Category Archives: US

Trump coup attempt in motion as fascists storm Congress, police watch on

Trump supporters have stormed the US Capitol with reports of shots being heard inside the building.

Congress has gone into lockdown and the police have allowed the assorted fascists to breach all the capitol buildings, according to reports.

The floor of Congress is being evacuated and gas masks distributed to the country’s elected officials

The kid glove treatement of the all-white Trump rabble is in stary contrast to the treatment meted out to BLM or left-wing demonstartors.

It is not lost on those viewing the scenes how different the response of law enforcement would have been if this was a mostly Black crowd.

Earlier ni the day the protesters heard from Trump who egged on the crowd to do their worst inhis hour long diatribe of lies about how the election was supposedly stolen.

The Trump supporters are even more enraged by the events in Georgia where the Democrats are set to win both Senate seats, giving them control of all three branches of the US government.

Despite the best efforts of Republican white supremacists to suppress the Black vote in the state, it was the turnout of African-Americans that has swung the election in Georgia in the Democrats’ favour.

All the political leaders of the US are in the capitol and the police appear to have lost control of the situation as “protesters”, some alleged to have concealed weapons, roam the buildings.

This is a Trump coup attempt

This is political intimidation that has all the hallmarks of fascism in action.

A republican congressman has described the storming of the capitol as a coup attempt. He is right.

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A 6pm curfew has been declared by the mayor of Washington DC but many will be asking why the capitol was not properly protected in the first place following days of warnings about violence from Trump loyalists.

It is time for Trump to be arrested for sedition against the republic.

Kenosha cop who shot Jacob Blake in the back faces no charges

Rusten Sheskey, the police officer in Kenosha County, Wisconsin, who shot Jacob Blake sparking off days of protests which led to white supremacist vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse shooting dead two BLM protesters, will not be charged with any crime.

The news was announced by Kenosha County district attorney Michael Graveley. The announcement was greeted with dismay by Blake family members.

“This decision failed not only Jacob and his family but the community that protested and demanded justice,” said the family’s lawyer, Ben Crump.

The white policeman who shot Blake several times in the back after attending a domestic incident with other officers, has left Blake semi-paralysed and he will never walk again.

Expected protests on Tuesday, many businesses had been boarded up and National Guardsmen were stationed at the court house.

Sheskey has been on administartive leave since the shooting, on full pay. So while he has been on holiday, another Black family has been grieving as a result of racist police violence in the US.

Rittenhouse was arraignment today also, and pleaded not guilty to the six charges against him, which included first degree intentional homicide.

In the protests that turned into an anti-police uprising, the armed Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time, was seen colluding with police and even after he killed two protesters was able to depart the scene with no intervention from the police.

Minneapolis police killing of Dolal Idd and raid shows their brutal racism

The shooting dead by police of Dolal Idd last Wednesday in Minneapolis was the first since the murder of George Floyd by the same police force.

Police have released a body cam video they say shows that Mr Idd fired first, but he shows no such thing.

All that is seen in the video is the man’s car window blowing out, but that shot could equally have come from the other side of the car as it could from within the vehicle. The police claim a firearm was found in the car.

No further body cams have been released by the police to help to clarify the situation.

Following the killing, police officers descended on the family home of Mr Idd in a raid that has left the Somali-American family shell shocked.

The police forced their way into the home screaming orders, putting teenagers into handcuffs as well as Dolal’s father Bayle Gelle when he came rushing down the stairs after hearing his wife screaming.

The only ones not put into cuffs were the young children. The police did not say what they were searching for and it was only as they were leaving the home that they saw fit to inform the family that Dolal had been killed by police.

The killing by police of Dolal Idd
Raid by militarised police on the family home

Breonna Taylor statue smashed but $25k raised for bronze replacement

In a little less than two weeks after the installation of the memorial statue to Breonna Tayor, racists vandals have attacked and smashed it.

The memorial was sculpted by white artist Leo Carson, taking him several months to complete the work.

Breonna – an emergency room medical technician – was killed by police in Louisville Kentucky upon exercising a so-called “no knock” warrant in March 2020.

The bust took pride of place near Oakland town hall, California.

Protests to demand justice for Breonna took place all over the world, including in the UK.

Say Her Name: Breonna Taylor

This latest act of racist vandalism sadly follows similar incidents across the US, notably in Washington DC when Trump supporters and fascist from the Proud Boys racists street gang sought out and destroyed memorials to other African American individuals killed by police officers.

Leo Carston said of the attack: “I built it to support the Black Lives Matter movement, but that also makes it a target for racist aggression.”

Since the attack took place, $25,000 has been raised to fund a bronze replacement The original was made from less sturdy clay with ceramic finish.

Donate today: Breonna Taylor statue gofundme page

Three Breonna cops now fired but still walking free

In other news, of the three officers involved in the killing of Breonna, one has been fired (detective Brett Hankison) and another two are slated for termination – Detective Myles Cosgrove (one of the shooters) and Detective Joshua Jaynes (who got the search warrant from the judge).

None of the police have been charged with the actual killing of Breonna. Hankison was found guilty of wanton endangerment because one of his bullets entered a neighbouring apartment.

Proud Boys thugs attempted lynching led to stabbing incident

A Black man – Phillip Johnson – has been arrested and charged with assault with a dangerous weapon for allegedly stabbing four people, thought to be members of the fascist Proud Boys street gang.

The incident happened on the Trump supporters’ protests in Washington DC at the weekend.

Turns out the fracas outside Harry’s Bar where the fascists thugs were meeting was an attempted lynching, judging by the New York Times report of the demonstration.

The Times reports that a number of the violent far-right gang had gathered at the bar and spotted a black man dressed in black and decide to attack him, even after three Trump supporters implored them to leave him alone.

The pack attacked and start beating the lone black man, ounching and kicking him.

Johnson managed to get free of the mob twice:

The NYT report continues: “At that point, the man pulled out a knife and began slashing with it as more demonstrators piled onto him. The man broke free twice, but was then grabbed and beaten again. Police officers intervened after the man was face down on the ground. Several protesters yelled that the man had a knife and had stabbed someone. The man’s face was swollen and bloodied when police officers picked him up.”

The paper says that minutes before the attack on Johnson, the fascists had targeted two black churches – the United Methodist Church (established in 1836) and the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, ripping down BLM flags outside the places of worship and burning them.

The pastor of the United Methodist Church, Rev. Dr. Ianther M. Mills, described the scene as reminiscent of a cross burning in the Deep South:

“We are a resilient people who have trusted in God through slavery and the Underground Railroad, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement,” she said, “and now as we face an apparent rise in white supremacy.”

Brandon Bernard executed – Trump lines up 4 more black men for murder

Brandon Bernard was murdered by the barabaric US government last night.

Bernard was in prison for the alleged killing of two people in 1999 when he was 18 years old.

This is the first Federal execution to take place for 17 years and the first during the period of a lame duck presidency for 130 years.

Four more black men are being fast-tracked for state murder by the Trump administration.

This is the same Trump who has been encouraging violence against his political opponents and praised a white supremacist youth – Kyle Rittenhouse –who shot dead a BLM protester.

NBC reports:

Bernard’s attorney called the execution “a stain on America’s criminal justice system.”

“Brandon made one terrible mistake at age 18,” said the lawyer, Robert C. Owen. “But he did not kill anyone, and he never stopped feeling shame and profound remorse for his actions in the crime that took the lives of Todd and Stacie Bagley. And he spent the rest of his life sincerely trying to show, as he put it, that he ‘was not that person.'”

Giuliani in antisemitic and racist meltdown in latest pitch to steal election

Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani who you might remember from the latest Borat film, as the sleazy man with his hands down his trousers, is apparently still not embarrassed about appearing in public.

With a man like this tasked with trying to steal the election from Biden and Harris, we already knew the chances of Trump making any headway were slim to non-existent.

But that’s not holding back Giuliani.

He held another press conference yesterday, at which he made more unsubstantiated and wild claims about supposed election fraud and one of the companies that supplies counting machines – Dominion.

Republican racism anti-semitism goes into overdrive

As is typical of the American right, his comments were laced with straight up racism and anti-semitism, as he claimed that George Soros was funding BLM, Antifa and that Cuba and China were in on the ‘steal’ efforts.

His deranged nonsense was of course not for the consumption of ordinary folk, but the rabid near-fascist base of diehards, whose whole world collapsed when the reality dawned that Trump lost by more than five million-plus votes and also massively on the electoral college vote tally.

Giuliani meltdown was literal

But that wasn’t what caught the eye of the assembled journalists, who still had visions of the previous presser, which was held in a parking lot with the Trump media team sandwiched between a pawn shop and a crematorium, outside Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Nope, this time it was even more bizarre.

As the so-called lawyer spewed his anti-Semitic bile and full-on racist garbage as he spun his story about Dominion (the voting machine people) and how they were run by Venezuela’s Chavez (from the grave presumably), before correcting himself by remembering that the president of Venezuela is a man called Maduro, a weird brown juice started dribbling down the side of his face – it was his hair dye!

Rudy Giuliani meltdown

Is this a thing with men in the Trump orbit, and of course Agent Orange himself who spends tens of thousands of dollars on his appalling hair do?

And here’s that video, in case you missed it – 30 seconds in:

Racist Michigan Republicans try and fail to disenfranchise black voters

update 19 November 2020 EST 11am

The Washington Post reports that Trump rang Palmer on Tuesday to pressure her to rescind her vote certifying the election results for Wayne County. The certification has already gone to Michigan’s Secretary of State, so the racist Republicans are too late with their attempt to disenfranchise Black voters.

Two racist Michigan Republicans on the Wayne County Board of Canvassers tried – and failed – to disenfranchise black voters in Michigan yesterday.

It is the job of the board to certify the vote, but instead the GOP representatives tried to disenfranchise the voters of Detroit, where more that three-quarters of the citizens are black.

Trump has lost the US presidential election but that is clearly not stopping his supporters in various US states from trying to steal the election.

The latest such attempts – as we have come to expect – is dripping with thinly concealed racism.

William Hartmann and Monica Palmer said they were happy to certify votes in the state, with the sole exception of the heavily black Detroit region covered by Wayne County.

Racist Michigan Republican Monica Palmer

Racist Michigan Republican William Hartmann

Only white votes count in racist Republican mindset

They then offered a ‘compromise’ of sorts by suggesting they could certify one of Detroit’s majority white suburbs, but not the city itself.

There are four people on Board of Canvassers and their duties are normally simply a matter of procedure. However, this election cycle the Republicans are trying to turn them into a weapon to undermine the will of the electorate.

Trump lost the vote oin Michigan, which means that challenger Joe Biden – now the president-elect – grabs all of the state’s electoral college votes.

But the attempts of the racist Republicans were forestalled by citixens joining the Zoom meeting en masses to object to the undemocratic manoeuvres of the Republican party representatives.

One outraged citizen – local entrepreneur Ned Staebler, was scathing:

“The Trump stain, the stain of racism that you, William Hartmann and Monica Palmer, have just covered yourself in is going to follow you throughout history,. Your grandchildren are going to think of you like Bull Connor or George Wallace,” said commenter Ned Staebler.

He was joined in the attack on the Republican racists by Wendell Anthony, the president of the Detroit chapter of the NAACP.

The two Republicans later reversed their vote as the storm of protest against them raged.

But before that had happened, Trump was quick to endorse the disenfranchisment of black voters, describing it as “a beautiful thing”.

The next time you hear or see an Americasn justifying wars for ‘democracy’ somewhere in the world, remember that America was built on slavery and oppression and that the legacy lives on today.

Unfortunately for the white supremacists, there attempts to turn the clock back on voting rights has been defeated on this occassion.

Racist Michigan Republicans have friends in Georgia where Lindsey Graham leans on officials to fix vote

We expect more underhand tactics from the Republoicans in the Georgia run-off for the all-important Georgia elections for US senators.

Lindsey Graham has been leaning on the secretary of state in Georgia to fix the vote in the recount demanded by the sore losers in the Republican party.

There need to be international observers at US election counts to call out any more racist interventions from Trump supporters, although it should be said that the good people on the ground are maintaining a vigilant watch on the white supremacists.

If any one is any doubt about the racism that courses through the Republican party, then the stuff Hartmann shares on Twitter should clear things up – he loves haring racist memes about black people (see the thread):

Million MAGA March losers fail to mobilise for fuhrer Trump

updated 10:00 GMT 15 November 2020

The million maga march is a flop – official! The Trump diehards haven’t quite managed the million they had claimed would be in attendance.

Instead, there was a rag-bag showing more like in the hundreds, not even the thousands.

Trump, who didn’t exactly do a lot of work for the people in his four years as president, is doing even less now.

Indeed, it was when he was on the way to play golf at one of his nearby courses that his cavalcade ran into a gaggle of his enthusiastically deranged supporters who swarmed his car.

Some of his fans were impressed by his apperance; others not so much. This from the Washington Post at the scene in DC:

“He drove right past me. I saw him. He waved right past me,” one man said, squatting to collect himself.

A group of women huddled around their phone, looking at a video they took of Trump’s appearance.

“He looked fake,” one said. “I’m still shaking.”

Among those that turned out were the fascist thugs that otherwise go by the name of the Proud Boys.

Here you can see the Nazi thugs initiating a new member of the tribe (try not to laugh):

https://twitter.com/RexChapman/status/1327726287620886528?s=20

They couldn’t find any black people to beat up on and looked rather disconsulate (turns out the cowards waited until nightfall to do that).

As usual at gatherings of the Trump meat-heads, there were no masks in evidence on Freedom Plaza, so the covid virus was certainly having a good day out.

After they had finished with the bonding thing, the Proud Boy thugs started rioting, pretty much on the order of Trump:

Fascist-enabler Trump didn’t hold back on Twitter with his call for violence, in what the Huffington Post described as a ‘stunningly vicious post’:

ANTIFA SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back. Antifa waited until tonight, when 99% were gone, to attack innocent #MAGA People. DC Police, get going — do your job and don’t hold back!!!

Million MAGA March of racists ‘heartwarming’ says Trump

Trump called the gathering of the far right and various hangers on “heartwarming”, as you would expect of the fascist enabler.

But the Trump well-wishers are not having the streets to themselves – far from it.

BLM and anti-fascist counter-protesters showed up early and made sure ‘LOSER’ signs were in view for the arriving ‘millions’.

There’s no sign yet of Alex Jones and his gang of militia terrorists who said on Thursday they would be showing up today.

Meanwhile, the TikTok generation is raining on Trump’s parade again. The #millionmagamarch hashtag has been taken over by the youth of America, with a proliferation of pancakes (Biden flipped four states, Trump none) to make the point about who actually won the election.

The MAGA crowd earlier in the day ripped down BLM memorials to Black men mudered by police. Those memorials have largely since been repaired, as the smell of buring MAGA flags fills the air:

One of the many MAGA flags that burned last night as the Million MAGA March descended into fascist-inspired violence. 20 were arrested. Trump’s neo-Confederate white supremacist base seems to have forgotten that since the civil war Washington DC has been a black city. Don’t come back!

Registration of black people and young surged after George Floyd murder

From TargetSmart

The entirety of the Trump presidency has been marked by uncertainty and volatility for our country, exponentially more so during the coronavirus pandemic. As we focused our efforts on understanding how a pandemic which has seen people of color impacted more severely than white Americans, the creation of an economic recession, and an inspiring movement for racial justice and equality might impact the November elections, we turned our focus to voter registration and turnout trends.

While we will have a more comprehensive analysis to share soon, I wanted to share some of our initial findings, as I believe they at once demonstrate the challenges that lay ahead of us while providing hope that we can and will prevail.

As we shared in our recent analysis, voter registration slowed immensely in the first several weeks of the pandemic taking hold in our country. Election offices were closed, and in-person voter registration efforts were halted. Our analysis showed that, while those who were registering to vote were slightly more likely to be white, Republican, and older as compared to prior to the pandemic, the overall gaps were minimal and generally no more than a few hundred voters per state.

Following the activism that took place after the murder of George Floyd and demands for justice and equality, along with states gradually re-opening around the country, we took this opportunity to check-in on voter registrations and reflections in the electoral process.

The earliest sign came from Georgia, as the state began allowing voters to cast early ballots in person for their June primary. We found a significant surge in turnout among Black voters, who comprised 35% of early ballots cast before the demonstrations, and 47% after they began. Youth intensity also surged as well, with voters under the age of 30 seeing their early vote share almost double in a day:

Voter registration in Georgia

And all the hard work paid off in driving Trump out of office. But we will need to stay on the street to win justice.

https://blacklivesmatteruk.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/trumpthefinger-1.mp4
F**k off Trump