Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

The image of someone carrying the flag of secession into the Capitol shocked lawmakers and the public alike. House Democratic Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said on CNN that this specific flag was never formally adopted by the Confederacy, but has since been used by the KKK, neo-Nazis and various other white supremacist groups. 

“That is something that will stay with me,” Allred told the newspaper. “They set up a noose and scaffolding on the Capitol Hill. This event has to be a wake-up call.”

In addition, authorities in Pinellas County, Florida arrested Adam Christian Johnson, who they said was the man who appeared in viral photos carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern. 

Organizers were preparing for an expected crowd of 5,000 on Tuesday and more than 30,000 throughout the week, according to permits issued by the National Park Service.

Some of the speakers during the rally at the Freedom Plaza delivered aggressive speeches claiming the groups were “at war,” targeting Republicans in Congress who have refused to protest the results of the election.

“I hope the Democrats, and even more importantly, the weak and ineffective RINO section of the Republican Party, are looking at the thousands of people pouring into D.C. They won’t stand for a landslide election victory to be stolen,” Mr. Trump said, using the acronym for “Republican in Name Only.”

Yet despite Mr. Biden’s clear win, many of Mr. Trump’s allies were slated to speak at the protests this week and continue to promote the president’s false claims, including Roger J. Stone Jr. and George Papadopoulos, former Trump campaign advisers who recently received pardons.

In December, violent clashes in Washington between supporters of Mr. Trump and counterprotesters left four people with stab wounds. Preparing for similar brawls, the National Guard said on Monday it would dispatch about 340 troops to the rallies, responding to Ms. Bowser’s request for additional security.

Protesters have trickled to the Capitol since Monday, many without masks and crowded close together as they carried Trump flags and “Stop the Steal” banners.

There is commotion far down a hallway, and someone tells Mr. Evans that some people are trying to break into one of the chambers. He turns away and walks down the hall, shouting, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe we’re in here right now! Who thought this was going to happen today?” He then tries to start a chant of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” As the video ends several minutes later, he appears to be looking for an exit.

In a statement on Facebook on Wednesday evening, Mr. Evans said that he has “traveled across the country to film many different events,” and that earlier he had “had the opportunity to film at another event in DC.”

“I was simply there as an independent member of the media to film history.”

Roger Hanshaw, said in a statement on Wednesday night that he had “not spoken to Delegate Evans about today’s events,”

though he said he saw what was posted on social media. He added that “storming government buildings and participating in a violent intentional disruption of one of our nation’s most fundamental political institutions is a crime that should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Social media’s scale and searchability is such that anybody looking to believe almost anything can quickly and easily find what seems like evidence to support that belief, then push it out to a wider and wider circle. In the past few days, factions of political factions have coalesced around cherry-picked pieces of reality or fondly held bits of delusion.

It should be simple: antifa or “patriots”? The choice between claiming responsibility and passing it off is an ideological line in the sand for each person who makes it. At the same time, the online MAGA world’s stutter step in this moment illustrates just how flexible reality can appear online, particularly in the thick of a breaking news event. And particularly in the hands of people who don’t care what the truth is, and are interested only in whether it can serve them.

As she marched through Washington, D.C., on Wednesday afternoon, an Instagram parenting and travel blogger who goes by @thatboldmama asked her followers why they were mad at “Americans fighting back,” insisting that “storming the US Capitol is NOT violent.” She seemed surprised to be receiving pushback. By yesterday morning, she was fully on board with the antifa theory, and sharing posts about how the event must have been staged. When I reached out to her, she referred me to one of her posts: “Don't let the news media FOOL you,” she wrote. “It was a great day until NON Patriots breached” the Capitol.

Mr. Meredith told The Journal-Constitution in 2018 that he had put up the QAnon billboard because he was “a patriot among the millions who love this country.”

In another text message, accompanied by a purple devil emoji, he said he had “a ton of 5.56 armor piercing ammo.” In other text messages, he referred to Ms. Pelosi with misogynistic slurs and threatened to run her over, the F.B.I. said.

The American people witnessed Mr. Trump’s actions for themselves. We all saw his speech on Jan. 6. We watched his fanatics storm the Capitol at his request. Five people died, including a U.S. Capitol Police officer and four of the president’s supporters. We fear what Mr. Trump may do with his remaining time in office.

What happened last Wednesday was an abomination. There is no question about that. There is also no question that Mr. Trump becomes more of a threat to public safety by the moment.The only question now is what Congress will do about it.

"to expel members to voted to overturn the election and incited a white supremacist coup that has left people dead. They have violated the 14th Amendment,"

House impeaches Trump this week, the earliest the Senate could begin to take it up would be January 19

Gail: New York prosecution has some advantages: no worries about the president prepardoning himself on the way out the door. Don’t know if that’s possible anyway, but it definitely wouldn’t work on nonfederal charges.

Republicans have long ignored Trump’s habit of openly using violent rhetoric that puts people at risk. GOP lawmakers, when asked whether they support what Trump says, have consistently tried to pretend they never see his tweets. Or they insist the tweets don’t matter. Or they simply refuse to weigh in on what he’s said.

“If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Just knock the hell out of them.” At another campaign rally that year, he said of a protester: “I’d like to punch him in the face.”

“The audience swung back. And I thought it was very, very appropriate,” he said in an interview. “He was swinging, he was hitting people and the audience hit back. And that’s what we need a little bit more of.”

Trump has constantly demonized the media and encouraged his supporters to treat journalists as “the enemy of the people.” He berates and belittles reporters when they ask him questions he doesn’t like, becoming particularly incensed when female journalists challenge him.

A violent and largely white mob of Trump supporters overpowered police, broke through security lines and windows and rampaged through the Capitol, forcing lawmakers to scatter as they were finalizing Biden’s victory over Trump in the Electoral College.

“We will act with urgency, because this President represents an imminent threat,” Pelosi said in a letter late Sunday to colleagues emphasizing the need for quick action.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says the House will proceed with legislation to impeach Trump as she pushes the vice president and the Cabinet to invoke constitutional authority to force him out, warning that Trump is a threat to democracy after the deadly assault on the Capitol.

“The horror of the ongoing assault on our democracy perpetrated by this President is intensified and so is the immediate need for action.”

Pence has given no indication he would act on the 25th Amendment. If he does not, the House would move toward impeachment.

“I think the president has disqualified himself from ever, certainly, serving in office again,” Toomey said. “I don’t think he is electable in any way.”

Potentially complicating Pelosi’s decision about impeachment was what it meant for Biden and the beginning of his presidency. While reiterating that he had long viewed Trump as unfit for office, Biden on Friday sidestepped a question about impeachment, saying what Congress did “is for them to decide.”

The Capitol’s attending physician notified all lawmakers Sunday of the virus exposure and urged them to be tested. The infected individual was not named.

Trump is now facing impeachment after having incited supporters who were rallying near the White House before they marched to the Capitol. The House could vote on impeachment in a matter of days, less than two weeks before Democratic President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20.

Authorities on Sunday announced the death of a 51-year-old Capitol Police officer. Two people familiar with the matter said the officer’s death was an apparent suicide. Officer Howard Liebengood had been assigned to the Senate Division and was with the department since 2005. He is the son of a former Senate sergeant-at-arms.

Now, to the East, this behaviour is both jaw-dropping and bewildering. It goes beyond mere irresponsibility, and is considered something more like stupidity, ignorance, malice, deceit, or all four

That is what civilization is, and where it begins: the presence of the very first kind of enlightened mind, which can nourish, protect, and elevate another

What does Mead’s Femur have do with the West’s stunning failure that let Covid spiral out of control? As it turns out, everything.

These days, the tourists are gone, mostly. But — and here’s the point — the bars, restaurants, and clubs are still full. I pass by them on my daily walk to the park and wonder: what are these people doing? How are they sitting there so close to one another, with no social distancing in place, laughing, joking in the middle of a literal pandemic that’s exploding all around them? What the?

The people I pass by in the bars are made of two social groups, largely. Young people, and the working class. That’s the same group, in a sense, since most young people are working class, until they amass enough wealth to rise beyond it

They have made a choice. Their beer and burger or cocktail and steak matters more than stopping the spread of a deadly disease. What the?

This group is putting the most vulnerable in society at profound risk. Those who are already ill, and immunocompromised. Those even lower down the socioeconomic ladder than them — minorities, the underclass, and so forth, among whom death rates are astronomical. The elderly, the frail, the aged.

Certain groups in Western society have made the decision that the vulnerable’s lives matter less than their right to party, to have a beer and a burger, a cocktail and a steak, a laugh at the pub with friends. What the?

The groups who are now apparently completely indifferent to spreading Covid seem to have taken their cues from leaders. Young people and the working class seem to have no conscience or compunction left whatsoever about spreading Covid

To act in such a way as to put your elders, or the ill, especially, at risk, is something that is a grave violation of social norms. Easterners can’t understand why Westerners are behaving like…spoiled children. Are they right?

There is a kind of toxic indifference that seems to have spread through Western societies. Life itself is treated with a kind of shrugging fatalism — especially those of the vulnerable. It is literally valued less than a night out at the pub by much of society.

The attitude of toxic indifference is what the West seems to share in common now, and that is why it has been brought to its knees by Covid.

the West” is not monolithic. Certainly, toxic indifference is not at the same level across all of it

let me discuss the most extreme examples — America and Britain — to highlight where toxic indifference comes from: leadership.

In Britain and America, Covid cases have now exploded well past their first peak. America is approaching 100,000 cases per day — the point at which social breakdown will begin. Britain is hitting more than that, on a per capita basis. And yet neither of these societies has a national lockdown.

uccessful societies — New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam, and many more — deliberately crunched the curve. Their strategy was to eradicate Covid, through what’s now a global template of best practices — lock down, test, trace, quarantine, isolate, and so forth.

The approach of Western leaders, in other words, was reactive, hesitant, and cautious, not decisive, swift, and proactive:

Margaret Mead once said that the beginning of human civilisation was found in a healed femur. That that single, simple discovery meant that someone took the time to invest in healing someone else’s broken leg — without which they surely would have died

Western leaders, in other words, modelled toxic indifference for their societies. They gave people a license to be indifferent, by acting largely indifferent themselves.

Young people justify it by saying that “they need to have social lives” — as if they weren’t spending most of their social lives online before Covid, and the working class by saying they need to work. Both of those arguments are partially true. But it’s truer to say that these are groups which have become dangerously indifferent to preserving the value of the lives of the vulnerable.

The young and the working class are punching down, as American leftists would put it.

More formally, more accurately, Covid has made Western societies predatory ones. The young and working class are exploiting and abusing those more powerless than them

Neither group seems to consider the possibility much that society needs to come together to defeat the pandemic, once and for all, and the only way that can be done is to put the vulnerable first.

America treating Covid indifferently is no surprise, after all — it’s a nation where kids are gunned down in schools, diabetics are simply left to die, people beg strangers online for money to pay for crippling healthcare costs

But it’s more surprising to see Europe turning predatory due to Covid, or having Covid expose its vulnerability to becoming predatory

I don’t mean to single the young and working class out. That is missing my point. What I am saying is that toxic indifference is trickling down in the West. From elites, like leaders, to the bourgeois — that’s been the case for the last few decades

Indifference is trickling down from the elite and the bourgeois, to the working class and the young.

we know where a society of indifference ends. It ends in America. In stupidity, ignorance, violence, hate, racism, brutality, and the poverty and despair which underlies it all.

The indifferent cannot act collectively, therefore they cannot invest, transform, change, unite, come together, and therefore they cannot live in a modern, functioning society, with an expansive, sophisticated, supportive, generous social contract

So what about climate change? Mass extinction? Ecological collapse? The massive waves of depression and ruin those will unleash — in the next decade? How can societies that can’t unite, act wisely, behave responsibly to fight Covid come together to do much about even larger catastrophes?

Covid reveals the decivilizing of the West. As I mentioned, Margaret Mead said the fundamental test of civilization is the healed femur: that someone took the time and effort to heal someone else. It is the absence of indifference and the presence of care, in other words

What made the West special, once upon a time, was not its brutality, but its idea of civilization, as the elevation and nourishment of every life, with dignity, purpose, belonging, truth, justice, and, more crucially, the idea that freedom was a society that was able to act in a civilised way.

freedom became free-dumb: the idea that my right to be abusive, exploitative, ignorant, violent, selfish — to carry a gun to Starbucks or deny you healthcare and retirement — came to prevail

If the pattern of the West’s decaying attitudes, the spread of the foolish American idea of free-dumb as “freedom,” is what Covid has revealed — I punch down, on the person below me, I exploit and abuse the person even lower than me in the socioeconomic hierarchy, because that is what I must do to survive, or at least what I have been taught to do to feel good and worthy — then the simple fact is that the West has little future

Their failure teaches us something. Civilization matters. When a society gives up on the idea of being civilized, it collapses harder and faster than its most learned wise men often imagine. That is because no society can withstand a tidal wave of stupidity and violence. Is that where the West is headed?

In a simpler way, maybe the simplest, what I am talking about is a lack of simple human goodness. That is what Mead’s Femur points to — the presence of goodness — and it is what is missing in America and Britain. They are now societies with a massive, gaping, jaw-dropping lack of human goodness, and Covid is just the latest example. But that deficit spells real trouble — it isn’t some kind of abstract moral concern.

Covid is a cold wind, and it shows that the flame is flickering. If anything, it shows us the future of civilization — in Mead’s sense, as the absence of violence, and the presence of decency, dignity, care, nourishment, equality, of human goodness realized — may lie in the East.

According to a national survey conducted by The Upshot and Siena College, they aren’t so much fretting about themselves as they are anxious about the country.

They fear the next generation in America will be worse off. Even some voters who say they are personally better off than four years ago say the country as a whole is worse off.

“I’ve never felt this way about our country,” said Jerry Thatcher, a 76-year-old Trump voter in Yamhill, Ore.

Diane Haller, a 50-year-old Biden supporter in Avon, Ohio, says President Trump has threatened the country’s foundations by bending the Department of Justice to his personal ends. “How is a democracy going to work if that’s allowed?” she said. “We’re just teetering, and it’s scary as all get-out.”

"I and our organization, marchers, demonstrators and potential voters left here sunken, sad, traumatized, obstructed and distracted from our intention to lead people all the way to the polls," said the march organizer,

"Let me tell you something: We were beaten, but we will not be broken," he added.

Video published by the Raleigh News & Observer appears to show demonstrators and law enforcement scuffling over sound equipment outside the Alamance County Courthouse. Alamance County sheriff's deputies wearing gray uniforms soon deploy pepper spray, and at least one deputy is seen spraying a man in the face. Others spray toward demonstrators' feet.

Lt. Sisk said Sunday officers allowed the march to pause for about 8 minutes and 40 seconds, but after 9 minutes marchers were told to clear the road.

"They started arresting people before our rally began,"

The Alamance County Sheriff's Office said it made arrests at the demonstration, citing "violations of the permit" Drumwright obtained to hold the rally.

"As a result, after violations of the permit, along with disorderly conduct by participants leading to arrests, the protest was deemed an unlawful assembly and participants were asked to leave."

The rally was scheduled from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. ET starting from Wayman's Chapel AME church, with an expected stop at the Confederate Monument at Court Square, before ending at a polling place on Elm Street, according to the flyer for the event.

At least eight people were arrested during the rally on various charges,

Later, a Graham officer was assaulted, Sisk said, and the rally was deemed unsafe and unlawful and law enforcement officers dispersed the crowd.

After five minutes, several people remained and officers again pepper sprayed the ground, authorities said.

"At no time during this event did any member of the Graham Police Department directly spray any participant in the march with chemical irritants,"

Sisk called the irritant a "pepper fogger" similar to OC spray, commonly referred to as pepper spray

"they suffered the same effects" of the pepper spray.

Sisk disputed that the march was "scheduled to go to the polls," saying the event was meant to stop at the courthouse where a rally would be held.

"We need the public to understand that we made every effort to coordinate with the planner of this event to ensure that it was successful," Sisk said, alleging it was organizers' intent to block the road, but authorities aimed to ensure safety of both demonstrators and others in downtown Graham.

the "peaceful protests" became violent "because law enforcement tried to take the sound equipment," he tweeted.

Rain Bennett, another attendee, told CNN that demonstrators stopped at Court Square for an eight-minute moment of silence for George Floyd following the march, and that "police presence was there and they had no problem with that."

"Everybody is coughing and kind of running away," he said, adding that it was "really confusing because it'd been fine."

The incident was criticized by a number of officials and civil rights groups, including the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights, the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, whose executive director likened it to "voter intimidation."

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper shared the Raleigh News & Observer's article about the march on Twitter and called the incident "unacceptable."

"This is extremely concerning, and we need to get to the bottom of it," he said.

North Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Wayne Goodwin issued a statement condemning the actions of law enforcement, calling them "completely unwarranted police hostility and voter suppression."

"We thought there would be tons of people coming in after this event," Peppler told CNN. "We had extra people come on hand because the idea of this was that this gathering would end at the polls, but they broke it up over there at the courthouse before they ever got here."

“Our police officers are being vilified this evening for doing their job and keeping the community safe, after being confronted by a man with a knife,” he said. “We support and defend these officers, as they too are traumatized by being involved in a fatal shooting.”

The Working Families Party, aligned with high-profile progressives, such as New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is battling on behalf of liberal candidates in contests that will decide who holds positions as sheriffs and prosecutors.

"We're going from protests to the polls," Angela Angel, a former Maryland state legislator who is a senior adviser to the new Black Lives Matter PAC, told CNN. "We understand in this moment that the real power is in exercising our right to vote."

the group has targeted young voters in more than a dozen key states with a particular focus on reaching people who had requested absentee ballots but had not yet returned them.

In Georgia, a traditionally red state now in play in this year's presidential and US Senate elections, the Black Lives Matter PAC is backing Joyce Barlow, a Democrat running for the Georgia House of Representatives to represent a swath of rural southwest Georgia.

A study released earlier this year by the Prosecutors and Politics Project at the University of North Carolina's Law School at Chapel Hill examined more than 2,300 prosecutors' races around the country and found contested elections in fewer than 700 -- or less than a third -- in either the primary or general election.

In Florida, meanwhile, the PAC is urging a "yes" vote on Amendment 2, which would phase in a $15-an-hour minimum wage in the Sunshine State by 2026.

Tuesday's election "isn't just about the presidency. Your money, your minimum wage is on the ballot."

"We saw that very different outcomes were realized by Black people killed by police violence, based on the prosecutors elected in their jurisdictions," said Arisha Hatch, who oversees the Color of Change PAC.

Taylor's mother has sought the appointment of an independent prosecutor to handle the case. In September, Cameron announced that a grand jury indicted one former Louisville Metro Police Department Detective Brett Hankison, with three counts of first-degree wanton endangerment in connection with his actions on the night of the raid.

But the Color of Change PAC and other liberal groups are putting their political muscle into local prosecutors' races around the country

The groups engaged in electoral politics include Black Lives Matter, the sprawling social justice organization closely associated with this year's protests.

Rural counties might lack enough lawyers to mount a challenge to an incumbent. Prosecutor elections don't generate much attention. And voters don't always understand the power local county and district attorneys wield.

The Working Families Party mailers in the race tout Rucker's opposition to cash bail for non-violent offenses. "People shouldn't be sitting in jail because they can't afford to not be there," Rucker said in an interview with CNN.

The Working Families Party's "people's charter" calls to "shift resources away from policing, jails and detention centers" and into schools, housing and jobs programs.