Background Briefing: December 30, 2020
A Look Back at the Movement Against Racial Injustice and Police Brutality in 2020
Will This Nationwide Uprising Bring About Racial Justice and Economic Equality?
Today we continue to look back on the stories that dominated the headlines in this tumultuous year of 2020 which is fast coming to a close. Nothing was more graphic than the killing on camera of George Floyd which sparked protests across the country bringing forth a multi-racial movement of young and old Americans fed up with racial injustice and police brutality. On June 3 we spoke with Bree Carlson, the Deputy Director of People’s Action, a national network of state and local grassroots power-building organizations united in fighting for justice. She joined us to discuss the deep pain in the black community after centuries and decades of abuse and domination, the very word our president is using to “dominate” the streets with military power. But while this uprising and rebellion has to succeed to return the country to a path of reform to redress injustice and inequality, the danger arises that our wannabe dictator will exploit the unrest to become the “law and order” president.
Citizens of Portland Continue Their Stand Against Brutal Police Now Aided by Trumps Stormtroopers
Then we go to an interview from July 19 as a trial run was underway in Portland, Oregon for Trump’s reelection plan to become the law and order president. After having invented the specter of Antifa as a threat to America, Trump used an executive order to protect statues and government buildings as an excuse to deploy his private federal militia led by the rabid Trumpsters, the acting head of DHS Chad Wolfe and CBP Deputy Director Ken Cuccinelli, to create chaos in the streets to be shown with hysterical commentary on Fox intended to rile up his base. All this to try again to distract the public from the real crisis, a pandemic Trump has let loose on the land, which our absentee leader is incapable of dealing with and is trying to wish away. Robert Evans, an investigative reporter for Bellingcat who has been covering the protests in Portland for months and has worked as a conflict journalist in Iraq and Ukraine and has reported on far-right extremists in the U.S., joined us. The host of the podcast behind the Bastards for iHeartMedia, he has documented clashes between protesters and police including Trump’s fascistic kidnapping of protesters by federal officers without insignias in unmarked cars and protests in response to these police-state tactics. We assess whether the outrage expressed by Portland’s mayor, the state’s congressional representatives and its two U.S. Senators along with the governor, will deter Trump’s stormtroopers from continuing their phony war against a couple of hundred leaderless anarchists while ignoring the growing threat of right wing neo-Nazis and Boogaloo radicals who are actually intent on killing police to start a civil war.
How the Dirty Wars We Exported Are Coming Home in Portland
Then finally we go to an interview from July 29 when we spoke with Stuart Schrader, Director of the Program in Racism, Immigration and Citizenship and Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing about his article at The New Republic “Trump has Brought America’s Dirty War Home: The authoritarian tactics we’ve exported around the world in the name of national security are now being deployed in Portland“.