Civil strife. Civil insurrection. Civil War. There are some people in this nation who believe we have entered into a new national battle for justice and freedom. Only I don't think they’re really on the right side of that fight.
After three people were killed during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Portland, Oregon in recent days, right-wing groups that have made a habit of showing up armed to protest are forecasting a larger, more violent struggle. Experts told TPM that was purposeful.
“The first shot has been fired brother,” said Stewart Rhodes, founder of the armed anti-government group Oath Keepers, in a tweet Sunday. “Civil war is here, right now. We’ll give Trump one last chance to declare this a Marxist insurrection & suppress it as his duty demands. If he fails to do HIS duty, we will do OURS.”
Rhodes was referring to the killing of Aaron Danielson in Portland on Saturday. Danielson was affiliated with a right-wing group known for street brawling, Patriot Prayer, whose members had joined a caravan of trucks that made a route through Portland earlier in the day, many armed with pepper spray and paintball guns.
[...]
For years, Oath Keepers leadership has speculated about potential armed conflict: In 2015, for example, members of the group claimed that the “Jade Helm” military training exercise was a front for martial law. And last year, Rhodes said Democrats’ impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump marked “the verge of a HOT civil war.” But these conflicts, of course, never materialized.
“They’ve identified the start of a civil war over and over again,” Jackson said. “The identification or anticipation of a civil war is consistent.”
“What’s different now is they’re pointing to a particular act of violence from the people that they’ve identified as the other side — the enemy combatants in the civil war,” he added. “What’s different now is they’re not just anticipating that it’s going to happen soon — they’re rhetorically positioning that it has begun.”
Newly armed with the bigoted rhetoric of Donald Trump and Bill Barr the Oath Keepers, III Percenters, Proud Boys and Boogaloo Bois have now identified their enemy, and their going on the attack. We are now in a hot shooting war. But then again, the truly sad truth is that the original Civil War never really ended, it only changed venues and tactics.
This, of course, will not be a standard military conflict with large groups of opposing forces squaring off against each other. It will be guerrilla urban warfare. Individual conflicts and skirmishes. Individual acts of verbal disrespect, physical assaults, shootings, knifings, bombings and murders.
We’ve been seeing this for a long time as individual cases. It goes back to Timothy McVeigh and Eric Robert Rudolph who bombed the Atlanta Olympics. The murder of Dr. Slepian, the killing of Dr. Tiller, the Unitarian Church shooting in Knoxville, Brevik Anders, the attack on Planned Parenthood, the Tree of Life Synogogue, Christchurch and now we have Rittenhouse.
There are thousands more where Rittenhouse came from.
It won’t be “war” in the traditional sense, it will be terrorism. It’s only a matter of time before we have (another) mass casualty event. And then another. And another.
The Lincoln Project’s Steve Schmidt thinks this is a big deal.
“It’s a lie we’re seeing Donald Trump project from a point of weakness, trying to convince people of this alternate reality that there’s very little resemblance to actual reality,” said Schmidt. “Where the country is cruising towards 200,000 dead from coronavirus, a shattered economy, escalating foreclosures, and eviction crisis. But it’s important to note that Trumpism is no longer a haphazard and accidental set of pathologies that have come together that define because it’s hard to explain this moment in American life and American politics.”
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“One of the things we know, also, is these movements all around the world, that they team with menace and violence. No mistake that the Hawaiian shirt-clad fetishists want to see a second Civil War in this country. They are all supporting Trump and Trump has encouraged all of them,” he went on.
This was discussed by Chris Hayes on MSNBC.
On MSNBC Tuesday, reporter Brandy Zadronzny warned that the threat from the far-right “boogaloo” movement is only getting worse.
“What do you see as the sort of situation now in terms of particularly Facebook and others in hosting activity for thee kinds of groups?” asked host Chris Hayes.
“I talked to someone on the Homeland Security Advisory Council in March, and he said to me, you know, when we have groups of heavily-armed people loudly talking about their plans for insurrection and to kill law enforcement officials, we should probably listen to them,” said Zadrozny. “It seems that we haven’t. And Facebook right now continues to host boogaloo groups who are getting around just the basic level of content moderation they’re doing for these groups and, you know, right now they’re existing on Reddit and they’re even siphoning off to smaller, more private forums that we’re seeing like Discord. I mean, the long and short of it is these groups continue to exist even after all this violence. So in terms of what the platform, their role in it, their responsibility, it seems they’re taking very, very little.”
And it appears they’ve been secretly embedding themselves within the George Floyd protests.
Young, white men dressed in Hawaiian-style print shirts and body armor, and carrying high-powered rifles have been a notable feature at state capitols, lending an edgy and even sometimes insurrectionary tone to gatherings of conservatives angered by restrictions on businesses and church gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic.
Just as many states are reopening their economies — and taking the wind out of the conservative protests — the boogaloo movement found a new galvanizing cause: the protests in Minneapolis against the police killing of George Floyd.
A new iteration of the militia movement, boogaloo was born out of internet forums for gun enthusiasts that repurposed the 1984 movie Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo as a code for a second civil war, and then modified it into phrases like “big luau” to create an insular community for those in on the joke, with Hawaiian-style shirts functioning as an in-real-life identifier. Boogaloo gained currency as an internet meme over the summer of 2019, when it was adopted by white supremacists in the accelerationist tendency. In January, the movement made the leap from the internet to the streets when a group boogaloo-ers showed up at the Second Amendment rally in Richmond, Va.
It’s not just the jittery aesthetics and pop-culture irony that sets boogaloo apart from an older generation of militia activists, but also its unbridled hostility towards law enforcement. In late 2019, the movement spread beyond private Discord servers to multiple Facebook groups with names like Thicc Boog Line, Boojahideen of Occupied Appalachistan and, in North Carolina, Blue Igloo. Some of the memes generated and shared on the Facebook pages contain overt signals towards white nationalists, including images of the German Wehrmacht during World War II and references to the failed war to preserve white rule in Rhodesia during the 1970s. But others signal an interest in building bridges with the political left by lifting up the names of black victims of police violence like Oscar Grant, Eric Garner and Breonna Taylor, alongside right-wing martyrs like LaVoy Finicum, Sammy Weaver and Duncan Lemp, the latter a boogaloo-er who was killed by police in March during a no-knock raid at his home in Maryland.
When protests against the police killing of George Floyd escalated into clashes between police and protesters on Tuesday night, a significant segment of the boogaloo movement was electrified.
After the various BLM protests around the nation they have been engaging in acts of vandalism, arson, looting, terrorism and murder while pretending to be doing so in support of Black Lives, when in fact they are out to discredit and shame the movement.
Three white men are facing
terrorism-related charges in Nevada after allegedly planning to incite violence at protests over the death of George Floyd.
Federal prosecutors describe the men as being connected to the "boogaloo" movement, which is associated with far-right extremists who support an uprising against the government.
This is just one example of how extremist groups are using recent protests — both those over police brutality and coronavirus lockdowns — as an opportunity to incite violence, according to a new report by the Network Contagion Research Institute.
The report found that these extremist groups have been responsible for shooting at Black Lives Matter protesters, damaging police vehicles and committing arson on court buildings during demonstrations across the country.
“We've seen enthusiasts from the boogaloo movement in particular, who've been donning Hawaiian shirts at over 40 protests in the past week, and they've even adopted George Floyd as a symbolic martyr,” says Alex Goldenberg, who co-authored the report.
Extremist groups such as the boogaloo movement, Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters have coalesced on social media to spread “malicious fear,” he says. According to the Tech Transparency Project, there are about 125 Facebook groups connected to the boogaloo movement, many with tens of thousands of followers.
They’ve also apparently infiltrated the US military.
The Boogaloo movement, the civilian-run militia, has now infiltrated the U.S. military, VICE News reported Wednesday. Members of the military take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” but the Boogaloo movement wants to overthrow the American government and start a second “Civil War.”
The word “Boogaloo” is used as a code for “civil war,” which is gaining steam at anti-mask and anti-lockdown protests.
The discovery was made when Facebook groups and online networks used by anti-government militia members started to grow with active-duty military members of all branches and a variety of positions.
“Some of the most active online boogaloo communities are on Discord, a platform popular among gamers,” wrote Vice. “There, members have been discussing ways to co-opt protests against racism and police brutality to advance their own agenda. And current or former military have chimed in with their expertise, from the best gas masks to military-grade firearms,” screen captures show.
“I was not particularly surprised to see current and former military members involved in boogaloo groups online,” said Professor Megan Squire, an Elon University expert who tracks extremist groups online. “The question for me right now is whether military men are attracted into online groups or whether they are forming groups themselves. Which direction is the influence going?”
It appears that alleged double murderer Kyle Rittenhouse was not a member of the Boog movement, but on the day that he killed two BLM protesters he had spent all his time hanging with 32 Boog boys who were there in Kenosha.
An adherent to the far-right boogaloo movement — whose most extreme followers are reportedly looking to spark a civil war — was with Kyle Rittenhouse last week in Kenosha, Wisconsin, before the Antioch teenager allegedly opened fire on protesters, killing two and wounding another.
Ryan Balch, an Army veteran from West Bend, Wisconsin, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he met Rittenhouse in the lead up to last Tuesday’s shootings and spent much of the day with him. While Balch said Rittenhouse “had no connection” to the loosely organized group, he noted that as many as 32 boogaloo adherents were in Kenosha that day.
Balch, who has used social media to post Nazi propaganda and white nationalist messaging, described himself in a series of Facebook messages to the Sun-Times as a “Boog Boi.” According to the Anti-Defamation League, white supremacists, militia members and other extremists use the phrase boogaloo as “shorthand for a future civil war.”
“Whereas the militia movement [and] radical gun rights activists typically promote the boogaloo as a war against the government or liberals, white supremacists conceive of the boogaloo as a race war or a white revolution,” the Anti-Defamation League said.
Trump has habit of being on the wrong side of tracks on race and violence.
Trump’s response to the Rittenhouse shooting has been, of course, to defend it and call it “self defense.”
Asked during a press briefing whether he would condemn the actions of Kyle Rittenhouse—who has been enthusiastically embraced by the right-wing media—after criticizing Democratic nominee Joe Biden for offering a purportedly insufficient denunciation of violence, Trump said “that was an interesting situation” and proceeded to suggest Rittenhouse’s shooting of three people was justified on self-defense grounds.
“He was trying to get away from them, I guess; it looks like,” the president said. “And he fell, and then they very violently attacked him. And it was something that we’re looking at right now and it’s under investigation. But I guess he was in very big trouble. He would have been… he probably would have been killed.”
Rittenhouse shot a guy who had his hands up in surrender. That’s not self-defense, that’s murder.
Trump’s response is not surprising, he always defends those who support him. He defends Qanon, and he defended the Alt-Right protesters in Charlottesvile not only claiming there were “good people on both sides” he also went on the attack against the “alt-Left” which he claimed “came charging at the alt-Right.”
But none of that actually happened.
Instead members of Antifa actually defended and protected members of the clergy who had been trapped by the White Supremacist protest, including Professor Cornel West.
CORNEL WEST: But what happened was, they held us hostage in the church. We could not leave after the service, because the torch march threatening the people who were there. And so, in that sense, I said, “Hmmm, boy, these neofascists, they’re out of control. Where are the police?”
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CORNEL WEST: Absolutely. You had a number of the courageous students, of all colors, at the University of Virginia who were protesting against the neofascists themselves. The neofascists had their own ammunition. And this is very important to keep in mind, because the police, for the most part, pulled back. The next day, for example, those 20 of us who were standing, many of them clergy, we would have been crushed like cockroaches if it were not for the anarchists and the anti-fascists who approached, over 300, 350 anti-fascists. We just had 20. And we’re singing “This Little light of Mine,” you know what I mean? So that the—
AMY GOODMAN: “Antifa” meaning anti-fascist.
CORNEL WEST: The anti-fascists, and then, crucial, the anarchists, because they saved our lives, actually. We would have been completely crushed, and I’ll never forget that. Meaning what? Meaning that you had the police holding back, on the one hand, so we couldn’t even get arrested. We were there to get arrested. We couldn’t get arrested, because the police had pulled back, and just allowing fellow citizens to go at each other, you see, and with all of the consequences that would follow therefrom.
Antifa saved them from the alt-Right.
But to hear Trump and Bill Barr talk of “Antifa” you would think they were a domestic terrorist group. In fact, Barr and DHS has decided to go after Antifa and BLM leadership using RICO statutes.
Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf stated that the Justice Department is looking into arresting leaders of Black Lives Matter (BLM) amid protests over the shooting of Jacob Blake by police officer Rusten Sheskey.
“Do you think the Department of Homeland Security is getting the help it needs from the Justice Department?” Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked. “Why haven’t we seen the leaders of antifa and BLM arrested and charged for conspiracy under, say, [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Law], like the heads of the mafia families were?”
“This is something I talked to the AG personally about and I know that they are working on it,” Wolf replied, referring to Attorney General Bill Barr.
The DHS chief also stated that the Justice Department is “targeting and investigating the head of these organizations, the individuals that are paying for these individuals to move across the country.”
Bill Barr is going after both antifa and BLM as if they were organized crime, criminal gangsters. He essentially admitted as much during his interview with Wolf Blitzer this week. He also stated they he completely disagrees with the entire foundation of the BLM movement, that law enforcement is systemically biased.
“I don’t think there are two justice systems,” Barr told CNN in an interview where he largely defended President Donald Trump’s law and order campaign message and gushing praise of law enforcement who have employed aggressive tactics to quell social unrest in the aftermath of recent police killings of Black people. “I think the narrative that the police are in some epidemic of shooting unarmed black men is simply a false narrative and also the narrative that’s based on race.”
He then argued that there isn’t “systemic bias” in law enforcement, but then he admitted that black people are often mistreated due to “stereotypes” — then he says “that’s not racism” and misquotes Jesse Jackson from 1993 saying he felt relieved when he sees white people walking behind him. Then he claimed that unarmed black people being killed by police is “very rare. There were only 7 or 8 cases last year.”
If black people are being “stereotyped” and treated as if they are violent criminals, even when they aren’t. That’s systemic bias. It’s the very definition of systemic racism.
The WaPo records that police shot 1022 people in 2019, black people are more than twice as likely to be the victims of these killings. Young black men are killed at a rate that is nine times greater than their white peers. The Guardian reported in 2016 that 42 unarmed black men were killed by police out of 1093 cases. 79 unarmed black men were killed out of 1146 cases in 2015. The Bureau of Justice Statistics said in 2015 that there’s almost 90% more cases than that which go unreported including people who are killed in our jails. 64% of Arrest Related Deaths were homicides, 18% were suicides. 10% were accidents.
None of his happens without systemic bias.
Barr believes all of this is a “false narrative”, which means he feels that the entire underlining rationale for Black Lives Matters is essentially based on a “lie.” You don't have to go far from there to conflate peaceful protests by BLM with the rioting, looting and murder being committed — under a false flag — by Boogaloo Bois who are essentially pretending to be Antifa.
Once you’ve pegged Antifa and BLM as “terrorists” you can justify going after them as organized crime. You can use federal law enforcement to surveil them, track them as they travel on their special blacked-out “antifa plane." You can continue to gin up a narrative of them as the evil enemy, and you can continue to ignore, rationalize and justify people like Kyle Rittenhouse and the Boog Bois.
California Republican candidate, who lost in the recent primary, DeAnna Lorraine took to Twitter to celebrate charged murderer Kyle Rittenhouse after he allegedly shot and killed two protesters in Wisconsin last week.
According to Lorraine, “We need more young people like Kyle Rittenhouse and less like Greta Thunberg,” comparing the shooter to a climate change activist urging the world to save the Earth.
The lines in the sand have been drawn. The battle is engaged. That battle has raged for a long time.
After the original Civil War Colonel Nathan Bedford East took former Confederate soldiers and formed the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan who implemented insurgent terrorism on the south for the next century. During their time they murdered and lynched between 4000 and 6,500 people.
As the nation celebrates the upcoming Juneteenth holiday which recognizes the emancipation of enslaved Black Americans on June 19, 1865, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) released a new report today (June 16) showing that during the Reconstruction era, from 1865 to 1876, nearly 6,500 documented lynchings took place, 2,000 more than previously thought. And EJI researchers believe there are thousands more unknown and undiscovered deaths of Black people who were killed by White mob lynchings.
And all of that is in addition to the massacre of Black Wall Street in Tulsa Oklahoma a century ago.
The true “Second Civil War” has already taken place. It happened on the Edmon Pettis Bridge in Selma. It happened in the streets of Watts during the 1968 riots. Bill Barr says that the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act and Housing Acts that were spawned during that era are an “infrastructure” of justice. But his Civil Rights Division of the DOJ has yet to file a single case since Trump entered the White House.
How can we have an “infrastructure of racial justice” when the levers or power can be so easily disabled?
After the Civil Rights era we still had incidents of police violence, including Rodney King which also led to riots. We’ve had Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, now there’s George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Jacob Blake. The violence and murder has to stop. The bias has to stop.
We have to come to the realization that this nation was built on racial terrorism. The slave trade was terrorism. Reconstruction was disrupted by terrorism. Terrorism was used to fight against Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in Selma, in Chicago, against Medger Evers and in the Birmingham Church bombing. Terrorism, under the color of authority, is what is going on now in our cities, in our streets. It’s ever been thus. Particularly since our police systems are partially built and designed to be modern Slave Patrols.
Policing in Colonial America had been very informal, based on a for-profit, privately funded system that employed people part-time. Towns also commonly relied on a “night watch” in which volunteers signed up for a certain day and time, mostly to look out for fellow colonists engaging in prostitution or gambling. (Boston started one in 1636, New York followed in 1658 and Philadelphia created one in 1700.) But that system wasn’t very efficient because the watchmen often slept and drank while on duty, and there were people who were put on watch duty as a form of punishment.
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As the nation grew, however, different regions made use of different policing systems.
In cities, increasing urbanization rendered the night-watch system completely useless as communities got too big. The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places, says Potter. These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.”
In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts, Potter says; the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704. During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves.
In general, throughout the 19th century and beyond, the definition of public order — that which the police officer was charged with maintaining — depended whom was asked.
The public order. Maintaining the peace. Preventing an uprising. Controlling the minorities and the poor. All of these are synonymous.
Until we recognize how we got to this position, until we admit what this nation has done to African-American people, and to Native Indigenous people — we will not solve this problem. Riots will repeat. Confederates like the Boogaloos will respond and rage. The fight will go on.
Until we make a change.
Here are the remaining events for this week.
August 30th—
August 31st —
- Biden also blasts Trump for having “forfeited any moral leadership” in a blistering speech about crime, violent, protests and justice.
- Full appeals court rejects Flynn’s dismissal and hands the case back to Judge Sullivan.
- WH rips Biden for not visiting Kenosha: “Trump shows up.” [Although the Mayor and Governor have told Trump not to come.]
- WH Covid advisor Scott Atlas claims that we should pursue a “herd immunity” strategy. [This would kill about 2 million Americans.]
- Herman Cain’s twitter claims Covid isn't as deadly as the media claims. [Uh, what?]
- Trump and supporters twist a CDC stat that 9% of Covid victims had died without any other complicating factors, to minimize the death count claiming only 9% had died of Covid. [We have 200,000 more people dying this year, did theyjust die of respiratory failure, hyper-tension and obesity all of a sudden?] He also claims that he talked to the “family pastor” of the Blake family, but they don't have one. [It was his mother’s pastor.] He refuses to speak to the family on the phone because they had their attorney Ben Crump on the line. [Crump had been on the line when Obama called the Martin Family, when he called the Brown family and when VP Biden and Sen. Harris had called the Blakes.] He criticizes Biden’s speech saying that he didn’t mention “antifa”: “If you can’t say the name of the problem, you can’t fix the problem.” [Antifa fights Nazis and Fascists, they have no real reason to fight with cops, to riot or to loot. They likely have nothing to do with any this, but the GOPers keep chasing that Dragon.]
- House oversight committee will subpoena the Postmaster General for docs on the mail slowdown that he hasn’t supplied Congress.
- Appeals court continues to stymie the House’s subpoena of Don McGhan claiming there is no law that supports congressional subpoenas, but they could make one. [Are these the same two wingnut DC appeals judges who agreed with Flynn’s dismissal?]
- Feds cite ‘voluminous” info seized in their fraud case against Steve Bannon.
- Melania’s former friend Stephanie Winston Wolcoff is working with 3 prosecutors who are investigating funky spending on Trump’s inauguration.
September 1st —
- Trump claims that police who murder or attempt to murder citizens have simply “choked” just like a golfer missing a 3-foot putt. [Then they would have missed with their shots, wouldn’t they?] He defends alleged double murderer Kyle Rittenhouse claiming he was acting in self-defense. [Rittenhouse shot a guy who had his hands up!] He claims that his supporters firing paintballs at BLM protesters were “non violent.” [Yeah, that’s just felony assault dude.] He recycles a vague Franklin Graham claim about black shirted [antifa?] guys being packed into a plane and flown somewhere, maybe out of DC, maybe to the RNC. He visits a law enforcement forum in Kenosha but not the Blake family because they “don’t want a photo-op.” While there he displays that he doesn’t know whether police should wear body cams, and he again denies that there is systemic racism in the legal system, only a few “bad apples.” [But somehow all he “good apples” never seem to arrest their ass!] He doesn’t even say the name “Jacob Blake”. [If you can’t name the problem, you can’t fight the problem.] Then not stroke victim Trump, rails against stroke claims and demands that CNN fire Joe Lockhart for repeating the claim. Also, reportedly, Trump told (married) Sarah Huckabee-Sanders to “take one for the team” after Kim Jung-un winked at her.
- Matt Drudge revives the “dragging leg” claims after Trump denies he had “mini-strokes.”
- Jacob Blake’s family host a block party and voter registration drive in response to Trump’s visit.
- Acting DHS Sec Wolf tells Tucker Carlson that he and AG Bill Barr have been pursuing RICO charges against Antifa and BLM leadership who have been “paying for flying protesters around the country.” [Uh, what? Really? These guys probably can’t even FIND Antifa and BLM leadership.]
- Pence was placed on “standby” to receive Presidential power while Trump was hospitalized at Walter Reid.
- Fox Host Pete Hegeseth criticizes Biden for “not having anyone around” during his speech. [He’s abiding by Covid protocols.]
- Some right-wingers are claiming that the Second American Civil War has already begun.
- Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance hints that his probe into Trump goes far beyond the hush money payments.
- Milwaukee Bucks dunk on Jared Kushner for his ignorant comments about the NBA boycott.
- Trump and the House’s lawyers wrangle over the subpoena for his financial records.
- Dr. Fauci squashes Trump’s distortion of CDC Covid death statistics.
- Judge Sullivan revives his analysis of Flynn’s dismissal and sentencing.
- Second Circuit Appeals court delays the criminal subpoena for Trump’s financial records from NY DA Cyrus Vance. Oral arguments are scheduled for Sept. 25th.
- Doctor insists that Trump never suffered any “mini-strokes” after Trump himself brings it up.
- Bogus Russia News story shows how election disinformation can “hack your mind.”
- PA Supreme Court will be ruling on ballot drop-boxes and other vote-by-mail disputes.
- Federal prosecutors are close to filling charges against GOP fundraiser Elliot Broidy for his involvement in a foreign influence campaign to extradite a Chinese Billionaire to Malaysia.
- America doesn’t have a national strategy for asymptomatic Covid testing, it needs one.
- USPS review finds delays in on-time delivery since 2018.
- Mnuchin touts “strongly recovering” economy and offers no concessions on the stalled Covid relief bill.
- Pence claims Trump has “remarkable” health amid mini-stroke claims.
- Former DHS Official Elizabeth Nuemann says that Trump is “ideologically aligned” with many of the biggest threats to America.
September 2nd —
- Ed Markey defeats Joe Kennedy in his primary bid.
- Kenosha store owner was replaced during Trump's damage tour because he didn’t want to be featured in a photo op. They used the former owner of the store, who also owns the building.
- Trump gives a conflicting excuse for his mysterious unexplained visit to Walter Reed Hospital as he continues to rail over mini-stroke claims. Then he slams Nancy Pelosi for visiting a hair salon in San Francisco where she was told she was within Covid rules, but she wasn't. He has a meltdown over a Lincoln Project ad that mocks the RNC ratings. “We had more people” [No, you didn’t — the DNC had 2 million more viewers.] Trump directs Federal agencies to “defund” cities that have had major police protests. [Whose “defunding” the police now?] He suggests that people send in an absentee ballot then go to the polls and try to vote again, which is a felony and won’t work.
- CNN fact checker Daniel Dale calls “BS” on Trump’s later complaints about mail-in voting.
- Melania’s former friend Stephanie Winston Wolcott claims FLOTUS has several private email servers. She also has secret recordings of the Trump family.
- Jim Sciutto corners Hogan Gidley about spreading Trump’s conspiracy theories.
- Biden makes a statement about how to handle the Covid crisis, and takes questions from reporters from Wilmington Delaware.
- Iowa Senator Joni Ernst pushes a Qanon conspiracy theory about there being only about “10,000 Covid deaths”.
- New Engineering reports states that Steve Bannon's privately built border wall will fail.
- Trump supporter hit with $250,000 lawsuit for firing paintballs at BLM protesters.
- DHS reportedly kept a Russian plot to smear Biden’s mental health under wraps.
- Biden plans to visit Kenosha tomorrow for a community meeting. He also has the best month in history for Presidential fundraising.
- Whistle-blower report says there are “serious errors” in the rushed Census for 2020.
- Trump camp refuses to condemn Rittenhouse saying “People have to defend themselves some way.” [Double Murder, that’s now he did it.]
- CNN’s Brianna Kieler brutally fact checks former WH Doctor Ronny Jackson on his claim that Trump’s Walter Reed visit was “no big deal.”
- Trump’s IRS commissioner Charles Rettig earns over $100,000 per year from renting out Trump properties in Hawaii.
- Postmaster General Louis Dejoy is “surprised and confused” after House Oversight subpoenas him for ignoring deadlines. Also court documents indicate that he stole his brother's portion of their family company.
- Current and former Trump supporters clash on CNN: “Voting for him helped kill over 100,000 Americans.”
- Experts are afraid as CDC tells them to be ready to receive a vaccine by November 1st.
- BIll Barr gives a stunningly partisan and arrogant interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN.
- He criticizes Biden and Harris for calling for Jacob Blake’s shooter to be prosecuted, then he claims that Jacob Blake “committed a felony” and was armed during his arrest. [He wasn’t. There was knife in his SUV, but he was never holding it.]
- He gets very angry about mail-in voting “People are playing with Fire” saying it undermines confidence in the election, then says that he’s only known of a “few” cases of voter fraud but can’t provide a specific number, and cites a mail-in voter harvesting case that involved “1,700” ballots in Texas. [Predictably, that’s bullshit.]
- He argues that there isn’t “systemic bias” in law enforcement, but then he admits that black people are often mistreated due to “stereotypes” — then he says “that’s not racism” and misquotes Jesse Jackson from 1993 saying he felt relieved when he sees white people walking behind him. [Yes, treating people differently due to stereotypes is racism.]
- He claims “Epidemic of police shooting black men is a false narrative” and that unarmed African-Americans are only “rarely shot by a white cop. It’s only 7 or 8 cases last year” [The WaPo records that police shot 1022 people in 2019, black people are more than twice as likely to be the victims of these killings. Young black men are killed at a rate that is nine times greater than their white peers. The Guardian reported in 2016 that 42 unarmed black men were killed by police out of 1093 cases. 79 unarmed black men were killed out of 1146 cases in 2015. The Bureau of Justice Statistics said in 2015 that there’s almost 90% more cases than that which go unreported including people who are killed in our jails. 64% of Arrest Related Deaths were homicides, 18% were suicides. 10% were accidents.]
- He says that between Russia, China and Iran the country that is the most active and dangerous to our upcoming election is China. [Written Intel documents say it's Russia.]
- He claims that he doesn’t know which plane Trump is talking about with people wearing “black t-shirts” but the DOJ has tracked members of antifa traveling from state to state by plane several times. He also claims that members who self-identify as antifa have been arrested at protests, he doesn’t say how many, but he never mentions members of the white supremacist Boogaloo Bois who’ve also been arrested for murder, terrorism, starting fires, trashing buildings and looting at various protests.”
- He says that despite the fact that Trump accuses them of “Treason” for “spying on his campaign” Obama and Biden are not currently under criminal investigation.
- He says when asked whether he would make an announcement that could impact the election with 60 days, he says “that's not the guidance” [The Hell it’s not!] and that you can’t do something “for political reasons.” [Which means John Durham could announce a political prosecution within 60 days of the election if he had some other excuse for it.]
- Wisconsinites are angry because Trump’s Foxconn deal is merely a shadow of what he promised.
- USPS watchdog found 1 million mail-in primary ballots that arrived too late to be counted.
- Bill Barr is blasted for his “open white supremacy” and “exact definition of racism” in his remarks about police violence protests.
- Trump’s fantasyland hopes of receiving a polling bump from the RNC have been dashed.
- Fox News has to report that Trump is losing in the polls, so they do it as fast as possible.
- Propublica argues that there’s never been a case in Texas or anywhere where someone attempted to fraudulently submit “1,700” mail-in ballots as Bill Barr described.
- Stephanie Winston Wolcoff is interviewed by Chris Cuomo about her new book about Melania and she states that she is not secretly resistant to Trump's bigoted and cruel ideas, she is down with the program and just as much of a monster as he is.
- Rubio: Senate Intelligence committee is still receiving in-person briefings on election security despite DNI Ratcliff’s order.
- Jacob Blake’s uncle does a take down of Bill Barr mis-stating of the facts of the case.
September 3rd —
September 4th—
- Trump scrambles to deny that he trashed John McCain and fallen soldiers. [Yeah, but we all heard him say McCain “wasn’t a hero”, was a "loser” and we saw he didn’t lower flags to half-mast for days after McCain’s death.] He doubles down on call for his supporters to vote twice. Then he inflicts a new wound on the military by ordering magazine Star and Stripes to be shuttered in 4 weeks. Trump bad mouths and blames John Kelly for the troops leak.
- Federal task force kills suspect from the “Patriot Prayer” shooting from last week while attempting arrest in Lacey Washington. The shooter had been interviewed and claimed he was acting in self-defense and the defense of others during the original Portland shooting.
- Unemployment falls to 8.4% with 1.4 million jobs added last month.
- DOJ admits that Bill Barr’s example of mail-in voter fraud with “1,700” ballots was bogus. [Told you it was bullshit.]
- Dr. Fauci tries to calm vaccine fears: “The FDA is very committed to science over politics.”
- Two heavily armed Trump supporters were arrested when authorities were tipped they wanted to “pick people off” the Feds in Kenosha.
- A former admin official says Trump believes troops who go missing in action aren’t worth finding.
- Ret. Gen. Mark Hertling tells Jim Sciutto that many service members hate Donald Trump; “Vile and disgusting.”
- Morning Joe says that Trump is shaken that his smears of the military are coming back to bite him.
- Veterans groups condemn Trump as a “national disgrace" for his comments about fallen soldiers.
- Trump’s EPA gives power plants a pass on deadly coal ash.
- A visibly angry Biden calls Trump’s comments on veterans “deplorable, damnable, disgusting. a disgrace” He takes it personally since his son Beau served in Iraq and Kosovo. He says Trump “doesn't care” about Americans hardships during the Covid crisis. He also slams Trump’s weird obsession with conspiracy theories.
- Jerry Falwell Jr. threatens reporter over Liberty U investigation into his finances.
- AR-15 toting Qanon candidate Marjorie Taylor Green threatens “offense” against the Squad.
- Medal of Honor recipient Col. Jack Jacobs tells MSNBC host Chris Jansing that he’s heard confirmation of how Trump speaks about our troops: “I’ve spoken to a lot of people who work directly for the president who reiterate exactly what Jeffrey Goldberg said in that article, who said the president has no respect for people in uniform, no respect for people who have served and, most significantly, does not understand the notion of being part of something that’s larger than yourself.”
- Over 175 law enforcement officials endorse Biden over Trump.
- Florida bars officials from releasing Covid infection rates in schools.
- Trade deficit soars to a 12-year high despite Trump’s promises to wipe it out.
- Illegal DHS officer Ken Cucciinelli struggles to defend Trump’s “antifa plane” claims.
- Fox News confirms reports that Trump denigrated the troops. He said about Vietnam “It was a stupid war, anyone who went was a sucker.” And he also had a standoff with WH staff over lowering flags to half-mast over John McCain, he didn’t like it.
- Miles Taylor confirms on CNN that he was there when Trump asked for the flags that were lowered for John McCain to be pulled back up, and they refused to do it unless he made it an “order.”
- In his first Interview since being fired by the FBI Peter Strzok frets about Trump-Russia unknowns.
August 5th —