AmeriKKKa

[pErvinalia]

Can't be far from Civil War: The Sequel.

[Sean Hayden]

Putin's loving this eh

[Sean Hayden]

And here's Tucker Carlson justifying murder, because of course he is. This is the most watched show on the most watched "news" network. Fox News is dangerous, fascist propaganda.

Tucker Carlson defends actions of teen charged in killings of Kenosha protesters
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/ ... ittenhouse

How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”

In any sane country people would be very shocked by this.

I don't have the words to describe the level of pathetic this represents. --the guy's got all the depth of a soup spoon

[Hermit]

And here's Tucker Carlson justifying murder, because of course he is. This is the most watched show on the most watched "news" network. Fox News is dangerous, fascist propaganda.

Tucker Carlson defends actions of teen charged in killings of Kenosha protesters
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/ ... ittenhouse

The rightwing Fox News host Tucker Carlson has defended the actions of a 17-year-old who was arrested and charged with murder after two people were killed in Kenosha, Wisconsin, as white vigilante agitators shot at Black Lives Matter protesters.

Kyle Rittenhouse, from Antioch, Illinois, 20 miles south-west of Kenosha, had taken to the streets of Kenosha with a rifle after protesters marched demanding justice for Jacob Blake, a young Black father who was shot and gravely wounded by police on Sunday.

On his TV show Carlson – who has a long record of making racist and inflammatory statements, triggering an advertising boycott – said that Rittenhouse’s actions were understandable given the violence and property damage in the city.

“Kenosha has devolved into anarchy because the authorities in charge of the city abandoned it. People in charge from the governor of Wisconsin on down refused to enforce the law. They stood back and they watched Kenosha burn,” Carlson said.

He then added: “So are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder? How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”

I'm sure Tucker Carlson's regards the murder of a couple of random protestors by vigilantes as a valid method of maintaining order when no one else would. Nothing to do with skin colour, of course. I am certain Carlson would have condoned the murder of some participants of the original Boston Tea Party.

[rainbow]

And here's Tucker Carlson justifying murder, because of course he is. This is the most watched show on the most watched "news" network. Fox News is dangerous, fascist propaganda.

Tucker Carlson defends actions of teen charged in killings of Kenosha protesters
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/ ... ittenhouse

How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”

In any sane country people would be very shocked by this.

I don't have the words to describe the level of pathetic this represents. --the guy's got all the depth of a soup spoon

Puckered Arsehole are the words I use to describe him.

[Brian Peacock]

--the guy's got all the depth of a soup spoon

I still think you're being a bit generous there.

[Svartalf]

yeah, I was thinking more of a coffee spoon...

[pErvinalia]

Or maybe a spork.

[Seabass]

The FBI warned for years that police are cozy with the far right. Is no one listening?

I was an FBI agent who infiltrated white supremacists. Too many local police don’t take the far right seriously – or actively sympathize


For decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has routinely warned its agents that the white supremacist and far-right militant groups it investigates often have links to law enforcement. Yet the justice department has no national strategy designed to protect the communities policed by these dangerously compromised law enforcers. As our nation grapples with how to reimagine public safety in the wake of the protests following the police killing of George Floyd, it is time to confront and resolve the persistent problem of explicit racism in law enforcement.

I know about these routine warnings because I received them as a young FBI agent preparing to accept an undercover assignment against neo-Nazi groups in Los Angeles, California, in 1992. But you don’t have to take my word for it. A redacted version of a 2006 FBI intelligence assessment, White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement, alerted agents to “both strategic infiltration by organized groups and self-initiated infiltration by law enforcement personnel sympathetic to white supremacist causes”.

A leaked 2015 counter-terrorism policy guide made the case more directly, warning agents that FBI “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers”.

If the government knew that al-Qaida or Isis had infiltrated American law enforcement agencies, it would undoubtedly initiate a nationwide effort to identify them and neutralize the threat they posed. Yet white supremacists and far-right militants have committed far more attacks and killed more people in the US over the last 10 years than any foreign terrorist movement. The FBI regards them as the most lethal domestic terror threat. The need for national action is even more critical.

In recent years, white supremacists have engaged in deadly rampages in Charleston, South Carolina, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and El Paso, Texas. More ominously, neo-Nazis obtained radiological materials to manufacture “dirty” bombs in separate cases in Maine in 2009 and Florida in 2017, which were only avoided through chance.

But in June 2019, when Congressman William Lacy Clay asked the FBI counter-terrorism chief, Michael McGarrity, whether the bureau remained concerned about white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement since the publication of its 2006 assessment, McGarrity indicated he had not read it. Asked more generally about this infiltration, McGarrity said he would be “suspect” of white supremacist police officers, but that their ideology was a first amendment–protected right.

The 2006 assessment addresses this concern, however, by summarizing supreme court precedent on the issue: “Although the First Amendment’s freedom of association provision protects an individual’s right to join white supremacist groups for the purposes of lawful activity, the government can limit the employment opportunities of group members who hold sensitive public sector jobs, including jobs within law enforcement, when their memberships would interfere with their duties.”

More importantly, the FBI’s 2015 counter-terrorism policy, which McGarrity was responsible for executing, indicates not just that members of law enforcement might hold white supremacist views, but that FBI domestic terrorism investigations have often identified “active links” between the subjects of these investigations and law enforcement officials. But its proposed remedy is stunningly inadequate. It simply instructs agents to protect their investigations by using the “silent hit” feature of the Terrorist Screening Center watchlist, so that police officers searching for themselves or their white supremacist associates could not ascertain whether they were under FBI scrutiny.

Of course, one doesn’t need access to secret FBI terrorism investigations to find evidence of explicit racism within law enforcement. Since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to white supremacist groups or far-right militant activities have been exposed in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia, among other states. Research organizations have uncovered hundreds of federal, state and local law enforcement officials participating in racist, nativist and sexist social media activity, which demonstrates that overt bias is far too common.

Law enforcement officials actively affiliating with white supremacist and far-right militant groups pose a serious threat to people of color, religious minorities, LGBTQ people and anti-racist activists. But the police response to nationwide protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, includes a number of law enforcement officers across the country flaunting their affiliation with far-right militant groups.

A veteran sheriff’s deputy monitoring a Black Lives Matter protest in Orange county, California, wore patches with logos of the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers – far-right militant groups that often challenge the federal government’s authority – affixed to his bullet-proof vest.

A 13-year veteran of the Chicago police department with a long history of misconduct complaints was investigated for wearing a face covering with a Three Percenters’ logo while on duty at a recent protest. A supervisor pictured with him at the scene apparently did not order him to remove it.

In Philadelphia, police officers failed to intervene when mostly white mobs armed with bats, clubs and long guns attacked journalists and protesters. The district attorney has vowed to investigate the matter. The following month, however, Philadelphia police officers openly socialized with several men wearing Proud Boys regalia and carrying the group’s flag at a “Back the Blue” party at the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge.

Police officers casually fraternizing with armed far-right militia groups at protests is confounding because many states, including California, Illinois and Pennsylvania, have laws barring unregulated paramilitary activities and far-right militants have often killed police officers. The overlap between militia members and the Boogaloo movement – whose adherents have been arrested for inciting a riot in South Carolina, and shooting, bombing and killing police officers in California – highlights the threat that police engagement with these groups poses to their law enforcement partners.

continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... sts-police

[Seabass]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... house.html

The Conservative Defense of Kyle Rittenhouse Is Dangerous Nonsense


On Tuesday night, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly shot three people in Kenosha, Wisconsin, with an AR-15-style rifle, killing two. Videos of the event tell us an incomplete story of what, exactly, happened that night. But they appear to clearly show this much: Rittenhouse traveled to the protests in illegal possession of an assault weapon to act as a vigilante. He placed himself at the center of the violence, then escalated it by shooting a man in the head. Minutes later, he shot two more people who appeared to be trying to disarm him, then fled across state lines. For this bloody spree, prosecutors charged Rittenhouse with first-degree intentional homicide. In short, a teenager obsessed with law enforcement decided to play the role of a cop and wound up, according to law enforcement, committing murder.

Some on the right, however, see Rittenhouse differently. As footage of the incident emerged, conservative media figures began crafting a counternarrative in which the teenager is not a delusional vigilante but a well-intentioned if overzealous patriot who shot two violent assailants in self-defense. Rittenhouse, they suggest, is essentially a martyr who took action because Democrats would not let police do their jobs. This narrative rests on a racist belief, deeply rooted in American history, that white people must sometimes break the law to enforce it. The near-instant rehabilitation of Rittenhouse on the right should remind us that white Americans’ most heinous acts of violence can always be justified by their ideological allies.

Kenosha’s protests began on Sunday after Officer Rusten Sheskey, who is white, repeatedly shot Jacob Blake, who is Black, in the back in front of his children. Video indicates that Blake was walking away from Sheskey when the officer began shooting. He appeared to pose no threat. Blake is alive, but is reportedly paralyzed from the waist down. A mix of peaceful protests and riots broke out across the city, which is majority white but has a sizable Black community. By Tuesday, men carrying firearms who identified as members of a private militia stood outside local businesses, allegedly to protect them. A video shows Kenosha police handing water to these gunmen—including Rittenhouse—telling them: “We appreciate you guys, we really do.”

Rittenhouse, who traveled to Kenosha from Illinois, initially joined this putative militia but later peeled off. A video later in the evening showed him being chased by a group of Black and white protesters into a parking lot. Someone else fired a gun into the air, and Joseph Rosenbaum lunged at the armed teenager. Rittenhouse responded by firing four times, shooting Rosenbaum in the head and killing him. He then fled the scene. Protesters pursued him as one shouted, “That’s the shooter!” Rittenhouse tripped, and multiple people made an apparent attempt to disarm him. He fired four shots. One bullet hit Anthony Huber in the chest, killing him; he was wielding a skateboard, which he seemed to use to try to subdue Rittenhouse. The other bullet hit Gaige Grosskreutz in the arm; he was holding a handgun, though not aiming it at anyone. Rittenhouse then walked past a group of police officers—the beginning of his flight back to Illinois. They did not stop him.

It is almost dizzying to count all the ways Rittenhouse appears to have broken the law on Tuesday. He allegedly twice drove across state lines carrying a firearm he was not legally permitted to possess. He then illegally brandished this firearm in the streets. He violated the Kenosha curfew that provided the basis for police to arrest protesters. He fled out of state after shooting three people. And, most obviously, he killed two protesters. The footage indicates that two—and possibly all three—of Rittenhouse’s victims were trying to disarm him.

And yet, almost as soon as video of the shootings emerged, conservative media began to defend Rittenhouse. They mocked Huber for using a skateboard to “attack a man packing a rifle.” Erick Erickson said Rittenhouse was “not the bad guy” because he “was firing on people who were attacking him.” Fox News guests asserted that Rittenhouse effected “vigilante justice” because he filled “a void” left by police. And all these claims built toward the inevitable conclusion: Rittenhouse didn’t commit first-degree intentional homicide; he didn’t even commit murder at all. He was merely defending himself against a pack of thugs hellbent on beating him, possibly to death, because he tried to keep the peace. In Tucker Carlson’s words: “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”

This narrative transforms Rittenhouse from an unstable killer to a Second Amendment hero. And you need only accept a few fictions to buy into it. First, you must believe that the protesters chasing down Rittenhouse and attempting to wrest his gun away were not trying to prevent further bloodshed, but simply to brutalize him. Second, you must agree that even if these protesters were trying to confiscate Rittenhouse’s gun, they were wrong to do so, because they were the vicious lawbreakers and he was the vulnerable peacekeeper. Third, you must embrace a definition of self-defense so capacious that it allows a gunman to legally shoot a civilian dead when that civilian is trying to seize a weapon the gunman has used to kill someone. Or, as the New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie put it, “if someone is trying to stop you after you killed someone, you can continue shooting and killing in ‘self-defense.’ ”

It is much easier to accept the first two propositions if you are predisposed to believe that white people are more likely to uphold the law and Black people are more likely to break it. Like many protesters in Kenosha, Rittenhouse’s victims were white. But they were part of a diverse group that pursued the 17-year-old in an apparent effort to stop him from shooting more people. That group included many Black people, who were also imperiled when Rittenhouse tripped and fired his weapon indiscriminately. The claim that these protesters had a malign plan to assault or kill Rittenhouse, rather than disarm him, rests on the racist assumption that a white vigilante’s motives must be purer than a racially diverse group of demonstrators.

The third proposition—that the gunman was merely defending himself—rests on a chilling vision of self-defense that would excuse homicide and limit civilians’ ability to forestall future shootings. Wisconsin law only licensed Rittenhouse to shoot his pursuers to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm. The video of the second shooting makes it quite clear this did not happen. While the circumstances surrounding the first shooting remain murky, it is evident from the footage that Rittenhouse ran away carrying his rifle, pursued by protesters who rightly believed he might shoot more people. When he tripped, his pursuers immediately tried to seize his gun. These are not the actions of thugs eager to inflict bodily harm, but of good Samaritans trying to stop what looked like the beginning of a mass shooting.

Indeed, the argument for self-defense boils down to this: If civilians try to seize a weapon from a gunman who just shot somebody in the head, that gunman has a right to shoot them. If this theory were legally correct—thankfully, it isn’t—then a person who tries to grab a mass shooter’s gun may be legally killed by the shooter himself. Rittenhouse ultimately proved to be a mass shooter, one in illegal possession of a firearm, a gun that police allowed him to carry even after he had apparently shot three people a block in front of their squad cars. The cops who ordered protesters to disperse for violating curfew did not order an obviously underage teen to put down his assault weapon. Tucker Carlson got it backward; the question here is why anyone is shocked that protesters tried to disarm a vigilante when law enforcement refused.

After all, as University of Washington professor Dan Berger pointed out after the Charlottesville, Virginia, catastrophe, police have a lengthy history of complicity with right-wing insurgents. American law enforcement have viewed far-right paramilitary groups as allies in the fight against true subversives and radicals, such as the civil rights demonstrators of the 1960s. They assume that white gunmen toting assault weapons who speak favorably of law enforcement are more trustworthy and peaceable than racially diverse protesters who criticize the cops.

When officers thanked Kenosha’s militia while threatening to arrest protesters—even though the militia and the protesters were both violating curfew—they carried on this tradition. When Kenosha Police Chief Daniel Miskinis blamed protesters for their own deaths because they broke curfew, he carried on this tradition. When officers let Rittenhouse walk past them, illegally armed with a gun he had just used to kill two men and injure another, and drive back to Illinois, they carried on this tradition, too. These officers perceived a racially diverse group of demonstrators to be more of a threat than a cadre of heavily armed white men. It is not difficult to guess why.

After Jacob Blake’s shooting, conservative media hunted for evidence that might exonerate the officer, fixating on the presence of a knife in Blake’s car. After Rittenhouse shot three protesters, the right hunted for evidence that might exonerate the shooter, settling on the fantasy that those protesters were the real vigilantes who got what was coming to them. The lesson here is simple: A white man with a gun is innocent until proved guilty; his victims are guilty until proved innocent. It is a lesson tragically embedded in American history, and one that racist far-right militias around the country will surely take to heart this week.

[Tyrannical]

I hear the 'conservative' websites are saying.....

Victim #1 grabbed the rifle and attempted to take it from Kyle before being shot in the head. Which would make it self defense. Then Kyle was chased by a mob as the video shows. Victim #2 hit Kyle in the head with a skateboard after tackling him. Which would make it self defense. Victim#3 drew a handgun after chasing Kyle, which again would make it self defense.

[Brian Peacock]

Living the dream eh Ty? Living the dream...

[Seabass]

All these fascism comparisons are ridiculous!

Kentucky State Police training slideshow quotes Hitler, advocates ‘ruthless’ violence

A training slideshow used by the Kentucky State Police (KSP) — the second largest police force in the state — urges cadets to be “ruthless killers” and quotes Adolf Hitler advocating violence.

The slideshow was included in KSP documents obtained via an open records request by local attorney David Ward of Adams Landenwich Walton during the discovery phase of a lawsuit. Ward requested KSP materials used to train a detective who shot and killed a man in Harlan County, and Ward shared the presentation with Manual RedEye.

One slide, titled “Violence of Action,” in addition to imploring officers to be “ruthless killers,” instructs troopers to have “a mindset void of emotion” and to “meet violence with greater violence.”

A line from Adolf Hitler’s fascist and anti-Semitic manifesto, Mein Kampf, is featured in the slide: “the very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence.”

The presentation also links to a Hitler page on Goodreads, a database of quotes and books.

Two other slides quoting Hitler bring his total to three, making him the most quoted person in the presentation.

[...]

https://manualredeye.com/90096/news/loc ... sentation/

[JimC]

A bit of a worry, that...

[Brian Peacock]

Just a few bad apples, probably.