54: The Murder of George Floyd and the Right-Wing Instigators (in Blue)
In this edition of IDSG, recorded less than 48 hours ago at the time of publication but already looking like an artefact of a dimly-recalled epoch, we talk about the savage 'ropeless lynching' of George Floyd by police, the subsequent explosion of protest and repression that has rocked the US, and a little bit about Trump's escalatingly bloodthirsty fascistic rantings. Daniel addresses the question of whether the violence has been stoked by fascist agents provocateurs. Basically the answer is: yes, but they're in blue. Content warning. Notes/Links: 'The Boogaloo Movement is Not What You Think' by Robert Evans and Jason Wilson: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/27/the-boogaloo-movement-is-not-what-you-think/ Other links to follow.
Hello and welcome to I Don't Speak German, the anti-fascist podcast in which I, Jack Graham, and my friend Daniel Harper have conversations about the far-right's conversations.
Every episode comes with a big content warning.
And it's episode 54 of I Don't Speak German with myself, Jack Graham, he him, And my buddy Daniel.
Also he him, I believe.
Hi, Daniel.
How are you?
There's nothing going on over in America at the moment, is there?
So I'm sure it's all tranquility and peace over there at the moment, isn't it?
Nothing at all going on.
The history of race relations being a harmonious utopia in this country continues unabated this week, the last week of May.
We recorded this on May 31st, 2020.
Yeah.
So for those of you in the distant future, Uh, well, may not remember that date.
I don't know.
For the historian.
There's a lot of shit happening.
Yeah.
Well, actually, it's the 1st of June where I am, but it's still the 31st of May where Daniel is, so how's that for a head fuck?
Yeah, this is just the fact that it's an inconsistency in the data that forces us, future historians are going to have to reconcile against the I-don't-speak-German deniers who deny that this podcast exists.
That's right, yeah.
It's very much like the uncertainty about the exact length of the audiobook of David Duke's autobiography.
That alone is enough to discredit us.
And prove that we're completely fake.
I'm actually an American.
This is my fake British accent.
And Daniel, I believe, is... Where is it you're from?
It's certainly not America, is it?
I'm actually Russian.
Of course!
God, I should have known.
And actually, I haven't been telling the truth to any of you, or Daniel in fact, because I'm Russian too.
He didn't know that, I'm just telling him now.
It turns out you're Russian and I'm Chechen, and we have a deep animosity.
Damn, podcast fucked.
This is the last episode of I Don't Speak German because it turns out we both speak Russian.
That's right.
No, we should edit in the very classic Russian stereotypical music that you get in all the Cold War movies.
Oh yeah, yeah.
Lovely Basil Polidorus theme from Hunt for Red October, yeah.
I don't know, as you might be able to tell, listeners, from our slightly odd conversation so far, We're both a little bit frazzled, a little bit tired.
Not only with, you know, just life generally.
I mean, personally, as I say, it's the 1st of June here and our Prime Minister and our government is about to send all the kids back to school.
Well, not all of them, but a lot of the kids back to school and kill them all.
So that's kind of fucking with my head a little bit.
I don't have any kids, thankfully.
But as I say, we're a bit frazzled and a bit tired with life generally and also with a bit of a day.
A bit of a day.
Well, the President of the United States just declared on Twitter that Antifa is a terrorist organization.
So this podcast is officially on the, I guess, banned listening list.
That's right.
We're on the terrorist shit list.
As I said on Twitter, you know, I had to get in touch with Antifa headquarters and take new orders from my section commander as a ranking officer in the Antifa, the Antifa organization, as I believe it's called.
Yeah, well I think we'll get to that, won't we?
But yeah, this is an emergency episode in response to the sort of general May the 31st of 2020-ness of everything.
And I think maybe a good way into it is to start with a little announcement that Daniel has about a long-running fan favourite segment, Cantwell News.
Yeah, I mean, I like to take the criticism of our listeners to heart, and I really take them seriously.
You know, when people say that, you know, a segment just isn't working or doesn't really do anything, and you know, obviously, you know, we kind of take our most important listeners, the Nazis we cover, the most important listeners, to heart.
And one of the things that Eric Stryker always says about this show is that all we ever do is talk about Cantwell.
Because Cantwell is such a pathetic figure that just proves that we're pathetic and of course that's completely misunderstood.
Like he doesn't know anything about like how to produce an entertaining show because he doesn't.
You know other people can say whether whether the show is but like the Cantwell news segments are you know both meant to be humorous and informative.
It's meant to be a light-hearted way to get into the show.
That's what segments do, but that's fine.
But in deference to Mr. Eric Stryker, Joseph Jordan, we're now going to basically retire Cantwell News until he does something actually newsworthy.
Right now there is a bail hearing for him scheduled, so he might be getting out of jail soon.
He will definitely go to trial soon, and he will almost certainly be convicted, and we will cover that when it happens.
But until then, we're going to retire the Recantwell News segment for the new segment, the TRS News segment.
So not in this episode, but we will be making regular returns to just the batshit things that the TRS personalities say on a regular basis, just to kind of let you know.
Because I think that our friend Eric Stryker just feels a little bit slighted that we don't talk about him enough.
And he definitely, he doesn't actually go out and do anything.
Like, that's what makes Campwell News kind of interesting, is that he's actually, like, doing stuff and threatening people and, like, making headlines.
Nobody fucking cares about Eric Stryker except for Eric Stryker and his pals.
I'm sorry.
So but we'll talk about him if he if it would make him feel better We'll can definitely you know, like reveal all the bullshit things that he says So we'll make that kind of a regular recurring segment going forward.
So no more can't one news for a while It's gonna be it won't be entirely Eric striker news.
It'll be TRS news but we'll make sure to kind of throw some stuff in there on a regular basis of Just whatever batshit insanity they're getting into on a various week.
So yeah, that's the announcement.
Okay, so that wonderful announcement.
I'm really looking forward to TRS News, I have to tell you.
I don't know, once we start doing this, I don't know how you're going to feel about that.
Moving on, moving on.
I don't know, you might not have picked up on it, but I was being a little bit sarcastic there.
It's my dry Russian irony.
Yeah, but as I say, it is the 31st of May, stroke the 1st of June 2020, and I think it's fair to say that Daniel and I have both been glued to Twitter and various other news sites and things today, watching the...
Well, I don't know.
It's hard to characterize, isn't it?
I mean, it's awful, but it's also kind of exciting and inspirational and menacing and frightening.
And, you know, it's all sorts of things at once.
Yeah.
And obviously this is, you know, there were after the death of a man named George Floyd at the hands of a police officer.
And the fact that he was not arrested for several days.
Um, for this and, uh, the, uh, you know, kind of local guy.
Sorry, but the policeman in question, the policeman who, um, who murdered George Floyd on camera, um, in, in essentially, uh, what is a homemade snuff film.
Capturing the ropeless lynching of a man whose crime, as far as I can tell, was to be African-American and to pay for something with some money.
He had a fraudulent $20 bill.
He had a fraudulent, I think it was a fraudulent $20 bill.
He had a fake $20 bill.
Was it actually fraudulent?
Do we know that now?
It was either suspected to be fraudulent or it was fraudulent.
I don't know that that detail has come out.
That's the accusation.
That's what the cops originally called for him for.
In the original reporting, it was like a fraudulent check.
This is why I like to not do breaking news.
I like to wait like three months and then cover it in detail because then all the details have been hammered out.
My understanding was it was initially kind of like a fraudulent check, or at least that's sort of the way it sort of spread, and then it ends up being a $20 bill.
Yeah.
But let's say for the sake of argument that it was a fraudulent $20 bill.
I'm not aware of that being a capital crime.
Oh, no.
I mean, not if you're white.
Not if you're white, yeah.
Sorry, I was forgetting that vital.
So, yeah, the police officer who has only just been charged with, I think, manslaughter?
He was charged with third-degree murder, which is something kind of unique in Minnesota.
It's like they've kind of carved out some of the second-degree murder stuff from other states.
In the United States, the criminal justice system is Entirely fucking wacko because it's everything is on a state level and so we have 50 sets of laws about like what various kinds of murder mean and then like these federal statutes sort of like derive up from there and you know they have be across state lines and I'm not a lawyer, but I listen to several lawyer podcasts, and that convinces me that I never, ever want to be a lawyer.
I'm not a lawyer, but I watch Law & Order.
Yeah, I watch a lot of Law & Order.
I think that might come up here later on.
So anyway, apparently third-degree murder in Minnesota is this special form of second-degree murder where they're making it even less of an offense than it would be even in other states.
And second-degree murder is like – I mean this – he very easily could have been charged with first-degree murder because it's a premeditated murder effectively.
But he's charged with both third-degree murder and manslaughter.
This is very common in the United States that you get charged on multiple counts, and the DA hopes that one of them sticks essentially.
But yeah, the point I was going to make was a flippant point really, about a very non-flippant issue, because they finally charged this guy with these, on the face of it anyway to me, quite inadequate charges, after days and days of people protesting, which is undoubtedly why he was charged at all, it wouldn't have happened otherwise.
Um, you know, showing the rationality of the protests, which everybody writes off.
But, um, yeah, he was finally charged after days and days of them trying to let him off.
And, uh, this cop, uh, I mean, not only, I mean, I don't know if you want to talk about him specifically.
Derek Chauvin?
Chauvin?
I'm not sure that's how to pronounce it.
Well, this is it.
His name is Chauvin.
Um, I mean, it's America, so it's probably pronounced Chauvin or something, because you're a bunch of barbarians out there.
But it's, Yeah, his name is Chauvin.
Don't paint us all with the... I mean, I'm a barefoot redneck from Alabama, but I'm not a racist cop, so, you know... Don't smear me with the racist cops, buddy.
But no, he has the same name as the guy after whom the word chauvinism was coined, which is just wonderful.
I love that.
Yeah, it's glorious, right, yeah.
It's another example of God being a hack novelist.
So, yeah, you're right.
He's definitely...
It certainly seems like too little too late.
And even the DA kind of has come out and made some statements to the effect of...
It seems there may have been underlying conditions in George Floyd's...
There's some suspicion that he was on drugs...
Again, I don't think we have any confirmation one way or the other on that, whether he was on something.
Or he may have had some underlying health conditions.
I don't think an autopsy report has been publicized, or maybe not even produced to this point.
But the basic story is... And there's some sort of press release from the medical examiner's office, I think, wasn't it?
That said he didn't die from asphyxiation, he had underlying conditions.
The most serious underlying condition he was suffering from, of course, being white supremacy, in my opinion.
Right, exactly, exactly.
Um, but, you know, this is always the thing that, I mean, they've been, this is kind of a standard talking point on, particularly in kind of right-wing media and right-wingers in general regarding, you know, COVID-19 and, you know, any of these other things.
It's like, well, you know, if he had, if he had been fully healthy, And not, like, a degenerate piece of trash who was just gonna die, you know?
Like, I just want, like, you know, anybody who, um, anybody making that talking point, I'll tell you what, why don't I kneel on your neck for ten minutes and let's see how you feel at the end of that, you know?
Like, and I won't even try to kill you.
Like, let's just see, let's just see what, how you feel at the end of that, you know?
The video is horrifying.
I'm not going to link to the video.
It is easily findable on YouTube.
I couldn't watch it.
I quite happily confess to being a wuss.
Yeah.
I mean, I've seen the Christ Church Massacre video, which was worse, but not by an order of magnitude.
I mean, not by that much.
This is really bad.
And just the sheer seeming indifference of it is, I think, something that's...
Really striking here, and I think what's you know kind of jumping ahead a little bit.
I think that what's interesting is that The video is so clearly damning on the face of it that Even like they'll kind of right-wingers who would normally you know sort of sort of poo-poo this stuff have been kind of like oh Yeah, that seems excessive that seems really excessive Um, and this is, like, the guy's looking at the camera.
There are three other cops around him.
Like, they're, like, they know they're being filmed.
What happens when they don't think they're being filmed?
You know, like, it's just, like, this is the part that we get to see.
And, like, I do think that there is this, you know, kind of, as white people, um, you know, it's at least, you know, kind of perceived as being somewhat middle class or low middle class and sort of, like, isolated from this to some degree.
I mean, it is easy To think that this is exceptional or to think that this is something that is unique and the reality is that events like this are very near to this happen with startling regularity within the policing system of particularly of cities, but not solely of cities every single fucking day and the.
The thing that makes this one different is just that we have it on video.
Yeah, and it's, I mean, I'm old enough to remember before everybody carried a high quality video camera essentially around in their pocket, and nobody outside of the left or, you know, activist organizations believed it.
You know, you would tell people about the stuff cops did at demonstrations and protests and stuff like that, And, you know, it wasn't just high court judges who just, you're telling me that a police officer did?
Oh, come off it!
You know, it was nobody believed it.
Practically nobody believed it.
And then just like a sliver of a fraction of time ago, really, in real human terms, we started having, you know, everybody's carrying a camera, you know, because CCTV doesn't count because, you know, it's under the control of the authorities.
But now, like, private citizens carry these cameras, video cameras around with them all the time, and it's, you know, it's there for you to see in pin-sharp detail over and over and over again.
And it's amazing how people, sort of the culture as a whole, has switched from, oh, that doesn't happen, stop lying, stop making things up, to, oh, yes, I know, it's terrible, isn't it?
We must do something about that at some point, I suppose.
Yeah, and now that you see it, it's still kind of this, like, one bad apple kind of phenomenon, where, you know, people want to believe that, no, the system is basically okay, like, we want cops to exist, right?
Like, who's gonna go catch murderers and rapists if not for cops?
And it's like, there are ways around, you know, like, maybe these people who are going after murderers and rapists could be like a different group than the people who are you know um yeah responding to civil complaints of petty crime maybe maybe there could be a different kind of thing there maybe we just don't need this kind of organization to exist and maybe they don't have to be armed and that's something that like does i think differentiate you know um our cops from your cops other
Us in Chechnya versus you in the USSR, or former USSR.
American cops are armed.
Like, every cop is armed.
And I'm led to believe that's not the case.
Well, a lot more cops in Britain are armed than they used to be, but it's still the exception rather than the rule.
They don't walk around packing heat.
Not for want of trying, on the part of quite a few right-wingers, right-wing politicians over the years.
But they still find their ways, you know.
They still find ways to do their damage.
Not on the same scale, though, obviously, because the situation is quite materially different in the United Kingdom, and I think that's a different conversation, maybe.
Yeah.
Well, I will definitely have to talk a little bit about kind of where this kind of swatification and this kind of militarization of the police force comes from.
But I really want to step back slightly and to talk about sort of like the conditions that made this such a flashpoint.
And I think you really can't I think you really can't understand kind of what's going on socially and sociopolitically around this without Also understanding these two other incidents which happened in the last week or so.
Yeah.
That is the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, seems to be, and not even because the actual event of that happened in late February.
So this is the young African-American man who was jogging in Georgia, in a rural kind of suburb in Georgia, and was accosted by these two white men, father and son, one of whom the father had been a former father and son, one of whom the father had been a former kind of police officer for, you know, They had called in a 911 call, and in a scuffle they ended up murdering this young man.
They essentially lynch him and there is a video of a portion of this.
And while this original case gets sort of swept under the rug, kind of the local DA looks at it, the story seems to be that the first DA had a kind of conflict of interest because he knew the father because the father had worked kind of alongside him in his law enforcement duties and in like kind of some private security gigs.
And so it got passed on I think to one or two other people before finally somebody didn't have a conflict looked at the looked at the the evidence and kind of went yeah, there's no crime here and Everything kind of gets dropped until like two months later this video gets released and then once people see the video There's this outcry and then suddenly the authorities in that neck of the woods suddenly have to do something about it And so what I want to be clear about is like all this is like allegedly we're talking about kind of an ongoing legal matter and I don't want to kind of
Either overstate the case or understate the case.
Georgia has this law which allows for private citizen arrests.
And what these two men are claiming is like, no, this was just sort of a, we thought this guy had just committed a felony.
We were chasing him down using under the you know the auspices of this statute and when he he resisted and then he fought for the gun and then he ended up getting shot and that's just sort of what happened and you know what kind of what's on him is on him now if that law Like, A, this is, you can find other lawyers kind of conversant in Georgia law who will say, this is true to a point.
You're not allowed to use lethal force.
A private citizen is not allowed to use lethal force in pursuant of this law.
Like, if you get to the point, like, if the guy dies while you're trying to apprehend him, you can still be charged with murder, right?
Like, you can still be charged with a crime for this.
And I'm sure this is going to be kind of legislated back and forth if this thing goes to trial.
If this was a legal thing that they got to do, it is only because of the racist laws of Georgia which made this explicitly legal.
I want to be clear about that, right?
Yeah.
Like, if you take one step away from this and you say, you know, this young man was jogging.
It kind of was revealed he had entered this construction site.
And everybody's like no, he's stealing.
He's obviously stealing copper.
They're like he was wearing Timberlands He isn't on the video.
You can clearly see he's wearing jogging sneakers.
He's not like and there's like oh he was he was carrying a hammer That was another thing the right-wing media started to play up because there's a stick in the road It's visible in the video when it looked a little bit like a hammer, but you can see it's already sort of like on the ground long before Arbery like passes that spot.
So he isn't, whatever that is, he wasn't carrying it and it's probably just a stick in the middle of the road.
But it becomes a hammer within this discourse in the same way that, you know, gas chambers, you know, like four holes become three holes become five holes become, you know, et cetera.
And so they get to just kind of spew nonsense about it without having to look at and actually kind of defend a piece of data.
And so suddenly the fact that he was carrying a hammer and wearing Timberlands, neither of which is remotely true and neither of which would convict him regardless.
Can I ask you to define right-wing media?
Oh, sure.
In the circles in which I follow a lot of these, not even explicitly Nazi stuff, but even in private chats and Facebook groups.
I don't know that it was reported that way on Sean Hannity or whatever.
I know there's a lot of kind of talk about, you know, because they're slightly more responsible than that.
But it becomes kind of a major like talking point among that thing.
I mean, I've seen like cartoons made and kind of shared in these kind of right wing groups.
Right.
And so it becomes this kind of like folk wisdom around that this guy was clearly kind of caring.
So, yeah, let me let me I'm sorry to kind of say right wing media slightly.
Yeah, that was just a bit general.
But we're talking about, you know, your your you know, the people that are more in your focus of study rather than like, you know, Tucker Carlson.
Right, right.
But, you know, what Tucker and what, you know, Fox News was definitely doing was kind of using the, kind of like, guilt by implication.
Oh, yeah.
Like, oh, he's in this building.
What is he doing?
And they'll just kind of ask the question, like, what was he doing there?
Is this something that normal people do?
And it kind of was revealed, you know, there is other security footage from that same building from that same, you know, house under construction, that there were a number of people who came onto that property over the course of the last, you know, several months.
Doing the exact same thing that Ahmaud Arbery was pretty obviously doing was just kind of looking at the place, you know It's a place in your neighborhood.
It's a it's a it's gonna be somebody's home.
Um, no, I've never done this I don't know if you ever have but you know Apparently it's kind of a common thing that people say like oh, yeah I used to walk into houses that were under construction in my neighborhood all the time Like I used to just kind of go in and check it out and you know Nobody really ever said anything.
I mean if there's no nobody's working there I mean it's it's slightly dangerous and so they don't recommend you do it because they're like Tools and you know nails and you know, like you get you get hurt, you know Just walking around if you're not careful, but like it's a thing that people do.
Yeah, you know like Suddenly this becomes like damning evidence.
This kid was up to no good Yeah, and why is he up to no good?
Well because he's black, you know Yeah.
And there's a nice piece, I'll put this in the show notes, from the blog, Angry White Men, that talked about sort of how TRS in particular, they spent about an hour looping the video over and over again, and then convinced themselves that there's a hammer in the middle of the road, etc, etc.
And in the same way that they get convinced of all the other things that they Believe or pretend to believe but there's a very nice piece Kind of okay versus coverage of this and I will recommend that to people Because I have watched that video and listened to that episode the raw audio as well Okay, well piece where we can kind of go into that well our our TRS news segment from here on in is going to be called hallucinating hammers Yes.
But I think that this case, and in particular, like, the reality is whenever these kinds of stories kind of come up in the media, and whenever, like, these kind of Nazi, and even Nazi-adjacent, even alt-right, or even, you know, sort of more like kind of Ben Shapiro types, etc., cover this, they always kind of do the whataboutism.
But, like, what about all the black-on-black murder?
What about all the white women who have been killed by black men in Chicago and New York City?
And the answer to that is, of course... Why aren't black people rioting about black-on-black crime?
Why don't we talk about that?
Why don't we spend as much time in the media covering that?
And the answer is, we have a giant racist police force that is built around going after and arresting those people, and in every single case it's like, oh my god, there was a white woman who was murdered, and then they found a guy who Maybe didn't, maybe didn't, but that person is being prosecuted.
That person is under the auspices of the law.
That person is being dealt with by the justice system, by whatever definition you want it to be.
And so it's not the same fucking thing at all.
If these two, if this father and son had been prosecuted originally, you would say, oh my god, that's a, that's a lynching.
That's a terrible, terrible thing to happen.
But if they had been prosecuted for it and gone through something that's even remotely like a true justice system, The system is dealing with that.
That's what we want a justice system to do, is to treat these things equally.
Although, as a matter of fact, African American people get treated worse for having a dime bag of weed than these people did for murdering someone.
And that happens all the time.
And I'm not justifying the system.
I'm saying even if the system were considered reasonable, This is something that's broken fundamentally in it, you know, and that's kind of the liberal critique as opposed to the leftist critique, and so I'm not, but that's the reason.
Yeah, that's a different level of analysis.
That's just the, like, completely obvious thing that every right-wing grifter talking about this topic has to miss completely whenever they mention anything connected to this.
Those people got prosecuted, and so, like, you're wrong, you know, like, the fact that this becomes a news story precisely because there was no prosecution of it.
You know, like, that was in some sense the outrage, is that the justice system is not behaving justly in this case.
The other story that seems to kind of lead up into this is this case of this man Christian Cooper.
And this is where the naming thing kind of gets weird, because there's...
Christian Cooper and Amy Cooper, and these two people have no relation.
Amy Cooper is a woman, probably in her 30s, maybe early 40s, who was walking her dog in Central Park off of a leash.
Oh, right, yeah.
In the section of Central Park called the Bramble.
I don't live in New York.
I've never been there.
I have visited Central Park.
I stepped in and just, you know, that's as much as I ever saw of Central Park.
And then this black man who is like a bird watcher.
He's like a former president of the Audubon Society, sort of like this very Harvard-educated man who is, I believe, 60 years old or something similar to that, who is a writer.
He's written for Marvel.
You know, this is, you know, It doesn't matter that he exists in this class position, but the fact that he exists in this class position and still received this treatment is probably one of the lodestars to view it here.
Because, um, there's an interaction where she's walking her dog off of a leash.
And, uh, the story goes, and this seems to not be disputed by anyone, but the story goes that Christian Cooper, um, and again, they're both named Cooper.
It's kind of this weird thing, like everybody kind of had a take when it's like, wait, they're both named Cooper?
That's, it's just weird.
Anyway.
So Christian Cooper walks up to her and asks her to leash her dog.
This is an area of the park where you're not allowed to have your dog off a leash.
And the reason being because this man is a naturalist.
He's a bird watcher.
He's a member of the Audubon Society.
The dogs are going to kill the birds, or they're going to scare the birds off.
Like, this is meant to be a common space that everyone is supposed to be using, right?
Well look, he doesn't need to justify the request.
She's not supposed to have it off the lead in that area.
Right, yeah, there are other areas where she can have it off the lead, but not here.
Yeah.
And so he kind of politely asked her to put the dog on a leash.
She refuses, and he says, well, actually, I keep dog treats in my pocket for precisely this kind of occasion.
And this comes from a Facebook post that he put up.
So this part isn't on video.
And he says, you know, I'm going to do something and you're not going to like it.
And then he starts offering the dog a treat.
Now, this is the kind of the one like sticking point where people seem to kind of go like, there are lots of ways to interpret and you're not going to like what's about to happen.
Like, oh, he's trying to poison my dog or, you know, like that sort of thing.
But around this point, the video, he starts taking video of her and she's dragging the dog around by its collar and ways that are Very distressing for the I mean this is this is you know it is kind of a funny little thing that more people were upset by the SBC but by the by the treatment of the dog than the treatment of the african-american man and that's just sort of one of those you know like you got liberals really upset about the dog is clearly in distress when it's like the content this is what she's doing is calling a hit out for this man.
Because what she does is she says like I'm gonna call the cops and he says you can please call the cops She's like I'm gonna tell them an african-american man is threatening me and she's kind of like standing there She's got her dog on the leash and she's on the phone with the cops and kind of putting on this Very feigned performance of terror like there is this man.
There's his man and he's trying He's advancing towards me and then the video is clearly he's just standing still he's not doing anything and clearly what she's doing is she's trying to get the cops to come and Look, regardless of her specific intentions, everybody knows, or they have no excuse for not knowing, what can happen to African American people when the cops get called.
You know, it's not hyperbole to call this attempted murder.
She's attempting to use the cops as a weapon to kill this guy, whether she means to or not.
You know, it's the old shouting fire in a crowded theatre thing.
If you do something that you know, or have no excuse for not knowing, can cause death, you know, it doesn't matter if you specifically wanted to, you're still guilty of it.
You know?
Yeah, absolutely.
Again, I'm not... often what I'm trying to do in these... No, I know you're not, but... ...is to kind of give every benefit of the doubt and sort of tell the story so I can't be accused of being, you know, like, partisan or, you know, not telling the, you know, kind of the full version of this, but... Yeah.
You're absolutely right.
You be good cop, I'll be bad cop.
You're absolutely right.
What she's doing here, knowingly or unknowingly, willfully or not, is she knows by expressly saying, there's an African-American man who is threatening me, that this is going to get this much more extreme reaction from the cops.
And regardless of what happens to Christian Cooper, who's a well-spoken, upper-middle-class, upper-class kind of guy who's a writer and an artist, etc., etc., What if the cops just ran into some other African-American person in the park who did not pass our credibility standards for who gets to be in the park and who doesn't?
And she could have easily gotten some other person killed.
And look, I'm not playing purity politics.
I'm not playing optics here.
I'm not doing who is and is not a legitimate victim.
I'm just saying there is a reality here to this situation that the only reason that Christian Cooper had the ability to do what he did, the only reason he could stand up to her and film her and say, yeah, call the cops, you know, it's fine, you're in the wrong and I'm in the right, that his class position gives him the ability to do so, right?
And so how many other instances?
It's like an experiment designed in a lab, isn't it?
And so these two incidents happening kind of within the same, both within the conversation around this time, When this video is released of George Floyd being allegedly murdered by Siobhan,
It really creates this flashpoint, and I think we have to view what's happening now not in context with necessarily Floyd himself, although obviously it's a tragedy and obviously it's an awful, awful thing.
But it's not just part of kind of an overall system, an overall pattern that we've been noticing for years, but like a pattern that we've seen in the last week, you know?
And I think that's part of what kind of made this whole thing kind of blow up the way it has.
And by blow up the way it has, I mean, I don't know.
Has it spread to your neck of the woods yet?
Because, you know, cities all over the United States are... there's rioting going on in support of George.
Everywhere across the United States.
At first it was kind of limited to Minneapolis and sort of the, you know, kind of that general area, but we're seeing protests and rioting in Detroit and Knoxville and, you know, New York City, all over California, Oregon, Portland.
It really started to blow up in Portland a couple of days ago.
And, you know, basically, I mean, I'm in group DMs where, you know, like almost everyone I know is being confronted by violence from the police at this point.
And it's a it's a scary like moment.
So have you seen anything like that over and over in your neck of woods?
It's scary, but it's also, I mean, I said, I hinted at this before, it's also in some ways quite exciting and inspirational.
I mean, you know, it's easy for me to say because I'm not in the middle of it, I'm not in any danger.
But, you know, people use the word riot to describe it.
Riot, I mean, I was listening to the Citations Needed pod.
They did an emergency episode on this.
They did, I listened to it too, it's very good, yeah.
It's very good indeed.
It kind of says almost everything I want to say really, so if I just sort of parrot them, forgive me.
That being the podcast that it is, it's focused to a large extent on the media reaction and they're very good on that.
But they take in a lot of other stuff as well, including the politics of quote-unquote riots and how the way that term is used is racist, etc.
And really what we're seeing is, you know, it's an insurrection.
It's a rebellion.
And, you know, it's bad that people are in danger.
I don't like that anybody's being hurt.
And I think we're going to get on to why people are being hurt and how it's become that later in this episode.
But, you know, I am inspired by the sight of people taking to the streets in rebellion against this system and these injustices.
And yeah, we have, to answer your specific question, we have seen a little bit of it leaking over here.
We've seen protests, gatherings in London and Manchester, I believe.
And I'm not sure about the Manchester one, but I've seen footage from people's phones, again, people's phones, from the London protests in Solidarity.
And we've got, again, it's different, because obviously, you know, the political and material situation is very different in the United Kingdom, not least with the police being not armed in the same way.
But, yeah, we've got very heavy-handed, aggressive police tactics.
Right, yeah.
I mean, but have you seen, like, kind of the level of, you know, police violence in particular in response to it?
Not on the same level, no.
Okay.
And this is really what I want to kind of get at here, because I think there's a big kind of complicated narrative that I think this is really what people wanted us to cover.
The police are very different in Britain and America.
I mean, essentially it's recognizably the same institution, but yeah, American police.
Fucking hell.
Well, we've kind of done a long preamble to this, and I think the reason that it was important to do that was to sort of frame these events in terms of kind of what's actually happening and what I think is kind of going on in terms of the Sociological dimensions to like kind of how this kicked off, right?
Yeah.
And I think that there's some confusion among kind of people who sort of follow me on Twitter, maybe listen to the show, who are kind of aware that like, that there is there is going to be some level right wing infiltration of this.
And maybe right-wing instigation of this, and I think well-meaning and even educated people are just sort of like confused on some of this stuff, which I think is fairly straightforward, and that's kind of the reason I decided to just kind of go ahead and do this Emerge the Episode, was to sort of like clarify a few things.
And that is, I think primarily, and this is the big like kind of top-line conversation we need to have about this, is that These protests turned into riots.
I know there's kind of a complicated use of the word riot.
I don't use the word riot in a kind of value-laden way.
I use it as a, you know, this is what's happening, you know, that there is a fuzzy but I think distinct line between, you know, something that looks more like a protest to something that looks like a riot.
And, you know, when you're burning buildings down, that's a riot.
I don't have a problem with property damage if it's getting results and you're going after major corporations.
I mean, this is something that's very well documented, particularly in Minneapolis, in which small local places were not attacked.
It was kind of target.
It was, you know, banks and the kind of police stations and that sort of thing, things that are much more kind of directly related to the economic and sociopolitical repression of the locals.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, in particular, like local shops are really being defended by the protesters, by the rioters and saying, like, no, don't go after that.
This is not something that, you know, you need to be doing.
That's right, yeah.
And those places by and large have stood unscathed.
There's some good reasons for sort of local people to not be fond of Target, for instance.
Right.
Yeah, and apparently there was some indication that this is, like, apparently the Target Corporation is headquartered in Minneapolis.
Yeah.
And that particular store was often used as a test store for draconian loss prevention techniques.
So there may have been some particular animosity there.
At least that's sort of like some of the kind of conversation I heard around that.
I haven't really kind of had the wherewithal to sort of research that and kind of figure out to what degree that's true.
But that's at least something that was kind of in the conversation around it.
And again, all these places are insured.
And it bears repeating, they burned down the police precinct, they waited until it was empty.
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
The deaths that have occurred from this have by and large been You know, there was a shop owner who killed someone who was trying to kind of loot the store.
There were a couple of incidents like that.
And of course there have been protesters who have been shot.
To my knowledge, and I forget, I think in Oakland there was a police officer who was killed.
I'm not sure exactly.
I don't have the details of that in front of me.
So there have been a handful of deaths, but to this point it has been largely a question of, you know, kind of looting and rioting and burning of property as opposed to kind of direct in-person violence.
Except for from the hands of the fucking cops.
Yeah.
And this is the real thing.
There have been many places, including like Flint, Michigan.
Detroit has gotten a little bit of this kind of, you know, rioting and such, but much smaller than what you would expect from a city that size.
But in Flint, Michigan, the local sheriff put his baton down and marched with the protesters.
And there was no violence.
There was no looting.
There was no rioting.
Now, there's a kind of complicated material analysis to be done there as to, like, well, this is clearly meant to, you know, kind of prevent the property damage and to prevent the voice of the unheard from being heard.
Again, this gets into some complicated places, and it's not my place as someone who isn't kind of a part of that community and who is not doing that work myself to kind of make that determination.
But if the people of Flint are willing to, you know, be heard through that sort of official channel, and if they can get some kind of result, That is moving the ball forward from their community perspective.
I'm willing I'm willing to listen to them.
You know I'm not gonna make a pronouncement about that.
You know now I have doubts about whether that's whether that's an effective remedy.
But there's also like seeing the just the sheer level of violence coming from the police around the country on this and some of the ways that this is kind of being used federally.
I mean Donald Trump put out a tweet that was You know, you know, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.
And this is straight out of the late 60s, I think 1968, referring to the Black Panther Party from, you know, it's explicitly like, you know, well, when black people start acting uppity, we're just going to open fire.
And this is, you know, the president is essentially giving permission.
to um to the police to do whatever the fuck they want and um that that's the tweet that um that twitter famously put the uh oh the warning on triggering the president's hissy fit way i don't even want to get into that there's a lot of discourse around that like it's just not worth us covering it right now but not only that but just today he he put out a tweet you know saying antifa is we're going to designate it a terrorist organization which yeah a
you don't have the legal authority like there's no legal framework for declaring a domestic organization a terrorist group in the united states like Like, A, that can't be done legally in the United States.
Now you could say like the international arms, you could declare them terrorist organizations, except that Antifa is not an organization.
Yeah, so it's kind of wrong on two separate things, but ultimately it doesn't matter what he's being heard by is by The right-wing nutjobs which by whom I mean the cops That it's open season on leftist and by leftist.
I mean Democrats frankly anyone anyone who is not towing the line completely it's it's he's essentially declaring open season and Exactly, yeah.
He's telling them you have carte blanche to, you know, attack or shoot or run over whoever you like in the moment, whoever looks like a dissenter or a left winger or, you know, anybody basically who isn't obeying and we've got your back.
We'll back you up on it.
You'll be fine.
That's what he's telling them.
Yeah.
It doesn't matter more that journalists are being targeted, but it certainly matters a lot that, you know, there was a camera crew from CNN that was filming quietly at five o'clock in the morning in Minneapolis who was arrested Live on camera.
Yeah, you know live to CNN.
I will put the link to the video It's astonishing video because they're literally just filming they're doing there.
They're you know, just reporting on what the cops are doing They're sending out the police message at that point.
They're just standing and filming and This is this is a kind of a local CNN host.
This is a man and they just arrest him and Right there and then they arrest his entire crew including the camera crew and the camera is still filming They just go and set the camera down somewhere and you just like see off into people's feet upside down You know, um, you know these the reporter is a is a person of color as well.
I think isn't right?
Oh, yeah Yeah, you know the police aren't doing this too.
Well, you know, they're not doing it to white reporters.
Oh Right.
They did to this African American reporter and then like his entire crew.
Yeah.
You know, and they just, they just, they did release them later in the day, just a few hours later, but it's, it's, it's one of those moments of like, what the fuck are you even doing?
Like, this is, this is, this is CNN.
This is not, these are not like, you know, again, playing the respectability politics game.
I'm not, I'm not trying to kind of do that.
And I'm not trying to suggest that like it matters less, but, It is, it is just like, who gave you this fucking order?
Like, why did you think this was a good idea?
No, they're just off the chain.
I mean, like, again, see the Citations Needed pod emergency episode for a good discussion of this, I like that a lot.
But, you know, they're just off the fucking chain with their Punisher Robocop fantasies.
Oh yeah, definitely.
And I mean, that's just kind of where it started, right?
So there are two journalists who are very familiar with sort of far right and kind of covering the far right.
There's a photojournalist named Linda Tirado.
She is at KillerMartinis on Twitter.
I've never had a conversation with her.
She doesn't know me from Adam.
Um, but I've been following her for a while.
She does good work.
Um, she, uh, was filming or kind of taking photographs at one of these protests and, uh, lost an eye in the process when a rubber bullet hit her, I think hit her backpack and then kind of like, uh, fragmented and, uh, hit her in the eye.
And she ends up in surgery.
She's lost this eye.
She lost vision in the eye immediately and they had to surgically remove the eye effectively.
Yeah.
And she was back at work the next day, you know?
Which, you know, is just worth comparing to Mr. Andy Neo, who, you know, got hit with a milkshake and got $200,000 worth of donations for it, so.
Oh, yeah.
And Christopher Mathias, who follows me on Twitter.
I've never talked to him, but he's, I believe, with the Huffington Post, who does a wonderful job of covering.
I believe he was kind of the first person to break the Alex McNabb EMT losing his job story.
I think that was him.
And he's done some great work in this space.
And his work is – he was arrested in one of these protests.
And everyone who has kind of watched this guy work was kind of saying, Christopher Mathias is one of the most professional journalists you can imagine – Like, he is not doing anything to upset the guy.
They just arrested him, you know, because they could.
And not only that, but we've seen countless videos of, you know, cops just opening fire On innocent people.
There's a video from Minneapolis where a member of the National Guard literally is yelling at some people on a porch to go inside their homes because it was after a curfew.
And so these people were standing out on their porch and just watching the cops, watching the National Guard pass by.
And one of them opens fire on them to force them into the house.
There are countless videos of cops running protesters over, of police officers shooting various...
I mean, I was kind of looking at these all day.
I was going to try to put together a list, but there are too many for me to even track them all.
There are at least a dozen cases of reporters being shot at by cops just in the last 24 hours.
And this does seem to have come literally just from...
It does seem to be like they've gotten permission to do this.
Like there is some authority, because it's happening all over the country.
It's not like one or two little incidents.
It's happening everywhere, all of these protests.
And this is the key here, you know.
It is coming from This isn't something that's, you know, a few bad apples.
This isn't something that's, you know, some right-wing infiltrator.
This isn't something that's being instigated or like a kind of a reasonable response to rioters kind of like creating damage and going after people.
This is where these, where this escalation by the police is not happening.
We are not seeing the level of violence and property damage being done.
It's just not happening.
And so, we have to keep that in mind whenever we talk about this, is that it's the fucking cops making this happen, and if the cops would de-escalate, you would not see this level of, you know, however you feel about what's happening to Target buildings.
It's not happening out of the blue.
It's happening in response to escalation by the official authorities here, and it is on their hands, it is on their heads that this lies.
Yeah, absolutely.
As an institution, in a unified way, in an almost national way, they are engaging in aggression against protests.
And it's difficult not to imagine that that's, you know, at least partly related to the fact that they're being given tacit permission to let themselves off the leash by the raving Facebook grandpa who's in charge of the White House.
Who's in charge of the nuclear arsenal, right.
Yeah.
That guy.
That guy, you know.
There is definitely an argument to be made that, you know, Democrats and Republicans, you know, that they're two sides of the same coin.
One side of it has that particular face on it.
It does seem to make a difference.
It does.
And this is something that the citations needed.
A podcast episode that you've mentioned a couple of times mentioned is that, you know, yes, there are issues in which Democrats are clearly better than Republicans on Supreme Court picks on, you know, kind of gay rights on abortion rights, etc, etc.
But there is a structural thing that just makes reverence of the police just a fundamental part of American society, and both parties engage in this.
And yes, there is kind of a slight edge to what Democrats are slightly less likely to Do it gleefully, maybe?
Yeah, they'll do it in a hand-wringy sort of way.
They'll kind of hector themselves about like, oh, we need to really do some soul-searching about this thing, this stain at the heart of America, and why is it that these cops are doing that?
And I can tell you exactly why this is happening, at least in the way that it is.
It's because the fundamental structure of the justice system is built around, like, You know, arresting and caging poor people, and in particular, poor African-American people.
This is what our system is built to do.
It's what it's always been built to do.
Now, there's a lot of kind of discourse around, you know, that this kind of derives back to kind of like slave patrols in the pre-Civil War era, and, you know, that the modern police state kind of derives from that.
And then there's some kind of pushback on that about whether You know, how direct a link that is, and, you know, I'm not here, I'm not a historian who's going to be able to kind of dig out all those tendrils.
I think there's a case to be made there, but I think sometimes it gets made a little bit too directly.
At the same time, we know that this kind of mass carceral system really didn't exist in the way that it does now until kind of tough on crime policing started in the 70s and 80s in response to the Great Migration, in which African Americans kind of moved out of the South in a real way.
And that you really didn't see this kind of like harsh, harsh, you know, kind of prison system in this kind of mass incarceration until that happened.
And this all was, you know, put into kind of a hyperspeed after 9-11 when the Department of Homeland Security just started like offering money to local police departments to quote unquote fight terrorism.
And if you're, you know, trying to fight terrorism in bumfuck Idaho, basically what that means is the feds are going to cut you a check and you get to buy some new toys.
And those new toys look a lot like new toys.
Military hardware, you know, which was also being, you know, auctioned off cheaply by kind of the federal government.
Like they kind of used, literally used military equipment up to and including tanks to kind of local police departments.
And so that's when you started to see, you know, your local cop didn't look like a person in a uniform anymore.
It didn't look like kind of a Boy Scout with a badge and a gun.
but started to look like, you know, Rambo.
Yeah, yeah.
And this kind of swatification of the cops is just kind of, once the tools are in their hands, they're going to continue using them.
There's this interesting kind of like factoid, there was this thing after when the Iraq war first started, when there was this kind of suspicion that what was going to happen is like a bunch of soldiers were going to come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, there was this kind of suspicion that what was going to happen is like a bunch of soldiers were going to come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, kind of like a broken with PTSD from the war and that they were going to, um, start engaging as, you know, kind of get jobs as cops because, you know, it's a relevant, you know, you carry a gun, you're kind of doing, it's a relevant, you know, you carry a gun, you're kind of doing, it's a similar Okay.
I used to be a, I used to be a soldier.
Now I become a cop.
It's just sort of the thing to do.
And that bringing the war home, bring the war home.
And if these people would, um, then engage in more violence than, uh, you know, kind of local cops who didn't have that experience.
And what, um, studies have shown is that, um, it ends up being not the case.
Yeah.
That soldiers are actually like exquisitely, like all those things with PTSD and all that stuff happen and is a serious problem, but that soldiers are actually much, much better trained to control their rage and do not act aggressively.
Towards populations to the way that normal cops do because your ordinary cop might only get like a few weeks training on some spiffy new piece of equipment and then being kind of go out and use it to patrol the neighborhood and You know, so I'm not saying that like training is the is the answer here I mean the real answer here is you have to defund the fucking cops and And the real answer is you have to defund the entire—you have to empty the prisons.
Like, there's just—this system has to be shut down from the inside.
This is not something that, like, your kind of moderate liberal person is going to ever find an answer for.
You have to fundamentally challenge the basis of the system before you're going to make meaningful change.
Yeah.
Well, you know, without wanting to get into deeper issues that are outside our scope here, you know, this is the way capitalism developed from the 70s onwards.
You know, in an attempt to restore profits, they started instituting a different set of policies that resulted in, you know, shutting down social programs, shutting down social provision, impoverishing and disenfranchising people.
And what they put in place instead of social provision and stuff like that, the stuff they were cutting and ransacking and looting and re-accumulating, was, you know, in place of spending on schools and health and infrastructure and welfare, etc, they put militarised police in prisons.
That's what they did.
They put that there instead.
And so, the problem fundamentally stems from these things, the carceral system, the new Jim Crow, the prison industrial complex, whatever you want to call it, and the militarized police force.
If you want to stop it, or ameliorate it anyway, you've got to address those things, which means you've got to challenge the structure of present-day capitalism.
In my opinion.
I agree, I just, I agree.
I'm just going to move on here.
I mean, just to kind of amplify here, you know, George Floyd walked into a deli with a fraudulent $20 bill, allegedly.
I mean, assuming that that's what happened.
And they called a militarized police force.
Yeah.
They called out men with guns to handle that problem.
Yeah.
Like Central Park Karen, you know, a man told her to put her dog back on a leash and she calls the police to come and kill him for her.
Yeah, she calls in a hit, you know.
She's trying to swat the guy, right?
But they call in a militant, because that's the only person you can call.
There's not like a food bank that you can call, hey, I've got a guy who's clearly, he's in a deli, he's looking for food, right?
He's hungry.
He needs a meal.
He needs a place to sleep.
He needs something.
He doesn't need a guy with a gun coming and Killing him, or even putting him in jail, or doing, you know, that's not what he needs.
And because we've cut all these social services, whenever we do run into these conflicts, where there are people who need things, who may have problems, I mean, certainly I've been, you know, I worked retail for a lot of years, you run into people who clearly have issues that need to be dealt with.
And when the only person that you have who can come and solve that problem is A man with a gun and a grudge, that's not going to end well.
It's just not.
And it's also demoralizing.
And again, I want to just, you know, all cops are bad, but that's a structural thing.
That's a structural statement and not a, you know, all cops are bad because they're within this kind of broken system, which incentivizes the worst kinds of behavior and which is built on a system of white supremacy, etc, etc.
But most people who want to become cops, they watch all this kind of copaganda.
As an aside, that's a whole other topic.
We had planned to do a movie episode on Dirty Harry, specifically to kind of cover some of these issues.
And then we just kind of like, I think that was right before COVID started and we just kind of skipped it and then never got around to doing it.
So just as an aside, we were going to talk a bit about copaganda and about how the Law and Order franchise kind of Treats the stuff and we might still do that and maybe just not do it to the length of dirty Harry, but um What you see in?
You know kids kind of grow up They want to be they want to protect and serve their community they want to be somebody who's you know gonna have a decent paying job because being a police officer in a lot of places is a pretty decent job that you can get and You know, it's a way of kind of, like, they want to be public servants.
A lot of them are bullies, but a lot of them really do have, you know, something in their heart where they do want to, like, kind of do good for their communities.
And instead of like, oh, I'm going after killers, or oh, I'm going after, you know, people who are actually harming the community, you end up basically being a ferrying service for drunks.
To a jail cell you end up with all these you end up with these kinds of situations where you're essentially like beating up on poor people or harassing poor people and harassing people who have clear issues and you're not actually able to solve the problems because that's not under your purview and there's nobody else who can do it for you and you can only imagine how.
You know, the version of the life that you're sold is not the version of life that you get from this, right?
No.
Relentlessly you're propagandized to believe, you know, in the media now, the cop is always the hero, or the prosecutor is always the hero, you know.
And it's another aspect of neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism as a cultural counter-revolution, you know?
You don't get TV shows now where you get the different perspective.
It's all cop heroes and prosecutor heroes, law and order heroes.
And, you know, it has changed people's perceptions.
And, you know, the psychology of this is a big thing.
And, yeah, the good version of it is you want to serve your community.
The bad version of it is you're a sad, pathetic little wannabe that wants to live out his RoboCop...
Punisher fantasies, you know, which is what, you know, you were talking about the sort of difference between the cops and the army earlier, you know, there's a difference.
The army's full of, like, poor kids that joined up because it was the only way they could get out of their neighbourhood and get some training.
The cops full of people that joined up because they wanted to be Frank Castle, you know. - Right.
But that's the bad version of it.
There is a good version of it.
You buy into the propaganda, the relentless sort of neoliberal cop, prosecutor, law and order propaganda.
And you find yourself in the reality which is that you're an enforcer for the system that has basically left the job of dealing with social problems, the social problems created by the vast gaps it leaves in society, by chucking police officers with guns at them.
Exactly and it's just it's just this you know this vicious cycle and then once you're in once you're you get this kind of like thin blue line kind of you know blue lives matter kind of kind of propaganda at you and you become indoctrinated within this like well I have to kind of protect my buddies I have to protect the people who are on this side of the line who are kind of you know defending the world against the the psychos and the savages and all that sort of thing and without us then
You know, because you want to believe that you're doing the right thing, that you're doing something good, even if your day-to-day life is, you know, not necessarily, you know, it's kind of difficult to square that, right?
And so you kind of tell yourself, well, I'm, I may not be doing much, but I'm part of this larger system that kind of exists and does good.
And then it's very easy to kind of get like sucked into that as well.
And again, I'm not trying to like defend cops here.
No, no, no.
Like, leave your job.
But this is why good cops do leave.
It happens.
It's routine.
Or they get drummed out.
Or they get drummed out.
Yeah, no, that happens all the time as well.
Especially if you start talking about all the things that you've witnessed over your tenure and you start actually reporting people.
Or trying to stop cops like Chauvin doing what he's doing.
I mean, and it's important to note that Chauvin was only there were three other cops who were involved exactly and like I didn't I didn't kind of describe the full like details of that but they had him they had Floyd in the in the police car and then they pull him out and And then start kneeling on his neck.
And, like, obviously we don't know the exact circumstances of that.
It would be nice if George Floyd were around to tell us and we could actually compare differing versions.
It turns out one of these men is dead and one of them is not.
And so, like, of course the story we're going to get is the one that makes Chauvin and the rest of them, you know, look good.
All four of those cops have been, you know, kind of drummed out of the force from what I understand, or at least kind of, you know, put on leave or whatever.
To my knowledge, only Siobhan has actually been charged.
I don't know, we're gonna have to kind of see what happens.
I am suspecting they're going to kind of let it dangle until the rioting stops and then just kind of, you know, quietly let him go off into the pasture.
That's only because they've become an embarrassment, you know?
If there weren't film and there weren't protests, they would have just gotten away with it, as indeed Chauvin appears to have done several times before.
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
There were days of, you know, the most aggressive protest riots that we've seen in probably, at least since 1992, and that was limited really to just L.A.
Yeah, that was on post-OJ.
Right, you've got to go back to the 60s to really see this kind of level of insurrection.
I've been kind of describing it as violent, although it's not violence, I don't think violence against property is violence.
I've been describing it in this kind of, like, slightly liberal way, not because I agree with that framing, but just to sort of, like, give it its due for our, you know, maybe less lefty audience here.
But this is insurrection.
This is clearly, you know, on some level...
A valid form of expression and a valid show of force against this absolutely oppressive system and the system that is that is out to that does worse violence to people in this social strata every day than like burning a fucking target down.
But it's all that invisible stuff that happens over the years and decades that doesn't get into the news that just forms the nature of people's lives.
And we have to judge these things on that basis and not like, wow, there's a really impressive footage of a target burning.
Yeah, yeah.
No, the grinding, daily, structural violence of oppression and disenfranchisement and impoverishment.
And then on top of that, you know, aggressive, militaristic, brutal, racist policing.
And, you know, again, as they say on the excellent edition of Citations Needed, which I do, again, heartily recommend you go listen to, listeners, you know, Black Lives Matter is now six or seven years old.
It's been going on since, you know, Trayvon Martin through Mike Brown and Eric Garner and Ferguson and all that, you know, and people have been protesting and asking for justice for all this time.
I mean, much longer than that, but just in this recent phase, the phase that's associated with the phrase Black Lives Matter.
You know, and essentially nothing has been done.
They've not been listened to.
They've been fobbed off with hand-wringing and platitudes.
So, what the fuck do you expect to happen?
Exactly.
And, um, I do think, I mean, we've been going over an hour now, so I do think that it's worth kind of getting to the thing that I think people wanted us to talk about a little bit more, which is this right-wing infiltration, the way that sort of the Boogaloo crowd kind of plays into this.
And it's not that I've been trying to avoid that because I think it's a valid thing to ask about I do think that there's some some lack of clarity and some of that But I did want to emphasize up top that like this is the story of the right wing Of the right wing doing violence in these situations is the story of the fucking cops and the sort of story of the u.s Justice system writ large is not the story of the boogaloo crowd.
Although that's that's also a story But we need to keep the focus where it should be and that's why we did what we did what we've already done What we've essentially just done, which is spend an hour and a quarter throat clearing before getting to the actual topic.
Before getting to the actual topic, which actually isn't, like there's just not a lot there yet.
So I would like to, I don't want to say apologize, but just kind of clarify that in the previous episodes we've done about the Boogaloo, I kind of approached this from the point of view of someone studying these extremely far-right race war spaces, and that's kind of where I was first exposed to this boogaloo, at least in terms of its kind of context, meaning kind of Civil War II, Civil War II electric boogaloo.
And so that got shortened to boogaloo, and then got shortened, got kind of changed to big igloo and big luau, and I think there are a couple other versions at this point.
They're trying to avoid censorship.
Again, the coded language that isn't supposed to happen in anything except for this mail-in.
Anyway, I keep coming back to that.
I get so upset about these people, and they're stupid.
Not that it's Holocaust denial, but they're stupid Holocaust denial.
Anyway, they're just so dumb about it.
If they'd just be smarter, it would at least annoy me less.
Be better at being evil.
Be less easily Google-able with your evil, you know?
Give me more than a four second chat.
Anyway, okay, we need to get into this.
That's how I first kind of ran across the idea and sort of reported it as that, right?
And that's true.
That's definitely true.
What I was kind of less aware of, just because I don't follow the kind of Patriot groups and I don't follow the Militia groups to the same degree, is that the concept has a wider connotation.
And that is through, and there's an excellent piece at Bellingcat by Robert Evans and Jason Wilson, Who are both friends of the pod, so, you know, Jason Wilson has been on.
Robert Evans probably would come on, except he is insanely busy all the time.
He has no time to come do this show, but he has promoted us on several occasions.
He is definitely a friend of the pod.
I talk to him regularly.
They did an excellent in-depth piece kind of going through everything that we know about sort of the origins of this Boogaloo concept.
as it applies to sort of American civil war.
And, um, it seems to have come out of, um, 4chan, but it doesn't come from the poll board, which is, uh, this kind of explicitly right wing, um, you know, kind of racialized, um, anti-semitic, anti-black, et cetera, et cetera.
Um, you know, political board, but from the K board and the K board is, uh, all about weapons.
It's just about people talking about weapons, everything from hunting knives to, you know, drones, you know, to, to missile missiles.
Um, and it's people just talking and just being nerds about weapons.
And, um, they kind of phrase it as, you know, there is nothing that's really apolitical and you and I can understand that, but no, they do frame it as like, this is supposed to be sort of an apolitical place.
We're not talking about politics.
If you want to talk politics, go and talk about it over on the poll board, but we don't do that here.
And so it's just people kind of sharing weapons and memes about weapons and that sort of thing, and, you know, this kind of boogaloo concept seems to come from there.
And while it is sort of an apolitical space, at least kind of expressly apolitical place, it does have this libertarian-ish bent, just because most kind of places on the internet have a bit of a libertarian-ish bent in this kind of sense, because the kinds of people that are going to sit on the internet and talk about weapons anonymously to other nerds on the internet, that skews very libertarian.
It just does, right?
And you almost can't blame it for that.
It's just a thing.
As much as libertarianism is a nonsense ideology, it's even more hollow than fascism.
It's just a thing.
I can blame it, but never mind.
Right.
Anyway, this boogaloo concept seems to have arisen there as kind of a meme and kind of a like, well, when the boogaloo happens, this is going to be kind of the thing that I have.
You know, expressed idea.
And libertarianism, again, there is a, you know, kind of expressly racist tinge to a lot of it, an expressly racist wing to it.
But certainly when the alt-right gets started and when the alt-right starts to be kind of a thing in, you know, kind of starting around 2014, 2015, those, all those people tended to just kind of become, they kind of call themselves alt-right.
They didn't really call themselves libertarians anymore.
And so what you're left with is this sort of, like, protecting this sort of coded implicit racism, this sort of implicit white supremacy, that, you know, is built around these sorts of ideas of, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and anti-welfare, and anti, you know, kind of government support, and pro-low taxes, etc.
etc.
I don't know what you're talking about.
I've never heard anything about this.
Libertarianism with racism in it?
Surely that's a contradiction.
Never mind.
Go on.
Right.
Well, many, many libertarians consider themselves, like, kind of expressly anti-racist, but they're anti-racist in the way that, like, the government shouldn't be allowed to do things, and I don't care kind of what your race is so long as you obey my kind of standards for, you know, kind of public behavior, which means, you know, not taking money from the government, etc.
And so this is its own kind of complicated thing, but, like, I think that, like, saying that, like, there is an implicit coded racism here, but they would consider themselves broadly You know, non-racist, or, you know, that's how they would describe themselves.
And of course we can argue with that.
And in fact, a whole lot of those members, a whole lot of those people are people of various races.
It is kind of, I don't want to say aggressively multi-ethnic, but you do have, you know, African Americans and people of Hispanic ancestry who mix it up and who love guns just as much as their, you know, kind of white counterparts.
Love Murray Rothbard to the same degree and you know love their guns and like it's just it's just kind of a thing and So when you see these kind of boogaloo boys who are?
You know african-american or who are hispanic or who are you know various other POC?
They are typically coming from that implicit racism they're typically coming from that libertarian side of things and And they want to spark off a race war because they hate the fucking cops, as I hate the fucking cops, right?
But they hate the fucking cops because the cops are enforcing, you know, like, tax laws on them and not because the cops are, you know.
But they absolutely, and this is, you know, Chris Cantwell was one of these people for years.
Chris Cantwell was like this avowedly anti-cop.
Like, anti-law and order.
Like, he hated the cops so much he went around harassing meter maids, to the degree that one of them described the experience of dealing with Chris Cantwell as worse than his tour in Afghanistan.
Yep.
And you have to understand that while this kind of implicit white identity and this implicit white supremacy is important to talk about, that's how you get this sort of non-racist, slightly anti-racist, not avowedly racist version of this boogaloo.
It is anti-cop, it is anti-police, it is kind of pro-small business owner and whatever, and so it's sort of like avowedly pro-capitalism and their kind of twisted idea about what capitalism means.
But that's kind of where you're seeing these things.
And so you do have to understand them as, in some sense, separate phenomena, right, between this kind of implicit and explicit racism.
Because the boogaloo boys who would consider themselves libertarian and kind of anti-racist in that way don't like the Nazis any more than you and I do.
Given the choice of who you're going to side with, if it comes down to, like, you gotta line up with the communists or line up with the fascists, I think, you know, the bulk of them are going to be on the fascist side, but at least under this kind of neoliberalism, they're definitely not kind of on the side of the overt neo-Nazis.
If nothing else, the neo-Nazis make them look bad, right?
And so there's an important distinction to draw there, despite the fact that we can kind of connect them in this kind of broadly the same movement that we're kind of fighting against as kind of a valid anti-racist, if that makes sense.
And so when we see this kind of right-wing infiltration of these events now, We know that there are, like, kind of the terror wave types kind of sitting around on Telegram and, like, boosting the messages of this.
We know that there has been one of the police scanners, somebody hacked into one of the police channels and was broadcasting the audio of a song celebrating the Bosnian genocide, which Britton Tarrant, the Christchurch massacre shooter, played on his livestream before he went out and killed all those people.
Yeah.
And so we know that there are the ovately terrorist Nazi types who are interested in kind of capitulating on this event.
So we do need to kind of keep our eyes out for that.
To this point, and Emily Gursinski has been kind of all over this on Twitter, and she has really been kind of looking into all these kind of alleged instances of right-wing infiltration and can't really find one that she can confirm.
Now, that's as of right now at the time of recording, or before we started recording, because I saw it like an hour before we started to record that she was talking about it.
Um, and obviously she's not like the final word on this, but I think that's pretty, like, there are some things that really look fishy.
In particular, there's this, um, the AutoZone that burned in Minneapolis.
There's some guy who was dressed in kind of full tactical gear with a full gas mask and carrying an umbrella.
He's called Umbrella Man.
Among, and he kind of walks up to, Umbrella Man is funny because Jack and I both kind of come out of the JFK conspiracy world a little bit, and there's another Umbrella Man who's, you know, essential to that whole narrative.
But, you know, but he kind of walks up to, and even the other like protesters on the ground, We're asking him thought he looked and sounded really fishy and really suspicious and the the indication was they thought he was a cop Because what he does is he just kind of comes up and he breaks out the windows with a hammer This man actually did have a hammer Breaks out the windows with a hammer of his Autozone and then just kind of walks away and kind of lets people kind of run in and then that Autozone eventually caught fire
And burn to the ground.
Autozone, just for our foreign listeners, it's an auto parts store in the United States.
It's a big chain.
So it was fully insured and all that sort of thing.
There's some indication that he was this, somebody had doxed him or identified him as being possibly this particular police officer in the Minneapolis PD.
Now the Minneapolis PD put out a statement No, this guy wasn't there because we know what time that happened and he was over on this other side of the city and like I'm not one to trust the cops on this matter, but it's definitely up for dispute about, you know, kind of all that and there's no kind of guarantee that that's what's going on.
But all the other incidents seem to kind of like line up to be this way.
We know there were some particular proud boys who are hanging out at one of these events.
It doesn't seem like they really did anything.
They were just kind of hanging out and they were dressed as black block.
Maybe they were planning on trying to infiltrate and make it look like Antifile was doing some shit or something.
Yeah, it's also like we just haven't seen that much like kind of Antifile presence like kind of explicit block presence and tactics of these things from what I understand.
It's by and large been kind of like really local people, you know There was a tweet by the our statement by again the kind of Minneapolis DA or the Minneapolis PD Stating that 80 that all not one of the arrests from this from that last night's protests were done were actually Minneapolis residents or Minnesota residents that were all from out of state and
And then a reporter kind of dug into that and found, well, no, actually 80% of them were from Minnesota and mostly from Minneapolis and a handful of counties surrounding Minneapolis.
So, like, that was an overt lie from authorities.
And they're trying to push this kind of outside agitator narrative.
As they always do.
As they always do.
No, this isn't something, you know...
Our black people are, you know, nice and well-behaved, and it must be somebody coming from outside and doing all this because, you know, certainly there's no, like, legitimate reason that people could be angry at us for the way that we've been behaving, and killing them, and, you know, putting them in positions of poverty.
Clearly that's not our fault, you know?
There's a legitimate grievance here, and that's what the outside agitators think is always meant to convey.
And of course, anybody who studied the civil rights era knows that like the Southern cops and Southern mayors and, you know, use that to describe the civil rights leaders who are now, you know, vaunted, you know, peaceful, peaceful, nonviolent action when that wasn't the case of what was going on in the 60s at all either, at least kind of willful misunderstanding of it, which is built through this kind of liberal
Some version of the outside agitators thing goes back to Spartacus.
They've always been trying that one.
He has a lean and hungry look.
That's Cassius.
That's the one line of Shakespeare I remember.
It's a good line to remember.
I had to read Julius Caesar a few times in my high school curriculum.
I don't speak English, a podcast about Shakespeare.
I don't speak Latin, it would be, wouldn't it?
You can explain to me all those therefores.
Um, so yeah, that's kind of the big story, and again, I hate that we spent like an hour and a half going through, an hour and fifteen going through all the like, kind of deeper sociological things, and then the real thing people want us to talk about is like, it's just not happening.
I mean, it is, but it isn't, right?
So we need to be aware of it, and we need to be, and I am tracking it, and there are lots of us tracking it, but that's just not what's happening on the ground.
What's happening on the ground is a very straightforward, above ground, Cops committing violence against local people, many of whom I know.
I know people who were run over or attempted to be run over by police cars.
I know people who have taken rubber bullets.
I know people who have taken a truncheon.
I do not celebrate the fact that this violence is happening in this way precisely because it is going against the blood and the bones of people that I know who are good people working to build a better world.
And to say that this is only the act or to focus on this as being something that is being Enacted upon by Shadowy far-right figures who are instigating this a it takes the It takes sort of the moral authority away from the people actually doing the protests And it removes the agency from the fucking cops in terms of actually like kind of forcing this escalation Because it's like oh, there's somebody from the outside.
There's this like right-wing person.
There's a shadowy person and Kind of making this happen and it's just it's just not what's happening yet So if in a week or two, we actually are kind of seeing that sort of thing happen I'll be happy to sit here and explain it and we will tell you at that point that yes No, it ends up being something that happened and it happened and we know about it because we were tracking it the whole time But right now it's just not the story focus on the cops.
That's my that's my soapbox right now Yeah.
No, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And yeah, we did take a little bit of time getting to what is, technically speaking, our subject.
But as you say, on the question of our subject this time around, it's kind of that, you know, nothing to see here or not much to see here.
They're not really involved.
And they're being used as another part of the smokescreen there.
It's outside agitators, whether it's Antifa from the left coming in, or whether it's the white supremacists or the fascists from the right coming in.
It's got to be somebody else coming in malignantly, stirring things up.
You know, an otherwise fine situation.
Which is a lie, and it takes away, as you say, the responsibility of the cops for the aggression and the provocation that they're engaged in.
And it also takes away the agency of the people who are... I'm just saying the same thing you said, but I just want to agree with you.
The agency of the people who are protesting.
And I certainly don't celebrate anybody's injury or jeopardy or death or anything like that, but I am inspired by the heroism of people protesting against injustice.
I think that's incredible.
It is, absolutely.
I mean, it's just... We live in interesting times.
Yeah, I mean, I think, again, Robert Evans had tweeted something like, you know, watching, I think, the third day of these protests and watching the fires burn, I think in particular after the third precinct in Minneapolis burned to the ground.
Um, you know, just sort of tweeting something to the effect of, uh, coronavirus may not be the biggest story of 2020, you know, like, and there's been a lot of like, remember, isn't there an election still happening?
It's like, you know, yeah, yeah, that's like 10 down on the list of important issues at this point, isn't it?
You know?
Supposedly, anyway.
He's making noises about cancelling it or delaying it, and he's already started on the excuses for nullifying the result if it goes against him.
Mail-in ballots and all that stuff.
I don't know.
We don't need to get into that.
No, no.
It is interesting that because this all kind of sparked off in Minneapolis, And Klobuchar, Amy Klobuchar, who was a former presidential candidate on the Democratic side who dropped out as part of that kind of big sequence of people who dropped out and helped make Joe Biden our nominee.
I'm not going to talk about that.
No.
Well, she is a former prosecutor from Minneapolis and had a light hand, shall we say, in terms of dealing with instances of police brutality during her tenure.
And this guy, Chauvin, came up on the death of a young Hispanic man as a case of police brutality during her tenure.
This was kind of reported that this happened.
And then there's this other prosecutor in the office who said, well, Klobuchar didn't handle that case.
I handled this case.
And so, you know, there's this kind of like a, it looked like there really was this like direct link between like, because of the, if this guy Chauvin had been dealt with in 2006, then he wouldn't have been around to do this in 2020.
Right.
So it does, you know, I'm willing to say that like Klobuchar was not kind of directly relevant to this.
But certainly, it's sort of an indicator of, like, this is why we don't want fucking prosecutors as our political leaders.
Because they enable this very system, you know?
Both Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris built their careers on exactly this kind of letting cops off the hook.
And, I mean, look, this fucking Supreme Court has, you know, repeatedly allowed this sort of thing to happen.
You know, the truth is, like, the brutality of the act is all the more stark because it is so normalized.
Because we have legal structures that just allow this to happen.
There's a thing in U.S.
law, and in, you know, kind of state law, to qualified immunity.
Cops get qualified immunity for injuries and deaths that happen while they're kind of undergoing, while they're kind of doing their duties.
It's very difficult to prosecute a cop for things that they do while they're on duty.
And the justification for that is like, well, look, this is a difficult to dangerous job, and we need to have some latitude and not to feel like we're going to get hit with a lawsuit or hit with a criminal complaint if somebody happens to die in the process.
that's not what's fucking happening I'm sorry.
This is like a fucking shooting gallery for the cops.
This is fucking murder and fucking assaults all the time.
And they do it with impunity.
And what's happening now in Minneapolis, and in Oakland, and in Tampa, and in New Orleans, and Detroit, and Chicago, is it's being forced into people's living rooms right now.
I hope that's the lesson we can take from this.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
And I think that'll do for episode 54.
I think we've... We have solved the problem of police brutality.
We have.
Yeah, we've comprehensively covered this issue.
I can't imagine anybody else will have anything to say, or any further events will create any need for it.
So, yeah.
Next week we may look at this as like, oh, remember the salad days of May 31st?
That's right!
Anyway, yeah, thanks for listening everybody and thanks as ever for spreading the word and supporting us and tweeting about us and sharing and recommending us to your friends.
Somebody's creating a Facebook group for us, a Facebook fan group apparently.
Yeah, just a listener.
And she was like, hey, do you have a Facebook group?
And I'm like, I'm not really on Facebook anymore.
And Jack is not on Facebook anymore.
And so it was like, well, if you want to create a fan group, I'll retweet it for you.
So maybe we'll have a Facebook fan group.
You know, I won't be involved in it, but if we're going to talk about the episodes, that'd be a place to go do it.
The I Don't Speak German Funtime Party Pit, we could call it.
I'm not going to be involved.
That's a reference to another podcast, but that's fine.
But yeah, thanks to all our listeners.
And this episode, as all our episodes, is brought to you by our Patreon sponsors, who are very, very nice.
And George Soros.
Oh, and George Soros, of course.
Yes, and of course, in my case, Vladimir Putin.
That was I Don't Speak German.
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