A massive statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson was removed…
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]]>Seattle city councilmember Kshama Sawant had a personal message for billionaire Jeff Bezos after the passage of the so-called Amazon tax, warning him that “we are coming for you.”
The avowed socialist framed Monday’s 7-2 council vote for the hefty payroll tax on larger businesses as a step toward the goal of overthrowing the “bankrupt system of capitalism” and replacing it with “a socialist world.”
“And if you, Jeff Bezos, want to drive that process forward by lashing out against us in our modest demands, then so be it,” she said in a video address that was posted Tuesday on Socialist Alternative. “Because we are coming for you and your rotten system.”
Two years ago, the council passed and then promptly repealed a head tax on businesses with more than $20 million in annual gross revenue in the face of opposition from a coalition of businesses, including Amazon, that sought to overturn the tax with a ballot referendum.
In her message, Ms. Sawant warned Mr. Bezos, the Amazon CEO and one of the world’s richest people, that he would face the wrath of “thousands” if he tried that again.
“I have a message for Jeff Bezos and his class,” Ms. Sawant said. “If you attempt again to overturn the Amazon tax, working people will go all out in the thousands to defeat you. And we will not stop there. Because you see, we are fighting for far more than this tax, we are preparing the ground for a different kind of society.”
After passing the “Amazon Tax,” Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant went on this unhinged rant.
She threatens to seize control of the Fortune 500 and overthrow the “racist, sexist, violent, utterly bankrupt system of capitalism.”
If you oppose her? “We are coming for you.” pic.twitter.com/2L17D6wScp
— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) July 7, 2020
The newly passed tax increase, officially called JumpStart Seattle but better known as the Amazon tax, would raise at least $214 million annually by taxing businesses with more than $7 million in annual payroll 0.7% for every employee earning at least $150,000, and 1.4% for those making more than $500,000.
The city said the tax hike was needed for “affordable housing and essential city services,” as well as to help small businesses and “our most vulnerable community members” get back on their feet after the novel coronavirus pandemic.
“Seattle residents have made it clear — now is not the time for government austerity or divisiveness,” said councilmember Theresa Mosqueda, the measure’s sponsor. “Investing in communities of color, small businesses, and community health leads to a more robust and resilient economy.”
Critics argued that the hefty tax hike will further hobble hundreds of businesses still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic shutdown.
“All of our leaders should be thinking day and night about how to get businesses back open and people back to work safely,” said Alice Teel, spokesperson for the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce. “Instead the Council turned immediately to new revenue and passed one of the largest tax increases in Seattle’s history.”
Ms. Sawant framed the payroll tax increase as part of a larger social struggle, saying, “We are coming to dismantle this deeply oppressive, racist, sexist, violent, utterly bankrupt system of capitalism, this police state.”
“We cannot and will not stop until we overthrow it and replace it with a world based instead on solidarity, genuine democracy and equality — a socialist world,” she said.
The vote came days after Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan issued an executive order to dismantle the Capitol Hill Occupied Zone, or CHOP, after Black Lives Matter protesters took over a six-block area June 8 around the East Precinct.
Ms. Durkan asked the council in a June 30 letter to investigate and possibly expel Ms. Sawant for “disorderly or otherwise contemptuous behavior,” including leading a crowd of protesters to the mayor’s home, but the council president held off, saying the city was already facing “concurrent crises.”
“The public airing of issues amongst and between independently elected officials will not advance solutions on the deepening needs of our constituents,” said council president M. Lorena Gonzalez in a July 1 statement.
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]]>The post This is what Seattle’s CHOP looks like after cops oust protesters appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>July 1, 2020 | 9:22pm | Updated July 1, 2020 | 9:22pm
A worker walks by a former barrier as city crews dismantle the CHOP area outside the Seattle Police Department’s vacated East Precinct in Seattle.
Getty Images
City crews dismantling the CHOP area.
Getty Images
A city worker moves concrete barricades away from “BLM” graffiti in Seattle’s CHOP area.
REUTERS
Seattle Department of Transportation begins removing plywood outside the closed East Precinct.
The Seattle Times via AP
Seattle police enter the East Precinct after clearing out the CHOP zone.
The Seattle Times via AP
This is what Seattle’s Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone looks like after police officers stormed in on Wednesday to clear protesters out.
Photos showing the aftermath of the eviction showed city crews using heavy equipment to remove concrete barriers and cart away debris, including plywood signs that read “BLM” and “Still our streets.”
“I was just stunned by the amount of graffiti, garbage and property destruction,” Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best said after she walked around the area.
Sanitation workers were spotted scrubbing the pavements in the former protest zone and cleaning graffiti.
Police also strung yellow caution tape from tree to tree warning people not to reenter.
Earlier on Wednesday, Mayor Jenny Durkan authorized police to remove protesters who are “unlawfully occupying Cal Anderson Park area” — dubbed the Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone, or CHOP.
More than three dozen people were arrested during the early-morning ouster, charged with failure to disperse, obstruction, assault and unlawful weapon possession.
Durkan said that while she supported cops in making arrests Wednesday, she didn’t think many of those arrested for misdemeanors should be prosecuted.
The dismantling of the CHOP came after two teens were shot and killed in the zone that spans multiple blocks in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
With Post wires
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]]>The post ‘A lot’ of protestors have left Seattle’s autonomous zone, leader says | TheHill appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>The de-facto leader of Seattle’s autonomous protest zone said Wednesday “a lot” of protesters have already left the area following a call days earlier from the mayor for protesters to clear out.
The Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, or CHOP, in a statement posted to Twitter on Wednesday said that “very few” people remain in the protest zone, and the “CHOP project is now concluded.”
The statement was signed by the “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest Solidarity Committee.”
An important message from #CHOP #CHOPSeattle. Please amplify. Thank you for your support over the last two weeks. #ChopWasASuccess #CHOPcomms #CHOPCHAZ
#BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/7e5ISrWvX6
— Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (Official Account) (@CHOPOfficialSEA) June 24, 2020
Hip-hop artist and de-facto CHOP leader Raz Simone also told CNN that many protesters have already left the zone after some were getting harmed.
“The protesters of CHAZ [Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone] have targets on their backs, and that is an issue,” Simone told CNN. “A lot of peaceful protesters are being harmed, so it’s sad that’s where we’re at in America.”
As a result, Simone told CNN that “a lot of people are going to leave,” adding that “a lot of people already left.”
The CHOP committee said in its statement it expects “a very small handful of holdouts to remain in the CHOP,” but said no further organizing will occur to support the presence. The committee said it will shift into a phase of virtual activism.
Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan (D) said Monday the city’s police department would return to the abandoned East Precinct after a weekend during which three people were shot in the CHOP.
She said that protests would still be allowed, but authorities would try to scale back evening activities by asking them to voluntarily leave rather than use force.
“It’s time for people to go home, it is time for us to restore … Capitol Hill so it can be a vibrant part of the community,” Durkan said, The Seattle Times reported. “The impacts on the businesses and residents and the community are now too much.”
Thousands of protesters have occupied the area in Seattle’s Capitol HIll neighborhood since June 8 as part of demonstrations over police reform sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
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]]>The post Dan Bongino: Seattle’s violence defeats the ‘whole liberal ethos’ appeared first on Virus Reports.
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]]>The post Seattle’s activist-occupied zone is just the latest in a long history of movements and protests appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>The six blocks of occupied Seattle streets now known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or “Chop”, have become a focal point of the nationwide anti-racist protests, eliciting both encouragement and concern.
But for this pacific north-west city, it is far from the first time in the radical spotlight.
Inside Chaz, Seattle’s police-free zone: ‘We’re proving the world can change’ – video
Seattle has a long and storied history of social movements and protests, dating back at least as far as a 1919 general strike. The peaceful, six-day event involved so many workers walking off the job to push for better labor conditions that it brought the entire city to a halt.
It “put Seattle on the map as a place that had a strong labor movement and a burst of radicalism,” said James Gregory, a history professor at the University of Washington. “Ever since then the city has managed to mostly maintain that reputation.”
By the 1930s, Seattle and the rest of Washington state had earned such a distinct reputation that the postmaster general, James Farley, is said to have joked: “There are 47 states in the Union, and the Soviet of Washington.”
Since then, there have been rallies by the Black Panther party and anti-war demonstrations led by the Seattle Liberation Front in the 1960’s and 70’s, and, after students at Kent State University were shot in 1970, thousands of people protested by blocking the city’s freeway.
In 1999, Seattle hosted the World Trade Organization conference, and drew national attention when attendees were greeted by 50,000 protesters opposing the entity they considered a threat to everything from worker protections to the environment. Police shot teargas and projectiles at activists, and ultimately arrested more than 500 people.
Today, with the creation of the community-controlled space of Chop, Seattle has once again lived up to its reputation.
Chop, initially named the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or “Chaz”, was founded after a series of dangerous clashes between protesters and law enforcement culminated in police abandoning their precinct building in the area.
The streets of the self-proclaimed police-free zone are now lined with gardens, a medic station, a wide array of free food and supplies, a meditation station and an area filled with couches called the “Decolonization Conversation Café”. In the evenings, there are often speeches, movie nights and teach-ins.
There are signs throughout the space with such messages as, “This is just the beginning” and “Remember who we’re fighting for.” And of course, across the main road in the encampment are three words written in large, colorful letters: “Black Lives Matter.”
A variety of demands have been raised during the course of the occupation, but the main three involve defunding the police, using that money to invest in community health and services, and dropping criminal charges against protesters.
Larry Gossett, a former King county council member and key civil rights leader in the area called the occupation “powerful”, but also, given the city’s history of political movements, “not totally a surprise”.
“I like the alternative people’s culture that’s been manifested particularly in the autonomous zone around Capitol Hill,” he told the Guardian. “I like the variety of people working together, creating, self-policing.
“It’s really quite peaceful. Absolute opposite of what Trump said,” he added.
Since Chop was founded, there has been a wide array of misinformation spread by the rightwing media and conservative politicians, some framing the community as a genuine threat to the country. In one particularly egregious example, Fox News published a photo that was digitally altered to show a man holding a rifle in front of a broken window.
Donald Trump tweeted on Sunday that “Antifa and other Far Left militant groups” had taken over the city “without barely a wimpier [sic] from soft Do Nothing Democrat leadership.”
Chop is located in a part of the Capitol Hill neighborhood that has a long history of being an “alternative space”, according to Michael McCann, a political science professor at the University of Washington.
It’s a magnet for protests and speeches, and is known as a hub for the LGBTQ community, he explained. Crosswalks have been painted rainbow and Cal Anderson Park, where part of Chop is located, was named after the state’s first openly gay state legislator.
It “has always been a scene for various types of counter culture, including LGBTQ and youth politics of various sorts, along with its proximity to the African American population, which is further down in central Seattle,” said McCann.
When discussing the alternative community during a recent press conference, Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, said she had been going to Capitol Hill for nearly half a century and that “it’s been autonomous my whole lifetime and anybody who knows and loves Capitol Hill knows that to be true”.
Kshama Sawant, a Socialist city council woman, has been one of the the most vocal supporters of Chop. Her district includes Capitol Hill, and last week, she announced on Twitter that she will be introducing legislation to convert the East Precinct into a community center for restorative justice.
“Our movement needs to urgently ensure East Precinct is not handed back to police, but is turned over permanently into community control,” she wrote.
With each day, Chop seems to only become more robust. It’s success raises the question, why do these types of alternative movements seem to spring up in Seattle?
Gregory said the answer may lie in the city’s reputation. The stories of the 1919 strike or the World Trade Organization protest can encourage future generations to follow suit, and even attract young people interested in radical activism to the city.
“Reputation and migration have tended to perpetuate or at least bring the possibility of new fluorescence of radical energy,” he said.
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]]>The post Journalist Andy Ngo says Seattle’s occupied zone is like ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>There is a stark contrast between how protesters staying at Seattle’s “Capitol Hill Organized Protest” zone behave during the day and during the night, according to journalist and author Andy Ngo.
In a Monday interview on “Fox News @ Night” with host Shannon Bream, Ngo explained that the area protesters are calling CHOP could be described as a “sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
MSNBC REPORTER BLASTED ON-AIR BY PROTESTERS FOR DESCRIBING CHOP as ‘STREET FESTIVAL’
During the day, he said, it could be considered peaceful if one ignored boarded-up businesses or graffiti calling for the murder of police. But when the sun goes down, the “criminal elements come out,” Ngo noted.
“Unfortunately, last night that was made very clear, when one person on a microphone and a loudspeaker was able to sic a mob of probably more than 100 people to chase down this business that was several blocks away. They just all descended on it. It was pure anarchy,” Ngo remarked.
“They pushed up against the fence and all rushed in. It could have been extremely violent,” he recalled. “Fortunately it wasn’t, according to what I heard from the owner and staff. They had detained one of the comrades of this camp for alleged arson and theft. And, because of that, all [of] his comrades came to help get him out.”
“[The] police never came,” Ngo added.
Ngo told Bream that while there may be some businesses in the area that are sympathetic to the protesters’ cause, many others are not.
“For example, there’s a Trader Joe’s nearby who announced just a few days ago that they’re closing indefinitely because of security and safety issues,” he remarked. “So, when you take that and you also see all [of] the businesses that are boarded up, that no cars can drive into this area — I don’t see how the few anecdotes of positive experiences of some owners could be the representative voice.”
“Particularly when there are now some dissident voices coming out to speak and they’re having to do it anonymously because of threats of retaliation,” Ngo noted.
Another contributing factor to what Ngo described as a chaotic atmosphere is that many people have been seen openly carrying weapons like handguns, rifles, batons or knives.
In addition, Ngo highlighted other concerns like rampant drug use, homelessness and lack of medical care.
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“At night, t’s a completely different vibe than during the day,” he asserted. “You see vagrants come there. Some of them are dealing with mental and health [crises]. There was an ambulance that was called yesterday. The fact that police are not going in should tell you quite a lot. And, this is what my own sourcing had told me last week is that if anybody needs help you actually have to leave the physical zone and go return to the U.S., let’s say, to get help.”
“So, this is a now one-week experiment in anarchy and chaos, and those who live there have to fend for themselves,” he concluded.
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]]>The post In Seattle’s Capital Hill autonomous protest zone, some Black leaders express doubt about white allies appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>CLOSE
A third weekend of demonstrations for racial justice was held in the nation’s capital as tensions remain high after George Floyd, a black man, died after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee to his neck. (June 13)
AP Domestic
SEATTLE — Tracy Stewart stands on a street corner in the newly claimed Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and shakes her head.
Young white people are wandering what’s become known as CHAZ, White Claw seltzers in hand as a tuba player lofts a jaunty tune into the evening air. A woman is drawing chalk art on the street as dozens of others wait patiently in line to buy hot dogs, ignoring the free food piled across the street at the “No Cop Co-Op” tent. A red-haired woman roller-skates in turquoise boots and couples wander the six-block area with $16 craft Negronis. A Pilates instructor poses for photos at the “Free Cap Hill” sign and a group of people sit on couches at the “Conversation Café” near a Post-It covered Dream Board.
“Somebody’s dead. Why do Black bodies have to be in the street for people to have to show up?” says Stewart, an African American mental health therapist. “These people, I’m not even sure they know why they’re here.”
In just a few short days, Seattle protesters who once violently clashed with riot police over the death of George Floyd have had their rough edges dulled by tens of thousands of tourists and sightseers. Once criticized by President Donald Trump and FOX News commentators as a haven for anarchists and the far-left Antifa movement, CHAZ has morphed into what looks and feels like a mini Burning Man festival, complete with its own corps of volunteer street cleaners and medics, as well as dreadlocked white girls blowing soap bubbles and taking selfies in front of paintings of men and women killed by Seattle police.
The autonomous zone’s evolution from a somber protest site to street festival highlights the problem Seattle’s Black residents say they face: The city’s overwhelmingly white population loves to protest but might not be taking the Black Lives Matter movement as seriously as they should.
King County, home to Seattle, has about 2.2 million residents, and is about 65% white. Only about 6% of residents are Black and the Seattle Police Department has a long history of using excessive force against the area’s minority population. In 2012, President Barack Obama’s Justice Department implemented strict oversight of Seattle police, leading to a 60% drop in the use of serious force against the community over the next eight years as taxpayers poured an extra $100 million into the department.
In early May, city officials asked a federal judge to remove the decree, arguing Seattle police were no longer the racist, violent department they once were.
Eighteen days later on Memorial Day, Floyd, a 46-year-old black man in Minneapolis, was pinned to the ground by officers after being accused of passing a fake $20 bill at a grocery store. In a video of the encounter, Floyd gasped for breath as officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes while three other officers looked on.
Floyd’s death sparked a wave of protests internationally, and Seattle’s veteran protesters swung into action, with a massive demonstration on May 30. There were incidents of looting and violence, and a Seattle police officer was caught on video restraining a man by kneeling on his neck.
The protests grew more confrontational, with police using tear gas and pepper spray to disperse the massive crowds protesting police brutality. And then on June 8, police withdrew from the East Precinct station, ceding control over what’s now known as CHAZ. Protesters ransacked the building, and with spray paint renamed it the “Seattle People Department.”
Most businesses in the area have since closed, although a liquor store, ramen restaurant and taco joint are still doing brisk business. Police officers have showed no sign of trying to reassert control in the area, and a steady flow of city officials, including the fire chief and mayor, have visited to discuss trash, sanitation and emergency response concerns.
In an interview with local TV station King5 on Friday, Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best, who is African American, declined to give a timeframe for reasserting control, although she noted losing access to the precinct station has dramatically increased response times of officers responding to 911 calls in the area.
Friday afternoon, poet Roberto Carlos Ascalon visited CHAZ with his family and friends, towing children ages 3, 4 and 5 in a small wagon. He and his wife live in a nearby neighborhood and they wanted the children to witness history unfolding.
Ascalon, 46, saidthe national response to the coronavirus pandemic — which includes $600 payments to the unemployed, billions of dollars in business grants to restaurants and shops, and widespread mask-wearing and social distancing — demonstrates that society can transform itself when and if it decides to.
“If we have a chance to abolish systemic racism and white supremacy, shouldn’t we do everything we can to take that chance?” says Ascalon, a first-generation Filipino American. “We are changing the entire system of the world on a dime. We can actually do this.”
Stewart, however, shakes her head as she thinks about the problems and solutions. A big part of the problem, she says, is that white people who love to protest fail to follow through by holding city officials accountable for new police contracts or spending priorities. She wants to know: Where were these people when the chief pushed back against union contract changes? Where were these people when the city declared the police department “fixed” early last month?
“White people need to stay in when it gets uncomfortable and stop treating this like it is a party,” she says. “The marching and the protesting, all of that is important. But the work is every day holding the mayor and the City Council and the Legislature and all the way up to the president accountable.”
A big feature of the Seattle protests is the lack of specific leadership and who gets to negotiate change with the political establishment.
There’s no equivalent, at least not yet, to a Martin Luther King Jr., Congressman John Lewis, Jesse Jackson or Patrisse Cullors, the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement who has organized protests after the death of Floyd and other black men, women and children in recent years. Ben Crump, the civil rights attorney for Floyd’s family, hasn’t put in an appearance in Seattle. The local chapter of Black Lives Matter has helped organize protest marches, but the CHAZ doesn’t have anyone in charge.
Participants have posted signs around calling for changes ranging from maintaining the police consent decree, to reducing police funding to put more counselors and nurses in schools, and even requiring police officers to ensure their badge numbers are readable.
Other protesters are demanding financial reform to prohibit the super-wealthy, like Seattle-based Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, from getting richer without also investing in their communities, and to call for more financial and community assistance for the city’s large population of people experiencing homelessness.
“We are not here to become a bunch of armed mercenaries. We just want equal rights,” said Matthew “Bootleg Bill” Born, 40, who is white. “This is so into the unknown. We can only ask for so much and try to leverage that. We’re trying to leverage space at the table. We’re tired of being victimized by police officers in riot gear. We’re not at war.”
But if the CHAZ lacks a leader, it most definitely has two visible faces: community journalists and activists TraeAnna Holiday, 38, and Omari Salisbury, 44, who have been conducting live Facebook and YouTube broadcasts daily from next door to the abandoned police station, based out of a loft borrowed from a Microsoft techie. Holiday and Salisbury, who are both Black, work for a marketing firm, Converge, using its resources to raise questions and highlight issues they’ve been pushing for years.
Walking around CHAZ, Salisbury is greeted like a celebrity: people stop him for selfies, they boast how often they watch his videos, or ask for advice on how to get started in citizen journalism. They offer free coffee, doughnuts, handshakes and hugs, which he sometimes forgets to decline amid the pandemic.
He’s has been on the front lines of the protests for days, capturing videos that he says shows police lied about who has been starting confrontations, in particular when an officer grabbed a umbrella protesters were using to shield themselves and pepper-sprayed the crowd.
Like many African Americans in Seattle, Salisbury has a deep-seated fear that these new white allies will once again quickly lose interest.
“This is a time for tough questions,” he says. “A lot of the things the community has been saying, especially the African American community, they’ve been saying for a long time. There’s hardly anything out there that’s new. These aren’t new things.”
Friday evening, Salisbury interviewed Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, asking her what assurances she could give the Black community that things will actually change this time. Three members of the nine-member Seattle City Council have called on Durkan to resign over how the city has mismanaged the protest response. None of the council members are Black.
“We have let people down. And we quit too early. We got comfortable with the changes we made and we thought it was done,” Durkan told Salisbury. “And it’s not done. Words, in many ways don’t matter. It’s going to be action. So peoplegotta see what I’m going to do and how I’m willing to listen and then do what the community needs and wants.”
What the community wants is change, say many Black protesters. Change from the status quo. Change from institutional racism and biased policing and violence that targets minority faces. Change so that white allies will do more to support people of color.
Some Black protesters expressed gratitude that white allies were showing up.
“We’ve gotta have hope that it’s going to change. Otherwise we’re going to die,” says Lawanna Wright, 44, as she watched some of the estimated 60,000 people march through Seattle Friday afternoon in a silent protest organized by Black Lives Matter. “It’s great to see the variety of people. There’s not a lot of Black faces out here. And that gives me hope we’re not out here fighting this battle alone.”
But many are worried they will soon be left alone to take on the city’s racist structures.
Like many of the city’s African American residents, Wright, a substance abuse counselor, notes that Seattle’s white residents are really good at protesting but not so good at bringing about systemic change. There were the 1999 World Bank protests opposing globalization and the 2011 Occupy Seattle protests, both of which did little to halt the increasing corporate control over daily life in the city. And while the city has a reputation as a liberal bastion, Durkan is a former federal prosecutor criticized for overzealous “sweeps”of homeless encampments. Meanwhile, during the 2017 mayoral election, only 42% of registered voters participated.
Wright’s colleague Candis Dover, 55, says the true test will be time, calling this moment “the Kumbaya phase.” Her father, born in 1918 in Georgia, quit school in the third grade to pick cotton as a sharecropper because that was his only option.
“They freed the slaves but didn’t give them a pot to piss in,” she says. “We have to keep this momentum and keep moving. We can’t let up. We just can’t do this by ourselves. We have police in the schools but no nurses. We have police in the schools, but no mental health counselors.”
Watching the silent protest flood into Jefferson Park, protester Mackenzie Thornquist, 28, a flight attendant, says she’s confident her generation is ready to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the African American community.
“My parents and their parents, some stood up for what was right but not enough of them,” says Thornquist, who is white. “The younger generation is ready to stand up. A lot of people have been too neutral.”
Back at the CHAZ, Holiday, the community activist and citizen journalist, lets a note of frustration creep into her voice as she thinks about the way the media has covered the protests, riots and takeover of the area. Conservative media has focused on the presence of armed men in the area, none of whom were breaking the law, or simply concocted fake images like FOX News, which was forced to apologize after publishing a doctored photo that appeared to show an armed man in front of a looted store.
Trump in a statement on Twitter Friday demanded that city officials end the takeover: “The terrorists burn and pillage our cities, and they think it is just wonderful, even the death.”
Seattle Mayor says, about the anarchists takeover of her city, “it is a Summer of Love”. These Liberal Dems don’t have a clue. The terrorists burn and pillage our cities, and they think it is just wonderful, even the death. Must end this Seattle takeover now!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2020
Holiday says all she sees around her is love, kindness and community, from the free food to the colorful artwork and the volunteer medics helping everyone stay safe. What’s been startling to politicians, she says, is that Americans truly want to see change, and they’re increasingly demanding it.
“The apathy in this nation has been so real. Seeing people stand up and say ‘we can’t see this happen anymore’ has literally shocked the world. It’s making every leader think about their position,” she says. “I have two sons. Two black boys. What I want is real change. Not minor. Not incremental. But something that makes the world shift.”
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