Steve King, the Republican congressman who openly embraced white supremacy, will not be the party's candidate in November's general election. Sen. Randy Feenstra defeated him in Tuesday's five-way primary race.
Republicans in northwest Iowa ousted Rep. Steve King in Tuesday’s primary, deciding they’ve had enough of the conservative lightning rod known for making incendiary comments about immigrants and white supremacy throughout his nearly two decades in Congress.
The nine-term congressman, shunned by his party leadership in Washington and many of his longtime supporters at home, lost to well-funded state Sen. Randy Feenstra in a five-way GOP primary. The challengers argued that King’s loss of clout, even more than his continuous string of provocative and racially-charged statements, was reason enough for turning on him.
Some on the left thought it would be better strategery for King to have won as he was so widely hated, but the district was unlikely to turn blue this November even with a white supremacist on the GOP ticket: the party still led 51%-40% on a generic ballot poll in March. So this can be seen simply as a slightly reassuring preference among Republicans for less blatant racists. Read the rest
“NYC, CALL UP THE NATIONAL GUARD. The lowlifes and losers are ripping you apart. Act fast!” Trump tweeted on Tuesday.
PSA: If you're using a black square on Instagram as a way to show you are "muted and listening" to Black voices and/or to show your solidarity with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, STOP using the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. That hashtag is meant to share resources and information and using it for a "Blackout Tuesday" post is drowning out the voices that need to be heard, activists say. Better yet, they ask, remove the empty squares completely. Removing the BLM hashtag from your black square post isn't enough, as it will keep the post in the previously tagged category. Best to take it down completely and start using your platforms to amplify Black voices and share information, activists write. Listen but don't be muted.
What CAN you do? Here's a start (and please add relevant and helpful resources in the comments):
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A comprehensive list of at least one hundred separate incidents in the past week where law enforcement was violent with press at protests over the police killing of George Floyd.
Over the past few days, Nick Waters / @n_waters89 of Bellingcat has collected over 100 photos and videos showing American police violently attacking credentialed reporters.
More at Mediagazer. Here are excerpts from the thread.
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“There is a new movement being born right now.
A movement against hatred. And the elements of that movement includes racism, which traces its origin back 400 years, antisemitism, sexism, and xenophobia.”
Watch this incredible comment by longtime CNN anchor and news presenter Bernard Shaw. Read the rest
It's depressingly fitting that a nationwide spree of protests against racist policing would occur on the anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, what's been called the single worst incident of racial violence in American history. Using guns and aircrafts, white racists destroyed 35 square blocks of what had — until then — been the wealthiest black community in the country, resulting in more than $32 million dollars in damage adjusted for inflation. Like many such tragic events, it began when white racists accused a black man of looking at a white woman the wrong way.
And sadly, it's a thing that most people didn't even know about it until they watched Damon Lindelof's Watchmen sequel on HBO in the fall of 2019. It took 80 years before any kind of official report was made to acknowledge the event; mass graves are still being discovered nearly a century later.
Here are some links if you want to learn more:
‘Watchmen’ Opened With the Tulsa Race Riot. Here’s What to Read About It. [Jennifer Vineyard / The New York Times]
"They was killing black people" [DeNeen L. Brown / The Washington Post]
The Massacre of Black Wall Street [Re/Think / The Atlantic]
Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921
Black Wall Street: The African American Haven That Burned and Then Rose From the Ashes [Victor Luckerson / The Ringer]
Image: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
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In this video, two cops are seen detaining a black man. The casual racism and hostility to a peaceful bystander is appalling in any case, but these cops have made a worse error: the man they've handcuffed identifies himself as an FBI agent. They free the man at once.
Here's a longer cut of the video.
Whether or not the man is really an FBI agent, it's a great illustration of law enforcers being predatory bullies whose behavior changes completely around perceived power and privilege.
Correction: the cops are not from NYPD and this occurred long before this weekend's protests. Read the rest
Buzzfeed News reporters obtained the explanation offered by United States Department of Homeland Security's CBP to congressional staffers who asked why it decided to fly a Predator Drone over Minneapolis during the protests over the killing of George Floyd. Read the rest
Donald Trump on Friday afternoon claimed to be completely ignorant of the racist history of the phrase 'when the looting starts, the shooting starts,' which he tweeted, and the White House retweeted, and which was also posted on the Presidential Facebook account. Read the rest
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has had it with Donald Trump's bullshit threats of violence against Americans. Read the rest
“If we fail the test case here, history will not judge us kindly.”
Leaked internal Facebook posts reveal that Facebook employees are horrified that Mark Zuckerberg and C-suite executives refuse to remove impeached president Donald Trump’s threats of violence. Read the rest
The Mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, has declared a curfew for the city following protests over impunity in the killing of George Floyd.
An 8 p.m. curfew imposed by the mayor late Friday will extend through the weekend.
PREVIOUSLY ON BOING BOING:
• Cop who killed George Floyd arrested
• Minneapolis ablaze after prosecutor suggests no crime was committed by cops who killed George Floyd
• The cop who killed George Floyd has a long record of police brutality Read the rest
Derek Chauvin, the cop who killed George Floyd, was arrested today and taken into custody.
The arrest follows three days of growing unrest in Minneapolis, where Floyd, suspected of passing a fake $20 bill for a pack of cigarettes, was filmed gasping for his life while Chauvin kneeled on his neck.
Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington said state investigators arrested Derek Chauvin, who was one of four officers fired this week, but he did not provide details. The state attorney who would oversee any prosecution on state charges, whose home was also the site of protests, was scheduled to provide an update later Friday.
News of the arrest came moments after Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz acknowledged the “abject failure” of the response to this week’s protests and called for swift justice for officers involved.
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Twitter last night hid one of President Trump's tweet behind a warning, saying that it broke the company's policy against glorifying violence. In the tweet, Trump branded protestors in Minneapolis 'THUGS' and suggested they should be shot.
....These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!
Floyd was an unarmed black man killed by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Minneapolis has seen two nights of unrest as local authorities refuse to release unredacted footage of the incident or to charge Chauvin with a crime. "Thug" is a storied euphemism for black people.
The warning notice comes three days after Twitter placed a fact-check warning on another of Trump's tweets and a day after Trump signed an executive order denouncing the company.
'A riot is the language of the unheard.' —Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King
UPDATE: Trump posted it again, from the official White House account, and Twitter has applied the same warning to it.
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William “Roddie” Bryan Jr. charged with Felony Murder & Criminal Attempt to Commit False Imprisonment.
A Volkswagen ad posted to its official Instagram account depicted an enormous disembodied white hand dragging a black man away from a Volkswagen Golf, then flicking him into a building signposted "Petit Colon", which translates as "little colonist". Volkswagen soon removed it an apologized.
"We posted a racist advertising video on Volkswagen's Instagram channel," the VW brand's head of sales and marketing Jürgen Stackmann and group head of diversity Elke Heitmüller said in an apology posted on social media. "We understand the public outrage at this. Because we're horrified, too," they added.
How odd that through the whole process of commissioning the ad, filming and editing it, approving the results, transcoding it to mobile-friendly formats, and posting it to social media, no-one realized it was racist. But as soon as it went live, they say "we're horrified, too."
Last year, VW apologized after CEO Herbert Diess used the expression "Ebit macht frei," or "Ebit sets you free," at a management event. Ebit is short for earnings before interest and tax and is a measure of company profits. The phrase sounds similar to "Arbeit macht frei," which was inscribed on the gates of Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps during World War II.
There is a culture problem at VW. Read the rest
Camila's Tex-Mex, near St Louis, Missouri, installed a piñata in the shape of the Covid-19 virus with a caricaturized face of a Chinese man on it, reports The Riverfront Times. The backlash was swift and severe, and the restaurant took down its Facebook page in shame, but not before trying to pass off the caricature as being Hispanic:
According to the customer who originally posted the photos to Facebook, employees allowed people into the restaurant Monday night due to poor weather conditions, despite the fact it is located in St. Louis County and therefore remains under lockdown orders that prohibit dining in. The photos show a complete lack of social distancing, with at least fifteen people, some of them children, crowded around two tables in close proximity to one another.
Image: Facebook screengrab Read the rest
