted and raped. So that's how they punish you.
That’s pretty heterodox language- Black America ghettoland, White woman accosted and rape. You’re asking for it with that kind of language.
Gettoland is not just black. I came from a white one.
You have obviously never been to North Philly. Its just as bad as Chicago.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2262958/Christina-Eilman-Chicago-pays-22-5-MILLION-woman-gang-raped-plummeted-seventh-story-window-police-failed-proper-care-her.html
Be 4'11" white young girl dumped out in North Philly at 3 am and feel how safe you feel with no way to get home to west philly just BECAUSE YOU BOUGHT A MOVE T-SHIRT (as a protest) and got arrested for it. RJF I bet you would have just driven by.
Ok, got ya ,I believe you, terrifying and done on purpose by the police, you are saying they put your life at risk. I’m just saying those words together in a single sentence are deeply dangerous for you, forbidden and incendiary, you might want to proactively apologize.
I had no idea until today how much that time and my anger about it was lying inside me festering. HOw Wilson Goode the first black Philly mayor and a contender for high office in the making was set up by local and state govt and police to DROP A BOMB on MOVE on Osage Street then that blew them up killing men women and children - a few suirvivors have written about it and BLEW UP THE ENTIRE BLOCK OF A BLACK COMMUNITY and everybody has forgotten it. And Wilson Goode was archived into nobody land after that. Completely ruined as he was blamed for letting them bomb OSAGE STREET in west Philly. dont get me started. I know so much more about this.
Antifa is still protesting every night in Portland, trying to burn down police stations with people inside and federal courthouses with no blowback from the federal government. But it's never covered by MSM.
The BLM violence is being used to get the Black communities to beg for help. When enough of them organize and ask the govt to intervene the SWAT teams will come in, martial law may be declared. The police force is beinbg decimated so federal law enforcement can be the rule of the day. Like Hitler's storm troopers began taking over on Kristalnight smashing windows. This govt wants total control over us. No more chance for a poulist president again.
Bingo
Someone who gets it. The Feds are intentionally looking to weaken local police.
Yes. BLM is a "floating sign" on this. Weaiken the police and blacks will scream for help and "here come the saviors in federal attire and we will be under federal police, all of us."
Except for crime was nearly double in the 1980s and 90s. Actual black people will not cry for help, the clown politicians will. If CNN is fake news, why do you believe everything they tell you about blacks and what we supposedly think? LeBron, celebrities and everyone on CNN lives in white communities.
"LeBron, celebrities and everyone on CNN lives in white communities."
Those EVIL a-little-bit-less-white-today communities! Boy, that Constitutional freedom-of-association thing sure does get in the way of anti-racism, doesn't it?
Well yes for decades, what do you think all the investigations and “Consent Decrees” are about? Consent decrees mean the locals or state pay for the Feds to undermine them - bypasses any appeal to Congress since the funding is not Federal.
Cute ha?
Politics is Power.
The Feds of course are jealous of the plenary policing powers which are local. They naturally seek them for themselves, so undermine the locals and make them pay for the abuse.
The Feds don’t suffer the consequences, the locals do.
A couple of years ago the Dem mayor of New Orleans got into trouble when he found out who pays - and the City Council did not want to pay. Instantly an entire series of media stories appear on NO police brutality.
NJ on the other hand caved early in 1997 and got the Platinum package- the cops can knock heads and not worry about bad press. Sometimes submission works, but you have to time it.
Politics is Power.
100% about power
It still amazes me there are still people in the developed world who think when some young “exciting” marxist comes out clamoring for helping the poor that it’s about anything other than power. The young marxist is sitting around with his advisors with a shit eating grin saying “works every time”
The entire apparatus, whose participants common skill is pathological lying and manipulation, repeatedly con most of Socieity into think they are needed.
Adults keep buying into it over and over.
You're definitely zeroing in the problem. The label-soup props up the notion we're discussing ideology, when in fact, we're just talking about mentally aberrant mediocrities, trying to punch above their weight-class. A more scientific diagnosis: Narcissistic control-freaks & sociopaths. (I wish I could put a finer point on it, but that's the best I can do at the moment.)
King sized beds and private planes are a yuman right, not a privilege!
https://nypost.com/2021/05/27/book-reveals-bernies-hotel-demands-king-size-beds-and-60-degree-rooms
I blame the "adults" more than I blame the confidence schemers.
#OusmaneSembene made a film about this early in his career. #BlackGirl and it is superb.
Agreed. This is all a set up.
I live in a black community. You're living in a fantasy world because nothing you said is true. BLM is designed to agitate white people like yourself, so that you get distracted from the real issues. Nobody gives a shit about BLM in my area. White people and the indoctrinated sanctioned "black" people the media trot out to say inflammatory things to get you riled up, are the only ones who care about BLM. And it's apparently working since you guys wasted pages on a pointless argument.
The greatest victims of the BLM movement will be blacks. As usual they are being scammed. The DNC has been scamming them for votes and support for decades.
Now you have a downright sinister Marxist movement who is looking to turn enlightenment principles upside down and race is just a false cover. Wake up you were being used like a pawn
You aren’t black and don’t live in a black community. You just copy and paste the same drivel. Nobody gives a shit about BLM in the actual communities. Nobody even votes in the poorest neighborhoods because it’s pointless. Do you see any black people from the hood on here debating? No I see a bunch of angry white people ranting about Marxism. I tutor in my neighborhood. They don’t know who tf Marx is and they don’t care. BLM is just another tactic to distract white people who can’t seem to understand that the federal government does more harm than good. I see nothing but partisan bickering which leads to no solutions and perpetuation of the status quo. The government doesn’t care about your partisan BS. They play both sides. To them you’re no better than the negro in the poorest neighborhood. You’re dirt under their boots. But but just vote in the right people they say. Yeah how’s politics working? Positive change will not come through the ballot box, so I suggest you actually get out and get involved in your community and start changing things. Change never comes from the top. It comes from the bottom up.
No, they vote 105% Democrat.
That's usually how it is. 95% of the population usually doesn't give a shit. It's the vocal minority 5% on twitter which is driving the culture war. The woke 5% twitter mob which is followed by 97% of the registered democrat run media. Media uses this woke mob as if that's the regular majority but it isn't. They just use each other as useful idiots.
The rest of the 95% which is mostly ignorant and also spineless cowards don't push back against this woke mob. They are too afraid to get cancelled, so they follow whatever they are told. And that's how a society deteriorates. The 5% woke mob is winning the culture wars which in turn leads to teaching critical race theory nonsense in academia. That leads to universities becoming indoctrination camps causing "scientists" to chase social justice instead of actual science (calling lab leak a conspiracy theory was perfect example, 1200 scientists writing letters about how white supremacy is a public health crisis and therefore protests during COVID lockdowns is okay but anti-lockdown protests is not okay). Woke universities leads to graduates who go to big tech companies, media and other corporations which censor anyone who speaks against their woke nonsense. Hollywood and arts get filled with these wokesters who go on late night TV shows and spout the same nonsense. Ever wonder how 100% of the late night TV hosts all supported the Hillary? Since the sane people are now censored, wokesters are running 97% of the media, your elections become a farce because one side has no voice. When elections become a farce, politicians become even more corrupt. And thus the country falls.
It's all related. This is how you get things like the russiagate hoax, russian bounty hoax, you get scientists who waste 1.5 years calling everyone with a logical conclusion a conspiracy theory.
"A substantial group of scientists have now admitted they refrained from publicly acknowledging the evidence that the virus may have been engineered in the Wuhan lab. Alina Chan was one of those scientists. This is what she now says: "... it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins."
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/lab-leak-theory-science-scientists-rcna1191
Can you imagine the 5% woke mob causing major scientific institutions to abandon their critical thinking skills?
And while only 5% of the population is really woke, 76% of the democrat base has blinders on:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/321116/americans-remain-distrustful-mass-media.aspx
Media trust by Democrats is at an all time high of 73-76%. Independents is at 35% and Republicans is at the lowest 10%. Aka Democrats are buying whatever propaganda media is selling.
So unless that 5% woke mob isn't dealt with, no amount of "Change never comes from the top. It comes from the bottom up." is going to work.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Note that I don't disagree with you. I am saying that you are severely underestimating the power BLM and wokesters have.
That poor argument “you’re nit black” isn’t going to work. It’s bull shit. The pigmentation in my skin neither validates nor invalidates an argument
As for the rest, you literally processed nothing. The BLM movement is what it is. They are OPENLY marxist and openly looking to turn the US upside down.
The fact that you concede that the same people who have plastered BLM all over everything and posted the signs all over the place - don’t know what the movement is really about - well that pretty much was my point. Processing yet?
You
Are
Being
Used
Wake TF Up
Oops!
You write here:
"...just another tactic to distract white people who can’t seem to understand that the federal government does more harm than good."
That attributes active will to a tool, as if blaming a hammer for driving a nail in the wrong place.
No, what's happening, and has been happening since time immemorial, is that because government is the only tool that can restrain the impulses of the ultra-rich (ultra-powerful if you prefer), they actively work to "capture" and control government and set it to their own aims.
This is the whole idea behind democracy, which we do not genuinely have in the USA; if The People are in control, the many, then they can constrain the ultra-rich from inflicting the harms that they always seem to produce - which you note yourself with your "more harm than good."
What we have here is a "representative republic", in which the ultra-rich control who the representatives are and in that way retain control.
What we have to do to prevent or even undo the harms the ultra-rich create is take control of government ourselves, not tear down government itself; tearing down government itself serves the interests of the ultra-rich since that's exactly what they want - no constraints at all.
Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.
Its crazy but both of you can be right.
Just an observation. I live in a gentrified yuppie scum neighborhood in Philadelphia adjacent to a neighborhood that has been home to working class black families since the 1950s. All the BLM signs are in the yuppie windows in my neighborhood. I don't think I've seen more than one or two in the black neighborhood. I don't know what people think, but I see the signs.
Did you forget the Black Panthers used to sell the communist books to make money to buy shotguns? Read up on Bobby Seale and Huey Newton.
I knew some. They were very intelligent people.
Yes I too believe race is being usefd as camouflage, as a mask.
Agreed, BLM is a win-win for the DNC. They rally the extremists in their base and when the extremists on the right oppose it, they label the entire right as racist for it.
On top of this the DNC then does nothing for minority communities and uses this same tactic every few decades. I mean name a single DNC-run city that has had good results. Real question. Why haven't we ever duplicated the success Tulsa had before their race riots?
The idea is to keep the black community from being a black culture. The ideology of colonialism is established here. Do not let any culture remain. They must be fragmented. Do you really think if the Black. Panthers were active now that they would be allowed with their programs. When they spoke to groups they were enthralling. When they led adolescent groups you were astonished listening to how they did it and wished you had those skills. Walter Palmer of Philly was not a member but he was influenced by them and when he defused a bad situation where teens wanted to openly revolt at a negotiation compromise our lawyers had made with the city about the homes, Walter Palmer spoke to them with such force and verbiage to ensure they understood that the SWAT teams would take care of them for good. This was after the Panthers had been ambushed in their beds pre dawn and assassinated. They had been a major force to be reckoned with. I dont see anything even close with BLM. I do see hidden auithority in creating safe zones in the streets. And I can understand smashing and burning institutional. buildings. And I understand the looting so I am cursed with seeing the points of both sides and how riots can be manipulated depending on who manipulates them. They put Trump in a catch-22. He couldn't send in federal troops without antagonizing and losing the black vote completely and inspiring hate. and he couldn't just let it go on and. on without losing the confidencr of middle class blacks. That was a nice strategy to turn the hate on Trump. Really good strategy.
The frequency at which this tactic is used is increasing. It seems we are reaching "constant" status.
I've lived in a mixed community in West Philly. That is just my reading of it that's all. I do think that's what will be the outcome. I may not be correct.b Just understand there is no right/wrong reading to all this. If we can get out of the Binary Discourse we will be way ahead of our game now.
They have started a war of liberal aggression. Of course you can't find this in history book but Union soldiers circa 1859ish often looted southern plantations. Deflowering debutantes at an alarming rate
Oh! You were there!
I am a descendant of a deflowered debutante. Billy Yank apparently used the old "Hey you want see my horse" bit on her. I was told that we were slightly scorned during reconstruction. My great-great grandpa was not allowed to join up with Nathan Bedford Forrest due to trust issues concerning yankee bastards. Based on the stories of his life there was really no reason not to trust him. He was a strong christian white man if you know what i mean.
You mean 1869 right?
Nope. Soldiers were on the same side for the most part in 1859. Northern soldiers stationed near plantations were responsible for this carnage. The southern gentlemen that would later become Johnny Rebs were typically not allowed to attend Cotillions due to class issues. And they knew better than to lurch around outside at these functions. Most northern boys didn't understand the repercussions for sullying an impeccable lineage.
Pity that you slaveowners lost, eh, Mack? Sucks to be you.
i believe your timeline and my branch of the family don't quite jive. my 5 year old great-great grandpa attempted to purchase a fishing buddy in 1864. He slapped that cash down on the barrelhead but the men at the market just laughed at him. And my great-great-great grandma, the deflowered debutante, was hardly a debutante. Dixie fuckin trash that did not give a fuck. Family had no slaves but they sure helped her out with her new invention. Hairspray. She had stolen a fancy dress from a clothesline 2 towns over and crashed the Cotillion. The other girls were either getting suspicious or jealous so she slipped out in the parlor to smoke. That's when it happened.
A quick glance at the clothes and shoes we wear shows we are ALL slave owners. This whole word "slave" has become meaningless because almost everything NOW depends and originates from slaves.
Even fair trade products, lovely though they are, depend on stolen resources and big oil and slave made computers and phones to be purchased and delivered. Can we get real just for a change????
Just to clarify, M. Mack, to whom does "They" refer?
I believe it was the leftists destroying the cities last summer. I keep losing the line that links to the original comment. I should have used "those people" instead
That is what I thought you meant, so I can now "heart" you without regret.
btw, I would have questioned the object of "those people" also!
While I unequivocally condemn the violence that did occur -- whether initiated by protestors, counter-protestors, or police -- you are substantially overstating it. The protests were mostly peaceful. I can find no reports of children being killed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_during_the_George_Floyd_protests
The "mostly peaceful" protests led to weak-willed elected officials taking anti-law enforcement actions that have resulted in an explosion of violent crime across the U.S., taking the lives of multiple children. It is easily detected by those not willfully blind.
But the comment I replied to claimed that the protestors themselves killed children, not that the protests indirectly allowed them to be killed by other people.
Glenn always seems to be arguing for the importance of the truth even when it fails to support our preferred narratives. It is interesting to me that so few of the commentors in here seem to take that message seriously.
I read both the comment to which you replied and your response. I stand by my comment. When the cue ball hits the six ball, causing it to impact the two ball and put it in a pocket, it counts.
Well, the world is a little more complicated than a pool table. Anyway, I'm not saying the protestors bear no responsibility for these deaths; they were a predictable, albeit unintended, consequence of the protests. But they weren't _part_ of the protests; they weren't committed in protest of anything. They're just ordinary murders, committed by people who calculated, probably correctly, that they were more likely to be able to get away with them since the protests had the police on the defensive. To count them as part of an "insurrection" doesn't make any sense.
But I don't think the Jan. 6 riot counts as an insurrection either.
There was a 16 year old shot to death in the CHAZ/CHOP.
This is my first day commenting, and i saw most people here just want Glenn to confirm their biases rather than challenge their beliefs. Glenn is seasoned enough to see through the partisan noise and realize government is all the same.
Welcome to the forum, M. David. I have been enjoying your well-put opinions, and I hope I did not offend earlier when I called you an anarchist. I think I was wrong, and I rescind the charge. In any case, you get to define yourself, of course.
About your point here concerning what I believe most refer to as "confirmation bias," I have found that to be natural and common on most all forums attached to expository journalism. I have found substack forums to be much, much better at posters recognizing that most all is opinion, and therefore to disagree, even very strongly, with "agree-ability" and substance, as opposed to ad hominem. I think you fit right in!
From left leaning source WaPo and TheHill: "Over 90 percent of protests this summer were peaceful, report shows"
So 10% were not peaceful. 10% is a VERY BIG number. Especially considering only 12 anarmed blacks died from cop shootings out of millions of positive interactions with cops. Or considering the number of gun related deaths is negligible compared to over 400 million lawful guns in America.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/515082-over-90-percent-of-protests-this-summer-were-peaceful-report-shows
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/the-united-states-is-in-crisis-report-tracks-thousands-of-summer-protests-most-nonviolent/2020/09/03/b43c359a-edec-11ea-99a1-71343d03bc29_story.html
Very, very big number. Consider that the Floyd protests were the largest in US history so that even suburban folks were marching their streets. All those folks went home. But in our largest cities, where protesters easily outnumbered enforcement, as soon as the sun went down those protests became riots. Damn near every large city took a hit.
But very unevenly - fun fact: Nordstrom in downtown Seattle saw methodical liberation of the merchandise (broken in, looted, vandalized), while the Amazon headquarters - 4 blocks away didn't even see its carefully manicured native plant landscaping trampled. It would be Russian/Iranian/Venezuelan/Cuban/Chinese/North Korean propaganda from me to suggest maybe there is a "follow the money" reason to it?
Sad to say the credibility of wikipedia has been totally undermined by Leftists (much like the 90% of "journalists" who are Leftists).
Neither of those are "Leftists", they're neo-liberals, and there's a substantial difference.
Do you have credible evidence that this particular page is inaccurate?
finally someone is thinking about the children
That's because you're a partisan, which is stupid. Both examples are people driven to protest by whatever BS prevailed at the time, and some, in each camp, got out of hand, as individuals in mobs often do. That's it. Sometimes a banana is just a banana.
What if the banana was if FBI-sponsored?
Maybe some irony here but banana republics are called just that because of the creation of actual... banana-producing puppet-governments.
United Fruit comes to mind.
Are these protests being fueled by and used by our own government? I mean, it IS their calling card around the world, you know.
What does that have to do with partisanship?
If it affects people across voting lines, religious lines and ethical lines... well it's by definition a universal issue.
I would think that federal agencies creating bogus events and directly manipulating information presented as "news" to wrestle power out of peoples' hands would be called treasonous.
The only violent death on 1/6 was the murder of an unarmed white female protestor. You don't care about the because she was white and female. But the murders of black cops throughout 2020 in city after city are somehow equivalent? We see you dishonesty.
Lol.
Don't discount the Black Flag provocateurs. Exhibit A - WTO Toronto 2010 events.
Wow! Holy moly! Somebody said it! A follower of Glenn Greenwald made this statement. I’m not being ironic I agree with this 100% .
Left and right don’t mean much anymore do they?
Certainly a huge fraction of the people who comment under Glenn Greenwald articles are clueless about what is "left" and conflate it to mean liberals and neo-liberals.
I think many agree with you all. over the world. I can see justification of both sides. But I am cursed that way.
They were basically a bunch of drunk tailgaters. I’ve seen worse after a college football game. It wasn’t an insurrection in any serious sense.
Methed up tailgaters maybe.
Some of the tresspassers were, I am sure.
You've seen cops beaten half to death at a college football game?? Name the college so I know which Bumfuck U to avoid like the plague.
Oh maybe you didn’t get the latest. Including articles from GG on this very topic. The MSM falsified virtually everything about the Jan 6 clown show.
Even if a single cop was beaten, it wouldn’t make it an insurrection or anything even remotely close. Don’t be part of the lies. Don’t falsify to push your narrative
I’m not a trump supporter, didn’t vote for him, didn’t care for him. That doesn’t mean i go along with lies
You know what I see people missing is at least on January 6th they went to the seat of our federal government to protest what they saw as the font of their concerns over government overreach, deep state. The BLM/ANTIFA riots were in communities, damaging innocent businesses and injuring innocent bystanders. There is a difference.
With the exception of the clowns who paraded through the capitol with no particular objective - everyone else was protesting an out of control, corrupt, lying, parasitic state. Not only is that peaceful it was people with integrity do. They defend themselves from the state that is taking over their lives.
Don't tell lies.
No police were beaten. One died from a stroke that evening, Sicknick. He was not hit with anything, nor was he beaten. Don't lie. We see your propaganda for what it is.
Actually Sicknick died the next day. Had texted his brother the night of Jan. 6 to say he was ok. How long did it take for the govt to actually tell us what he died from allowing the BS claim that he was hit with a fire extinguisher by a protestor go on and on and on and on. Disgusting!
😜🤡🤪
Really people should be peacefully protesting, but I agree with you entirely otherwise. The impression that over 600 violent protests and a good handful of attacks on federal buildings was overlooked for much of 2019 and even described by the media as "mostly peaceful" but that the Jan. 6th riot was an "insurrection" is unforgivable.
So.. they make a federal holiday called Juneteenth and pat themselves on the backs for moving ever-forward toward Utopia. While people see that, they're passing $1.9B law enforcement packages so they can crack heads.
Meanwhile... the cities are still prison-labor farms rife with despair. I'm not buying it any more. I do hope that more people stop buying it as well.
Protestors interrupting congressional proceedings is a common occurrence. They're usually from the Left, actually. In this case they were let in by Capitol police. If we want to talk about genuine threats to elected officials, we should be talking about James Hodgkinson shooting at the softball practice. Yet we did not hear much talk of blaming all Democrats or the politicians who egged him on after he tried to murder numerous congressional Republicans.
All of the BLM rationales apply. It was only a very small percentage of overall protestors who did anything, yet what was not representative of BLM protestors was suddenly defining of Trump supporters. Trespassing and property destruction became insurrection, even as BLM's declarations of autonomous zones was not.
I believe it was WaPo of all sources that recently printed a reminder of the Democratic protestor invasion of Wisconsin's state capitol in 2011 - an event in which thousands flooded the building and congress was forced to evacuate through tunnels, preventing a vote. Efforts to murder politicians were plainly spoken then, and the media only celebrated them as heroes. This precedent, like so many others that led Trump's supporters to feel justified in reciprocating, has been memory-holed.
BLM violence has frequently been justified by the good intentions of the rioters. Even left-wing people I know personally have said that the difference between BLM and January 6 was the righteousness of the cause, which to them makes the former noble and the latter treasonous. But to a person on the other side of the aisle, precisely the opposite is true. Which side is correct is not a "settled science" that we can adjudicate with. Then again, given the bastardization of the term "settled science", maybe that's exactly what it is!
not only Mich. Ave. was torched last year; black and latino businesses all over the city of Chicago were destroyed by BLM. No insurance.
They torched the Ronald MacDonalds House with kids inside.
Oh but it's for the cause.
Well said, JD
Trespassers in jail for months!!
If you live in the DC area it's hard to be anything but a statist.
Democrats have hunted republican representatives.
A BLM "protestor" has recently been hunting random white men.
The names are part of the same process. Before you can persuade people to slaughter other people you first de-humanise & demonise the targets. You're right about the state but you're not yet quite up to speed with what they're doing.
You desensitize them to horror with words and images and then they can watch with indifference. Or participate with indifference. Hitler and Goebbels showed us how. Easy.
Goebbels's propaganda machine was terrifying. I still find it hard to believe how easily he created and enforced his information blackout, and combined it with disturbingly effective propaganda saturation. When the Wehrmacht rolled into Poland, the troops really believed that they were there to save ethnic Germans from the murderous Poles and that they had just been attacked.
The belief levels can be overstated. The Nazis themselves knew there was significant grumbling and anti-government jokes circulating even during times like the invasion of Poland.
Ah but the trick is that even if some people believe all of it, many people believe some of it, and a few people believe none of it, everything is going to plan. Sure a lot of Germans were skeptical of a lot of the things they were hearing, but they probably did not expect every single thing they heard to be an outright fabrication. There is a difference in thinking things are exaggerated and realizing they are complete bullshit.
I've done a lot of reading on this topic recently; area of interest for me, my grandfather dropped a ton of books on the topic on me back in the 70s when I was just a kid (along with a dog-eared copy of "The Campaigns of Napoleon", but I digress). Anyway, the latest scholarship on this has changed quite a bit over the years. Immediately postwar, the interest of most accounts was in making all the servicemen feel better about what they'd done by making the Nazis out as evil in all regards. Goebbels as purveyor of lies comes from this era. My grandfather was one of those servicemen in Europe in WWII. Though he would have been open to a reinterpretation of Goebbels.
The truth is a lot more complex. Goebbels was very interested in having his propaganda be effective. About the only thing he was more interested in than that was having Hitler give him the adoration he craved. He was the only intellectual amongst the Nazis, making him more interesting than the rest. He also left behind a daily diary he kept from the early 1920s on. Some events we have no corroboration for but Goebbels' diary.
He realized that being inaccurate and being caught in it was corrosive to the efficacy of his propaganda. So he insisted on accurately representing factual things such as where attacks happened, rough casualty amounts, and the result (as in retreat or advance). He insisted on reporting these first, before the Allies. His logic was that he wanted to present it first, in his own context, before the Allies could. He might suggest that the brave soldiers who were lost in Tunisia in mid-1943 were German heroes and their sacrifice would assure German victory in the long run (he actually did say pretty much just that). That was his wartime definition of propaganda success. And looking at his press dispatches, you can get an accurate enough account of how the war was going, at least up until the very end.
The thing was, even with all the care he took with presenting accurate reports, many people disbelieved even the accurate portions of the reports. Old SPD and KPD members, and people who had just tired of all the bullshit. He blamed the Jews for a lot of stuff and while it varied by week and month, it got tiresome i'm sure, especially since most Germans couldn't figure out how the Jews were doing all this horrible stuff to them. They'd been divested of their wealth and turned into pariahs and most knew they were being killed off in the East...
Anyway, I recommend the Evans trilogy and Longerich's biography of Goebbels for more information. He's really an interesting person, far more interesting than Stalin or Hitler, really.
No cell phones, no internet, no modern transport, no free journalists. Peoples were MUCH more isolated then. Germany was raped by her Western sisters, her population was made easy prey.
Hopefully we give the Statists a harder time creating their "Fourth Reich." (Unless you count USSR/Putin)
Don't worry, the Chinese Communist Party has been trying to adapt it to the modern internet world.
Yes, I thought of pointing that out. It seems to me that a Totalitarian State SHOULD have a tougher time getting so powerful today, which makes the CCP's success so much more the scarier.
Auschwitz Memorial tweet: | Nov 26, 2018: When we look at Auschwitz we see the end of the process. It's important to remember that the Holocaust actually did not start from gas chambers. This hatred gradually developed from words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanisation & escalating violence.
Gina Carano got cancelled for saying something similar by people who have forgotten history.
I remember when I visited Dachau. It left a profound impression on me. The sign above the entrance saying "work sets you free" was a kind of disturbing I cannot describe. Of course it still did not prepare me for when the 16 year old me stumbled across a copy of "The Rape of Nanking" in a local library. As I grew older and read more history, I learned that crimes against humanity were not the rare events we like to think of them as. The Holodomor, the Armenian Genocide, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the list really goes on and on. It is stupefying dangerous to pretend that only one group and one ideology was capable of it.
Very few people know of these things. The massacre in Rhawanda was sparked this way. And the ignorance of this history opens the gate wide open for it to happen again..we are seeing it coming now with the convergence of 1 party, police power, and media propagandists.
The Rwandan thing did not end there. I would suggest you look up the Great African War or sometimes called the Second Congo War. Hardly anyone knows about it, but it was the deadliest conflict since the Second World War. Hell, while we are at it, the Taiping Rebellion killed more people than the First World War. Yes, you read that right. Hardly anyone has even heard of the deadliest conflicts before and after the Second World War.
The Mongols killed a lot of people too, including razing and depopulating (murder) a city with over a million inhabitants at least once. Localized conflicts usually don't get much press, and the Taiping Rebellion was a purely Chinese phenomenon.
That said, the fact that the Taiping leader stated he was the brother of Jesus Christ is quite interesting.
The contemporary media have learned all of Goebbels' tricks. That said, even Goebbels himself realized that his propaganda had diminishing returns after a while. People box their ears at propaganda eventually regardless of how you couch it. His refrain to the German press was to "stop being stupid" and write more interesting entertainment articles to counteract the people tuning out. But no amount of "interesting" material makes a constant diet of propaganda palatable.
"Work sets you free" is a poor translation. The verb is macht, to make. And the sentence is shorter - it's not "Arbeit macht sie frei", which would be "work makes you free", it's "Arbeit macht frei", which, without interpretation translates exactly as "work makes free,"
In German, which is a fluid language, just as English and all other languages are, I think a better translation is "work makes freedom", where the verb, makes, can be understood in multiple ways simultaneously, from "create" to "transform" - you get the basic idea here.
Anyway, a sick joke? Surely sick. A joke? I'm not so sure! As you say, they worked them to death, and that was the only way out, so in a certain way of looking at it, death was freedom from the horrific life the camp inmates suffered through. So in a sense it was literally true - call it a prediction, or maybe a promise.
It depends how you classify people, but over 50% of the "admitted" prisoners at the Nazi KL were ultimately released back into German society. Until mid-1941, even Jewish people could obtain release.
That said, there are caveats. Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec were not KL, they were extermination camps (not run by the SS, strangely) where everyone sent there died. The three camps probably killed over 2 million people amongst themselves. Auschwitz killed 1.7 million, mostly exterminated without being "admitted" to the camp itself.
Auschwitz was originally built to intimidate Poles in the vicinity with short-term forced labor. "Arbeit Macht Frei" should be considered in that context, rather than what it later became.
Actually I try not to get involved with CONTEBNT in order to stick with the MESSAGE. It is far worse than anyone thinks at this time and I am really afraid.
Within minutes of the siege all the networks, save one, had labeled the incident an insurrection. All of em, at the same time. And before the incident occurred all the conversations were uncomfortable discussions about the massive losses the Dems had taken in the house and in state legislatures. The siege was a gift to the Democrats. The narrative was suddenly turned from Dem failure to fear mongering over the siege. And we’re also supposed to believer that the FBI can’t figure out how tall the supposed pipe bomber is, and that he magically disappeared. Something doesn’t smell right.
"The siege was a gift to the Democrats."
Yeah, they gave themselves a gift.
Who were the big winners on Jan 6?
Trump and his supporters lobbied hard for senators to join house members in the planned objections to the electoral votes of 6 states. One house member and one senator objecting means 2 hours of debate on the floor of each chamber.
That would have been a total of 24 hours of reading the arguments and the evidence of election irregularities into the public record directly in front of the American public.
The Capitol was evacuated 20 minutes into the first debate (Arizona). When the joint session reconvened, all the senators rescinded their support for the objections, and that was that.
On top of that brilliant "stroke of luck" for the Democrats, the "insurrection incited by Trump" gave them another run at impeachment.
It also gave the "new boss" the justification to purity test the military for "radical right wing Trumpists" and other undesirables (read: conservatives), and to mobilize a "war on domestic right wing white supremacist possible terrorists."
Which basically means surveillance and potential prosecution of anyone who openly supports Trump, the Republican party or any "far right" group, such as Patriot Prayer or the Tea Party.
The plot against Gretchen Whitmer was foiled before it could be realized, which is what these operations are supposed to do.
But this plot? Yeah, the undercover agents and confidential informants just let it go ahead as planned. There were no sting operations on Jan 4, rounding up the conspirators before they could launch their assaults on the Capitol. There were undercover agents and confidential informants AMONG THE "INSURRECTIONISTS" WHO BREACHED THE CAPITOL.
They let it happen because they wanted it to happen. Because if it happened, all their problems would be solved.
Sounds totally logical to me. I honestly immediately wondered what Dems knew the minute they moved like lightening without any questions or investigations what so ever! Too crazy!
And we know who was in charge of the Capitol police. Apparently many police had no advance warning, despite that there was multiple warnings.
Changing words is a strategy.
Glad everyone has picked up on insurrectionist AT LAST! That's how they do it. Notice how "stealing the election" got ytou bvanned from twitter and facebook PRONTO!
I had to stop watching the one video when the guy started talking about "violently breaking through police lines". As in what?! You're supposed to, as a protestor, walk up to the line and ask nicely if you can get through? Is that how protestors can avoid being shot in the face?!!
And yes, they were and are protestors! They were protesting the bullshit our gov does every damn day. In fact for 4 years THEY TOLD US our elections weren't straight. They told us! But then the second they barely "win" suddenly anyone who questioned the results was crazy?! 4 years of questioning the elections and suddenly anyone who does is a threat to our democracy?!! WTF?! And what blows my freaking mind is the idiots "don't think, just do what we tell you and vote this way" who are all happy about watching these people be destroyed as terrorists. They're maniacly laughing and righteously feeling themselves as their next door neighbor's house gets napalmed. Wait till the winds shift directions. Which THEY ALWAYS DO!
Exactly!
Agreed regarding the term "insurrection." A bunch of people dressed like Vikings, the Statue of Liberty, and clowns, brandishing few or no weapons, do not constitute the Roman Legions. Insurrectionists don't take selfies of themselves cackling like hyenas and put them on social media. The mob on January 6th entered the Capitol, then wandering about, dazed and confused. They had no plan to take over the government and continue government functions. MSNBC, the late night shows, etc, use "insurrection" as a canard to garner support for rapacious corporate Democrats who pay their salaries.
Lableing cannot be proven one way or the other. It is a strategy to label it the way they want it to be interpreted. Just refuse to use their word-s- and use the one you want to use. Riot is good, protest is better. I knew at this time the election was stolen (Italy) and did expect Pence to invalidate the confirmation until it was investigated. He didn't. He did not have the courage to do that. What was the rush anyway. Well the rush was to get Trump out fast to instrument SPEED. It worked. But US people are not the only ones who think it was a fake election. All of Europe and Asia knows it also. Biden is not perceived as an honestly elected president and never will be. Even if he was legally elected he would be perceived as illigitimate. He is a moron. Mentally challenged if you will. But he has always been linguistically challenged as you can see by watching the youtube of him interrogating Sowell who is defending Reagan's choice of Bork as Supreme Court Justice nominee versus Biden who is challenging him in a meaningless mashing of language incompetence.
I can't like this enough
Insurrectionists is deliberate. It changes the narrative to make it frightening, politically dangerous. Why they keep using it. So we must always use the word protestors. Riot at the worst.
We are in a language game. Be aware and use it against them.
"Uprising" is a better word than "protest" or "insurrection". "Protest" doesn't do as well in conveying the violent element, while "insurrection" suggests an emphasis on stuff like a contest between the maintenance of state authority and a violent rebellion against the state.
Some of those involved in the 1/6 uprising might have seen themselves as engaged in an attempt to coerce Congress, by violence or other pressure, to reject the orthodox vote counts from the states. When this attempt comes from people who are outside the normal governmental process of establishing the election result, and it involves trying to coerce a desired outcome of the presidential election, you might say that it counts as an attempted coup, particularly if they intended to use violence. But I usually call it an uprising.
Well the problem is that the protesters that came to DC with Trump were not there to bust into the Capitol. They were there to support those in congress arguing Trump's case at great cost to their political careers. Why on earth would Trump or his supporters wanted to bust that up? They didn't. So whomever did that would not have been connected to the larger group there protesting. These facts continue to bother me because journalists have become lazy reporting what actually happened. It was horrific, what happened, no doubt about it. But they weren't there to "overthrow" the government.
Totally agree. And I feel in my heart some of those people just got swept up in a mob action (Trump supporters) and entered the Capitol only to suddenly realize they made a very stiupid decision. But what do I know? There were thugs no doubt, but not all of them.
Seeing the videos of some old dudes like me looking up at the chamber reminded me of tourists who just happened along. Many just wanting to see what was going on. We await their court hearings.
I don't find your post logical or convincing. Although you claim that the Republicans in Congress who argued Trump's case experienced "great cost to their political careers", the actual pattern for years has been that those Republican politicians who argue Trump's case do better in their political careers (as far as getting support from voters in the Republican and Republican-leaning parts of the spectrum) than those Republicans who reject Trump's case. The Republicans who actually got "great cost to their political careers" are those who voted to impeach Trump over 1/6, not those who sided with Trump on that day. There are times when politicians have to choose who to alienate so as to optimize their chances of succeeding with their party's voters. So in this case, Republican politicians who found a way to express sympathy for Trump's case have political prospects that are at least as bright as their fellow Republican politicians who expressed no sympathy for Trump on that day, at least if we're talking about politicians who come from Republican-leaning areas. The Trump-supporting politicians may have alienated some donors but they made the calculation that their standing with Republican voters was more important.
Your account of 1/6 isn't realistic. Although there were indeed a lot of protesters who came to DC to aid Trump on 1/6 and who didn't come for an uprising, you are off-base in saying that these people "were there to support those in Congress arguing Trump's case". I remember the days before 1/6 and it was pretty clear in advance that Congress was not disposed to do what Trump wanted in rejecting the orthodox electoral results; clearly if Trump supporters wanted to change that they would have to find some way to shake things up. You say the protest was to support legislators arguing Trump's case, but major protests are almost never just about supporting politicians. They're called protests because part of their message is against people in power, not merely about supporting people in power. In this case, a large aim of the protests was to pressure politicians, including the wavering ones, to support Trump's case. It is not surprising that many who came to DC that day thought that this pressuring could be done more effectively from within the Capitol. Although I think we may have to have uprisings from time to time from different parts of the political spectrum, 1/6 was the kind of situation where some of those who came to oppose Congress's acceptance of the orthodox vote totals would naturally be attracted to some kind of uprising. But in general, I don't find your post logical or convincing, so I'll move on.
We're looking at it from two different sides. But you're right that I should not have said "political careers" as they will do better with the current populist movement on the right.
I appreciate this fair reply, thanks.
This is a very well-documented article. The questions from Revolver News are addressing the strangeness of the entire FBI and DOJ response to the January 6 protests. This one is the most troubling to me: "• Why are low-level protesters being charged with major crimes while the alleged organizers of this riot and the leaders of these groups have not been?"
How can the holding of those who did minor crimes for five+ months be justified? That's longer than the time in prison that their listed crimes would warrant.
And the treatment of Parler was a total disgrace.
Thank you, Glenn, for preparing this article.
I predicted that when Biden would bring up the Navalny imprisonment to Putin during the summitt, Putin would allude to the political prisoners of 1/6,held without due process, to call Biden a hypocrite. Instead Putin brought it up during an NBC interview BEFORE the summit. Beat me to the punch.
To me, this is akin to the coverup of the death of Ashli Babbitt. I have watched the video of her shooting repeatedly concluding that it was clearly murder. She posed no risk of death or great bodily harm at the time she was killed. Yet the DOJ pronounced they would not prosecute the shooter as he had ample reason to kill her and he was even referred to as as a "hero". Moreover, the name of the shooter has not even been revealed even though I wrote my US Senator asking him to identify the shooter. Low level protestors indicted for serious felonies and the killer of Ashli Babbitt was and is even praised. My heads like Linda Blair's in The Exorcist.
There's only room for one Mack in Glenn's comment cesspool. Leave at once you fool. whomever you may B.
But first tell us what the US Senator wrote back to you. Surely the ole letter to a Senator for such a legitimate inquiry could not be ignored
"She posed no risk of death or great bodily harm at the time she was killed."
I've never understood that argument. She was climbing through the broken window of a door that presumably separated a violent crowd from members of Congress. If she had gotten through, she might have opened the doors to let the crowd in. The agents on the other side couldn't know if she was armed. It's not surprising that the Capitol police or federal agents would use deadly force in such circumstances.
I believe she got caught up in the heat of the moment and made a foolish decision, and I consider her death tragic for her and her family and friends, but I don't see why some people are surprised that she was shot.
If it was a black male who was killed instead of a white woman, would you make such a ridiculous assertion?
Climbing through a broken window that presumably separated a violent crowd from members of Congress? And you think shooting to kill is the only way they could have stopped her from unlocking the doors?
Finally, "the agents on the other side couldn't know if she was armed?" Isn't that the case every time the po-po walks up to a driver's window and asks to see license and insurance? Every single time?
Can you name ANY other time a law officer shot and killed someone but he remained un-named?
Mygod, John Mitchell, you're such a hypocrite.
This wasn't a traffic stop - there was an angry, violent crowd breaking windows in doors that separated the crowd from government officials whom the agents were there to protect. There were suggestions that the Vice President may have been nearby. Ms. Babbitt was climbing through the window. Expecting the agents to use minimal force in such a situation seems very naive to me.
The question of why the government has not released the name of the agent who shot Ms. Babbitt is a separate issue. I agree that it raises important questions.
I have no idea what you find hypocritical about my statements.
Don't use the word "naive" in response to those who would have wanted more justice for Ashli Babbitt. When we say it was wrong to kill her, you irrelevantly respond that it's naive to think she wouldn't be killed. But we are making a point about ethics: it is ethically wrong to kill her regardless of whether it was naive to think she wouldn't be killed. Even if you could show that it was naive to expect agents not to kill her, that fails to negate our point that she shouldn't have been killed. We are saying that agents who killed her should not have behaved that way even if any reasonably well-informed person would know that they do behave that way.
You say "the Vice President may have been nearby" as if that justifies killing her then and there. The frequency with which you invoke the high rank of these officials (the Vice President! members of Congress!) suggests that you think their high rank makes it more justified to killing her then and there than if it had been some janitors instead of high officials. Again, we all know that federal agents do act in these homicidal ways when high officials are involved, but the point is that it is not right to be so immediately homicidal just because those nearby are high officials.
Ashli Babbitt's life does not matter less than the life of a member of Congress. She happened to work at what most people would say is a more honest trade than being a politician, but that does not make one person's life more or less valuable than another's.
In case you cannot understand, I'll spell it out further. The decision to shoot Ashli Babbitt at that moment destroyed the life of a person who had done little or no harm. No warning was given before shooting; her killer's lawyer claims that the killer issued orders to stay back, but that falls short of being a warning. There are alternative paths that could have been taken, such as giving a warning before shooting (perhaps even giving more than one warning and making sure it can be heard), or to look for ways to protect officials without rushing so immediately to use lethal force. It appears that these alternative paths would lead to at most a tiny amount of increased risk that an official would die, and make it much more likely that someone like Ashli Babbitt would live. Unless you think that her life matters less than a tiny risk of death for officials, the better course would have been what many decent people would have done in that situation: to refrain from shooting right away. It is not surprising that agents defending powerful officials do not act as decent people do, but that does not make it right.
One way to give warning would be not hiding in a closet like a coward when there was no evidence of the breachers having missile weapons. Stand out there like a man and point your weapon as fair warning, give loud verbal orders.
I wasn't there, so I can't be sure what warnings, if any were given, what government officials if any were nearby, etc.. But as I mentioned in another reply, the protester in the video linked below claims that the police and Secret Service agents did give verbal warnings. I think Ms. Babbitt's decision to climb through the window was a tragic mistake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCuIxBzylyo
Randall: I didn't argue that Ashli Babbitt's killing was ethically justified (or that it wasn't). I said that I've never understood claims such as Mark B.'s that "She posed no risk of death or great bodily harm at the time she was killed." Given the circumstances, I think it was reasonable for the police and agents to conclude that by attempting to climb through the broken window into the hallway, she posed a clear risk. As I see it, the question whether shooting her was justified is a separate issue.
I do not consider the life of a politician, or any authority, to be more valuable than others' lives. I generally have a very low opinion of politicians, with just a few exceptions, but I consider all life sacred, and as I said, I consider Ms. Babbitt's death tragic.
Regarding warnings, the protester in the video linked below claims that the police and secret service did warn the crowd to stay back, but Ms. Babbitt "didn't heed the call".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCuIxBzylyo
In terms of how the law should be written in the future - I would be in favor of something similar to the "Castle Doctrine" for the US Capitol. Anyone not obeying the lawful orders of US Capitol police while advancing on the Capitol, or violently accessing the Capitol, can be subjected to deadly force. With the presumption of legal action favoring law enforcement, just as a homeowner gets the benefit of the doubt if you enter their domicile by force or breaking and entering.
Would you reach the same conclusion if a BLM insurrectionist was shot by police? I'm going to take a wild guess and say you would conclude that to be felonious abuse of police power.
Again, Babbitt didn't threaten anyone's life or safety. Yeah, she stepped through a broken window*. You tack on a couple of hypotheticals - she could have been armed... she could have unlocked the doors. Coulda? Nowhere close to justification for use of deadly force. There wasn't any reason to think she was armed (notice how the word "armed" has disappeared from "armed insurrection"). The Capital Police couldn't physically stop her from unlocking thee doors?
I've had this discussion before here on Substack. Some, like you, seem to think the fact that it was government officials on the other side of the doors is some kind of justification for using deadly force.
I don't agree. Please tell us, where is that written?
*broken by John Sullivan, a member of BLM who has so far escaped detention. (BLM disavows Sullivan as a member, but his social media history says otherwise).
Evil: I explained why I don't agree that Ms. Babbitt "didn't threaten anyone's life or safety." She presumably didn't explicitly threaten anyone in the moment, but given the circumstances, her intentions were unknown (to the police and Secret Service) and her actions posed a threat.
I think there's room for a discussion of whether deadly force was justified, but I also think it's hard to judge in this case given the unknowns.
The Secret Service and U.S. Capitol Police do have the responsibility of protecting the President, Vice President, and members of Congress, and just as with local police, there are circumstances in which they are authorized to used lethal force. As I just said, the question of whether or not it was justified with Ms. Babbitt is a separate issue, and it's frankly not very clear to me (in terms of U.S. society's laws and ethical norms, such as they are).
I don't see the relevance of who broke the window(s), particularly since the agents on the other side of the door were not likely to know the identities of the people in the crowd.
We both agree, the authorities didn't know her intentions. Not knowing is NEVER a valid justification for using deadly force. I can't think of any case where a law officer was able to justify killing someone with the excuse, "I didn't know his/her intentions." Can you?
We both agree, she stepped through a broken window. Even if there is a violent mob behind her, we'll never be able to agree that what she did posed the kind of threat that justified use of deadly force. You can spin all the hypotheticals you want about what might have followed. There must be an IMMINENT threat to someone's life or safety to justify deadly force. I really can't see how you can think that stepping through a broken window posed that kind of imminent threat.
You are correct- the police didn't know who broke the window. My reason for mentioning it is to show that the whole tragic mess, including the unprecedented withholding of the shooter's identity, is rife with oddities that point to a failure by the government to apply justice evenly and fairly.
Add to it the point of Greenwald's piece - there is justifiable reason the think the FBI may have done things that promoted the "mostly peaceful protest", which, for once, was actually that.
You want to pull each little piece of the thing apart and look at it in isolation.
I think the only way to fairly understand what happened is to look at it altogether as a whole picture.
Mr. Mitchell- so would it have been acceptable to clear the area around the White House in 2020 with gunfire? Or not. Certainly all your conditions were met there as well? Along with a NFAC Legit insurrection.
Or start shooting the Supreme Court rioters that pushed past Capital POlice and pounded on the doors of the SC angrily to protest Kavanaugh?
That was enormously worse than what occurred on Jan 6.
Long Warred: Of course not. If you're referring to protestors outside the White House, that's not at all the same conditions as Ms. Babbitt climbing through a "shattered window in a barricaded door" to get to a hallway "that led to the Speaker's Lobby" (1), where one or more government officials may have been located. Mark B. claimed that Ms. Babbitt "posed no risk of death or great bodily harm at the time she was killed", but it seems counter to common sense to expect the police and agents on the other side of the door to assume that someone climbing through the broken window into the hallway posed no great risk in such a volatile situation. That situation was clearly different from, say, the crowd of protestors strolling through the entrance to the Capitol, or even to the Viking dude sitting in the Speaker's chair.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_response_to_the_2021_United_States_Capitol_attack#Shooting
Correct, totally.
How about you answer your own question? If it was a black man breaking through a window in a riot and not a white woman, would you be as forgiving?
As if this was a hypothetical.
People ignoring 2020 doesn’t mean we have forgotten 2020, Burn, Loot, Murder. 😂
Having said that if black men and black women had been shot during protests for breaking windows - or hurling Molotov Cocktails, by design lethal to TANKS never mind people - if blacks or the other Dem street soldiers had been shot as policy then I would say fair is fair.
But it didn’t happen.
If we’re going to make it legal to shoot rioters then we shoot all rioters. Not just White Republican rioters.
And whoever did that was a coward, and still is a coward.
I didn't in any way say or even remotely imply that the woman deserved to be shot or that it was justified or that black rioters should get a pass when they commit violent acts. They shouldn't. But I've read countless comments blasting BLM protesters while cutting the Capitol attackers slack.
From all the news and video sources, how could anyone equate BLM "protesters" to Jan. 6 trespassers?
The former are the insurrectionists, the latter just fools. The ONLY similarity is both are used to further the interests of the growing security State.
Capitol "attackers"? Lol. 99% of the January 6 crowd protested and went home. A few hundred trespassers entered the Capitol Building after being let in by Capitol Police. It's on video for God's sake. Yet even now you make up your own fantasy.
Yep. I would.
Any other questions?
Yeah, why did you play the race card? You're intimating that Mitchell is some liberal woke warrior with double standards. And my turning your own question back on you is simply responding to your own assumptions about Mitchell. You're the one who brought race into it.
You're so clever. You turned it back on me. Oh my.
No, John didn't personally mention the two ends of the spectrum. But lefties as a group practice it all the time.
All I did was ask a question. If you want to say I'm playing the race card, I'm OK with that. Y'all think you can cow us into staying silent by making us afraid of being accused of being racists, or something else awful. Those accusations have been so over-used, they've lost their meaning.
We're not going to stay silent anymore.
I'm calling bullshit on that John. To have the right to shoot her, legally he must be in fear of his or others lives via an imminent risk of death or great bodily harm. That is called " self defense". She was climbing through a window when she was shoot. No evidence of a weapon. No threat at the time she was shot. . "She might have opened the doors"? So ? Its like Don Meredith used to say " If "ifs and buts" were candy and nuts, we would all have a Merry Christmas". In short, legally speaking you are light years off base.
Mack B: I wasn't trying to make a legal argument. I was arguing that it shouldn't be surprising that she was shot, given the circumstances.
You say that she was not a threat to the agent who shot her and that there was no evidence she had a weapon. It's not just a question of the agent's personal safety - the police and other agents were there to protect government officials. How could the agent know if a woman who had been on the other side of a door and was now climbing through a broken window was armed, or otherwise a threat? Her actions were obviously not innocuous.
In short, the law requires "great fear of imminent bodily harm" before you can use deadly force. I repeat I was a trial lawyer for 30+ years. I am no neophyte. Accept it or not, he had no legal standing to kill her. Period.
Mack B.: There was an angry crowd pressing against the doors, and they had smashed the windows. Ms. Babbitt was wearing a backpack (possibly with weapons), and was climbing through the window, reportedly after being warned to stay back. If, for example, the U.S. vice president was nearby (down the hallway), is it really so clear-cut to you that Ms. Babbitt was not potentially an imminent threat to him? It's not clear to me, and that was the point of my first reply to you. I do think the public deserves to know the details, including the name of the officer who killed her.
Regardless of such questions, I am sincere in saying that I consider her death tragic.
He was lucky not to hit the cops standing behind her.
Look he had his chance to shoot someone and he took it. Happens to be a common problem among middle aged men in their first gunfight. He was hiding behind a door, couldn’t see (like the cops standing behind her) got all amped up , came out shooting.
And has been hiding since.
Very brave.
I think it might have been easier to just grab her and handcuff her. If everyone who trespassed sere shot we would have streets covered in bodies. Oh yeah there were few if any Congress persons still in the building. This was a covered-up murder by an incompetent and frightened mouse with a gun. What a crock of made up lies and B.S.
I actually now think it was ALL planned. The planners decided they needed some gunshot and some blood to complete the ruse. Shooter has been hidden now because he wasn't supposed to kill her. That also means they knew the trespassers (who were invited in; and who broke the window she entered through?) would be un-armed, which they were.
Jan. 6 was an intel operation by the State to stop the debate concerning whether the vote would be accepted. If the vote had been investigated then, the fraud and cheating would have been revealed.
Posters like M. Radical Normal may be plants.
Right? If she was such a danger what the hell are the cops behind her standing there for? It's absolutely absurd that they were standing behind her doing nothing if she was an immediate threat. Who didn't do their job in this case? Ridiculous if not so tragic.
Not Me$: It would certainly have been a better outcome if Ms. Babbitt had not been killed. I don't think it's at all accurate, though, to call what she did merely "trespassing" or to claim, as Mark B. did, that she posed no great threat. I don't know, and presumably none of us know, what government officials the Capitol Police and Secret Service may have known were nearby, and the situation was extremely volatile.
Given this lack of knowledge, I find it hard to judge what level of force was justified (in terms of U.S. laws). The video below illustrates the danger that's present whenever firearms are present. I do think the public has a right to know which officer killed Ms. Babbitt and to hear more about his presumed justification.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/las-vegas-murder-suspect-lunges-for-cops-gun-after-allegedly-confessing-to-killing-toddler-report
He was attempting "suicide-by-cop."
Perhaps. But in any case, it does highlight the danger of a volatile situation with firearms present.
In hindsight, we know the trespassers had no firearms. So are you arguing that police be dis-armed, a la London bobbies?
I'm all for shooting the first person over the barricade to make the point and stop the emergent problem.
However, in this instance, the legal standard for whether or not the deadly force was reasonable was what a reasonable officer would do, and there were six other officers on Babbit's side of the door not making any attempt to pull people back using any force at all, never mind drawing weapons.
The casual behavior of some of the police officers was bizarre. Perhaps they sided with the protesters, or perhaps there's another explanation. We don't know what agents were in the hallway, or who shot Ms. Babbitt. It may have been a Secrete Service agent charged with protecting a government official who was nearby, for example. It's not clear to me that the behavior of the police on the side of the door with the protesters serves as a standard for the agents on the other side. There's a lot about that particular situation that's not clear, partly because the government has not been forthcoming about the killing.
Not clear to me either, but as a juror I would weigh it. I would need to hear from them to know if other factors weighed in, such as: did they perceive a serious threat to health and safety of those beyond the door? if so, why not act - did they fear for their own safety if they acted?
That's a respectable approach.
There are plenty of highly effective deterrents in our legal system that may be a bit harsh to the individual concerned - but serve a much larger purpose. It's not so humane or just for an individual to go to jail for 15 years for stealing a few pieces of mail - but how often does your mail get stolen?
Yes, and it's a decision. Is Singapore's justice system "insane" or just different? Your own justice system has these features in certain instances as well. The CAstle doctrine results in many "unjust" situations where someone gets shot by a homeowner when they were not there for a violent reason. But it also probably prevents hundreds of thousands of home invasions, and maybe many more deaths than occur today, because the criminal is deterred effectively from attempting the act.
I didn't defend it as "just", only effective. Anything that has the effect of reducing deaths overall can be moral, even if unjust to the individual criminal who dies as a result of the harsh system.
Why do you think criminals in this country don't carry automatic weapons? They clearly can buy them. It's because it's 25 years in jail without question if you have one. Is that just? I don't think so, personally. But there would be a lot more deaths if they went around carrying them, so it's a good system even though overly harsh to the individual sentenced.
The Capitol gift shop had a 50% off flash sale for due process and equal justice under the law just before the riot broke out. Unfortunately, they had a limited supply and Ashli Babbitt missed out on the chance of a lifetime.
I understand your point, but I think there were alternatives to deadly force. Presumably people in the other side of the door could have dealt with her.
I am a former prosecutor and her shooting looks unjustified to me.
Hugh: I tried to clarify my position in a reply to "Evil Incarnate". It may well be that non-lethal force could have been used to protect whomever the police and Secret Service were protecting. I don't think I know enough to form a firm opinion on that point. There's a separate question of whether it was reasonable to view Ms. Babbitt as a threat. That's the question I was trying to focus on.
Very good point. I don't know the facts well enough either. Congress has kept the record secret. We need a public airing of the facts so we can look at the facts.
But the presumption should be that the gov't., OUR gov't., must prove that ANY use of force is appropriate.
And in the zeit gheist (gov't. OVER-secrecy), we have been conditioned to NOT expect forthcoming honesty from our "betters."
Where is the public investigation after 5 months?!
Timothy: Note that both Hugh and I agreed that the public should know more about whether Ms. Babbitt's killing was justified, and we also agree that the government has not be transparent about this issue.
Agreed. I just wanted to emphasize that in cases of public vs. private, the burden should be on the public. Innocent until proven guilty applies to the individual only, not the gov't.
I gave a sufficient response to this dumb comment of yours in my reply below.
Exactly. But she didn't make a "foolish" choice. She figured she was a white lady and her sense of entitlement led her to believe they'd never fire on her. It's a good lesson for the rest of the MAGATS.
> MAGATS
Thanks for showing your true colours. You are okay with violence as long as it's against your political opponent. TYT and MSNPC types.
What purpose does it serve to call those with which you disagree maggots? Do you actually believe it will change minds? Further your cause? Win hearts and minds?
Aren't you having a "deplorables" moment? Are you Hillary Clinton?
And are you a Statist?
That could be. In any case, it's a tragedy for those who loved her.
Yes. She served our country. On the other hand, her "tragedy" helped stop a lot of additional carnage.
I can see this issue from both sides. Was Ashli Babbitt herself a heinous individual whose specific, individual actions were so comparatively dangerous and threatening that they justified the use of deadly force? Definitely not. She was just one member of a much, much larger mob. The fact that she died and others didn't was pure luck, random chance.
But realistically, every member of that mob should have recognized that they were taking their lives in their hands when they breached the Capitol boundaries during an extremely tense time while congress was in session. I used to live in Washington, DC. I went to George Washington University during the Clinton years. When my friends and I would set out from the dorms at night, the White House was often an obstacle to our progress: it interrupts the perfectly mathematical grid system of streets. And as I spent many an evening walking the length of the White House fence, I imagined how this perfectly peaceful night could be marred forever if I just jumped the fence and started running towards the White House. Even though I was just a dumb 18-year-old asshole living in that groovy time before 9/11 where it seemed like nothing THAT bad could ever really happen, I took it as a given that if I tried to run at the White House, I'd be shot dead before I touched the front door.
If Glenn's right that American intelligence agencies were complicit in or responsible for 1/6, I'd agree that Ashli's blood is on their hands. But I can't fault the individual cop who shot her. When a large group of cops is trying to defend your nation's entire legislative branch against an out-of-control mob whose parameters you have no way of understanding in the moment, there's going to be a certain amount of shooting at what moves. As ridiculous as they might have ended up being, and whoever might have been pulling their strings, I don't think we're that far off from the reality where they hanged Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. And even though I'm having trouble articulating what exactly would be the downside of that reality, it probably wouldn't be the best precedent to set.
I would like to know who pushed or convince her to try to go through that window and then ran away when she was shot and bleeding to death
I have a state of the art sound lab in my basement. I have spent the past few months pouring over the audio. Magnifying this, softening something else. Never was able to match it with a person through enhanced lip reading techniques but here it is.
"Go Ashley
Go Ashley
It's your birthday
Go Ashley"
Chilling, I know. But I think this was more of a by-product of a group that really was all about giving people that believe the exact same thing a helping hand. The MSM has really ignored the fact that this was a supportive group. I saw countless people helping others climb thru windows and whatnot. How bout when the crowd parted to let that women led (YAY women!) camo-armored group up the stairs? Moses himself would have been proud.
It's sad but many times when a young woman is killed the husband is often the culprit.
OMG! Was the husband the FBI plant? He could have been planting crazy ideas in her head throughout the entire pandemic. Or even over the last 4 years. Good grief! Back to the basement for me. Looks like my work is not done
Say My Name - because they won't say murdered Ashli Babbit's name.
Lieutenant Michael Leroy Byrd
Mack - The murderer has been named and identified in video images. He'll be thrown under the bus, or suicided, when the time is right.
We have to eradicate the DoJ, its FBI and the CIA, and we have to do it state by state, because we can't do it in DC, nor through the Federal courts.
Lieutenant Michael Leroy Byrd
Michael Leroy Byrd.
"The murderer has been named" - who named him? Link?
Are you a retard? Just lazy? Michael Leroy Byrd
Link?
Do. You. Have. A. Browser? I'm not your mummy. Try DuckDuckGo. Or fuck off.
Too many dots. Was that a url? You look so cool on TV, Barack. Here your spit is all over the place.
What cover-up? I watched it on TV. She got what she deserved.
Radical, let me nip this in the bud. I was a trial lawyer for 30+ years. What is your area of expertise to give a legal opinion?
Mine is Sui Juris Nemo Sapien, and your legal system is a fraid from top to bottom. Parasites and bottom feeders, all.
In that light, your expertise has no standing in my court.
I'm not giving a legal opinion, Mack. I'm giving a visceral, political, and emotional "fuck you" position. That said, your "legal" opinion is full of crap. You're saying the shooter did not fear for his life or others? When did your "law degree" give you the ability to read minds? And as for IDing him -- why? So you and other right wingers can harrass him and threaten his life? The man IS a hero and Babbit a casualty of a failed insurrection.
Finally, the truth comes out. A "visceral, political, and emotional "fuck you" position." At least now everyone knows you are as full of shit as a Christmas turkey. Ive seen swiss cheese that had less holes in it than your moronic, ill-informed diatribe. Thus, I sign off with you. Cannot rationally speak to a fool.
Lol, Mack. I wasn't hiding my disdain for you right wing assholes. And you're calling me irrational? The same guy who thinks Ashley Babbit didn't deserve her bullett? You're the moron, Mack. Climb back under your rock.
> "The man IS a hero and Babbit a casualty of a failed insurrection. And as for IDing him -- why?"
Insurrection eh? Those insurrectionists that stay in single line inside velvet ropes are the worst! 🙄
Was it an insurrection when Democrats encouraged by Pelosi, AOC stormed the capitol, senate chambers 2 years ago during the anti-kavanaugh protest? And how about the "peaceful protests" last year? How about the leftists burning down federal courthouse in Portland? And can't forget "CHAZ". But I guess all that is just "whataboutism" because you don't actually care about people getting hurt or violence - you are totally okay with it and encourage it as long as it's for your political advantage. You created the monster which you only complain about when it fits your narrative.
That's why cops who justifiably shoot get instantly ID'd by Lebron James to millions of his followers while a white trump supporter getting shot by a cop gets forgotten. And then you cry about muh "systemic racism" and "police brutality".
A tough guy. Full of the "fuck you's", right wing assholes", and the ever-articulate "LOL's". In his own imagination, he tells it like it is.
The marks of someone whose daddy wasn't around to teach him how to be a man.
It must suck to have your pitiful future.
This guy "Radical Normal" illustrates how you can find bad people in any part of the political spectrum; he happens to be left like me, but that doesn't excuse him for being evil.
I'd call him a fed bot but they're typically better programmed.
What other unarmed insurrections are you aware of?
You must be a joke, or a plant.
Only a stupid American can claim that someone deserved to be killed.
Not long ago, I was a vocal supporter of the security state. I used to laugh at the idea that there was a deep state. Then, Trump was elected and every imaginable horror crawled out from under the rocks in DC for everyone to see. Now, I just feel like a tool and an idiot. But at least I'm no longer ignorant. That is something I guess.
It is. I was the same way. I truly want the FBI and CIA eliminated. Start from scratch. Our central/Federal govt is a corrupt, dangerous mess
We can add all of the other alphabet agencies to this. We have an agency for alcohol, tobacco and firearms. Three things that are completely legal and one that is in the bill of rights. It should have been pretty obvious that the alphabet agencies were out of control when the ATF came into being.
Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms should be a convenience store, not a federal agency!
Somewhere in this world, ATF agents are drinking, smoking and packing heat while they laugh at us.
How many remember that Janet Reno's ATF agents murdered all those women and children at Waco.... which led directly to Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. No wonder Biden is convinced that "white supremacists" are dangerous. We might finally stand up to the terrorists in charge of our nation.
Do not forget their full name is the BATFE. I'll bet the E make their 4th of July parties fun.
That is just adding insult to injury. I want to know where antifa sources their commercial fireworks from.
So true!! And all these agencies have heavily armed SWAT teams!! Even the EPA. Amazing!!
They had successfully duped half of the US population into believing their propaganda without question. This was a rich conservative tradition that went back for decades.
Then, they decided to openly attack the duly elected president of the United States and the people who supported him. I realize that he was threatening to them but that does seem like a bit of an overreaction.
Now, they have completely burned their credibility with me. It took years for that to sink in. Now that it has, I cannot unsee it. That is quite the accomplishment. I would support any legislation that strips them of their power.
Lucky for us they do not understand the concepts of subtlety or restraint.
Lucky isn't the best way to describe how I feel about this but I can appreciate the sentiment.
Our wonderful FBI...
The FBI knew in advance the Pulse Nightclub shooter (Omar Mateen) and were tipped off by the local sheriff. 53 dead.
• The FBI knew in advance the Las Vegas shooter (Stephen Paddock). 60 dead.
• The FBI knew in advance the San Bernardino Terrorists (Tashfeen Malik). 14 dead.
• The FBI knew in advance of the Sandy Hook shooter (Adam Lanza). 26 dead.
• The FBI knew in advance the Boston Marathon Bombers (the Tsarnaev brothers) tipped off by Russians. 3 dead, hundreds injured.
• The FBI knew in advance of the Parkland High School shooter (Nikolas Cruz). 17 dead.
• The FBI knew in advance of the Fort Hood shooter (Nidal Hasan). 13 dead.
• The FBI knew in advance of the Boulder Colorado shooter (Ahmad al-Aliwi Alissa). 10 dead.
• The FBI knew in advance the Garland, Texas, shooters (Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi). 1 dead.
• The FBI knew in advance of 9/11 that terrorists were training in US flight schools and had plans to fly planes into buildings. 2,977 dead.
• The FBI suppressed a massive amount of evidence concerning McVeigh’s accomplices of the Oklahoma bombing. 168 dead.
• The FBI entrapped General Flynn.
• The FBI knew in advance and facilitated 1/6.
• The FBI is a terrorist organization weaponized against it's own countrymen.
When you have a government which is illegitimate in a way we haven't seen since 1876, and the whole thing is swept under the rug and 30k troops surround the federal government buildings for months...what do you expect?
In 1876, the two parties negotiated out a solution which made neither happy but there was some give and take. Contrast that to now. This government is not working for the people. It's working for itself.
What a bunch of malarkey. You don't negotiate with terrorists. Besides, we had a free and fair election, and if you don't like the outcome, just wait, there's another one right around the corner. It's called constitutional democracy. Too bad the GOP has forgotten what that means.
I did not vote for Trump but You clearly haven’t been following all of the audits and what’s being uncovered in the states of Georgia Michigan and Arizona. Even the Democrats had joined bipartisan committees to hold hearings (Widen and Klobuchar) several years ago raising concerns about black box voting, problems with mail in ballots, voting systems that were owned by foreign shell companies. There are election integrity experts who have been digging into this since 2009. And if you don’t know their names you don’t know what you’re talking about. Dems were all conspicuously silent though this time around since they benefited. Keep drinking that Kool-Aid. I actually blame the media because of course they are not reporting any of this. You have to find it at the local level with investigative reporters. But it takes effort
Bullshit.
That's what all of you assholes say when you've run out of ideas.
Run out of ideas? They have no ideas.
Well, you do seem to know all about Bullshit.
Keep telling yourself that, totalitarian.
Project much? You're the Trumper, which means you're the totalitarian. I believe in elections. You believe in insurrections. I have a brain. You have, maybe, half?
Your Reichstag Fire redux shows how much of a totalitarian you and your shitbag uniparty buddies are. Try your bullshit on someone who doesn't see right through you.
You're not a fellow countryman.
If this is what my resume looked like, no one would hire me.
FBI would.
The struggle sessions would disqualify me.
hahaha :) Session! Very impressive! Usually it's moments ;)
They clearly need more funds to do a better job protecting us.
I'll give you a heart, if you add a "/sarc."
Yes, I was being facetious.
I think the 9/11 count is much higher, considering the first responders.
I'm afraid to click the like button on this post.
I think that is the point.
That was my attempt at humor.
I started to laugh, then took your advice and thought better of it.
I was with you until the last three. Nice list though.
What's the matter with the last 3?
They have to keep the lie of the insurrection up for control and power. Their news media fan boys need to keep it up to carry water for the elites. This January 6 story doesn't get better with age just unravels.
My questions are when did our government start hating it citizens this much? And when does it stop?
Answer To your question:
Since there have been governments. The only difference is they’re not hiding it now.
You have to look at government the way it looks at you: with contempt
They dcanbt hide it anymore. Trump tore the roof off the house and we are all looking in right now. That is what I wanted him to do and he did it.
He did, and the media and the government have nothing but contempt for Americans who want to be left alone
What’s scary isnt that. It’s that at least 50% of Americans are loving what is happening now. They relish it.
Well there were hordes of German who loved what Hitler was doing. A few got it early. Some escaped. I read of a Jewish boy going to the seashore with his graduating classmates and being told. he couldn't swim in the same area as they were. He was distraught and came home and told his parents about it saying he did not live in a country that thought he was too "dirty" to swim with them. They aided him in immigrating to the US to live with relatives. His family all perished during the Holocaust. That is the kind of perception you need to save yourself. It is here today all around us. Can you see it. Only now with globalization there is no space to go to. Time is instantaneous and space is condensed into nothing. Ask the animals. The birds migrating. Ask ASK ASK!
Family legend has it that my great grandfather (who immigrated to the US from Italy) was going to return to Italy to retire. He went for a short visit in the 1930s, and came right back to California. "Nobody is criticizing the government in Italy. I can't live there" was the reason he gave for changing his retirement plans.
Ignorance is bliss
While I enjoy all the give-and-take, here, and agree heartily with some of the commentators, I think you are a mystic, Janet Abbey. Even though it is futile, we must resist.
Yes of course we must resist. I am just following Virilio BTW. He is a phenomenology person in French intellectual circles. We are now occupied #TheAdministrationofFear (Virilio again) and that has turned all of us into collaborators or resisters. We cannot know who the collaborators really are.
What has always impressed me was how many psaychoanalysts got out in time.Many taught at The News School in NYC. What a time to have. been there to study.
You want a revolution without a revolution? This govt will never stop, never give up their goodies, never fix it, never never never. They will destroy our world first and you got it first hand during the lockdowns. A nice taste. Chew on it. Change will deprive them of all their possessions and obsessions.
Non-bloody revolution is difficult but possible, and should always be the aim.
Amen!!
I am going to. go under tho.
Yes. The more contempt we receive the more contempt we mirror back.
It is a matter of how they can manipulate the VELOCITY of this "incurrection" message. Can they gather enough globalization emotional reaction hysteria to be synchronized globally. I dont think so. It is fizzling out. It is yesterdays news and the fish in it are smelling bad. It is not a pandemic like Covid armed with lockdowns and masks and biz closures and FEAR FEAR FEAR OF DEATHI! They need something more flamboyant and sizzling!
Devastating deadly climate change. Brace yourself
UFOs.
I am thinking it might be Covid Delta which is more deadly. And which vaccinated people die at a 50% rate to the unvaccinated. A coin toss eh.
That is a great question. The fatal steps were probably the security state. The FBI AND CIA. They both need constant enemies to pursue to justify their existence. These enemies can be foreign OR DOMESTIC.
Turns out THEY are the domestic enemy number 1.
Turns out?
The State and the People are enemies, always have been, always will be. That is what the Declaration and her Constitution recognize and accommodate.
I don't think they necessarily hate us. Their over-arching goal is to control us.
They may well have other emotions toward us- they may scorn us, disrespect us, think we're stupid...
But they no more hate us than the wolf hates the sheep.
They are ind8ifferenbt to us. Just the way many of us are indifferent to the animals who suffer all their lives so we can eat them. We are commodities for them. That's all.
It's called the Reichstag Fire.
Can't wait for the NEXT big thing.
What the hell are you talking about? The entire world watched the insurrection unfold on live TV. And now you claim "the story" is "unraveling?" That we didn't see the truth with our own eyes? You MAGATS take the cake. When did the GOP start hating our democracy so much?
Hilarious. LOL!
Do you know what an insurrection is?
They weren’t even armed. How do a few hundred, disorganized unarmed people attempt to take power from the largest most powerful military in the world?
Think!!!!!!
Aaaagghhhh
Your eyes are closed. Your ears are covered. You fool yourself, and denegrate others.
Jan. 6 is SO obviously a set-up ruse by the security State, that only a TDS would not see it.
What makes you think anyone here is a Trumper or GOP? I know that doesn’t describe myself but i can only speak for myself. But I believe this is a collective of people who think for themselves and do not believe what the media or government tell us, which is self serving and used to makes us hate each other. If you are interested in learning more than what Chris Cuomo has to say read along. If not move along.
I think none of you have ever been in a real one.
To me one of the most damning facts about our vaunted corporate media is their utter lack of curiosity concerning events when the answers to normal journalistic probing questions might reflect badly upon the agreed group think narrative. They are media, but they are certainly not journalists.
Revolver News is an upstart, having been in existence for just over a year. Yet reading their story, referenced/linked by Glenn, they appear much more capable than ANY corporate media outlet at asking the questions that should be asked. How weird is it that they now do the work that NYT, WaPo, WSJ, etc., USED to do. I wonder whether an industry has EVER self-destructed in less time than the MSM. I can't think of any. They will hang on by telling their minion readers what they want to hear, but they will never be anything but Dem/IC/radical left lackeys again.
Agreed, except for the radical left part.
The MSM doesn't support the radical left?
MSM doesn't support even non-radical, real left. Recall the time when Bernie wasn't a spineless weasel yet. He was practically blacklisted.
MSM supports the monied elites of this country, to the best of its ability to earn money the said elites are willing to spend to propagate their agenda.
Sometimes said agenda coincides with what is a leftist position (like equal rights for everybody). That's how we get Blackrock with a rainbow flag on its logo.
When I see Professor Richard Wolff on MSNBC at least once a week, I will reconsider this answer.
I suspect what you call radical left and what is a radical left may be two different things.
But the elites and their captured MSM only have power by co-opting the massive power we have allowed the State to amass, thanks to those who vote to move further LEFT on the political spectrum, whose left endpoint is 100% State control (Fascism, Soviet/Chinese communism). Moving right on the spectrum, towards LESS State power and more individual freedom, would solve the problem of the elites/MSM/woke/crony-Capitalists having ANY ability to be powerful.
I don't see how the State is moving to the left. If anything, it is more right than ever before. Today, I suspect even St. Reagan would be considered a pinko-commie.
yes
OK, but there is a bunch of nonsense in that Revolver story about the way federal prosecutions work. I think we're all quite aware that sometimes undercover law enforcement or law enforcement cooperators occasionally do more than simply dutifully record what defendants were already going to do. But stating that large numbers of uncharged people identified as person 2, person 3, person 4 etc. must be FBI or FBI cooperators is just something that any defense lawyer knows is wrong. It is far more likely that, for example, person [ ] is someone that discussed joining, but never attended, or someone that attended but didn't enter the building, someone that become a cooperator on Jan. 7, someone they haven't yet identified, someone they intend to charge in a separate case for the same thing...the list goes on. I don't particularly doubt that there were undercover FBI officers present in the crowd. If you are in a room with 5 right-wing miltia members, probably one them is an undercover FBI officer and if you're in a room with 3 white supremacists, you are the only one that isn't an undercover FBI officer. But the evidence touted by that Revolver story is mostly evidence that the author has no understanding of how federal prosecutors go about their work.
You may have points here, but they are at least asking relevant questions instead of carrying water for the FBI.
The Revolver story described some of the PersonX people not as bystanders, but as people who appeared in a webcast, telling the audience of people who tuned in to hear the plans for the Jan 6 events, "you take your orders from US - the people you see on your screen now." (I'm paraphrasing- don't have the verbatim quote in front of me).
So tell us again, you who know how federal prosecutions work, IS that how they work?
Generally, they find a low level person and threaten them with doom so they will give up someone higher in the chain in exchange for immunity or more likely a reduced sentence. They don't come looking for the ultimate target of the investigation until they have a modicum of a case.
That said, this is all in the realm of prosecutorial discretion. They can choose to pursue people strategically if there are good reasons to not prosecute (bc a person is a CI). It'll take a change of administration and a cleanout of the federal security apparatus to get this investigated properly. Meaning, probably never.
FBI knew and did nothing/encouraged and entrapped people? Corrupt.
FBI didn't know and did nothing to prevent it happening? Incompetent.
Any further questions?
Probably both
yes
The ignored, but most relevant fact, is the derailing of the Congressional discussion of voter fraud. This was the only national exposure to the evidence of voter fraud, and it was being presented in both the Senate and the House. I was watching those proceedings on CSPAN which had just started. The anchors shifted from those proceedings to the protestors outside of the capitol. One of them remarked that the Capital Police had been told not to engage with the protestors, the was some conversation as to why that might be. I only know that once the incursion happened that the discussion of voter fraud swiftly ended, never to be resumed. In fact it seemed that to bring that subject up was to be complicit with the "armed" insurrectionists. A term of art which has specific and drastic legal consequences.
Yes. The uncovering of the extent of the fraud terrified the deep state. They needed a diversion. They created one. The truth will come out
No it won't. The election system was already compromised such that evidence of the validity of ballots doesn't exist. One can't prove fraud OR non-fraud now.
Which is all they needed.
I don't think the situation was different on January 5th or any time before that, either. The election system absent firm ID is entirely unverifiable. You can make suppositions and deductions "more votes than # of registered voters in this precinct" but not much else. Signature matching is a joke. The ability to compare machines for spurious results is there, but an argument can be made that machines that weren't at the same location wouldn't have the same results anyway.
Anyone who believes in the system is the problem at this point. We don't have elections. We have dog and pony shows called elections.
The FBI is the leading purveyor of child porn. The FBI is probably the leading purveyor of terrorist plots. The CIA was heavily involved in cocaine distribution. The ATF runs guns.
I’m beginning to think the agencies in DC don’t have our best interests in mind.
*FBI walks in carrying a pizza
Chris Hansen: "Come sit down, I want to ask you a few questions."
Do not forget all the corrupt narcs at the DEA!
Glenn writes:
"But now, reverence for security state agencies reigns."
My instant response to that is:
"Only in the twisted minds of the ultra-rich's propagandists."
Seriously, I think whatever "reverence" may have existed for "security state agencies", that's been waining since the start of the Iraq war and is probably now at an all time low among the general population. Simply, we, collectively, just aren't that stupid, and we're better informed now (thanks in large part to people like Snowden, Assange, and, yes, Glenn).
From my personal experience, I agree with Glenn. The Democrats/Fake Resistance Left just can't get enough of the spooks (former or otherwise) on the TV. WIth the rise of Russiagate, the alphabet agencies have been elevated to the status of reverence never seen before.
Now, Is there a connection between Alphabet the company and the alphabet agencies. Are they telling us exactly what that company is? <g>
"Now, Is there a connection between Alphabet the company and the alphabet agencies. Are they telling us exactly what that company is?"
Good catch! Yes, why yes they are!
https://blog.google/threat-analysis-group/tag-bulletin-q1-2021/
The important thing to note here is the complete absence of the worlds largest known hostile actor, the united states federal government, from all of "googles" findings.
The prefect absence of any mention at all of the ongoing global cyberwar started and led by the deep state and all their five part appendages.
The filtered by alphabet for content before their "TAG" team publishing anything publicly for propaganda channels consumption cone of silence is extremely telling if you know where to look.
WTF is that list? Terminating accounts because they post something about something? Man, this is just crazy. Well, YT CEO bragged about suppressing the non-official channels, so not too surprising.
It is the express purpose of a collegiate intelligentsia to pervert their society to serve only them, creating two classes: the class of degreed experts who cannot be questioned, and the slave caste who doesnt know what they are.
Half of the nation, not only listened to all the Russiagate garbage, but they willingly embraced it, even after Mueller and Horowitz said it was all a tall tale. Glen is right. Certain segments of the population embrace whatever the IC tells them.
I am getting at this in my newsletter FOCUSFREE as #Virilio goes into it thoroughly. It is because of globalization and instantaneous communication of video-audio. The media can pump it up world wide into an emotional reaction of simultaneous emotional hysteria. It is not about feelings, it is about REACTION and it is total. Anyone who was aware of the TWILIGHT movies and the sex idol RobertPattinson and the hordes of women sleeping out to be in line first to get a ticket to see the opening of the next film in the series knows this completely.
Lord lady. I grew up in the Beatles era. Sleeping in line to get a ticket isn’t some new phenomenon.
Here, Glenn indicates he agrees with at least part of my assertion I make in the comment above:
"Anyone not asking these questions or, worse, trying to delegitmize them, is a propagandist and has no business calling themselves a journalist."
YEP, those same people who he cites as having reference for security state agencies ARE propagandists.
Yes they are intent in protecting their turf.
Meh, I think the Pandemic behavior, BLM behavior, amongst a long list of other post event behavior by the vast majority of Americans- argues otherwise than what you are saying. They continue to bite on everything hook, line, and sinker.
The media feeds them the bait on irresistible flies.
I wish you were right, but I fear that traditional Dems, misled by the DNC and media, have been so throughly propagandized that they embrace the security agencies.
Unfortunately the traditional Repubs, misled by the RNC and media, have been reinforced by the propaganda in their innate trust in the security agencies.
Optimism is a fine thing.
Can I ask you: how many of these "aren't that stupid" people have taken the not-vaccine?
Unfortunately, there's ample reason for people to have been skeptical about the vaccine - and the virus.
I think that as the numbers of vaccinated people in the western world crosses into the hundreds of millions category, "what we know" about the vaccine's safety can move into the pretty well undeniable stage, though some will, I'm sure, believe media is covering up serious problems.
1. It's not a vaccine. The media, the people you imply are not "covering up serious problems" redefined the term (like they did with torture (right, Glenn?)) to include an experimental gene therapy.
2. The WHO says that the clinical trials for this not-vaccine will be completed in 2023. So not even they know anything worth knowing about its safety. Anyone who tells you it is safe is lying to you, because nobody knows.
3. Well, it's not like the media have ever lied about anything before, is it?
4. You missed the point; half the western world have taken it because their TV (i.e. "the media") told them it is safe and they'll be killing grandma if they don't. They told them they'd not be allowed to travel if they didn't. They told them they'd not be allowed to send their kids to school if they didn't. They told them they'd not be allowed to go to work if they didn't. They told them they'd not be allowed to go to church, to a movie, to a concert or a play, or a funeral, if they didn't. Is this the vaunted freedom our troops are killing random Aghanis, Syrians, and Iraqis to protect? I hate to say anything negative but I'm starting to doubt your claims to being better informed.
For your points 2 and 4:
We are "doing the experiment" in real-time; hundreds of millions have taken the vaccine, it's orders of magnitude larger than any clinical trials ever done, and therefore we can and are learning faster than, and better than, any trial.
By now we know; at least the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are safe and very effective, work against most of the currently know variants, might work against the remaining known variants - we're still looking at emerging data on that - and the complications are super-rare, well understood, and not life threatening.
As a scientist, I don't look to the media for information... Non-scientists can look to real science too. Trouble is, some of us, like Janet here, just aren't prepared to understand it all, and instead of looking deeper to understand it, she just presumes she knows and jumps to the wrong conclusions - as illustrated by her comments here. So maybe not all of us can really look to the actual science itself. But perhaps looking to actual scientists can be helpful.
So, "as a scientist" you'll not only be well-informed about, but keen to inform the other commenters here about the current crisis of reproducibility in science.
"as a scientist" you'll know that we hanged people after World War two for doing experiments on human subjects "in real-time" and you'll be extremely careful not to venture onto that territory ever again.
"as a scientist" you'll know that being a scientist does not relieve you of all the ills that flesh is heir to, being wrong, greedy, corrupt, short-sighted or stupid, remaining among those ills to which scientists are not immune.
Your whole position in this thread, hosted on a venue where the primary purpose of this column is to illustrate all the many and varied manners in which no authority can ever be trusted with anything, not even the most basic things such as "what actually happened?", has been to encourage people to trust the authorities. I'd accuse you of being a fed bot except that I perceive you actually believe what you are saying. I've little doubt you consider yourself a liberal but for some odd reason you do remind me of Britney Spears.
Rant on, buddy!
THIS is pure bullshit:
"Your whole position in this thread [...] has been to encourage people to trust the authorities."
Your reading comprehension is in the toilet.
It's been said "right wingers don't do nuance and don't have time for detail," so I suppose they have a point.
Firstly, I don't have a single overall point, I have simply commented on individual issues one at a time. And secondly, if there is any overall point, it's to look at evidence and don't be an idiot - that "don't be an idiot" part can also be less succinctly said as "pay attention to what you're consuming and in analysis, if you don't already know the subject well, educate yourself, but as you educate yourself beware of what you don't know you don't know because that way lie dragons." (Case in point, Janet here confusing and conflating the Moderna vaccine with their treatment for those who already have caught Covid-19 - she didn't know they had a treatment and therefore thought all the discussion was about a vaccine - oops!)
Right. It is not a vaccination. The other lie is asymptomatic contageous is erroneous. There is no such thing as having a positive and being asymptomatic. If you are sick that is defined by symptoms.If you are not at home groaning in bed but walking around YOU ARE NOT SICK and need not wear a mask or practice social distancing. All that theater was about OBEDIENCE, identifying who obeys and who does not. Some are still masking they are so brainwashed.
"Asymptomatic carrier" is newspeak, invented by a focus group of highly paid PHds who were tasked with replacing the word healthy.
Asymptomatic carrier means HEALTHY.
"Healthy" only in quotes; potentially still infectious and dangerous to others.
Yes. I have ewondered for a long time if vaccinated people can carry a virus. I saw the Jane Goodall documentary that came out a few years ago. Students started coming to Gombe to study the chimps with her and started experimenting wildly with the chimps creating all. sorts of "accidents." The chimps suddenly got polio and it was terrible. Of course all the students had been innoculated but tht was what made me wonder as so many chimps died and were paralyzed and crippled.
Orwell.
Yes made up.Relabeling works.
You don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about.
For a perfect historical example, lookup the sad tale of Typhoid Mary.
Asymptomatic carriers who are themselves infectious are a fact of life. Face reality.
Asymptomatic spread is not a driving force behind pandemics and there are studies that show this. Scientists have conflicts of interest as much as any other profession. Big pharma and government linked people sits on the board of most major publications. What gets published is controlled by a few people. Who gets research grants is controlled by a few people.
Mary happened a long time ago. We do not know much about her case or her health or anything much to help us with Covid. She is just one case long ago.
I was just about to end my break and get back to work when this popped up.
I haven't time to respond to more but just this one bit:
"1. It's not a vaccine. The media, the people you imply are not "covering up serious problems" redefined the term (like they did with torture (right, Glenn?)) to include an experimental gene therapy."
I don't have any idea where you got that one from but it's not based in fact. If I had the time I could explain to you how the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines actually work - there's no "gene therapy" going on there whatsoever.
Scuzza, there's no change to DNA which is what a gene therapy would be. Think of it this way... making a protein in your body takes three steps, DNA, mRNA, and then the "protein translation" - making a new strand of amino acids. They are roughly equivalent to a recipe (DNA), gathering the ingredients (mRNA), and cooking the meal (protein translation). These vaccines don't change the recipe or change DNA in any way.
What they do is lay out the ingredients (mRNA) for your body to make something that looks like part of the spike protein. After the protein translation "cooks" up the small, inactive part of the spike protein, it is recognized as foreign by your immune system and it creates antibodies against it. Those antibodies cross over to attack spike protein on live coronavirus.
So they don't change DNA, they hijack the protein production apparatus in a short term way. Which is not to say it's zero risk, who knows, we haven't done it that often before. I do take some reassurance that there have been a fair number of clinical trials of other mRNA vaccines (like Zika) with some patients approaching a decade and no wacky safety issues reported in them.
Yeah, they've been mocking Lamarck for two centuries and claiming that nurture cannot change DNA, too, but we know now that it does affect genetic expression. You want to be part of their experiment then fine, you go right ahead. I won't try to stop you, I wont try to persuade you, and sure as hell I won't coerce or force you either way. But I'll take my chances with the WuFlu and we'll see who laughs last.
Thisb "vaccine" is experimental and it is an ACCIDENT waiting to happen.
I can't wait.
What we know about the vaccine's ten year safety will remain zero until ten years have passed, which is highly relevant in the context of whether or not to vaccinate an eleven year old who had almost no risk in January before we vaccinated the rest - and not has practially zero risk given that we're approaching 75% vaccination rate.
The "almost no risk" part is flawed.
Moving forward in a recent future where kids are going back to school, children will be, as they always have been, the singularly most active vector of society for transmissible viruses of all sorts, including any then extant strains circulating. And, given the new variants that are both far more contageous than the original SARS-CoV-2 strain that launched the pandemic and reportedly also more damaging, AND given the many documented examples of seriously negative outcomes that sometimes arise in children, from permanent dysfunctions and even death, it's truly nuts to be so dismissive of vaccination for them.
Do we know as much as we'd like to before making such a decision? In medicine we never really know as much as we'd like. Is this a good call now given what we do know? I don't know the answer to that but I suspect it is.
Remember, FAR too many of us are focused exclusively on defining a "risk" of pandemic virus being death while forgetting / overlooking / being dismissive or ignorant of all the myriad other harms it causes, including permanent loss of taste, permanent heart damage, permanent lung damage, etc. ... You seem to be one of those people.
Who you calling nuts - apparently, someone who was "dismissive of vaccination for them", which wasn't me.
However, if cases are near zero, risk is near zero, full stop. In the further context of about 10 deaths per million total versus the 200 times worse adult death rate, a clear answer starts to form.
In contrast to this review of data, everything you say is conjectural. I thought we were supposed to follow the science, not predict stuff out the thin air of the many many things we can choose to fear?
If there were "no risk" then all of them would not have been so demanding that THEY WILL NOT BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE. No legal lawsuits can be filed against them. THEY ARE IMMUNE! You are not.
The accountability stuff was asked for at the beginning, before much else was known, and it was a suitable request, though it should have been reworeded to be a bit more temporary.
"No legal lawsuits can be filed against them. THEY ARE IMMUNE!"
Where can I find THAT vaccine?
https://news.yahoo.com/cdc-panel-confirms-likely-association-235202936.html
A CDC advisory panel says there is a "likely" connection between mRNA coronavirus vaccines and rare cases of heart inflammation. But as Omar Villafranca reports, health officials say the benefits still outweigh the risks and are urging young people to roll up their sleeves.
But weren't they safe and effective a week ago? If you said otherwise you were a conspiracy theorist. Who is Omar to determine which risks I should take? Our public health officials have violated the principle of informed consent.
The doctors and research scientists of integrity and critical pointsnof view that have been CENSORED advised that onlyb old people with underlying morbitities should get vaccinated. Perhaps younger people with medical issues. But not healthy people. They have been shut up by the media, their respective universities and fear of losing grant money for research. End of career that.
It is a Virilio ACCIDENT waiting to happen. We have no idea what this for sure accident will be. Or even if it will be multiple. We cant know. But bet the farm on the fact that it is coming.
Don't bet the farm. Plenty of things have some risk without being fated to tragedy. Even vaccine "failures" only cause like 1 in 10,000 cases of bad things, usually. LIke the H1N1 vaccine that caused 1 in 10,000 cases of debilitating narcolepsy. That is bad, but like COVID it is also not the end of the world.
There is more than just one vaccine. mRNA is not the only way to do it. Vector vaccine (Sputnik V) works completely differently.
The talk of 'the vaccine' is itself misleading and muddying the waters.
That is the strategy. Change the labeling to vaccination and people believe the label, the image, not the REAL. Like fake boobs it is just the same. The plastic ones are much prettier.
I disagree about the plastic ones.
Maybe you wont when you are older. LOL!
Re: Janet Abbey
I have (3) queries to make Janet (no pun intended) (:-})
1) Does breast reduction surgery involve either fake or plastic boobs?
2) Are surgically replaced breasts, chosen as a result loss due to disease or accident, included within the scope of your metaphor?
3) Which vaccine is represented best by your "fake boob" metaphor?
As Usual,
EA
Yes it is. But this govt wants us to have the US vaccines as they have RNA/DNA experimental observations to come.
J&J is not mRNA technology.
Right it is not. But it does coagulate the blood. So if you are on blood thinners you are at risk. If you are not on blood thinners who knows if you should be or at least eating lots of garlic that will keep you unemployable. Or you might be borderline. Are you? Your age? Your physical health? Dont know? Go do a mile on a tilted treadmill. If you are doing it easily I wouldn't worry. If you get out of breath I would worry about the J@J one. Russia's and China's seem safe.
The media has lost all integrity. Even when they might be telling the truth we dont trust them.
And they have no one to blame but themselves for it!
A US military doctor asked in the flu epidemic of 1918 "What if our boys had not had so many vaccinations for diseases that were not fatal, would their immunity have been better?" Good question. Now children cant get childhood diseases. No measles, mumps, chicken pox, etc. We were so happy to get them and stay home for 2 weeks. The doctor came, diagnosed us, put a poster on the front door to quarantine us and we were happy. We even ran toexpose ourselves when our first friend in the neighborhood got sick.
Tends to work the other way. The entire developing world had resistance to early COVID, likely because of BCG vaccine for tuberculosis. You tend to get better immunity against random things from more vaccination, not worse.
Considering the SPEED with which it was developed I have serious doubts about it. No human trials which I have done in the past and have little respect for but still......This "vaccine" is a Virilian ACCIDENT waiting to happen. And it may take a very long time. After all I smoked cigarettes from age 16 to 26. I am 87 and still feeling the effects of it even more now than at any time in the past few decades. I know now the consequences will be with me the rest of my life as far as respiration is concerned and who knows what else. When you reach a certain age almost everything that makes you feel old, sick, etc can be brushed off asb "What do you expect at your age?" When you rationalize that way you throw away your chances at getting better and probably take meds for the symptoms. They are seductive and you do feel like taking them. DO NOT TAKE THEM!
I am about to get on this at my new newsletter FOCUSFREE.
So, art works for or is heavily invested in the medical industry.
Wrong.
I'm an Earth scientist.
I have taken some computing technology I designed and built for NASA and applied it to a few fields in the life sciences, but I'm not in that industry.
However, as pertains to this discussion, is: I am not a media influenced idiot, and I am educated enough to understand the science involved.
You sound self-educated. I admire that. And, by your own (constant) admission, you have educated well. So well, it seems you have self-arrived at that high plateau of 100% accuracy in your knowledge, so that all that is left for you in life is to educate others (and mentor journalists), especially those "media influenced idiots,' you know, the ones who deign to disagree with you, here or there.
Btw, doesn't "earth scientist" describe every adolescent?
Lol whats an earth scientist? Geologist? I work in healthcare and I'm not taking the vaccine. Most of the medical industry is a racket and COVID-19 is a racket that would make the mafia proud. Drug companies are convicted felons, but you must believe their data. They took no risk(they have no liability, got paid for R&D, used tech developed by universities, name their own price and get reimbursed), the consumer assumes all risk, free advertising and artificial market due to mandates. Nothing but a scam.
Nice question
Waning since the 60s. The Pentagon paper revealed the lies about US involvement in Vietnam.
Not without furor and scared whistleblowers
yes.
Good point. I stand corrected!
You use your quote out of context. (The new reverence is coming from the Left.)
M. Art, what percentage of "ultra-rich" are evil?
What percentage of peope in a 100% corrupt society are not evil?
Again, sorry for my mis-use of the completely unsubstantive word, "evil." I destroyed my own purpose in asking M. Art to tell me what to think about those who are (a lot) wealthier than I, and how many of them I need to watch out for.
Wealthy people are not your enemies. They are their own worst enemies. it cocoons them. Makes them indifferent.
It makes them not poor, which leads to a better life in many ways. Even Chairman Mao, at the end, saw the light: "To grow rich is glorious." We should celebrate the savers of capital. They will save the world from State-caused mass poverty.
Deng said that not Mao
You know wealthy is not the same as the former wealthy aristocratic class we had at one time as we mimicked Europe. There were all kinds in that class and at the same time there was an invisible demand on them to do things that would benefit the poor. Dante's Beatrice's father built a hospital and that was an example for her and all those who knew and respected her father. Others imitated. For whatever motivations the aritocratic class was not all made up of playboys. Today the wealthy donate to accepted charities, the non-profits, and certain good benefits come out of that. They are tax write-offs and that contaminates the giving of the gift.
Depends if you are measuring those who act visibly, those who act invisibly, those who are indifferent, those who are asleep, those who are.................
Evil is invisible. Our media shows us visible violence to hate. But never reveals invisible violence. Learn to see the invisible.
Yes, my use of "evil" was hyperbolic, confusing, and unnecessary, or so I thought would be obvious. (But M. Art considers the "ultra-rich" to be so, I suspect, as if wealth itself is the problem. We ALL know the solution to that!)
You have already been doing a wonderful job of teaching me to "see the invisible."
EVIL is invisible. Baudrillard has written a wonderful short book on #TheTransparencyofEvil. Me? I consider this Biden administration EVIL. Trump was the bull in the China Shop. Not a totalitarian or fascist. But they are and they do it invisibly with friendly caring words that mask the REAL. Once you see invisibility you cant unsee it and your daily life gets ruined as you noticre it in all sorts of ways you ignored before you learned to do it. Think Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri shot for walking in the street instead of on the sidewalk. Obviously the cop just didn't like him. But what was EVIL? I saw EVIL just leaving his dead body in the street like road kill. If an ambulance had come right away, pretended to try to help him but could not, and he was taken to emergency and pronounced dead I dont think it would have started a riot. Maybe I'm wrong but that's my feeling. It was just the sick way of leaving his dead body in the street on a blistering hot summer day for THREE FUGGIN HOURS that was intolerable to me and obviously everyone else whether they consciously knew that or not. That complete contampt for George, that I would hate if it were a dog or cat left like that, but a young man. Just Road Kill. Mexicans have been doing this for 30 years now to kidnapped young girls, gang banged on video strangled and left like road kill a little ways off the road in the desert. Hundreds and hundreds of them turned into snuff films. That is EVIL. BLM did nothing EVIL in their riots. Neither did anyone on Jan 6.
You know better; that "reverence" is coming mostly from neo-liberals and a few old-school liberals.
As for percentages of the ultra-rich who are "evil", that would surely vary by how one defines who is among the ultra-rich. Is it those who are within the richest 0.1% (defined in 2018 as those with $50M of wealth and above), or does one need to be a billionaire? Etc. And, it depends on how we define "evil."
I'd love to lead - or even participate in - a study to figure that out. ... Got any funding?
Yes all that fake fluffy reverance. Now Juneteenth another National Holiday to placate. MLK instead of Malcolm. Now we have sdo many National Holidays that none of them matter at all anymore. Like a car full of candy. Who cares.
You dissemble. You know better what I am asking you. I will rephrase the question for our audience:
You constantly denigrate the "ultra-rich." You must have some sense that not ALL wealthy are....out to violate the rights of the less wealthy. Some wealthy are good people who do NOT use ther wealth to hold others down, right? You must have some sense, some idea in your head of the "scope" of the problem, i.e. what percentage of "ultra-rich" (however YOU choose to define the cut-off) do you ESTIMATE (in your obviously vast knowledge of...well, everything) is close to reality?
People building wealth these days are really interested in the multiplication of numbers ( read money) and not so much in what they can buy with it. Trump has shown us how boring it is. He had so much. But enough was not enough and he realized that and did reality shows. Then ran for pres and won. Then he saw how all his money couldn't help him AT ALL. Just useless after a certain amount for comfort and pleasure. So he sees that MONEY is irrelevant. What good is it if you live in a corrupt world where everyone is kept down. No one can fully live if they are only surviving. That is what the Biden administration will go after. Survival. Not LIVING.None of them know the difference between these two words. Biden knows he is just a cardboard paper doll. He knows. He has allowed it. He knows that too. What a terrible end for him. Gates and Soros and Schwab are pulling the puppet's strings and Schumer is enabling it. I think Pelosi is aghast. And AOC is being groomed to replace the aging tired old Bernie. I dont think she knows it.
Money is just a store of value. It is necessary for any free market to work.
Ahem!! Is not the decades of failed Chicago School Friedmannian Reagan popularized "trickle-down" "free-market" BS and feckless "blind faith" been trumpeted long enough? Think about the lately provided added economically global horrors by our boy Larry Summers' addition of pre-planned austerity implemented through the fine offices of our appointed Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin (the champion of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall law) , after his tenure at the IMF, and its benefactor The World Bank, while getting the bugs out of his austerity concept experiments; the ones that intentionally destabilized the economic infrastructures of Central and South American societies with bogus financial aid loan programs designed to force liquidation and privatization of their public utilities to the highest bidder in an international auction. You guys, and especially girls, should all have Sir Lawrence Summers' name burned into your patriotic memories. Prior to the aforementioned deeds, he was the Dean of Harvard U.; the guy who made very disparaging public remarks about the inferiority of female intelligence.
Anyway, that's my rant for the day, and I hope no-one's offended.
As Usual,
EA
#TheTransparencyofEvil #Baudrillard. It is thrilling.
I think the FBI does more than "shape" media these days. It sure seems like they are directing a lot of it (along with the other swamp members).
Yes. The FBI is an IDEOLOGICAL STATE APPARATUS FOR THE PURPOSE OF REPRODUCING THE IDEOLOGY OF THE RULING CLASS. Read Althusser - pdf on this - the great reader of Marx for the 20th century.
Why you'd think they a division of state propaganda. They do, it just doesn't have such an obvious name.
Remember the first "controversial" article from Revolver? They pointed out that Officer Sicknick was not murdered and there were several other inconstancies. The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, et all wrote a fantastical account of a great "insurrection." Tellingly, only one of them has had to issue retractions so far.
The questions being posed by yourself and Carlson, etc. are reasonable questions. The fact that the media are protecting the FBI should concern everybody regardless the scenario. These last few years have convinced me that our DOJ and FBI are a fully politicized, wholly corrupt deep state which will do ANYTHING to protect themselves including leaking to the media, disappearing emails and text messages, altering evidence and arresting/intimidating political enemies. Clapper lied to congress and he's a left media hero but Roger Stone had his door kicked in at 5am with a SWAT team and a CNN news crew. Welcome to Brazil.
We are a collection of benighted cowards and whores, easily and eagerly manipulated by the "deep state," who are very few.
Mmmm this sentence is poetry to me.
It's David and Goliath for sure but I'm going down swinging.
All true!!
Prior to Trump, I had resigned myself to the fact that politicians and prestige media were thoroughly corrupt. Now I have to toss in the federales, too! What truly surprises me is how vicious, immoral, and conscienceless these groups are. They will lie, defame, and misrepresent to destroy anyone who could threaten their grip on power. Truly, we are dealing with sociopaths.
MSM: It's a wild conspiracy theory!
Me: Oh? It must be true then.
MSM: This issue will have dire consequences if we do not address it right now. It is a crisis!
Me: Oh? Okay so it is bullshit.
Absolutely how I react now
Exactly