Myron B. Pitts: My advice for Fayetteville march with Proud Boys, QAnon? Stay away – The Fayetteville Observer

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Myron B. Pitts|The Fayetteville Observer

The Proud Boys are a hate group with a record of violence. Facebook has banned them.

On Saturday, a North Carolina-based chapter of the group is supposed to be coming to march in Fayetteville.

The alleged purpose is to participate in a march against child sex trafficking and pedophilia. The event is co-organized by Emily Dean, an online apparel designer, and Heather S. Holmes, a Republican running against incumbent Democrat Billy Richardson for the District 44 seat in the state House. The seat represents Fayetteville.

More: Members of far-right group the Proud Boys expected to be at Fayetteville march

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While the march is supposed to be about protecting children, it seems to be becoming a meeting of the minds, to use the term advisedly, of some far-right groups. Conspiracy group QAnon is supposed to be taking part as well as the Three Percenters, an armed militia group organized in the wake of President Obamas election.

Holmes told a Fayetteville Observer reporter she was initially concerned about the Proud Boys coming but was not anymore. She feels there will be an adequate police presence at the event.

I dont want to turn anybody away from marching (against) trafficking and pedophilia, she said.

Holmes told me Wednesday she doesnt know anything about QAnon and is not affiliated with them. She says: They dont fit into Saturdays march.

It is at least possible a well-meaning event has been hijacked. Media accounts say QAnon and the Proud Boys are joining forces to leverage a cause to which no one disagrees how do we best protect children to create an opening for their controversial ideas.

But Dean doesnt sound like shes being hijacked. She said of the Proud Boys: I consider them friends and added they were family-oriented.

I have some advice for anyone who truly supports the marchs stated causes or who might wish to show up to counter-protest. Ignore the march. Let it show up and fade away like a raindrop in Sandhills heat.

I certainly hope the event will be peaceful. But I dont agree with Holmes or Deans stance of come-one-come-all when it comes to whose support you accept.

You have to be aware, especially as a leader, who you choose to align yourself with and what message you are sending to the public. The women should tell the Proud Boys, Three Percenters and QAnon: Thanks but no thanks. We got this.

The Southern Poverty Law Center designates the Proud Boys a hate group. Organized during the 2016 election, the members do not admit women and call themselves western chauvinists. The Anti-Defamation League describes their ideology as Misogynistic, Islamophobic, transphobic and anti-immigration. Some members espouse white supremacist and anti-Semitic ideologies and/or engage with white supremacist groups.

The Proud Boys are known for street fights, most recently for tussles at a rally organized by the group in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Last year, two Proud Boys were sentenced to prison for brutal assaults on a residential street in New York City in October of 2018.

Jason Kessler, a former member, was a co-organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right Rally, in Charlottesville, Virginia, a white nationalist event that drew together neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates and the Ku Klux Klan. There, a counterprotester, Heather Heyer, was murdered by a man who drove his car into a crowd.

As for QAnon, it is the pro-Donald Trump conspiracy group that previously gained its most notoriety in 2016 when a man from Salisbury drove to Washington, D.C., and brandished and then shot a gun in a pizza parlor. He had been on the hunt for a nonexistent child sex ring in an incident dubbed Pizzagate.

The movement has only grown, and recently a QAnon supporter won a GOP congressional primary in Georgia and is likely headed to Washington in the fall.

Event is tarred

In a news release Wednesday, Holmes criticized the Observer news story about the Saturday march and wrote: I dont condone racism, hatred or violence of any sort. No activist groups were invited to participate as this is a march to bring awareness to the issue which has been kept quiet for decades.

She also called for stricter legislation and harsher punishment for offenders.

For sure if she or anyone wants to make an effort to protect children from predators there are plenty of organizations and individuals in Fayetteville and Cumberland County that do this important work.

They include: The Child Advocacy Center; Prevent Child Abuse NC; and the Community Child Abuse Prevention Plan, which includes more than two dozen partner organizations that seek to prevent abuse, to include trafficking.

As for Saturdays event, Im probably going to hold anyone suspect who shows up. I will wonder: Are you in it for the child advocacy? Or for the racism and QAnon nuttiness?

People judging from the outside will not know. Whatever legitimate cause an organization wishes to raise at this proceeding will be tarred by the association with extremist groups.

I believe you dont fight against one social ill, child sex abuse, by inviting in two others intolerance and the threat of violence.

Opinion Editor Myron B. Pitts can be reached at mpitts@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3559.

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Myron B. Pitts: My advice for Fayetteville march with Proud Boys, QAnon? Stay away - The Fayetteville Observer

Portland Police Are Giving Up On Policing The Far-Right – HuffPost

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The Portland Police Bureau appears to have all but given up on policing the far-right factions brawling in the Oregon citys streets, despite a recent escalation in violence that has seen those extremists throw explosives, brandish guns and in one case fire them at other protesters.

Its common to see far-right extremist groups like the Proud Boys exchanging blows with counterprotestersin Portland. Theyve been doing that for years, often as PPB officers watched until a riot was officially declared and then police cleared the streets using tear gas and other munitions.

But over the weekend, police took an entirely hands-off approachto the fighting, even as the demonstrations grew more violent than ever. As officers stood by on Saturday, the Proud Boys and their far-right friends attacked and intimidated anti-fascist protesters using paintball guns, mace, fireworks, aluminum bats and various firearms, according to The Washington Post.

One of them notorious Proud Boys organizer Alan Swinney was seen pointing a gun at protesters, his finger on the trigger. Another Proud Boy, Tusitala Tiny Toese, was present, per the Post,in apparent violation of his parole over an attack at a similar demonstration in 2017 (he wasnt apprehended on Saturday, but a judge on Monday issued a warrant for his arrest).

Nathan Howard/Getty ImagesA member of the Proud Boys fires a paintball gun into a crowd of protesters against police brutality as the two sides clashed on Aug. 22 in Portland. For the second Saturday in a row, right-wing groups gathered in downtown Portland, sparking counterprotests and leading to violence.

Meanwhile, over a loudspeaker, police encouraged those present toself-monitor for criminal activity. In essence, the PPB had thrown up its hands.

In a statement to The Washington Post, the bureau said that officers were tired from responding to ongoing demonstrations against racism and police brutality, which have kept Portland in the national spotlight for weeks. Officers wouldnt intervene in small skirmishes between willing participants, even if the clashes fit the citys definition of a riot.

Each skirmish appeared to involve willing participants and the events were not enduring in time, so officers were not deployed to intervene, the bureau said of Saturdays events.PPB members have been the focus of over 80 days of violent actions directed at the police, which is a major consideration for determining if police resources are necessary to interject between two groups with individuals who appear to be willingly engaging in physical confrontations for short durations.

Allowing local far-right groups to wreak havoc on the city isnt a big departure for the PPB. As the Proud Boys cheered, officers launched tear gas and other munitions at anti-fascist counterprotesters during a rally in 2017, which left one antifa protester with a gas canister lodged in his head. Policegave the Proud Boys an escort out of the cityfollowing a rally in 2018 that saw the far-right demonstrators outnumbered by anti-fascists. A key officer had a friendly and ongoing relationship with the leader of Proud Boys affiliate group Patriot Prayer, judging fromtexts obtained by Willamette Week.

But relinquishing the act of policing to the brawlers themselves is both new and concerning, especially given the context: Local extremists have escalated their violent tactics in recent weeks, brazenly introducing guns and a lot more weaponry to the melee.

Local right-wing protester Skylor Jernigan, who attended a conservative flag wave demonstration in Portland earlier this month alongside Swinney, allegedly shot at Black Lives Matter protesters from inside a car. (Nobody was hit.)He was later arrested and charged with two felony counts of unlawful use of a weapon. During the same event, Swinney was seen spraying protesters with chemical irritants and shooting them with rounds from a paintball gun. He faced no immediate consequence for those displays or for pointing a pistol at protesters this past Saturday.

Long before this months events, the Proud Boys and other local Portland groups had been emboldened by governmental inaction during their rallies. Proud Boys leadership admitted at a rally last year that one of their stated goals was to continue such demonstrations in order to waste taxpayer dollars, overburden city resources and embarrass Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler. (For his part, Wheeler released a statement Monday saying he was closely reviewing the PPBs strategy to limit their intervention.)

Now it appears that the Proud Boys enjoy not just a broader arsenal at their rallies, but a tacit promise from the city that theyll face little to no police intervention.

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Right-Wingers and Anti-Fascists Brawl Downtown as Police Stand By – Willamette Week

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Aright-wing rally with the theme "No to Marxism in America" led, unsurprisingly, to brawling in downtown streets near the Multnomah County Justice Center early Saturday afternoon. Opposing left-wing groups protected themselves with shields, while some right-wingers, including Proud Boys, openly carried guns.

Video and photos posted by the Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, among others, showed at least one right-wing protester pulling his weapon on a crowd in the midst of a brawl.

Reporters, including Katie Shepherd of The Washington Post and freelance journalist Sergio Olmos, provided running coverage on Twitter. Both noted that Portland police allowed violent skirmishes to proceed. Olmos filmed federal police swarming only after the right-wing protesters left the area.

In a statement after the event, the Portland Police Bureau responded to questions why it had not intervened to halt the violent clashes.

"Incident commanders have to weigh out the entire situation to determine if police action is likely to make things safer or not. In this case there were hundreds of individuals and many weapons within the groups and an extremely limited amount of police resources actually available to address such a crowd," the bureau said. "Additionally, PPB members have been the focus of over 80 days of violent actions directed at the police, which is a major consideration for determining if police resources are necessary to interject between two groups with individuals who appear to be willingly engaging in physical confrontations for short durations.

"While the activity in the group met the definition of a riot, PPB did not declare one because there were not adequate police resources available to address such a declaration. PPB had roughly 30 officers available for crowd management and there were several hundred individuals associated with the events downtown."

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Gresham mulls removing BLM flag in face of armed threats – Pamplin Media Group

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Council split on strategy around Wednesday evening's planned protests at City Hall

The city of Gresham is mulling taking down the Black Lives Matter flag flying at City Hall in an attempt to deescalate threats of violence surrounding a planned armed protest tonight.

During an emergency council meeting Wednesday afternoon, Aug. 26, hours before a planned protest and counter-protest surrounding the flag, city leadership debated different strategies on keeping the community and police officers safe.

"I am very concerned about the safety of our officers, staff and community," said Mayor Karylinn Echols. "When it comes to violence and destruction, we can't have any tolerance around this."

The Wednesday evening event is a planned "flag wave" organized by folks from outside the community, including an alleged spearheading by the Proud Boys, and have included messages on social media about "tearing down the Black Lives Matter flag."

The Gresham Police Department received reports the anti-flag group's plans on coming armed with weapons to City Hall, 1333 N.W. Eastman Parkway. Chief Robin Sells, who requested the flag be taken down for the evening, said the organizer is Alan Swinney, a member of the Proud Boys, who has been involved in the downtown Portland "Back the Blue" rallies that have led to violent spats with counter protestors.

Swinney made national headlines Saturday, Aug. 22, when he brandished a gun and pointed it at the opposing crowd. Regardless of whether the city removes the flag, Swinney has allegedly told police he and his group are coming.

In response to their arrival in Gresham, a group of local protestors plan on rallying around the Black Lives Matter flag to protect it from being forcibly removed.

"I might have 50 officers here tonight but we will be outnumbered," Sells said. "My ask is that we take down all the flags at City Hall. I don't know if we should stand by the flag and jeopardize the safety of our community."

Council was split on what to do about the potential for violence. Mayor Echols, Council President Janine Gladfelter, and Councilors Jerry Hinton and David Widmark all were reluctantly leaning toward taking down the Black Lives Matter flag tonight in an attempt to remove the potential target. The idea includes putting the flag back up in the morning, and continuing to fly it through Aug. 31 as was initially voted on in June.

"I am afraid for my community," Widmark said. "We have honored our commitment to the symbol, and I would be willing to consider taking it down for tonight. I do not want to consider putting our officers in harms' way."

Councilors Vincent Jones-Dixon, Eddy Morales and Mario Palmero all disagreed with that strategy.

"If hate is truly not a value we have, then we cannot lower the flag," Palmero said.

Instead, they said, the flag should remain in place so the city does not bow to intimidation tactics.

"I don't want us to be a council that takes action when we are threatened by violence, hate and weapons," Morales said. "We need to put our foot down and show we don't accept hate speech and destruction of property here in the city of Gresham."

The protests are planned to begin at 6 p.m. at City Hall, and the Gresham Police Department recommends the community stay away.

At the end of the meeting, council reiterated that it denounces any hate speech, racism or violence within the community.

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When You Say Yes to Hate: Dispatch From Portland – Reason

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C. and I arrive at Justice Center in downtown Portland on Saturday a little after 11 a.m. Unlike the night demonstrations, in which protesters pelt police headquarters with fireworks and flaming trash, the few dozen people this morning are waving American flags and shouting, "Blue lives matter!"

Which is not popular with the crew across the street, who shout back "ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS!" and that all cops must die.

Even the good ones?

"There are no good ones," an Ojibwe boy wearing a medicine pouch tells me.

He cannot name an instance where a police officer has done good for someone?

"You need to step six feet away from him," a kid at the curb tells meand, regarding my question about the police, "I am going to totally KICK YOUR ASS!"

So good morning from Day 87 of the protests in Portland, Oregon. This one is a little different: It's organized by Back the Blue, a group showing its support for police, support that includes a caravan of Trump-supporting motorcyclists who roar up and form a barrier between the opposing sides.

The call-and-response continues.

"All cops are brave!"

"Especially when they're wearing white hoods!"

"God, what a mess," says what looks to be a homeless dude, just before he wings a full water bottle at the flag-wavers.

"The Proud Boys are 100 deep and on their way in, on the MAX [light rail] train," says C. She's referring to the alt-right group behind today's "No to Marxism in America Rally," planned for noon. Last year's meet between the Proud Boys and antifa resulted in just about zero face time, in part because Portland police coordinated with various factions to keep the groups apart.

Things are different this year. Though the action is taking place directly in front of police headquarters, there is not, for the length of today's confrontation, one officer in evidence. Instead, there's a message through a bullhorn several times an hour, "This is the Portland Police Bureau. Our priority is the preservation of life and the protection of everyone's First Amendment [right] to speech We recognize there are groups with different views gathered here today"

The message's coda, to "Stop participating in criminal activity," does nothing to stop the anti-cop side from throwing eggs, throwing rocks, and shooting fireworks across the street. They are primed to fight, and they've been practicing every night since late May. The movement has grown from grief and outrage over the killing of George Floyd to demands for the abolition of all police and all forms of what it considers state-sponsored oppression.

The oppressors now appear to include anyone inside their homes at night. For two months the protestswhich during that time were mainly protests, with people of all stripes and ages marching in relative peace for the cause of Black Lives Matterwere in the main held at the courthouse blocks where we are today. But the dynamic has now changed. Each night, usually at 8 p.m., the black blocthe by-any-means-necessary wing of the movement, named for their all-black clothesmeet at a park somewhere in the city and march to the closest institution they deem problematic (police stations, social services buildings), which are graffitied, set on fire, pelted with trash and sometimes feces. Last week they added a new twist, marching through residential streets late at night and shining lights into people's homes, demanding they wake up, that they get "out of the house and into the streets!" These nightly campaigns take place citywide; residents have no idea if or when it will come down their block, which does not make for a peaceful night's sleep.

"I feel, as a community memberwe came from East Portland, Cherry Park neighborhoodand as one of many mothers in that neighborhood, we want to see the violence and the rioting end," says Christa, a petite woman standing next to a stroller holding her three children, ages four and under. "We want the city council to make a stand, to make some tough calls. We believe in peaceful protest and Black Lives Matter and all these issues. We do not agree with the collateral damage that is happening to our city. We love Portland and downtown is being ravaged by the ongoing riots; businesses are going out of business. It's just very frustrating."

She holds over her head a sign that reads "WHEELER/HARDESTYDO SOMETHING!" What does she think Mayor Ted Wheeler and Councilmember Jo Ann Hardesty should do?

"Hardesty needs to step up and support the police doing their job," she says. "People have the absolute First Amendment constitutional right to protest. They do not have the right to destroy property or assault individuals."

Christa is drowned out by the canned police announcement asking people to stop antagonizing each other.

"Right. 'Stop criminal behavior,'" she says. "The problem is, the district attorney refuses to prosecute once they're arrested. In essence, they're promoting ongoing violence by not having any consequences."

Would it be better if the police had a presence here today?

"Honestly? If the police were out here right now, it would just escalate the situation," Christa says. "When you have such a polarized issue, anything can add fodder. The police show up, this could very well turn into a violent situation."

It's already a violent situation: Proud Boys and black bloc screaming in each other's faces, golf balls and eggs being launched, pepper spray and smoke bombs making everyone cough, and the kid who promised to kick my ass whacking the sidewalk with a thick six-foot pole.

"USA! USA!

"BLM! BLM!"

"This is the Portland Police Bureau.We recognize there are groups with different views gathered here today"

"It's a testament to the passivity of Portlanders that someone hasn't gotten shot," says Kevin. Right, I tell him. Portland is not Pocatello, or Chicago. If someone is eventually shot by, say, someone who feels their home is under threat, the protesters will then have a martyr, who will be held up as proof of a racist system. It's a bit of a finger trap, really.

"And exactly their plan," he says. "For people who claim to be anti-fascist, they're awfully fascist in their tactics."

This "free speech for me but not for thee" manifests, too, in the anti-fascists constantly taking pictures of me, taking pictures of my notes, and, one time, taking my phone. The Ojibwe boy heckles me for 20 minutes. Someone posts photos on Twitter, identifying me as a "fash."

"I don't like you," a man I have never met tells me. "You spread propaganda."

What?

"Don't deny it, I've watched hours and hours of you online," he says. When I press him for these propagandistic details, he spends 10 minutes telling me he doesn't know exactly but doesn't need to know to know I am an enemy. He then galumphs toward the black bloc side, and I think how it makes sense for him to join a movement where he can feel integral without having to substantiate his reasoning, where the cost of membership is hating the people he is told to hate. As I watch him become subsumed by the crowd, another unidentifiable figure in black, I see him as no part revolutionary, more a meat-sack of insecurity.

I've encountered black bloc activists who, when alone, fold like a cheap suit, and also those who want to talk one on one, to maybe find a way toward progress together. This is not what is happening today.

A painter who's told me he paints the demonstrations because "they need to be captured in a medium other than film" gets a face-full of bear mace. A black bloc "medic" rinses his eyes with milk of magnesia. Five minutes later, C. pukes from the pepper gas.

To quote the homeless guy: What a mess.

"And it's not going to stop until the mayor and the governor let us do our jobs," a Portland police officer later tells me. Which neither have been inclined to do, framing the protests as peaceful when they visibly and exponentially are not.

What, I ask the officer, will it take for the nightly demonstrations to stop?

Maybe violence, he says. "You have a 24-year-old white kid who lives in his mother's basement get hit upside the head? He's not going to come out the next night."

The violence right now is not being doled out by the absent police, nor by the Proud Boys, who a little after 2 p.m. have started to march south. The black bloc contingent, which grew considerably as the afternoon wore on, follows close behind. Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down" plays as the Proud Boys are pursued through the empty streets of downtown. A dozen young people in black run up the ramps of the Unitus Plaza building, looking like cat burglars, looking to cut off the Proud Boys, to continue the fight. What else are they going to do in a COVID-closed city on a Saturday night?

But the Proud Boys have apparently ditched, heading not into the streets but directly to the MAX train. There will be no more fight with them tonight.

There will, apparently, be a little more pepper spray.

"I can't open it," says a young woman, her eyes shut and streaming tears as she holds a bag of eye wipes. Two blocks later, C. and I minister to another girl similarly blinded.

"I used to love this city. I used to love waking up and knowing I lived here," says C., as we walk past people cheering and sloganeering in the park across from Justice Center. "Now I just feel bad. Not for Portlanders. For Portland."

What will the park crew do on a Saturday night? What they do every night, which is take to the streets, maybe your street. They will tell you, via the same six or seven slogans, that if you are not with them, you're against them. They will call it love for their fellow man. They will claim they are righting historical wrongs, and who but a monster or a racist would object to that? They will call the destruction of property free speech, and average citizens, out of fear or confusion or not wanting to be seen as a monster or a racist (because who knows what terrors that might bring?) will say nothing, or squint hard enough to think yes, yes, it all makes sense, better to be with them than against them; better, maybe, to burn it all down.

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New York Seeks to Ban Reverse Location Searches Free Press of Jacksonville – Jacksonville Free Press

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The normally quiet Upper East Side erupted into a street brawl between white supremacists and anti-fascists. Members of the Proud Boys, a white supremacist group with a violent history, allegedly attacked four Antifa protesters Oct. 12, 2018, during a violent clash near the Metropolitan Republican Club, where the leader of the Proud Boys had just finished giving an address.

The New York Police Department sought 12 suspects for rioting and assault. They had a complete list of all the Proud Boys on the scene because everyone had signed the register at the Metropolitan Club speech. What they lacked was the identity of the four assault victims, all presumed to be Antifa members. Disguised in black anti-surveillance garb during their counter-protest, the victims could not be identified by street camera footage. And the wounded Antifa supporters refused to come forward to press charges.

Eventually, the Manhattan District Attorneys office used a controversial technique to further trace victims: a reverse location search warrantalso called a geo-fence warrantwhich compiles the anonymous digital identity and location data from the cell phones, smart watches, laptops and tablets of all users who were in a given geolocation at a certain time.

While a reverse location search can potentially track individuals through their geolocation at the scene of a crime, privacy advocates say the system fails to differentiate between potential suspects and innocent passersby. New York state Assembly Member Dan Quart introduced a bill earlier this year to ban reverse location search warrants.

I became very concerned because I believe it violates Fourth Amendment requirements for particularized search, Quart said. Reverse location search is the exact opposite. Its a fishing expedition to get peoples data without actual probable cause. Thats just antithetical to the Fourth Amendment.

The digital evidence identifies not people but devices, said Andrew Quinn, general counsel to the NYPD Sergeants Benevolent Association. Any investigative technique could be abused, but what prevents abuse is for an independent magistrate to review evidence and issue the warrants.

The use of reverse location search warrants often remains undisclosed to the public, however, attorneys in the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance testified to using such a warrant during the court trial of several Proud Boys members.

In this particular case, the use of the digital reverse location warrant yielded no evidence used in the trial. Nonetheless, the Manhattan D.A. managed to nail two Proud Boys convictions based on video shot during the violent clashes.

Vances office declined a request for comment from Zenger News, as did the New York Police Department.

You may be innocent but you may be able to provide invaluable eyewitness evidence, said Quinn. Reverse location search can be an incredibly useful tool in solving a serious crime. Son of Sam was solved because they tracked a parking ticket on his car in the area of one of the crimes.

Under Quarts bill, proposed in April, evidence from reverse location search warrants would become inadmissible in any New York court. The bill and a companion bill in the state Senate by Sen. Zellnor Myrie are pending in the New York State Legislature. No vote has yet occurred.

In the era of a burgeoning Black Lives Matter mass protest movement, banning reverse location searches appears timely. If allowed, Quart said, it creates a double infringement of constitutional rights. In addition to Fourth Amendment violations, it can target protesters and accumulate data on thousands of individuals who are peacefully assembled to exercise First Amendment rights.

Quart also objects to the lack of transparency. Its unclear whose data is revealed, and how long the data will linger in official law enforcement files after an individual warrant is closed.

The goal of the bill was really to create a first of its kind. It will outlaw the practice in New York State, blocking police and prosecutors from using reverse search warrants, said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, which helped author the proposed legislation. I hope it will start a national trend because we will eventually need federal legislation to completely block the practice.

Cahn said a reverse location search warrant is an incredibly powerful way to monitor every single person who attends a mosque, a protest or a healthcare facility. Its chilling and dystopian.

Everyone at the protest is visible, counters Quinn. Law enforcement is not permitted to go to the protests and take pictures to form a database. Almost all the videos of protestors are taken by the protestors themselves and posted to social media.

All people in the range are also having their data collected, even those who had nothing to do with it, said Jerome Greco of the Legal Aid Societys Digital Forensics Unit. The problem is, youre making innocent people possible suspects. Also, its not always accurate.

In 2020, big tech companies control so much of the publics personal informationeven incidental apps, downloaded free of charge, can access and collect data for the developer to sell to the highest bidderthat constitutional privacy rights in the digital realm have become an issue.

For the past decade, Google has published a biannual report that reveals the number of government requests for user data, without differentiating the types of warrants or locale.

A Google spokesperson said that when a request comes in from a governmental agency or member of law enforcement, it is carefully vetted before any data is released. If Google perceives them as overly broad, requests are refused or challenged.

Unfortunately, much of the pushback comes at the discretion of Google and other tech companies. National communications privacy laws were last challenged in 1986. Back then, the digital world was less complex. Big tech companies played a more limited role in controlling public discourse.

The problem is technology moves at an incredible pace, and the court system at a glacial pace, said Greco.

Thats why legislation is so important, advocates say.

Dan Quarts bill strikes the right balance, said Greco.

(Edited by Emily Crockett and Blake French.)

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Here Is A Timeline Of Police Brutality in 2020 – Grit Daily

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The start of 2020 caught everyone off guard, and honestly, no one was expecting 2020 to bring this much drama and tragedy. George Floyds passing sparked a global uprising against police brutality on social media, news outlets and in cities around the world. Weve seen videos and heard stories of similar experiences for years now, and it all culminated in late May.

The world was hurt and angry, protesting not only for Floyd but also for others like Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Elijah McClain and Tamir Rice. The world was no longer going to stay silent on these tragedies that were happening in Black communitiesand havent stopped.

Black people are disproportionately killed at the hands of the police, and its continuing to happen with each video going circulating social media that depicts another Black person dying at the hands of the police.

The latest horrible video going around social media (that doesnt need to be shared because his family is facing enough pain),twenty-nine-year-old Jacob Blakewas shot seven times in the back atpoint-blank range.

Blake was allegedly trying to break up an altercation between two women when the cops pulled up to address the situation. In the video, Blake walks away toward his car with the police following closely behind and then shooting him in the back. Blake did survive the shooting and will be paralyzed from the waist down,according to his dad.

Blakes altercation with the police is just one of dozens of tragic incidents with the police that have happened this year. Here is a timeline of some of the major instances of police brutality and racist killings in America in 2020:

February 25 Ahmaud Arbery, anunarmed25-year-old Black male, was fatally shot by two civilians while jogging in Georgia.

March 13 Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old black EMT, was shot by police eight times when entering her apartmentwhile she was sleepingwhen they executed a no-knock search warrant in Louisville, Kentucky.

May 25 George Floyd, a 46-year-old black male who was killed in Minneapolis during an arrestallegedlyusing a counterfeit $20 bill.

June 12 Rayshard Brooks was shot by an officer when a complaint filed against Brooks wasasleepin the restaurant drive through line.

August 23 Jacob Blake was shot seven times by police while trying to break up a fight between two women in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

These are just five out of countless other victims killed in the from police brutality and racism, and there are still many cases that are popping up every day with the same scenario of a black male shot by the police. All those protestors that are out there every day only want justice for the victims that have lost their lives.

News outlets can misconstrue protesting.

Just because you dont see it on the five o clock news doesnt mean that protests arent still happening. In places like Portland, Seattle, Chicago and Detroit, protesting is still going on strong. There are many places that are still having protests, and the police riots have not stopped either.

Portland protestors getting hit with tear gas, rubber bullets, and beaten.

People are still protesting because they are demanding justice against police brutality.

News coverage on the police brutality protests can both help and hinder the protests. Since the protests began, many news outlets have covered the stories as a way of inciting fear that the protesters are destroying cities by focusing on the negative stories instead of seeing the bigger picture.

In a recent study from thePew Research Center,half of U.S. adults (51%) say nonviolent protests against police brutality are getting too little coverage. I believe that to be truenot only with the protests but also with any news; we can change that by focusing on the good and focusing on the message that Black Lives Matter is trying to send.

We arent here for violence, nor do we care for it; we just want the world to acknowledge whats wrong and whats right.

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Here Is A Timeline Of Police Brutality in 2020 - Grit Daily

Kenosha Doesn’t Have To Be a Vision of America’s Future – Reason

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Protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin against the shooting by police of Jacob Blake degenerated into lethal violence Tuesday night, with two dead and one injured. Who did what last night is still unclear, though a suspect is in custody.

While we'll learn more details, what's unlikely to change is the chaos in the streets, with multiple hard-to-identify factions and unaffiliated individuals joining up in loose alliances or squaring off in volatile confrontations. That's the face of modern social unrest, and a sight with which we'll become very familiar if the situation in this country continues to spiral out of control.

"Two people were killed and a third injured in a shooting at a used car lot on the corner of Sheridan Road and 63rd Street overnight Wednesday by a man armed with an AR-15-style rifle," Kenosha News reports. "The man, who was white, was seen on social media with a group of armed men described online as 'militia' who were at a small used car lot on the northwest corner of Sheridan Road and 63rd Street."

"Militia" could mean anything at this stage, from local people defending businesses to organized groups from elsewhere participating in the scrum. For what it's worth, at least one Boogaloo Boys group disavows any connection to the shooter.

But there are any number of possible participants. In Portland, Proud Boys and antifa (and others) tangled over the weekend while police pulled back. In communities around the country, residents and business owners have faced-off against protesters and sometimes shot looters. And lone individualsadvocating police reform, or else supportive of cops, or just wanting to see shit burnhave shown up to participate in protests or to just stir the pot.

That's all too common a pattern, and an unpleasant indicator of where the whole country could be headed if the growing political and racial tensions of recent years follow the path on which the people of Kenosha, Portland, and elsewhere are already walking.

In terms of where those tensions are taking us, the possibility of domestic strife as serious as a second Civil War has been a topic of conversation in recent yearssometimes mockingly (#secondcivilwarletters, anybody?)but other times more seriously. Three years ago, Thomas E. Ricks scared the hell out of a lot of people when he casually asked "smart national security thinkers" their spitball estimates of the near-term chance of a second civil war and came up with an average estimate of "about 35 percent" for a piece in Foreign Policy.

Most Civil War 2 discussions dwell on a red states vs. blue states battle, as if clear geographical divisions and well-defined sides are a standard feature of civil wars. But social unrest in the modern world is usually messier.

"The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was a battle between three factionsthe Bosnian Muslims, Croats (Catholic) and Serbs (predominately Orthodox Christian)," the U.S. Army notes of the experience of Hajrudin Djedovic, who left the Yugoslav Army in 1992 as that country was falling apart to fight for Bosnia and Herzegovina. "It was strange fighting against people he had served with only a few years earlier, he said. One day, they are neighbors and friends. The next daythey attacked his village, killed his friends and members of his family."

Countries don't have to collapse for chaos to reign. From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, Italy muddled through the anni di piomboyears of lead. The Economist summarizes the confusion of that time, which still cast a shadow over Italians' lives:

Marxist extremists, notably the Red Brigades, began kidnapping and assassinating 'anti-worker' officials: policemen, judges, journalists. Their right-wing opponents bombed civilians to 'drown democracy under a mountain of corpses'. Both sides hoped to weaken the state and to spark revolution or a military takeover. Members of the Italian secret service nudged things along, working with neo-fascist killers to frame the left.

For a taste of the uncertainty of a country plagued by factional violence, it's worth seeing the 2014 movie '71. Set in Belfast at the start of "The Troubles," it follows an accidentally stranded British soldier whose fate depends on the loyalties of the neighborhoods through which he passes, and the inclinations of whichever paramilitary has him at its mercy not just unionist or nationalist, but specific factions thereof.

The U.S. as a whole is not yet immersed in its own version of "The Troubles" or the "years of lead," let alone a Balkan-style civil war. But we're not as far from that state as we were six months ago, let alone a decade ago.

We started this year with nearly six in 10 Americans believing that political tensions in this election year would lead to protests and rioting, according to Ipsos polling. The source of those fears is obvious, given the contempt in which the country's major political factions hold each other. Fifty-five percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats say the party opposing their own is "not just worse for politicsthey are downright evil," according to a 2019 YouGov survey. As a result of those hostilities, just over 20 percent of both Democratic and Republican respondents believe violence is at least somewhat justified if their side loses the election, according to the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group.

To that political tension, we've added pandemic-fueled panic and lockdown orders that have crippled the economy and increased stress. We've also seen an eruption of long-simmering resentment over police treatment of civiliansespecially African-Americans. The killing of George Floyd brought that anger against law enforcement abuses to a head, and it continues to this day.

The result has been protests, which have all-too-often morphed into violence in the streets in multiple cities. That violence features antifa, Proud Boys, Black Lives Matter, Boogaloo Boys, neighborhood watches, and other factions and individuals of every and no ideological flavor. They interact in various shades of support, conditional alliance, and outright oppositionsometimes resulting in bloodshed.

And we haven't even arrived at Election Day, which had Americans so on-edge at the beginning of the year.

Kenosha doesn't have to be a vision of America's future. Neither does Portland. But the fact that the violence is continuous and seems to be escalating is cause for concern. To avoid the spread of that conflict, we're going to have to find a way to live with each other, or to leave each other alone. If we don't, the violent social unrest that plagues some of our communities will become a feature of many more.

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Kenosha Doesn't Have To Be a Vision of America's Future - Reason

Locals have organized against Black Lives Matter, leading to street fights, standoffs – The Register-Guard

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Adam Duvernay|Register-Guard

Rarelocal episodes of violence and property destruction, videos of scenesout of Portland and asense the Black Lives Matter movement has been infiltrated by anarchists are driving some in Oregon to organizedandsometimes violent resistance.

In Eugene and Springfield, Black Lives Matter protesters now are more frequently met with opposition beyond the policepolice-supporting counterprotesters, often calling themselves patriots, who say their missionis keeping local neighborhoods safe.

Some have group affiliation. Some are just sympathetic to organized opposition to Black Lives Matter or other groups they perceive as threats. Some come to rallies and protests armed. Some come from out of town. Some are more than willing to fight protesters.

Many support President Trump and conspiracy theories about the federal government. Most see the Black Lives Matter movement as largely dangerous and misguided.

"The only thing that keeps the level of violence we're seeinginPortland from happening here is they simply do not have the numbers to do that here, and because we have been coming out, meeting them and facing them down. We're not going to allow it," said Tim Davis, a Springfield contractor affiliated with the group The American Patriots Society.

Groups like TAPS andWe the People of Lane County have attended or organizedlocal rallies and counterprotested Black Lives Matter events here and elsewhere as that movement gains longevity and daily scenes of clashes with police comefrom Portland.

"We're regular Americans that are coming together because we're afraid of what's going on against our country, against our businesses and against our families," Davis said.

But when belief meets fear, the potential for action rises, saidJoe Lowndes, a University of Oregon political science professor who's written extensively on right wingpolitics.

"The threat they describe is antifa as a terrorist organization and Black Lives Matter as a group that is only there to cause chaos," he said. "The dangeris they have created this imagined threat, and that authorizes the possibility of extreme violence in that moment."

Tyshawn Ford, a leader of local racial justice protest organization Black Unity, said his group rejects violence and destruction forits part of the Black Lives Matter movement. Though he said people of color may be righteous in using those protest tactics, he said he believes others merely are taking advantage of the movement for their own ends.

"They've been in quarantine. They just want something to do, to get that adrenaline from fighting the cops or breaking stuff," hesaid."That detracts from the movement 100%."

Despite what they say, Ford said he believes people like Davis actually know better.

"Counterprotesters ask us all the time if we're antifa. I think it's just an ignorant question," Ford said. "We don't go out covering our identities. We put on community events. We come out and show our faces. Anyone that's antifa is not going to do that."

There was a riot in Minneapolis after a white police officer there killed George Floyd, a Black man,during a May 25arrest by pressing his knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Many protests remained peaceful, but downtown Minneapolis from May 27-29 was subjected to looting and property damage. Rioters burned down a police precinct.

The night of May 29,protesters in Eugene marched for the first time. The march itself was loud, went against traffic and set the tone for most protests that would follow hundreds of bodies chanting the names of people of color killed by police nationwide.

But at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Washington Street, the march stopped and some in the crowd set fires in the street with dumpsters,city property and signs torn from local local shops. An hour later, people brokein and looted nearby businesses.

Eugene police declared a riot.

Eugene police recently arrested 11 and are looking for more than 60 suspects.

Since May 29, there have been more daysthan not with some form of local activism, but no local protests, except for the night of July 25,included widespread property damage.

Those who support Black Lives Matter say marchers arefighting for racial justice.

"The movement is just going to get stronger from here. It may not be in the way of marches, but definitely our ability to capitalize on what's happening," Ford said.

In a small area of Portland over more than 60 days, however, authorities have declared a riot more than a dozen times. Images of clashes with police, tear gas cloudsand often violent arrests of the protesters there have been splashed daily across national news.

In Seattle, Austin, Oakland and elsewhere, similar scenes of violent clashes with police have played out over the summer. But across the country and Oregon, the vast majority of demonstrations are peaceful protests calling for police reform and racial justice.

How those protests and riots have been portrayed varies by outlet and viewership. But such images have played a role in promoting organization against Black Lives Matter.

Davis sees no distinction between the wider Black Lives Matter movement, powered largely by local leaders and lacking nationwide marching orders, and antifa, shorthand for a loose affiliation of far-left militant anti-fascists that resist right-wing demonstrations.

Trump has branded antifa a terroristgroup despite its inherently unorganized nature.

Ford says counterprotesters at their marches now are a frequent occurrence.

"Now it's like every protest ... " Ford said.

He believes the appearance of right-wing counterprotesters at Black Unity and other marches truly started with the July 25 protest outside the U.S. Courthouse in Eugene.

They showed up at the Black Lives Matter protest, some carrying firearms and the set of homemade plywood riot shields made up to look like protest signs that they have carried into multiple protests and rallies. The two sides squared off near the federal courthouse, exchanging competing chants and taunts.

Then ashot was fired intothe air. A Black Lives Matter protester threw water on a counterprotester who fired a Taser in response. There were fights. Two men pointed guns at each other. A motorcycle sped through the crowd. They spilled onto Mill Street.

Though the two sides eventually broke apart, Black Lives Matter protesters continued on to the Lane County Jail where police ordered them to disperse, which they then did.

But before the night was done, many people had vandalized parts of downtown, includingbreaking the windows of the Wells Fargo bank and tagging walls and city sidewalks with spray-painted graffiti. Though some protest leaders called for destructive behavior to end, Eugene police eventually declared a riot as the vandalism continued.

"That triggered the counterprotesters coming out more to'protect' their city," Ford said.

Five days later, Black Unity brought a protest to Springfield's Thurston neighborhood. Their march was a reaction to accusations of racism leveled by a Black resident against her neighbor, who hadhanged a Halloween decoration skeleton with a noose in his yard.

The noose, a terrifying image from America's history of racial lynchings, has been used in more recent times as a hate symbol. In Thurston, the skeleton's owner said his was just one of the many Halloween decorations he keeps up year round, not a racist icon.

He told The Register-Guard before the march that he'd been threatened over the noose.

"I'm a combat veteran with severe PTSD. I really don't feel good about having a crowd of people known for throwing things and setting things on fire," David Harbick said. "You could have just told me that you have a problem with this. I would have taken it down."

Ford said that while the hanged skeleton triggered theprotest in Thurston, Black Unity changed its route from passing Harbick's house once they learned more about the situation. But he said the group still felt an educational demonstration there was needed.

Harbick said he didn't ask anyone to help him, but some who saw the social media post calling for the protest reached out to support him. Many showed up to protect his house.

Davis was one of them, and so were others from TAPS and counterprotester groups.

Before that Black Unity march was done, fights had broken out on Thurston streets.

Davis was one of the locals who went to Salem last weekendto take part in a rally at the Capitol that devolved into group-on-group clashes. He spoke for the group Open Up Oregon, which wants to see an end to mask mandates and forced business shutdowns.

Davis said it was the BLM supporters who started the violence that day. Black Lives Matter protesters that day toldthe Salem Statesman Journal it happened otherwise.

Also at the Capitol protestwas Marcus Edwards, a speaker at the July 10 "All Lives Matter" rallyat the Springfield Public Library, who told the Salem Statesman-Journal:

"These criminals, theyre trying to attack the American way of life, and if you understand how these communists work, they use every form of either political or racial tension, and they use it to create division as a divide-and-conquer strategy so that we do not pull together as an American people and rise up against the corruption at our door.

At the Springfield All Lives Matter rally, Edwards spoke to a need for unity while also defaming the BLMsupporters playing the role of counterprotesters across the street.

At that rally, like most others, the groups largely kept separated and exchanged insults and slogans, though thescene did grow tense.

But whenEzekiel Rubottom, a counterprotester, marched through therally to disrupt it with an accordion, a handful of men attendingused U.S. flags to push him to the ground, mobbing himand smashinghis instrument in the process.

Rubottom then was arrested on a years-old warrant for missing a court date in Eugene. Springfield police on July 14 said an investigation was ongoing into the incident.

"I thought at most I wouldget booed out of there. The next thing I know I'm getting pushed," he said."Then I had a sign-shield pushed at me with screws coming out of it."

Accordion player attacked at 'All Lives Matter' rally in Springfield

At a July "All Lives Matter" in Springfield, Ezekiel Rubottom was attacked by rallygoers after he walked through the demonstration with an accordion.

An Aug. 16"pro-America rally and flag wave" hosted by "the Oregon patriots" in the same downtown space had a different tenor. Billed as family friendly, members of groups like TAPS and We the People Oregon held a peaceful cookout in front of the Springfield library.A similar flag wave event was held recently in Cottage Grove.

No one came to counterprotest the gatherings. There were no fights.

Lowndes, the UO right-wing researcher, said he attended a July 25 rally in Salem where protesters on opposing sides clashed in a brief skirmish. He described meeting people who see it as their jobs to defend the nation against threats he said are largely fictitious.

Though such people often are lumped in with white supremacists, Lowndes said what brings them together is less about race and more about perceived threats to their lives.

"There is a general right wing organizing itself not around white supremacy, but the Second Amendment, around the idea antifa is a terrorist organization, around the idea Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization and people wanting to defend the police," Lowndes said. "These protests potentially bring out more, different kinds of people."

We the People of Lane County started as a Facebook group created by Springfield resident Mark Miller. Some of its membership went to scenes such as those at the federal courthouse in Eugene and Thurston. Miller said they see themselves asguardians.

"Black Unity, or whatever flag you want to call it, went there to intimidate people and to threaten people. It was not about anything else," he said. "They come with this disguise of Black Lives Matter. But listen to these people and what comes out of their mouths."

Miller said he believes the Black Lives Matter movement is not the grassroots endeavor it's portrayed to be and is funded by nefarious sources. He said he believes antifa members are the ones primarily responsible for property destruction in Eugene.

And he believes members of groups like his have done the job of keeping the peace.

"By our presence, they've cleaned it up a little bit," Millersaid. "We will not tolerate, particularly in Springfield, criminal behavior."

A June Black Lives Matter protest in Klamath Falls drew hundreds ofcounterprotesters, many armed, bent onprotecting homes and businesses from riots. There were rumorsantifa was coming to the protest, but the antifa threat that night was unfounded.

On July 31, hundreds gathered outsideNew Hope Christian College in south Eugene to protectthe cross that once stood on Skinner Butte from a threat that never materialized.

Threats to tear down that "racist" symbol its history is otherwise were circulated on social media, possibly as a hoax. Neither antifa members nor other groupsshowed up.

Many who did go see antifa and BLM-aligned groupsas a threat demanding opposition.

"Much of the community has risen up spontaneously. We didn't call them, they called us and they showed up en masse," college President Wayne Cordeiro said at the time. "They are saying we are tired of this and we're not going to stand it anymore."

Lowndes said this kind of organization is happening in Oregon, but also nationwide.

Incidents in Eugene and Springfield such as these, in which the opposition to racial justice marches isn't police presence but other civilians, are infrequent but troubling, he said.

"My fear is we're going to see more of this," Lowndes said. "As the election gets closer, I think we're going to see things get more heated."

The July 29 Black Unity march in Thurston was designed to be peaceful and educational, but the night ended as one of the summer's most violent and confrontational.

Before the beginning of the march which at its midpoint saw a locally unprecedented brawl between protesters and cops there was a chance for dialogue.

Ford was one of the Black Unity members to cross the street out ofJesse Maine Memorial Park and talk with people who said they'd come to protect the neighborhood.

"We're here for people like you guys that think we're antifa and we're going to come through your neighborhood and bust your houses and bust your cars up, to show you that we are here to peacefully protest," Ford told them.

"Well, why do you guys let antifa come with you? Don't let antifa come with you," said a man who only would identify himself to The Register-Guard that day as Will.

"Black Unity has done multiple marches. We did one through Thurston where we did not break anything. We do not march with antifa.That's not our group," Ford told them.

Ford wasarrested later that evening in a violent skirmish with Springfield police.

Though that tense conversation ended with some moderately mollified because, as Will said, "we like what we're hearing so far, you're not here to destroy," any progress they made evaporated by night's end. After the fight with police,the sun went down and theBlack Unity marchers were confrontedbycounterprotesters at the park.

Groups face off after Thurston protest march

Groups of counterprotesters confronted Black Unity demonstrators in Springfield's Thurston neighborhood after a march last month.

The protesters were trying to leave, but the last leg of their march included taunts, threats and their own chants"whose streets?" "our streets" thrown back at them. In front of the park, groups squared off face to face, and there were sporadic fights.

"We're supposed to fight them! That's why we're here," shouted one man who was angry with hisfriends' chastisementsafter he fought with a Black Unity protester.

The Civil Liberties Defense Center has been deploying legal observers at protests in Eugene and Springfield to witness police conduct and behavior, already having filed two lawsuits against Eugene police during the protest season. Executive DirectorLauren Reganwas on the ground performing that role in Thurston during the Black Unity march.

She said CLDS will file another lawsuit against Springfield police concerning "blatant collusion" between certain officers and "knownand obvious white supremacists."

A Springfield police spokesman said those allegations are baseless.

"The suggestion that SPD has 'colluded' with counterprotesters, specifically during the Thurston protest, is not supported by evidence. There are several occasions where our officers turned away counterprotesters who were asking to 'assist'officers with crowd control," Springfield Police Department spokesman Sgt. David Grice said in an email.

Springfield police arrested one counterprotester for assault that night.

Miller said he and others lined up behindpolice barricades where Black Unity marchers fought with police. He said they were there to support police in case of violence.

"We didn't have to do anything but stand there," Miller said.

Miller said We the People of Lane County also tried to stop the Thurston protest before it happened by starting a rumor on its own Facebook page, knowing it was being monitored,that Proud Boys and federal officers would be joining the counterprotest.

Regan said she's been a legal observer for more than 20 years, but that never before in the local community has she felt afraid for her safety while doing her job.

"I'm constantly looking around for, basically, violence, fascists and racists that are pulling out guns, pulling out machetes, pulling out wasp spray and aiming it at innocent human beings," Regan said. "When you have to use a thick neck and a gun in order to try and scare your adversaryor scare someone who disagrees with you, that is a sign you recognize your position is incredibly weak and you're on the wrong side of history."

Thurston residents had mixed reactions to the night's protests and fights.

Some were displeased Black Lives Matter protesters came at all, and more still that some of the protesters after the fight with police shouted obscenities and threats at peoplethey perceived as a foe. Some were happy to see self-appointed defenders come to Thurston in an attempt to balance the scales and protect property from harm.

Others just found both to be a nuisance. Some were frightened. Some felt put in the difficult position of having to comfort their childrenor explain the violence and profanity.

Charlie Vermilyea lives on the street where most of the protester vs. counterprotester collisions occurred that night. She described a night of fear, suspecting neither Black Unity nor TAPS nor anyone else who came from outside Thurston was there for peace.

"It's a nice, quiet, peaceful neighborhood. Most of those people weren't from our neighborhood,"Vermilyea said. "They were looking for trouble."

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Locals have organized against Black Lives Matter, leading to street fights, standoffs - The Register-Guard

QAnon crimes: US allegations linked to conspiracy theory and followers – Insider – INSIDER

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On August 19, President Donald Trump praised believers of QAnon a movement based on the unfounded conspiracy theory that a cabal of elite Americans run a child trafficking ring and are secretly fighting to destroy the president.

Followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory passionately believe that Trump himself is actively fighting this cabal, which they also allege involves Hollywood power-players and several Democrats.

Adherents to the unfounded theory have been accused of violence, attempted kidnapping, attempted murder, and other criminal acts. The FBI field office in Phoenix warned in a bulletin last year that the group was becoming a domestic terrorism threat, and the same determination was made in a July report from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Many of the accused consider themselves to be vigilantes seeking justice where the US government has not.

And yet, when asked by a reporter to address the conspiracy theory, Trump showed support: "I've heard these are people that love our country," he said during a press conference.

Immediately after Trump gave his response, QAnon followers rejoiced on social media. August has been a particularly emboldening time for the movement, as Marjorie Taylor Greene, a popular supporter of QAnon from Georgia, earned the GOP nomination for a US House seat. Trump called her a "future Republican star."

Trump's flattering comments have already emboldened QAnon believers and could lead to more serious incidents, according to Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters for America (MMFA), a progressive non-profit that tracks far-right extremism and right-wing media, and has extensively analyzed the spread and dangers of QAnon.

"If you believe in QAnon, you almost have to fundamentally believe that violence is inevitable to 'save the world,'" Carusone told Insider in an email. "As we get closer to Election Day and in the days after, you will see increased urgency for action within the QAnon community, increasingly inflammatory language, and increased calls for acts of violence."

Here are all of the crimes QAnon-linked people have been convicted or accused of so far.

Have a tip about QAnon-related crimes? Email this author at rgreenspan@businessinsider.com.

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QAnon crimes: US allegations linked to conspiracy theory and followers - Insider - INSIDER

The Infiltration of Law Enforcement by Racist Extremists – Fair Observer

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As protests continue to bring cities across the United States to a standstill, the problem of racist policing is more evident than ever before. The killing of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department was the latest in a long line of violent assaults on people of color by law enforcement, and his name joins an ever-growing list of those who have been killed by ones who are sworn to protect and serve. The United States is grappling with the issue of police racism before the worlds eyes, and the scale of the conversation currently happening is unprecedented and, sadly, still not enough.

While the unconscious bias of some officers of the law has been laid bare for all to see, the conscious and hateful bias of others has remained largely in the shadows. The systemic issue of racial profiling is evident, but the hidden epidemic of far-right activism in police departments around the country is an insidious and even more dangerous threat. The links between the police and organized racism are as old as the institutions themselves. During the civil rights movement, Southern police chiefs coordinated with local Ku Klux Klan chapters, and many officers and commissioners in the deep South were accused of aiding Klan activity and even being active members of KKK organizations.

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While this trend seems like an archaic symptom of the era of segregation, links between law enforcement and far-right organizations have remained constant through the 20th century and into the 21st and are now seemingly more widespread than ever. In the 1990s, a federal judge found that a number of deputies in the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Office had concrete links to neo-Nazi organizations and that a number of cases of police violence against black and Latino communities had been motivated by their racist hostility and terrorist sympathies. Likewise, in 2008, a prominent Chicago-area police officer was fired and prosecuted over links to the Ku Klux Klan.

A 2015 FBI investigation found that white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement agencies was at epidemic levels, and suggested that right-wing and anti-government domestic terrorists were using links with law enforcement to gain intelligence and restricted access privileges, as well as ultimately evade capture. The report found that the vast majority of law enforcement agencies across the United States did not screen potential recruits for links to far-right organizations and often turned a blind eye to those recruits with questionable political beliefs.

The bureau was aware of widespread infiltration as early as 2006, suggesting in a heavily redacted report that white supremacist activists were taking advantage of weak vetting procedures in local law enforcement agencies to gain access to restricted areas vulnerable to sabotage and to elected officials or protected persons, whom they could see as potential targets for violence. The 2006 report suggested that this was a systematic effort, coordinated by high-profile far-right figures such as William Pierce, and infiltration was seen as a key element in the philosophy of leaderless resistance.

Despite the concerns and recommendations outlined in the FBIs latest report, recent research has shown that the links between law enforcement and the extreme right have continued to flourish. Last year, a Reveal News investigation found that hundreds of active duty and retired law enforcement officers were members of online forums dedicated to Islamophobia, neo-Confederate ideology and even neo-Nazism. Almost 400 police officers from 150 different departments had their identities verified, and many were found to have been actively peddling hate speech, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and anti-government rhetoric.

The Proud Boys in particular have strong links to law enforcement, and a number of high-profile investigations have highlighted the extent of the collusion between police and the hate group described as the alt-right fight club. In May this year, a Chicago PD officer, Robert Bakker, was found to have been an active member of a Proud Boys Telegram channel called Fuck Antifa, where he actively coordinated Proud Boys meet-ups and bragged about his connections in the police department and the government.

Six months earlier, a police officer from East Hampton, Connecticut, was forced into retirement after his links to Proud Boys groups in the area. The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law led an investigation into the officers social media activity, finding that he was an active member of the self-described western chauvinist group. A year before that, a female officer from Clark County, Washington, was fired after she was pictured wearing a Proud Boys sweatshirt and was later discovered to have been merchandising Proud Boys apparel on the design-sharing RedBubble website.

Even in cases in which officers are not active members of hate groups, collusion remains a very real issue. In 2019, police officers in Washington, DC, were pictured fist-bumping Proud Boys members at a July 4 rally in front of the White House. The members of the group were then given a police escort to a local bar, while anti-fascist protesters were met with violence from both the police and the Proud Boys. In an even more egregious case, an investigation in Portland, Oregon, found that a senior police officer had been exchanging friendly text messages with Joey Gibson. Gibson was the leader of the far-right Patriot Prayer, a sometimes violent offshoot of the Proud Boys defined by both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.

In the lead-up to a number of high-profile clashes between the group and anti-fascist counterdemonstrators, Gibson and Lieutenant Jeff Niiya shared joking messages and talked about Patriot Prayers planned actions, with Niiya even confiding in Gibson that he had told officers to ignore outstanding warrants for the arrest of a prominent Patriot Prayer member, Tusitala Tiny Toese. A separate investigation found that Niiya had submitted police reports on Gibsons behalf, launching criminal investigations against antifa activists based on footage Gibson had privately sent him. This raised concerns that far-right demonstrators were being given preferential treatment by Portland police, particularly given the reputation for forceful suppression of anti-fascist counterprotest in the city.

Although this trend reaches uniquely epidemic levels in the United States, the rest of the world is not immune. A 2019 report showed alarming levels of collusion between law enforcement and violent right-wing extremists in Germany. The investigation, led by the nations general prosecutor, found that the extreme-right Nordkreuz group had compiled a death list of leftist activists, journalists and pro-refugee targets using police records and was in the process of planning a major terror attack. It was found that the 30 members of the group had close ties to law enforcement, with at least one member actively employed by a special commando unit of the state office of criminal investigations.

A recent investigation by Der Spiegel found that the elite unit, known as the KSK, openly tolerated extremist right-wing iconography and membership, even using widely-known Nazi ciphers such as 88 code for HH, or Heil Hitler. The investigation uncovered high-level officers openly promoting national-conservative ideology and espousing racist ultranationalism. Earlier this year, a KSK soldier who reportedly had links to extremist groups was arrested after a weapons and explosives cache was found in his back yard. The German government responded to Der Spiegels expos by launching its own investigation into the unit, finding that racist extremism was endemic across all ranks. As a result, the unit was officially disbanded in early July.

As historian Kathleen Belew has shown in her most recent book on the long history of the far rights links to the United States military, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, the siphoning of weaponry and ammunition from military bases to white supremacist organizations has been a constant tactic of would-be terrorist groups. There is no doubt that the continued militarization of police forces in the United States and Europe, combined with the high levels of extremist infiltration, offers new avenues for the theft of high-grade weaponry and tactics, and further armament of extremist right-wing groups.

These links between law enforcement and white supremacist organizations are deeply concerning, and present a very real threat to peace, justice and liberty in the United States and around the world. As police racism once again enters the spotlight, it is more important than ever to examine and challenge the infiltration of law enforcement by racist extremists. A centralized vetting process that directly seeks out links to organized racism and excludes candidates with any affiliation with far-right groups is the bare minimum and should be the first step toward a total overhaul of the training and oversight procedures.

Despite a number of legal challenges to the protective role of policing, law enforcement, at its core, still exists to protect and serve the people regardless of race, religion or creed, and any affiliation with hateful ideology compromises an officers ability to execute this role fairly and without prejudice. Until the systemic and personal racism of law enforcement is no longer an issue, we will see more George Floyds, more Breonna Taylors, more murders in the name of law and order. Preventing and eliminating racist bias in police departments across the US is only the first step toward a long process of reckoning and reconciliation.

*[Fair Observer is amediapartner of theCentre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observers editorial policy.

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Crackdown on free speech a threat to justice – The Tribune India

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Shelley Walia

Professor Emeritus, English & Cultural Studies, Panjab University

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King Jr.

In the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, John Rawls A Theory of Justice had a long-lasting impact on American anti-statists and British egalitarians, as well as on the larger issues of civil disobedience, international justice and commitment of the state and citizens in capitalist welfare states. Such a political philosophy aimed to legitimise political change by appealing to public intellectuals as moral agents of reform.

This development occurred in a culture of racism, bigotry and ultra-nationalism that has dominated the democracies ever since. Plagued by the crackdown on dissent, the situation in many countries is exacerbated by uncertain employment, housing and healthcare. A prejudiced leadership, partial media and the demise of the Opposition has given rise to the increasing intrusion of the private sphere.

Varavara Rao, poet-activist with a singular voice of protest, languishes in jail. GN Saibaba, a disabled professor, remains incarcerated with no trial in sight. With baseless and flimsy evidence, their lock-up violates civil liberties and subverts the constitutional order. Some fine scholars and writers come under police and judicial harassment for standing up for the deprived and the marginalised. It becomes a matter of anguish for the nation when a citizens fundamental right to life and liberty is denied.

However, radical change is optimistically envisaged with the possibility of producing a politics of freedom and resistance, with the hope of finding solutions to the nagging issues confronting a democracy. The defence of bona fide beliefs of an individual in a democracy screams for attention in an environment of pervert rational thinking and brash exercise of Orwellian surveillance for absolute ideological control.

The last few months have been exceptionally volatile in the history of the democratic working of public institutions. Democracy and free speech are under siege. For example, Prashant Bhushan, in declining to tender an apology to the Supreme Court, has secured his dignity and his sense of responsibility to the future of Indias democracy. His is a moral act defined by affirming the inviolability of free speech, public values and truth that resonate in Vaclav Havels statement on speaking truth to power: When I speak of living within truth, I naturally do not have in mind only products of conceptual thought, such as a protest or a letter written by a group of intellectuals. It can be any means by which a person or a group revolts against manipulation. Such a stand against the depravity of the political moment is an earnest attempt to uphold the power of the powerless and the fairness of justice.

Bhushan has not shown any disrespect for the judicial system, but has peacefully redirected the attention of the nation to the quality of justice and the dignity of our public institutions. A civil, humanistic public action against the jeopardising of democratic institutions cannot be anything but ethical to the core and, unquestionably, not invite the over-reaction of criminal reprimand through a self-deprecating contempt order.

Recent social and political upheavals in the wake of sectarian violence or the increasing infringement of public space has raised questions about the future of liberty and dignity, freedom and justice, calling for a scrutiny of the working of the Reserve Bank, judiciary, police or civil services. With politics taking on the character of regressive and unabashedly unconstitutional right-wing intimidation through the misuse of public institutions, public oppression becomes acute and expectations of the institutional foundations of our democracy fail. At such critical moments, the critical-minded progressive thinkers rise to counter any form of unanimity or mindless obedience to the capricious assertions of the leadership, fighting for the survival of a culture that reflects on deeper ethical and social concerns.

It is a fact that radical social transformations have been brought about not by totalitarian means, but by peoples participation in offering resistance or critiques of the retrogressive functioning of institutions and the arbitrary suppression of any opposition. The end of debate is apparently the outcome of the end of history syndrome that has dominated the liberal democracies of the world.

The liberal recipe stands botched in ushering a new world order promised by the happy birth of a global community. History brings us face to face with the threat of despotism, provoking public intellectuals to rise up against the obsessive use of raw power. At the irreducible existential moment of economic or military crisis when the row between democracy and fascism, freedom and tyranny becomes an unrelenting political encounter, they advance an alternative vision with a global appeal of a new reinvention of participatory democracy and free thinking.

The historical necessity of the times inspires the freedom-loving people to adopt strategies of non-violent resistance and non-cooperation, thereby echoing an ethical dimension of the politics of living in truth with a sense of individual responsibility.

The lesson to be learnt from Rawls, Havel or historians like Howard Zinn is to exist in the embrace of robust forms of free speech practical and responsible enough to create an environment with a commitment to challenge the state apparatus and institutions that it undemocratically uses for its authority.

Not surprisingly, intellectuals like Arundhati Roy, Ramachandra Guha, Harsh Mander or Prashant Bhushan have opened spaces for new civil and democratic politics in India, underpinned by notions of truth, accountability and civility. They bring their adverse stand into the shaping of the world through their scrutiny of the social and political world with a belief in their sense of belongingness to the state free from any sense of alienation or antagonism.

Why then should the state feel a sense of disquiet at resistance movements hurling ideas of emancipation and justice? It is wrong to presume that autocracies can wipe out the diversity of political thought. The spectre of Marx hangs on the contemporary world and dialectical materialism remains an antidote to ideological unilateralism, a condemnation of the systems that have usurped socialism and progressive movements. Indeed, the constitutional values of liberalism cannot be ignored for long.

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Crackdown on free speech a threat to justice - The Tribune India

Opinion | Putting professor on leave is a crackdown on free speech – The Daily Orange

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At the very least, Syracuse Universitys decision to place a professor on administrative leave for referring to COVID-19 as the Wuhan Flu and the Chinese Communist Party Virus demonstrates the administrations oversensitivity and willingness to fold under pressure from the speech police. At most, it represents SUs zealous crackdown on free speech.

In their joint statement emailed to the SU community on Tuesday, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Karin Ruhlandt and Interim Vice Chancellor and Provost John Liu pillory one of their own staff members for his bold decision to place these terms in his syllabus.

Racist, xenophobic, bigoted and hateful are the allegations the two administrators circuitously levy against this professor.

So its hateful now to attribute to an illness the name of the geological region where it originated? In that case, infections like Ebola, West Nile Virus, Lyme disease, and Zika (just to name a few) need renaming as well.

Naming illnesses after places is time-saving and allows for greater distinction between similar diseases. While examples do exist of highly distasteful disease naming-schemes, like AIDS at times referred to as gay-related immune deficiency, the naming process is almost never intended to humiliate or shame a group of people.

In all fairness, very few people likely desire to have their neck of the woods be associated with disease and death. Folks who share names with hurricanes are frequently reminded by meteorologists not to take it personally. Their justification? More easily recognizable storm names generate greater public awareness: more lives saved.

Nevertheless, SU administrators are not interested in reasonable explanations. They have, instead, decided that labeling COVID-19 after the totalitarian regime that actively suppressed life-saving, early reporting isnt a righteous calling-out of a malicious government but an act of vicious racism.

How many lives and livelihoods could have been saved had the Chinese government sounded the alarms in December when cases of this new virus started piling up? Blood is on the hands of the Chinese government, but dont let SU administrators catch you acknowledging that reality.

Published on August 25, 2020 at 10:43 pm

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Opinion | Putting professor on leave is a crackdown on free speech - The Daily Orange

Standing by O’Shaughnessy, and for free speech – theday.com

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The sensitivity meter in Stonington needs adjustment. Communities are concerned that the level of violence allowed on the streets of our cities has progressed from legitimate protest to lawlessness when criminal elements like Antifa, unchallenged,run wild with looting, burning and life-threatening actions.

The two reposted twitter messages were from American citizens with a different opinion than the whining liberals, who prefer to talk over and drown out the First Amendment. The first twitter message could have just as well been directed towards the conduct of the two accused in the hotel incident. Have any of the critics asked police commission member Bob OShaughnessy? Besides "We the People" have had enough. That is pretty much the content of both of those articles.

The Democratic Party is desperate, standing on the wall at the Alamo knowing the outcome.I have known Bob since 1970 and have worked with him and for him. He is a retired Connecticut State Police captain and since his retirement has done more civic volunteer work than all his critics combined. This patriot means to draw a line in the sand.

James L. Miller

Retired Connecticut state trooper

Salem

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Standing by O'Shaughnessy, and for free speech - theday.com

KSL Investigates: Does armed protest have a chilling effect on free speech? – KSL.com

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SALT LAKE CITY A summer of protests highlighting the First Amendments protection of free speech has culminated in a movement highlighting the Second Amendments protection of the right to bear arms.

Members of Utah Citizens United have begun showing up at protests against police brutality carrying semi-automatic rifles.

Critics said that has a chilling effect on the freedom of speech.

So what happens when those two constitutionally protected rights seem to conflict with one another?

As the KSL Investigators learned, legal precedent has some catching up to do.

Provo native Casey Robertson formed Utah Citizens Alarm after a protest in his hometown on June 29 ended in a shooting when a protester opened fire at a driver whose vehicle was being blocked at an intersection.

It hit home that the violence is now here, Robertson explained.

That is when he took to Facebook and put out the call for support.

Who wants to come down there with me and show em were not going to put up with violence in our town, he said about his Facebook post.

Members of UCA have since attended rallies across Utah, oftentimes wearing military fatigues, tactical gear and carrying AR-15 style rifles. Many also wear face coverings, making them unidentifiable.

They show up to protests, Robertson said, to show solidarity with law enforcement.

We back law enforcement 100% as a group and they appreciate that because law enforcement is getting a horrible, terrible name right now, Robertson said. Were simply there to be eyes and ears for the police and just be a deterrent for violence. Thats it.

When asked if he encourages members of his group to come armed to protests, Robertson said, We encourage people to be aware of the laws and follow them closely.

Im not sorry if were intimidating. Im not. Utah citizens want to be intimidating. We dont want violence here in Utah. We do not want chaos and anarchy, Robertson continued.

While violence and property damage have occurred, of the dozens of protests that have taken place in Utah this summer, most have been peaceful.

While Robertson and his members argue their presence at protests absolutely deters violence, property damage and destruction, activists like Josianne Petit believe what UCAs presence really deters is people from exercising their First Amendment right to protest.

Petit started an organization for parents of black children called Mama and Papa Panthers. She has used her voice to speak out at many protests this summer.

They say theyre there to keep the peace. Well, the way my group and like groups have shown that were here for non-violent protests is we dont bring enough ammo to take out a small village, Petit said. They are weapons of war. They are not made to disarm or disable an opponent.

Petit is passionate and outspoken about the need for police reform and the need to end police brutality. She is demanding change and knows doing so is her First Amendment right.

Were just asking for the same treatment when we engage with police officers as white people have come to expect, Petit said. Its the cause of liberation.

She said the presence of heavily armed, masked men and women at largely non-violent protests has resulted in serious fear. In some cases, the concern for protesters personal safety is so concerning, she said, they are shying away from exercising their First Amendment right.

Their tactic is working, right? Its silencing the vast majority of black voices here in Utah, Petit said.

Shes equally worried about another intimidation tactic she said is employed by members of UCA.

They have made a point of stalking us at every single event that we hold, she said. They just monitor our Facebook page and if we say were going to an event, they show up.

Robertson admitted that as his group grows, its expanding focusing on intelligence gathering.

We have quite a few people that have stepped up and that have created false accounts where we can infiltrate some of their conversations and some of their planning and groups, Robertson said.

The KSL Investigators went to Jess Anderson, commissioner of the Utah Department of Public Safety, to get his perspective on UCA and similar groups.

We appreciate their support for law enforcement, Anderson said specifically about Utah Citizens Alarm, However, its not done with the proper training. Its not done with a proper perspective or understanding.

He made it clear: when it comes to law enforcements interactions with UCA and groups like it, there is no working relationship.

Listen, we didnt request you. Youre not the backup to the police, Anderson explained. Theyve been respectful of that so far, but it causes concern to the law enforcement community just because it puts us in a very peculiar situation, knowing and understanding that if something were to happen, guess whos caught right in the middle of this? Its now the police [who] have an armed standoff.

As for UCAs aim of intelligence gathering, Anderson said, We, in the policing world, have all of our access to good intelligence, to which we are using in a most respectful way.

At what point do intimidation tactics cross the line and infringe on protesters Constitutional rights? University of Utah law professor RonNell Andersen Jones said theres little clear legal precedent.

Certainly the Supreme Court has recognized that if someone engages in a behavior that rises to the level of being what the court calls a true threat, then it loses its First Amendment protection and your capacity to express yourself with a weapon in your hand changes. You dont have the ability to continue to invoke Constitutional protection and the government can regulate you from threatening other people in that way.

However, the courts have not decided if a large number of firearms at a public protest rises to the level of a true threat.

The bare existence of the firearm on their person under Utah State law isnt necessarily a threat against another person. Its an exercise of the open carry right, said Jones. Were still waiting for jurisprudence from the United States Supreme Court that helps us to understand the boundaries of firearms in public.

Case law may not be far away.

There are lots of test cases that seem to be emerging all across the country as the Black Lives Matter movement and other protest movements are generating these conflicts on a scale that we havent seen before, said Jones.

Its actually, in some respects, quite remarkable that weve had since 1790, to have some of these conflicts emerge and havent had the chance to sort of tussle with them, she said. But its also a uniquely modern problem with modern firearms and with modern protest movements. And so sometimes it takes time for the Constitution to catch up with the problems that we face in the real world.

Casey Robertson said his group believes in the right to peacefully assemble and peacefully protest.

We dont exist to show up at protests, said Robertson. However, weve seen that these protests tend to get violent and Antifa is working through these protest groups to get their point across which is disruption and anarchy.

Antifa short for anti-fascists is a political group with no leader and no clear organization. Their ideology embraces violence as a tool to combat far-right extremists and white nationalist groups.

And its who Robertson believes is the real enemy of America.

Anderson, however, said Antifa is currently no cause for concern in Utah.

As far as identifying who those somewhat terrorist groups are, or otherwise really anarchistic groups, we do keep a close watch on that, Anderson said. By and large, we do not see that being an issue or a problem to the point where its causing us complete panic or concern.

Less than two months after Robertson created the Utah Citizens Alarm page on Facebook, it had attracted nearly 20,000 members.

Facebook shut down the page on Aug. 19, along with nearly 1,000 other accounts. The social networking company said the move was aimed at limiting violent rhetoric tied to anarchists, political militias and followers of the Q-Anon conspiracy theory.

According to NBC News, Facebooks policy states, Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts associated with these movements and organizations will be removed when they discuss potential violence.

Robertson said that will not deter his members. They created a website to continue operations online.

UCA is still here. We are still strong. This Facebook thing in no way will affect the momentum that we have created, Robertson said in a video posted on Monday.

Robertson said he is working on more formally organizing the group by providing members with training and legal support.

He also said UCA is more thoroughly vetting its members and hopes to change their image.

As weve grown, weve realized that an AR may not be the best thing to be carrying in a situation like that, Robertson said.

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KSL Investigates: Does armed protest have a chilling effect on free speech? - KSL.com

Lawsuits accuse Gov. Whitmer of squelching free speech and Sec. Of State Benson of violating election law – Fox17

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LANSING, Mich. Lawsuits have been filed that accuse Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of violating the First Amendment by restricting the number of people who can attend political rallies and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson of violating election law by allowing online application for absentee ballots.

The suits were filed by the Election Integrity Fund and One Nation Michigan.

The suit against the governor claims Whitmers executive orders limiting the size of indoor and outdoor gatherings virtually eliminate retail politics. It also takes issue with the governors ability to change the rules at any time without notice, claiming that is a violation of the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The suit against the secretary of state claims Benson made it possible to request absentee ballots online, violating state election law the requires a voters signature on such applications. The suit also claims Bensons plan to send applications to all voters is also a violation of state law that requires voters to ask for an application.

The lawsuits were filed in the Michigan Court of Claims in Lansing and asks the court to give the suits a quick hearing and to stop the governors and secretarys actions.

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Lawsuits accuse Gov. Whitmer of squelching free speech and Sec. Of State Benson of violating election law - Fox17

Trumpism Is the Real Cancel Culture – Washington Monthly

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Free speech is under threat in the United States. Thats what numerous speakers have told the Republican convention, which wraps up Thursday night.

Theyre right. And the biggest threat comes from the man theyre re-nominating for president, Donald J. Trump.Trump has called major media outlets enemies of the people, warning that he might withhold their broadcast licenses. He encouraged supporters at one of his rallies to assault protesters, promising to pay any legal bills that resulted. And he ordered the removal of peaceful demonstrators from the front of the White House, all so he could pose for a photo-op while holding a Bible.

You havent heard anything about that at the GOP convention, of course, where every attack is blamed on the other side. And thats the biggest problem for free speech in our country right now. We all want the right to speak, but were perfectly happy to deny it to somebody else. And that isnt free speech at all.

So numerous presenters at the convention railed against cancel culture, complaining that many Americans are prevented or discouraged from speaking their minds. At universities, especially, students find themselves suppressing their beliefs to fit into the acceptable groupthink, as Tiffany Trump, the presidents daughter, declared on Tuesday night.

Thats true. According to a wide swath of research, growing numbers of Americans bite their tongues for fear of being canceled on social media. Disagreement is fine; indeed, its the lifeblood of democracy. But when we seek to obliterate our opponents, rejecting not just their ideas but their humanity, we make honest discussion impossible.

But guess who is the Canceler-in-Chief? Donald Trump, of course. To Trump, political challengers arent simply people who disagree with him; theyre losers, dummies, morons, and more. He has called Mexicans rapists, women pigs, and African countries shitholes. Almost every day brings another vile presidential tweet, denigrating someones intellect, gender, or racial background.

Yet speaker after speaker at the GOP convention condemned opponents for cancelling them. Joe Biden and the radical left are now coming for our freedom of speech and want to bully us into submission, Donald Trump, Jr., charged. Seriously? What is his father, if not the quintessential bully? And how can Republicans champion free speech, but ignore the presidents own attacks on the same?

Alas, my fellow liberals have too often demonstrated a similar inconsistency. When Trump or another Republican endangers speech, we raise up a hue and cry. But when the threat comes from our own side, we keep quiet or even cheer it along.

So after prominent University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig tweeted out critical remarks about Black Lives Matter, we called for his head. Ditto for UCLA business professor Gordon Klein, who was placed on leave after questioning students demand to change his course requirements in light of the traumas suffered by African Americans.

And when respected Intercept reporter Lee Fang posted an interview with an African American about black victims of crime, Fang was denounced as a racistreallyon social media. Never mind that Fang himself is mixed-race, or that he attended predominantly African-American public schools as a child. The Twitter mob wanted blood, and it got it.

Enough already. If you really believe in free speech, it isnt enough to complain about somebody else. You have to put your own house in order, and grant other people the same liberty that you want for yourself.We believe in freedom of thought and expression, Tiffany Trump told the GOP convention. Think what you want. Seek out the truth. Learn from those with different opinions. Then freely, make your voice heard.

If only her father would follow her advice! The biggest danger to free speech is Donald Trump, who has used his own voice to suppress different opinions at every turn. And the second biggest danger is that the rest of us are imitating Trump, all in the guise of resisting him.

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Trumpism Is the Real Cancel Culture - Washington Monthly

Scotland’s Hate Crime Bill would have a chilling effect on free speech – Spectator.co.uk

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Among the encroachments on Miltons three supreme liberties contained in Humza Yousafs Hate Crime Bill is a cloturing of the debate on gender identity and the law. Proposals to remove medical expertise from the gender recognition process have either stalled or been shelved, but not before their radical scope prompted a lively dispute about the ethics of gender identity, sex-based rights and the freedom to dissent. That freedom will be meaningfully reduced in Scotland if the Hate Crime Bill becomes law because it is a piece of legislation that begins from the position that all legitimate debate has already concluded.

The Bill creates an offence of stirring up hatred against a list of protected characteristics, including transgender identity. That term was defined in Scots law a decade ago in the Offences (Aggravation by Prejudice) (Scotland) Act 2009 as referring to:

transvestism, transsexualism, intersexuality or having, by virtue of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, changed gender, or any other gender identity that is not standard male or female gender identity.

The explanatory notes to the Hate Crime Bill advance a new, more expansive definition that includes:

those who identify as male but were registered as female at birth, those who identify as female but were registered as male at birth, non-binary people and cross-dressing people.

Not only is this a much broader definition than that of gender reassignment in the Equality Act, the Hate Crime Bill defines its terms in opposition to those of the 2010 Act, with the accompanying notes specifying that transgender identity:

does not only refer to people with a Gender Recognition Certificate or who have undergone, are undergoing, (or propose to undergo) medical or surgical interventions.

This is a Polonian definition: to thine own pronouns be true. Identifying themselves along these lines may make life easier for transgender people, and who would object to that? But a law that adopts such arbitrary and subjective parameters - and provides for custodial punishments for offending against them - is a tripwire pulled tight around personal and expressive liberty.

Murray Blackburn Mackenzie (MBM), independent and respected analysts of Scottish public policy, warns that a failure to clarify what is meant by this term is likely to add to the already substantial risks around freedom of expression. MBM notes that, while the Bill sticks to broad themes, much more specific definitions are already in use by bodies such as Police Scotland and NHS Lanarkshire, and in both cases are:

grounded in a persons internal feelings, and specifically in a belief in the presence of a gender identity which exists innately and separately from physical sex, rather than being related to any observable behaviours or physical traits.

That is a policy analysts way of saying that everyone is making it up as they go along.

SNP justice minister Humza Yousaf is effectively adopting a Potter Stewart test for what constitutes stirring up hatred on the basis of transgender identity. The approach seems to be in essence that people (individuals? the police? prosecutors? the courts? juries?) will know it when they see it, MBM concludes. The Hate Crime Bill is legislated vagueness with a seven-year prison sentence attached.

Imprecision is not the cardinal sin of this Bill. MBM warns of a substantial chilling effect on freedom of expression and no wonder. To be prosecuted, a person will not even have to intend to stir up hatred against a group which the law itself cannot define. It will be enough that his behaviour or communications are considered threatening or abusive and that a court deems it likely that hatred will be stirred up. If this cascade of caprice becomes law some, perhaps many, holders of controversial or dissenting views will conclude that it is safer to simply shut up than risk arrest, prosecution and even imprisonment.

Ever since the Scottish Governments campaign to legislate self-identification stalled, gender-critical feminists have been on alert for attempts to introduce these changes by the back door. The Hate Crime Bill gets closer than any other measure to jimmying the lock. If it passes as drafted, the potential chilling effects on debate about gender and identity will be such that some aspects of self-identification are achieved by default. Who will dare write or say that transwomen are not women when it could bring, at the very least, a visit to your home or workplace by police? Who will insist that sex-reserved spaces be reserved on the basis of sex when there are activists out there just waiting to experience your policy as threatening or abusive? Who will object to girls who are boyish or attracted to members of the same sex being told they are trans when a fellow teacher or medic or social worker might pick up the phone and report your heresy as hate speech?

No people can consent to be governed by such an insidious and repressive law and still be counted among the freedom-valuing nations of the world. I tend to think that, rather than being motivated by conscious contempt for liberty, Humza Yousaf is so enraptured by the ascendant ideology of coercive progressivism that he cannot see what an almighty shoeing his Bill gives to the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience. Im not sure his intentions are worth a jot, though, when the consequences are so destructive. Yousaf is a Scottish nationalist but while he might believe in independence, he has no regard for freedom.

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Scotland's Hate Crime Bill would have a chilling effect on free speech - Spectator.co.uk

BOOK REVIEW: Yes, I Can Say That is Judy Golds take on freedom of speech – Wicked Local Provincetown

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Emmy Award-winning comedienne Judy Gold is now appearing at the Crown and Anchor in Provincetown. She has written a funny and compelling new book "Yes, I Can Say That" which details her musings about freedom of speech from the perspective of the comic. In the books forward, she writes, Its terrifying out there right now for stand-ups. The fear of backlash and inciting microaggression from the audience members by uttering a politically incorrect joke that offends is always present in the mind of the standup before, during and after a performance, she says.

This kind of scrutiny from the easily-offended, is not only coming from the right politically, but also those leaning left, Gold maintains. Asshe proceeds with her manifesto on a performers right to free speech, she interweaves some hilarious anecdotes and jokes that have arisen in her performing life and in the performing life of other comedians as well.

Gold talks about stereotypes, and how were all products of our history and legacy. We can laugh at them for the spark of truth they contain, and challenge them when theyve been unfairly assigned or used to denigrate," she says. "One of the best ways to challenge these long-held false beliefs is with comedy. She then gives examples of how various comedians with a host of ethnic backgrounds have handled issues centered around this kind of stereotype attribution.

But the best comedy lives on the edge of whats acceptable, Gold writes, and thats where audiences can either laugh at the joke being delivered or choose to feel offended. Sometimes feelings of offense get mixed with anger and an audience member decides to leave the show. It is simply an individuals natural impulse to protect themselves from unpleasantness that causes such action. As Gold maintains though, Jokes are nourished by tension; laughter is a release.

Golds book is also part-history, chronicling the great comics who have fought for freedom of speech, and giving homage to these comics fight against censorship. Shetackles the issue of the Cancel Culture, the phenomenon of promoting the canceling or the rejection of an individual whose actions remarks, or ideologies others consider to be offensive or problematic.

She delivers a blistering attack on Donald Trump, but the attack constitutes a valid argument. Here Gold quotes the comedian Jon Stewart, I dont understand why in this country we try to hold comedians to a higher standard we do not hold leaders to.

Gold delivers a wonderful tribute to her idol, Joan Rivers, who she says was The funniest and most fearless of women. Readers learn a great deal about Rivers career, her methods as comedienne, and her pioneering efforts to promote women in the field of comedy. Rivers jokes, interspersed throughout Golds retelling, are hilarious.

Political correctness, according to Gold, is a virus that is killing great stand-up comedy, and such a death hurts us all. Protocols defining political correctness were established to avoid insulting marginalized groups of people. Gold warns her fellow comedians that they should refrain from maliciously offending people, and be willing to laugh at themselves. A cardinal rule should be, always endeavor to gain the trust of the audience.

To us the audience, Gold challenges us to stop taking ourselves so seriously. The most important thing of all? Laugh! Let go and laugh!

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BOOK REVIEW: Yes, I Can Say That is Judy Golds take on freedom of speech - Wicked Local Provincetown

Getting wasted to win the War on Drugs and forget those who lost – Colombia Reports

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I signed up for the War on Drugs because I want to be a winner, unlike my murdered friend and the two American former interns who died of an overdose. They lost.

Almost 50 years after late US President Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Latin Americas narcos are doing better than ever.

The rest of the world agrees the United States drug policy is a racket, but try explaining that to the Washington DC pen pushers and the narcos who now have billions of dollars to celebrate their scams 50th anniversary.

The narcos have every reason to celebrate as they are trafficking more drugs than ever before. The DEA has every reason to celebrate because they are ripping off the American people for $3.1 billion a year without doing anything.

As a former loser in the War on Drugs I dont have that kind of money. Fortunately, now that I have joined the war I get drugs for free.

People will stand in line to feed you doobies, smarties and benzos when you say you want to write a column while off your tits on drugs only to debase feds and their so-called War on Drugs.

Ironically, I am now too wasted to remember what day it is, but one cannot be wasted enough to win the War on Drugs.

I got nothing against drugs. I think its a personal choice, just like alcohol and cigarettes, just as long as that personal choice doesnt infringe on the freedoms and other peoples personal choices. Really, thats the end of the story. Thats called logic, itll help you.

George Bush says: Were losing the War on Drugs. Do you know what that implies? Theres a war going on and people on drugs are winning. What does that tell you about drugs? Theres some smart, creative motherfuckers on that side. Theyre winning a war and theyre fucked up!

Had the DEAs $3.1 billion budget gone to healthcare like in developed countries, my dead American former interns may have gotten the help they apparently needed.

Had the DEA not colluded with Medellin drug trafficker Don Berna and the Cali Cartel my late colleagues brains may still be inside his skull.

If you make a deal with one bad guy to take down another bad guy. Whats wrong with that? I heard this gloating DEA prick say on Netflix the other day.

The answer is that when counternarcotics officials collude with narcos they the DEA becomes their plaything. Ask El Tuso, his drug trafficking even got him a green card.

Plan Colombia was supposed to deprive organized crime of their drug trafficking revenue, which became became a $10 billion failure, yet the ignoramus who invented it, Philip Goldberg, was promoted and is now the US ambassador in the country he helped ruin.

Goldberg now pretends to be fighting drug trafficking with a government that has more ties to the now-defunct Medellin Cartel than I have had girlfriends.

While asking US Congress for more budget to fight drug trafficking, the US Embassy refuses to answer any of my questions related to criminal investigations.

Im probably blacklisted or something and I didnt even ask why no narco has been arrested in years.

I did reveal that Pablo Escobars cousin was hanging out with former ambassador William Brownfield before he became Assistant Secretary of State for dont laugh the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.

Brownfield even won a Distinguished Service Award and three Presidential Performance Awards despite having secured a Medal of Freedom for another former Medellin Cartel associate.

Meanwhile, I was trying to overcome the deaths of my former colleague and former interns, but my days of losing this war are over.

It took pharmaceutical companies Novartis and Roche and my friends homegrown weed some convincing, but I have decided to become an active combatant in the War on Drugs.

I may be high as a fucking kite, but I believe I am winning and I no longer feel pain.

P.S. After sobering up I realized I dont want to be a racketeer like Goldberg or Brownfield and dont want to be responsible for the deaths of innocent people who either succumb to addiction or are assassinated for confronting organized crime and corruption. Ill just continue losing this stupid war.

Read more:

Getting wasted to win the War on Drugs and forget those who lost - Colombia Reports