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Posts tagged ‘GEORGE FLOYD’

Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

Branco Cartoon – The Falling Star

A.F. Branco | on May 25, 2025 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/branco-cartoon-the-falling-star/

Star Tribune Worships George Floyd — A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2025

A.F. Branco Cartoon – 5 years later, after the death of (Criminal) George Floyd, The Star Tribune continues to show bias, painting a picture far from the real truth, almost in a worshiping of Saint Floyd fashion as some hero.

BRANCO TOON STORE

EXCLUSIVE: 5 years later: Justice after George Floyd? The dismissed lawsuit revealing the truth—and Derek Chauvin’s response

By Dr. JC Chaix – AlphaNew.org – May 20, 2025

In an exclusive phone call from prison, Chauvin himself said then-Inspector Katie Blackwell’s testimony was “outright perjury.”
When a police chief doesn’t want you to look at police body camera videos, then you know you need to look beyond the lies and see the facts for yourself. From the very beginning, many of our so-called leaders misspoke and misjudged what was necessary to keep the peace and let justice truly prevail in Minneapolis.
Following the arrest and heart attack of George Floyd, police bodycam videos were withheld. Lawyers engaged in lawfare, and riots, protests and politics made any hope of a fair and impartial trial for the four accused officers nothing more than an impossibility… READ MORE

DONATE to A.F. Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, Elon Musk, and President Trump.

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Media, Political, political violence

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Covid Taught Americans to Stop Trusting a Government That Puts Them Last

By: Elle Purnell | March 12, 2025

grayscale photo of people walking street in masks — The reaction to Covid showed Americans the system wasn’t going to save them. They were going to have to do it themselves.

Author Elle Purnell profile

Elle Purnell

Visit on Twitter@_ellepurnell

When Donald Trump first sailed into the Oval Office, his detractors shrieked that his blunt rhetoric was dividing the country. His supporters pointed out that Trump wasn’t so much creating division as he was revealing divisions that had been growing in America for a long time.

The reaction to the novel Wuhan coronavirus did the country a similar service, by revealing a new fault line: two sets of rules, which were applied differently to Americans depending on their membership in certain political cliques. For the average American who assumed his political leaders still shared the belief that all men are created equal, it was a cruel betrayal.

Coronavirus lockdowns alerted Americans to an uncomfortable reality: the institutions to which they’d entrusted their liberties were no longer trustworthy. If the 2024 election is any indication, they got the message.

In the Covid times, hardworking people were deemed “nonessential” and lost their jobs while watching Tony Fauci’s net worth climb. They were banished from church while thousands gathered in the street to worship George Floyd. They watched their kids fall behind in school while Nancy Pelosi and Lori Lightfoot broke the rules to get their split ends trimmed. Their dying loved ones left this world alone, while Obama danced with Hollywood stars at his 60th birthday bash. To add further insult, those loved ones were denied proper funerals, while 10,000 people gathered to eulogize a drug-addicted criminal in a gold casket on television. Only some Americans were authorized to print their opinions online, while others were punished and censored.

The delusion that we were “all in this together” didn’t survive for long. A certain set of rules applied to the BLM protesters, the Democrat politicians, and the Hollywood elites, and another set of rules applied to everyone else. Americans started to realize they were being had.

When Covid vaccine mandates rolled out, the dichotomy was even clearer. For the vaccinated class, there were jobs, service academy appointments, college acceptances, and social acceptance. For the unvaccinated, there was talk of denying them entry to airplanes, restaurants, and stores, or even putting them into camps.

Once the double standard was exposed, it became visible everywhere. The Bidens got away with selling White House access because of their last name, while Trump was relentlessly prosecuted for made-up crimes because of his. Peaceful pro-life protesters were dragged to prison while abortion supporters got away with firebombing pregnancy clinics. Ukrainian oligarchs got billions while we watched the buying power of each paycheck shrink. Our government seemed more interested in caring for citizens of other countries who broke our laws than in looking after its own. Our president was more interested in apologizing for using the term “illegal” to describe Laken Riley’s murderer than he was in apologizing to Riley’s family for inviting her killer across the border. Our speech was muzzled as a “threat to democracy” while partisans gleefully dismantled our republic.

Nearly 8 in 10 Americans told Trafalgar Group pollsters in 2022 that they felt they were living under a two-tiered justice system.

If Covid brought the double standard into focus, the racial turmoil of 2020 confirmed leftists’ belief that it was a good thing. Americans were given different rules to live by, depending on the color of their skin. White Americans were expected to engage in public spectacles of guilt and self-hatred for their own inherent racism, examine their white fragility, pay “reparations” to their black friends, and accept fault for all of society’s ills. Black Americans were encouraged to celebrate their “black pride” and demand preferential treatment. The Smithsonian released an infographic saying traits like being “polite” or on time were hallmarks of “whiteness,” with the overly racist implication that black Americans should not be expected to do either. Hiring quotas were installed to reflect the principle that black and white people should be treated differently.

The ideology represented by the shorthand “DEI” turned this discrimination into a $9 billion industry. DEI didn’t just institutionalize racial discrimination, it also implemented discrimination based on sexual preferences. While white guys got blamed for society’s faults, white guys who dressed up as women got special victim status and Bud Light brand deals!

Americans who still believed God created each man and woman with equally valuable souls were offended at the creation of artificial hierarchies that turned true equality on its head, doling out special privileges based on a person’s race, politics, or sexuality. As institutions — from media to academia to government — led the way in imposing those hierarchies, Americans stopped trusting them.

Like Trump’s uncovering of deep-rooted political divisions in 2016, that loss of trust was as necessary as it was uncomfortable. It almost certainly played a role in Gen Z’s rightward swing. It was a huge step in shrinking the power of the leftist-dominated corporate press, which beclowned itself by uncritically repeating the government’s talking points about masks, vaccines, lockdowns, and Covid’s origins. And it laid the foundations for Americans, after four years of the Biden regime, to embrace Trump’s swamp-draining attitude more enthusiastically than ever.

The years of Covid paranoia and power-grabbing were an experiment in trusting The System, and whether Americans accepted or rejected it revealed as much about them as the 2016 election did. But it also revealed a lot about The System — and all the institutions of power that comprise it — to Americans.

They realized the system wasn’t going to save them. They were going to have to do it themselves.

Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.

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Health, Political

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Communist Defectors Warn About Four Stages of Subversion — And America Is on the Last One

BY: SCOTT S. POWELL | APRIL 29, 2024

Hammer and Sickle from Museum of Communism in Prague.

SCOTT S. POWELL

Forty years ago, a KGB defector, Yuri Bezmenov, revealed the systematic plan Soviet communists used to take down countries and establish a communist-type society and regime. More recently, a Chinese defector immigrant, Xi Van Fleet, has been on a crusade to warn Americans about the parallels between what is happening in America today and what Mao did in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

The systematic plan Bezmenov revealed involves four fluid stages of communist subversion: 1) demoralization, 2) disorientation, 3) crisis, and 4) normalization. In Mao’s America, Xi Van Fleet explains how Mao’s destruction of the “Four Olds” (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits) is being replicated by today’s leftist cancel culture, which will end what is left of freedom in America if not stopped.

Demoralization

The first stage in the Bezmenov analysis, demoralization, lasts a generation or more. One of its main thrusts is to undermine the Judeo-Christian beliefs, customs, habits, and traditions that have been foundational to America — these parallel the Four Olds that Mao destroyed in China.

Another target for demoralization is the family, which communists want to replace with the state. Xi Van Fleet points out that just as the Chinese Cultural Revolution turned children against their parents, American families are under increasing attack. Government schools, the medical establishment, and popular culture — which now support the transgender movement — are increasingly turning children against their parents.

A third demoralization strategy is breaking the people’s loyalty and love for their country by rewriting history, denigrating the founders and national heroes, and destroying historic monuments — again, the Four Olds. In summary, the goal of demoralization is to disconnect people from the virtue of the past and render them unable to assess what is true.

Disorientation

The second stage of the communist strategy, according to Bezmenov, builds on demoralization to advance society’s disorientation, a condition wherein the masses feel bewildered and helpless. While it’s impossible to prove intentionality at this time, the China-originated Covid-19 pandemic caused massive disorientation in the U.S. when the government mandated masks, social distancing, quarantines, lockdowns, and the abandonment of tried-and-true medical practices of preventive and therapeutic treatments.

Another important part of disorientation happened early in the Covid crisis after the death of George Floyd. Assertions of systemic racism in law enforcement triggered rioting, looting, and the destruction of several billion dollars’ worth of property, along with the tearing down of historic statues and memorials in many cities across the United States.

Americans became further disoriented when they realized government authorities were unable or unwilling to do anything about the destruction in big cities across America. There were few arrests while more than 2,000 police officers were injured. Disorientation may have reached its peak when cities with the most lawlessness, such as Minneapolis, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, initiated efforts to defund local law enforcement.

Crisis

Following disorientation is the crisis stage. An unprecedented crisis stage for America came in November 2020 with election rigging. Democrat operatives exploited the fear factor of Covid-19 in the summer months of 2020. They visited almost every swing state to change voting rules to accommodate expanded mail-in ballots, drop boxes, and extended vote-tally deadlines — all of which facilitate vote fraud.

The crisis that ensued from election irregularity was deepened by the massive media and social media censorship and cancellation campaigns that began well before the Nov. 3, 2020, election. The Department of Homeland Security division called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, better known as CISA, collaborated with the Stanford University-based NGO Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to suppress information that would help Trump.

EIP launched a campaign to prevent the public from challenging the anticipated voting irregularities by getting agreements from all the social media companies — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and Pinterest — to modify their customer terms-of-service policies to incorporate language about “delegitimization.” Once that was accomplished, according to Mike Benz, a former U.S. State Department communications policymaker and an expert on propaganda, the door was opened to algorithmic mass censorship and cancellation.

EIP exerted pressure on all the social media companies to adhere to their customer service policies and censor, cancel, or deplatform any content that contained “delegitimized” narratives about new election protocols and “processes,” election “issues and outcomes,” “mail-in ballots,” “early voting,” “drop boxes,” “Dominion Voting Systems,” and “Antifa.”

The media treatment of the Hunter Biden laptop story that broke in mid-October 2020 in the New York Post illustrates just how quickly the channels of propaganda and media manipulation fall into place. The laptop story (which contained massive incriminating evidence revealing a compromised Joe Biden family), was immediately delegitimized and taken down from every social media site. At the same time, 51 former top intelligence officials signed a letter, published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, stating that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

After the 2020 election, social media effectively thwarted discussion about election fraud. Again EIP insisted that social media companies uphold the terms-of-service contracts that required censoring social media content containing newly delegitimized terms, such as “Stop the Steal,” “dead voter rolls,” “Sharpiegate,” “stolen election,” “ballot harvesting,” and “Postal Service,” to name a few. Additionally, people questioning the integrity of the 2020 election were marginalized by the media and discredited as “election deniers.”

Bemenov’s four stages are fluid, so demoralization and disorientation continue in the crisis stage. We see this with lawfare against Donald Trump, his aides, and some 1,200 Jan. 6 participants arrested by the FBI.

The target is not just Trump and his supporters, but the American people, who are now seeing that large parts of the justice system in America resemble that of a banana republic. With equal justice under the law and respect for the Constitution being mocked, the subliminal message is, “This is not the America you know; it’s a new world that you have entered, so get used to it.”

Normalization

While America is still in the crisis stage, some subversion experts argue that the lawfare, censorship, and cancellation regimes that now exist are really part of the last stage of communist takeover known as normalization — Bezmenov’s fourth and final stage. If America’s borders remain open and the American people are denied access to information, become accustomed to rigged elections, accept limitations on free speech, and acquiesce to the rewriting of history, the constitutional republic that was the United States will be gone, and the new world of communist global elite control will be normalized.

John Adams, the second president, unequivocally warned, “Liberty once lost is lost forever.” It is no longer enough just to man the ramparts. It’s time for the people to turn the tables on the elite destroyers of our constitutional republic.

Scott Powell is senior fellow at Discovery Institute and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. His recent book, “Rediscovering America,” was the No. 1 Amazon New Release in the history genre for eight weeks. Reach him at scottp@discovery.org.

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International Politics

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A Closer Look at Black Lives Matter’s ‘Bankruptcy’ Shows Radical Leftists Still Have Millions in Their Coffers

BY: JOHN COHEN | JUNE 22, 2023

crowd standing in front of giant Black Lives Matter banner

JOHN COHEN

A number of headlines have been making the rounds declaring that Black Lives Matter is going bankrupt. These are misleading, not only because they conflate the Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLM GN) and the BLM movement, but also because BLM GN is not, in fact, on the verge of bankruptcy. To a certain extent, the confusion is understandable. BLM GN is the most visible and well-known of the various BLM organizations, the one founded by movement figureheads Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal “Ayo” Tometi. When the general public hears “BLM,” this is who they think of. The BLM movement is not known for its transparency, and it’s easy to confuse its various members and their alphabet soup of acronyms.

While BLM GN fancies itself as the head of the BLM movement, the reality is that BLM is a many-headed hydra. BLM GN ostensibly was once the parent organization of a multitude of grassroots BLM chapters, but disputes over funding and priorities have led many of them to part ways with the organization, some becoming entirely independent entities and others banding together to form new collectives (for example, the “BLM 10+”). Most of the BLM movement’s heavy lifting is done by these grassroots chapters.

Then there is the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a shadowy collective of more than 150 activist organizations that is even more radical than BLM GN. M4BL provides funding and administrative support to its members and is currently a fiscally sponsored project of the Common Counsel Foundation (in 2020, it was fiscally sponsored by the Alliance for Global Justice [AfGJ], a Marxist revolutionary front with ties to the Sandinistas).

The group refuses to disclose the bulk of its members, but among those that it does disclose are Southerners on New Ground, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, UndocuBlack Network, Black Feminist Future, Organization for Black Struggle, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, BlackOUT Collective, Highlander Research and Education Center, and the Black Movement Law Project. It received more than $30 million in donations in 2020, and that figure doesn’t include contributions made directly to its members. Why the group hasn’t received more media attention is a mystery.

Lastly, there is the BLM movement’s vast NGO archipelago, a menagerie of subversive organizations working tirelessly to advance the movement’s revolutionary agenda. These organizations include BLM GN’s official partners such as the NAACP and wholly independent outfits such as BLM At School, which with the help of the National Education Association (NEA) reaches children in thousands of schools across the country.

Even if BLM GN were to go bankrupt, these other organizations — the heart of the BLM movement — would live on. But reports that BLM GN is insolvent or going bankrupt are false. A cursory examination of BLM GN’s Form 990s shows that in 2020-2021, it raked in nearly $80 million in grants and donations, but the following year, that number fell to just over $9 million. Meanwhile, the nonprofit spent a little over $17 million and saw its investments drop by nearly $1 million. This meant it ended the year $8.5 million in the red.

That is where many journalists stopped reading. But a closer look reveals that BLM GN retains more than $40 million in its coffers from its record 2020 haul. Because it is a grantmaking organization helmed by a skeleton crew, it can easily pare back its spending over the coming year to balance its books.

That’s not to say that BLM GN has acted in a fiscally responsible manner. Its penchant for luxury real estate is well known, as is its proclivity for self-dealing. The nonprofit spent $6 million on a sprawling mansion in Los Angeles and granted M4BJ, a subgroup of BLM Canada, $8 million which was subsequently spent on a 10,000-square-foot Toronto mansion formerly owned by the Canadian Communist Party. Patrisse Cullors and her spouse, BLM Canada and M4BJ co-founder Janaya Khan, have purchased at least four high-end houses for $3.2 million in the U.S. alone. Interestingly, BLM Canada is one of the few regional BLM chapters to have actually received funding from BLM GN.

Meanwhile, BLM GN continued to hire relatives of Cullors and its board members. According to the organization’s tax filings, Paul Cullors, the brother of Patrisse Cullors, founded two private security companies which were paid $1.6 million in 2022. He was also paid a $126,000 salary as “head of security” despite being a graffiti artist with no experience in security. The previous year, BLM GN paid $970,000 to a company owned by Damon Turner, the father of Cullors’ child.

That same year, Shalomyah Bowers, who replaced Patrisse Cullors at the helm of BLM GN after her resignation, paid his own consulting firm $1.7 million. And $1.1 million was paid to New Impact Partners, a firm owned by Danielle Edwards, the sister of former BLM GN board member Raymond Howard. BLM GN also agreed to pay $600,000 to an unidentified former board member’s consulting firm in connection with a “contract dispute.”

Given the amount of money remaining in BLM GN’s coffers, it’s likely that the nonprofit will continue to behave in accordance with its current modus operandi. But again, this reprehensible organization is just one member of the greater BLM movement, which features a host of more serious actors that don’t squander their resources. BLM’s opponents would be wise to remain vigilant and refrain from declaring victory prematurely.

John Cohen is an Investigative Fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. He holds a B.A. in Molecular Biology and Public Health from Hampshire College and a M.A in Security Studies from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service.

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Political

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Making Jordan Neely the New George Floyd Is the Next Step in the Left’s War on America

BY: JONATHAN S. TOBIN | MAY 08, 2023

New York subway — If the veteran who restrained the homeless man is prosecuted, it will establish a right to terrorize subway passengers and help revive the ‘anti-racist’ assault on justice.

Author Jonathan S. Tobin profile

JONATHAN S. TOBIN

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Daniel Penny is not going quietly to the slaughter. The 24-year-old Marine Corps veteran who took action when fellow subway passengers were being threatened by a maniacal homeless person has lawyered up and will need all the legal help he can get if he hopes to avoid spending decades in prison.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has assigned Joshua Steinglass, a veteran prosecutor who led the trial team in the case that prosecuted former President Donald Trump’s family business, to conduct the probe that will determine whether Penny will be put on trial for killing Jordan Neely. But the decision won’t be made in a vacuum. The liberal commentariat is already damning Penny as the civilian version of Derek Chauvin. Leftist politicians such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., are accusing him of having committed a “murder” and Democrat and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is saying Penny’s actions were unjustified and demanding that “justice” be given Neely’s family.

Neely, the 30-year-old homeless person who died during an incident on a New York City subway train on May 1, had a record of mental illness. He had been arrested 44 times for criminal conduct and had an outstanding warrant for felony assault. On an F train stopped at the Broadway-Lafayette Street subway station in Manhattan, he allegedly began acting in a threatening manner to other passengers. It was at that point that Penny restrained him and put him in what appears on a cell phone video of part of the incident to be a chokehold.

In doing so, it could well be argued that he prevented Neely from committing another crime against a fellow passenger. Video released Sunday also seems to show Penny put Neely in a recovery position after Neely was subdued and appeared to be OK.

But the reason this case is already a cause Celebre, leading to leftist demonstrations in the subways and an endless stream of articles in corporate media, is that Neely’s fate is blamed on the supposed indifference of the public to the lives of the homeless.

Broader Racial Ramifications

Penny’s fate will, as Peachy Keenan wrote in The Federalist, be a test of whether young American men should dare to act courageously when others are in peril. But there’s even more at stake in this case. With Neely being anointed as the new George Floyd, the questions of whether Penny was right to restrain Neely or if he used inappropriate force to do so are merely sidebars to a broader narrative about American racism.

Floyd’s death became a metaphor for a myth about systemic police racism. Floyd’s actions the night of his death, his criminal record, and the fact that his body was full of what might have been a lethal dose of fentanyl were dismissed as irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was that he was a black man and that the cop who had, in an act of undoubted callous brutality, snuffed out his life was white. In the name of a belief, however mistaken, that Floyd’s death was just one of countless incidents in which blacks were being slaughtered with impunity, millions took to the streets in “mostly peaceful” riots that shook the nation.

More than that, it set off a moral panic in virtually every sector of American life that elevated the woke catechism of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to a new secular religion — since accepted by the Biden administration as mandatory for every government agency and department — that treats color-blind policies and even the goal of equal opportunity as forms of racism that must be eradicated.

Parallels to 1984 Case

Penny’s actions might, for those with a long memory of controversial New York subway criminal controversies, have more in common with those of Bernhard Goetz than of Chauvin. In 1984, Goetz opened fire on four black teenagers he said were trying to mug him on a No. 2 train. In an era of rampant crime, Goetz was largely supported by public opinion and acquitted of attempted murder, though he was fined and sentenced to six months in prison for illegal weapons possession. One of the people he shot, who was paralyzed in the incident, later won a $43 million civil judgment against Goetz that, as late as 2017, still hadn’t been paid.

As racially charged as that incident was, nearly 40 years later, we are living in a very different post-Black Lives Matter world. Any New Yorker who rides the subways knows how dangerous they have been made by authorities’ willingness to tolerate the presence of threatening people. But someone who isn’t a “person of color” is always going to be assumed to be in the wrong in any violent confrontation today, when the claim that America is an irredeemably racist nation is treated as inarguable by the chattering classes.

The prosecutor in the Kyle Rittenhouse case told him that “everybody takes a beating sometimes” and that he had no right to defend himself against lethal threats from armed BLM rioters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Penny’s chances of winning a trial in a New York City courtroom in 2023 are immeasurably lower than were Goetz’s.

Leftist Campaign Against Justice

As such, and regardless of the facts of the case, the campaign against Penny must be viewed as merely the next stage in a long-running leftist campaign against the justice system in which pro-criminal prosecutors like Bragg, elected with the help of leftist billionaire George Soros, are in the forefront. The sympathy for Neely, which is framed as compassion for the homeless, is akin to the so-called decarceration movement that takes it as a given that too many nonwhite people are being jailed for crimes and calls to defund the police.

The prosecution of the ex-Marine will not just establish a precedent that there is a “right” of a deranged, drug-addicted person to terrorize others with impunity. It will also, like Floyd’s death or that of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, or a dozen other equally dubious cases, be routinely cited from now on as proof of American racism and a reason for doubling down on woke policies that will further divide and racialize the nation.

Talk about our indifference to the lives of the homeless is gaslighting, since it is the policies of the political left that have allowed such persons to camp out on streets or in subway cars rather than be taken by police to shelters and hospitals. The freedom for the homeless that has been established in New York — where the “broken windows” policing of the administrations of Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg has been abandoned — means the rights of other citizens to a livable city are abrogated. When people like Neely can harass people into buying their safety with donations in honor of performances like his Michael Jackson imitations or violent rants, then the rule of law is dead.

Leftists believe that, like Floyd, Neely died for our sins as a racist nation. That is why he is now being elevated to the status of secular saint regardless of or perhaps even because of his dysfunction and willingness to threaten others. The Floyd case led to de-policing throughout the country as cops, the only defense minority communities have against the black-on-black crime that afflicts their neighborhoods, have backed down in the face of prosecutions and demonization.

Penny’s prosecution will now pump new life into the BLM movement and ensure that public discourse about race and crime will continue to ignore the facts in favor of ideological myths that will send America’s cities into even greater squalor, violence, and racial conflict.

Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for Newsweek. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.

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Crime, Political

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As Seattle Settles Major Lawsuit, Media Still Insist George Floyd Riots Were ‘Mostly Peaceful’

BY: MARK HEMINGWAY | FEBRUARY 22, 2023

CNN "fiery but mostly peaceful" protest chyron as reporter talks in front of Kenosha's burning buildings

After the death of George Floyd, leaders in Democratic cities across the country, who were alternately scared and desperate to virtue signal, refused to take action while the ensuing riots and looting did billions of dollars in damage to city centers across the U.S. And amid many callous and inept responses to the crisis, Seattle is a leading contender for the locality that handled things the worst.

Today, the city agreed to settle a lawsuit in federal district court that alleged the city violated the civil rights of several business owners after it ordered police to withdraw from a section of its Capitol Hill neighborhood and let protesters set up their own lawless “autonomous zone.” The area became alternately known as either the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) or Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP). This left business owners in the areas completely abandoned as law and order broke down — without a police presence, there was rampant violence, drug markets, and literal armed warlords patrolling the streets.

The settlement comes after a federal judge levied major sanctions on the city for apparently deleting thousands of text messages involving, among others, the city’s former mayor and police chief relating to their handling of the autonomous zone. The notion that city officials had something to hide here is certainly at odds with the rhetoric during the month the city abandoned the business owners in the CHAZ.

Former Mayor Jenny Durkan went on CNN and said what was happening in the CHAZ was “a block party atmosphere.” “We could have the summer of love,” she said. When Trump lambasted the city for abandoning law and order, this resulted in a defensive Twitter spat between Durkan and the former president, and Gov. Jay Inslee told Trump to “stay out of Washington state’s business.”

Not that there was ever any doubt, but with Seattle settling this lawsuit it’s now impossible to argue that city officials weren’t encouraging violence and guilty of abdicating their most basic responsibility to keep citizens safe. Or is it? If you’re wondering who would be so desperate to cling to a political narrative they would insist letting anarchists take control of your city wasn’t so bad, well, here’s today’s Seattle Times write-up featuring an epic “challenge accepted” moment:

While CHOP was mostly peaceful, there were instances of vandalism and sporadic outbreaks of violence, including fights, an attempt to torch the abandoned police precinct and at least four shootings that claimed two lives of two teenagers, including a 16-year-old boy whose death led the city to end the protest.

That’s right, other than the fights, shootings, multiple homicides, and an attempt to burn a police station to the ground, it was “mostly peaceful,” says the local newspaper. Who among us wouldn’t mistake what was going on here for a “summer of love”?

The media’s suspicious coalescing around the phrase “mostly peaceful” to describe the Floyd protests in the summer of 2020 was always transparently dishonest. The CNN chyron declaring the protests in Kenosha “mostly peaceful” as the city was in flames in the background is now iconic.

However, it is truly astonishing that two years later a major newspaper is still clinging to this phrase like some talisman they hope will ward off holding their local leaders responsible for, among many other crimes, facilitating the deaths of two young black men.

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator

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MARK HEMINGWAY

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Political

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Without Black Lives Matter, Tyre Nichols Might Not Have Died In Memphis Last Week

BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | JANUARY 30, 2023

Black Lives Matter protesters carry signs

Two of the five police officers charged in the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols were hired by the Memphis Police Department after it relaxed its hiring requirements, a new report by The New York Post shows. Tadarrius Bean and Demetrius Haley both joined the MPD in August 2020 after education qualifications to become an officer were dramatically lowered two years prior. The department nixed the required associate’s degree or 54 college credit hours for recruits in 2018 due to a lack of applicants.

“They’re desperate. They want police officers,” retired NYPD detective Mike Alcazar told the Post. “They’re going through it, they check off some boxes, saying, ‘Ok, they’re good enough, get them on.”

In fact, the department was so desperate for recruits it offered $15,000 signing bonuses in both 2021 and 2022, and waivers for applicants who had been convicted of felonies. Even this did not prevent the force from being down 500 officers in January 2022.

Back in September 2020, a month after Bean and Haley were hired, former Deputy Director of MPD Mike Ryall told the Memphis Commercial Appeal that the rise of violent crime in the city could be attributed to the police department’s understaffing and lack of manpower. Bean and Haley were also hired during the summer of the George Floyd riots, a global protest movement organized by Black Lives Matter in response to the death of Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. The protests spread to more than 2,000 cities across America, causing more than $1 billion in property damage and killing at least 25 people. Such a movement, whose main mantra was “defund the police,” significantly damaged police morale.

According to a June 2021 survey by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), the rate of retirement at police departments rose 45% in 2020 compared to the previous year, with a 20% increase in resignations. The hiring rate also dropped by 5%. Simply put: police officers were quitting at unprecedented rates across the country to escape such a hostile environment, and departments were struggling to meet minimum staffing requirements. This coincided with a massive crime wave across America’s major cities.

“So at that very moment you’re hoping you can put police out there to try to deal with crime, you’re seeing the workforce shrinking with an unprecedented number of retirements and resignations,” PERF’s Executive Director Chuck Wexler told NPR.

While a shortage of recruits is no excuse for relaxing hiring standards for cops, it is a product of disastrous dynamics the Black Lives Matter movement and leftist elites have cultivated. There is a lot of power and money in stoking fears of racism and hatred. And it is all done at the cost of the safety of the American public, most especially black Americans like Nichols.

For sure, let the cops implicated in Nichols’ death be charged to the fullest extent of the law, but it is important to remember why officers of that quality were hired to those positions in the first place.

Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.

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If What Kanye West Said About George Floyd Is Crazy Wrong, The Corrupt Media Wouldn’t Have To Lie About It

BY: EDDIE SCARRY | OCTOBER 19, 2022

George Floyd mural — **That West more or less told the truth about Floyd has the corrupted national media performing emergency clean-up for their cause.**

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EDDIE SCARRY

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Of all the things that the occasionally interesting Kanye West has said over the course of the past week, the one that can’t ever be called sociopathic or pathological is what he said about George Floyd, patron saint of Hennepin County.

But of course, the historical revisionism of Floyd’s death is an enduring priority of the Democrat Party. They can’t justify their political violence without it. So that West more or less told the truth about Floyd has the corrupted national media (a.k.a. the Democrat Party) performing emergency clean-up for their cause.

Like almost everything West says in interviews, his remarks on Floyd on a show last weekend weren’t delivered with much precision. “They hit him with the fentanyl,” he said. “If you look, the guy’s knee wasn’t even on his neck like that. When he said ‘mama,’ mama is his girlfriend. They said he screamed for his mama. Mama was his girlfriend.”

The bulk of that is demonstrably true, but Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson falsely claimed this week — lie! lie! lie! — that, “None of that is true.”

A separate news article in the same paper said Kanye had made “false claims about the Black man’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police.”

An NBC News report also referred to West’s “false claims” related to Floyd.

Let’s take them one by one.

It’s a fact that Floyd had lethal levels of fentanyl in his blood. The medical examiner’s report said at the time of his death, there were 11 nanograms of the drug per milliliter. That report noted that “severe respiratory depression” — trouble with breathing — is a common symptom of fentanyl toxicity, and that fatal blood levels of the drug have been recorded at as low as 3 nanograms per milliliter. Floyd had nearly four times that.

Also present in his system were methamphetamine, other opiates, and morphine, which the report said, have the effect of “respiratory depression” as well.

West’s assertion that Derek Chauvin’s knee “wasn’t even on his neck like that,” is likely a reference to a line of defense put forward by Chauvin’s legal team. At trial, defense attorney Eric Nelson zoomed in on video from Floyd’s run-in with the police. Nelson suggested that the images showed Floyd’s neck was, at least for some period of time, not in direct contact with Chauvin’s knee, and that when it was, the applied pressure was justifiable for the circumstances. The jury didn’t buy the defense, but the medical examiner’s report said there were no injuries to Floyd’s neck nor to the cartilage of his larynx. There was no bleeding or bruising on his neck. There were, in fact, no injuries to any of his organs at all.

That Floyd referred to his girlfriend as “mama” is also just a fact. And we know that because his girlfriend and drug buddy, Courteney Ross, said so in court. I know that it’s more romantic and thus useful for the media to claim Floyd used his final gasps to call for his mother, but she died in 2018, two years before the incident.

What West didn’t say in the interview was that Floyd also had “severe” heart disease, with some of his arteries blocked by up to 90 percent. His heart was enlarged, and he suffered a history of hypertension. And that leads us to why the medical examiner declared Floyd to have died of “cardiopulmonary arrest,” triggered by the stress of contact with the police. And it’s no small point that the contact was made after the 6’4”, 223 lb. Floyd, hopped up on drugs, attempted to purchase a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit bill. When police showed up, he was panicked, delusional, and either unable or unwilling to cooperate with police. Maybe it was both.

In the end, the medical examiner, Dr. Andrew Baker, did determine Floyd’s death to formally be a “homicide,” though the term in his profession simply means another person was a factor. At trial, Baker said, “In my opinion, the law enforcement subdual, restraint, and the neck compression was just more than Mr. Floyd could take, by virtue of those heart conditions.” In other words, Floyd would have survived the incident if not for his severely compromised heart.

Guess who had no clue that this giant man had a sick and fragile heart before that fateful day? Precisely no one, least of all the police who were tasked with subduing his massive frame in his erratic condition.

Kanye West made no false claims against our lord and savior George Floyd. He told the truth, as sad as it may be.

Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Liberal Misery: How the Hateful Left Sucks Joy Out of Everything and Everyone.”

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Jason Whitlock Op-ed: We should scrap Juneteenth, aka George Floyd Day, for a holiday commemorating America’s 1865 rebirth

Commentary by JASON WHITLOCK | June 20, 2022

I spent a lot of time this weekend contemplating “Juneteenth,” our newest federal holiday. I first heard of it in 1985, when a college football teammate from Texas chastised a group of us for being unaware of the celebration. He explained the history of it to us. As a boy from Indiana, I understood his appreciation for Texas history but didn’t think it applied to me or my family.

I never celebrated Juneteenth. I never gave it much thought. I’ve lived in Indiana, South Carolina, Michigan, Missouri, Kansas, California, and Tennessee. No one in any of those states ever invited me to a Juneteenth party.

I suspect most people don’t fully comprehend or get Juneteenth. It’s a national holiday because of the death of George Floyd, not because our political leaders had a sincere interest in celebrating the emancipation of slaves in Texas or across the South.

This weekend, the New York Times ran an op-ed from Casey Gerald, an author and a native of Texas. Here are his opening lines:

“I won’t pretend Juneteenth has always meant a lot to me.

“I was born in Texas, as were my parents and most of my kin, all the way back to at least the 19th century, when some of them were enslaved. Still, for most of my life, the day was just another holiday marked on the community calendar — even if it was our day, a day for black Texans. Perhaps one sign that a thing belongs to you is that you take it for granted.

“The past few years have forced some stronger feelings to the surface.”

The “Summer of George Floyd” forced those stronger feelings to the surface.

A weekend article in the Washington Post spelled out the impetus for those stronger feelings, writing:

“During the summer of 2020, amid the racial-justice protests following the murder of George Floyd, millions of white Americans became aware of Juneteenth for the first time. Some companies announced they would give employees the day off on Juneteenth, and momentum grew to make it a national holiday. Last summer, the U.S. did just that, as President Biden signed a bipartisan bill into law on June 17.”

David Kaufman, writing in the New York Post, agreed with the Washington Post assessment:

“At a time when there is so much rewriting of American history, Juneteenth proves why history should be kept intact.

“Officially declared a national holiday by Congress last year in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 murder, the day marks the emancipation of black slaves by President Abraham Lincoln in January 1863. As we prepare to celebrate it for the first time as a nation on Monday, it feels as important as the Fourth of July.”

Juneteenth’s connection to the George Floyd riots undermines the holiday’s ability to unify Americans. A lack of unifying messaging undermines the success and purpose of a national holiday.

What’s the purpose of Juneteenth?

Opal Lee, known as the “grandmother of Juneteenth,” offered this explanation:

“Juneteenth asks Americans to recognize that our nation’s principles are neither grossly hypocritical nor naively aspirational. We have inherited lofty yet practical ideals, and it falls to us to implement them as best we can.

“In 1865, that meant fighting attempts to reimpose slavery through violence. In 2022, it means opposing new forms of violence, whether it is violence that comes from within a community or violence perpetrated by the police.”

I like the first part of Lee’s explanation. It’s unifying and inspirational. But the second half falls flat. She analogizes slavery to violent police misconduct. The end of slavery freed 2.5 million black people. Slavery was codified into law and custom. The rare instances of illegal police violence are not backed by law or even custom. They’re aberrations.

Casey Gerald summarized his thoughts on Juneteenth this way:

“Let us grieve for our forebears and feel deep gratitude as we think of the enormous price our people paid so we could be free. Let us remember that despite the degradation of slavery, they lived fully human lives, too. They laughed. They loved. They dreamed. They ate sweet treats. Let us pray to them and say, this year and always: Thank you.”

Gerald’s definition leaves out the price paid by the hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers whose enormous price included the sacrifice of their lives. Gerald wants a black national holiday, not a unifying one.

My point is, as black people, we can’t fully explain or justify the Juneteenth holiday. Most black people did not care until George Floyd died. The black female mayor of New Orleans, LaToya Cantrell, best represents our confusion.

Over the weekend, she unveiled a monument she had erected at Lafayette Square in celebration of Juneteenth. The monument is an afro pick with a clenched fist. She said the sculpture represents the freedoms we’ve gained. New Orleans’ next sculpture will be of a durag and a can of Murray’s hair grease.

Let me take a crack at defining Juneteenth.

American black people did a lot of celebrating in 1865.

Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant on April 9 of that year, ending the Civil War and kicking off the official death of slavery.

Twenty-two days later, more than 10,000 freed slaves in Charleston, South Carolina, held a parade honoring deceased Union soldiers. The event is credited with starting the Memorial Day tradition.

In June 1865, Union Army General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and enforced Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Black Texans adopted June 19th as a day to celebrate their freedom.

In early December, the United States ratified the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery.

The year 1865 is as important to American history as 1776. America was reborn, reimagined, and resurrected from the dead. The year marks black Americans’ central role in this country’s march toward freedom and exceptionalism. The African-American journey has been America’s north star, its moral compass.

The fact that Juneteenth is such a divisive and polarizing issue speaks to how far this nation and its citizens have strayed from our shared moral struggle, purpose, and values.

I wish we could rebrand Juneteenth as 1865 Day. We could spend the day honoring the people who sacrificed everything for America to experience a rebirth. Right now, it’s a celebration of George Floyd. I feel sorry for George Floyd. I have no interest in celebrating him.

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Faced With the Horrific Results of Their Ideas, Leftists Are Backpedaling with All Their Might

REPORTED BY: CASEY CHALK | MARCH 04, 2022

It would appear that leftists don’t actually like a lot of the radical policies they have been advocating for since the beginning of the lockdowns and the death of George Floyd in spring 2020. From homelessness to crime to Covid policies, the left is backtracking on much of its platform in the face of disastrous results and frustration from rank-and-file liberals. Recent developments in our nation’s capital provide some of the most dramatic examples.

Cities across the country are taking a more aggressive stance on homeless encampments in response to residents’ complaints, including Washington, D.C. An early February poll conducted by The Washington Post found that three-fourths of Washingtonians support the district’s plan to clear the camps of homeless persons that now proliferate across the city.

That the American Civil Liberties Union and even some D.C. council members oppose Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s cleanups have not stopped their enforcement. Bowser has quite a mandate for this: the number of city residents who want these camps cleared does not substantially change based on respondents’ race, and is above 70 percent for white, black, Hispanic, and Asian residents.

That the district is pursuing this policy with substantial local support is a bit ironic, given that so many prominent leftist organizations, local leftist leaders, and Democratic politicians have been trying for more than a year to protect these encampments. This included Ann Marie Staudenmaier, wife of Maryland gubernatorial candidate Tom Perez, who last year advocated for homeless camps in the district to be permitted and protected. “Don’t evict them from the only place that they have to call home,” she urged.

Perhaps it has something to do with how large numbers of homeless persons affect the cleanliness, security, and attraction of neighborhoods. A separate recent WaPo article cited residents who noted homeless persons in the camp have harassed them. One D.C. resident said downtown is “not pleasant” and that the ubiquity of the encampments threatens the security of local residents.

Although many on the left would likely grimace to say it, national trends on curbing these camps indicate a significant percentage of the rest of America feels the same way.

Refunding the Police

Mayors of America’s largest cities, once responsive to calls to defund the police, have done a dramatic reversal in response to local frustration with higher crime rates. Now “refund the police” has become the cry of many liberal residents.

In D.C., residents’ opinions on crime and police have experienced this shift, given increased crime and murder rates in the city since 2020. According to a recent WaPo poll, a sizable majority (59 percent) now agree that increasing the number of police officers patrolling communities would reduce the amount of violent crime in D.C.

“The share of Washingtonians who say they are not safe from crime has risen to 30 percent this year from 22 percent in November 2019 and is the highest in more than two decades of Post polls,” reports the WaPo.

This is quite a change from the “defund the police” initiatives city residents — and various activist groups — so loudly endorsed after the death of George Floyd. The D.C. government in 2020 supported measures in June 2022 to cut $15 million from the police department budget. At the time, the police chief warned this could lead to the loss of hundreds of officers and that underfunding training and equipment might result in officers using more excessive force.

Thankfully, D.C. is not alone in wanting to refund the police. As NBC reported in February, Democratic politicians are calling the “defund the police” movement “dead” and mayors in San Francisco, New York, and Chicago are “moving to increase police budgets and end ‘the reign of criminals.’”

Surrendering to Pandemic Fatigue

Democratic states are also ending many Covid restrictions in the face of rising complaints from their constituents. Consider D.C. Mayor Bowser’s mid-February announcement that she would lift the city’s vaccine requirement for businesses and “dial back” the city’s indoor mask rules. This announcement followed a number of states — including many governed by Democrats — that have also eased their restrictions as polls come back showing their rising unpopularity. Now D.C.’s party scene is “returning to normal,” reports the WaPo, even though coronavirus case counts in and around Washington remain “high.”

This is a remarkable and speedy shift, especially considering D.C. had some of the most strict Covid restrictions in the country. Perhaps the District’s dramatic about-face has something to do with widespread annoyance with pandemic restrictions, even among liberal voters. Perhaps it results from the rising tide of Democratic politicians listening to their constituencies despite “public health guidance” claiming the country is moving too fast in loosening the rules.

Perhaps all of these changes also relate to the fact that the District of Columbia is no longer experiencing the population boom and gentrification that have defined the last couple of decades. The capital’s population declined by 2.9 percent from 2020 to 2021, according to the Census Bureau. Living in an increasingly dangerous, filthy nanny-city is apparently not that appealing, even to the District’s majority leftist population. This has been part of a broader national trend as people across the nation in 2021 left Democratic-run states.

Mugged by Reality

To borrow a phrase from the late Irving Kristol, D.C. residents (and liberals across the country) have been mugged by reality — and in some cases actually mugged. Perhaps living in a lefty utopia where the homeless camp wherever they like, undisturbed by a defunded police force, with fickle and irrational health-related restrictions isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

Democrat D.C. residents, like the rest of Americans, don’t actually like their public spaces overrun by homeless persons, their neighborhoods suffering increased violent crime rates, or their cities stuck in a cycle of never-ending draconian public safety regulations.

What this all means is that, thankfully, certain activist narratives that threatened all Americans have lost considerable steam. It also means these policies are likely political liabilities in upcoming elections. Perhaps it also shows there are certain things that all Americans can still agree on.

Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.

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Chauvin juror wore BLM shirt with George Floyd references last summer. Now legal experts say it is ‘undeniably suggestive of a possible bias.’

Reported by NEWS CHRIS ENLOE | May 04, 2021

New questions have surfaced about the impartiality of a juror who was empaneled for former police Officer Derek Chauvin’s trial last month after a picture sparked speculation that he may not have been as unbiased as he told the judge. During jury selection, Brandon Mitchell — a 31-year-old high school basketball coach who was known as Juror #52 before speaking publicly last week — told Judge Peter Cahill that he only heard “basic info” about the high-profile case, and was certainly not aware of any information that would hinder his ability to serve as an impartial juror.

However, Mitchell was pictured last August wearing a T-shirt that included references to George Floyd’s death and Black Lives Matter. The picture shows Mitchell wearing a shirt with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s picture surrounded by the words “GET YOUR KNEE OFF OUR NECKS” and “BLM.” He is also seen wearing a Black Lives Matter baseball cap.

Mitchell told the Minneapolis Star Tribune he does not remember wearing the shirt but explained the photo was taken during a trip to Washington, D.C., last August when he attended an event commemorating the anniversary of King’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech.

“I’d never been to D.C.,” Mitchell said. “The opportunity to go to D.C., the opportunity to be around thousands and thousands of Black people; I just thought it was a good opportunity to be a part of something.”
“It was directly related to MLK’s March on Washington from the ’60s … The date of the March on Washington is the date … It was literally called the anniversary of the March on Washington,” Mitchell explained.

What does this mean for the Chauvin trial?

Despite Mitchell dismissing the Washington event as “a national thing,” legal experts agree the picture is problematic.

Jury consultant Alan Tuerkheimer told the Washington Post that Chauvin’s attorney will no doubt use Mitchell to argue for an appeal. But the real question will be whether Mitchell provided false answers during jury selection, Tuerkheimer said.

As the Star-Tribune noted, Mitchell answered “no” to questions on the juror questionnaire that inquired whether he participated in demonstrations “against police brutality” in Minneapolis or whether he or anyone close to him “participated in protests about police use of force or police brutality.”

“That could change the outcome of things; if there is anything that makes him seem that he was not forthcoming, it could be an avenue for the judge to reconsider the case,” Tuerkheimer said.

Civil rights attorney Brian Dunn agreed the real concern is whether Mitchell “lied about, or failed to provide complete answers on whether he has engaged in public activism, or whether he has any affiliations with BLM that go beyond the mere wearing of the shirt.”
“If it is determined that the juror did not provide full disclosure to the defense, the question then becomes whether this lack of candor violated Mr. Chauvin’s right to a fair trial,” Dunn told the Post, adding the photo is “undeniably suggestive of a possible bias in this juror.”
“If [Mitchell] specifically was asked, ‘Have you ever participated in a Black Lives Matter demonstration,’ and he answered, ‘No,’ to that, I think that would be an important appealable issue,” Joseph Daly, emeritus professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, similarly told the Star Tribune.

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After 11 Months Of Rioting, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler Calls For Citizens To ‘Stand Up’ To The ‘Mob’

Reported by JORDAN LANCASTER, REPORTER | April 26, 2021

Portland Reacts After Fatal Shooting During Violent Night Of Protests

Nathan Howard/Getty Images

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler called for people to ‘stand up’ to rioters destroying his city when he announced Friday that the city’s state of emergency would be extended through Monday.

“They want to burn, they want to bash, they want to intimidate, they want to assault,” Wheeler said during a Friday speech, the New York Post reported. “If BLM leaders can show the courage to stand up to this mob, then we all should.”
Wheeler said that “the self-described anarchist mob” was responsible for the “criminal intimidation and violence.”
“Together we can make a stand … and take our city back,” he added.

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler reacts after being exposed to tear gas fired by federal officers while attending a protest against police brutality and racial injustice in front of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse on July 22, 2020 in Portland, Oregon. State and city elected officials have called for the federal officers to leave Portland as clashes between protesters and federal police continue to escalate. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

Riots have been a reoccurring problem in Portland since May 29, 2020, shortly after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But the mayor seemed hesitant to take steps to quell the unrest and restore peace to Portland. In August, Wheeler rejected then-President Donald Trump’s offer for federal assistance, saying in a statement that the city didn’t need his “politics of division and demagoguery.”

The former president criticized Wheeler’s decision in a tweet calling the mayor a “fool” and said that Portland “won’t put up with no safety any longer.”

Wheeler, while calling for calm, took steps like banning police use of tear gas in September after four months of riots. The Portland Police Bureau said at the time that banning tear gas “will make it very difficult to address this kind of violence without resorting to much higher levels of physical force.”

It took six months of rioting and destruction for Wheeler to announce increased law enforcement actions against the violent mob. By that time, millions of dollars in damage to property and revenue loss had already occurred. Rioters were still causing damage and chaos through mid-April, when crowds set off fireworks and lit buildings on fire near the Portland Police Association.

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Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Not Peaceful or Patriotic

A.F. BRANCO on April 21, 2021 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-not-peaceful-or-patriotic/

Maxine threatened violence if there wasn’t a guilty verdict in the Chauvin trial.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Critical Child Abuse

A.F. BRANCO on April 22, 2021 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-critical-child-abuse/

Critical Race Theory is dividing our country and demoralizing children because of the color of their skin.

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.

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Chauvin Trial Judge: Rep. Maxine Waters’ threats may result in “this whole trial being overturned” on appeal

Posted by William A. Jacobson | Monday, April 19, 2021

For years Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters has gotten away with stoking political violence, without ever behing held to account by the media or her own party. This time her sleazy incitement may have real world consequences.

Just yesterday Waters threatened Protesters Need to “Get More Confrontational” If No “Murder” Conviction Of Derek Chauvin: “We got to get more confrontational. We got to make sure they know we mean business.”

Today the defense in the Chauvin trial moved for a mistrial based on Water’s comments. The judge denied the mistrial motion, but noted it may be an issue on appeal and could lead to any conviction being overturned.

The Post Millenial reports:

“I’ll give you that Congresswoman Waters may have given you something on appeal that may result in this whole trial being overturned.” He said further that I’m aware that “Congresswoman Waters was talking specifically about this trial, and about the unacceptability of anything less than a murder conviction, and talking about being confrontational, but you can submit the press articles about that. This goes back to what I’ve been saying from the beginning: I wish that elected officials would stop talking about this case, especially in a manner that is disrespectful to the rule of law and the judicial branch and our function.“ I think if they want to give their opinions, they should do so in a respectful, and in a manner that is consistent with their commitment to the constitution, to respect the co-equal branch of government. Their failure to do so is abhorrent, but I don’t think it has prejudiced us with additional material that would prejudice this jury. They have been told not to watch the news and I trust that they are following these instructions and that there is not in any way a prejudice…

“A congresswoman’s opinion really doesn’t matter a whole lot,” Cahill concluded, and denied the motion for a mistrial.

Chauvin trial judge denies the defense's request for a mistrial, BUT he did SLAM Maxine Waters for her threatening comments in Minnesota this weekend to jurors, calling them "abhorrent" and "disrespectful to the rule of law and to the judicial branch and our function." pic.twitter.com/rAoa1QvcqZ
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 19, 2021

The obvious reason for the Judge to deny a mistrial is that if there is a not guilty verdict on all counts, then the issue of Waters’ threats goes away. Andrew Branca will have his full write up later tonight, but I think the defense counsel Eric Nelson was phenomenol in closing, he picked apart the timeline of the 9-minute video. He was so good that the prosecution rebuttal was mostly personal attacks on him, which led to another motion for mistrial that was denied.

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Ann Coulter OP-ED: Derek Chauvin, Human Sacrifice

Commentary by Ann Coulter |Posted: Mar 31, 2021

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

Source: AP Photo/Craig Mitchelldyer

In modern America, we periodically offer up white men as human sacrifices to the PC gods. Among our benefactions: Jake Gardner, Kyle Rittenhouse, Darren Wilson, the Duke lacrosse players, University of Virginia fraternity members, Stacey Koon and Mark Fuhrman.

The rest of us just keep our heads down and pray we won’t be next.

At least the Duke and UVA human offerings were sufficiently upper-crust to have a few journalists and lawyers defending them. But policemen, bar owners, military veterans and a Midwest teenager? Definitely not our crowd, darling.

Currently, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is on trial for killing George Floyd by kneeling on his neck, as it appeared in cellphone videos. You may remember something about this: It’s why America had to burn in 2020.

But the chief medical examiner’s report establishes that, however else Floyd died, it wasn’t from Chauvin’s knee. Oopsie! I guess it wasn’t absolutely essential that our country go through eight months of looting, riots and mostly peaceful arsons.

In lieu of citing some B.S. media “fact check,” I shall quote directly from the autopsy report by the Hennepin County Chief Medical Examiner, Andrew Baker:

“No life-threatening injuries identified —

“A. No facial, oral mucosal, or conjunctival petechiae

“B. No injuries of anterior muscles of neck or laryngeal structures

“C. No scalp soft tissue, skull, or brain injuries

“D. No chest wall soft tissue injuries, rib fractures (other than a single rib fracture from CPR), vertebral column injuries, or visceral injuries

“E. Incision and subcutaneous dissection of posterior and lateral neck, shoulders, back, flanks, and buttocks negative for occult trauma”

In short: No bloodshot eyes and no trauma to any part of Floyd’s neck.

And yet, day after day, prosecutors, witnesses and the media tell us that Chauvin “squeezed the life out of” Floyd. The medical evidence establishes that whatever else caused his death, it was NOT asphyxiation.

That’s the entire case against Officer Chauvin! But the howling mob isn’t giving up its holy religious observance because of one dork in a lab coat. The sun might not rise! The city of Minneapolis could be wiped out! Wait — that might actually happen.

The medical examiner also found that Floyd had enough fentanyl in his system — I don’t want to say “to kill a horse,” because that would be a cliche. But it would be enough to bump off an entire team of Budweiser Clydesdales. In technical medical jargon:

“A. Blood drug and novel psychoactive substances screens:

“1. Fentanyl 11 ng/mL”

That’s just the first few words of the “Toxicology” section. Also listed are norfentanyl, 4-ANPP, methamphetamine, cannabinoids, amphetamines, morphine and so on.

But the 11 nanograms per milliliter of fentanyl is rather important, inasmuch as the chief medical examiner called this “a fatal level of fentanyl under normal circumstances,” saying, “deaths have been certified with levels of 3.”

Three. But George Floyd went up to 11.

Naturally, Baker was quick to add, “I am not saying this killed him.” Please don’t throw me to the woke gods! Leave me to my test tubes! (And you thought lawyers were craven.)

I have a feeling we’re about to see another example of the left not accepting science.

In addition to liberals refusing to accept the science of:

— DNA (the O.J. trial)

— AIDS (we’re still waiting for that big heterosexual outbreak!)

— Cancer clusters and breast implants (billions of dollars wasted and companies destroyed because of the left’s adherence to junk science)

— I.Q. (just watch the reaction to my mentioning this hate-science) …

… we can now add “pharmacology”!

You mean to say that just by sticking a syringe in someone’s arm you can tell if he’s been taking drugs? That’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo, just like the moon landing.

This trial is a total sham, but the entire power of the state, the media, the left-wing shock troops and the country’s finest legal talent is being deployed against Derek Chauvin.

In addition to Minnesota’s top prosecutor, the state has hired Neal Katyal, former solicitor general of the United States — an unheard-of maneuver in a case that doesn’t involve some highly technical specialty, like antitrust. A slew of lawyers are working pro bono for the prosecutor — also unheard of. The state has unlimited resources to pursue Chauvin.

Against this, Chauvin has one lone defense attorney, Eric “Atticus Finch” Nelson. The Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association’s legal defense fund will put up to $1 million toward his defense, and Nelson can talk to the other rotating attorneys whom the fund employs. But unless they’re working pro bono, too, $1 million runs out pretty fast.

The legal mismatch in the O.J. Simpson case wasn’t this one-sided.

In the middle of jury selection, the city of Minneapolis announced an eye-popping civil settlement of $27 million with the family of George Floyd. Liberals are still denouncing Richard Nixon for a 1970 speech in which he inadvertently described defendant Charles Manson as someone who was “guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders” — leading to demands for a mistrial.

What does a $27 million settlement with the family of the alleged victim say?

Black residents of Minneapolis are threatening to burn the place down if Chauvin isn’t convicted — and the only reason anyone thinks a jury could possibly return a guilty verdict is that they believe them.

In the darkest days of Jim Crow, the entire country never ganged up on a single individual like this.

Please, gods of wokeness, we ask that his human sacrifice be acceptable!

Throw another virgin into the volcano.

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Political

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Biden’s timeline in violence

Reported by Emily Larsen, Political Reporter | September 01, 2020 06:47 AM

URL of the originating web site: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/bidens-timeline-in-violence

US WI Kenosha Shooting Witness (CR)

“Too little too late. The left wing militants have been at war in America’s cities for MONTHS and you’re only commenting now because the polling told you to,” Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas tweeted.

“Amazing that after 90 days of silence (and not one mention at the DNC) on the looting and rioting in the #BidenRiots, Biden finally says something after CNN says it’s hurting him in the polls. Weak!” tweeted Donald Trump Jr.

In a Saturday Breitbart piece, commentator John Nolte claimed that “violence raged for 88 days before Joe Biden finally emerged from his Delaware bunker and said it was wrong.”

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Biden’s statements explicitly condemning looting, arson, destruction of property, and violence include a written statement on May 31, a speech on June 2, a speech on July 28, a video on Wednesday, a written statement on Sunday, and a speech on Monday. Biden, however, did not forcefully address daily violence and vandalism that took place in Seattle, Washington, and Portland for much of June and July, instead focusing criticism on federal law enforcement officers for harming “peaceful protesters.” At the end of July, Biden again started to criticize arsonists, looters, and other violent demonstrators explicitly.

The former vice president and Democratic presidential nominee has condemned violence on all sides and called out anarchists but has focused more attention on violence stemming from right-wing groups, white supremacists, and law enforcement than from “anti-fascist” factions.

Below is a timeline of some violent events stemming from protests over police brutality and racism across the country and key Biden statements about the protests and violence.

Monday, May 25, 2020: George Floyd, a black Minneapolis man, dies after being held by his neck under a white police offer’s knee for nearly nine minutes.

Tuesday, May 26, 2020: Biden tweeted a call for an FBI investigation into the officers involved in Floyd’s death.

Protests in Minneapolis began, resulting in clashes between those protesting Floyd’s death and police, including the use of tear gas. Some police vehicles were vandalized.

Wednesday, May 27, 2020: During a virtual town hall event, Biden called for a Department of Justice investigation into Floyd’s death. “George Floyd’s life mattered. It mattered as much as mine. It mattered as much as anyone’s in this country. Or, at least, it should have,” Biden said.

Looting erupted in Minneapolis, with viral images showing a Target near the 3rd Police Precinct being ransacked. An AutoZone near the precinct was set on fire.

Protests and riots began to spread nationwide. By June 1, at least 140 cities across the country had Black Lives Matter protests, and the National Guard was activated in 21 states.

Thursday, May 28, 2020: Biden, in a virtual fundraiser, addressed Floyd and made a passing reference to violence and riots.

“Tonight, the National Guard has been called out of Minneapolis, and I urge the protesters to exercise their rights peacefully and safely. But people all across this country are enraged and rightly so,” Biden said, according to a pool report.

Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz mobilized the state’s National Guard to help quell protests earlier that day. Late that night, fires started at other area stores and at the Minneapolis 3rd Police Precinct.

Friday, May 29, 2020: Biden delivered a brief address from his home studio on “the unfolding situation in Minnesota” and Floyd’s death. He revealed that he had spoken to Floyd’s family.

He did not directly condemn the riots and looting in Minnesota during the speech, but he did reference a tweet from President Trump that said, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

“This is no time for incendiary tweets. It’s no time to encourage violence,” Biden said.

Overnight, protesters in St. Louis, Missouri, blocked off an interstate for almost three hours, set a fire in the road, and broke into an Amazon Prime truck and a FedEx truck. One man died after getting caught in between two FedEx truck trailers, and the truck drove away.

A 21-year-old was killed in Detroit, Michigan, after shots were fired into a crowd of protesters, police said.

Rioters and vandals swarmed CNN headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.

Saturday, May 30, 2020: Reuters reports that at least 13 Biden campaign staff members posted that they had donated to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which used donations to pay bail fees for those arrested in the Minneapolis protests.

Democratic Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey implored residents to stay home, saying in a tweet, “What started as largely peaceful protests for George Floyd have turned to outright looting and domestic terrorism in our region.”

Overnight in Indianapolis, Indiana, three people were shot, and one was killed amid the riots.

In Chicago, six people were shot, one fatally, amid protests and looting downtown.

Sunday, May 31, 2020: In a written statement sent early in the morning just after midnight, Biden addressed the violence happening across the country. He said that while protesting brutality in the wake of Floyd’s death is “right and necessary” and an “utterly American response,” violence and looting “is not.”

The statement said, in part:

These last few days have laid bare that we are a nation furious at injustice. Every person of conscience can understand the rawness of the trauma people of color experience in this country, from the daily indignities to the extreme violence, like the horrific killing of George Floyd.

Protesting such brutality is right and necessary. It’s an utterly American response. But burning down communities and needless destruction is not. Violence that endangers lives is not. Violence that guts and shutters businesses that serve the community is not.

Later in the day, Biden visited the site of protests that happened in Wilmington, Delaware. “The only way to bear this pain is to turn all that anguish to purpose. And as President, I will help lead this conversation — and more importantly, I will listen, just as I did today visiting the site of last night’s protests in Wilmington,” Biden said in an Instagram caption.

Overnight in Louisville, Kentucky, police “returned fire” into a crowd while trying to clear protesters and killed one man.

Tuesday, June 2, 2020: In a live speech from Philadelphia City Hall, Biden again expressed disapproval of violence:

The country is crying out for leadership. Leadership that can unite us. Leadership that can bring us together. Leadership that can recognize pain and deep grief of communities that have had a knee on their neck for a long.

There’s no place for violence. No place for looting or destroying property or burning churches, or destroying businesses — many of them built by the very people of color who, for the first time, were beginning to realize their dreams and build wealth for their families.

Nor is it acceptable for our police, sworn to protect and serve all people, to escalate tension, resort to excessive violence. We need to distinguish between legitimate peaceful protest and opportunistic violent destruction.

He also criticized Trump for dispersing a protest crowd outside the White House with crowd control gas before the president walked to St. John’s Church, which had been set on fire amid the protests.

“And [we] have to be vigilant about the violence that’s being done by the incumbent president to our democracy and to the pursuit of justice … When peaceful protesters are dispersed by the order of the president from the doorstep of the people’s house, the White House, using tear gas and flash grenades, in order to stage a photo-op at a noble church, we can be forgiven for believing that the president is more interested in power than in principle. More interested in serving the passions of his base than the needs of the people in his care. For that’s what the presidency is: the duty to care — to care for all of us.”

Tuesday, June 9, 2020: Demonstrators in Seattle declare a portion of the city a police-free “autonomous zone,” known as CHAZ/CHOP.

Saturday, June 20, 2020: A 19-year-old man in the Seattle CHOP area is shot.

Sunday, June 21, 2020: A 17-year-old boy in the Seattle CHOP area is shot.

Tuesday, July 21, 2020: In a written statement, Biden criticized the presence of Department of Homeland Security law enforcement officers in Portland, saying that they attacked “peaceful protesters” without recognizing the violent and destructive protesters.

We have a president who is determined to sow chaos and division. To make matters worse instead of better. We all remember the appalling scenes in front of the White House, when peaceful protestors were gassed to make way for a Trump photo op. Now Homeland Security agents — without a clearly defined mandate or authority — are ranging far from federal property, stripped of badges and insignia and identifying markings, to detain people. They are brutally attacking peaceful protestors, including a U.S. Navy veteran. Of course the U.S. government has the right and duty to protect federal property. The Obama-Biden administration protected federal property across the country without resorting to these egregious tactics — and without trying to stoke the fires of division in this country. We need a president who will bring us together instead of tear us apart, calm instead of inflame, and enforce the law faithfully rather than put his political interests first.

Monday, June 29, 2020: Two teenagers were shot, one fatally, in the Seattle CHOP zone.

Wednesday, July 1, 2020: Police clear the Seattle CHOP area and restore their presence there.

Tuesday, July 28, 2020: Biden, in a speech from Wilmington, Delaware, called for arsonists and anarchists to be prosecuted by local police while criticizing Trump for using federal law enforcement from the Department of Homeland Security in an attempt to quell protests.

And he [Trump] is — horrifyingly, but not surprisingly — intentionally stoking the flames of division and racism in this country.

I’ve said from the outset of the recent protests that there’s no place for violence or destruction of property. Peaceful protesters should be protected, but arsonists and anarchists should be prosecuted, and local law enforcement can do that.

When President Obama and I were in office we protected federal property, and we were able to do it without turning DHS into a private militia.

Wednesday, July 29, 2020: The Department of Homeland Security and Oregon reached a deal to leave Portland.

Thursday, July 30, 2020: Portland police reported that after over two months of protests downtown, there were 125 reported shootings, a spike from a total of 59 shootings during the same time period in 2019.

Monday-Thursday, Aug. 17-20, 2020: Democrats held a virtual national convention in which some speakers praised peaceful protesters, but arson, looting, and property damage are largely ignored.

Sunday, Aug. 23, 2020: Kenosha, Wisconsin, man Jacob Blake is shot seven times in the back by a police officer.

Monday-Thursday, Aug. 24-27, 2020: Republicans held a mostly virtual national convention in which many speakers argued that violence taking place in Democratic-controlled cities will spread if Biden is elected.

Monday, Aug. 24, 2020: Riots and fires in Kenosha destroyed blocks of business.

Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2020: Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old Trump and law enforcement supporter who came to Kenosha from just over the border in Illinois with the intent of protecting businesses alongside other vigilantes, allegedly shot and killed someone while injuring another in a shooting.

Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2020: Speaking to a camera in a video addressing the police shooting of Blake in Kenosha and subsequent protests and riots, Biden condemned violence.

“As I said after George Floyd’s murder, protesting brutality is a right and absolutely necessary. But burning down communities is not protest. It’s needless violence. Violence that endangers lives, violence that guts businesses, and shutters businesses, that shutters communities. That’s wrong.”

He quoted Blake’s mother, Julia Jackson.

“She looked at the damage done in her community, and she said this: ‘This doesn’t reflect my son or my family.’ So, let’s unite and heal, do justice, end the violence, and end systemic racism in this country now,” Biden said.

Police arrested Rittenhouse.

Thursday, Aug. 27, 2020: Biden condemned the violence and claimed that right-wing militias supported by white supremacists are the source of much of the problems on the streets.

I have made it clear. There is no place for violence, looting, or burning. None. Zero.

All it does it hurt the communities reeling from injustice – and it destroys the businesses that serve them – many of them run by people of color who for the first time in their lives have begun to build wealth for their family.

But while I have condemned all forms of violence – police violence, lawless violence and violence perpetrated by extreme, right-wing militia groups – like the groups the 17-year-old just arrested in Illinois for murdering two people in Wisconsin is reputed to have been aligned with. Trump doesn’t speak out against these extreme right-wing groups. Instead – as he did about Charlottesville – he embraces them.

If you’re worried about the violence you’re witnessing, you better be worried about the armed militias – often aligned with white supremacists and white nationalists and Neo-Nazis and the KKK – who are often the source of the biggest trouble.

Friday, Aug. 28, 2020: In a joint written statement with his running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, on the 57th Anniversary of the March on Washington, Biden condemned violence:

“That is where we are today. The murder and violence toward Black Americans of the 1960s is happening today in broad daylight for the world to witness. A pandemic and economic crisis lays bare the systemic racism that still plagues our way of life. And instead of seeking to heal and unite, too many in our nation seek to inflame and divide. We’re in an ongoing battle for the soul of our nation. We condemn the violence. We cannot afford our cities and the bonds between us to be burned, broken, and scarred any further. We have to root out the racism, hate, and the vengeance.”

Saturday, Aug. 29, 2020: In Portland, at around 8:45 p.m. local time, a man was shot and killed when a pro-Trump car caravan clashed with anti-Trump demonstrators. The man who died wore a thin blue line patch, signaling support for law enforcement, and a hat with a logo for the far-right group Patriot Prayer.

Sunday, Aug. 30, 2020: Biden condemned violence in a written statement in response to the killing of an apparent Trump supporter in Portland.

The deadly violence we saw overnight in Portland is unacceptable. Shooting in the streets of a great American city is unacceptable. I condemn this violence unequivocally. I condemn violence of every kind by anyone, whether on the left or the right. And I challenge Donald Trump to do the same. It does not matter if you find the political views of your opponents abhorrent, any loss of life is a tragedy. Today there is another family grieving in America, and Jill and I offer our deepest condolences.

We must not become a country at war with ourselves. A country that accepts the killing of fellow Americans who do not agree with you. A country that vows vengeance toward one another. But that is the America that President Trump wants us to be, the America he believes we are.

As a country, we must condemn the incitement of hate and resentment that led to this deadly clash. It is not a peaceful protest when you go out spoiling for a fight. What does President Trump think will happen when he continues to insist on fanning the flames of hate and division in our society and using the politics of fear to whip up his supporters? He is recklessly encouraging violence. He may believe tweeting about law and order makes him strong – but his failure to call on his supporters to stop seeking conflict shows just how weak he is. He may think that war in our streets is good for his reelection chances, but that is not presidential leadership – or even basic human compassion.

Monday, Aug. 31, 2020: Biden reiterated his opposition to rioting and looting in a speech from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that argued Trump is making the United States less safe.

The senseless violence of looting and burning and destruction of property. I want to be clear about this: Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting. It’s lawlessness — plain and simple. And those who do it should be prosecuted. Violence will not bring change, only destruction. It’s wrong in every way. It divides instead of unites.

Destroying businesses only hurts hardworking families that serve the community. It makes things worse, not better. It is not what Dr. King or John Lewis taught. It must end.

The fires are burning — and we have a president who fans the flames rather than fighting them.

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Political

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Portland Mob Floods Residential Area, Threatens People in Their Own Homes

Reported By Johnathan Jones | Published August 10, 2020 at 7:26am

URL of the originating web site: https://www.westernjournal.com/portland-mob-floods-residential-area-threatens-people-homes/?

Civil unrest in Portland, Oregon, spilled into a residential neighborhood Saturday night, where rioters targeted people inside their own homes, according to a report. While the city has experienced nightly protests and riots since May, when George Floyd died while in police custody after being detained in Minneapolis, most of the protests have remained contained to the city’s downtown area.

Journalist Andy Ngo reported that Saturday, a group of leftist activists targeted a residential neighborhood in the embattled city.

“‘We’re gonna burn your building down.’ ‘We know where you live,’” he tweeted, apparently quoting demonstrators in a video he shared on Twitter.

“As #antifa have taken to Portland residential areas to riot, they’ve also assaulted & intimidated residents there. Tonight, they threatened those who looked out the window,” Ngo added.

WARNING: The following video contains graphic language that some viewers might find offensive.

Video of the incident shows a crowd of demonstrators apparently threatening people inside a multistory residential building as some residents looked out of windows and were stunned by flashlights. One man off-camera on the video yelled about “capitalism,” while another man could be heard yelling, “We’re gonna burn your building down!”

The people in the video appeared to be sitting peacefully inside of their homes amid the chaotic situation.

Police in Portland later put out a news bulletin outlining the activities of Saturday’s demonstrations. They began at Peninsula Park in the city’s Piedmont neighborhood, about four miles north of downtown. While police described the group, which numbered in the hundreds, as “peaceful,” officers said the situation deteriorated as the activists marched west toward the Portland Police Association building near the park. A riot was declared by police before midnight.

“By 10:30 p.m., the large group reached the PPA office. As the group approached, Portland Police began making public address announcements informing the crowd they were to not to engage in criminal activities,” the bulletin said.

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“People within the crowd committed crimes when they erected a fence, pushed dumpsters into the street to block traffic, set a dumpster on fire, vandalized the PPA office with spray paint, and destroyed security cameras,” it said.

Journalist Shauna Sowersby shared video of the riot on Twitter:

Police also said rioters threw glass bottles and paint balloons at officers and assaulted them with laser pointers. Three officers were injured, and two of them were treated and released by a local hospital. The rioters also tore down a barricade protecting the police union building and set a fire inside.

Sowersby shared video of the fire reported inside the Portland Police Association building.

“Personnel from Portland Fire and Rescue were able to gain access to the location and extinguish the fire inside the PPA Office,” police said.

Nine arrests were made during the riot, which carried over into Sunday morning, police said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Johnathan Jones

Johnathan has authored thousands of news articles throughout his career. He has also worked as an editor and producer in radio and television. He is a proud husband and father.

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Political

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George Floyd Police Bodycam Footage Released – Floyd Resisted Arrest, Said He ‘Couldn’t Breathe’ While Standing and Breathing (VIDEO)

Reported By Cristina Laila | Published August 3, 2020 at 6:45pm

URL of the originating web site: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/08/george-floyd-police-bodycam-footage-released-floyd-resisted-arrest-said-couldnt-breathe-standing-breathing-video/

The Daily Mail UK obtained George Floyd police bodycam footage which shows the moments before and during Floyd’s arrest.

George Floyd died on May 25 after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for 8 minutes during an arrest. Officers were called to the scene after George Floyd used a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes at a convenient store.

The bodycam footage shows George Floyd wailing in pain before any of the cops touched him.

Floyd also kept telling the officers he’s claustrophobic as a way to resist arrest. He said over and over again, “I can’t breathe” after the police officers put him in the back of the cruiser. Police officers knew he was on drugs. George Floyd, who had an extensive criminal history, resisted arrest – he resisted as police officers tried to put him in the back of the cruiser.

Transcripts of the arrest were previously released, and on Monday for first time the full police bodycam footage was released to the public.

WATCH (video via Daily Mail):

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Cristina Laila

Cristina began writing for The Gateway Pundit in 2016 and she is currently the Associate Editor.

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Law

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GEORGE FLOYD

Tucker Carlson Asks the Ultimate Question: How Can Democrats Run the US When They Hate It?

Commentary By Joe Saunders | Published July 7, 2020 at 10:52am

It’s the question every American should be asking heading into November, but Tucker Carlson said it out loud. It wasn’t polite. It wasn’t politically correct. But it’s an answer every voter should know before casting a ballot on Election Day: How can Americans trust liberals to lead the country when they’ve spent the past months proving how much they loathe it?

In his monologue Monday night, the Fox News host, who has had his own share of run-ins with the violent left, used liberals’ own words and actions to back up his point, and contrasted them with President Donald Trump’s speech Friday at Mount Rushmore to drive it home.

Besides delivering a paean to the greatness of American history and the figures who created it — white and black, male and female — Trump slammed the Black Lives Matter riots that have taken place across the country. The anarchy under the guise of what the mainstream media blithely refer to as “mostly peaceful protests” has the ostensible aim of targeting alleged “systemic racism” — but the real target is the United States as a whole.

“Make no mistake, this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution,” the president said.

“In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery and progress.

“To make this possible, they are determined to tear down every statue, symbol and memory of our national heritage.”

And for Carlson, those words said it all.

“Trump is the most dangerous to his enemies when he tells the truth,” the Fox News host said. “In fact, they’re his enemies precisely because sometimes he does tell the truth and he did the other day.”

Check out his full monologue here. It’s about 13 minutes long, but for anyone who missed it Monday night, it’s well worth the time. It contained Carlson’s own paean to the country, reminders of exactly why the United States is the place countless millions born elsewhere want to live.

About the 10:30 mark, Carlson zeroed in on Joe Biden, the man who spent 36 years in the U.S. Senate before going on to another eight years as vice president. Biden should be overflowing with gratitude for the country that has given him and his family a life in politics probably far better than he could ever have earned in the honest world.

And what did the man who’s sewn up the Democratic nomination for president offer in a speech supposedly celebrating this great nation’s birthday?

“A full-throated attack on the United States,” Carlson said.

Then he played a clip of Biden’s Independence Day message.

“Our country was founded on an idea, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created.’ We never lived up to it,” the Democrat said.

“Jefferson himself didn’t. He held slaves. Women were excluded.

“American history is no fairy tale. It’s been a constant push and pull between two parts of our character. The idea that all men and women and all people are created equal, and the racism that has torn us apart. …

“We have a chance to rip the roots of systemic racism out of this country.”

If it weren’t so laughable, it would be enraging.

Joe Biden is talking about a chance to rip up the “roots of systemic racism” in this country”? This is a man who’s spent his entire life in American government.

Biden spent the early parts of his career kissing up to the arch-segregationists who were the power of his party for so long, and now he’s spending the last years of it sucking up to the new segregationists of the Black Lives Matter movement. If there were systemic racism to be ripped up, Biden had a lifetime to work on it. In the vice president’s office, he had eight years working with the country’s first black president — so it really should have come up, if it were present.

But it wasn’t and it’s not. It’s another liberal lie that’s being used as a weapon to undermine the country at its foundations — exactly what could be expected from a group that has moved from political opposition to one doing its damndest to teach Americans to hate themselves.

Joe Biden and the modern Democratic Party that’s trying to install him in the White House can talk all they want about how much they “love” this country, but their deeds show the exact opposite. And Tucker Carlson called it out.

“It’s long been considered out-of-bounds to question a person’s patriotism. It’s a very strong charge, and we try not ever to make it,” Carlson said.

“But in the face of all of this, the conclusion can’t be avoided — these people actually hate America. There’s no longer a question about that. And yet paradoxically, at the same time, they desperately want to control America more than anything.”

Those are strong words, but the behavior of the Democratic Party and its supporters merit them. There was a time when this all could have been chalked up to fanatical opposition to the administration.

The lies of Rep. Adam Schiff that led up to the ludicrous impeachment trial, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Maleficient-level treatment of Trump, the endless propaganda of the mainstream media, was all rough stuff, but it was politics, and politics is no game of beanbag.

What the country has witnessed over the past month has been something different, and far more malevolent. It’s the difference between “opposition” and “resistance.” The Democratic Party chose the latter at the beginning of the Trump presidency, and the country is now seeing the fruits of that decision.

The fact is, the indefensible death of a man in police custody in Minneapolis has been used to unleash the worst, basest instincts of a sizable group of Americans twisted by their own ignorance into despising the country they should love. The Democratic Party has chosen them as a vessel to return to power in the White House and in doing so has betrayed its own apparent loathing for America itself — an imperfect country they will never forgive for its imperfections.

There are still months to go before Election Day, and it’s entirely possible there will be an epiphany of some kind on the Democratic side that puts a stop to the party’s descent into nihilism. (Contrary to all evidence, there are still millions of decent men and women misguided enough to identify as Democrats. You might even know a few.)

But it’s still a question every American voter needs to ask and answer before casting a ballot in November:

How can Americans trust liberals to lead the country when they’re bent on proving to the country and each other how much they loathe it?

And Tucker Carlson asked it out loud.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Joe Saunders

Story Editor

Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.

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Race Stats for Protesters Finally Come Out, Destroy Leftist Narrative

Reported By C. Douglas Golden | Published June 27, 2020 at 11:39am

URL of the originating web site: https://www.westernjournal.com/race-stats-protesters-finally-come-destroy-leftist-narrative/

The headline of the news release from the Pew Research Center was a master class in trying to make the headline fit the prevailing narrative: “Recent protest attendees are more racially and ethnically diverse, younger than Americans overall.”

“Large-scale protests and rallies for racial equality have captured public attention and amplified calls for policy reforms in recent weeks,” the Wednesday article began.

“Some 6% of U.S. adults say they have attended a protest or rally that focused on issues related to race or racial equality in the last month, and those who have are more likely to be nonwhite and younger than Americans overall, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. They are also more likely to live in an urban area and to identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party.”

Let’s say you stopped reading there. What would be your takeaways on the reading comprehension tests? a) Lots of people attended these protests. b) Those people skewed nonwhite. c) They tended to be urban and Democratic in nature.

You’d only get a high-D, however — 67 percent right.

As for what you got correct: a) Yes, 6 percent is a high number. c) The crowds were urban and tended to vote for Democrats.

As for b) — well, let’s talk about that.

The Pew Research Center’s survey of protest-goers is heavily dependent on what you’re willing to consider “more likely to be nonwhite and younger than Americans overall.”

Younger? Yes, definitely. “About four-in-ten (41%) of those who say they recently attended a protest focused on race are younger than 30; among all U.S. adults, 19% are in this age group,” Pew said.

“In turn, those ages 50 and older are underrepresented among the protesters, while those ages 30 to 49 represent a similar share of those who have attended a protest as they do of the adult population overall.”

The problem comes out when you look at how many people who attended protests that were supposed to be about black people achieving racial justice were actually black.

“Black Americans account for 17% of those who say they attended a protest focused on race or racial equality in the last month, compared with their 11% share of all adults in the survey,” the news release said.

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“Hispanic Americans account for 22% of recent protest attendees, versus 15% of all adults. The difference is less pronounced but still statistically significant when it comes to the share of protesters who are Asian (8% vs. 5% of the adults surveyed). While 64% of U.S. adults are white, just 46% of those who said they attended a protest focused on race in the last month are white.”

The results came from a web survey managed by Ipsos of 9,654 respondents between June 4 and June 10. The margin of error was 1.6 percentage points. So, the difference between the share of adult black respondents and the percentage of black individuals in attendance at the protests in which the Black Lives Matter movement played a large part and which were perceived to be about black Americans standing up for their rights was just 6 percentage points.

The vast majority of people who were protesting for racial equality, in other words, weren’t black.

This wasn’t at all like the skew of Democrats-to-Republicans.

“When it comes to political party affiliation, about eight-in-ten (79%) of those who say they participated in a protest or rally focused on race or racial equality in the last month identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, while just 17% say they are Republican or Republican-leaning,” the news release said.

Meanwhile, 51 percent of all adult respondents in the survey said they were Democrats or leaned Democrat, compared to the 44 percent who were Republican or leaned Republican.” And yet, both Democrats and Republicans expressed outrage at the death of George Floyd.

I suppose part of the difference could be explained by the fact that the average Republican probably isn’t going to show up to a protest with a “Trump Supporters 4 Justice” sign, but the reality is that this is about something significantly different than requesting justice for Floyd.

This is nothing short of Democrats and the media using black pain as a prop for themselves.

While many black Americans may be frustrated with their treatment by law enforcement, that’s largely not who was protesting. The demonstrators, according to this survey, were within 5 percentage points of being majority white. But that’s not what the narrative was — and that’s likely not what the narrative will remain.

Facts and narrative, however, are two very separate things, no matter how hard the Pew Research Center wants to make them fit.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

C. Douglas Golden

Contributor, Commentary

C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal for four years.

@CillianZeal

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Oakland Abolishes School Police Department

Reported by JOEL B. POLLAK | 25 Jun 2020

URL of the originating web site: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/06/25/oakland-abolishes-school-police-department/

Abolish the police Oakland (Philip Pachedo / AFP / Getty)

The Oakland Unified School District abolished its own police force at a school board meeting on Wednesday night, bowing to the wishes of radical left-wing activists and the Black Lives Matter movement.

The decision came a day after the Los Angeles Unified School District board could not agree on a similar proposal. It follows nationwide demands from activists, including many Democrats, to defund or abolish the police.

The San Jose Mercury News reported:

In an unanimous vote, the board passed the “George Floyd Resolution to Eliminate Oakland Schools Police Department.” The annual $2.5 million spent on the 10 sworn officers and police administrators is instead expected to be redirected toward other student support services and restorative justice efforts.

Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell has from August until Dec. 31 to build a new alternative safety plan, which will include input from a committee of community members and other stakeholders.

Of the nearly 30 speakers who addressed the board Wednesday, all were in favor of the elimination of the police force. Some spoke about how black and brown students can feel dehumanized, disrespected and generally not safe with having police on campus. Others urged the board to set an example for the nation in their act of removing police.

The organization Black Organizing Project helped craft and bring the resolution to the board. Jessica Black, its organizing director, addressed the board about the importance of the resolution and her organization’s fight for the last 10 year[s] to remove the police from schools.

Meanwhile, across the bay in San Francisco, the board voted to sever ties with the local police department. Police provide protection for schools against gang violence in the hallways and mass shooting events.

Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly disagree with the idea of defunding or abolishing the police, though some surveys show a majority of Democrats favor the idea.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Mostly Peaceful Riots

A.F. BRANCO | on June 26, 2020 at 7:00 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-mostly-peaceful-riots/

The Marxist-stream media are ignoring the violent mobs rioting across the country claiming it’s a mostly peaceful protest. It’s no longer about George Floyd.

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!…

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.

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BLM Co-Founder Admits Their Goal Is Just To ‘Get Trump Out,’ Alienates Black Trump Supporters

Reported By C. Douglas Golden | Published June 21, 2020 at 1:50pm

URL of the originating web site: https://www.westernjournal.com/blm-co-founder-admits-goal-just-get-trump-alienates-black-trump-supporters/

It’s probably a good question, before we go forward on a wider cultural discussion that involves unanimous consent for the three-word construct “black lives matter,” what those words really mean. The phrase itself, unless your views on race and culture are rebarbative, is axiomatic and has been since it was coined over a half-decade ago. You could plug almost any group into the blank space in “_______ lives matter” and you’d be right. This isn’t what it means.

The general conclusion we’ve reached over the gut-wrenching past few weeks, ever since the events leading up to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody was available to watch by anyone with a cell phone, is that it means something nebulous-ish involving the force of the state being brought to bear on people of color in an inappropriate manner. The problem is that “nebulous-ish” part. The group Black Lives Matter was never quite just an official organization, it also wasn’t just a hashtag. This means that while it currently has one foot in mainstream acceptance, another foot remains in its roots as an organization on the far-ish reaches of the left.

If you wanted evidence of this residual hard-leftist slant, you need have looked no further than Patrisse Cullors’ appearance on CNN on Friday. Cullors was one of the founders of the movement back in 2013 and has remained one of its most prominent voices, which means she’s in demand again. On Friday, she appeared on CNN to discuss the movement and what its goals were. You may not be surprised at one of them:

During the interview on “The Lead,” Jake Tapper and his perma-scrunched face asked Cullors just what is it she wanted to do — at least when it came to the election.

“I’ve heard a lot of criticism of former Vice President Joe Biden from civil rights activists,” Tapper said.

“The election, obviously, will be a choice. How do you think Biden matches up compared to President Trump when it comes to these issues that are important to you?”

“Trump not only needs to not be in office in November, but he should resign now,” Cullors said.

“Trump needs to be out of office. He is not fit for office. And so what we are going to push for is a move to get Trump out. While we’re also going to continue to push and pressure Vice President Joe Biden around his policies and relationship to policing and criminalization. That’s going to be important. But our goal is to get Trump out.”

In other words, at a basic level, this isn’t really about black lives — at least not for Cullors. After all, if Cullors’ belief is that all black people are in danger from a bigoted law enforcement structure, the obvious choice would be to work not only with white allies but also black individuals who make common cause with Trump on enough issues to vote for him.

And even though the possibility that Trump has support among black voters, polling from as recently as June 5 shows the incumbent president with black support that should give Democrats nightmares.

Of course, Democrats won’t buy that number. And the mainstream media won’t be trying to sell it. But the point is, Rasmussen is a respectable polling organization. If Trump is running at 40 percent black voter support — or even half that number — he’s getting more support in that segment of the electorate than leftists believe.

And if that Rasmussen number is anywhere near correct, the woman who is accepted as speaking for Black Lives Matter is ignoring a substantial number of actual black lives in the United States. But building unity in the black community, or even reaching out to black Trump supporters, is not what this wing of Black Lives Matter is about. It’s about beating Donald Trump.

Now, the thing with Black Lives Matter is that Cullors does not — in fact, cannot — speak for the entire movement. That’s a weakness, both when it comes to organization and leadership, but it’s a strength when it comes to nailing down the protean nature of the organization. Black Lives Matter is more than just a slogan, but the great thing for its principals is that it’s like a slogan: It means exactly what you want it to mean.

It’s also good to know that at the same time Black Lives Matter is demanding redress for centuries-old issues, it’s ostensibly throwing its weight behind the Democratic Party, which was — in some of our lifetimes — the party of segregation and Jim Crow. (And as a relatively young senator in the 1970s, Biden had no problems buddying up to some of its most segregationist members.)

Cullors ignores this racist history.

And notice how Cullors makes it clear that her group needs to need to “pressure Vice President Joe Biden around his policies and relationship to policing and criminalization.” In other words, they know the former veep’s record around policing in this country

But this is just one voice, you may say. True — and therein lies the advantage.

Black Lives Matter is whatever you think it is, at least when it’s ingratiating itself to the public. Give its members a modicum of power, however, and you’ll see that change posthaste, especially in the run-up to the 2020 election.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

C. Douglas Golden

Contributor, Commentary

@CillianZeal

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Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Stand for Freedom

A.F. BRANCO | on June 9, 2020 at 7:40 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-stand-for-freedom/

If You’re white you better kneel or you aren’t woke but free people should never kneel to anyone.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Life Alert!

A.F. BRANCO | on June 9, 2020 at 1:11 pm | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-life-alert/

Nancy Pelosi, along with Schumer is pandering to Black America by kneeling wearing kente cloth.

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump

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Pelosi Catches Fire for New Low in Pandering: Kneels Before Introducing ‘Justice in Policing’ Act

Reported By Joe Saunders | Published June 8, 2020 at 12:21pm

URL of the originating web site: https://www.westernjournal.com/pelosi-catches-fire-new-low-pandering-kneels-introducing-police-reform-act/

Nancy Pelosi has been lowering herself — and American politics — for decades now. But on Monday, she did it literally.

As the country heads into President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election bid, the crassly opportunistic (and maliciously anti-Trump) House speaker clearly hopes to capitalize on a wave of anti-police sentiment, stemming from the May 25 death of George Floyd after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for roughly nine minutes during an arrest, to defeat Trump’s campaign.

Claiming that police are the real problem, Democrats at the local level are working to “defund police” forces in their communities — and leave the minorities they claim to care about even more vulnerable to crime. The mainstream media is doing its ever-predictable part by portraying an astonishing orgy of riot and looting as some kind of heir to the dignified, morally driven protests of the civil rights movement.

And now comes House Speaker Pelosi herself, ostentatiously taking a knee in the ornate surroundings of Emancipation Hall (formerly the Great Hall) in the nation’s Capitol before introducing a bill to put a new set of federal regulations onto the nation’s locally controlled police forces.

Congressional Democrats take a knee as they observe a nearly nine minute moment of silence for George Floyd at Emancipation Hall at the U.S. Capitol. https://t.co/JnqDlzMFDq pic.twitter.com/8CBdgtLUjz

— ABC News (@ABC) June 8, 2020

The bill, officially known as the “Justice in Policing Act,” is ostensibly intended to “hold law enforcement accountable in court, improve transparency through data collection, and reform police training and policies.” What it’s more likely intended to do is whip up Democratic voters heading into the November election, and provide a patina of legislative covering to continuing unrest in overwhelmingly Democratic-controlled cities.

“The martyrdom of George Floyd gave American experience a moment of national anguish as we grieve for the black Americans killed by police brutality,” a somewhat garbled Pelosi said at a news conference after the kneeling ceremony.

“Today, this movement of national anguish is being transformed into a movement of national action as Americans from across the country peacefully protest to demand an end to injustice.”

For Democrats, it probably looked like a moment of perfect political theater.

But some of the online reviews were appropriately damning:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: "The martyrdom of George Floyd gave American experience a moment of national anguish as we grieve for the Black Americans killed by police brutality. Today, this moment of national anguish is being transformed into a movement of national action" pic.twitter.com/xu22quQaHQ

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) June 8, 2020

It’s interesting that this is a Democratic proposal, given that the highest-profile incidents of “police brutality” that Democrats seem to think is suddenly on an epidemic scale in the nation seem to crop up mainly in cities where Democrats have been in control for decades. Minneapolis, for instance, where Floyd died and where the city council now wants to disband the police force, is made up entirely of Democrats but for one Green Party member.

New York City, where a black vendor of illegal cigarettes named Eric Garner died after being arrested by police back in 2014, is staunchly Democratic.
Baltimore, where the death of a drug dealer named Freddie Gray in 2015 set off days of rioting, hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1967, as Breitbart has noted.

Its elected officials at the local and federal level (including the late Elijah Cummings) have done nothing to prevent Charm City from a descent into slums. These are just a few examples, and every American, Democrat and Republican, knows the truth.

Yet Democrats see themselves as the force to reform American police agencies? The reality is that the party is throwing anything it can at Trump and the possibility he will serve another term in the White House.

The three-year national nightmare known as the “Russia collusion” probe came up deservedly empty. The impeachment affair from the first month of the year was so ludicrous it’s almost hard to remember — at a remove of six months — the exact lies Rep. Adam Schiff and Co. were peddling.

When the coronavirus hit, Democrats thought they had their issue, but Trump’s handling of it compared far too favorably with other world leaders — and especially favorably to the obvious ineptitude of Democratic governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo and rumored Democratic vice presidential possibility Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

So now Pelosi’s Democrats have turned to the death of George Floyd and a national outbreak of looting and violence to try to convince American voters that the real problem the country has is racist police officers. It’s a desperate attempt to rally a dispirited Democratic base in time to win a 2020 election in which Democrats have pinned their hopes on a 77-year-old Joe Biden whose chief strength in the Democratic primaries was that he wasn’t Bernie Sanders.

He’s a man with a lifetime’s worth of political baggage, including the 1994 crime bill that Democrats despise today and a questionable past with China, not to mention endless accusations of improper behavior with women, as well as one serious claim of sexual assault.

Pelosi’s career has made clear for years that there’s really no depth she will not lower herself for the sake of political power — for herself and her party. On Monday, in the Capitol’s Emancipation Hall, she did it literally, for the whole world to see. And every voter needs to remember it in November.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Joe Saunders

Story Editor

Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.

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Black State Trooper Tells BLM Protester: ‘I Only Kneel’ to God

Reported By Joe Saunders | Published June 8, 2020 at 8:35am

URL of the originating web site: https://www.westernjournal.com/black-state-trooper-tells-blm-protester-i-only-kneel-to-god/

Ryan Fournier

✔@RyanAFournier

· 21h

This is Georgia State Trooper O’Neal Saddler.

He was asked to kneel today, and this was his response.

God Bless him!

Evan @Darefuhl

This is the kind of officer we need nation wide, much to respect this man.

975

2:26 PM – Jun 7, 2020

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Of course, there were a few liberal knuckleheads ready to jump in with irrelevant jibes (there was at least one mocking comparison to President Donald Trump’s visit to St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., for instance).

But the overwhelming majority of comments were approving — and grateful.

At a time when Americans are being assaulted daily with lies about the nation’s supposedly “racist” police forces based on the actions of the tiniest sliver of their membership, and watching as liberal politicians attack the men and women who actually protect law and order, a statement of quiet dignity and faith like the one out of Georgia carries weight.

But one state trooper, with a respectful demeanor and gentle logic that only added strength to his words, gave the answer that every law enforcement officer — and every American — should take to heart.

For free Americans, kneeling is reserved for one power only — and that’s not the rabble of Black Lives Matter movement.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Joe Saunders

Story Editor

Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.

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George Floyd Had Tested Positive for Coronavirus Before His Fatal Police Encounter

Reported by Shane Trejo | June 3, 2020

URL of the originating web site: https://bigleaguepolitics.com/george-floyd-had-tested-positive-for-coronavirus-before-his-fatal-police-encounter/

George Floyd, who has become a national rallying cry for rioters and looters across the nation since dying during a police encounter, tested positive for COVID-19 in the months prior to his death.

The full autopsy for Floyd was released on Wednesday from the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office. Chief Medical Examiner Andrew Baker said that Floyd had tested positive for the coronavirus on April 3 but was reportedly asymptomatic. He also noted that Floyd’s lungs looked fine at the autopsy but he had narrow arteries in his heart, which may have resulted in the heart attack during the police encounter.

Floyd died after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin placed his knee over his neck for nine minutes. He has now been charged with second-degree murder, as authorities tack on more charges against him in order to placate the left-wing mob at war with America.

Big League Politics has reported on the dueling autopsy reports, one from the Medical Examiner that claimed Floyd died due to a heart attack with another commissioned by Floyd’s family that claimed he died of asphyxia:

The Hennepin County Medical Examiner has announced that George Floyd, whose death during an encounter with Minneapolis police has set off nationwide riots, had fentanyl in his system during his passing with the cause of death being a heart attack.

The medical examiner claims that Floyd suffered “a cardiopulmonary arrest while being restrained by law enforcement.” In addition, the report claims that Floyd had used methamphetamine recently in addition to the fentanyl. They listed his cause of death as a homicide.

This comes shortly after the news that another medical examiner, brought onto the case by Floyd’s family attorney Benjamin Clump, determined that Floyd died from asphyxia. Forensic specialist Dr. Michael Baden determined that Floyd was dead for several minutes as he was being restrained with a knee to the back of the neck by former law enforcement officer Derek Chauvin, who is being charged with ~~third~~ second-degree murder and manslaughter…

Baden made the case that Floyd was in good health, and the asphyxia was caused solely by Chauvin’s actions. He also determined that the handcuffs and positioning of Floyd on the ground did not allow his diaphragm to function properly, which exacerbated the asphyxia.

“When he said ‘I can’t breathe,’ unfortunately, many police are under impression that if you can talk that means you’re breathing. That is not true,” he said during the news conference.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Fiddle Dee and Fiddle Dumb

A.F. BRANCO | on June 4, 2020 at 7:40 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-fiddle-dee-and-fiddle-dumb/

Governor Cuomo and Mayor DeBlasio Fiddle like Nero while New York city burns refusing to ask for help from Trump.

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A. F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Feel the Burn

A.F. BRANCO | on June 3, 2020 at 7:40 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-feel-the-burn/

Violent leftist groups are destroying many black communities in the name of social justice as they blame Trump.

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.

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Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Unmasking

A.F. BRANCO | on May 29, 2020 at 7:00 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-unmasking/

Press Secretary McEnany hammers the press corp into submission and exposing them as the Democrat hacks they are.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – No Peace, No Justice

A.F. BRANCO | on May 29, 2020 at 1:27 pm | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-no-peace-no-justice/

Minnesota Business owners get a worse deal from the press that the rioters and the looters in Minneapolis.

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.

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Posts tagged ‘GEORGE FLOYD’

Branco Cartoon – The Falling Star

EXCLUSIVE: 5 years later: Justice after George Floyd? The dismissed lawsuit revealing the truth—and Derek Chauvin’s response

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By: Elle Purnell | March 12, 2025

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BY: SCOTT S. POWELL | APRIL 29, 2024

Demoralization

Disorientation

Crisis

Normalization

Scott Powell is senior fellow at Discovery Institute and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. His recent book, “Rediscovering America,” was the No. 1 Amazon New Release in the history genre for eight weeks. Reach him at scottp@discovery.org.

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BY: JOHN COHEN | JUNE 22, 2023

John Cohen is an Investigative Fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. He holds a B.A. in Molecular Biology and Public Health from Hampshire College and a M.A in Security Studies from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service.

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BY: JONATHAN S. TOBIN | MAY 08, 2023

Broader Racial Ramifications

Parallels to 1984 Case

Leftist Campaign Against Justice

Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for Newsweek. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.

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BY: MARK HEMINGWAY | FEBRUARY 22, 2023

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BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | JANUARY 30, 2023

Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.

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BY: EDDIE SCARRY | OCTOBER 19, 2022

Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Liberal Misery: How the Hateful Left Sucks Joy Out of Everything and Everyone.”

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Commentary by JASON WHITLOCK | June 20, 2022

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REPORTED BY: CASEY CHALK | MARCH 04, 2022

Refunding the Police

Surrendering to Pandemic Fatigue

Mugged by Reality

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Reported by NEWSCHRIS ENLOE | May 04, 2021

What does this mean for the Chauvin trial?

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Reported by JORDAN LANCASTER, REPORTER | April 26, 2021

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – Not Peaceful or Patriotic

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Critical Child Abuse

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Posted by William A. Jacobson | Monday, April 19, 2021

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Commentary by Ann Coulter |Posted: Mar 31, 2021

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

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Reported by Emily Larsen, Political Reporter | September 01, 2020 06:47 AM

Overnight in Indianapolis, Indiana, three people were shot, and one was killed amid the riots.

In Chicago, six people were shot, one fatally, amid protests and looting downtown.

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The Daily Mail UK obtained George Floyd police bodycam footage which shows the moments before and during Floyd’s arrest.

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“Make no mistake, this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution,” the president said.

“In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery and progress.

“To make this possible, they are determined to tear down every statue, symbol and memory of our national heritage.”

“It’s long been considered out-of-bounds to question a person’s patriotism. It’s a very strong charge, and we try not ever to make it,” Carlson said.

“But in the face of all of this, the conclusion can’t be avoided — these people actually hate America. There’s no longer a question about that. And yet paradoxically, at the same time, they desperately want to control America more than anything.”

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The vast majority of people who were protesting for racial equality, in other words, weren’t black.

This is nothing short of Democrats and the media using black pain as a prop for themselves.

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Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell has from August until Dec. 31 to build a new alternative safety plan, which will include input from a committee of community members and other stakeholders.

The organization Black Organizing Project helped craft and bring the resolution to the board. Jessica Black, its organizing director, addressed the board about the importance of the resolution and her organization’s fight for the last 10 year[s] to remove the police from schools.

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – Mostly Peaceful Riots

The Marxist-stream media are ignoring the violent mobs rioting across the country claiming it’s a mostly peaceful protest. It’s no longer about George Floyd.

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – Stand for Freedom

If You’re white you better kneel or you aren’t woke but free people should never kneel to anyone.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Life Alert!

Nancy Pelosi, along with Schumer is pandering to Black America by kneeling wearing kente cloth.

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Nancy Pelosi has been lowering herself — and American politics — for decades now. But on Monday, she did it literally.

Reported by NEWS CHRIS ENLOE | May 04, 2021