One of the ques­tions that I ask par­tic­u­lar­ly of peo­ple of col­or is, why don’t you take a more active vot­ing posi­tion? Last year one 60-some­thing African-American man told me that he did not get into white peo­ple’s busi­ness, speak­ing of voting.
Normally I would try to tell some­one like that why it’s impor­tant to vote, but where there is no floor, where do you stand?
I told myself some things are best left alone; I was not going to make a dif­fer­ence in that kind of darkness.
It is easy to gloss over the strug­gles that African-Americans have waged to gain the right to vote. A right that white men bestowed upon them­selves and them alone. Yes, at one time, they did not even allow their white women to vote. No, even if her dad­dy left her wealth, her hus­band had great pow­er over her inher­i­tance. She could not pur­chase prop­er­ty or do what she pleas­es with her own money.
It would be easy for some­one to auto­mat­i­cal­ly assume that because of those strug­gles, African-Americans would be attuned to the pow­er of vot­ing, or at the very least be enlight­ened by the war that the white pow­er struc­ture has waged to pre­vent them from voting.
Unfortunately, this is not so, but to be fair Black women have been loy­al sol­diers in the strug­gle to reg­is­ter and get oth­ers to vote.….…… Today Charles Schumer owes his Senate Majority Leadership to Stacy Abrams and oth­ers who worked to deliv­er not one, but two Democratic US Senate seats in Georgia, the heart of Dixie.

One of the mis­con­cep­tions that exist at the local lev­el, is that local Republicans are some­how less evil than nation­al Republicans. As if nation­al Republicans are from Mars.
Black vot­ers are fooled into think­ing that they can live with local Republican elect­ed lead­ers, not under­stand­ing that Republicans’ harm begins at the local level.
Like ground­hogs, they bur­row into the heart of our every­day lives, exist­ing in pre­tense, they vis­it our church­es, they pre­tend to be friends by throw­ing a few bones, but their inten­tions are nefarious.
On the issues that are of the great­est sig­nif­i­cance and impor­tance to African-Americans, Republicans at all lev­els are uni­tar­i­ly opposed.
No exceptions!!!
Please make no mis­take about it; vot­ing is not sole­ly about oppo­si­tion to a hate­ful white-suprema­cist agen­da. It is also about wolves-in-sheep­’s-cloth­ing-democ­rats who can­not get elect­ed with­out the African-American vote, but who vote in sup­port of a white suprema­cist Republican agen­da as soon as they are elected.

The New York Legislature recent­ly Voted to Legalize Adult-Use Marijuana; the Bill was signed into law soon after by Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Over sev­er­al decades America’s war on drugs has wrought untold suf­fer­ing and death on African-Americans and oth­er Black and brown peo­ple, as police live out their blood-lust of hatred on inno­cent peo­ple they did/​do not like.
Using dra­con­ian stop & frisk, traf­fic stops, and raids on Blacks’ homes and prop­er­ty, police across the United States have filled jails to the over­flow­ing, feed­ing the hun­gry beast of mass incar­cer­a­tion as police plant drugs and engage in all kinds of abu­sive and dead­ly prac­tices against African-Americans.
Police have wrecked count­less lives and filled ceme­ter­ies with the bod­ies of those they killed in botched drug raids, in many instances hav­ing entered the homes of inno­cent peo­ple using bad intelligence.
The sad fact is that for the most part, those drug laws were the brain-child of Republicans and so-called mod­er­ate Democrats.
Although there is con­sis­tent data that shows that African-Americans do [not] con­sume drugs or alco­hol in greater quan­ti­ties than whites or any oth­er racial group, police have used drug enforce­ment to exact a dra­con­ian assault on peo­ple of color.
The Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act passed the NYS Senate recent­ly by a vote of 40 – 23.
All 20 Republicans vot­ed against the Bill’s pas­sage, even with the knowl­edge of the destruc­tion that the nation’s drug laws have caused on Black people.
Let that sink in African-Americans, the next time they come into your church­es to tell you about them­selves and seek your vote, or to lull you into a false sense of secu­ri­ty because you refuse to be informed by the facts.

In addi­tion to the Republicans, who have act­ed in lock-step with their coun­ter­parts in Washington DC, three (3) wolves- in- sheep-cloth­ing ‑democ­rats vot­ed [no] to the Bill’s passage.
Anna Kaplan, a Long Island State sen­a­tor, was one of the Democrats who vot­ed against the bill, using the flim­sy excuse that there is still a lack of tech­nol­o­gy to detect impaired driving.
“I have long-held con­cerns and have spent the last few weeks speak­ing with con­stituents,” Kaplan said. “Long Island already leads the state in traf­fic fatal­i­ties.”
Here is the thing, there is zero evi­dence in that state­ment that the traf­fic fatal­i­ties on Long Island have any­thing to do with mar­i­jua­na. Many fac­tors may be respon­si­ble for those traf­fic fatal­i­ties, includ­ing reck­less and dan­ger­ous dri­ving, poor roads, and even impaired dri­ving from alco­hol or syn­thet­ic drugs favored by the whiter pop­u­la­tion, the fur­ther out on Long Island you venture.
Under the new law, police will no longer be able to use the smell of cannabis to jus­ti­fy search­es. New Yorkers with con­vic­tions for mar­i­jua­na use will have their records auto­mat­i­cal­ly and imme­di­ate­ly expunged.
Tom, an African-American man (not his real name) who worked for years as a Corrections offi­cer and has recent­ly retired, told me the only rea­son that New York state passed this law is ‘mon­ey.
I told him that even though I was just as cyn­i­cal about the motives behind the new law’s pas­sage, I was buoyed at the restora­tive jus­tice that may be derived from it…

Speaking of money…

The state will also be cre­at­ing the Office of Cannabis Management, which will set up reg­u­la­tors and licens­ing distributors.
Cannabis prod­ucts will be sub­ject to a 9 per­cent state tax and a 4 per­cent local tax. The local tax would be split, with 1 per­cent going to coun­ties and 3 per­cent going to cities, towns, and villages.
All cannabis tax­es would be direct­ed to the “New York State Cannabis Revenue Fund.” The rev­enue would cov­er the costs to admin­is­ter and enforce the program.
After that, 40 per­cent of the remain­ing mon­ey would go to a com­mu­ni­ty grants rein­vest­ment fund, 40 per­cent to edu­ca­tion, and 20 per­cent to drug treat­ment and pub­lic edu­ca­tion programs.
The idea we are told is to help heal the com­mu­ni­ties that have been dev­as­tat­ed by America’s war on drugs, which real­ly has been just one iter­a­tion of America’s war on African-Americans.
That con­cept of heal­ing is fraught with prob­lems as gen­tri­fi­ca­tion has changed the faces of the com­mu­ni­ties that were once the com­mu­ni­ties that were turned upside down by the aggres­sive polic­ing and the infu­sion of syn­thet­ic drugs aid­ed by ele­ments of the very said government.
So it fol­lows that the peo­ple who live in the expen­sive brown­stones in Harlem today are not the peo­ple who were dev­as­tat­ed by the drug wars.

Black vot­ers who are fooled into think­ing that local Republicans are harm­less must under­stand that in our coun­ty of dutchess, the coun­ty exec­u­tive Marc Molinaro, pres­i­dent of the State County Executives Association, said instead of leav­ing it up to the state to admin­is­ter and dis­trib­ute those funds, more fund­ing should be direct­ed straight to counties.
It is safe to say that if Marc Molinaro had a vote in the state sen­ate, he would have opposed the bill the same way that Sue Serino did.
My call to Serino’s office to hear direct­ly from her why she opposed the bill was met with an auto­mat­ed mes­sage that direct­ed me to leave a mes­sage or email her.
I did neither!
However, her web­site fea­tured the fol­low­ing statement.
“At a time when we have all been told repeat­ed­ly to ‘fol­low the sci­ence,’ sci­en­tif­ic and oth­er con­cerns put forth by pub­lic health offi­cials, law enforce­ment, and mem­bers of our school and busi­ness com­mu­ni­ties have been ignored so the state can prof­it off a bill that unfor­tu­nate­ly remains dan­ger­ous­ly flawed.
Unlike with alco­hol, cur­rent­ly, no accu­rate road­side sci­en­tif­ic test exists to detect mar­i­jua­na in an impaired dri­ver, mak­ing it incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to deter impaired dri­ving and even more dif­fi­cult to hold those who dri­ve while impaired account­able for any harm they may cause. A lack of avail­able detec­tion meth­ods will also pose a num­ber of health and safe­ty chal­lenges in the work­place — whether on a con­struc­tion site, in a health­care facil­i­ty, or else­where. Most impor­tant­ly, while this bill intends to legal­ize only adult-use recre­ation­al mar­i­jua­na, I remain incred­i­bly wor­ried about the unin­tend­ed con­se­quences it will have on our kids.
I gov­ern by lis­ten­ing, and I have spent sig­nif­i­cant time lis­ten­ing to those on both sides of this debate. While I under­stand and respect the points all have offered, [sig­nif­i­cant health and safe­ty con­cerns] remain unad­dressed in this par­tic­u­lar bill. Therefore, I could not in good con­science sup­port its pas­sage at this time.” 

Serino’s response is a clas­sic Republican talk­ing point. One that engages in a cir­cu­lar nar­ra­tive that gives law enforce­ment sup­port when­ev­er the ques­tion of law-enforce­ment abuse and the need for restora­tive jus­tice comes up. It is the very same faux nar­ra­tive that cre­at­ed the Republican war on drugs in the first place. It is a shock­ing act of dis­re­spect to the mil­lions of African-Americans who have been incar­cer­at­ed and insti­tu­tion­al­ized and killed due to the war on drugs over the decades that this war was first autho­rized as an assault on Black people.
Last year as the entire world reg­is­tered out­rage at the bla­tant mur­der of George Floyd by Minneopolic cops Derek Chauvin and oth­ers, Sue Serino was gloat­ing on social media about the police groups that endorsed her.
I point­ed out the insen­si­tiv­i­ty of the social media post in a point­ed response.
In response, Serino again reit­er­at­ed the same gib­ber­ish about being proud of law enforce­ment sup­port with­out address­ing the role the said law enforce­ment has played in oppress­ing seg­ments of the population.
There should be no mis­take about their inten­tions when they default to sup­port of law enforce­ment or [sig­nif­i­cant health and safe­ty con­cerns]  when chal­lenged on the harm law enforce­ment has wrought on peo­ple of color.
Supporting good police offi­cers who do their jobs with pro­fes­sion­al­ism and respect, and work­ing to remove bad cops, and right­ing the wrongs they do are not mutu­al­ly exclu­sive tasks, both are fun­da­men­tal­ly necessary.
It has noth­ing to do with con­cerns for health and safe­ty, but every­thing to do with secur­ing blocs of cop vote, and cur­ry­ing favor with police unions.
Here in the coun­ty of Dutchess, the County Sheriff, the Judges, Police brass, County Political lead­er­ship, the city’s Mayor are all cut from the same Republican cloth.
A vote against The Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act was a vote against restora­tive jus­tice for African-Americans in New York state.

A Statement from Governor Cuomo before he signed the bill into law

A state­ment from Attorney General Letitia James.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

I haven’t been watch­ing the Derek Chauvin mur­der tri­al I must admit, but some­thing on tele­vi­sion caught my ear this morn­ing as I was get­ting ready for work.
It was the way the judge pre­sid­ing over the tri­al of the mur­der­ous cops spoke to a young female EMT& Minneapolis fire­fight­er Genevieve Hansen, who cor­rect­ly pushed back at Chauvin’s lawyer.
Could he have been any clear­er in his con­tempt for the fact that the young EMT was giv­ing what he knew was a pow­er­ful and dam­ag­ing account of what she watched as a pro­fes­sion­al whose job it is to save lives?
So before we go any fur­ther, it is impor­tant to state that this is not the George Floyd mur­der tri­al. It is the Derek Chauvin mur­der tri­al. George Floyd was mur­dered in real-time as the world watched.
Dereck Chauvin killed him in real-time as the world watched.
There is noth­ing con­vo­lut­ed or com­plex about it. That’s what hap­pened unless you are will­ing to sus­pend what you saw and believe anoth­er iter­a­tion of why white police offi­cers can­not be con­vict­ed of the mur­der of Blacks.
Unless you want to con­tin­ue to believe that the old American law that a Black man has no right a white man is oblig­at­ed to respect is still the law.

The young firefighter/​EMT’s had every right to be testy, but this is some­thing that escaped the tri­al judge as he lec­tured the young woman, who clear­ly was emotional.

In his cross-exam­i­na­tion Tuesday after­noon, defense attor­ney Eric Nelson again honed in on the crowd’s behav­ior, ask­ing fire­fight­er Genevieve Hansen if she would agree that her own behav­ior became loud­er, more frus­trat­ed, and upset.

“More des­per­ate,” Hansen replied.

Nelson asked whether Hansen would agree that stress­ful sit­u­a­tions can affect peo­ple’s mem­o­ry. Hansen replied, “absolute­ly,” adding that’s why it’s a good thing the video exists. In a tense exchange, Nelson asked whether the bystanders were becom­ing angri­er over time. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen any­body be killed, but it’s upset­ting,” Hansen replied.
Later, fol­low­ing anoth­er tense moment when Hansen com­plained she had­n’t been allowed to fin­ish her answer, Judge Cahill issued a stern warn­ing to Hansen that she should answer Nelson’s ques­tions and refrain from being argu­men­ta­tive. “Do not argue with the court, do not argue with coun­sel,” Cahill said before adjourn­ing court for the day.
I decide when you are fin­ished answering”.
Totally uncalled for in tone and tenor.

Seventy-six (76) years ago, in a South Carolina court­room, anoth­er judge sat as the tri­al judge in anoth­er case of bla­tant abuse of pow­er by police. Army Sergeant Isaac Woodard, 26, was beat­en and blind­ed by a police chief and oth­er vio­lent, racist thugs in police uni­form. Woodard was trav­el­ing by bus to see his fam­i­ly; he was dressed in his mil­i­tary uni­form, hav­ing just returned from a long stretch at war.
Woodard asked the white bus dri­ver if he could stop so that he could relieve him­self, the dri­ver refused, and an argu­ment devel­oped. “Sit down boy”, the imbe­cil­ic dri­ver told Seargant Woodard. The dri­ver stopped at the next town and report­ed the exchange to the police, who prompt­ly ordered Sergeant Woodard off the bus and imme­di­ate­ly com­menced beat­ing him.
Sergeant Woodard was charged with a litany of trumped-up charges and con­vict­ed. The police chief was even­tu­al­ly charged with Sergeant Woodard’s blind­ing, but the all-white jury, in typ­i­cal fash­ion, set him free after delib­er­at­ing for only a few minutes.
Sounds Familiar?
See the sto­ry below.

https://mikebeckles.com/isaac-woodard-jr-blinded-by-white-cops-in-north-carolina-in-1946/

The tri­al judge, in that case, Judge J. Waties Waring, dis­agreed with the rul­ing. Judge Waring would become an inte­gral part­ner in the fight for social jus­tice dur­ing the civ­il rights fights of the 1960s.
Judge Waring’s recog­ni­tion of the wrongs in the American jus­tice sys­tem 75 years ago should not be con­sid­ered a sign that we live in bet­ter times.
The American Justice System was built as a bar­ri­er between whites who enjoy all of the priv­i­leges of a free soci­ety and Blacks who are to be kept sub­ju­gat­ed and in their place as sec­ond-class citizens.
To ensure that the sys­tem works as planned, they cre­at­ed the con­cept of ‘polic­ing,’ which is an off­shoot of slave-catching.
They empow­ered them to do what­ev­er they feel is nec­es­sary to keep Blacks in their place.
For those rea­sons, white juries have stead­fast­ly refused to con­vict white police offi­cers who mur­der Black Americans. They see the actions of those uni­formed killers as doing [exact­ly] what they asked them to do.
It is a sys­tem that can­not be changed with per­sua­sion; it must be vig­or­ous­ly tack­led stri­dent­ly at the bal­lot box and over­turned, and a new sys­tem cre­at­ed in its stead.

.

.

.Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

On Feb. 12, 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodard, 26, had just returned to the U.S. from fight­ing abroad in World War II and was on a Greyhound bus en route to his home in Winnsboro, S.C., when he asked the bus dri­ver if he could pull into a rest stop for a bath­room break. The dri­ver refused, and the two got into a ver­bal argu­ment. At the next stop in Batesburg, S.C., the dri­ver ordered Woodard off the bus, and police offi­cers, includ­ing Batesburg police chief Lynwood Shull, took Woodard into custody.

The exclu­sive clip above fea­tures Woodard’s drama­ti­za­tion describ­ing how he was blind­ed on April 23, 1946, affidavit.
The police­man asked me, ‘was I dis­charged?’ When I said, ‘yes,’ that’s when he start­ed beat­ing me with a bil­ly near across the top of my head. After that, I grabbed his bil­ly, wrung it out of his hand. Another police­man came up and threw his gun on me, told me to drop the bil­ly, or he’d drop me, so I dropped the bil­ly. He knocked me uncon­scious. He hollered, get up. When I start­ed to get up, he start­ed punch­ing me in the eyes with the end of his billy.

Orson Welles, at the time a promi­nent radio announc­er, pub­li­cized the inci­dent, rais­ing aware­ness among white Americans. The NAACP helped Woodard embark on a speak­ing tour to help peo­ple see the real­i­ties of police bru­tal­i­ty up-close. In August 1946, enter­tain­ers Billie Holiday and Woody Guthrie and box­er Joe Louis head­lined a ben­e­fit con­cert at Harlem’s now-defunct Lewisohn Stadium to raise mon­ey for Woodard and his fam­i­ly. The event drew a crowd of 20,000 and raised $10,000 for Woodard and his fam­i­ly (about $132,835 in Feb. 2021).

“I spent three-and-a-half years in the ser­vice of my coun­try and thought that I would be treat­ed like a man when I returned to civil­ian life, but I was mis­tak­en,” Woodard told the audi­ence. “If the loss of my sight will make peo­ple in America get togeth­er to pre­vent what hap­pened to me from ever hap­pen­ing again to any oth­er per­son, I would be glad.”

In November 1946, in a tri­al over whether exces­sive or unnec­es­sary force was used on Woodard, Batesburg police chief Shull claimed he only hit Woodard once. An all-white jury acquit­ted Shull after delib­er­at­ing for 30 minutes.

However, the fed­er­al judge who presided over the case, Julius Waties Waring, didn’t think the out­come was fair. The case was a polit­i­cal awak­en­ing for him, accord­ing to Richard Gergel, a South Carolina fed­er­al judge who start­ed research­ing Woodard’s case a decade ago and who brought atten­tion to how it influ­enced future land­mark civ­il rights cas­es in his 2019 book Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring. Waring described the case as a “bap­tism by fire” that led him to issue opin­ions in favor of civ­il rights cas­es for years afterward.

For exam­ple, Waring’s dis­sent­ing opin­ion in Briggs v. Elliott (1952) — in which 20 Black par­ents in Clarendon County, S.C., sued for equal edu­ca­tion for their chil­dren — argued school seg­re­ga­tion was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al per the Fourteenth Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court came to the same con­clu­sion in Brown v. Board of Education, which cleared up five school seg­re­ga­tion cas­es, includ­ing Briggs after Waring encour­aged NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund lawyer and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to appeal the deci­sion as a direct attack on segregation.

Woodard’s blind­ing was also a polit­i­cal awak­en­ing for future civ­il rights lead­ers. Student Nonviolent Coördinating Committee co-founder Julian Bond’s ear­li­est mem­o­ry of racial vio­lence saw news­pa­per pho­tographs of Woodard with ban­dages over his eyes at the age of six, pho­tographs he would remem­ber for “as long as I live,” per his 2021 posthu­mous­ly-pub­lished col­lec­tion of lec­tures, Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement.

Crucially, Woodard’s blind­ing spurred President Harry S. Truman to take action. NAACP leader Walter White recalled in his mem­oir that when he told Truman about Woodard’s blind­ing, Truman stood up and exclaimed, “My God! I had no idea it was as ter­ri­ble as that! We’ve got to do some­thing!” In Dec. 1946, a month after the acquit­tal of the Batesburg, S.C., police chief, Truman cre­at­ed a pres­i­den­tial com­mis­sion on civ­il rights. In 1948, per its rec­om­men­da­tion, he signed an exec­u­tive order call­ing for the deseg­re­ga­tion of the U.S. mil­i­tary and cre­at­ing the President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services.

“The Department of Justice had been some­what timid in doing any­thing about the wide­spread denial of basic rights to African Americans in the South and across the coun­try, but with­in two years of Woodard’s blind­ing, the Department of Justice would begin fil­ing briefs in the United States Supreme Court in seg­re­ga­tion cas­es, argu­ing that this Court should act against seg­re­ga­tion,” says Mack.

As for Woodard, he wouldn’t receive dis­abil­i­ty ben­e­fits from the Army until 1962. To sup­port his fam­i­ly, he bought prop­er­ties in the Bronx, N.Y., and lived there until he died in 1992 at the age of 73. In 2019, a his­tor­i­cal mark­er about Woodard went up in the city where he was blind­ed, now called Batesburg-Leesville.

Woodard stayed out of the spot­light, but the trau­ma of the inci­dent always stayed with him. In a Sep. 16, 1982, inter­view with the pub­lic affairs TV pro­gram Like It Is, Woodard said he was frus­trat­ed that the police offi­cer who blind­ed him kept his job. But he didn’t allow it to lose his faith in human­i­ty. “Everybody ain’t bad,” as he put it.

When the host Gil Noble asked him what he want­ed future gen­er­a­tions to learn about America from what hap­pened to him, Woodard replied, “People should learn how to live with one anoth­er and how to treat one anoth­er. Because after all, we all are human beings, regard­less of color.”

By Aymann Ismail

Around the city, many Black res­i­dents had a grim pre­dic­tion for the out­come of the George Floyd case — but also some hope.

In Minneapolis, few can get any­where near the Hennepin County District Court. It looks more like a bar­racks than a cour­t­house now. The build­ing, where open­ing argu­ments begin on Monday for Derek Chauvin’s tri­al in the death of George Floyd, has been sur­round­ed by mil­i­tary-grade barbed wire and fenc­ing, and it’s guard­ed by National Guard sol­diers scat­tered across the perime­ter. Dozens of cam­era crews are posi­tioned out­side. Recently, as jury selec­tion in the case began, there was an eerie qui­et all around. People on both sides of the bar­ri­cades stared at one anoth­er warily.

The only sounds in the area came from the occa­sion­al light rail and, on that day, the dis­tant howls of about 300 pro­test­ers who marched near­by, fol­lowed by dozens of pho­tog­ra­phers and jour­nal­ists. I fol­lowed the echoes of peo­ple chant­i­ng “Do the right thing!” to find them. Local orga­niz­er Toussaint Morrison was at the helm. “Let me tell you some­thing about this build­ing right here. It is undoubt­ed­ly going to affect every sin­gle Black youth in this state,” he said when they made it to the court. “What’s on tri­al is the val­ue of a Black man’s life, and I don’t need the Hennepin County gov­ern­ment to let me know if I’m valu­able or not. The ver­dict can go either way.”

Morrison wasn’t the only one who seemed to be gird­ing him­self for the even­tu­al ver­dict. As I spoke to Black res­i­dents around Minneapolis, they all had one pre­dic­tion. “He ain’t going nowhere,” one man, Jaleel, told me about Derek Chauvin. “And I hate to say this in front of all these peo­ple out here protest­ing, but they’re not going to get him.”
Jaleel, who asked not to use his last name, was born in Minneapolis and has nev­er lived any­where else. (“It’s not a bad place. It’s a good place to live. It might get cold as shit, but it’s a good place to live,” he said.) He said he knew George Floyd well — and he can’t con­vince him­self that Chauvin will be held respon­si­ble for Floyd’s death. He’s espe­cial­ly wor­ried about what could hap­pen in that event. “They’re going to find some way to get a hung jury, and they’re going to tear this moth­er up again,” he said.

Nearby, Katina, who stood with fel­low pub­lic school teach­ers behind a ban­ner for the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, told me she’s not espe­cial­ly polit­i­cal­ly active, but came to the ral­ly to set an exam­ple for her stu­dents. “We want to make sure that they keep hope in their mind. And that maybe jus­tice just might be served, pos­si­bly?” She didn’t sound so sure her­self. When I asked the out­come she was expect­ing at the tri­al, she gave me a care­ful look and said, “Just hav­ing hope is a good thing.”
Like many oth­er teach­ers across the coun­try, Katina said she wor­ries about the men­tal health of her stu­dents, but is espe­cial­ly wor­ried for kids in Minneapolis, who are expe­ri­enc­ing “com­pound­ed stress” due to the tri­al. She’s low­ered her expec­ta­tions for her stu­dents’ abil­i­ty to stick to the cur­ricu­lum vir­tu­al­ly and is hope­ful that a year of protests like this one is teach­ing them in anoth­er way. “Even if they’re not learn­ing English or social stud­ies, they’re learn­ing the his­to­ry of America, and watch­ing things change,” she said.

Inside the Hennepin County court, he told me he noticed some­thing pecu­liar. “I was there in the media room watch­ing the tri­al. One of the things that I noticed is that the pros­e­cu­tor, the pros­e­cu­tor attor­ney, and the defense attor­ney share sim­i­lar con­cerns,” he said. “They want to impress upon peo­ple that the sys­tem works. They want peo­ple to accept the real­i­ty of the sys­tem, that a per­son isn’t guilty until the sys­tem says he’s guilty. You can see him com­mit a crime, but there’s a sep­a­rate set of rules here. We also know that that’s not true. When you talk to Black peo­ple, that only holds true for wealthy peo­ple and the police.”At George Floyd Square that week, locals mourned the death of anoth­er man who was shot only steps from where Floyd died. Tommy McBrayer, a com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er, was resigned when we spoke. “It’s trag­ic. I’m still feel­ing that trau­ma in my body. It’s been a roller coast­er, men­tal­ly and phys­i­cal­ly,” he said of the past nine months, adding that the death of his friend recent­ly and Floyd’s death are intrin­si­cal­ly tied. “I think Black folks will nev­er get jus­tice. We’re liv­ing in a white America where noth­ing has ever been jus­ti­fied. Even if you think I’m wrong, the proof is every­where. We’re still only three-fifths of a per­son.” I asked if he wor­ried about the trial’s out­come. “You can only con­trol so much,” he said. “Of course I wor­ry.” But if there is anoth­er upris­ing, he said he still felt con­flict­ed about the last one: “I don’t think we got any­thing out of it, because we were just mess­ing up our own neigh­bor­hood, but doing noth­ing is eas­i­er. It’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly better.”

Carmen Means, anoth­er local orga­niz­er, told me she’s also expect­ing a “not guilty” ver­dict, but she’s think­ing of the tri­al and ver­dict from anoth­er per­spec­tive. “I’m a mama, so the jus­tice isn’t just for me. I have sons, and when you have chil­dren, your stance has to be dif­fer­ent. Will it be heart­break­ing beyond belief? Absolutely. But I have to remain hope­ful.” Even so, she said she couldn’t say for sure how she’ll react. “I’ve nev­er watched that tape in its entire­ty, the 8 min­utes, 46 sec­onds — I couldn’t, and I can’t. But sec­ond­hand trau­ma is real, and I don’t know how my body will respond. And what­ev­er way my body responds, I’ll give it space for that.”

Some of you may recall me say­ing from time to time that I fun­da­men­tal­ly believed for years now that African-Americans have fall­en asleep in their beliefs that the war has been won against racism.
I was nev­er con­vinced that there was any gain not won by the sheer pow­er of arms that could not be reversed.
When you depend on the same peo­ple and insti­tu­tions that have sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly abused you for hun­dreds of years to find the bet­ter angels with­in them­selves sud­den­ly, your path to jus­tice becomes even more tedious.
When there are no bet­ter angels (in fact, there are no angels at all), with­in those on whom you depend to do the right thing, yet you con­tin­ue to wait for those bet­ter angels, even a sin­gle angel to emerge from the dev­ils, then.….….….….….…..

The Trump vot­er fraud, stop the steal lie, was a cal­cu­lat­ed move designed to steal the pres­i­den­tial elec­tions in 2020 that even Republican offi­cials deemed the fairest elec­tions ever.
But the dark and murky intent behind the Trump lie was far more sin­is­ter than just the plan to steal the pres­i­den­tial elec­tions; it was designed to lay the ground­work for an all-out assault on vot­ing rights across the country.
When Black Americans vote, Democrats win. Republicans do not get the Black vote because they are opposed to Black autonomy.
But the fix was in for the new­ly found pow­er African-Americans were flex­ing, [par­tic­u­lar­ly after they came out in num­bers and elect­ed Barack Obama, the nation’s first African-American President in 2008, and again when they showed out and elect­ed a Jew and a Black preach­er in the heart of ‘dix­ie.’
Barack Obama was re-elect­ed in 2012, but by 2013, the Republican major­i­ty on the US Supreme Court led by Chief jus­tice Jon Roberts a Reagan admin­is­tra­tion lawyer opposed to vot­ing rights, evis­cer­at­ed Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act as uncon­sti­tu­tion­al in its June 25, 2013, rul­ing. … The Court declared that the Fifteenth Amendment “com­mands that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race or col­or, and it gives Congress the pow­er to enforce that command.

Writing for Politico Magazine in August of 2015, Ari Berman wrote; Just months before Roberts came to Washington, the Supreme Court had sig­nif­i­cant­ly lim­it­ed the scope of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. As a young lawyer, Roberts eager­ly took up the con­ser­v­a­tive cause, becom­ing a key foot sol­dier in the effort to pre­serve that deci­sion and weak­en the VRA. It was a fight Roberts would con­tin­ue decades lat­er when he replaced Rehnquist as chief jus­tice and authored the major­i­ty opin­ion in a land­mark case gut­ting the VRA in 2013. Fifty years after the pas­sage of the land­mark civ­il rights law and 35 years after he first worked so hard to dis­man­tle it, Roberts remains at the cen­ter of an impas­sioned debate about vot­ing rights in America, one that shows no signs of end­ing any­time soon.
John Roberts clerked for William Rehnquist; an avowed ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive Berman wrote, “Rehnquist’s oppo­si­tion to civ­il rights laws on fed­er­al­ism grounds and the rebrand­ing of that oppo­si­tion as prin­ci­pled “col­or blind­ness” would become a sta­ple of con­ser­v­a­tive jurispru­dence on civ­il rights issues.
In 1952, as a 28-year-old clerk to Justice Robert Jackson, William Rehnquist wrote; “It is about time the Court faced the fact that the white peo­ple of the South do not like the col­ored peo­ple,” “The Constitution restrains them from effect­ing this dis­like through state action, but it most assured­ly did not appoint the Court as a soci­o­log­i­cal watch­dog to rear up every time pri­vate dis­crim­i­na­tion rais­es its admit­ted­ly ugly head.”
John Roberts, the present Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was indoc­tri­nat­ed by the Rehnquist ide­ol­o­gy. It was that hatred for Black-Americans’ civ­il rights that led to John Roberts and his cronies strik­ing down Section 4(b) of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that has led to this new Jim Crow 2.0 attack on the rights of African-Americans & Native-Americans to vote.

Section 4(b) con­tains the cov­er­age for­mu­la that deter­mines which juris­dic­tions are sub­ject to pre­clear­ance based on their his­to­ries of dis­crim­i­na­tion in voting.
Section 4(b) of the land­mark 1965 Act man­dat­ed that offi­cials in states like Alabama, which has made it dif­fi­cult and in some cas­es impos­si­ble for minori­ties to vote, could pass no elec­tion laws that impact­ed vot­ing unless the law passed Federal clearance.
By strik­ing down sec­tion 4(b), John Roberts and his cabal on the high­est court flung the doors wide open for states to embark on a new set of vot­er-sup­pres­sion laws like the ones we are wit­ness­ing in Republican-run states, and the law passed by the Republican leg­is­la­ture in Georgia and signed by their Governor Brian Kemp sur­round­ed by white men under a por­trait of a slave plantation.

The American Democracy is now caught up in a cyclonic whirl­wind of anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic activ­i­ties engi­neered by Republicans, geared at wip­ing out lit­er­al­ly all of the gains achieved by the civ­il rights strug­gles over 50-years ago.
Regardless of what even­tu­al­ly occurs in response to the Jim Crow laws Brian Kemp signed, those chal­lenges will end up, you guessed it,(a) before John Roberts, a man whose life’s work has been open oppo­si­tion to the right of African-Americans to vote,(b) the same man who vot­ed to strike down sec­tion 4(b), Neil Gorsuch who ille­git­i­mate­ly sits in the seat in which Merrick Garland should be, Brett Kavanaugh who it is alleged no real FBI back­ground check was done on for alleged improp­er actions against women, the likes of Amey Coney Barrett who was ille­git­i­mate­ly foist­ed on to the court, Samuel Alito & Clarence Thomas a negro who thinks he is white.
This is fur­ther enhanced by the timid­i­ty of the Democratic Party and indi­vid­ual elect­ed mem­bers of that par­ty based on that par­ty’s iden­ti­ty politics.
Frozen in fear of los­ing their per­son­al seats, indi­vid­ual politi­cians like Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly place their own polit­i­cal sur­vival over the agen­da of the vot­ers who elect­ed them to office.
So even when the Democrats have the major­i­ty, seri­ous and con­se­quen­tial issues like vot­ing ‑rights, end­ing the fil­i­buster in the Senate, and adding more jus­tices to the supreme court to right the wrongs per­pe­trat­ed on the nation by Mitch McConnell in the Merrick Garland case can­not get done.
Republicans know that Democrats are squea­mish; they know they are afraid to go bold and big even when most American peo­ple vot­ed them into pow­er to do the big, bold things.
Stricken with fear of the minor­i­ty par­ty and divi­sion in their ranks, the Democrats who now con­trol the White House, the Senate, and the House, are unable to pass their agenda.
Republicans could care less; when they have the pow­er, they change the rules to suit them­selves and ram through their agen­da while the Democrats whine like puny babies.
When Democrats do not do the same, Republicans make the case that, ‘see when you elect them, they do noth­ing, so elect us.’ And they are again giv­en the pow­er to cause more harm.
In addi­tion to that, Democratic vot­ers refuse to vote In off-year elec­tions; this gives Republicans con­trol of state leg­is­la­tures and the abil­i­ty to define con­gres­sion­al dis­trict lines and auton­o­my on state laws, even in so-called blue states.
For exam­ple, in Georgia, the same vot­ers who gave Joe Biden the state in 2020 and elect­ed two demo­c­ra­t­ic US Senators also have the pow­er to elect Democrats. Still, they sit on their hands and allow Republicans to wield pow­er they should not have as a minor­i­ty party.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

Kim Janey made his­to­ry when she became the first woman ever to become may­or of Boson Macchachutes on Tuesday, March 23^rd, 2021.
The new act­ing may­or promised “a city­wide agen­da of recov­ery, reopen­ing, and renew­al” and high­light­ed city con­tract reform and polic­ing reform among the areas she wants to focus on.

Congratulations to this beau­ti­ful strong black woman. We salute you, Mayor Janey.

A Fox News report crit­i­ciz­ing Vice President Kamala Harris for not salut­ing the mil­i­tary hon­or guard at Air Force Two got plen­ty of back­lash on Tuesday. Critics ripped the con­ser­v­a­tive news chan­nel for stir­ring up false out­rage, point­ing out that the vice pres­i­dent is not in the mil­i­tary chain of com­mand and was not vio­lat­ing pro­to­col. Fox News wrote in a report on its web­site of Harris “appear­ing to break with prece­dent and fail­ing to salute the hon­or guard” when board­ing the plane. It includ­ed insult­ing tweets from for­mer NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik and right-wing radio host Charlie Kirk, who showed a video of a recent Air Force Two approach and accused Harris of being dis­re­spect­ful to men and women in uniform.

Then who would jump in with a fact-free & mis­guid­ed com­ment, olé Bernie Bernard Kerik, for­mer con­vict­ed felon and for­mer NYPD Commissioner of police

Bernard B. Kerik. @BernardKerik

·Mar 22

DISGRACEFUL:

@VP

Kamala Harris refus­es to salute the hon­or guard at the steps of the air­craft. It is a clear demon­stra­tion of her dis­like for those in uni­form, both law-enforce­ment and military.

The old Felon should still be locked up but was par­doned by anoth­er crim­i­nal, seek­ing rel­e­vance was fact-checked immediately.\

Ex-Vice President Mike Pence and President Joe Biden were seen on video salut­ing hon­or guards when they were vice pres­i­dent, Fox News not­ed. But Dick Cheney, who served as veep under GOP President George W. Bush, is shown else­where on video not salut­ing.
Many on Twitter point­ed out that Harris was not break­ing pro­to­col because she is a civil­ian and not in the chain of command.
Even the com­man­der-in-chief is not required to salute. The late President Ronald Reagan began the prac­tice as a “mat­ter of cour­tesy,” U.S. Naval War College pro­fes­sor Tom Nichols wrote.
“There is no over­ar­ch­ing instruc­tion or reg­u­la­tion that requires the President or Vice President to return hand salutes from mem­bers of the Armed Forces,” Pentagon press sec­re­tary John Kirby wrote to HuffPost in a state­ment on Wednesday. “Vice President Harris has made very clear her respect and admi­ra­tion for the men and women of the mil­i­tary, as well as their families.”

Many on Twitter jumped at the oppor­tu­ni­ty to fact check Fox News:

Geoff @GeoffFrck

·10h

It’s not pro­to­col. Fox News con­sis­tent­ly fails to tell the truth.

POX @xpjupiter

She is not in the chain of com­mand. Then again, you know this. You want to stroke dis­cord and hate for clicks and ratings.

VP is a civil­ian. Fox News isn’t news.

You should real­ly review the pro­to­col. She is not required, nor should she feel com­pelled to salute.

Actually, she’s gone back to prece­dent as she is not in the COC.…»»

The fore­gone were only a few of the Twitter fact-checks that hit the old con­vict­ed crim­i­nal Bernard Kerick. One would think that this embar­rass­ment to police offi­cers every­where would shut his pie hole and find a hole to crawl into but no.…
Bernard Kerik worked from 1982 to 1984 as chief of inves­ti­ga­tions for the King Faisal Specialist Hospital’s secu­ri­ty divi­sion in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Six mem­bers of the hos­pi­tal secu­ri­ty staff, includ­ing Kerik, were fired and deport­ed after an inves­ti­ga­tion in 1984 by the Saudi secret police.^[12] In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Kerik wrote that he was expelled after a phys­i­cal alter­ca­tion with a Saudi secret police inter­roga­tor; how­ev­er, in 2004, after he was nom­i­nat­ed Secretary of Homeland Security, nine for­mer employ­ees of the hos­pi­tal told The Washington Post that Kerik worked with a hos­pi­tal admin­is­tra­tor to sur­veil peo­ple’s pri­vate affairs, lead­ing to a scan­dal part­ly based on Feteih’s use of “the insti­tu­tion’s secu­ri­ty staff to track the pri­vate lives of sev­er­al women with whom he was roman­ti­cal­ly involved, and men who came in con­tact with them. (w)

Bernard Kerik joined the New York City Police Department in 1986. He first met Rudolph Giuliani in 1990, and dur­ing the 1993 New York City may­oral elec­tion cam­paign, he served as Giuliani’s body­guard and dri­ver.
As Rudolph Guiliani’s water­boy serv­ing as the NYPD’s com­mis­sion­er, Kerik had a tense rela­tion­ship with the FBI; he was accused of bla­tant abuse of power.
The New York Times report­ed that: “Behind the scenes, Bernard Kerik ruled like a feu­dal lord, many for­mer employ­ees have said. He had tak­en up with a woman who was a cor­rec­tion offi­cer; he was accused of direct­ing offi­cers to staff his wed­ding. He befriend­ed the agen­cy’s inspec­tor gen­er­al, whose watch­dog respon­si­bil­i­ties require keep­ing an arms-length rela­tion­ship, and the inves­ti­ga­tor attend­ed his wed­ding.” On one occa­sion, Kerik sent homi­cide inves­ti­ga­tors to inter­view and fin­ger­print sev­er­al Fox News employ­ees whom Kerik’s pub­lish­er, Judith Regan, sus­pect­ed of steal­ing a neck­lace and mobile phone.

Bernard Kerik plead­ed guilty in Bronx Supreme Court on June 30, 2006, to two ethics vio­la­tions (unclas­si­fied mis­de­meanors). Kerik acknowl­edged that he accept­ed a $250,000 inter­est-free “loan” from Israeli bil­lion­aire Eitan Wertheimer and failed to report it dur­ing the time he was Interior Minister of Iraq. Kerik first met the bil­lion­aire, whose vast hold­ings include major defense con­trac­tors. Kerik took a four-day trip to Israel less than two weeks before September 11, 2001, to dis­cuss counter-ter­ror­ism with Israeli officials.

On November 8, 2007, Kerik was indict­ed by a fed­er­al grand jury in White Plains, New York, on tax fraud charges and mak­ing false state­ments to the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment about the $250,000 he received from Wertheimer. Prosecutors fur­ther accused Kerik of receiv­ing about $236,000 from New York real estate mogul Steven C. Witkoff between 2001 and 2003. Some of the New York charges were dropped in December 2008, but Kerik was then re-indict­ed on the same charges in Washington, D.C.

On November 5, 2009, Kerik plead­ed guilty to eight felony tax and false state­ment charges, specif­i­cal­ly two counts of tax fraud, one count of mak­ing a false state­ment on a loan appli­ca­tion, and five counts of mak­ing false state­ments. He was sen­tenced to forty-eight months in fed­er­al prison and three years super­vised release (pro­ba­tion). Criminal defense attor­ney Michael F. Bachner rep­re­sent­ed Kerik. He sur­ren­dered to the U.S. min­i­mum-secu­ri­ty prison camp in Cumberland, Maryland, on May 17, 2010. He was dis­charged from fed­er­al cus­tody on October 15, 2013, and after serv­ing five months’ home con­fine­ment, his super­vised release con­clud­ed in October 2016.

Donald Trump par­doned his ser­i­al criminal.
This is what is known about the crim­i­nal, Bernard Kerik, we do not know what he did and was not pros­e­cut­ed for, but this is the punk that crit­i­cizes the vice-pres­i­dent of the United States.

One crit­i­cal les­son that I have learned in my life is to lis­ten more and talk less. I real­ized this many years ago as I lis­tened to peo­ple tell their sto­ries when I was involved in law-enforce­ment inves­ti­ga­tions. I real­ized ear­ly that if I lis­tened more and allowed peo­ple to talk, they would tell me what­ev­er I need­ed to know.
I also learned that if you real­ly want to get to the truth, you must allow peo­ple to explain their side of the sto­ry, and if you do, you will walk away with a good idea if they are lying.
After all, it is good to lis­ten, even a bro­ken clock is right twice each day, so there is that.

I said the fore­gone to speak a lit­tle on a sub­ject that I have no train­ing or exper­tise on.….… the sub­ject of vaccines.
Across the globe, coun­tries are going through vary­ing stages of the COVID-19 virus and its variants.
Like pret­ty much all of the oth­er coun­tries, the United States, my adopt­ed home, and Jamaica, my coun­try of birth, are expe­ri­enc­ing their own prob­lems with curb­ing the virus.
Two of the issues that have seri­ous­ly impact­ed how cit­i­zens treat the warn­ings from the experts in the United States have been (a) politi­ciza­tion by the Donald Trump régime & (b) mis­trust of vac­cines by cer­tain pop­u­la­tion segments.
Trump believed that if he down­played the dan­ger the virus posed, he would be able to fool the pop­u­lace, and he would cruise to reelec­tion vic­to­ry in 2020. It did not turn out that way, and as a result, over half a mil­lion peo­ple died, many arguably who would not have died had he done due dili­gence to inform the coun­try about the dan­gers of the dead­ly virus.
Donald Trump’s lies caused his sup­port­ers, more than a third of the pop­u­la­tion, not to take the dis­tanc­ing and mask rec­om­men­da­tions seri­ous­ly. In addi­tion to that, he held mass ral­lies geared at his reelec­tion that experts said were super­spread­er events.

There are now sev­er­al vac­cines on the mar­ket; the Biden admin­is­tra­tion promised that in his first one hun­dred days in office, 100 mil­lion peo­ple would be vac­ci­nat­ed due to his one mil­lion per day pledge.
But with a nation of 330 mil­lion and a huge swath of the pop­u­la­tion leary of vac­cines, how will the new pres­i­dent accom­plish that goal?
New data show that a major­i­ty of white men say they will not accept the vac­cine. If the men aren’t will­ing to take the vac­cine, it is prob­a­bly fair to assume that a large per­cent­age of the women in their lives will also refuse to take the vaccine.
For some white men, the rea­son for their refusal to accept the vac­cine may be their free-spir­it and a refusal to con­form to any­thing that has a hint of a gov­ern­ment man­date. Others may be refus­ing to take the vac­cine on reli­gious grounds.
Then there is the African-American com­mu­ni­ty, rough­ly 40 mil­lion peo­ple that the American Government has burned at dif­fer­ent stages with vac­cines and treat­ments designed to destroy them.
How will this 40 mil­lion come around to trust­ing a gov­ern­ment that has done so much harm to them?

One of the strongest argu­ments that the anti-vax crowd has in its arse­nal is that the gov­ern­ment has nev­er allowed a tragedy to go un-exploited.
I sup­pose that if you do not believe that, you are not pay­ing atten­tion. After the September 11h 2001 attacks, George Bush and his cronies gave us the Patriot Act, a law which all but took away what lit­tle free­doms we had left — — This was done under the guise of keep­ing us safe.
A recent Pew Research Center sur­vey found that only 72% of Americans would prob­a­bly or def­i­nite­ly get a coro­n­avirus vac­cine if it were avail­able. And that fig­ure is even low­er among Black Americans, at 54%.
Writing for quartz Olivia Goodhill said the fol­low­ing; Meanwhile, the same US Public Health Service was con­duct­ing the infa­mous Tuskegee Study. As part of a pur­port­ed study on syphilis, Black men in Alabama were lied to, denied treat­ment, and left to die. “If Black peo­ple were sus­pi­cious of the polio vac­cine, it’s because eugen­ics was still hap­pen­ing in this coun­try at the time,” says Terence Keel, pro­fes­sor at UCLA’s Institute for Society & Genetics and depart­ment of African American stud­ies. Forced or coerced ster­il­iza­tions of poor, Black women were so com­mon they were known as “Mississippi appendectomies.
Medical racism is still preva­lent today. Black and Latino peo­ple have been killed by coro­n­avirus at dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly high rates across the US. And racial dis­par­i­ties are evi­dent across the med­ical field as a whole: Death rates from breast can­cer are 40% high­er among Black women than white women, for exam­ple, while Black moth­ers die in child­birth at three to four times the rate of white women.

As we pon­der these facts, it becomes even more imper­a­tive that we rec­og­nize how impor­tant it is that every per­son is allowed the time and space to make their own deci­sion about tak­ing the vac­cine, even as we are cog­nizant of the impli­ca­tions of non-action.
Many peo­ple, includ­ing those on the right, are extreme­ly wary of the gov­ern­men­t’s propen­si­ty to overreach.
People want to be able to make that deci­sion for them­selves with­out gov­ern­ment man­dates. As I said before, even a bro­ken clock is right twice each day.
Many Trump sup­port­ers are the worst mes­sen­gers to be con­vey­ing the mes­sage that soon we will not be allowed on air­planes and in restau­rants or gov­ern­ment build­ings or any­where else for that mat­ter, unless we can all pro­duce a CODID ‑Passport.
But are they wrong?
So you have nev­er heard of a covid-pass­port? This is a term already being bandied about in European cap­i­tals, so make sure that you sat­is­fy those require­ments before you decide to book your European vacation.

Jamaicans are prob­a­bly one of the few nations of blacks that can­not be accused of not read­ing. Well, let me rephrase that. Not all of us are vora­cious read­ers, but we are all vora­cious con­sumers and dis­sem­i­na­tors of information.
It fol­lows, there­fore, that peo­ple in Jamaica would have strong opin­ions on the use of vac­cines based on their own per­cep­tions of what hap­pened to American Blacks at the hands of their own gov­ern­ment through the use of vaccines.
Every indi­vid­ual will have to choose whether they want to accept a vac­cine hop­ing that they will be inoc­u­lat­ed against a poten­tial­ly dead­ly virus with­out know­ing the poten­tial long-term con­se­quences to their health or hope that they will not get the virus.
Some believe the virus was cre­at­ed so that peo­ple could be forced to take a vac­cine with ele­ments that give the gov­ern­ment con­trol of their lives.
The idea that gov­ern­ments are con­sid­er­ing lim­it­ing peo­ple’s move­ments unless they have a COVID-Passport adds fuel to that fire.
People of faith adamant­ly believe they are liv­ing the prophe­cy of the Bible; in Revelation 13:17, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark — the name of the beast or the num­ber of its name.
Since no one is forc­ing those who are will­ing and accept­ing of what the vac­cine has to offer not to take it, should­n’t those who think oth­er­wise be afford­ed the same respect?
Even if you believe they are yahoos who are far too unin­tel­li­gent to be rea­soned with, don’t you believe they have a right to their beliefs?
I do !!!

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

Donald Trump made mar­gin­al gains with some Black and Hispanic vot­ers in 2020 that some of us may find incom­pre­hen­si­ble, not so for me.
At the height of the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign sea­son, last year pol­i­tics was on every­one’s tongue; what I heard from my cus­tomers as a small busi­ness own­er, may have been the key to Trump’s suc­cess in get­ting at least more black peo­ple to vote for him.
Don’t for­get that Donald Trump sup­port­ed the addi­tion­al $1400 in stim­u­lus mon­ey going out to Americans. Whether his sup­port was based on what peo­ple were going through, or saw it as a poten­tial pay­off to get votes is up for dis­cus­sion and debate.
The fact that Donald Trump got more Black and Hispanic vot­ers in the last gen­er­al elec­tions than his Republican pre­de­ces­sors is sec­ondary to the point I’m mak­ing today.
Despite Donald Trump’s open­ly racist and xeno­pho­bic views, he man­aged to get some with­in the two vot­ing blocs, (Blacks & Hispanics) to vote for him. This tells us that if the Republicans cared about being an open and inclu­sive polit­i­cal par­ty, it could com­pete for all American cit­i­zens’ votes.
Clearly, there will be some vot­ers in all cat­e­gories and groups of vot­ers, regard­less of defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics, who will sell their souls on the promise of a few bucks; Judas Iscariots cer­tain­ly showed us that.

The Republican par­ty does not want to com­pete for Hispanic vot­ers, and worse yet, it has no inter­est in com­pet­ing for the African-American votes. Republicans do not like Black peo­ple, so they have no inter­est in com­pet­ing for the Black vote.
The Republican par­ty, and by the par­ty, I mean, ‘the peo­ple in it,’ lit­er­al­ly hate Black people.
They nev­er had a prob­lem with Black peo­ple get­ting gunned down inno­cent­ly by police; they have no issue with the dis­parate and unjust sys­tem that keeps Blacks teth­ered to the bot­tom of the bar­rel; in fact, they rev­el in it.
They find them­selves on the oppo­site side of every issue that is impor­tant to African-Americans.
Republicans can do so and open­ly pass leg­is­la­tion that obvi­ous­ly and bla­tant­ly lim­its the Black vote, because of the built-in advan­tages the par­ty has nation­al­ly in the two United States Senators per state & the elec­toral col­lege, which all but guar­an­tees Republican wins, if they man­age to con­tain the black vote.
Donald Trump is a leg­end to Republican elect­ed offi­cials and their new­ly homog­e­nized and con­cen­trat­ed white vot­ing bloc. Trump demon­strat­ed that they do not need any­one in their par­ty if they are will­ing to do what it takes to bring the racist white vote around.
The silent white racists have always been there; Trump knew it and proved it. The unprece­dent­ed lev­els of nean­derthals who crawled out of the prover­bial caves to cast votes in the last elec­tions, some of them for the first time, are evi­dence of Trump’s mag­net­ic pull as a racial magnet.

Republican pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates before the 1960s weren’t too con­cerned about the Black vote; Blacks scat­tered across the coun­try were not going to be impact­ful to nation­al elec­tions. Their num­bers could only make a dif­fer­ence along the mar­gins, or so they thought, as long as they con­tain and lim­it their right to vote.
However, the growth and con­cen­tra­tion of the black vote in large cities and coun­ties across the coun­try, helped by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, have caused a pan­icked response from Republicans that harkens back to the peri­od after reconstruction.
New vot­er sup­pres­sion laws and poli­cies enact­ed by Republican leg­is­la­tures across the coun­try to lim­it and stop Blacks from vot­ing have tak­en on new urgency after Donald Trump lost the pres­i­den­cy in 2020.
This time Republican leg­is­la­tors are not try­ing to hide their inten­tions; they open­ly say the new laws and poli­cies are designed to stop peo­ple from voting.
South Carolina US Senator Lindsay Graham and oth­ers have argued, if they do not stop peo­ple from vot­ing, the Republican par­ty will cease to exist.
And so the Republican par­ty is on a course to end this democ­ra­cy as we know it, and install in its place an auto­crat­ic régime that will keep in place a white ethnostate.

The Republican par­ty does not want to build a coali­tion that includes Black vot­ers; doing so runs counter to its goals and aspi­ra­tions. The par­ty of Steve King, Steve Scalise, Matt Gaetz, Ron Johnson, Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has no place for blacks.
They would rather burn this exper­i­ment down and gov­ern over the ash­es of a weak­er, more dis­tort­ed ver­sion of it. One in which their pale skin gives them the sense of supe­ri­or­i­ty they crave, but know in their hearts they do not have.
The imbe­cil­ic Wisconsin Joe McCarthy (2.0) Ron Johnson’s com­ments on the Capitol insur­rec­tion is the best win­dow that I have seen that char­ac­ter­izes what the Republican par­ty is today.
Ron Johnson voiced what I felt; that capi­tol insur­rec­tion­ists were not there to hurt Republicans like the igno­rant Wisconsinite; they were there to hang Mike Pence; they were there to mur­der Speaker Nancy Pelosi, pro­gres­sives like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and others.
Ron Johnso said he had no fear of them; these were patri­ots who love their coun­try, they loved police offi­cers, they would nev­er break the laws. But if he saw Black peo­ple demon­strat­ing to have jus­tice, to avoid being gunned down by KKK mem­bers in police uni­forms, that would invoke fear in him.

The shame­less imbe­cile from Wisconsin speaks to what Republicans want to take America back to, Sunday pic­nics where the lynch­ing of black peo­ple was the main attraction.
In the eyes of this men­tal lit­tle per­son, American patri­ots are peo­ple who beat cops to death with flag­poles, fire extin­guish­ers, and what­ev­er else they could get their hands on. None of what they did was a crime; they wore shirts that say they sup­port the police, they love their country.
Patriots to Ron Johnson are white mili­ti­a­men who bear-spray cops, break down doors, smash fur­ni­ture and destroy moments, steal doc­u­ments, shit in the halls of our democ­ra­cy to over­turn an elec­tion deemed by patri­ot­ic Republicans as the fairest elec­tions ever.
Great job Wisconsin, you gave the nation Joe McCarthy; you allowed Paul Ryan and Scott Walker to poi­son the coun­try fur­ther; one would have thought that you would have bet­ter taste than to foist this pathet­ic rel­ic of an embar­rass­ment on the rest of us. But then again, you chose [that] over Russ Feingold, so there is that.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

MINNEAPOLIS — The Minneapolis City Council unan­i­mous­ly approved a $27 mil­lion set­tle­ment with the fam­i­ly of George Floyd, whose death in police cus­tody last year sparked a sum­mer of unrest and a racial reck­on­ing over law enforce­men­t’s treat­ment of Black suspects.
The set­tle­ment stems from a fed­er­al civ­il rights law­suit filed by the fam­i­ly against the city and the four police offi­cers charged with var­i­ous counts of mur­der or aid­ing and abet­ting mur­der in the death of Mr. Floyd, who was under arrest for alleged­ly pass­ing a forged $20 bill

Benjamin Crump and oth­er attor­neys rep­re­sent­ing Floyd’s fam­i­ly mem­bers are sched­uled to hold a news con­fer­ence Friday after­noon. Asked whether he would make an announce­ment about a set­tle­ment, Crump said, “all things are possible.”

“The city needs to exhib­it respon­si­ble lead­er­ship in the face of the hor­rif­ic tragedy that real­ly was a water­shed moment for America,” Crump said in an inter­view Friday

Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill, who is over­see­ing the tri­al, on Thursday grant­ed pros­e­cu­tors’ request to rein­state a third-degree mur­der charge. He had reject­ed the charge last fall on the grounds it was not war­rant­ed by the cir­cum­stances of Floyd’s death. But an appel­late court rul­ing last month in an unre­lat­ed case estab­lished new grounds.

The Minnesota Court of Appeals ordered Cahill to recon­sid­er whether to add the third-degree mur­der charge a week ago. Chauvin’s attor­ney, Eric Nelson, appealed that rul­ing, but the state Supreme Court said this week it would not intervene.

The three oth­er offi­cers involved — Tou Thao, Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng — are charged with aid­ing and abet­ting both sec­ond-degree mur­der and manslaugh­ter. They are expect­ed to go to tri­al in August. All four offi­cers were fired the day after Floyd’s death.

The Nurnberg Nazi Rallies were mas­sive events held in 1923, 1927 & 1929; after that, annu­al­ly, from 1933 through 1938.
According to [Brittinaca], the ral­lies were pro­pa­gan­da events staged to rein­force par­ty enthu­si­asm and show­case the pow­er of National Socialism, not just to Germany but also to the rest of the world.
The ral­lies were staged in loca­tions that high­light­ed quaint medieval sites; they were replete with loud music, lots of ban­ners, goose steps, human swasti­ka for­ma­tions, torch­light pro­ces­sions, bon­fires, and mag­nif­i­cent fireworks.
It is report­ed that Adolph Hitler and oth­er lead­ers deliv­ered lengthy ora­tions, build­ings were dec­o­rat­ed with enor­mous flags and nazi insignia.
The ral­lies’ cli­max was a solemn cer­e­mo­ny in which new flags were touched in the Blufahne (blood ban­ner a tat­tered stan­dard said to have been steeped in the blood of those killed in Hitler’s abortive Beer-Hall-Putsch of November 8 – 9, 1923.
A Putsch is a German word mean­ing [push], used to mean, an attempt to over­throw a gov­ern­ment by force.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which con­clud­ed on Sunday, February 28^th, 2021, it was dif­fi­cult to tell the dif­fer­ence between CPAC and one of Hitler’s Nurenberg rallies.
CPAC did not spare any expense in mak­ing its loy­al­ties to Donald Trump known. At the Conference held at the Hyatt Regency in Orlando, it was a mod­ern-day Nurenberg.
In response to the firestorm on social media sur­round­ing the nazi sym­bol­ism, Hyatt Hotels Corporation called the sym­bols of hate “abhor­rent.”
The web­site Themarysue​.com exclaimed; CPAC atten­dees going all-in on white suprema­cy and Nazism, from their talk­ing points, speak­ers, and actions down to the very design of their main stage at the Hyatt Regency.
Hyatt said all aspects of con­fer­ence logis­tics, includ­ing the stage design, were man­aged by the American Conservative Union, which orga­nized the conference.

Matt Schlapp is chair­man of CPAC, so we know the respon­si­ble par­ties are, for the full-blown Nazi extravaganza.
In response to the out­rage, Schlapp did not apol­o­gize or make changes to the stage-design, even though he had ample time to make changes before the con­fer­ence got underway.
Instead, Schlapp, lashed out argu­ing that what we observed with our own eyes was fake news, that CPAC has Jewish atten­dees and Speakers.
By that def­i­n­i­tion, Jews are the only peo­ple offend­ed by offen­sive Fascistic imagery.
The com­par­isons were “out­ra­geous and slan­der­ous,” Matt Schlapp, American Conservative Union chair, said in a Twitter post on Saturday. He added the orga­ni­za­tion had a “long-stand­ing com­mit­ment to the Jewish com­mu­ni­ty” and that the con­fer­ence fea­tured sev­er­al Jewish speakers.

After the sto­ry became viral and sev­er­al peo­ple called for a boy­cott of Hyatt, the com­pa­ny issued a state­ment that said,” With CPAC’s denial of any inten­tion­al con­nec­tion to hate sym­bols and our con­cerns over the safe­ty of guests and col­leagues in what could have been a dis­rup­tive sit­u­a­tion, we allowed the event to con­tin­ue,” Hyatt said late on Sunday.
Even so, the Hyatt lashed out at CPAC atten­dees for con­tin­ued hos­til­i­ty to their work­ers, whom they refer to as “col­leagues.”
“Colleagues occa­sion­al­ly faced hos­til­i­ty from atten­dees” at the con­fer­ence when atten­dees were remind­ed to wear masks and social dis­tance. Hyatt also said it was “extreme­ly dis­ap­point­ed by the dis­re­spect many indi­vid­u­als involved in the event showed to our col­leagues.”
In its state­ment on Sunday, Hyatt said: “We take the con­cern raised about the prospect of sym­bols of hate being includ­ed in the stage design at CPAC 2021 very seri­ous­ly as all such sym­bols are abhor­rent and unequiv­o­cal­ly counter to our val­ues as a com­pa­ny.”

Trump s not known to be a read­er of the writ­ten word; in fact, he has borne the brunt of late-night come­di­ans’ attack as a man who can­not read.
In an arti­cle in the Atlantic, dat­ed January 5, 2018, Brendan Graham wrote, “Ironically, it was the pub­li­ca­tion of a book this week that crys­tal­lized the real­i­ty of how lit­tle Donald Trump reads. While, like many of the ten­den­cies described in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Trump’s indif­fer­ence to the print­ed word has been appar­ent for some time, the depth and impli­ca­tions of Trump’s strong pref­er­ence for oral com­mu­ni­ca­tion over the writ­ten word demand clos­er examination.
“He didn’t process infor­ma­tion in any con­ven­tion­al sense,” Wolff writes. “He didn’t read. He didn’t real­ly even skim. Some believed that for all prac­ti­cal pur­pos­es, he was no more than semi-­lit­erate.”
So much for that busi­ness degree from that pres­ti­gious col­lege in Pennsylvania. I guess, dad­dy paid for his name to be slapped onto one of those.
Some of his detrac­tors have argued that he has read the “Art Of the Deal,” a screed writ­ten about him, and not by him.
Others have stead­fast­ly insist­ed that Trump’s favorite book, (not sure if one can have a favorite out of a sum of one) is a book of Adolph Hitler’s speech­es, ‘My New Order.’

According to a 1990 Vanity Fair inter­view, Ivana Trump once told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that Donald Trump, kept a book of Hitler’s speech­es near his bed.
This leads us to con­clude that Donald Trump may not be a vora­cious or pro­lif­ic read­er, but he may actu­al­ly read what he wants.
There is lit­tle doubt that the poli­cies that Trump espous­es and the iconog­ra­phy he uses at his ral­lies are direct­ly copied from Hitler’s rallies.
Please make no mis­take about the fact that the iron­clad sup­port that Trump enjoys from the peo­ple who sup­port him is direct­ly derived from real­iz­ing that Donald Trump is a white suprema­cist in words and deeds.
From his Muslim ban, chil­dren in cages, immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy, derid­ing and dis­parag­ing of black women, dis­re­spect of black ath­letes, racism toward China a‑la label­ing the CODID-19 virus (the Chinese virus), dis­re­gard for the Palestinian peo­ple to the ben­e­fit of Israeli Jews, refer­ring to African and Caribbean coun­tries as shit­hole coun­tries, the list goes on and on.
Donald Trump has demon­strat­ed that what he craves is a white eth­nos­tate, or at the very least, whites hold­ing all of the pow­er, every­one else rel­e­gat­ed to second-class,and not allowed to vote.
Donald Trump made light of Joe Biden’s can­di­da­cy; he even went as far as to joke that if Joe Biden won the elec­tions, he would leave the coun­try; we are still await­ing that respite.
However, his ven­om was reserved for the Woman on the tick­et, not a white woman, but a woman of African-Jamaican and Indian descent. He told his Nuremberg-like crowds that he was not opposed to a woman President; he was mak­ing sure that ‘Kamala’ was not that woman.
Surely Kamala Harris’s resume’ far exceeds any­thing that DonaldTrump could ever hope to accom­plish, so what could be his issue with this immi­nent­ly qual­i­fied woman.….…..
.……of color?

The con­sol­i­da­tion of the Republican par­ty around Donald Trump, and the par­ty’s even­tu­al mor­ph­ing into what has now become the Trump par­ty, could only have hap­pened because of white resent­ment and griev­ances at the pow­er of the minor­i­ty vote.
According to some media reports, Republicans in states where they con­trol the leg­is­la­tures have writ­ten over a hun­dred vot­er-sup­pres­sion bills and have already passed some.
In Georgia, in which they lost two run-offs Senate elec­tions, they are going all out to reverse black vot­er par­tic­i­pa­tion in the process.
Of course, this is aid­ed and abet­ted by the Republican major­i­ty on the Supreme Court, due to its own evis­cer­a­tion of sec­tions of the 1965 vot­ing rights act.
The John Roberts court con­tin­ues to whit­tle away at the vot­ing rights act,making vot­ing for some minor­i­ty groups a near impos­si­bil­i­ty. No one should be sur­prised by John Roberts, as a young Reagan admin­is­tra­tion lawyer John Roberts was aggres­sive­ly anti-vot­ing rights, even to the polit­i­cal right of Ronald Reagan. Even so ‚John Roberts may very well be the most lib­er­al of the Republican cabal on the high­est court.

In a bril­liant book titled “the sum of what Racism cost every­one and how we can pros­per togeth­er,” Heather McGhee wrote; Near the begin­ning of the cen­tu­ry, pub­lic pools could be found in many urban areas across the coun­try, but that all changed as cities moved to deseg­re­gate those swim­ming areas. Cities closed their pools rather than com­mit to desegregation.
Built in 1919, the Fairground Park pool in St. Louis, Missouri, was the largest in the coun­try and prob­a­bly the world, with a sandy beach, an elab­o­rate div­ing board, and a report­ed capac­i­ty of ten thou­sand swim­mers. When a new city admin­is­tra­tion changed the park’s pol­i­cy in 1949 to allow Black swim­mers, the first inte­grat­ed swim end­ed in blood­shed. On June 21, two hun­dred white res­i­dents sur­round­ed the pool with “bats, clubs, bricks, and knives” to men­ace the first thir­ty or so Black swim­mers. Over the course of the day, a white mob that grew to five thou­sand attacked every Black per­son in sight around the Fairground Park. After the Fairground Park Riot, as it was known, the city returned to a seg­re­ga­tion pol­i­cy using pub­lic safe­ty as a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, but a suc­cess­ful NAACP law­suit reopened the pool to all St. Louisans the fol­low­ing sum­mer. On the first day of inte­grat­ed swim­ming, July 19, 1950, only sev­en white swim­mers at­tended, join­ing three brave Black swim­mers under two hun­dred white pro­test­ers’ shouts. That first inte­grat­ed sum­mer, Fairground logged just 10,000 swims — down from 313,000 the pre­vi­ous sum­mer. The city closed the pool for good six years lat­er. Racial hatred led to St. Louis drain­ing one of the most prized pub­lic pools in the world.

Even when they are not com­pet­ing for jobs because they failed to earn the edu­ca­tion or skills-sets required to have those jobs or oppor­tu­ni­ties, many would rather not see any­one but peo­ple who look like them hav­ing those jobs.
Whether these posi­tions are in Government, or the pri­vate sec­tor, their reac­tion is the same.
Even with an abun­dance that would ensure that all Americans have enough, they would rather starve along with those they do not like.
That is what’s behind this Trumpmania, griev­ances, & resent­ment. It was griev­ances that pro­pelled Adolph Hitler to pow­er; it was his fas­cist ten­den­cies that plunged the world into the sec­ond world war in 1939.
America seems to be intent on a fascis­tic con­fla­gra­tion, one that is bound to engulf the nation at great per­il to the rest of the world.
And it’s all because a group of peo­ple would rather drain the pool than share it even though every­one paid to build it, some more than oth­ers. After all, they gave every­thing, they gave their blood, even their lives.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

Speaking specif­i­cal­ly to cer­tain fac­tions with­in the Black com­mu­ni­ty that President Obama did noth­ing for the Black com­mu­ni­ty, please watch the Senate judi­cia­ry com­mit­tee hear­ings of Judge Merrick Garland for Attorney General.
The attack on the Obama admin­is­tra­tion’s Justice Department by cer­tain Republicans Raphael Cruz, John Cornyn, and oth­ers, and on for­mer Attorney General Eric Holder is a tes­ta­ment to Obama’s com­mit­ment to the Black community.
For the fee­ble-mind­ed who con­tin­ue to expect that a Black President’s great­ness is how many checks he mailed out to them, please be edu­cat­ed on the facts.
I have always believed that President Obama’s great­est accom­plish­ments relat­ed to the Black com­mu­ni­ty have been what he could do in the Holder Justice Department.
As part of shak­ing up the entrenched racial dis­par­i­ties, then-Attorney General Eric Holder, was held in con­tempt of Congress by an antag­o­nis­tic Republican-con­trolled Senate that hat­ed what the AG was doing.
Then-Attorney General Holder also had his name on the supreme court deci­sion Holder vs. Shelby County Alabama, leg­is­la­tion in which the Supreme court evis­cer­at­ed sec­tions of the vot­ing rights Act.
When we jux­ta­pose what President Obama did, with Judge Garland’s ques­tion­ing by Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, a crys­tal clear image emerges of where Republicans stand on the rights of African-Americans.

I had a rather con­tentious con­ver­sa­tion with a young Jamaican preach­er, who claims to be a Republican over the week­end. He want­ed to know what polit­i­cal par­ty I sup­port­ed; I answered cer­tain­ly not the lying Republican cult that rep­re­sents hat­ed and divi­sion, that lies as a mat­ter of course, and wants to destroy Democracy.
He claimed to oppose the Democrats because of the 1994 Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act, oth­er­wise, known as the Clinton Crime bill). In typ­i­cal Jamaican fash­ion, the young preach­er act­ed under the belief that those who speak the loud­est were the ones who are right.
His style of com­mu­ni­cat­ing was ask­ing a ques­tion with­out allow­ing for an answer. Asking what he thought was a knock-out ques­tion was more than a ques­tion; it was the point for him.
When con­front­ed with doc­u­men­tary evi­dence that the 90’s crime bill was sought by black law-mak­ers, black cler­gy, sup­port­ed by both polit­i­cal par­ties, and was a response to the ram­pant killings in the Black com­mu­ni­ty, he did not want to see the evidence.
As I said before, ask­ing the ques­tion was his point, because I had pre­emp­tive­ly dis­armed him of the abil­i­ty to use Religion and hatred of Gays as a rea­son to lash out against the Obama administration.

In my pro­fes­sion­al capac­i­ty, I have the high hon­or of inter­act­ing with peo­ple of vary­ing polit­i­cal stripes. I under­stand, even though I’m afraid I have to dis­agree, with a white per­son who votes Republican, because he/​she sees that par­ty as a pro­tec­tor of his/​her white privilege.
I am baf­fled by the ques­tion, “what did Obama do for the Black com­mu­ni­ty” com­ing from Black Americans?
Considering that (a) Presidents can send leg­is­la­tion up to the Hill, but that Presidents do not pass leg­is­la­tion, (b) Presidents have to be pres­i­dent for all the peo­ple, not just some peo­ple, © that Obama faced blan­ket­ed Republican oppo­si­tion to every pol­i­cy posi­tion he pro­posed, even poli­cies they pre­vi­ous­ly sup­port­ed, that Obama only had a Democratic House for two of the eight years he was in office, what was he sup­posed to do differently?
The Gentleman asked me, what exact­ly Obama had done in the eight years he was in office. I direct­ed him to the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion and end­ed the conversation.

OBAMA’s FIRST TERM RECORD

1. Ordered all fed­er­al agen­cies to under­take a study and make rec­om­men­da­tions for ways to cut spending
2. Ordered a review of all fed­er­al oper­a­tions to iden­ti­fy and cut waste­ful spend­ing and practices
3. Instituted enforce­ment for equal pay for women
4. Beginning the with­draw­al of US troops from Iraq
5. Families of fall­en sol­diers have expens­es cov­ered to be on hand when the body arrives at Dover AFB
6 Ended media black­out on war casu­al­ties; report­ing full information
7. Ended media black­out on cov­er­ing the return of fall­en sol­diers to Dover AFB; the media is now per­mit­ted to do so pend­ing adher­ence to respect­ful rules and approval of fall­en soldier’s family
8. The White House and fed­er­al gov­ern­ment are respect­ing the Freedom of Information Act
9. Instructed all fed­er­al agen­cies to pro­mote open­ness and trans­paren­cy as much as possible
10. Limits on lobbyist’s access to the White House
11. Limits on White House aides work­ing for lob­by­ists after their tenure in the administration
12. Ended the pre­vi­ous stop-loss pol­i­cy that kept sol­diers in Iraq/​Afghanistan longer than their enlist­ment date
13. Phasing out the expen­sive F‑22 war plane and oth­er out­dat­ed weapons sys­tems, which weren’t even used or need­ed in Iraq/​Afghanistan
14. Removed restric­tions on embry­on­ic stem-cell research
15. Federal sup­port for stem-cell and new bio­med­ical research
16. New fed­er­al fund­ing for sci­ence and research labs
17. States are per­mit­ted to enact fed­er­al fuel effi­cien­cy stan­dards above fed­er­al standards
18. Increased infra­struc­ture spend­ing (roads, bridges, pow­er plants) after years of neglect
19. Funds for high-speed, broad­band Internet access to K‑12 schools
20. New funds for school construction
21 The prison at Guantanamo Bay is being phased out
22. US Auto indus­try res­cue plan
23. Housing res­cue plan
24. $789 bil­lion eco­nom­ic stim­u­lus plan
25. The pub­lic can meet with fed­er­al hous­ing insur­ers to refi­nance (the new plan can be com­plet­ed in one day) a mort­gage if they are hav­ing trou­ble paying
26. US finan­cial and bank­ing res­cue plan
27. The secret deten­tion facil­i­ties in Eastern Europe and else­where are being closed
28. Ended the pre­vi­ous pol­i­cy; the US now has a no tor­ture pol­i­cy and com­plies with the Geneva Convention standards
29. Better body armor is now being pro­vid­ed to our troops
30. The mis­sile defense pro­gram was being cut by $1.4 bil­lion in 2010
31. Restarted the nuclear non­pro­lif­er­a­tion talks and build­ing back up the nuclear inspec­tion infrastructure/​protocols
32. Reengaged in the treaties/​agreements to pro­tect the Antarctic
33. Reengaged in the agreements/​talks on glob­al warm­ing and green­house gas emissions
34. Visited more coun­tries and met with more world lead­ers than any pres­i­dent in his first six months in office
35. Successful release of US cap­tain held by Somali pirates; autho­rized the SEALS to do their job
36. US Navy increas­ing patrols off the Somali coast
37. Attractive tax write-offs for those who buy hybrid automobiles
38. Cash for clunk­ers pro­gram offers vouch­ers to trade in fuel inef­fi­cient, pol­lut­ing old cars for new cars; stim­u­lat­ed auto sales
39. Announced plans to pur­chase a fuel-effi­cient American-made fleet for the fed­er­al government
40. Expanded the SCHIP pro­gram to cov­er health care for 4 mil­lion more children
41. Signed nation­al ser­vice leg­is­la­tion; expand­ed nation­al youth ser­vice program
42. Instituted a new pol­i­cy on Cuba, allow­ing Cuban fam­i­lies to return home to vis­it loved ones
43. Ended the pre­vi­ous pol­i­cy of not reg­u­lat­ing and label­ing car­bon diox­ide emissions
44. Expanding vac­ci­na­tion programs
45. Immediate and effi­cient response to the floods in North Dakota and oth­er nat­ur­al disasters
46. Closed off­shore tax safe havens
47. Negotiated deal with Swiss banks to per­mit US gov­ern­ment to gain access to records of tax evaders and criminals
48. Ended the pre­vi­ous pol­i­cy of offer­ing tax ben­e­fits to cor­po­ra­tions who out­source American jobs; the new pol­i­cy is to pro­mote in-sourc­ing to bring jobs back
49.. Ended the pre­vi­ous prac­tice of pro­tect­ing cred­it card com­pa­nies; in place of it are new con­sumer pro­tec­tions from the cred­it card industry’s preda­to­ry practices
50. Energy pro­duc­ing plants must begin prepar­ing to pro­duce 15% of their ener­gy from renew­able sources
51. Lower drug costs for seniors
52. Ended the pre­vi­ous prac­tice of for­bid­ding Medicare from nego­ti­at­ing with drug man­u­fac­tur­ers for cheap­er drugs; the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment now real­izes hun­dreds of mil­lions in savings
53. Increasing pay and ben­e­fits for mil­i­tary personnel
54. Improved hous­ing for mil­i­tary personnel
55. Initiating a new pol­i­cy to pro­mote fed­er­al hir­ing of mil­i­tary spouses
56. Improved con­di­tions at Walter Reed Military Hospital and oth­er mil­i­tary hospitals
57 Increasing stu­dent loans
58. Increasing oppor­tu­ni­ties in the AmeriCorps program
59. Sent envoys to the Middle East and oth­er parts of the world that had been neglect­ed for years; reen­gag­ing in mul­ti­lat­er­al and bilat­er­al talks and diplomacy
60. Established a new cyber­se­cu­ri­ty office
61. Beginning the process of reform­ing and restruc­tur­ing the mil­i­tary 20 years after the Cold War to a more mod­ern fight­ing force; this includes new pro­cure­ment poli­cies, increas­ing size of the mil­i­tary, new tech­nol­o­gy, and cyber units and oper­a­tions, etc.
62. Ended pre­vi­ous pol­i­cy of award­ing no-bid defense contracts
63. Ordered a review of hur­ri­cane and nat­ur­al dis­as­ter preparedness
64. Established a National Performance Officer charged with sav­ing the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment mon­ey and mak­ing fed­er­al oper­a­tions more efficient
65. Students strug­gling to make col­lege loan pay­ments can have their loans refinanced
66. Improving ben­e­fits for veterans
67. Many more press con­fer­ences and town halls and much more media access than pre­vi­ous administrations
68. Instituted a new focus on mort­gage fraud
69. The FDA is now reg­u­lat­ing tobacco
70. Ended pre­vi­ous pol­i­cy of cut­ting the FDA and cir­cum­vent­ing FDA rules
71. Ended pre­vi­ous prac­tice of hav­ing White House aides rewrite sci­en­tif­ic and envi­ron­men­tal rules, reg­u­la­tions, and reports
72. Authorized dis­cus­sions with North Korea and pri­vate mis­sion by Pres. Bill Clinton to secure the release of two Americans held in prisons
73. Authorized dis­cus­sions with Myanmar and mis­sion by Sen. Jim Web to secure the release of an American held captive
74. Making more loans avail­able to small businesses
75. Established inde­pen­dent com­mis­sion to make rec­om­men­da­tions on slow­ing the costs of Medicare
76. Appointment of first Latina to the Supreme Court
77. Authorized construction/​opening of addi­tion­al health cen­ters to care for veterans
78. Limited salaries of senior White House aides; cut to $100,000
79. Renewed loan guar­an­tees for Israel
80. Changed the failing/​status quo mil­i­tary com­mand in Afghanistan
81. Deployed addi­tion­al troops to Afghanistan
82. New Afghan War pol­i­cy that lim­its aer­i­al bomb­ing and pri­or­i­tizes aid, devel­op­ment of infra­struc­ture, diplo­ma­cy, and good gov­ern­ment prac­tices by Afghans
83. Announced the long-term devel­op­ment of a nation­al ener­gy grid with renew­able sources and clean­er, effi­cient ener­gy production
84. Returned mon­ey autho­rized for refur­bish­ment of White House offices and pri­vate liv­ing quarters
85. Paid for redec­o­ra­tion of White House liv­ing quar­ters out of his own pocket
86. Held first Seder in White House
87. Attempting to reform the nation’s health­care sys­tem, which is the most expen­sive in the world yet leaves almost 50 mil­lion with­out health insur­ance and mil­lions more underinsured
88. Has put the ball in play for com­pre­hen­sive immi­gra­tion reform
89. Has announced his inten­tion to push for ener­gy reform
90. Has announced his inten­tion to push for edu­ca­tion reform

Did I men­tion he passed health care reform?
I have no idea what the char­ac­ter­is­tics of a great American President are; what I do know is that, all things con­sid­ered, Barack Obama comes pret­ty damn close, in my opinion.
It is pret­ty easy to crit­i­cize our own, who have done things we could nev­er dream of doing, while sup­port­ing those who would rather see us back on the plantation.
We all have a right to sup­port who and what­ev­er we want to under the law. But when we chose to dis­par­age a per­son or a polit­i­cal par­ty to jus­ti­fy our shame­ful actions, we should at least get our facts straight.
Truth does still matter.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

I want­ed to wait for a while before say­ing any­thing about the pass­ing of one of the most vapid­ly tox­ic fig­ures to influ­ence our nation­al discourse.
I speak of Rush Limbaugh, the insid­i­ous big­ot who passed away days ago at 70 after a bat­tle with lung can­cer. But the hypocrisy of the media in not describ­ing Limbaugh in the way he deserves, prompt­ed me to break my silence.
Despite the hate, misog­y­ny, and xeno­pho­bia that Limbaugh rep­re­sent­ed, the main­stream media gush­es over him as if he was some­one who left a lega­cy of good.
God is still work­ing on me, so I still pray that he con­tin­ues to lead me onto the path he wants me to trod, like the new tes­ta­ment teach­ings, which ask me to be of pious sup­pli­can­cy. One who turns the oth­er cheek when my ene­my spite­ful­ly assaults me, love them, and be good to them?
Or fol­low the Old Testament teach­ings, hon­or­ing war­riors like David who asked God to deliv­er his ene­mies into his hands, slew them, and progressed.
Rush Limbaugh must be remem­bered for what he tru­ly was, a can­cer. But we must also take note of those who enabled him, The media hous­es that gave him the plat­form to spew the garbage he did, so that they could rake in the prof­its from his decades of preach­ing hate.

Criticize me all you want, but since he is not fin­ished with me yet, I will shed not one drop of tear for an insuf­fer­able big­ot whose pass­ing left the world a bet­ter place today, than it was before he died.
I refuse to play nice to a glo­ri­fied clown who used the pub­lic air­waves to sow hatred and divi­sion, turn­ing neigh­bors against neigh­bors, mak­ing Americans see their fel­low Americans not as peo­ple who dis­agree on prin­ci­ple, but as ene­mies to be reviled and hat­ed. If refus­ing to be def­er­en­tial to that kind of insid­i­ous trash is a vice, col­or me the new viceroy.
Rush Limbaugh built an empire on hatred and divi­sion; at the very best, Rush Limbaugh was noth­ing more than a dem­a­gogue with a micro­phone, a wannabe come­di­an who was every­thing but fun­ny. It was no sur­prise that Donald Trump rose to the pres­i­den­cy on the hatred and divi­sion that Limbaugh per­pet­u­at­ed and promulgated.
It was no sur­prise that Trump, anoth­er racial dem­a­gogue saw fit to bestow the pres­i­den­tial medal of free­dom on Limbaugh. So much for the val­ue of those going forward.

Limbaugh died, leav­ing a mas­sive for­tune, report­ed­ly to the tune of $600 mil­lion, derived from spread­ing hatred for every­one who was­n’t white and male. He could­n’t take a pen­ny with him, nei­ther could it save him, which brings to mind, Matthew 16-26, Yeshua asked, what good it is for a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?
Limbaugh is gone, nev­er to be heard from again, but the seeds of hatred and divi­sion he left behind will be hard to erase, if ever at all. His seeds of hatred all but splin­tered the coun­try, pit­ting broth­ers against broth­ers, sis­ter against sis­ter, par­ents against chil­dren, chil­dren against their par­ents, and neigh­bor against neigh­bor. Again here we see the word of God man­i­fest­ing right in front of our eyes, in plain sight, yet we ignore it.
Mark 13 ‑12, “Brother will betray broth­er to death, and a father his child. Children will rebel against their par­ents and have them put to death.

Rush Limbaugh’s life was about stir­ring up hatred and divi­sion, sow­ing lies and dis­cord; it result­ed in the rise of the king of lies and dis­in­for­ma­tion to the high­est exec­u­tive office, and we have seen how that turned out.
Limbaugh’s cam­paign of deceit includ­ed spread­ing lies that Barack Obama was not an American. He told his lis­ten­ers that the Affordable Care Act (Obama Care) would result in death pan­els; they gob­bled it up. He argued with a black caller to his show, telling him quote; “take that bone out of your nose and call me back.”
He asked his lis­ten­ers if they ever noticed that all com­pos­ite sketch­es of want­ed crim­i­nals looked like the Reverend Jesse Jackson. He invit­ed a guest on-air who sang “Barack, the Magic Negro” to the tune of “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” In 2016, he read an essay on air that a well-known white suprema­cist had penned.
He labeled Feminist women ‘Feminazis’. While speak­ing about the geno­cide of America’s indige­nous peo­ples, Limbaugh said, “Holocaust 90 mil­lion Indians? Only 4 mil­lion left? They all have casi­nos; what’s to com­plain about?”(salon)

Limbaugh fre­quent­ly mir­rored white nation­al­ist talk­ing points when dis­cussing Latino immi­grants, whom he described as lazy and depen­dent on the gov­ern­ment. He called migrants at America’s south­ern bor­der an “inva­sion.” He den­i­grat­ed Gays and Lesbians,’ the best way to stop the spread of the virus was to “not ask anoth­er man to bend over and make love at the exit point,” he asserted.
This guy was noth­ing but a blight, a poi­son, can­cer to the body politic, one that metas­ta­sized and inex­orable result­ed in Donald Trump and, worse, the storm­ing of the nation’s citadel of leg­isla­tive power.
The death of this guy is a bless­ing; no one should pre­tend to show def­er­ence to such a vile crea­ture, know­ing with­out a shad­ow of a doubt that the world is a bet­ter place today, than it was with him here.
We were all vic­tims of his hate; those who dis­agreed with his vile doc­trine, and those who agreed with him are equal vic­tims who now need redemption.
May God save their souls before it becomes too late for them too.?

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

Prime Minister Andrew Holness announced that Jamaica’s nation­al cur­few would start at 8 p.m., effec­tive Wednesday, February 10.
The mea­sure will remain in effect for a peri­od of at least two weeks.
The announce­ment came short­ly after Jamaica record­ed six con­sec­u­tive days of record-high COVID-19 cases.
Mr. Holness said the sit­u­a­tion is seri­ous, a cause for con­cern, and requires a gov­ern­ment response. Mr. Holness also not­ed the effect the cur­few will have on the econ­o­my, saying:
“If the num­bers set­tle, then we will go back to either 9 or 10 [p.m]. It is not the objec­tive of the gov­ern­ment to kill commerce.
“We do this very reluc­tant­ly but hav­ing great regard to the fact that if we don’t act, now, we could over­whelm our health sys­tem, which leads to either greater problems.”
The gath­er­ing lim­it has also been reduced from 15 per­sons to 10.
Check out more sto­ries here @ ( https://​jablogz​.com/​2​0​2​1​/​0​2​/​p​m​-​a​n​n​o​u​n​c​e​s​-​e​a​r​l​i​e​r​-​c​u​r​f​e​w​-​a​m​i​d​-​c​o​v​i​d​-​1​9​-​s​p​i​ke/ )

I am not going to speak to the lies Republicans told them­selves that they were the par­ty of law & order; every­one knew that was a lie. What I will do is try to do a lit­tle expose‘ on Republican lies and hypocrisy.
For decades Republicans like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Herbert Walker Bush, and Donald Trump ran as law and order candidates.
You may have noticed that I left out George Bush, who served two terms between 2000 & 2008. To his cred­it, George Bush did not make any claim to be much of any­thing but a goof­ball, at least not until the attacks of September 2001. Thereafter, Bush made him­self a wartime pres­i­dent; those wars are still in effect today.

The Republican claim of being the law & order par­ty was what is called a dog whis­tle. If you under­stand that bru­tal­iz­ing, lock­ing away, and killing blacks has been gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy after the so-called eman­ci­pa­tion dec­la­ra­tion, you begin to under­stand bet­ter, how run­ning as a law & order can­di­date means bru­tal­iz­ing, lock­ing away, and killing African-Americans.
It is cod­ed lan­guage to whites, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the South, what kind of pub­lic offi­cial they will be. Some Republican can­di­dates for pres­i­dent, irre­spec­tive of where they are from, launch their pres­i­den­tial cam­paigns from the deep South.
It was no sur­prise then, that the most igno­rant racist to run and occu­py the pres­i­den­cy in mod­ern his­to­ry ran as a law & order candidate.
No oth­er American war has been waged with more sav­agery and fer­vor than the FBI’s war against African-Americans. and black civ­il-rights lead­ers under Director J Edgar Hoover.
Hoover’s para­noia that America would be attacked and destroyed by com­mu­nists and gays is well doc­u­ment­ed, but his racist obses­sion with civ­il rights lead­ers was even more chilling.

In a February 11^th arti­cle, the Daily Beast, Jeffery Ogbar wrote; (On March 8, 1971, an anti-war activist group, the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania where they dis­cov­ered a cache of clas­si­fied doc­u­ments, many bear­ing the cryp­tic code “COINTELPRO.”
They leaked the doc­u­ments to the press. On March 24, 1971, The Washington Post ran a cov­er sto­ry on the FBI’s vast pro­gram in 1956 to neu­tral­ize sus­pi­cious per­sons and orga­ni­za­tions. Although ini­tial­ly formed to tar­get the Communist Party U.S.A., it was quick­ly expand­ed to include a wide range of groups con­sid­ered “sub­ver­sive.” No seg­ment had been as cen­tral to COINTELPRO oper­a­tions as civ­il rights activists. However, a broad­er scope of the FBI’s actions was unknown until Congressional hear­ings five years lat­er. What came to light was excep­tion­al­ly chill­ing — seeped in its own racism, with­out any checks or bal­ances, the FBI devot­ed more resources to harm­ing the Civil Rights move­ment than any oth­er task in its purview.)

J Edgar Hoover recruit­ed blacks to infil­trate civ­il rights orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing Earnest Withers, a cel­e­brat­ed pho­tog­ra­ph­er who had access to pri­vate meet­ings of the move­ment. Whithers then duti­ful­ly report­ed back to Hoover on what he had learned. William O’Neil, a pet­ty crim­i­nal, was recruit­ed and used to infil­trate the Black Panther Party.
O’Neil’s treach­ery result­ed in the FBI & local police report­ed­ly assas­si­nat­ing the 21-year-old Fred Hampton as he lay sleep­ing, alleged­ly drugged, by the same William O’Neil on the direc­tive of his han­dlers in the FBI.
While ter­ror­ism has been a part of American cul­ture from the begin­ning of this exper­i­ment, it was nev­er viewed as a prob­lem because the ter­ror was direct­ed at the peo­ple America despised and hated.
For those rea­sons, the Ku Klux Klan is not a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion, but Republicans want the splin­tered Anti-Fascist pro­tes­tors (ANTIFA) des­ig­nat­ed a Terrorist group.

Asked about actions in help­ing the FBI to set up and assas­si­nate Fred Hampton, Oniel said the following;
I didn’t feel like I had done any­thing. I didn’t walk in there with guns. I didn’t shoot him. FBI didn’t do it. I felt some­what like I was betrayed. I felt like if any­one should have known it was going to be a raid that morn­ing, I should have known, also. I felt like I could have been caught in that raid. I was there that night, and I felt like if I’d have laid down, I prob­a­bly would have been a vic­tim, so I felt betrayed, I felt like, I felt like I was expend­able. I felt like, like per­haps I was on the wrong side. Yeah, yeah, I had my mis­giv­ings. I’m not going to, I, no, I’m not going to sit here now and take respon­si­bil­i­ty for the raid, you know, I’m not going to do that. I didn’t pull the trig­ger. I didn’t issue the war­rant. I didn’t put the guns in the apart­ment. So I’m not going to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for that, but I do feel like I was betrayed. I felt like I should have known the raid was com­ing down. I felt like it was prob­a­bly exces­sive. You know, I felt like it was a sur­gi­cal strike, you know, and I was real­ly angry for quite a few days. Quite a few days.
O’Neil would die in 1990 as he ran across the Eisenhower express­way on Dr. King’s birth­day. The med­ical exam­in­er ruled his death a sui­cide. I guess the uni­verse does pay attention.

No one knows exact­ly how many black peo­ple the Klan mur­dered through­out its his­to­ry, pos­si­bly hun­dreds of thou­sands con­sid­er­ing that Klansmen were/​are judges, police offi­cers, gro­cers, farm­ers, bankers, and every oth­er cat­e­go­ry of workers.
The killings were made through lynch­ings, shoot­ings, bomb­ings, and oth­er heinous acts, includ­ing James Byrd Jr’s drag­ging death in Jasper, Texas, over two decades ago.
We do not know how many may have been killed because they saw the wrong Doctor, the wrong nurse, was arrest­ed by the wrong cop,( lit­er­al­ly every cop was the wrong cop)eating at the wrong restaurant?
Organizations that have done far less have been des­ig­nat­ed Terrorist groups. Yet, in the United States, white ter­ror is such an accept­ed real­i­ty that there is no Federal Domestic ter­ror statute.

The Klan’s activ­i­ties con­tin­ue today, despite the third Ku Klux Klan Act, Civil Rights Act of 1871, or Force Act of 1871. With the pas­sage of the Third Force Act, pop­u­lar­ly known as the Ku Klux Act, Congress autho­rized President Ulysses S. Grant to declare mar­tial law, impose heavy penal­ties against ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions, and use mil­i­tary force to sup­press them; Klux Klan (KKK). (History​.com)
In 1882, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Ku Klux Act uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, but by that time, Reconstruction had end­ed, and much of the KKK had fad­ed away, or so they thought.
That was then; no one believes today that the Ku Klux Klan has fad­ed away. However, the Klan is the least of America’s wor­ries at the moment; the FBI and oth­er intel­li­gence agen­cies have repeat­ed­ly warned that domes­tic white suprema­cist groups pose the gravest dan­ger to America’s nation­al security.

Since there has been no sense of urgency to deal with home­grown ter­ror­ism, white ter­ror­ism has flour­ished in the United States. Using the Constitution’s lan­guage on local mili­tias and the 2^nd amend­ment, which pro­tects gun rights, vio­lent racist mili­tias have been allowed to expand their oper­a­tions across the country.
Their sup­port­ers in Congress have been able to oper­ate out in the open, by pre­tend­ing to be gun-rights advo­cates; when they are tru­ly full-fledged white suprema­cist supporters.
It has been that sup­port for white suprema­cist ter­ror groups why capi­tol insur­rec­tion­ists could storm the US Capitol and parade the racist flag of white supremacy.
For those rea­sons, Wisconsin US Senator Ron Johnson declared that the Capitol mob were not armed insur­rec­tion­ists.
Never mind that five of their own peo­ple died, one police offi­cer was killed and scores more seri­ous­ly injured by the nean­derthal horde who were armed with guns, base­ball bats, hock­ey sticks, flag­poles, chem­i­cal irri­tants, and oth­er weapons.
The hypocrisy of Ron Johnson and oth­ers like him should not be allowed to slide. These clowns declare police jus­ti­fied in using lethal force on unarmed peo­ple of col­or. Still, when it comes to the rag­ing lunatic mob of white trai­tors, they make excus­es and triv­i­al­ize the seri­ous­ness of their crimes.

Violent white suprema­cists mili­tia groups have not been treat­ed with the seri­ous­ness they should be; this led to killing many peo­ple, whites includ­ed. Timothy McVeigh, a mil­i­tary vet­er­an, destroyed the Edward R Murrow Federal build­ing in 1995, killing 168 Americans and injur­ing 680 oth­ers. The bomb­ing remains the dead­liest act of domes­tic ter­ror­ism in US history.
Timothy McVeigh was even­tu­al­ly exe­cut­ed, but the dam­age was already done. Killing him could not unring the bell.
Investigators have report­ed that a dis­pro­por­tion­ate num­ber of those arrest­ed after the Capitol breach of January 6^th, 2021 were either past or serv­ing mil­i­tary and police members.
The cod­dling of vio­lent white extrem­ist indi­vid­u­als and groups con­tin­ues to result in the mur­der of inno­cent Americans of all stripes.
In the 2019 El Paso mas­sacre, the white shoot­er, a 21-year old from Allen, Texas, claimed in a man­i­festo that he was act­ing to pro­tect whites in America from “cul­tur­al and eth­nic replace­ment” brought on by “the Hispanic inva­sion of Texas.”He alleged­ly allowed peo­ple who did not look like Mexicans to go free; then, he sum­mar­i­ly mas­sa­cred those who were the ene­mies in his mind.

[The shooter’s alt-right writ­ings includ­ing excerpts and names of indi­vid­u­als and groups who claim to be fight­ing against the “Great Replacement,” as one of their lead­ers calls the pur­port­ed threat of “white geno­cide” around the world. Followers of this con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry aim to cre­ate a neo-fas­cist “eth­nos­tate” where at least 90 per­cent of inhab­i­tants are white. Their pro­posed pro­gram will be car­ried out by dra­con­ian bor­der enforce­ment mea­sures that will deter future migra­tion, mass depor­ta­tions, the revo­ca­tion of birthright cit­i­zen­ship, and purg­ing non­white chil­dren (who rep­re­sent the great­est threat to the dis­ap­pear­ance of the white race). According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, mas­sacres like the one in El Paso are part of a strat­e­gy these extrem­ist groups call “accel­er­a­tionism,” the idea that the delib­er­ate spread of ter­ror is nec­es­sary to elim­i­nate non-whites from this country.](Texas Observer)
The white suprema­cist group, the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and the pha­lanx of oth­er Neo-Nazi losers all sub­scribe to this racist ide­ol­o­gy, and in Congress, there is sup­port for it.
In many State Legislatures across the coun­try, draft leg­is­la­tion and laws passed reflect those xeno­pho­bic and racist ide­olo­gies. Proponents of those laws may not open­ly declare their intent when draft­ing and pass­ing such leg­is­la­tion, but we know their intentions.

The chal­lenge now for author­i­ties is how to deal with the mon­ster they allowed to grow because they did not think that these ter­ror­ists would endan­ger them.
Law-enforce­ment offi­cers, some of whom are mem­bers and sym­pa­thiz­ers of white nation­al­ists groups, played foot­sie with their mem­bers. Believing they had found allies against the hat­ed black peo­ple strug­gling for free­dom from police vio­lence and insti­tu­tion­al­ized racism man­i­fest­ed through bru­tal and mur­der­ous police departments.
Many were unwit­ting­ly duped by the so-called back the blue cam­paign they waged against Black Lives Matter pro­tes­tors, peace­ably protest­ing for racial justice.
It was a strate­gic ruse designed to pla­cate and paci­fy police, many of whom are anti-black, to begin with. When the rub­ber meets the road, they made it clear that they did not care about the blue, par­tic­u­lar­ly if the blue would not allow them to achieve their blood lust.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

OFFICERS EXPRESSED REGRET OVER NOT STOMPING AND GASSING A GROUP OF PEOPLE ARRESTED FOR PROTESTING IN OCTOBER.

Officers in Phoenix, Arizona were caught via their own body cam­eras dis­cussing regret over fail­ing to com­mit acts of bru­tal­i­ty against Black Lives Matter pro­test­ers dur­ing arrests last October. After arrest­ing 18 mem­bers of BLM, three Arizona offi­cers sat in a squad car ques­tion­ing why “they hadn’t tram­pled the group and doused them in pep­per spray,” accord­ing to The Washington Post. “Why didn’t we just stomp on them when they were leav­ing?” one offi­cer can be heard ask­ing. Another offi­cer said they should, “just gas them and let them run like crazy.” Arizona Police Chief Jeri Williams promised “swift and deci­sive dis­ci­pli­nary action,” and described the offi­cers involved as dis­re­spect­ful. Williams has so far not revealed what that dis­ci­pline may look like.

According to The Post, just hours after the body-cam footage was released, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office announced that it would dis­miss charges against 15 of the pro­test­ers who were arrest­ed on October 17, 2020. The pro­test­ers were fac­ing a num­ber of charges, includ­ing riot­ing, aggra­vat­ed assault with a dead­ly weapon, and resist­ing arrest. Phoenix pros­e­cu­tors also filed gang-relat­ed charges against the pro­test­ers. An offi­cer explained that, although they were not in a gang, the pro­test­ers faced gang charges because they chant­ed “all cops are b — — ,” and most of them wore black and car­ried umbrellas.

Chief Williams said the depart­ment is going to under­go reform in order to pre­vent anoth­er inci­dent like this one from occur­ring again. “I have been and will con­tin­ue to be an advo­cate of the amaz­ing work done in this depart­ment each day,” she said in a state­ment. “However, I know that unpro­fes­sion­al, dis­re­spect­ful, and inap­pro­pri­ate behav­ior from even one of our offi­cers tar­nish­es the badge, but more impor­tant­ly, it hurts the com­mu­ni­ty we have sworn to protect.”

YA!!!

By Zack Linly

Kyle Rittenhouse is await­ing tri­al for fatal­ly shoot­ing two peo­ple and seri­ous­ly injur­ing a third with a rifle he couldn’t legal­ly car­ry. His mul­ti­ple charges include two felony counts of inten­tion­al homi­cide. Regardless of how one feels about the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the Aug. 25 shoot­ing in Kenosha, Wis., there’s no deny­ing that, on paper, he appears to be the kind of crim­i­nal Americans would have no prob­lem con­demn­ing even before he’s found guilty. Except, Rittenhouse is white, looks like the kid next door (to white peo­ple), and is an American’s American — mean­ing he loves cops, guns, vig­i­lante “jus­tice,” and, well, America.

This is why Rittenhouse quick­ly raised funds to pay his $2 mil­lion bail and why he thought noth­ing of hit­ting a bar fresh off his release and hang­ing out with local white suprema­cists. It’s why Rittenhouse was like­ly con­fi­dent that vio­lat­ing court orders by leav­ing the court with a false address would be no big deal — and it’s why he was absolute­ly right about that.
The Washington Post reports that dur­ing a vir­tu­al hear­ing on Thursday, Kenosha County Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder denied the motion by pros­e­cu­tors to have Rittenhouse rear­rest­ed for vio­lat­ing the terms of his release and raise his bond by $200,000.
From the Post:

Schroeder acknowl­edged that the 18-year old had failed to keep the court apprised of his res­i­dence but dis­agreed with Assistant District Attorney Thomas C. Binger’s argu­ments, not­ing that Rittenhouse’s release con­di­tions require only that the defen­dant pro­vide the court with his address, not that he actu­al­ly reside there.

“To issue a war­rant now for a defen­dant that has appeared at every hear­ing would be break­ing the law, and I’m not going to do it,” Schroeder said, adding that he lacked the author­i­ty to issue the kind of war­rant Binger requested.
“Rittenhouse’s release con­di­tions require only that the defen­dant pro­vide the court with his address, not that he actu­al­ly resides there.”

Bruh, WHAT?

What kind of “whites only” bail con­di­tions are these that allow some­one charged in mul­ti­ple homi­cides to give the court any old address while the defen­dant lives wher­ev­er the hell he pleases?

You know what? Never mind; I’ve been writ­ing about “two Americas” since Rittenhouse first became news. According to the Post, dur­ing the Thursday hear­ing — which includ­ed state­ments by Gaige Grosskreutz, the man who sur­vived being shot by Rittenhouse; and John Huber, the father of Anthony Huber, one of the vic­tims who died — Schroeder did order Rittenhouse’s attor­neys to pro­vide the court with a cur­rent address, say­ing it would be kept secret from every­one except the judge, court clerk, and sher­iff. His attor­neys pre­vi­ous­ly argued their client left the address the court had on file because of “numer­ous death and oth­er threats based on the events of August 25, 2020, in the City of Kenosha, Wisconsin,” accord­ing to CNN.

HERE IS THE WAY THE SAME JUDGE RESPONDED TO A CASE INVOLVING A YOUNG BLACK MALE CHARGED WITH A LESSER CRIME
https://​www​.kenoshanews​.com/​j​u​d​g​e​-​n​o​-​d​i​s​m​i​s​s​a​l​-​f​o​r​-​m​a​n​-​a​c​c​u​s​e​d​-​o​f​-​f​i​r​i​n​g​-​g​u​n​-​a​f​t​e​r​-​f​i​g​h​t​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​_​2​4​b​c​4​a​f​a​-​6​370 – 5683-a1a3-f4246e4c1302.html

More from the Post:

During the hour-long hear­ing, which was at times con­tentious, Schroeder attempt­ed to head off sev­er­al argu­ments that veered too close to the polit­i­cal back-and-forth that has gripped the case. He stressed that he was try­ing to be as fair as pos­si­ble to every­one involved.

“This case is not going to be decid­ed by demon­stra­tors of one type or anoth­er,” he said.

Yeah, let’s hope America’s blind­ness doesn’t actu­al­ly decide this case to white crim­i­nal­i­ty. If the han­dling of Rittenhouse up until now is any indi­ca­tion of how he’ll be treat­ed when tried, I won’t be hold­ing my breath that his sto­ry ends in con­se­quences for his actions.