Shot, beaten, gassed

The GOP candidates for prez. have been ranting about Muslim terrorists, wanting to smash ISIS to smithereens. But what about these terrorists?

* Abortion clinics vandalized in Louisville as well as Planned Parenthood clinics in New Hampshire, Washington state, California, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

* Jamar Clark, a black man in Minneapolis, was killed by police earlier this month. Black Lives Matter activists protested outside the police station. White "counterprotesters" tried to shut down the protests, then fired into the crowd, hitting five. Fortunately, no deaths. With casualties on their doorstep the police turned their backs.

* Laquan McDonald was murdered by Chicago police a year ago. The release of a video of the shooting and the indictment of the officer for murder again brought out demonstrators. And the police's response was violence and aggression. Police also arrested a demonstration leader on trumped up charges.

* Mercutio Southall Jr. stood up in a Trump rally and shouted "Black lives matter!" The white crowd attacked him as Trump shouted for him to be thrown out. The crowd chanted "All lives matter!" Southall later wrote:

So for all the people who are still confused at this point, they proved what 'all lives matter' meant. It means, 'Shut up, n*****.'"

There have also been many protests at various colleges and universities around the country. I commend them and am glad to see them standing up. Most of what the black students want is safety, something rather basic.

Melissa McEwen of Shakesville catalogs the events – the acts of terrorism – over the last couple years perpetrated by white supremacists, some of whom are police. And still many white people refuse to see a connection between these events, declaring them to be isolated incidents. McEwen extends her catalog from the big things to the everyday things:

And school segregation, and job discrimination, and housing discrimination, and wealth inequality, and pay disparity, and mass incarceration, and municipal violations, and fair legal representation, and the disproportionate application of the death penalty, and lack of meaningful visibility, and unequal opportunities, and access to healthcare, and millions of microaggressions, and white people (and other non-black people) doubting whether anti-black racism really still exists and auditing the ways black people try to address it and accusing them of looking for things to get mad about and screaming BOOTSTRAPS at them and calling them oversensitive.

Oversensitive?

McEwen quotes her friend Dan Solomon:

Okay, here is the thing about Black Lives Matter protests and all the I'm-just-a-reasonable-white-guy whining about how the kids are all way too sensitive and don't deserve their "safe spaces" -- the space outside of a fucking *police station* in Minneapolis wasn't safe. If they want to talk about the way that black lives are at very real risk in this country, they are at risk of being fucking *shot* for it. The idea that they're not equipped for the "real world" because they want safe spaces on their campuses when the world tells them over and over again that they don't get safe spaces, that a space that is super safe for someone like me is actually dangerous as hell for them, is such heavy, condescending bullshit that anybody who spouts it should have fucking asphyxiated by now.

Every time black protesters go to the street to talk about this, they are aware that they are not safe. They get shot. They get beaten. They get gassed. They are aware that they get shot and beaten and gassed. They are *willing* to get shot and beaten and gassed. It's not because their tactics are too aggressive or they snatched a mic from Bernie fucking Sanders, it's because the world is filled with racist people who will shoot and beat and gas them. Motherfuckers, you'd want a "safe space" too.

Hey, all you GOP candidates, want to do something about terrorism? Forget about the Muslims coming into this country who might carry out some act of terrorism. Instead, look at the white supremacists who are already in the country and already are carrying out acts of terrorism. Oh, wait – this is your political base? So then you're promoting state sponsored terrorism.

The Democratic National Committee has a new video out: Inciting Fear Isn't Presidential. Using the phrase "Islamic Jihadists" is an oversimplification and wrong. How does the DNC know? Because George W. Bush said so.