The Shooting Gallery: Police Violence MEGATHREAD

[The Minsky Moment]

Speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday, Trump identified New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland as places in need of federal agents, describing those cities' mayors as "liberal Democrats".

Yeah. He's going to send these forces to cities with Democratic mayors and Democratic governors, because he doesn't really care about protecting federal property. He just wants to gee-up the situation so he can run on "law and order".

Unleashing the Freikorps to punish the reds, what could go wrong?

[The Minsky Moment]

The ACLU obtained a federal court order restraining the Portland police department from arresting or threatening to arrest journalists or legal observers.  DHS then responded by "surging" into Portland as they are not covered by the order.  The ACLU is now moving to apply the TRO to the Feds; hearing to be held Thursday, July 23.

[Syt]

https://www.heraldnet.com/news/doughnut-taunt-leads-to-jail-at-pro-police-rally-in-everett/

Man arrested in Everett after taunting police with doughnut

The 18-year-old is accused of fourth-degree assault. Video shows he didn't touch anyone.

EVERETT — Videos from a pro-police rally Friday night shared on social media show an 18-year-old man being arrested after he taunted people, including sheriff's deputies, by dangling a doughnut hanging from a stick in front of them.

He was booked into the Snohomish County Jail for investigation of fourth-degree assault and released the next day after making bail of $1,000.

The young man, from Duvall, had been a more daring counter-protester of the "Back the Blue" rally on Friday, which had been organized by the Snohomish County Republican Party. Featured speakers were candidates for state office, a local Young Republican and Sheriff Adam Fortney. Deputies estimated more than 300 people were in an attendance.

While most of the counter-protesters kept their distance and stayed on the other side of the street, the man was visible in the middle of the rally, holding up a skateboard with "BLM" and "ACAB" (which stands for All Cops Are [expletive]) written on it, and yelling "Black Lives Matter" as the crowd chanted "All Lives Matter" and "Blue Lives Matter."

Caution: This video contains potentially offensive language.

Around 8:20 p.m. on Friday, the man approached a group that included sheriff's deputies and marshals assigned to patrol the courthouse campus, one of whom was a lieutenant wearing plain clothes. The suspect reportedly shoved the stick toward the plain-clothes deputy, and marshal James Simoneschi pushed him away before arresting him, according to a police report obtained by The Daily Herald on Monday through a public records request. In court papers, the suspect was listed as 5-foot-5 and weighing 120 pounds.

There were no reports or video evidence reviewed by The Daily Herald that the man touched anyone during the rally.

Olushola Bolonduro, 26, one of the organizers of the counter-protest, said he witnessed the encounter with the doughnut, which took place after the rally ended and after most people had dispersed. From his perspective, the man didn't do anything to deserve being jailed.

"I thought, 'Oh, it's just a kid pulling a prank,'" Bolonduro said. He said he would understand if the deputies were annoyed, or if they gave him a warning, but arresting him seemed petty.

A teenage girl who took part in the counter-protest recorded the encounter on video. The footage starts with the man skateboarding toward a group of people who remained gathered after the "Back the Blue" rally had ended, holding a stick with a doughnut dangling from a string.

"I wanted to know if any of you guys wanted a bite?" he asks two Snohomish County sheriff's marshals in the video, as he waved the doughnut at them.

A younger looking man jokes he already had "like 10 doughnuts" earlier in the day.

The man holds the doughnut up higher in the air, in front of the plain-clothes lieutenant.

"Hey, any of you bootlickers want this?" the man says, louder.

The sheriff's lieutenant immediately becomes upset.

"Get that (expletive) away from my face or I will whoop your (expletive)," he says. "Get the (expletive) away from me."

Simoneschi then shoves the man from behind. "Get your (expletive) out of here, man," he says.

Meanwhile, the girl is still recording. Simoneschi arrests the teenage man. The girl asks why he's getting arrested, then gets shoved by the other deputy, who earlier was laughing at the doughnut prank.

"Back off! Back off! He assaulted a lieutenant," that marshal shouts. "You back off or you'll go to jail."

In his report, Simoneschi wrote that the man had pushed the stick toward the plain clothes lieutenant's face. The lieutenant was standing on a set of concrete stairs with a retaining wall and hand rail behind him, unable to back away, according to the report.

That's when Simoneschi pushed the man away, he wrote.

"I observed (the man) move closer to (the lieutenant's) face and that (the lieutenant) could not retreat any more or move out of (the man's) way," Simoneschi wrote. "I pushed (the man's) arm and (the man) away from" the lieutenant, his report said.

After, the young man "asked another protester, 'did you get it' and she stated, 'yes I did,'" Simoneschi added.

There had been no issues at the rally until counter-protesters crossed the street to confront the attendees, sheriff's spokesperson Courtney O'Keefe said in an email.

"The individual in the video was also intimidating and verbally attacking 'Back the Blue' rally attendees as they were leaving the area Friday night," she wrote.

On Saturday, the girl related her experience in a public Facebook post. She said she brought the doughnut as a joke, and that earlier in the night it had been well received by people gathered on both sides.

One person went as far as to thank her for bringing humor to "tense events" like Friday night's, she wrote.

The young man, who turned 18 in February, has had previous run-ins with the police, as a juvenile. In January 2019, he was booked for third-degree assault when he swung his arms at an officer while being treated for a suspected alcohol overdose at a local hospital. In July 2018, he reportedly was "angrily yelling profanities" at police when they arrested him for malicious mischief, harassment and fourth-degree assault. And in 2014, when he was just 12, he hit a school staff member and threatened a Lynnwood police officer, according to court documents.

Video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wFAAKVipTciqBJZTGLbyR0NoeFwxckM0/view

"Fourth Degree Assault" in Washington appears to be "unwanted touching" which, as far as I can see, didn't happen in the video.

I thought the change of tone was jarring. At first the cops are laughing him off, till the Lt goes ballistic, and they immediately fall in line.

[Tamas]

To be fair if somebody switched from seemingly jovial to calling me a bootlicker I'd lose my temper as well. Then again I am not a police officer.

[Tonitrus]

I would think one of the basic requirements one should have as a PO is to maintain one's professionalism and bearing  even when called a 'bootlicker'.

[Tonitrus]

It just reinforces my view that DHS needs to be immolated.

We should be able to mock the Russian camouflage-wearing internal security services* without hypocrisy. 


*And at least they have the fucking basic courtesy of wearing a camouflage pattern that is distinctly different from the regular military.

https://www.stripes.com/news/us/esper-is-worried-federal-agents-in-camouflage-uniforms-in-portland-look-like-us-troops-1.638354

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Mark Esper is worried federal agents dressed in camouflage uniforms on the streets of Portland, Ore, could be mistaken for U.S. troops, the Pentagon's top spokesman said Tuesday.

"There are some law enforcement that wear uniforms that that make them appear military in appearance. The secretary has expressed a concern of this within the administration that we want a system where people can tell the difference," Jonathan Hoffman, the chief Pentagon spokesman, told reporters at the Pentagon.

The concern first surfaced in June during the racial injustice protests in cities throughout the country when law enforcement agencies responded to control crowds. Some of those agencies dressed in gear that made them look like military. The issue has resurfaced with the recent unrest in Portland, where federal law enforcement officers from agencies under the Department of Homeland Security are wearing camouflage uniforms and equipped with body armor and helmets that are almost identical to those worn by American troops.

[jimmy olsen]

The unconstitutionality of the Portland arrests

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1285738001004482561.html

Today on TV, the Deputy Director of the federal paramilitary force in #PDX discussed the infamous van video. He described a textbook example of an unconstitutional arrest.

But... he doesn't seem to know it.

That is a BIG PROBLEM. Let's unpack this. It's important.


Here (again) is the video of the van encounter.

T. Greg Doucette
@greg_doucette

Portland, OR: federal troops doing a casual roadside abduction, wordlessly seizing someone and putting them into an unmarked van before driving off

15 July 2020

And here's the press conference, in which a reporter (at 35:02) asks @DHS_Wolf "what level of probable cause are you getting" in these encounters? Wolf turns it over to Kris Cline, Deputy Director of the Federal Protective Service.

Youtube video

Cline says "you're probably talking about the van," and goes on to give the government's account of what happened.
The agents, Cline says, were interested in the man in the video because, earlier, they'd seen him "in a crowd and in an area" where someone ELSE was aiming a laser at the eyes of officers.
I don't know if shining a laser at someone is a federal crime.

It doesn't matter.

The police do not have probable cause to arrest you just because you are standing near someone else who may have committed a crime.
We've all heard the saying that people shouldn't be treated as "guilty by association." Well, that's also the law. To wit, Ybarra v. Illinois, 444 U.S. 85, 91 (1979).



Cline goes on to say that the agents followed the man in the video—whom they had no basis to arrest—to a calmer location, away from the courthouse, because they wanted to question him.
So far as the Fourth Amendment goes, if that's all they'd actually done, there wouldn't be an issue. The police are allowed to walk up to you and question you, in a "consensual" encounter, so long as a reasonable person in your shoes would think it's ok for you to walk away.
(Side note: These encounters often don't feel consensual in the moment, even though a court will often deem them consensual as a legal matter after the fact. That's a problem for another day.)


Maybe these agents planned to execute one of those "consensual" encounters, maybe not. But in any event, Cline admits—and the video is clear—that they did something very different: they forcibly removed the man from the scene.
Again, not because of anything he did.

According to Cline, the agents grabbed the man because they saw *other* people coming toward them and felt unsafe.
They wanted to leave. They didn't want to let him leave. So they grabbed him and put him in a van and took him, in Cline's words, "to an area that was safe for both the officers and the individual to do the questioning."
Cline doesn't say explicitly where they took the man. But we know from other reporting that another person taken off the street in similar fashion, Mark Pettibone, was taken inside the federal courthouse.

And Cline does explicitly say that the man he is describing (the man from the van video) was questioned for approximately 20 minutes -- something unlikely to have happened out on the street, given the agents' apparent fear of the surrounding crowd.
And then, after those ~20 minutes, the agents "released the individual." Why? Well, let's let Cline explain:

Youtube video

"They released the individual because they did not have what they needed."
Translation: They did not have probable cause.
(Note how this plays out. Eventually, government lawyers show up and apparently say to the agents -- you gotta let this guy go, you have no lawful basis to detain him.)
Ok. Those are the facts, according to the Deputy Director of the federal police force deployed in Portland (and, apparently coming to a city "lead by Democrats" near you).

As far as the Fourth Amendments goes, there's two important points here:
1. Cline admits the agents NEVER had probable cause to arrest this person. That's why they let him go. They didn't have probable cause when the lawyers showed up. They didn't have probable cause when they put the man in the van. They never had it. And they aren't saying they did.
2. This man was arrested.
This isn't one of those law school exam types of cases where you're supposed to say "Well, *maybe* he was arrested."

This is one of those bar exam types of cases where they ask you "Was this an arrest? (A) Yes (B) No."
The answer is yes.
To wit, Dunaway v. New York, 442 U.S. 200 (1979), where the Supreme Court considered whether the police violated the Fourth Amendment when, without probable cause, they took someone "into custody, transported him to the police station, and detained him there for interrogation."



The answer is yes.



Just as in Dunaway, this man was "taken" from the street "where he was found," put into "a police car" (sorta), "transported to a police station" (inside the courthouse), "and placed in an interrogation room," where he was questioned.

That is an arrest. Period.



So.... the most troubling part of Cline's statement is NOT when he acknowledges the lack of probable cause.

It's when he says that this "simple engagement" was perfectly constitutional because "it's not a custodial arrest."

Youtube video

That statement is glaringly wrong.
It's been wrong since at least 1979.
Let that sink in.
The person in charge of this newly beefed up, paramilitary federal police force DOES NOT KNOW WHAT AN ARREST IS.
That means he doesn't know when he or his officers are committing one... illegally.

In violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Like they unquestionably did here.
Look, you can't possibly conduct arrests lawfully if you don't know your conducting them in the first place.
And if the Deputy Director of this new federal force will say on national TV that what these officers did was legal because "this wasn't an arrest," that raises serious concerns about what his officers are doing out on the street. When the cameras are on, and when they're not.

That's it.

[The Minsky Moment]

City of Portland, a defendant in the ACLU case and currently subject to a TRO, filed a brief yesterday supporting the ACLU's position against their federal co-defendants - not something you see everyday.

Quite simply, the City objects to federal defendants targeting non-violent protesters,
reporters, and legal observers. The City also strongly objects to the continued unlawful presence
of heavily armed federal officers on Portland streets despite the City's repeated requests to the
contrary. The actions of federal defendants are escalating violence, inflaming tensions in our
City, and harming Portlanders who seek to engage in non-violent protests in support of racial
justice. Serious and credible allegations have been made that the federal government has
effectively kidnapped people off Portland streets, among other abuses of power. The force used
by federal defendants has allegedly also resulted in at least one very serious injury to a person
shot in the head with an impact munition. The City rejects the unlawful actions of federal
defendants and believes that a temporary restraining order is necessary to prevent further abuses.

Docket is now littered with declarations from journalists attesting to have been shot and shot at by unmarked Feds (with mon lethal ammo)

[jimmy olsen]

ACLU wins in Portland

https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1286457637161377792

BREAKING: A federal court just issued a restraining order on the federal agents in Portland, Oregon.

We said we would deploy the full firepower of the ACLU in this fight to save our democracy — and we meant it.

https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/imperial-wars-always-come-home?r=bi90&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=twitter

Imperial Wars Always Come Home
Patrick Wyman
7 hr   
31
4
There's a person I think about from time to time.

We don't know his name, his exact age, or his precise occupation. But we do know when, where, and how he died: March 29th, 1461, near the village of Towton, in Yorkshire in northern England, the victim of a massive blow - probably from a poleaxe, a wicked axe blade mounted on a six-foot handle - that destroyed the left side of his face. It left behind only fragments of bone where his eye socket and cheek had been, and probably killed him instantly. His mutilated corpse was then stripped naked and thrown in a mass grave along with several dozen other similarly mangled bodies, where they all remained for the next five centuries.

Towton 16, as the owner of these battered remains is known, died in one of the largest battles of the Middle Ages: the Battle of Towton, one of the decisive engagements of the Wars of the Roses, a decades-long period of civil strife and occasional open war that afflicted England between the 1450s and 1480s.

This was the last battle for Towton 16, but it wasn't his first. He was an older man, probably in his 40s, and he was no stranger to violence. Just below the caved-in left side of his skull, a long, old gash ran along his jawbone from cheek to chin: a healed cut, probably from a sword, delivered by a right-handed assailant many years before. It would've left a vicious band of scar tissue running along his face, the kind of trophy that marked Towton 16 as a hard man amongst hard men.

The Bloody Cost of Medieval Warfare
Towton 16 was one of the older men in the mass grave: Most were between 24 and 30, strongly built, and like him familiar with war and violence. There were many such hard men in England in 1461. England had been at war for generations. Its long conflict with France, the Hundred Years War, had only reached an end eight years before. Prior to that, decades of war had taken thousands upon thousands of Englishmen across the Channel to serve in garrisons in Normandy and Aquitaine or burn and slaughter their way across French-held territory in central and northern France. War was a generational pursuit in mid-15th-century England, a career that produced huge numbers of trained and hardened soldiers.

When that war ended in abject failure in 1453 and English politics exploded in civil war soon afterward, due in no small part to failure in France, those out-of-work soldiers didn't stop knowing how to do violence. The nobles who had recruited and led them on foreign campaigns remembered how effective raw force could be. Towton 16 was of an age to have fought in France; so were many of the perhaps 8,000-10,000 who died at Towton that day. A great many of the others were the sons or nephews or grandsons of soldiers. Their weapons and equipment - longbows, poleaxes, two-handed swords, armor-piercing daggers, expensive suits of plate armor - had been produced for and developed over the course of that long, brutal conflict in France. Overseas adventurism helped produce both the tensions that tore English political society apart and the bodies of trained and capable men who slaughtered each other in huge numbers in the course of resolving those tensions.

Towton 16's crushed skull, and the thousands of men who died with him that day, are a good reminder that imperial wars never stay overseas. They always comes home sooner or later.

The last four years have been a period of numbingly rapid change in our politics, a critical juncture containing the seeds of many different potential future paths. That rapid change has built on a much deeper structural foundation rooted in everything from demographic turnover and shifts in partisanship to full-on breakdowns of the formal and informal institutions that make up our political system. This adds up to a full-blown legitimacy crisis for the system as a whole. It's a great deal to take in, even if we choose to put aside the raging pandemic for the moment and concentrate on the purely political. We won't be able to grasp the full implications of everything that's happened for years and even decades to come.

There's a lot to all this, many different threads leading in a bewildering array of directions and encompassing intertwined themes ranging from race and economic structure to policing and foreign policy. It's frankly overwhelming, particularly in an age of constant informational bombardment.

There is a common thread tying together many, if not all, aspects of our ongoing series of crises: These things can be understood - at least partially - as the consequences of empire coming home to roost.

Even by the standards of 2020, recent events in Portland, Oregon - a city I know well and deeply love - still have the capacity to shock. They've showcased the deployment of unidentified federal agents in military-style camouflage, armed with military-style weapons, who have beaten and tear-gassed protesters. This same paramilitary force has also occasionally snatched people off the street in unmarked vehicles and employed (or plan to employ) mass surveillance tools, including drones. The current administration has indicated that it sees Portland as a testbed for these tactics and deployments, with every intention of using them on a broader scale nationwide.


Zane Sparling
@PDXzane
Federal police strike protester with baton, use pepper spray and tear gas outside courthouse in Portland
July 19th 2020

30,430 Retweets77,127 Likes

To put it mildly, this is not good. Portland is hardly under siege by violent anarchists. We've seen mild vandalism of federal property and a few businesses in a restricted section of the city, coupled with largely peaceful protests against police brutality (a particularly vexing problem in a left-leaning city with right-leaning law enforcement institutions). For all but the most committed authoritarians, this is not a sufficient reason to deploy what amounts to a new paramilitary federal police force, much less to let them off the leash to beat, gas, and detain American citizens at will.

This is American policing shorn of any accountability and reduced to its most fundamental, animalistic drive: to maintain a particular social order, benefiting a particular group of Americans, through the open application of violence.

This is deeply troubling. It bodes really, really poorly for the future of the United States if we have a ready-made internal security apparatus for a more competent authoritarian to utilize in the future, staffed with people who are willing and able to do violence to their fellow Americans.

I used the term "shocking" a moment ago, but it really shouldn't be. We saw a dress-rehearsal at Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. last month, preceded by waves of police violence against protesters across the country, preceded by locking up would-be migrants in what amount to concentration camps...it's a long list of things, whether we choose to focus solely on the past four years or on a longer causal chain stretching back decades. But we can't make sense of either current events or the longer-term antecedents if we restrict our gaze to the United States proper.

The United States, in its restricted territorial sense, is the seat of a global empire. This shouldn't be controversial: The country maintains an archipelago of military bases and other holdings everywhere from the Arctic to South America, from the continental US to Central Asia. Its troops are actively engaged in combat operations across the Middle East and Africa. With a couple of hours' notice, its military forces could be engaged at practically any place in the world on an enormous scale. Technologies change over time, and so do imperial styles; in fact, no two empires - even those existing at the same time - are ever identical in their structures, their ability or willingness to project power, or how they justify their existence to themselves and others. Empire is a spectrum or a continuum, not an either/or proposition, and it's a little bit like the old saying about pornography: You know it when you see it. The United States is an empire, and nobody who works seriously on the subject of empire would be likely to argue otherwise.

Empires usually benefit the people who live in the imperial core. Trade concessions, direct resource extraction, plunder, imperial administrations that offer employment opportunities to a bureaucratic class, a professionalized and well-funded military: all of these things are inducements to expand and maintain an empire, and there are many more, not the least of which is ideological. Wielding power makes people feel good. Imperial elites, of course, benefit most of all: American empire remains and has been a bipartisan project, one beloved of both parties' foreign-policy establishments and the Washington, D.C. "Blob" since World War II and at various stages before then. American global hegemony wasn't an accident, but a consciously constructed and pursued policy that operated on multiple fronts and via many different prongs. It's embedded in the dollar's dominance, free-trade agreements, climate regulation (or lack thereof), and many other things. Overseas imperial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the current programs related to the War on Terror are just visible symbols.

But it's not hard to see that the American imperial project is in trouble. Iraq didn't end in a resounding victory; Afghanistan is still ongoing; the War on Terror has produced a massive group of special-operations warriors on constant and secretive deployment along with an expansive campaign of unaccountable drone strikes; and the Trump era has sounded the death knell of anything like American soft power overseas.

At times like this, when the empire abroad starts to come apart, domestic blowback is a common consequence. Empires, and imperial failures, rarely stay out of sight and out of mind if they become an ongoing pattern. The tools of empire don't stay overseas, trained solely on those designated as the empire's enemies; they find new targets, new uses, in the hands of people looking to grab the shreds of power left behind as the empire collapses in on itself.

Because I spent so long working on the later Roman Empire and its political disintegration, I'm deeply wary of making too explicit a comparison between it and the present-day United States. It's too easy to make an overdetermined, square-peg-into-round-hole type of argument simply because it's available and I know it well.

But one area where the comparison makes a great deal of sense lies in the role of the frontier.

There are a lot of different ways of understanding the end of the Roman Empire in the west: barbarian invasions, internal dissension, economic collapse, some combination of the above, or a gradual slip into imperial senescence. The one that's always made the most sense to me focuses on the imperial periphery.

The Roman Empire's frontier zones were a space dominated by the Roman army, not just as a military force but also as a cultural and economic institution. When the people living beyond the frontiers - barbarians - interacted with the Roman Empire, they were really interacting with its army. Sometimes they fought it, sometimes they supplied it with food and supplies, and most often, they joined it. The result was a distinctive shade of frontier culture focused on the Roman military, but with a healthy dose of "barbarian" - wearing trousers, using Germanic words, and so on - mixed in. This culture encompassed both sides of the border, creating a zone of intense interaction stretching well into both the barbarian lands and the Roman Empire.

In the later stages of the Roman Empire's existence in the west, it's often hard to tell the difference between a force of rampaging barbarians and a Roman field army. Both drew their recruits primarily from people living beyond the frontier. They used the same kinds of swords and wore the same kinds of helmet: Even the famous Sutton Hoo helmet from 6th-century England is just a Roman cavalry helmet (a Spangenhelm) with a cool-looking mustachioed face mask added. Roman soldiers spoke a variety of camp Latin that was generously spiced with Germanic words. Plenty of barbarian raiders had served time in the Roman military; it's not hard to imagine that some barbarian recruits into the Roman army had probably raided Roman territory at some point before they joined up. Even Roman soldiers recruited inside the empire's boundaries were often descended from recently settled barbarian groups.

The upshot of all this is that rather than seeing a series of barbarian invasions that brought foreign invaders into the Roman heartlands, we should instead think of what happened as the transposition of frontier culture from the periphery to the imperial core. We can't really draw a line between the "barbarian" and Roman military, because there wasn't a firm distinction; the two bled into one another, and it's easier to think of this as a militarized and ethnically distinct frontier culture. This culture, and people who had been brought up with it and molded by it, was what moved, not a distinct series of barbarian ethnic groups who were unfamiliar with Roman ways and practices.

The Roman frontier was a violent place. It was, after all, a militarized space. When the frontier and its military culture expanded into the formerly peaceful Roman core, violence came with it. A military aristocracy that derived its position from its war-making capacity replaced the Roman civic elite; where the latter survived, it assimilated to the new, militarized aristocratic culture. Armies tramped through the interior, sacking and burning cities like Rome and Carthage. It's a safe bet that the average folks of lowland Britain, coastal Spain, and fertile North Africa didn't welcome the sight of the frontier coming toward them; that meant violence, blood-stained swords, armored men rifling through their possessions, burning huts, and much more.

When we see Border Patrol agents wearing camouflage and helmets, carrying M4s with optics, rigged up like they're about to go on patrol in Ramadi or the Korengal Valley (or deal with a migrant caravan in the southwest), that's empire coming home. The viciousness of their handling of immigration during the Trump era, complete with threats of gunfire, concentration camps, and consistent dehumanization, has been a preview of their handling of American citizens. So too have been the various misdeeds of American soldiers overseas.

Even leaving aside the fact that the mishmash of federal agencies providing these paramilitary forces are stocked with veterans of overseas conflict - about 30 percent of Border Patrol agents are veterans, for example - the equipment and us vs. them way of approaching conflict are straight out of the imperial frontier. The fact that these paramilitary policemen aren't actually soldiers isn't as relevant as the ways of thinking about force and power, and who constitutes a legitimate target for violence, that empire produces. At this point, the periphery has entered the imperial core.

When we see armed agents of the state beating a Navy veteran with batons, tear-gassing moms in bike helmets and the mayor of Portland, and planning further deployments to Chicago and Albuquerque, I can't help but think of that man who spent five centuries buried in a mass grave at Towton, of his old wound and crushed face. Is that where we're heading? Is it inevitable that the tools of imperial war will be even more explicitly turned against people here at home?

All empires fall. When they do, the violence and terror they've wrought on others has a way of coming back around.

[Syt]

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1286477992672268289?s=20

"They knocked the hell out of him. That was the end of him" - Trump about Mayor Wheeler being teargassed.

[Razgovory]

Trump's response to the Portland protests.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1ELuUzct3A

[merithyn]

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1286477992672268289?s=20

"They knocked the hell out of him. That was the end of him" - Trump about Mayor Wheeler being teargassed.

I'm no Wheeler fan - I'll be voting against him in November - but this is bullshit. What it did was show Wheeler that his tactics prior to the feds showing up were uncalled for and wrong. And fuck Trump. Just fuck him in the eye. 

[Admiral Yi]

Shootings, one dead, buildings on fire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peag3gWCRM8

Not good stuff.

[merithyn]

This is going to get worse before it gets better.

[Eddie Teach]

This is going to get worse before it gets better.

Good news, everyone. It's going to get better!