James.galbraith

Congressional Democrats are calling on the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general to open an investigation into the agency’s denial of federal housing loans to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients and subsequent denials by agency officials, including HUD Sec. Ben Carson, to federal legislators that they had made such a policy change.

“Despite DACA recipients being able to receive FHA-backed loans during the Obama administration, in December 2018 news reports indicated that HUD was quietly denying these loans to DACA recipients without an official announcement of any changes in the agency’s policy,” legislators say in a statement. However, “Facing questions in April 2019, Sec. Carson denied knowing anything about the change in FHA policy,” they continue.

The call from Democratic legislators including New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez and Congress members Juan Vargas and Pete Aguilar of California comes just days after BuzzFeed News reported that emails obtained by watchdog group Democracy Forward through the Freedom of Information Act show HUD “made a specific internal decision by August 2018” to block DACA recipients from these loans while publicly insisting to Congress that it hadn’t.

Legislators note numerous lies and contradictions from HUD officials, including Carson. In one notable statement to the House Financial Services Committee last May, Carson told Vargas that, “[T]he same policy has been in place since 2003, which was reaffirmed in 2015 by the previous administration, and we have not made any changes to that whatsoever.” Several weeks prior, legislators said HUD also “told Housing Wire that HUD, the FHA, the Department of Agriculture, and Fannie Mae were not denying mortgages to DACA recipients.”

However, in its report, BuzzFeed News said, “The newly obtained emails show that HUD officials were telling lenders not to approve FHA-backed loans from at least early 2018, and that they had made a specific decision by that August to use an employment authorization category that only applies to DACA recipients to justify excluding them, though it’s not clear why that category was considered disqualifying.” 

If it seems like something’s fishy, welcome to the aquarium. “Specifically we are concerned that HUD imposed a new, nonpublic, and legally erroneous policy prohibiting the issuance of FHA-insured loans to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients,” legislators tell the inspector general, “and knowingly misrepresented to Congress the implementation and enforcement of this new policy.” These days, it can be hard to keep up with the Trump administration’s criminal actions, but that it would lie to Congress in the name of continuing to stick it to immigrants is yet another gross low.

“It’s unacceptable for the Trump Administration to secretly change the rules to stop DACA recipients from achieving the dream of home ownership. It’s equally unacceptable that the HUD Secretary would lie to Congress about the Trump administration’s discriminatory housing practices,” Aguilar said in the statement. “We’re demanding an investigation because it’s wrong and unlawful for the Trump administration to implement new and discriminatory housing policies and attempt to hide the truth from the Congress and the American people.”

In a hardly unexpected response, an editor of the Pittsburgh newspaper who banned two Black journalists, among others, from covering protests about the death of George Floyd has chosen to rebuke criticism about the decision instead of apologizing. 

”Let’s start with this,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette executive editor Keith Burris wrote. “Editors at this newspaper did not single out a black reporter and a black photographer and ban them from covering Pittsburgh protests after the killing of George Floyd. And we certainly did not single out two people and keep them from covering local protests because they were black. That is an outrageous lie—a defamation, in fact.”

Burris went on to explain that he and management “assumed the lie was so outrageous that it did not need refutation.” “Here’s the truth: No one was taken off the protest story because of race,” Burris wrote. “One person was not assigned a story because of the suggestion of bias. A tweet was issued and a dialogue followed that editors felt was strong commentary—opinion—on a story the reporter was only supposed to report.

“This person was not taken off a story, but was never on it. And this person does not cover race or protests. There is no such beat. This person covers social media, normally.”

Yet and still, that nameless person, Alexis Johnson, and anyone who supported her tweet in question—including Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Michael Santiago—were in practice taken off of protest-related coverage. 

Burris used scathing language in defense of his selectively principled editorial decisions from “tragic fraud” to “simplistic and useless.” He drew parallels that aligned a tweet to a violation of the very principles of journalism. 

In that tweet, by the way, Johnson seemed to mockingly point to a very real inequity between common media narratives about Black people and those about their white peers. “Horrifying scenes and aftermath from selfish LOOTERS who don’t care about this city!!!!! .... oh wait sorry. No, these are pictures from a Kenny Chesney concert tailgate. Whoops,” she wrote.

Then, the journalist got to live out the very inequity she seemed to mock. She told MSNBC’s Joy Reid that her white peer was warned about a social media post he sent but wasn’t then taken off of protest-related coverage. “In fact, he covered the protest the following day,” Johnson said.

Burris made no mention of that specific in his op-ed, but he defended the motives behind the ban as "purely journalistic" and refused to apologize for any wrongdoing in the matter. In fact, the closest he came to an apology was this section of his op-ed:

Did we fail to fully appreciate what the new civil rights movement means to a young black woman Did we miss the larger context of all that is happening in our country right now? As we attempted a teaching moment with a young reporter did we miss what could have been our own teaching moment? A reasonable person could make any one of those cases. But no fair person could make the case that our actions were race-based. And we will not apologize for upholding professional standards in journalism or attempting to eliminate bias.

Apparently, those professional standards only apply to the lowly journalists closest to the story and not the white editor given carte blanche to regurgitate his opinion all over the newspaper’s web edition. 

Or as Burris puts it: “A journalist can be a commentator or a chronicler. He or she cannot be both at the same time. But whether he is a straight up reporter or an opinion writer he must, above all, seek to be fair and truthful.”

So in the spirit of fairness and truth, can I assume Johnson’s op-ed is on the way, or must she assign a “commentator” to tell her truth for her because a white man defined her as only “a chronicler?”

RELATED: Pittsburgh union fights back when 2 Black journalists banned from covering George Floyd protests

A new ABC News scoop undercuts Trump's agitprop.

US Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) attends a House Judiciary Committee hearing on police brutality and racial profiling on June 10, 2020, in Washington, DC. | Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images

Republicans equated police lives with black lives at a House hearing Wednesday.

Wednesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing was Congress’s first big forum for discussing the killing of George Floyd, the nationwide protests it sparked, and the country’s problems with police brutality and racism. It was also apparently, in some Republicans’ view, a chance to try to redirect the conversation to some both sides-isms.

About midway through the question-and-answer period of the hearing — which was about a Democratic bill proposing several key policing reforms, including a ban on using chokeholds and creating a national database of officers who are fired for misconduct — Rep. Martha Roby (R-AL) asked George Floyd’s brother Philonise Floyd a question. She asked him to speak about the pain he’s felt over the past two weeks since his brother was killed after a Minneapolis, Minnesota, officer pinned him by the neck with his knee for several minutes, and what he hoped to see from Congress.

In his response, Floyd made a very simple, moving statement: that black lives matter because “all life is precious.” But some Republicans on the committee took that phrase as an opportunity to “both sides” the issue.

Immediately after Floyd’s heartfelt message, another committee member called on Republican witness Angela Underwood Jacobs, whose brother was a member of the Federal Protective Service and was killed while guarding a courthouse in Oakland, California, during recent unrest over Floyd’s death.

“The heartbreak and the grief is hard to articulate when your entire world has been turned upside down,” said Jacobs. “I do want to know, though, when I think about all of this is that, my brother wore a uniform and he wore that uniform proudly — I’m wondering where is the outrage for a fallen officer that also happens to be African American?”

The moment seemed designed to create a “both sides” situation, redirecting the conversation away from those harmed by police. Jacobs did go on to implore the Congress members there to find a solution to this issue, but the seeds were sown in that moment for some Republican lawmakers.

Some Republicans seemed more worried about protecting law enforcement than addressing police brutality

Amid discussion of specific policy proposals and their various merits and shortcomings, several Republican lawmakers instead took stands against concepts like “abolish the police” or “defund the police.” (The bill that prompted the hearing included neither.)

Other GOP members of the committee seemed committed to equating black lives and police lives.

Shortly after the moment with Floyd’s brother and Jacobs’s story, ranking member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) seized on the “both sides” narrative in an exchange with Republican witness and Fox News contributor Dan Bongino during his round of questioning.

Asking Bongino if he felt he was protecting life when he put on his NYPD uniform or was protecting presidents in the Secret Service, Jordan deftly flipped the narrative. “When you protected that life, you actually risked your life, is that accurate?” Jordan asked; Bongino responded affirmatively. “And officers do that every day, don’t they?” replied Jordan.

From there, Jordan said that the idea of abolishing or defunding the police is inconsistent with the statement “all life is precious,” even though the bill in question wasn’t proposing either of those things.

Jordan continued his back-and-forth with Bongino, hitting on this theme more clearly. “I think in your testimony earlier, you said if police forces are abolished, if police forces are defunded ... we’re talking about human beings, we’re talking about officers who put on their uniforms and protect our communities,” he said. “It will put their lives at risk, won’t it?”

The unsaid assumption underlying some Republicans’ arguments during the hearing was that police are the only thing standing up to a perceived menace — one presented by the black communities and other communities of color whose suffering at the hands of law enforcement other witnesses pointed out. Still, little moments seemed to expose this assumption. In his opening statement, Bongino had called on Congress to “commit to police accountability, without shredding the thin wall between civilization and chaos.”

Eventually, Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) said that police violence isn’t an “us versus them” issue.

“This moment is about what’s right, and this moment is about what’s wrong,” she said referring to Floyd’s death. “This is not a black issue or a white issue. It’s not a Democratic issue, a Republican issue. This is an American issue that has turned into yet another American tragedy.”

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As previously suspected, it looks like the Republican Party is homing in on Jacksonville, Florida, as the "new" location for Donald Trump's National Republican Convention. The Washington Post reports that the party's more boring, proceduralish meetings will still be held in Charlotte, North Carolina, so that the party can dodge lawsuits for breaking their contract, and that the decision will only be final after they figure out whether there are actually enough hotel rooms in the city to accommodate them.

So it looks like Donald Trump will be able to have the Republican convention he was demanding: one with no social distancing during a pandemic, no mask requirements or other annoying safety considerations, with thousands of people from around the country stacking themselves up like cordwood and when some inevitably contract COVID-19 and die, no remorse from Republican officials because the job is done, and none of those people are needed anymore.

Jacksonville was considered the top contender for Typhoid Hitler's new gig for the simplest of reasons. The city's Republican mayor really wanted it, and both he and pandemic number-fudging governor Rick DeSantis have been clear that they won't interfere with Trump's desire to pack an arena if Trump demands they pack an arena. The number of states willing to abandon pandemic restrictions for Trump was low, and limited to places with both Republican governors and Republican local officials; add to that, now, the near-certainty of large-scale protests against Trump and his enablers and it seems a disaster in waiting. Fortunately for Trump, "a disaster in waiting" is Florida's state motto. It's on the license plates and everything.

President Donald Trump at a roundtable with law enforcement officials at the White House on June 8. | Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images

The 10 facilities are in the South. Trump’s stance may have something to do with his 2020 reelection campaign.

President Donald Trump just said his administration “will not even consider the renaming” of 10 US Army facilities named after Confederate leaders, even though top Pentagon leaders said earlier this week that they were open to discussing such a change.

On Monday, Army spokesperson Col. Sunset Belinsky told Politico that “The secretary of defense and secretary of the Army are open to a bipartisan discussion on the topic.”

That opened the door for the Army to potentially reverse its long-held position on keeping the names honoring Confederate officers. The Army defended that stance as recently as February, with a spokesperson telling Task & Purpose, “The Army has a tradition of naming installations and streets after historical figures of military significance, including former Union and Confederate general officers.”

But the Army has come under renewed pressure in recent months to change its position. In February, the Marines signaled that Confederate-related items — including the Confederate battle flag — would no longer be permitted on its bases and officially followed through last week.

More recently, the protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd have prompted states like Virginia and Florida to announce plans to remove Confederate statues. Now, some of the Army’s most revered retired generals and former top civilian leaders have come out in support of the Pentagon’s seemingly more open stance.

But despite the growing movement recognizing the explicitly racist history behind the naming of Army installations after Confederate officers, the president remains intransigent.

“The United States of America trained and deployed our HEROES on these Hallowed Grounds, and won two World Wars,” he wrote in short Twitter thread Wednesday. “Therefore, my Administration will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations.”

Trump’s stance here is consistent with past comments he’s made on similar issues. After a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump said the removal of Confederate statutes was “so foolish.” It’s consistent with his history of racist comments and actions. And it’s consistent with his 2016 campaign strategy of using racist and xenophobic rhetoric to capitalize on deep-seated white racial resentment in America.

That white racial resentment is still alive and well in America, and Trump clearly seems to see it as a winning strategy for the 2020 election, too.

But recent polling suggests attitudes toward issues of systemic racism and police violence have changed dramatically in recent weeks following George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police last month, including among white voters — a trend that a number of Congressional Republicans seem to recognize as well.

The New York Times reports that congressional Republicans were “caught flat-footed by an election-year groundswell of public support for overhauling policing in America to address systemic racism” in recent weeks and “are struggling to coalesce around a legislative response.”

Trump’s decision to publicly stake a hardline position on the base-renaming issue right in the middle of this could possibly hurt such efforts.

Why the Army named bases after Confederates in the first place

Naming Army installations after Confederate officers is deeply intertwined with America’s long history of racism.

All 10 facilities named after Confederate men are in the South: three in Virginia, two in Louisiana, two in Georgia, and one each in Alabama, North Carolina, and Texas.

As the nation mobilized for both world wars, political leaders amended Jim Crow-era laws to allow more minority troops into the military’s ranks. Perhaps the most consequential amendments were made to the Selective Service Act of 1940, which required men between 21 and 45 years of age to register for the draft.

Two amendments to the law, one by Sen. Robert Wagner (D-NY) and another by US Rep. Hamilton Fish (R-NY), allowed black Americans and other minorities to volunteer for war or be drafted. The final text of the statute read “there shall be no discrimination against any person on account of race or color” in selecting or training men in the military services.

The Pentagon’s official history of racial integration in the armed forces concluded that, with varying degrees of success, such changes “actually spread federally sponsored segregation into areas where it had never before existed with the force of law.”

Most of those areas were in the South. Mike Jason, a retired Army colonel who commanded troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, told me on Tuesday the region had lots of cheap land, which is why the Army in the early 1900s built bases and other facilities there.

As a way to appease racist white political leaders and locals who didn’t want a more integrated military nearby, the Army named bases after Confederate “heroes” who were popular among these leaders and locals.

Take Fort Gordon in Georgia, first established as Camp Gordon in 1916, smack in the middle of World War I. It’s named after Lt. Gen. John Brown Gordon, one of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s most trusted officers. Gordon was elected to the US Senate in 1872, but he was also widely known as the head of Georgia’s chapter of the Ku Klux Klan (a charge he, as leaders of the organization often do, denied).

By the time of his death in 1904, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, he was for many “the living embodiment of the Confederacy.”

This is the kind of history Trump wants to preserve. That he’s openly defending this practice — at a time when the country is reeling from racial inequality — shows what the president truly values.

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Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

A retired judge issues a scathing report on the administration's corrupt effort to spring Michael Flynn.

The United States military may be reconsidering its practice of honoring traitors to the United States by naming bases and other facilities after them. The top leaders of the Marines and the Navy have ordered the removal of displays of the Confederate battle flag, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy are “open to a bipartisan discussion” of renaming places like Fort Bragg and Fort Benning.

This is a debate in 2020. And it may be a losing fight (for now), since adherents of the Confederacy retain significant sway in this country, even though the Confederacy was 1) treason against the United States, 2) committed in defense of slavery, and 3) a losing effort. Retired Gen. David Petraeus pointed to those issues in an essay at The Atlantic calling for bases currently named after Confederates to be renamed.

“For an organization designed to win wars to train for them at installations named for those who led a losing force is sufficiently peculiar, but when we consider the cause for which these officers fought, we begin to penetrate the confusion of Civil War memory,” Petraeus wrote. “These bases are, after all, federal installations, home to soldiers who swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. The irony of training at bases named for those who took up arms against the United States, and for the right to enslave others, is inescapable to anyone paying attention.”

As Petraeus admits, lots of people aren’t paying attention—in the piece, he acknowledges that, despite serving at many of the forts in question, “It would be years before I reflected on the individuals for whom these posts were named” and “Nor did I think about the messages those names sent to the many African Americans serving on these installations—messages that should have been noted by all of us.”

It’s also the case that an extremely vocal minority is paying attention, and fighting to keep Confederate names on these federal facilities. As the Marine Corps said in a statement last week, “The Confederate battle flag has all too often been co-opted by violent extremist and racist groups whose divisive beliefs have no place in our Corps.” But while the official position can be that these “divisive beliefs have no place in our Corps,” the statement acknowledged the very real position those beliefs have in the United States today: “Our history as a nation, and events like the violence in Charlottesville in 2017, highlight the divisiveness the use of the Confederate battle flag has had on our society.”

It’s long past time to erase every official honor given to Confederate leaders. That isn’t erasing history—we should still teach the history. But a true reckoning with the history does not lift their names up. 

A Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. | Tim Boyle/Getty Images

The revised definition will include systemic oppression.

Signifying the larger cultural shift felt around the US, Merriam-Webster will now include systemic oppression in its latest definition of racism.

The dictionary, which has long served as a gatekeeper of the English lexicon, made plans for the update after recent Drake University graduate Kennedy Mitchum emailed editors frustrated about the current definition’s inadequacy.

Merriam-Webster’s current definition of racism reads:

a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.”

a: doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles

b: a political or social system founded on racism

racial prejudice or discrimination.

Mitchum, a black woman who hails from Florissant, Missouri, a city just north of Ferguson, wanted the dictionary to provide a more detailed definition, one that includes an explanation of systemic oppression. She grew tired of having conversations about racial injustice, just to have people point to the dictionary as a defense for why they’re not racist.

“I kept having to tell them that definition is not representative of what is actually happening in the world. The way that racism occurs in real life is not just prejudice, it’s the systemic racism that is happening for a lot of black Americans,” she told CNN.

Mitchum was both shocked and pleased when editors at Merriam-Webster replied to her concern and pledged to make a change. In the response to Mitchum, Merriam-Webster editor Alex Chambers said: “While our focus will always be on faithfully reflecting the real-world usage of a word, not on promoting any particular viewpoint, we have concluded that omitting any mention of the systemic aspects of racism promotes a certain viewpoint in itself.”

As protests against racism and police violence continue around the world, Merriam-Webster’s statement signifies a shift in how people and institutions are coming to grapple with what racism is and the full scope of how it has always worked.

Racism and systemic oppression go hand in hand

White discourse on racism has historically relied on the part of the dictionary definition that says one must believe a particular race is superior or inferior to be racist. Under this definition, someone is racist, for example, if in one-to-one interactions they intentionally mistreat someone or deny them opportunity (a job or promotion, housing, a seat at a restaurant) based on their race. Under this definition, someone is racist if they use the n-word, a term that inherently speaks to the belief that black people are inferior.

But modern discourse has advanced the reality that larger systems and institutions at play in society — whether in education, policing, health care, or the economy — work over time to reinforce the superiority of one race over another. For example, the continued practice of redlining on the part of banks and the US real estate industry in the 20th century systematically disenfranchised black homeowners and furthered segregation and the prosperity of white Americans across the country. Or the country’s policing system, part of a greater criminal justice system that is racist, reinforces the false idea that black people are innately criminals and therefore inferior. Meanwhile, policies like stop-and-frisk criminalize and systematically oppress black people when they target them on the basis of race.

In its revision of the definition for racism, Merriam-Webster will attempt to show how racism isn’t just about discrimination or prejudice from one person to another but also about how longstanding institutions and laws and regulations buttress notions of supremacy and inferiority between the races. Moreover, the new definition may help us better see how white people benefit from racism since systemic oppression is ingrained in the fabric of American society.

“Because people often turn to the dictionary to gain a more nuanced view of the way a word is being used in a particular context, and because the use of the word racism to specifically describe racial prejudice combined with systemic oppression is now so common, ignoring this meaning of the word may leave our readers confused or misled,” Chambers wrote to Mitchum.

Merriam-Webster’s decision comes at a time when national attention has turned to the police killings of black people, from Breonna Taylor to George Floyd to Maurice Gordon. International unrest has followed these deaths, with protesters calling for changes to the systems and people that intentionally and unintentionally enforce racism.

Merriam-Webster said the revised entry for racism is being drafted and will be added to the dictionary soon. In addition, the dictionary said it will “revise the entries of other words that are related to racism or have racial connotations.”

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Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

This is not a joke and it is not satire. Donald Trump has now gone so batshit loopy that his campaign is now issuing a legal "cease and desist" demand to CNN for ... conducting a poll that shows Donald Trump is losing.

That's it, that's the complaint. The poll shows Donald His Majesty Batshit Von Weirdstance Trump behind challenger Joe Biden, with Biden winning 55%-41%, and the idiot was so infuriated by the poll, which he tweeted was "FAKE," that his campaign had to placate him by threatening CNN with dire legal consequences for bein' mean to him.

The letter, which again is apparently absolutely real and demands a "conspicuous retraction, apology, and clarification," claims that the poll was "a stunt" and "phony," to "cause voter suppression, stifle momentum and enthusiasm for" the White WalkerToChurch leader, reports CNN. And it uses numerous weird claims from perennially sketchy Republican pollster McLaughlin & Ass. to assert that well, CNN's pollster did it all wrong and Actually Dear Leader would be leading if they did it right, so everybody needs to shut up and apologize and I still cannot believe this is a real letter, are we serious about this insanity? Wait, I'm being told it really is.

The problem here, and there are many, is that the CNN poll is only one of many to show the same results: Trump's absolute botching of the pandemic and, now, blustering garbagemouthedness during nationwide protests are absolutely tanking his approval ratings, even causing states like Ohio to come back into campaign play.

The Trump campaign's assertion that well Actually Trump is winning includes claims that CNN had the audacity to conduct the poll before the latest "great economic news," which renders it invalid, and it was "biased," and also apparently the moon was in the wrong phase and CNN failed to account for the votes of invading Lobster People or whatever. It doesn't matter.

Similarly, the pseudo-legal campaign complaint that CNN produced the poll to "cause voter suppression" is not a particularly plausible assertion, given the Republican Party's robust support for suppressing voters as much as possible, using whatever means are necessary.

It's quite obvious that the only purposes of the letter are (1) to try to stifle Trump's narcissistic rage, as he turns "malignantly crazy" over bad polling and contemplates firing golden boy Jared Kushner, and (2) to serve as a campaign press release. It is important to Trump that his base believes he is not losing, and the only way those around him can regain even a modicum of control over the decompensating idiot is to flatter those delusions and adopt them as their own. It is also important for the campaign to propagandize their base further into the delusion that all bad news for the fascist manchild is assuredly "fake," the products of a malevolent media that has been conspiring against him rather than Trump repeatedly putting his own foot into his colon, then demanding to know how it got there.

So expect this to be a fundraising theme, for a while. And expect the campaign to target other polls and other outlets as being engaged in similar conspiracies to make Donald look bad.

And expect Donald to get even more unstable, and slip deeper into authoritarian demands and bizarre public claims, as his malignant narcissism rewrites all he sees and hears rather than admit he is not, in fact, the greatest human who has ever lived, spoken, or purchased real estate.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was just shady enough to be under two investigations—one involving his misuse of government employees, and one involving a sketchy arms deal he helped push through Saudi Arabia. After his investigator, inspector general Steve Linick, was fired at Pompeo's urging, Pompeo claimed he only knew one probe was in process—the one concerning the arms deal.

As for the investigation into his misuse of government employees: “I didn’t have access to that information,” Pompeo said on May 20, “so I couldn’t possibly have retaliated.”

Couldn't possibly. Except that high level State Department officials clearly did know, according to a newly released interview Linick did with lawmakers last week.

“As to that review, I never spoke with the Secretary directly about it,” Linick said according to a transcript of the testimony reported on by The Washington Post. “There was a point in time in late 2019 that my office reached out to get documents from the office of the secretary as well as the office of the legal adviser. And during that same period of time, I did speak with Undersecretary [Brian] Bulatao, possibly Deputy Secretary [John] Sullivan — but I am not sure — about the reasons — about the fact that we were making these document requests so they weren’t surprised.”

Additionally, Linick indicated that he contacted both Deputy Secretary Steve Biegun and State Department executive secretary Lisa Kenna.

Linick added that his overt approach was intentional as he didn't want any high-ranking State Department officials to be taken by surprise by the probe. 

So basically, Pompeo's "office" knew, as did a handful of Pompeo's high-level advisers, but supposedly Pompeo "couldn't possibly" have known about the probe when he told Donald Trump to fire Linick.

If Pompeo was the squeaky clean type, maybe he'd have a leg to stand on here. But we're talking about a guy who was facing multiple internal investigations and, oh, BTW, waited weeks to publicly admit that he just happened to be on that July 25 call in which Trump attempted to pressure Ukraine into interfering in the 2020 elections.   

A former federal judge tasked with reviewing the Department of Justice’s motion to dismiss former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s case called it “clear evidence of a gross abuse of prosecutorial power” and said the request should be denied.

The AP reports: “Former U.S. District Judge John Gleeson said in a filing Wednesday that the government ‘has engaged in highly irregular conduct to benefit a political ally of the President.'”

The DOJ’s decision was denounced in May by former president Barack Obama: “The news over the last 24 hours I think has been somewhat downplayed — about the Justice Department dropping charges against Michael Flynn. And the fact that there is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”

The decision on whether or not to dismiss Flynn’s case will come from U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who appointed Gleeson, and an appeals court.

The post Michael Flynn Case Dismissal ‘a Gross Abuse of Prosecutorial Power’ by DOJ ‘to Benefit a Political Ally of the President’ Says Former Federal Judge appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Caitlyn Jenner spoke with People on the five-year anniversary of her transition, and told the magazine that her politics have evolved, and said that thinking she was “wearing rose-colored glasses” when she thought “could change the world’s thinking” about transgender people: “Now I know I can only try and change one person at a time.”

People reports: “Jenner feels like she’s made meaningful progress. ‘I’ve changed my thinking in a lot of ways,’ she says. (She now identifies as ‘economically conservative, socially progressive’ and believes ‘we need equality for all, regardless of who’s in the White House.’) ‘I love my community. I truly want to help,’ she says. To that end, she has been quietly giving trans students college scholarships over the past three years and has realigned her foundation to focus on trans youth.”

The post Caitlyn Jenner Says She’s ‘Economically Conservative, Socially Progressive’ on 5-Year Anniversary of Her Transition appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

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The Trump administration is preparing to open the door to oil and gas drilling off Florida’s coast — but will wait until after the November election to avoid blowback in a swing state whose waters both parties have long considered sacrosanct, according to four people familiar with the plan.

Drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico would fulfill a long-sought goal of energy companies, giving them access to potentially billions of barrels of oil that have been off-limits since the federal government withdrew leases it had sold in 1985. But even the possibility of drilling is a politically explosive topic for Floridians, who worry that oil spills would devastate their tourism-based economy in a reprise of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.

President Donald Trump, who has set “energy dominance” as a key national goal, has eased regulations on offshore drilling put in place by the Obama administration. Interior has spent years working on a proposed drilling plan that would expand oil companies‘ access to waters around the country's coastline, including a draft plan issued in 2018 by the Trump administration that considered opening the federal waters off both of Florida's coasts.

That plan also included an expansion of offshore drilling in California, a move that would escalate the ongoing battles between the state and the administration over environmental issues since Trump took office. The people did not know whether the final proposal will include that section of coastline as well.

“Whatever is decided is expected to come out within two to three weeks of the election,” said one person who has had recent discussions with Interior officials about the issue and who agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity. The eastern Gulf is the “golden trophy” for the industry because it could be producing oil within 10 years using existing infrastructure from the Gulf’s western portion, the person said.

A second person who recently spoke to Interior officials said they had predicted that the plan would probably come out after the Nov. 3 election but before Trump’s current term ends in January. The timing was driven partly by the sensitive politics in Florida, but also because Interior Secretary David Bernhardt was conducting reviews to ensure it was legally defensible, the person said.

Two people who work in the energy industry said they had heard a similar timeline from agency officials several months ago for releasing the plan, which has been under development since the early days of the Trump administration.

“It’s a given that new acreage will become available when the politics of reelection are behind [Trump],” said one person in the industry, who described the eastern Gulf of Mexico as “the prize acreage.”

Interior did not answer specific questions about when it might release the proposal. The agency has been mostly silent on the plan’s future after Bernhardt in April 2019 said it was “indefinitely” delaying releasing its offshore drilling proposal, following a court ruling that upheld an Obama-era ban on drilling in certain Arctic coastal areas — a decision that blew a hole in the department‘s plans to also include that area in the new plan.

Once Interior releases the plan proposal, it will take public comment before implementing a final version.

The Trump administration’s efforts to open up additional stretches of shoreline to oil and gas production have run into opposition from both Republican and Democratic governors of coastal states. Former Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke had initially issued a draft plan to open the eastern Gulf once the current federal drilling moratorium ends in 2022 — but then walked that back in 2018, when he promised Florida's then-governor, Republican Rick Scott, that the state's coasts would remain off-limits. (Scott is now a U.S. senator.)

Interior’s drive to open up more areas to drilling is currently facing market headwinds. Oil producers have slashed their 2020 budgets amid a cash crunch brought on by low oil prices from the coronavirus pandemic, and U.S. production has declined by about 2 million barrels per day from record levels seen in March. New deepwater offshore drilling projects, which often cost billions of dollars to bring online, have also fallen out of favor with many companies in the industry, which has in recent years focused on developing onshore shale fields.

But with 3.6 billion technically recoverable barrels of oil and 11.5 trillion cubic feet of gas estimated to sit beneath the sea floor off Florida’s west coast, large, well-financed companies would probably be interested in lease sales for eastern Gulf acreage, especially if they faced little competition for the new acres, one of the industry sources added.

“They’d watch and think, 'It’s ridiculous we haven’t purchased [leases] for dimes on the dollars,'” the person said.

The offshore drilling plan, details of which remained closely guarded, has been developed by Bernhardt, Deputy Secretary Kate MacGregor and acting Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management Casey Hammond, the people familiar with the proposal said. Details around the timing could still change before its release, they added.

But such a plan would face opposition from Florida’s lawmakers. Scott and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio introduced the Florida Shores Protection and Fairness Act earlier this year to extend the eastern Gulf’s existing drilling moratorium by 10 years. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has not called the bill up for debate.

Florida lawmakers in recent weeks have taken their concerns directly to Trump, who last year declared himself an official state resident. They have also spoken to Senate leadership on possibly including Rubio and Scott’s bill in upcoming legislation, according to one Senate aide who requested anonymity to discuss the negotiations.

“It’s something we’re actively working on,” the aide said. “This is the one issue in Florida that every person agrees on.”

But opening up the waters off Florida has been a long-held goal of major companies in the industry who have spent years amassing politically-connected allies.

Interior documents obtained by POLITICO show lobbyists, including former Louisiana GOP Sen. David Vitter, requesting in March 2018 that the agency open Florida's waters for exploration. Three months after Interior released its draft leasing plan in 2018, former Interior Assistant Deputy Secretary Todd Willens forwarded to Joe Balash, Interior’s then-assistant secretary for lands and minerals, a letter of introduction for Vitter sent from former GOP Montana Rep. Denny Rehberg, another lawmaker-turned-lobbyist at the political strategy and consulting firm Mercury LLC.

“He [Vitter] doesn't know his way around DOI yet and I offered to help,” Rehberg wrote in his March 2018 email.

Vitter’s message to Interior contained a letter from EnVen Energy Ventures, a Houston-based company focused on oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. In it, EnVen Executive Vice President Nick Gibbens asked for access to federal waters in the eastern portion of the Gulf now off limits for drilling.

“While we respect that Florida’s economy relies heavily on tourism, oil and gas platforms and rigs 20 miles from the coastline would not be visible to tourists,” the EnVen letter says.

Interior did not directly answer POLITICO’s specific questions on the timing of the release of its offshore drilling proposal, or what regions it would include. Tracey Moriarty, spokesperson for Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, pointed to the agency's January 2018 draft plan written during Zinke's tenure that had sought to open virtually all the U.S. coastline for oil and gas exploration.

That plan had drawn widespread criticism, and had included possible lease sales in the eastern Gulf of Mexico in 2023 and 2024, after the expiration of the current moratorium on drilling in the region.

The Trump administration also considered reopening federal waters off California to new drilling, according to documents POLITICO obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The waters off California’s southern coast contain 5.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil, according to a BOEM estimate.

However, many industry analysts have cast doubt on whether the administration would seek to open up California’s federal waters to new drilling beyond the modest footprint it now has. Coastal drilling has long been unpopular in the state since a massive 1969 oil spill off Santa Barbara — the third largest spill in U.S. history, and one factor that led President Richard Nixon to create the Environmental Protection Agency.

But a late-2018 briefing plan that BOEM head Walter Cruickshank gave to Balash described the benefits of opening up at least the southern coast of California to new drilling.

“Currently, California imports nearly 60% of its crude oil refinery input whereas 10 years ago imports only comprised 45% of refinery input,” according to presentation notes dated November 2018. “Production offshore California could replace imports and reduce California’s dependence on foreign oil.”

Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat and staunch opponent of the fossil fuel industry, said in an interview that Zinke had repeatedly brought up possible leases around the Santa Barbara Ship Channel.

“I did have some conversations with Ryan Zinke and he kept coming back to the Santa Barbara Ship Channel,” Huffman said in an interview. “As much as he acknowledged that the West Coast was a heavy lift, he always left room for something in Santa Barbara.”

Zinke did not reply to questions.

Exxon and other companies still produce oil in the area. But the drilling industry would be unlikely to test the waters in a state that has been vocally against new oil and gas drilling and has set up regulations that would make it more difficult to do so, several people in the industry said.

“Nobody wants to do business in California. My God, that would be torturous,” one industry person said. “I would see this as something to antagonize Democrats and to create leverage to open up other acres.”

Kevin Slagle, spokesperson for the Western States Petroleum Association, a trade group that includes Exxon, Chevron, Shell and other companies, concurred.

“Our members are not champing at the bit for offshore exploration and production in the West,” Slagle said.

The coronavirus is still killing as many as 1,000 Americans per day — but the Trump administration isn’t saying much about it.

It’s been more than a month since the White House halted its daily coronavirus task force briefings. Top officials like infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci have largely disappeared from national television — with Fauci making just four cable TV appearances in May after being a near fixture on Sunday shows across March and April — and are frequently restricted from testifying before Congress. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is preparing to resume his campaign rallies after a three-month hiatus, an attempted signal to voters that normalcy is returning ahead of November’s election, and that he’s all but put the pandemic behind him.

“We’ve made every decision correctly,” Trump claimed in remarks in the Rose Garden Friday morning. “We may have some embers or some ashes or we may have some flames coming, but we’ll put them out. We’ll stomp them out.”

Inside the White House, top advisers like Jared Kushner privately assured colleagues last month that the outbreak was well in hand — citing data on declines in community spread — and that the long-feared “second wave” might have even been averted, according to three current and former officials. However, new data from states like Florida and mass protests across the country are renewing concerns about the virus’s spread. Texas, for instance, has reported three straight days of record-breaking coronavirus hospitalizations — highs that come shortly after the state kicked off the third stage of its reopening plan. Hospitalizations in the Lone Star State have increased 42 percent since Memorial Day.

Those officials also acknowledge that the Covid-19 task force has scaled back its once-daily internal meetings — the task force now meets twice per week — but insist that the pandemic response remains a priority. One official with direct knowledge of the administration’s strategy cited efforts to scale up testing, accelerate the development of treatments and vaccines and perform other behind-the-scenes work to get ready for a potential fall surge.

“We’re delivering the supplies and resources that states asked for,” said the official. “This doesn’t need to be the public ‘coronavirus show’ every day anymore.”

“You can’t win," said a senior administration official. "Some people complained for weeks that ‘we don’t want so much White House involvement,’ and that ‘the President should stop doing daily briefings,’ and then they turn around and complain that there aren’t enough or as many briefings."

But the White House’s apparent eagerness to change the subject comes as new coronavirus clusters — centered around meatpacking plants, prisons and other facilities — drive spikes in disparate states like Utah and Arkansas. Meanwhile, states and major cities are lifting lockdowns and reopening their economies, prompting public health experts to fret that additional outbreaks are imminent. And several Democratic governors also have defied their own states’ social distancing restrictions to join mass protests over police brutality, where hundreds of thousands of Americans have spilled into the streets, further raising public health risks.

The fear is that all the mixed signals will only confuse people, stoke public skepticism over the health threat and promote the belief the worst is over just as the outbreak enters a dangerous new phase.

“Cases are rising, including from cases in congregate settings,” said Luciana Borio, who led pandemic preparedness for the National Security Council between 2017 and 2019. “We still have a pandemic.”

Nine current and former administration officials, as well as outside experts, further detailed how the White House is steadily ramping down the urgency to fight a threat that continues to sicken more than 100,000 Americans per week and is spiking in more than 20 states.

For instance, the administration in recent days told state health officials that it planned to reorganize its pandemic response, with the Department of Health and Human Services and its agencies taking over the bulk of the day-to-day responsibilities from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“The acuity of the response is not what it was, so they’re trying to go back to a little more of a normal ongoing presence,” said Marcus Plescia, the chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

The coronavirus task force, which used to send daily updates to state officials, has done so with less regularity over the past several weeks, Plescia said. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has restructured its daily conference calls with states, moving away from the practice of giving top-down briefings to encouraging state officials to offer updates on what they’re seeing in their parts of the country.

One current and one former FEMA official also said they’re keen to have HHS resume its leadership role in containing the coronavirus so FEMA can make contingencies for a summer of hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters.

“Given the likelihood that we will soon see both hurricanes and coronavirus, HHS should manage the ongoing pandemic response so FEMA can prepare for coming ‘coronacanes,’” Daniel Kaniewski, who served as the top deputy at FEMA through January, wrote last week. “But they need to act soon. Coronacanes are in the forecast.”

Meanwhile, officials in at least 19 states have recorded two-week trends of increasing coronavirus cases, including spikes of more than 200 percent in Arizona and more than 180 percent in Kentucky. Two months after the White House issued so-called gating criteria that it recommended states hit before resuming business and social activities, only a handful of states — like Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and South Dakota — currently meet all of those benchmarks, according to CovidExitStrategy.org.

Officials within Trump's health department are strategizing over how to convey the current level of risk, given data that Americans have put off emergency care and other potential medical needs, fearful of contracting Covid-19. “Our message now is that people should start returning to their health care providers to get the screenings, vaccines, care, or emergency services that they need,” Laura Trueman, the HHS official in charge of external affairs, wrote in an officewide email to colleagues and shared with external groups on June 3, which was obtained by POLITICO.

Dan Abel, a longtime Coast Guard vice admiral, also has been installed at HHS with a small team, where he’s coordinating daily Covid-19 calls with HHS Secretary Alex Azar and the department’s division leaders, according to four officials with knowledge of the calls — an arrangement that’s raised some questions.

“Why is a Coast Guard admiral leading meetings between the HHS secretary and his senior staff?” asked one senior official, suggesting it created an unnecessary layer of management.

Meanwhile, the department is steadily turning back to its many pre-Covid-19 priorities. At the Food and Drug Administration, officials are returning to hot-button issues like tobacco and cannabidiol regulations. Some staff in the health department’s emergency response arm are pivoting away from Covid-19 and back toward natural disasters as hurricane season begins.

At the same time, the CDC — traditionally the beating heart of the nation’s infectious disease response — remains largely demoralized and often sidelined in fighting what CDC Director Robert Redfield last week acknowledged as the nation’s biggest health challenge in more than a century, and one he said is “moving through our social consciousness, our outward expression, and our grief.” That grim message has conflicted with Trump’s frequent vows of victory over the coronavirus.

“We were able to close our country, save millions of lives, open,” Trump said in Friday’s Rose Garden remarks. “And now the trajectory is great.”

“I fully recognize the anguish our Nation is experiencing & am deeply saddened by the many lives lost to COVID19,” Redfield tweeted just minutes later. “I call upon the American people to remain vigilant in protecting the vulnerable - protect your community, grandparents and loved ones from COVID-19.”

Redfield and other top officials also have spent the past week reckoning with the implications of widespread protests over police brutality, from meeting with staff to discuss longstanding concerns about systemic racism in health care to acknowledging the probability that those protests will spark new outbreaks.

HHS also on Monday sent members of Congress a fact sheet on its response to racial disparities in Covid-19 care — a much scrutinized issue in public health, with African Americans contracting and dying from the virus at much higher rates.

But on Capitol Hill, watchdogs say fact sheets don’t cut it, and they’re frustrated by the lack of access to experts and insight into how the administration is handling a historic pandemic.

“Some are acting like the battle has been won when in reality it’s just beginning,” said a senior Democratic staffer. “The White House still won’t let task force members testify at hearings in June even though they have disappeared from TV and it’s not clear how often they are meeting.”

Fauci, meanwhile, has continued to issue a string of dire warnings in his lower-profile media appearances and at an industry conference on Tuesday.

"We have something that turned out to be my worst nightmare," Fauci said in virtual remarks aired at a conference of the biotech industry's Washington trade group, recounting how quickly the virus spread around the globe, outpacing Ebola and HIV. "And it isn’t over yet.”

The White House has maintained that chief of staff Mark Meadows has needed to clear officials like Fauci to testify, so they can stay focused on other priorities, and a spokesperson insisted that Trump has still prioritized the coronavirus fight even as the White House shifts toward focusing on revitalizing the economy.

Several officials have suggested the task force’s lower profile has been helpful for the response, especially because the daily Covid-19 news briefings were often hijacked by Trump’s meandering remarks or the day’s political news.

“In some ways, it actually has been easier to get Covid-related work done,” said one HHS staffer who’s helped support the Covid-19 response. “The task force briefings and the prep sessions for them took up a lot of principals’ time, and staff would sometimes have to crash on putting together materials for them.”

But the white-hot spotlight on the coronavirus also brought urgency and intensity, and the increasingly scattered nature of the current response could present new challenges if there’s an uptick in cases.

“This is when a one-government approach is needed more now than ever,” said Howard Koh, who served as President Barack Obama’s HHS assistant secretary for health. “Get all those people together in one room every day at the highest level and track outcomes and address all the questions and try to maximize coordination as much as possible.”

Max Cohen, Adam Cancryn and David Lim contributed to this report.

In an appearance on FOX & Friends, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended Donald Trump’s tweet attacking a 75-year-old social justice activist who was brutally shoved to the ground by Buffalo, New York police, causing him to bleed from his head.

Trump, in a tweet on Tuesday, suggested that the incident was a “set up” and claimed that the man faked his fall.

Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 9, 2020

Said McEnany: “The president was raising questions based on a report that he saw, other questions that need to be asked and every case we can’t jump on one side without looking at all of the facts at play. This individual has some very questionable tweets, some profanity-laden tweets about police officers. Of course no one condones any sort of violence. We need the appropriate amount of force used in any interaction, but there are a lot of questions in that case.”

Here’s Kayleigh McEnany defending Trump’s attack on a 75-year-old man who was brutalized by police because he allegedly had some “very questionable tweets” — as if that justifies him almost being killed. #ThereIsNoBottom pic.twitter.com/dHnomI1GIT

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 10, 2020

The post WH Press Sec’y Kayleigh McEnany Defends Trump’s Attacks on 75-Year-Old Man Brutalized by Police: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Two New Jersey Trump supporters whose sickening George Floyd murder reenactment went viral on Monday have been fired and suspended from their jobs.

Just would like to speak about how disgusting, racist and evil people can genuinely be. Couple of Franklinville trump supporters mocking the tragedy of George Floyd. Twitter, do your thing please. This is unacceptable and disturbing pic.twitter.com/rgX37UuUEX

— Lexi Fagotti (@lexifagotti) June 8, 2020

Said the man with his knee on a mannequin’s neck: “You don’t comply, that’s what happens. You don’t comply, that’s what happens right here, look. He didn’t comply. He didn’t comply. If he would’ve complied, it wouldn’t have happened.”

It’s not my video but I just have to spread this thing… this was today in Franklinville, NJ. He works at Fedex. pic.twitter.com/zjlsj5nlOY

— Marayyyyyy (@_manyiagbor) June 9, 2020

One of the men, identified as Joseph DeMarco was a New Jersey corrections officer. He was suspended.

pic.twitter.com/bAXAZzExwW

— NJ Department of Corrections (@NJ_DOC) June 9, 2020

The other man worked for FedEx. He was fired.

FedEx released a statement: “FedEx holds its team members to a high standard of personal conduct, and we do not tolerate the kind of appalling and offensive behavior depicted in this video. The individual involved is no longer employed by FedEx. A diverse and inclusive workforce is at the heart of our business, and we stand with those who support justice and equality.”

FedEx holds its team members to a high standard of personal conduct, and we do not tolerate the kind of appalling and offensive behavior depicted in this video. The individual involved is no longer employed by FedEx. We stand with those who support justice and equality.

— FedEx (@FedEx) June 9, 2020

The post NJ Trump Supporters Fired, Suspended from Jobs After Sickening George Floyd Murder Reenactment: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

How long until Trump and his partisans to tie the protests to spikes in coronavirus?

Protesters gather at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, on June 9. | Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

Protesters have already brought about reforms to address systemic racism and police brutality following George Floyd’s death.

The nationwide protests over George Floyd’s death, police brutality, and systemic racism have made an immediate impact.

Minneapolis announced on June 7 that it will dismantle its police force and rebuild law enforcement from the ground up. Police departments in cities ranging from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Denver, Colorado, have reached agreements with their communities to improve accountability for their law enforcement officers.

Beyond these policy changes are broad culture shifts. Across the South, cities have brought down Confederate monuments and removed other homages to former slaveowners — accelerating a process that began with the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting in 2015.

Meanwhile, polling shows a sudden, seismic shift in public opinion: 57 percent of Americans and 49 percent of white respondents now believe that police are more likely to use excessive force against African Americans. In 2014, after Eric Garner died in police custody, only 33 percent of Americans and 26 percent of white respondents said so.

More than two-thirds of Americans believe that Floyd’s killing indicated broader issues in the way police treat black Americans, rather than just an isolated incident. By a two-to-one margin, voters are also more concerned by the actions of police in relation to Floyd’s killing than they are about violent protesters. (The protests have, by and large, been peaceful.)

And lawmakers at both the state and federal level are working on reform legislation. Democrats in Congress unveiled a sweeping police reform bill that would make lynching a federal crime, ban chokeholds, make it easier to charge officers with using excessive force, and curtail “qualified immunity” for those involved in wrongful injuries or deaths.

Activists have introduced detailed plans for meaningful police reform. Some have endorsed the 8 Can’t Wait reform platform, which includes remedies such as banning chokeholds, changing reporting protocols for use-of-force incidents, and mandating that police intervene when they witness misconduct. Others have called for even more radical measures: defunding or abolishing the police.

Here are major changes states and cities have made since the death of George Floyd on May 25:

Improving police accountability and restricting use of force

• Minneapolis officials announced that they reached a tentative agreement with the state to ban chokeholds and require police to intervene when witnessing another officer engaging in misconduct. The agreement still needs to be approved by a judge before it can go into effect.
• A veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledged to dismantle its police force a day after Mayor Jacob Frey was booed by a crowd of protesters for saying he opposed the measure. “[W]hen we’re done, we’re not simply gonna glue it back together,” Jeremiah Ellison, a Minneapolis City Council member, said on Twitter last week. “We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response.”
• New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced a four-step “Say Their Name” agenda for police reform that would make police disciplinary records transparent, ban chokeholds, make false race-based 911 reports a hate crime, and require the New York Attorney General to act as an independent prosecutor for police officers accused of murder.
• California Gov. Gavin Newsom directed police officers in the state to stop administering training on the carotid hold, a type of chokehold designed to cut off blood flow to the brain. Other kinds of chokeholds that aim to restrict airflow through the windpipe are already banned in the state. He said he also plans to sign legislation banning carotid holds.
• Denver police announced a series of policy changes, including a ban on chokeholds, requiring officers to report anytime they point a gun at someone, and mandating that SWAT officers turn on their body cameras during tactical operations.
• The New York state legislature started to approve a package of reforms that had been opposed by police unions, including a ban on chokeholds, and measures to increase transparency around police officers’ disciplinary records. Gov. Cuomo said he’s planning to sign the bills into law.
• The Phoenix City Council approved $3 million in funding for a new police civilian oversight board.
• The San Jose police department voluntarily adopted policies clarifying its prohibition on chokeholds, requiring police to intercede and report incidents of officer misconduct, developing updated crowd control training, prohibiting the use of projectile weapons in crowd control situations (except in incidents where individuals are threatening officers or other peaceful protesters), and fostering community engagement.
• The Lincoln, Nebraska, police department signed an agreement with community members to create a new “Hold Cops Accountable” initiative facilitating monthly town halls for the public to offer feedback. Anyone who voices a concern will be offered the opportunity to file a formal complaint with the Lincoln Police Department’s Internal Affairs Unit or the Citizen’s Police Advisory Board.

Tear gas bans

• Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan announced a 30-day ban on the use of tear gas against protesters.
• Members of the Allegheny County Council, which encompasses Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, introduced a bill to ban tear gas, rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, and bean-bag rounds.
• Members of the New Orleans and Washington, DC, city councils proposed banning the use of tear gas against protesters in their cities.
• A Colorado federal judge temporarily banned the use of projectiles and chemical weapons, including tear gas, on protesters, writing that the Denver police department had “failed in its duty to police its own.”

Defunding the police and reducing police presence

• The Los Angeles City Council filed a motion to reduce the Los Angeles Police Department’s $1.8 billion operating budget by up to $150 million for the upcoming fiscal year and redirect those funds to “disadvantaged communities and communities of color.”
• The Portland Superintendent announced that police will no longer patrol the area’s nine public high schools and that the district will increase funding for social workers, counselors, and other support for students.
• The University of Minnesota, Minneapolis public schools, and the city’s Park and Recreation Board announced that they were cutting ties with the city’s police department.
• New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a plan to redirect funds from the police force to youth and social services, arguing that young people “need to be reached, not policed” on Twitter.

Tearing down Confederate statues and racist symbols

• The US Marine Corps officially banned displays of the Confederate battle flag in public and work spaces on its military bases. The US Navy will soon follow suit.
• Protesters tore down the statue of Confederate Gen. Williams Carter Wickham in Richmond’s Monroe Park.
• Protesters took down a memorial to Edward Carmack, a former lawmaker and newspaper publisher who endorsed white supremacy in Nashville outside the Tennessee State Capitol. However, state law mandates that the statue be repaired and replaced, unless the state’s Historical Commission and the State Capitol Commission decide otherwise.
• A Confederate monument on the University of Mississippi campus was spray-painted with the words “spiritual genocide” and red handprints.
• The mayor of Birmingham agreed to dismantle a five-story monument to Confederate troops, urging protesters not to do so themselves. “Allow me to finish the job for you,” he said, despite the Alabama Attorney General threatening legal action if he proceeds.
• Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced that he would take down another prominent statue of Lee on Richmond’s Monument Avenue.
• Both a statue and mural of former Philadelphia mayor and policy commissioner Frank Rizzo — which current Mayor Jim Kenney called symbols of “bigotry, hatred and oppression for too many people, for too long” — were taken down. Rizzo, who once told voters to “vote White,” took an aggressive stance on policing in black and minority communities.

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Former FOX News anchor and NBC News host Megyn Kelly, who didn’t know blackface was wrong until October 2018, when she was canned from NBC for defending it as a Halloween costume and once asserted that Jesus and Santa are white, had a meltdown on Twitter Wednesday morning after reading that HBO Max had removed Gone With The Wind from its platform because it romanticizes the horrors of slavery.

“Are we going to pull all of the movies in which women are treated as sex objects too? Guess how many films we’ll have left? Where does this end??” Kelly tweeted.

She then bemoaned the fact that COPS was canceled and Live PD reevaluated in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer: “If you don’t like it, don’t watch.”

She continued: “Ok @hbomax – let’s do this – every episode of ‘Friends’ needs to go right now. If not, you hate women (& LGBTQ ppl,
who also don’t fare well on ‘Friends’). Obviously Game of Thrones has to go right now. Anything by John Hughes … Woody Allen… could go on & on… & on…& on…”

After several other sarcastic tweets about other shows that should go, Kelly said, “For the record, you can loathe bad cops, racism, sexism, bias against the LGBTQ community, and not censor historical movies, books, music and art that don’t portray those groups perfectly. Ppl understand art reflects life… as we evolve, so do our cultural touchstones.”

Are we going to pull all of the movies in which women are treated as sex objects too? Guess how many films we’ll have left?Where does this end?? https://t.co/Bh8mqpv0l3

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) June 10, 2020

‘Live PD’ is consistently one of the highest rated shows on cable. But now it may go away bc even watching a police show is somehow offensive to some. (Secret option #2: if you don’t like it, don’t watch.) https://t.co/CKmlcoZxnN

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) June 10, 2020

Ok @hbomax – let’s do this – every episode of “Friends” needs to go right now. If not, you hate women (& LGBTQ ppl,
who also don’t fare well on “Friends”). Obviously Game of Thrones has to go right now. Anything by John Hughes … Woody Allen… could go on & on… & on…& on… https://t.co/dVXWssnFKF

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) June 10, 2020

Totally. Forgot those guys. Let’s keep it going until all we have left is The Queen and Captain America. https://t.co/KNibMQXhEv

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) June 10, 2020

Good point – Law & Order has to go too. Our Corporate Protectors must see how evil it is. https://t.co/yBNVL6Vcky

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) June 10, 2020

For the record, you can loathe bad cops, racism, sexism, bias against the LGBTQ community, and not censor historical movies, books, music and art that don’t portray those groups perfectly. Ppl understand art reflects life… as we evolve, so do our cultural touchstones.

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) June 10, 2020

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Now that Boris Johnson has shepherded the United Kingdom into the top four countries for COVID-19 cases, the most infected nations in the world are: the United States, Brazil, Russia, and the U.K. Also known as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin, and Boris Johnson. That Donald Trump and his three tightest international buddies should end up topping the charts on infection and death is no coincidence. Don and the Trumpettes share an attitude that says they know more than the doctors, more than the scientists. Hundreds of thousands of people have died to feed their egos … so far.

But it’s not just the world that is seeing a fresh influx of cases. Inside the U.S., states that were quick to shrug off social distancing guidelines—and those that never really implemented them in the first place—are seeing a surge of new cases. More than a dozen states have reported their peak number of cases, not in March or April, but in the last week. And in some states, like Arizona and Texas, the growing number of cases is leading to a surge in hospitalizations that is threatening to crack apart health care systems just when many people were beginning to relax.

The frustration that many feel about maintaining social distancing guidelines, especially remaining at home whenever possible, and staying out of stores and restaurants, has led large numbers of Americans, even those who were being very diligent in their practices a month ago, to relax their practice. An apparent decline in cases, and a definite decline in media coverage, has given many the impression that the worst is over, that COVID-19 is on the way out, and that it’s safe to go back to something approximating “normal.”

It’s true that the 1,093 deaths recorded in the U.S. on Tuesday is way down from the 2,693 deaths recorded on April 21. It’s also true that, week over week, the number of deaths has been dropping. 

But the majority of that decline can be attributed to one thing, or rather, to one state: New York. That state is now generating less than 100 deaths each day, when at the peak of the initial outbreak in New York City, more than 1,000 people a day were dying. That single change in the numbers was enough to make it seem that the United States had beaten back its COVID-19 problem. This is absolutely not the case.

Where the United States is now is almost exactly where it was on March 31. That was a day that also saw just over 1,000 deaths. What happened from there is that the number of deaths continued up. Then up. Because on March 31, most states had either just issued a statewide lockdown, or had yet to issue such a plan. When the growth in new cases in the United States was first arrested, then began to slow around the end of April, it was specifically because of the use of social distancing efforts put in place a month earlier.

Those governors who were anxious to reopen, and those people who were in a hurry to eat in a restaurant, or gather at the beach, or have a big party felt safe enough because … things were better, right? And they’re still feeling basically okay now. Mostly.

But where we are now is just like March 31. Only no state is prepared to issue new lockdown guidelines. More people are already hospitalized, meaning that fewer beds—and specifically fewer ICU beds—are available to absorb any fresh surge of patients. The coronavirus task force is not appearing on television every day and the media is not leading every news cast with concerns over the virus. Across the country, hospital beds are already occupied with patients who have yet to recover from the disease, as well as those still staggering in. And COVID-19 is far more widely and generally disseminated now, with millions of cases in the U.S. alone.

Arizona is in a state of high alert as 76% of ICU beds are already occupied. North Carolina now has more people hospitalized for the disease than at any point in the pandemic. States like Texas are experiencing their sharpest increase in cases right now. Ditto Florida. No matter how many times Donald Trump lavishes praise on the Sunshine State (and no matter how many supplies were redirected to that state after being taken from other states), this past week has been Florida’s worst week for cases. And when it comes to deaths, it’s still impossible to tell what’s happening there because Governor Ron DeSantis has been practicing a campaign of deception. 

Those numbers have been growing not just in states that were quick to reopen, but in places like California where the percentage of people following stay-at-home guidelines and avoiding locations like beaches crumbled in parts of the state long before any official action was taken. Most of those who have taken place in the wholly necessary protests following the murder of George Floyd have been careful to wear masks and take what precautions they could. Many of those who are gathering at Lake of the Ozarks and the Olive Garden aren’t just refusing to wear masks, they’re actively fighting against actions to protect public health.

There is no state in the nation that either issued guidelines tough enough to really halt community spread of COVID-19, and no state that enforced those guidelines sufficiently. However, those stay-at -home orders and shutdowns did slow the spread of the disease. They took that “R0” value down to something that meant fewer people caught it and fewer people died. Nowhere was it sufficient to snuff it out. Even those not tough enough guidelines have now all but vanished. The rate of transmission is already going up, even if we’re still days or weeks away from seeing the effect.

For everything that has happened, less than 1% of the population in the United States has been confirmed as having COVID-19. Not even in New York City have enough people been infected to significantly reduce the rate of transmission. Think of this as fire season. There are two million sparks out there, most of the firefighters are already occupied, and no one has swept the damn forests.

Don’t play with matches. Or with COVID-19 … because this disease is a rat bastard. Stay home when you can. Wear a mask when you can’t. Stay as safe as possible. Because this is not over.

Photographs by Joshua Rashaad McFadden

Updated at 4:45 p.m. on June 12, 2020.

MINNEAPOLIS—Miski Noor watched just the first minute of the video of George Floyd’s killing before closing the tab and walking the two blocks to join the protests already forming at the scene. The days since have been filled with a maddening sense of déjà vu.

Noor had joined the Movement for Black Lives in 2014, after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The 34-year-old activist’s first protest was that December, a demonstration that shut down the Mall of America during the peak of the holiday shopping season.

Noor soon became intimately familiar with the gruesome cycle: The police killed someone. Activists protested. Small reforms were won. The police killed someone else…

In Minnesota, St. Paul police killed Philip Quinn, a Native American man in the midst of a mental-health crisis, in September 2015. One week later, a Kanabec County Sheriff’s deputy killed Robert Christen, a white former fullback for the Wisconsin Badgers who was enduring a mental-health crisis of his own.* Two months after that, in November 2015, Minneapolis police killed Jamar Clark, a 24-year-old unarmed black man. Hundreds poured into the streets.

In response to Clark’s killing, protesters launched what would stretch into an 18-day occupation of one of the city’s police precincts. One night, a group of armed white supremacists showed up. One of the racists opened fire, wounding five of the anti-racist activists. Serving as a spokesperson for the protesters, Noor questioned why police hadn’t done anything to prevent the attack—after all, the activists had reported the threats they’d been receiving to law enforcement.

The next day, police 400 miles east, in Chicago, released a grainy dashcam video depicting a white officer opening fire upon a 17-year-old black boy. The officer shot Laquan McDonald 16 times. People across the nation took to the streets.

The cycle continued.

In July 2016, we all watched Philando Castile die on camera, shot five times at point-blank range by a police officer during a traffic stop in suburban Minneapolis. A week later Mica Grimm, one of the leaders of the local Black Lives Matter chapter, traveled to the White House, where the then-mayor and then–police chief of St. Paul dressed her down in front of President Barack Obama—declaring the protests about Castile’s death “a disgrace.”

Exactly one year later, in the same city, came the death of Justine Damond, a 40-year-old yoga teacher who had called police to the alley behind her house because she thought she heard a woman’s screams. A police cruiser arrived, but when Damond approached, the officer got startled and shot her.

It would take two more years, but in April 2019, the local prosecutor finally secured a conviction of a police officer. But instead of a victory for the protesters, it was a cruel irony. The convicted officer was a Somali American, a black man, who was sent to prison for 12 and a half years after shooting and killing a white woman.

The following January, the most powerful newspaper in America endorsed the presidential campaign of Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, who in eight years as a county prosecutor had never once brought charges against a police officer for misconduct. After losing, Klobuchar offered herself up as a potential running mate for Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee.

That she’d even be considered for either post—despite new reporting that suggests she put an innocent black teenager behind bars for life—underscored how unseriously much of mainstream politics still seemed to be taking the movement. In the years since Ferguson, the Minneapolis activists had helped elect progressive-reform types to both of the Twin Cities’ governments, and secured significant new police-oversight and accountability measures. But the pace of change remained infuriatingly slow.

Then, on Memorial Day 2020, came the cycle’s latest deadly churn: The police killed George “Perry” Floyd.

Once again, Noor felt a disorienting heaviness as thousands of fed-up people stormed the streets—first in Minneapolis, then across the country, and ultimately in cities around the world. The activists in the city where Floyd died are tired of meetings and town halls and promises. Enough, they’ve declared in word and deed.

[Justin Ellis: Minneapolis had this coming]

“We have an elder here who said years ago that despair is a malfunctioning emotion,” Noor told me when we connected by phone between protests a few days after Floyd’s death. “Despair is what happens when grief doesn’t have somewhere to go.”

Seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier was on her way out the door to a Memorial Day bonfire on the other side of town when her 9-year-old cousin made a request: Would Frazier walk her to a nearby store? Of course, Frazier replied.

She and her cousin were on their way back home, at the corner of 38th and Chicago, just south of downtown, when Frazier spotted a distraught man sprawled on the pavement. A pile of police officers was holding him down. At least one of the cops seemed to be on top of the man’s neck.

Frazier pulled out her cellphone and hit Record.

Within hours, the whole world had seen the video: Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin driving his knee into the neck of 46-year-old George Floyd, not only until Floyd died but for minutes after his life had been extinguished. What came next was a national crisis.

When I first sat down to begin writing this story, parts of many American cities were on fire and police officers in dozens of places were committing indiscriminate acts of violence—unleashing tear gas, rubber bullets, and worse—against the citizenry they had sworn an oath to serve and protect. Elected officials were pleading for peace as parts of their cities burned and the nation, watching in real time on television, asked “Why?”

I’ve spent much of the past decade reporting on the Movement for Black Lives, which holds as one of its chief aims a complete upending of American policing. That reporting has meant dozens if not hundreds of nights at street protests both peaceful and violent, helping to lead a Pulitzer Prize–winning team that created a national database of fatal police shootings, and writing a book-length chronicle of the movement’s birth.

For years, thousands of protesters have taken to the streets to demand a wholesale reimagining of the criminal-justice system. They have stated clearly that they believe American policing is inherently flawed. Black people in America, they argue, are chronically overpoliced and underserved. They are stopped and frisked while walking to the bodega and harassed while cooking out on their porches and patios. But when they are murdered? American police almost never deliver them justice.

“We shouldn’t fear the police,” Alvin Manago, 55, who was Floyd’s roommate for the past four years, and still hasn’t been able to bring himself to begin packing up the slain man’s belongings, told me through tears as we stood next to the colossal memorial that has sprung up at the scene of the killing. “Like when I was a little kid—‘Oh, the police is here, they’re going to help us.’ That’s what I want us to believe and feel again.”

Though they sometimes diverge on tactical questions, the activists who make up the core of the movement desire to create, for the first time in our nation’s history, a reality in which black people aren’t routinely robbed of their livelihoods and lives by armed government agents. The aftermath of Floyd’s death has left many activists as encouraged as they’ve ever been that true change is on the horizon. Still, if the aim is a full recalibration of the American justice system, the task ahead remains monumental.

Public discussion about fixing the criminal-justice system often accepts as a premise that the path forward involves “reforming” thousands of individual state and local law-enforcement agencies and prison systems. But what if it doesn’t? What if the activists are right, and the solution is to dismantle American criminal justice and build something better? What might that look like?

The nation’s response to police killing after police killing has been to fire and criminally charge a handful of individual officers, mandate bias training that remains a relatively unproven remedy, and require body cameras that ultimately do little other than provide additional video evidence of the pervasiveness of police violence. (That is, when they are turned on at all.) The country collectively cares so little, five years after my former Washington Post colleagues embarrassed the FBI for its lack of federal data collection, that the agency still does not compile an accurate count of people killed by the police.

In May 2015, The New York Times Magazine wrote one of the definitive early profiles of the Ferguson activists. Its headline bore a straightforward message: “Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us.”

The killings continue unabated.

“I would never condone violence, ever,” says Elijah Norris-Holliday, a 24-year-old activist in the Twin Cities who has been organizing peaceful daytime protests and who was so distraught after seeing the video of Floyd’s death that he didn’t sleep for days. “But sometimes, when people feel like their voices are being ignored over and over and over, violence is the only other answer. They have to burn their own community down to get people to listen to them. We’re at a breaking point.”

Today’s young black activists have been beaten and arrested and harassed by local police officers. They’ve been doxxed by racist online trolls. They’ve had FBI agents show up at their homes. Some of the streets’ strongest voices and most potent symbols—Erica Garner, Darren Seals, Edward Crawford, Muhiyidin Moye—are now dead themselves.

“When civility leads to death, revolting is the only logical reaction,” Colin Kaepernick tweeted, as massive protests—both violent and nonviolent—spread across the country in response to Floyd’s death.

Kaepernick was banished from his job as an NFL quarterback and called a “son of a bitch” by President Donald Trump because he silently kneeled during the pregame national anthem. His act of peaceful protest—deeply unpopular with white Americans—was prompted by the July 2016 police shooting of Castile, the aftermath of which was broadcast live on Facebook by Castile’s distraught girlfriend. “The cries for peace will rain down,” Kaepernick continued in his tweet last week. “and when they do, they will land on deaf ears, because your violence has brought this resistance.”

For some, Kaepernick’s words may feel shocking. Yet they are the same words that echo through hundreds of years of black American activism, inescapable to anyone who bothers to pay attention. James Baldwin’s explicit allusion in the title of his 1963 masterwork, The Fire Next Time, is to coming riots in the streets. The Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes cautioned ominously in the 1940s that “sweet and docile” black Americans may one day “change their minds.” The poem is literally titled “Warning!”

[Ta-Nehisi Coates: The case for reparations]

Decades earlier, there’d been the determined journalism of Ida B. Wells, whose Memphis newspaper was burned to the ground by white supremacists. Wells is best remembered for her crusading work in the 1890s, which not only documented the frequency of southern lynchings but also provided what we’d now consider data analysis in order to disprove the racist lie that lynchings were happening because black men had a particular lust for and inclination to rape white women. Less well known is that Wells also dispatched herself to the scene of cases of police violence, providing essential scrutiny of an equally American strand of homicidal impunity.  

“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want the rain without thunder and lightning,” the former slave Frederick Douglass proclaimed in 1857. “They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”

“This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle,” Douglass continued, before arriving at a more widely quoted sentence: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

The power that is American policing has conceded nothing. Black men and women are still dying across the country as police unions continue to codify policies designed solely to shield their officers from accountability—such as rules ensuring that officers who kill can’t even be interviewed by investigators about it until their victims have been dead for days.

In the days since one of their own killed George Floyd, many American police officers have shamelessly brutalized the protesters whose chief demand is that the police stop brutalizing people.

Black Americans have grown so accustomed to pulling out cellphone cameras—who would believe us otherwise?—that we no longer risk having to rely on a single shaky video. Everyone pulls their phone out—which is why we can watch George Floyd die in full panoramic view.

In the days since the streets began burning, many have appealed to former President Barack Obama for intervention. Yet to suggest that Obama could silence the enraged screams of the streets is to fundamentally misunderstand the origins of the protests of recent years: They were, in part, a direct response to the perception among young black activists that his administration had failed to address persistent racial inequalities with adequate urgency.

“I voted for Barack Obama twice and still got teargassed,” the Ferguson activist Tef Poe said in 2014, after consecutive days of protests in which police deployed violence indiscriminately against demonstrators.

Obama did as much as, if not more than, any other American president to push for policing reform—yet as the former chief spokesperson for and political figurehead of the country whose police officers are carrying out the extrajudicial killings of black people, not even he can claim absolute moral credibility on these matters. Beyond that, though, is the reality that American policing as currently constructed is a matter of state and local government, and is not within the power of a president to single-handedly change. The symbolism of the first black presidency was potent. But the Obama-era reforms, ultimately, did not reduce the number of police killings.

[Rosa Brooks: Stop training police like they’re joining the military]

The Obama Justice Department launched an unprecedented number of “patterns and practices” investigations to force reform in local police departments, but those investigations were launched in response to only the most egregious viral videos and most questionable police killings. The department’s Civil Rights Division, limited in both resources and statutory authority, could not reform 18,000 American police departments.

“The inability of the Civil Rights Division to take on anything but willful misconduct, as much as I love Obama and (Former Attorney General Loretta) Lynch and everyone else—we failed on that one,” Roy Austin, a former deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights and a key Obama adviser on policing, conceded to me.

Not one activist I’ve spoken with over the years has suggested that Obama does not get it. But, on an issue rife with impassioned activism, they note the former president’s cool calculation—his studied avoidance of any comment or action that could backfire. (Recall, for instance, the outcry when he weighed in on the 2009 arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr.) Activists in Missouri observe that Obama never visited Ferguson, while allies of the former president note that his doing so could have prompted accusations that he was putting his foot on the scale of the investigation his Justice Department had launched into the police there; they also note that he dispatched then–Attorney General Eric Holder in his place. Obama has signaled for years that he does not see it as his ministry to lead protest chants.

“Obama has always said to me, ‘I was into community service, not community activism,’” the Reverend Al Sharpton, an adviser to both the Obama White House and George Floyd’s family, told me, by way of explaining the former president’s hesitation to insert himself more directly into these matters.

But in this arena too, Floyd’s death has spurred change. Those who have spoken with Obama in recent days say the former president is eager to use his platform to address American policing. Members of the Floyd family told me that they were impressed with the directness with which the former president tackled the subject in a recent online town hall, and some longtime activists are “increasingly satisfied” with Obama’s willingness to jump into the fray, Sharpton told me. After years of reluctance, the nation may be witnessing the birth of Obama the activist.

“We have seen in the last several weeks, the last few months, the kinds of epic changes and events in our country that are as profound as anything that I’ve seen in my lifetime,” Obama said during his address on June 3.

Even more frequent than public appeals to Obama are calls for a “new Martin Luther King Jr.”—someone who could “heal” the nation by persuading the thousands who believe their government is criminally apathetic to their humanity to join hands and sing “We Shall Overcome.”

These yearnings for a new Martin Luther King Jr. presume such a figure would have sufficient standing among white Americans—a group that collectively despised the original MLK while he lived—that he could succeed as a national unifier in a way the actual activist never did. This is such an outlandish assumption that one of the country’s most prominent young black comedians “joked” that white Americans are obsessed with finding the next Martin Luther King only so they can make sure to kill him, too.

Such suggestions also require the absolute confidence that, were King alive today, he would continue to advocate for precisely the same tactics in response to today’s injustices as he did in response to those of the 1950s and ’60s—a conclusion that presumes unknowable things about what a man who has been dead since 1968 would believe today. For all we know, King might by now have become so fed up by this nation’s persistent failure to address the injustices he made it his life’s work to expose that he too would be picking up a rock. Even saints have their limits. The real King, the one who lived and died fighting American white supremacy, openly declared that American police “make a mockery of the law.”

“While he did not want to see violent protests, he understood violent protests,” Martin Luther King III, the civil-rights leader’s son, told me last week. “Someone had their foot on the neck of George Floyd, and society has had its foot on the neck of black people. And black people and others now are saying that’s not going to happen anymore.” Yet when the living Martin Luther King quoted one of his father’s most famous statements—“A riot is the language of the unheard”—his Twitter mentions promptly filled with comments from white people eager to explain to him what his own namesake would have wanted at a time like this.

“When I saw the video, I cried, and I wanted to destroy everything in my house. That’s the truth,” Yolanda Renee King, 12, the sole grandchild of the slain civil-rights leader, said during a private moment with the Floyd family on the day of his Minneapolis funeral service. “We have been mistreated for 401 years! This is enough! I’m tired of this!”

Martin Luther King III and other activists I’ve spoken with in recent days share a unanimous belief that this time is different. Years into the movement, the potential for true progress may finally be at hand, in no small part because the same cycle of unabated violence that has infuriated black activists is finally, due to the unrelenting stream of video evidence, forcing many white Americans to wake up.

For decades, police violence and impunity had been problems that, polling suggests, only black people could see. The street uprisings of recent years—in Ferguson and Baltimore, Baton Rouge and Chicago—were propelled by black rage; although they had allies, those who flooded the streets in response to those incidents of police violence were primarily black men, women, and children. Now white eyes have been opened too.

A Monmouth University poll taken a few days after Floyd’s death found that 71 percent of white respondents deemed racism and discrimination “a big problem” in the United States—up 26 points from 2015. Nearly 80 percent of Americans—and 75 percent of white Americans—told pollsters that the protesters’ anger was either “fully” or “partially” justified. Forty-nine percent of white respondents said police are more likely to use excessive force against a black culprit than a white one, nearly double the 25 percent who acknowledged that fact in 2016.

“People finally see it. White people too,” Floyd’s younger brother Philonise told me as we talked in the lobby of the Minneapolis hotel where we were both staying. “My brother is going to change the world.”

When the day came for the first of Floyd’s funerals—his family held three services, in Minneapolis, where he died; in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he’d been born; and in Houston, where he’d spent most of his life—I stood silently, flush against the back wall of the hotel meeting room where they had gathered until it was time to depart. Gianna, Floyd’s 6-year-old daughter, twirled in front of me in her white lace dress. Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, the black man killed by New York police in 2014, briefed Floyd’s family members about how difficult the coming hours would be.

As we walked to the limos that had lined up outside the hotel, I asked Carr how many funerals like this she’d been to. She paused before softly responding: “You know, it doesn’t matter. This one will be different. Because this one was just like Eric.” Garner, like Floyd, had spent his final moments crying “I can’t breathe.”

After a short, largely silent drive, we all filed down the center aisle of the sanctuary at North Central University. The crowd, probably about 100 people, rose to its feet and sang “Total Praise,” a gospel staple. To attend a funeral in the midst of a global health pandemic was an act of protest in and of itself. Most attendees wore masks to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. About half were dressed in dark suits and dresses. The others wore T-shirts and hoodies that declared “I can’t breathe” and demanded “Justice for George Floyd.”

To the left of the stage sat the dignitaries. Martin Luther King III in the front row, Senator Klobuchar—who now says she regrets never charging any police officers—and Representative Ilhan Omar in the second. A few rows behind them was Clyde Bellecourt, 84, a White Earth Ojibwe who in 1968 co-founded the American Indian Movement, one of the most influential movements in the nation advocating for Native peoples. The movement had been launched in direct response to police violence against Native people in Minnesota—the available data show Native people are killed by police at the highest rate of any racial group—and Bellecourt had brought with him an eagle feather to present to the Floyd family, which is the Ojibwe tradition’s highest honor. I asked him what he thought of the video of Floyd’s death. “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” he told me. “Me and my people—” He paused. “We’ve seen a lot.”

[Read: History will judge the complicit]

To the right of the stage sat the celebrity mourners. In the first row, the rapper Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, the Hollywood producer Will Packer, and the comedians Tiffany Haddish and Kevin Hart. Just behind them sat the rapper Clifford “T. I.” Harris Jr., his wife, Tameka “Tiny” Harris, nestled into his shoulder. They, like so many, had been horrified by the video of Floyd’s death, and their attendance served as an acknowledgment that neither their money nor their fame insulates them from the possibility of a similar fate. Behind them sat the Reverend Jesse Jackson, noticeably slowed, two and a half years after announcing his Parkinson’s diagnosis. “They would have lied on George if it wasn’t for the camera,” he told me.

I found a seat about five rows back from the pulpit, across the aisle from the former NBA player Stephen Jackson, a close friend of Floyd’s who called him “twin.”

“I tell people all of the time, the difference between me and my brother Floyd is I had opportunity,” the former basketball player had explained at a protest earlier in the week. “So many of my brothers are so talented, and sitting in the ghettos and the hoods right now because they don’t have opportunity. And y’all wonder why we angry. We’re not just dying. It hasn’t been fair to us.”

Stephen Jackson sat silently throughout the funeral service. He leaned low in his chair, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses and much of his face tucked beneath the collar of a hoodie. But when the attorney Ben Crump vowed from the lectern that he would stop at nothing to procure justice for Floyd, Jackson sprang to his feet, spurring the entire room into thunderous applause.

The days since George Floyd’s death have been busy for Miski Noor. There have been protests to plan, and meetings to hold, and interviews to grant. But, Noor told me, the response across the city, country, and world has been inspiring.

The crowds filling the streets have been a racially diverse mix, and it seems that a fair percentage of those who have demonstrated are now willing to discuss more than body cameras and bias training. The coming days, weeks, and months, Noor and other organizers believe, will finally see a robust discussion about defunding and dismantling police departments, and ultimately abolishing American policing as it is currently constructed. Less than two weeks after Floyd’s death, officials in Minneapolis announced their intention to disband the city’s police department.

“We want justice for George Floyd, but we know justice isn’t enough,” Noor said. “That’s why we’re demanding bigger and bolder things. Now is the time to defund the police and actually invest in our communities.

“These systems were created to hunt, to maim, and to kill black people, and the police have always been an uncontrollable source of violence that terrorizes our communities without accountability,” Noor added. “Black communities have been and are living in persistent fear of being killed by state authorities.”

Many reformers, especially black reformers, have long viewed incremental policy changes as a way to reduce police abuse and killings in the short term while they work toward their true goal: fully remaking the entire criminal-justice system.

“We’re trying to grapple with one of the foundational sins of the country,” says Phil Goff, the executive director of the Center for Policing Equity, who has spent recent years working with police departments to implement vital reforms, expansive oversight, and new data-collection programs.

The movement to reimagine the criminal-justice system has not been defined by individual policy proposals, or even specific acts of injustice. The core ideology advanced by the black people in the streets is that the justice system—in fact, the entire American experiment—was from its inception designed to perpetuate racial inequality. The primary aim is to construct a world in which black Americans can live lives free of police harassment and violence, and are ensured justice when they are victimized—in other words, a world in which black people have access to the same protections that most white Americans already enjoy.

But in response to the mounting documentation of systemic bias—in nearly every study of the justice system, from traffic stops to prosecutions to sentencing to fatal police shootings to the application of the death penalty—“law and order” politicians of both parties and the leaders of local police unions continue to insist that the protesters are making it all up. These opponents, who hold a near-singular power to obstruct even piecemeal change, insist not only that the justice system is fair and equitable as is, but that all of this discontent is being fomented by opportunists and race-baiters who just like to say mean things about cops. “I don’t think that the law-enforcement system is systemically racist,” Attorney General Bill Barr said this week. “Painting law enforcement with a broad brush of systemic racism is really a disservice to the men and women who put on the badge, the uniform every day,” added Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf. One of the most-read pieces on The Wall Street Journal’s website since Floyd’s death is a column headlined “The Myth of Systemic Police Racism,” written by a conservative commentator who has devoted much of her career to defending American policing from calls for change.

“One of the reasons, sadly, that we are seeing this violence and this rioting is that you have a lot of demagogues that want to use this incident of clear abuse by one police officer and they want to use it to paint every police officer as corrupt and racist,” Texas Senator Ted Cruz declared on Fox News as protests broke out across the country. The escalating violence was not the result of an unrepentantly racist system, Cruz said, but rather “everyone that is stirring up racial division,” meaning the anti-racist activists.

Racism is not to blame, the thinking popular among at least some conservatives goes. It’s the people fighting racism who are the problem. If everyone could just stop talking about all of this stuff, we could go “back” to being a peaceful, united country. No one seems to be able to answer when, precisely, in our history that previous moment of peace, justice, and racial harmony occurred.

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* This article previously misspelled Robert Christen’s name and misstated the affiliation of the officer who killed him.

Greetings From the Wasteland: I’m Kickstarting a 200 page collection of the best political cartoons from the Trump era, featuring Tom Tomorrow, Jen Sorensen, Pia Guerra, and many more. Pre-order here!

HBO Max has removed the 1940 civil war drama Gone With The Wind from its catalogue after a Los Angeles Times op-ed by screenwriter John Ridley pointed out that it “romanticizes the horrors of slavery.”

HBO Max released a statement explaining that the film will be back, with some commentary: “Gone With The Wind is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society. These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible. These depictions are certainly counter to WarnerMedia’s values, so when we return the film to HBO Max, it will return with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of those very depictions, but will be presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed. If we are to create a more just, equitable and inclusive future, we must first acknowledge and understand our history.”

And Netflix and BBC iPlayerhas removed the UK comedy series Little Britain from its catalogue over the use of blackface.

Variety reports: “Variety has confirmed that Netflix pulled the BBC series, which was written by and stars Matt Lucas and David Walliams, on Friday. Netflix has also dropped the comedians’ airport mockumentary ‘Come Fly With Me.’ A BBC spokesman told Variety: ‘There’s a lot of historical programming available on BBC iPlayer which we regularly review. Times have changed since ‘Little Britain’ first aired, so it is not currently available on BBC iPlayer.'”

The post ‘Gone With The Wind’, ‘Little Britain’ Removed from Streaming Services Over Racism Issues appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tapped the chamber’s only black Republican on Tuesday to lead a group of senators developing a police reform proposal in the wake of high-profile killings of unarmed African Americans at the hands of law enforcement.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) will be tasked with confronting one of the nation’s most vexing challenges in a Senate that has done little to show it can set aside partisanship on the issue. But supporters of broad reform could have their best chance for success in decades as public opinion swings sharply in favor of reforms amid a nationwide uproar over the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

“None of us have had the experience of being an African American in this country and dealing with this discrimination which persists here some 50 years after the 1964 civil rights bill and the 1965 civil rights bill,” McConnell (R-Ky.) said, referring to the the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as he stood alongside his GOP leadership team. “We’re still wrestling with America’s original sin. … And I think the best way for Senate Republicans to go forward on this is to listen to one of our own.”

McConnell’s pronouncement comes amid encouraging signs for advocates of police reform. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows met with Scott later Tuesday to discuss his ideas, emerging from the meeting declaring that President Donald Trump wants to act “sooner rather than later.”

“We’re letting stakeholders establish their priorities. Hopefully, we can be responsive with real legislation or action,” Meadows said after meeting with Scott. “We want to let our actions speak louder than our words.”

Scott has taken on a more prominent role in the party as top Republicans wrestle with how to properly respond to the growing outcry over racial injustice in the U.S. criminal justice system and controversial police practices that have disproportionately targeted African Americans. Scott’s Republican-only working group includes Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John Cornyn of Texas, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and James Lankford of Oklahoma.

McConnell said Scott has been asked to draw up “a proposal to allow us to respond to the obvious racial discrimination that we’ve seen on full display on our television screens over the last two weeks, and what is the appropriate response by the federal government.”

On Tuesday, Scott presented some of his ideas to GOP senators during a closed-door lunch, the first formal step as Senate Republicans seek to build a consensus within their own ranks. Talks are in the early stages, but senators said they were optimistic the chamber could have legislative text before the July 4 recess.

Senate Majority Whip John Thune of South Dakota said Scott’s group will focus on reaching an agreement among Republicans, in addition to securing Democratic support down the line.

“I think there's a path forward to do that. The question is, how much the Democrats are willing to cooperate on that,” Thune told reporters. “And I hope, I hope a lot, because I think it should be a bipartisan issue.”

Supporters of police reform on both sides of the political aisle have been buoyed by an uptick in public support for their initiatives, especially given the recent media attention and nationwide protests surrounding the killing of Floyd, who was pinned to the ground for nearly nine minutes by an officer who had his knee on Floyd’s neck while Floyd begged for air. The officer, Derek Chauvin, is facing multiple charges including second-degree murder.

“There seems to be a lot of momentum behind this right now, and if we can keep driving it forward maybe we can get to a point where we can actually legislate, and in a bipartisan way, which would be ideal,” Thune added.

“Time is of the essence. I think it's important for this nation to take a very powerful stand,” said Scott.

Cornyn, a top adviser and confidant of McConnell, said there is no specific deadline but predicted the group could unveil a proposal by the end of this week.

While the specifics of Scott’s plan are still in the works, it does not include an explicit ban on the use of chokeholds by police officers — a key feature of a sweeping police reform bill released Monday by House and Senate Democrats. Democratic leaders in the House say they hope to hold a vote on their measure before the end of the month.

“While I might support the elimination of all chokeholds, I think the way to get there is provide more training and more resources so that the local jurisdiction has the ability to make that decision themselves,” Scott said.

His plan would include stricter federal reporting requirements on uses of force that cause death or serious injury, including a threat to slash funding for departments that fail to meet the standards. Scott’s proposal would also impose penalties on officers not using body cameras, among other initiatives, such as creating a national criminal justice commission.

Ahead of Meadows’ meeting with Scott, the South Carolina Republican acknowledged that his group is “on a separate track from the White House,” complicating potential efforts to push through a bill that has the president’s support.

In addition to drawing up a congressional response, Republicans are urging the Trump administration to act unilaterally. For example, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) is encouraging Attorney General William Barr to reinstate federal pattern and practice reviews for police departments, a program that was cut by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Blunt said he discussed the matter with Barr on Monday, adding that Barr “seemed more than willing” to do so.

“If you’ve got a [police] department that has apparently the systemic problem that goes well beyond a couple of officers, a department like that has a hard time reforming itself,” Blunt told reporters.

The politics of racial justice issues have vastly shifted in recent years in favor of adopting sweeping reforms to a criminal justice system that many lawmakers view as systemically racist. During the closed-door GOP lunch, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who last week called for the military to quell unruly protests and riots associated with the Floyd killing, urged his colleagues to be “sensitive” to the concerns of African Americans.

“Young black men have a very different experience with law enforcement in this nation than white people, and that’s their impression and experience and we need to be sensitive to that and do all we can to change it,” Cotton said, according to a source familiar with his comments.

At least one Republican senator said he is “thinking seriously” about the issue of qualified immunity, which shields police officers from civil lawsuits. The Democratic bill released on Monday includes the elimination of qualified immunity, though Republicans as a whole haven’t embraced it.

“Most in our conference don’t want to go that far, but I’m really going out to see if I can get a few others interested in looking at that as well, because I think that’d be the one thing that shows our conference means business,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) said. “You never know, this might be a watershed moment.”

Marianne LeVine and Jake Sherman contributed to this report.

If there was ever a tweet from President Donald Trump that Senate Republicans didn’t want to touch, it’s this one.

For four years, Senate Republicans have endured a regular gantlet of reporters’ questions about Trump tweets, ranging from attacks on their own colleagues to telling a handful of congresswomen of color to “go back” to the countries they came from.

Trump’s tweet Tuesday morning attacking a 75-year old protester in Buffalo — who was shoved by the police and bled from his head after falling — stunned some in a caucus that’s grown used to the president’s active Twitter feed. After examining a print-out of the tweet, Sen. Lisa Murkowski gasped: “oh lord, Ugh.”

“Why would you fan the flames?” she said of the president’s tweet. “That’s all I’m going to say.”

But though the moderate Murkowski was nearly rendered speechless, the missive mostly failed to get a rise out of Senate Republicans. Many know Trump will tweet something else soon they will be asked to respond to, even if the Buffalo tweet seemed a new frontier for Trump’s insult-laden social media persona.

“It’s a serious accusation, which should only be made with facts and evidence. And I haven't seen any,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) “Most of us up here would rather not be political commentators on the president’s tweets. That’s a daily exercise that is something you all have to cover... Saw the tweet. Saw the video. It’s a serious accusation.”

But those senators were the rare ones speaking out. Even Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who marched with Black Lives Matters protesters and voted to oust Trump from office in the impeachment trial, seemed exasperated.

“I saw the tweet,” Romney said. “It was a shocking thing to say and I won’t dignify it with any further comment.”

Many GOP senators declined Tuesday to respond to Trump’s tweet suggesting Martin Gugino, the Buffalo protester, “could be an ANTIFA provocateur.’ The president added, without evidence, that Gugino may have been trying to “set up” the police officers who hurt him. The tweet did not come up at the Republicans' weekly lunch, according to an attendee.

Republican senators have a well-worn playbook by now if they don’t want to wade into the latest tweet-fueled controversy by saying they hadn’t seen Trump’s latest comments. Still, even when provided paper copies of the president’s tweet on Tuesday, many declined to view them.

Sens. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) declined to comment on the tweet, saying they hadn’t read it. When asked whether they wanted to see the tweet, both showed little interest. Sen Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said he had “no information about that man or who he is.”

Other senators said they’ve stopped paying attention to Trump’s tweets altogether. Citing what he called a longstanding policy about Trump, Sen Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said: “I don’t comment on the tweets.”

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who read a reporter’s printout of the tweet, said he knows “nothing of the episode,” which occurred last week and prompted widespread outrage. The Buffalo police department later suspended the two police officers involved without pay, and the Erie County District Attorney charged the officers with assault. Both pleaded not guilty and were released without bail.

But Cramer suggested he’s long accepted the president’s communication style.

“I don’t think Donald Trump is going to change his behavior,” Cramer said. “I’ll say this: I worry more about the country itself than I do about what President Trump tweets.”

Trump’s tweets questioning Gugino’s credibility come amid a nationwide reckoning about police brutality in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Senate Republicans have urged the president to take on a more unifying tone but so far Trump has proven resistant.

Last week, peaceful protesters were cleared outside of the White House with tear gas so that the president could pose for a photo outside of a church, prompting a rare Republican rebuke.

The president’s latest attack on Gugino highlights the complicated prospects of Congress getting anything done when it comes to police reform. Democrats unveiled a sweeping police reform package Monday that would ban chokeholds and limit “qualified immunity” for police officers, among other provisions. Romney said Monday that he’s planning to introduce his own police reform bill and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) is also working on a proposal.

While Republicans have offered criticism of Trump’s handling of the protests, GOP senators see little upside in getting into a public argument with the president these days.

When asked about Trump’s tweet, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine.) merely replied: “I think it would best if the president did not comment on issues that are before the courts.”

Andrew Desiderio contributed to this report.

President Donald Trump has a long history of toying with conspiracy theories, many of which get little traction or even reaction. But his Twitter message on Tuesday suggesting that the 75-year-old man whose head was cracked open by Buffalo law enforcement last week was a tech-savvy “ANTIFA provocateur” prompted an immediate outcry, as well as support for the still-hospitalized victim.

“Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN,” Trump tweeted, citing the conservative cable channel One America News Network but offering no evidence to support such an assertion.

Trump added: “I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?”

Gugino’s attorney, Kelly Zarcone, pushed back against the president.

“Martin has always been a PEACEFUL protestor because he cares about today’s society,” Zarcone said in a statement reported Tuesday by various media outlets. “He is also a typical Western New Yorker who loves his family.”

“No one from law enforcement has even suggested anything otherwise so we are at a loss to understand why the President of the United States would make such dark, dangerous, and untrue accusations against him,” Zarcone said, adding that although “Martin is out of ICU,” he is “still hospitalized and truly needs to rest.”

The president’s conspiratorial social media post comes after a video of the encounter last Thursday between Gugino and officers in Buffalo, N.Y. — shot by local NPR affiliate WBFO — went viral online amid nationwide protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, by Minneapolis police.

The footage shows Gugino approach two officers outfitted in tactical gear who were part of a larger group of police officers enforcing the city’s 8 p.m. curfew in Buffalo’s Niagara Square, in front of City Hall. After a brief interaction, the officers forcefully push Gugino, and he falls backward onto the pavement. Officers can then be seen walking past Gugino’s body as he bleeds from his head.

Buffalo police initially said in a statement last Thursday night that a person “was injured when he tripped & fell” during a “skirmish involving protestors,” but they later apologized and said they were “working with incomplete details during what was a very fast-moving and fluid situation.”

Mayor Byron Brown announced on Friday that Buffalo’s police commissioner had suspended the two officers involved in the episode without pay, prompting dozens of other officers to step down from the department’s crowd-control unit in protest.

On Saturday, Erie County, New York, District Attorney John Flynn charged the two officers, Robert McCabe and Aaron Torgalski, with second-degree assault. McCabe and Torgalski pleaded not guilty and were released without bail.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York said Tuesday there was “no proof whatsoever” to back up Trump’s accusation that Gugino was associated with the leftist ideology antifa, fiercely criticizing the president during his daily news briefing in Albany.

“How reckless. How irresponsible. How mean. How crude,” Cuomo told reporters. “I mean, if there was ever a reprehensible, dumb comment — and from the president of the United States. At this moment of anguish and anger, what does he do? Pours gasoline on the fire. If he ever feels a moment of decency, he should apologize for that tweet. Because it is wholly unacceptable.”

The state’s lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul, a native Buffalo resident, also condemned Trump’s tweet as “sick,” writing online: “The President continues to use his platform to peddle conspiracy theories, this time about a peaceful protestor and fellow New Yorker. Not sure how this is supposed to bring our country together...”

Former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s likely Democratic rival in the November election, similarly denounced the president’s accusation.

“My Dad used to say there’s no greater sin than the abuse of power,” Biden said in a tweet. “Whether it’s an officer bloodying a peaceful protester or a President defending him with a conspiracy theory he saw on TV. I’m a Catholic — just like Martin. Our faith says that we can't accept either.”

The criticism wasn’t limited to Democrats.

“Oh, lord. Ugh,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) when shown a printout of the president’s tweet on Tuesday. “Why would you fan the flames? That’s all I’m going to say.”

Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said: “It’s a serious accusation, which should only be made with facts and evidence. And I haven’t seen any.”

Trump’s tweet echoed a recent OANN segment about a report from a website called the Conservative Treehouse, which alleges Gugino “was attempting to capture the radio communications signature of Buffalo police officers.” The report states that the “capture of communications signals … is a method of police tracking used by Antifa to monitor the location of police.”

Neither OANN nor the Conservative Treehouse offered any evidence to support their claims about Gugino, who is a longtime peace activist from Amherst, according to The Buffalo News.

The president and Attorney General William Barr have charged that extremist organizations are largely responsible for acts of looting and violence that have broken out at some protests across the country. Republicans have specifically blamed what they refer to as antifa, a collection of far-left militant groups that often resist neo-Nazis, white supremacists and far right-wing groups at demonstrations and other events.

Trump declared last month the U.S. government would be “designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization” — even though he does not appear to have the legal authority to do so, and it is not clear that the loosely defined group of radical activists is an organization at all.

At a news briefing last Thursday, Barr claimed Justice Department officials “have evidence that antifa and other similar extremist groups, as well as actors of a variety of different political persuasions, have been involved in instigating and participating in the violent activity” at protests.

Max Cohen, Marianne LeVine, Burgess Everett and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

California counties, including Los Angeles County, could decide to reopen movie theaters as early as Friday. The Los Angeles Times reports: Each local health officer has the authority to decide whether to move forward with relaxing restrictions on reopening theaters. While the state provides guidance on how businesses can reopen, counties decide when they occur. The new rules would limit the number of guests in a movie theater to 25% of theater capacity or a maximum of 100 attendees, whichever is lower. Also, theaters would need to implement a reservation system to limit the number of attendees entering the theater at a time when possible. "Designate arrival times as part of reservations, if possible so that customers arrive at and enter the theater in staggered groups," the state's rules say. To keep guests six feet away from others, theaters are to close or otherwise remove seats from use, which may require seating every other row or blocking off seats in a checkerboard style, in which no one is sitting directly behind other patrons. The rules would ask patrons to wear face coverings when not eating or drinking. Staff would need to be available to help usher people before the show begins and at its conclusion to reduce crowding when entering or exiting. The guidelines also suggest using disposable or washable seat covers in theaters, "particularly on porous surfaces that are difficult to properly clean. Discard and replace seat covers between each use," the guidelines say. Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura are among 51 California counties that will be given the option by the state to allow movie theaters to reopen. All but seven of California's 58 counties have filed attestation paperwork to reopen their economies at an accelerated pace. Six of the counties that have not done so are in the San Francisco Bay Area -- Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara -- and the seventh is Imperial County east of San Diego, which is facing a bad outbreak. Deadline notes that while some independently owned cinemas could open their doors again, "many notable chains won't." Not only do movie theaters need more time to prep, but many have paused their leases with landlords. "Also, while a 30%-50% capacity auditorium level is doable financially for most theater owners, a 25% cap is stretching it for some," the report adds. "Chains in California we hear aren't reopening Friday include AMC, Regal, Cinemark (which has outlined a three-phase approach beginning June 19 in Dallas), Alamo Drafthouse, Arclight Cinemas, Laemmle, Cinepolis and Landmark."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A sign shows Fort Bragg information May 13, 2004 in Fayettville, North Carolina. | Logan Mock-Bunting/Getty Images

“We are forcing our black soldiers to serve on a base named after leaders who served to keep them in chains,” an expert told Vox.

The US Army currently has 10 bases and facilities named after leaders of the Confederacy. Within the next few months, that number could possibly drop to zero.

On Monday, Army spokesperson Col. Sunset Belinsky told Politico that “The secretary of defense and secretary of the Army are open to a bipartisan discussion on the topic.”

That’s opened the door for the Army to reverse its long-held position on keeping the names honoring Confederate officers. The Army defended such a stance as recently as February, with a spokesperson telling Task & Purpose, “The Army has a tradition of naming installations and streets after historical figures of military significance, including former Union and Confederate general officers.”

But the nation’s oldest military service has come under renewed pressure in recent months to change that practice. In February, the Marines signaled Confederate-related items — including the Confederate battle flag — would no longer be permitted on its bases and officially followed through last week. In May, the New York Times editorial board wrote a scathing piece arguing the military celebrated white supremacy, in part because of the 10 installations’ names.

More recently, the protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd have prompted states like Virginia and Florida to announce plans to remove Confederate statues. Now, some of the Army’s most revered retired generals and former top civilian leaders have come out in support of the Pentagon’s seemingly more open stance.

“If the former Confederate state of Virginia can remove the statue of General Lee from Richmond, the capital city of that Confederacy, today’s Army ought to be able to respond to the realities of today as well,” John McHugh, who served as secretary of the Army from 2009 to 2015, told me.

The US Navy has taken a cue from all that’s going on, with Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday announcing Tuesday that the service would prohibit the Confederate battle flag in any public or workspaces, including ships, aircraft, submarines, and bases.

If the Army were to follow through, experts say the next step would be for current Army chief Ryan McCarthy to issue a memo to change the names or seek support from the armed services committees in Congress to approve changes in a forthcoming, must-pass budget authorization. However, it’s unclear if either move is on the near horizon.

For many, such a move is long overdue.

“Bases that continue to bear the names of Confederate soldiers and officers — persons who wrongly fought to protect the institution of slavery and would have denied black Americans from serving in the military — are a reminder of that systemic oppression we continue to confront and damages the culture of inclusivity needed to accomplish the mission,” Rep. Anthony Brown (D-MD), a retired Army colonel and vice-chair of the House Armed Services Committee, told me.

“Removing these names will be another step in an honest accounting of our history and an expression that we continue to strive to form a more perfect union,” Brown, who is African American, said.

Why the Army named bases after Confederates in the first place

The history of naming Army installations after Confederate officers is deeply intertwined with America’s long history of racism.

As the nation mobilized for both world wars, political leaders amended Jim Crow-era laws to allow more minority troops into the military’s ranks. Perhaps the most consequential amendments were made to the Selective Service Act of 1940, which required men between 21 and 45 years of age to register for the draft.

Two amendments to the law, one by Sen. Robert Wagner (D-NY) and another by US Rep. Hamilton Fish (R-NY), allowed black Americans and other minorities to volunteer for war or be drafted. The final text of the statute read “there shall be no discrimination against any person on account of race or color” in selecting or training men in the military services.

The Pentagon’s official history of racial integration in the armed forces concluded that, with varying degrees of success, such changes “actually spread federally sponsored segregation into areas where it had never before existed with the force of law.”

Most of those areas were in the South. Mike Jason, a retired Army colonel who commanded troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, told me the region had lots of cheap land, which is why the Army in the early 1900s built bases and other facilities there. As a way to appease racist white political leaders and locals who didn’t want a more integrated military nearby, the Army named bases after Confederate “heroes” who were popular among these leaders and locals.

That’s why all 10 facilities named after those men are in the South: three in Virginia, two in Louisiana, two in Georgia, and one each in Alabama, North Carolina, and Texas.

And the Confederate officers the Army chose to name the bases after weren’t just selected at random or because of their military prowess during the Civil War. Most were specifically chosen because of their local ties. For example, Gen. Robert E. Lee and Maj. Gen. George Pickett, both Virginians, have bases named after them in the state.

Take Fort Gordon in Georgia, first established as Camp Gordon in 1916, smack in the middle of World War I. It’s named after Lt. Gen. John Brown Gordon, one of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s most trusted officers. Gordon was elected to the US Senate in 1872, but he was also widely known as the head of Georgia’s chapter of the Ku Klux Klan (a charge he, as leaders of the organization often do, denied).

By the time of his death in 1904, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, he was for many “the living embodiment of the Confederacy.”

Many weren’t even particularly effective military leaders.

Pickett led the infamous Pickett’s Charge at the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg straight into opposing guns, helping the Union win that fight and turning the tide of the Civil War. Had the Confederacy prevailed in the battle, it might’ve continued northward to overtake Union territory.

Despite that massive blunder and the fact that he fled to Canada to avoid execution as a traitor, Virginia’s Camp Pickett was dedicated in 1942, earning the larger “fort” designation in 1979.

General Braxton Bragg was, in the words of Iraq War veteran Fred Wellman, “a jackass and an asshole.” Bragg, whose father owned slaves and who would later own slaves himself, had such a notoriously bad temper that Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in his memoirs recalled a story of one of Bragg’s superiors admonishing him: “My God, Mr. Bragg, you have quarreled with every officer in the army, and now you are quarreling with yourself!”

What’s more, he lost big in the 1863 Battle of Chattanooga, leading him to resign from the Confederate army. Yet, the largest military installation in the world by population — North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, founded in 1918 — bears his name.

“We are forcing our black soldiers to serve on a base named after leaders who served to keep them in chains”

The issue of what an Army base is named isn’t trivial: It has an actual effect on the thousands of black Americans and other minorities who put on the Army uniform every day to serve their country.

“We are forcing our black soldiers to serve on a base named after leaders who served to keep them in chains,” Wellman said.

Bishop Garrison was one such soldier. In the summer of 2000, the then-21-year-old spent a summer training at Fort Polk in Louisiana, named after Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk.

Polk, who was a slave owner and an Episcopal bishop in addition to being a Confederate officer, made one of the Confederacy’s biggest mistakes when he sent troops to overtake Columbus, Kentucky. His incursion led the state’s lawmakers to request help from the Union, thus ending Kentucky’s neutrality in the war.

Training at Fort Polk for a few weeks as a cadet didn’t sit well with Garrison. “The Confederacy, particularly as a black man from the South, was a shadow you couldn’t escape,” he told me. “We should have never named anything or erected effigies in the name of Confederates.”

“Symbols of oppression need to be removed, and the military would continue to set the great example as it has throughout history by renaming its bases,” he continued.

Which raises the question: Why has it taken so long for the Army to even consider changing these bases’ names?

It depends on whom you ask.

The Army has dragged its feet on this issue for years

Experts have offered three main explanations — some more convincing than others — for why those 10 facilities haven’t had their names changed: 1) the pervasiveness of the Lost Cause myth in Army culture, 2) bureaucratic inertia and competing problems, and 3) courting controversy.

Let’s start with the first point. Retired Army Gen. David Petraeus, one of the service’s most celebrated leaders before an ignominious fall, wrote an op-ed in the Atlantic on Tuesday describing how Confederate culture has persisted in the Army.

“When I was a cadet at West Point in the early 1970s, enthusiasm for Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson was widespread,” Petraeus wrote. “We were not encouraged to think deeply about the cause for which they had fought, at least not in our military history classes. And throughout my Army career, I likewise encountered enthusiastic adherents of various Confederate commanders, and a special veneration for Lee.”

Wellman, who attended the famed Army academy in the 1980s, told me that continued after Petraeus’s day. During the 1980s, professors taught him and his peers — one of his classmates was current Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville — about the Lost Cause: the “collection of historical myths meant to whitewash the hard truths of slavery and the Civil War,” as historian William R. Black has defined it. The lessons treated those myths as more or less truth, rather than a competing narrative to dispel.

And while the West Point campus features a gate, barracks, and a statute all dedicated to Lee, the academy only got a statue of Union General (and later US president) Ulysses S. Grant — a West Point alum — last year.

“The Army, like every other large institution in America, has been shaped by the Lost Cause mythology,” Jason, the retired Army colonel, said.

As to the second point, McHugh, the former top Army civilian, told me the service just hasn’t really had time to deal with this issue. “During all my time in the Pentagon, we were in two very bloody theaters of war that consumed most all of the bandwidth,” he said. “While in retrospect there should have been, there simply wasn’t the national level of discourse we see today that often leads to those kinds of decisions.”

Others who served in the Army told me that’s an understandable position, as the service always has a lot going on trying to keep Pentagon bosses, lawmakers, and the American people happy and its troops alive. Add two wars on top of that, and any free time on the calendar quickly goes away.

But others contend that’s just an excuse. The secretary could simply write a memo and the bases’ names would change. Politically, it’d be better to have the defense secretary and key members of Congress on board, but that doesn’t negate the fact that the names could be changed with the stroke of a pen.

McHugh, however, told me this issue never came up during his time in charge of the service — though it was certainly discussed numerous times in public discourse during his tenure.

And it’s worth noting that after the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, debate about changing the 10 facilities’ names started up again, though the Pentagon did little about it.

Perhaps that inaction had to do with the final explanation, which is one the Army has repeatedly used: that changing the names would stir up immense controversy within the ranks. Take, for instance, the response to a request from Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) in 2017. She asked the Army to rename two streets at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn: General Lee Avenue and Stonewall Jackson Drive.

When the Army wrote back, Diana Randon, who was at the time the service’s top official on these issues, said the two men were “an inextricable part of our military history.” Such a move would be “controversial and divisive,” she continued, and “contrary to the Nation’s original intent in naming these streets, which was the spirit of reconciliation.”

Of course, as discussed above, that is a blatant misrepresentation of why these individuals’ names were chosen. They were deliberately chosen to appease racist people, particularly in the South — not to achieve some kind of national “reconciliation.”

“That guy, any day of the week, is better than Braxton Bragg”

Clearly, it makes no sense for the Army to keep these names. But that still brings up an important question: Which names to replace the Confederates with?

Most I spoke with said Army leadership should put down multiple names on a list — say, 100 — and then put together a commission of experts to pick the best 10. But there are many different ideas about which names should appear on such a list.

One from Sandy Apgar, the former head of Army installations, is to rename the facilities after their locations, like Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. “By naming places, not people, the military can better exemplify its values of honor, sacrifice, and community,” he wrote in the New York Times last month.

Another is to give the spotlight to distinguished service members from minority communities. Experts I spoke with mentioned Medal of Honor recipient Sgt. Roy Benavidez, a Latino soldier who rescued eight members of his patrol after their helicopter crashed in Vietnam and came under intense enemy fire.

After getting stabbed with a bayonet, he continued to fight and pull troops onto another evacuation helicopter until he could no longer move or speak. As he was placed into a body bag, he spat on the doctor’s face to prove he was still alive. He died in 1998.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who commanded Fort Benning in Georgia, tweeted on Tuesday in support of renaming that base as Fort Omar Bradley.

Henry Benning, a brigadier general in the Confederate army, was a pro-slavery politician who became a top advocate for secession after Abraham Lincoln became president. Bradley, by contrast, was a World War II hero and the country’s last surviving five-star general, helping troops make it from the Normandy landing all the way into Germany to help win the war.

“Bad policy that such important Army posts be named after traitors,” Eaton tweeted. “Time for change.”

Another suggestion is Sgt. 1st Class Alwyn Cashe, a black soldier who received a Silver Star after pulling six wounded soldiers out of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle in 2005 in Iraq. He suffered burns on over 70 percent of his body doing so and died from those injuries.

Asked by the Stars and Stripes newspaper what compelled him to keep going back into the fire, he said “I had made peace with my God, but I didn’t know if my men had yet.”

“That guy, any day of the week, is better than Braxton Bragg,” said Jason, the retired Army colonel, which is why he finds the Army’s inaction on renaming the bases until now “inexcusable.”

“There is no reason to delay this decision another day,” he said.

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