Testing unconstitutional practices

I read another transcript of an episode of Gaslit Nation, hosted by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. This episode is titled Protest Season. Here is some of what they had to say.

The protests in America, promoted by the Black Lives Matter movement, have spread internationally and have become general protests against supremacy. I had previously mentioned the protests in Bristol, England that removed the statue of a slave trader and in Belgium against King Leopold II.

Chalupa says this reminds her of the 2013-14 revolution in Ukraine. After Yanukovich, Putin’s puppet, was toppled the government passed a “decommunization law.” Statues were removed and places renamed to remove references to Soviet brutality and to bring back historical names. It was a declaration of independence from Russia and announce to the rest of the world that they must view Ukraine as its own place, not just a former Russia satellite.

There are two Americas. One is founded on genocide. The other is a beacon of hope to the world. Chalupa’s parents saw that beacon. They were born in German refugee camps in Ukraine at the end of WWII and sought asylum in the US. It is this beacon that prompted Ukrainians in US and Canada to create a website on how to talk about racism. See it here. I’ll explore it as I have time.

Chalupa notes that though her parents are from another country she is not black. And that made a big difference when dealing with the police. Her community needs to understand that. Black Lives Matter is a self-education movement. She can go into a Ukrainian community, where her last name is common, and feel protected. She feels uncomfortable to step out from that protection and say, yeah, we’ve been oppressed, but we’re seen as white and given white privileges. We need to talk about how we benefit. And we’ll probably need to keep talking about that for the rest of our lives.

One thing in particular that the Ukrainian community should talk about is how the US treatment of black people is similar to the Soviet treatment of Ukrainian people. Then teach people in their own community how to not be racist. Don’t think a public space is a white space. Don’t be anti-black to demonstrate how white you are. That’s something Irish and Poles had to deal with before being accepted as white.

Stop those who try to say there are “good blacks” and “bad blacks.” Those who are racist attack the good blacks too. An example is Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. This was the “Black Wall Street,” a very affluent time and place for black people. Good people, right? White people burned the place to the ground.

Kendzior gets into the calls to defund the police. Over the last 40 years public education, healthcare, and other social services were steadily defunded. The police were not. They were militarized and given big budgets. So those calling for defunding police mean reallocating resources to drug counselors and social workers. The overall goal is to protect people – including from the police.

But supremacists – like the nasty guy and pandemic prince – have a different view of the police debate. Their goal is to make sure white collar crime, the kind they perpetrate, will not be punished. This may hide this under the guise of “criminal justice reform.”

Another danger is that police will quit when they are no longer allowed to brutalize people. They will be replaced by private militias whose only loyalty is to the company that hires them. One person eager to expand such a business is Erik Prince, brother to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Kendzior said:

The entire apparatus needs to be viewed as one interlocking system. If you're going to reform or abolish the police, you need to take into account how a crime will be defined, who will mete out justice, how the new system will be exploited by this administration, and so on. What we need to destroy is elite criminal impunity. That necessitates changing more than just the police, but the criminal justice system itself.

Chalupa reminds us this crisis doesn’t end when Biden takes over the Oval Office. Then she talked about our high levels of income inequality.

And as a result, you have the powerful police unions, the financially influential police unions, expanding their jobs because police are being sent into schools instead of guidance counselors and therapists.

Police are being sent to arrest addicts on the street. Police are being sent to arrest those suffering from mental illness on the street. So when we say “Defund The Police”, we're saying, “bring back the social programs to treat addiction, bring back the social programs to support students in classrooms. Pay your teachers more, make classrooms smaller, expand public schools, put that money into public schools.”
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We're not going to get Black Lives Matter unless we take on income inequality, and that's the real test for people. So all those brands and all these leaders, Mitt Romney and so forth, marching and saying, "Black lives matter,"; it's about the rich paying their fair share in taxes. It's like Elizabeth Warren advocated for, which was that multi-millionaire tax. If you could afford to own several homes, please pay your taxes.

Jeff Bezos, please pay your taxes to support public schools, and education, and Medicare For All, and free college. That's what we need right now and that's the real test, not the black squares you're posting on social media.

Kendzior said that because the nasty guy and his minions are encouraging bad behavior in police we should now consider police to be foot soldiers of a mafia state. That’s another reason for defunding the police. Things at the local level should be viewed in the context of a narrow elite hoarding wealth and resources. That elite has also connected up with a transnational crime syndicate, a network of billionaires, as well as criminal and white supremacist actors.

Local and state governments are trying to put their power up against the nasty guy. They do it by declaring they’re a sanctuary city, by proposing to dismantle or defund police, and by refusing to act on national orders to open up during the pandemic. Even so, the danger from the nasty guy is overwhelming.

November won’t be a quick and easy solution no matter who wins. Said Kendzior:

And what we've been seeing in recent weeks, I think is to some extent, a dress rehearsal for that. They're seeing what the police will do. They're seeing what the consequences are for that brutality. They're seeing how the military reacts when the military is encouraged to fire on the American people.

This is Trump and Barr and the rest of them testing unconstitutional practices, trying to terrorize, and intimidate, and brutalize protesters into submission, trying to establish the court of public opinion on this issue, and they're going to exploit it in every possible way. But what you should never forget is that these are criminals themselves. Trump is Individual One.
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We've said on the show many times that white collar crime is violent crime. That is why they call it blood money. And they're going to use that blood money for their propaganda apparatus. They're going to use it to build up private unidentified militias. They're going to use it to brainwash further the police and other just ordinary citizens into tearing this country apart. So that's where the danger lies.

Chalupa said we’ve already had a dress rehearsal for stealing an election. We’ve already has a dress rehearsal in William Barr spinning the Mueller report so that gullible newspapers report is says something other than what it said. He’ll spin the results of the 2020 election.

Chalupa reminds us what protesters are really demanding:

Defund The Police is an anti-corruption movement saying the police have gone too far, especially in New York City. We saw them beating people with impunity, and so let's put that money towards social strengthening and building a social safety net. That's it. It's that simple.

To those who declare defunding the police will return New York to the levels of crime in the 1970s and ‘80s Chalupa says a big reason for the high crime in that era was corrupt police.

This episode ends with a call to unsubscribe from the New York Times. Kendzior says they have been a mouthpiece of the nasty guy administration for some time. The reason for this renewed call is that the Times solicited an op-ed from racist Sen. Tom Cotton, who proposed using the military against American protesters. Yes, the Times does good stuff with their 1619 project (the year slaves first came to America). But Dean Baquet, the editor said he doesn’t want to cater to the resistance – which are people trying to keep democracy intact. Chalupa asks do you believe in human rights or do you not? She contends the Times does not.