Petition started after @TheBlaze host @TomiLahren called #BlackLivesMatter "the new KKK": https://t.co/T2lGpP1Cbv pic.twitter.com/OEI62e82Oj
— Heat Street (@heatstreet) July 9, 2016
And @TomiLahren weighs in but can't hit the delete button fast enough.@AnnCoulter, come get your daughter. pic.twitter.com/CdDt4xf4HL
— W. Kamau Bell (@wkamaubell) July 8, 2016
The Violent Tone of Black Lives Matter Has Alienated Even Liberals Like Me https://t.co/VjK0DklocX
— Heat Street (@heatstreet) July 9, 2016
DALLAS — Early Thursday evening, in the loud pitch of protests for the Black Lives Matter movement here at Belo Garden Park, at the corner of South Griffin Street and Main Street, a quiet moment went mostly unnoticed. A smiling middle-aged black man, carrying a handwritten placard, “No Justice. No Peace,” stopped to take a photo of a phalanx of several police officers.Keep reading.
One of the officers, a white man, responded with a smile and said, “Wanna take a picture together?”
A Hispanic female officer stepped forward to take the man’s camera phone, while the protestor stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the police officers, his sign visible at his feet, a black police officer on his right and the white officer on his left, all smiling. Beside them, with friends and my son, I smiled. It was a moment of warmth in an unfortunate race war that has polarized America.
In town for a fencing tournament, we had stepped out of dinner moments earlier to the buzz of helicopters overhead. Emergency vehicles wailed nearby. A young man, hustling for money, told us folks were in downtown for a demonstration against police shootings of black men. “Be careful,” he said.
We followed others to the protest, crossing South Griffin Street, to enter the well-manicured Belo Garden Park, where a black man shouted into a megaphone, with about 500 protestors around him. My friend, who is Hispanic, was wary of possible danger, having grown up years ago amid violent anti-dictatorship protests.
We stopped when I spotted the line of police. “We’ll be safe next to the police,” I told my friend. It is a difficult truth to acknowledge: After watching the streets of America burn from Ferguson, Missouri, to Baltimore, we feared violence from the protestors, not the police. Little could we know, we were — metaphorically, at least — in the sniper’s line of fire, with targets on the backs of police, six of them to be injured, five of them to be slain, hours later.
In Belo Garden Park, studying the crowd of demonstrators, I had told my friend: The tenor of the Black Lives Matter movement — with headline moments of storming stages, seizing microphones, sabotaging a gay pride event, expressing rage and even hate to police — had alienated even liberals, like myself, who care deeply about racial justice.
To be sure, Dallas Police Chief David Brown said that the sniper, Micah Xavier Johnson, killed by a police robot with an explosive, had told police negotiators that he wasn’t affiliated with any organization, and the movement officially denounced the murders. But the killings in Louisiana, Minnesota, and Texas reveal there is a needle we must still thread as a nation. We must face the wounds of social injustice with a nonviolent spirit of reconciliation and healing. When I expressed these sentiments on Twitter, not long after bullets flew blocks from where we had stood, some supporters of Black Lives Matter attacked me, particularly co=religionists from my Muslim community, using shaming techniques, like calling me “coon,” “racist,” “mental midget,” propagandist for Islamaphobia and now anti-Black racism,” to attempt to silence me and bully me to “f–k off.”
It's interesting how much supporters of #BlackLivesMatter have cussed at me while trying to defend their honor. https://t.co/11HDoV49wa— Asra Q. Nomani (@AsraNomani) July 9, 2016
Yes, I wanted you to say it. It's NOT okay to dehumanize others in the name of social justice. @HessahP @AbuBishrr— Asra Q. Nomani (@AsraNomani) July 9, 2016
This flawed premise that it's okay to incite hate against others is a hallmark of your campaigns @rabiasquared @MuslimMatters @nathanlean— Asra Q. Nomani (@AsraNomani) July 9, 2016
FYI Fmr @CAIRNational @RabiaSquared, #AdnanSyed fan, incites folks to "have at it" w/me to "set" me "straight." https://t.co/n742Lq4W8Z— Asra Q. Nomani (@AsraNomani) July 9, 2016
— Asra Q. Nomani (@AsraNomani) July 9, 2016
Their hopes to smear folks as "Islamophobes" hinges on race wars, @mistahspock. @rabiasquared @MuslimMatters @nathanlean— Asra Q. Nomani (@AsraNomani) July 9, 2016
Do you now see how Muslims throwing around the "Islamophobia" smear exploit the race wars for their own agenda? @nonpromqueen— Asra Q. Nomani (@AsraNomani) July 9, 2016
I am talking about storming stages, silencing speakers, stopping LGBT parade. I empathize w/the anger but dont agree w/the tactics @tarynj19— Asra Q. Nomani (@AsraNomani) July 9, 2016
@AsraNomani Slander, misrepresentation, lies and obfuscation are the traits of @nathanlean— Stefan Ride (@SRide44) July 9, 2016
Yes, there is real racial injustice, police misconduct. I just dont agree with BLM "tone" so they dehumanize me as "racist" @yepmeister— Asra Q. Nomani (@AsraNomani) July 9, 2016
Yes, there is real racial injustice, police misconduct. I just dont agree with BLM "tone" so they dehumanize me as "racist" @yepmeister— Asra Q. Nomani (@AsraNomani) July 9, 2016
More cursing. More demands to shut up, as if that is okay. Thank you for proving my point. @PersianCeltic— Asra Q. Nomani (@AsraNomani) July 9, 2016
G'night haters unleashed by @MuslimMatters @nathanlean @rabiasquared. W/hate, you prove my concerns on #BlackLivesMatter tactics. #Dallas— Asra Q. Nomani (@AsraNomani) July 9, 2016
Even as political leaders, protesters and law enforcement officials struggled to find common ground and lit candles of shared grief, there was an inescapable fear that the United States was being pulled further apart in its anger and anguish over back-to-back fatal shootings by police officers followed by a sniper attack by a military veteran who said he wanted to kill white police officers.More.
Just days after the United States celebrated its 240th birthday, people in interviews across the country said that the nation increasingly felt mired in bloodshed and blame, and that despite pleas for compassion and unity, it was fracturing along racial and ideological lines into angry camps of liberals against conservatives, Black Lives Matter against Blue Lives Matter, protesters against the police. Whose side were you on? Which victims did you mourn?
In a televised interview, the executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations blamed President Obama for waging a “war on cops.” On social media, others confronted the discrepancies in the everyday lives of black and white Americans, hoping understanding would lead to conversations and action.
Along the Las Vegas Strip, a sunbaked cross-section of races, backgrounds and political views, tourists and workers said the relentless parade of violence during the week had left them mostly in shock and disbelief. They worried that more would follow.
Police departments across the country took precautions, ordering officers to double up in their patrol cruisers and to work in pairs or teams. Civilians were also on guard. Trey Jemmott, an incoming freshman at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said his mother warned him to be careful before he left for the gym the other night.
“She always told me, being an African-American, you already have strikes against you,” he said. “I just feel like something’s got to change. We thought we were over this.”
At an outdoor food stand on the Strip, three co-workers — black, white and Asian — debated whether the bloodshed would lead to healing or deeper divisions as they talked about their own experiences with the police.
Martin Clemons, 28, said he and other black friends had been frisked for jaywalking across the Strip. Zach Luciano, 23, who is white, said he had never been stopped or had a negative run-in with law enforcement, and had considered becoming a police officer.
“There’s more good cops than bad cops,” Mr. Luciano said. “I wanted to be one of those good ones.”
What the three co-workers shared was a grim view that the country’s divides would not heal anytime soon.
“It’s sad, but this is what the world’s coming to,” Mr. Luciano said...
Critics have accused the Black Lives Matter movement of being a hate group that exploits and incites racial animosity. Fanatical supporters of Black Lives Matter flooded Twitter with anti-police messages after Thursday’s shooting, calling for even more violence against police.Continue reading.
“This is the war that Black Lives Matter asked for,” David Horowitz said Thursday night after the deadly attack in Dallas, later asking: “Do you think we have a domestic terrorist threat from the left?”
The anti-police ideology of “Black Lives Matter has historical roots in the radical Left, investigative journalist Matthew Vadum reports...
The ambush-style mass shooting of cops in Dallas, Texas, last night makes it clear that it is time for the dangerous, anti-American insurgency called Black Lives Matter to be designated a terrorist organization for fomenting a war against the nation’s law enforcement officers.Keep reading.
As FrontPage went to press early Friday morning, five Dallas area police officers were dead, systematically slaughtered by snipers.
That makes it the deadliest attack on U.S. law enforcement since Sept. 11, 2001.
The officers were killed during a demonstration in downtown Dallas against police brutality that leftists say is directed at black Americans as a matter of government policy. Similar marches and rallies took place in other cities, including New York, Oakland, Calif., and Denver, Colo. One suspect has been killed and three others remain in custody. Police have not yet released their identities. [Police now have released the identity of one suspect, Micah Xavier Johnson, who was killed in the standoff.]
Of course, murdering police officers has long been encouraged by activists with the Black Lives Matter cult, with the support of the activist Left. A year ago Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who openly advocates the mass murder of whites, called for “10,000 fearless men” to “rise up and kill those who kill us.” Like many radicals, Farrakhan mischaracterizes Black Lives Matter as a rising civil rights movement.
President Barack Obama, who a decade ago promoted inter-racial warfare in Kenya, has long tried to provoke civil unrest here in the U.S. with his hateful anti-cop rhetoric and his relentless demonization of opponents. His goal is fundamental transformation of the United States. A Red diaper baby who identifies violence-espousing communist Frantz Fanon as an intellectual influence, he has also steadfastly refused to condemn the explicitly racist, violent Black Lives Matter movement. In fact Obama has lavished attention on the movement’s leaders and invited them to the White House over and over again.
Members of the Democratic National Committee expressly endorsed Black Lives Matter, throwing their lot in with black racists and radical Black Power militants. The DNC officially embraced a statement that slams the U.S. for allegedly systemic police violence against black people. A resolution passed by hundreds of delegates at the DNC meeting in Minneapolis last year accuses the nation’s police of "extrajudicial killings of unarmed African American men, women and children."
The Left persists in these lies because, well, that’s what these people do.
According to one analysis, of all the people shot and killed in the U.S. by police so far in 2016, only 24 percent, or 122, were black. Black people are only about 13 percent of the population but they commit around half of all violent crimes. So far this year 47 percent of people shot and killed by police, or 235 individuals, were white.
Only 3 percent, or 13 people shot and killed by police year to date were black and unarmed. The percentage for whites is exactly the same. In other words, police are shooting and killing unarmed blacks and whites at the same rate, Paul Joseph Watson observes.
“There’s no racial disparity,” he says. “Do we have a problem with police brutality in America? Yes, undoubtedly. Is it almost exclusively targeted towards black people as Black Lives Matter claims? No, but the polarizing way in which Black Lives Matter made it all about race has divided the nation and made half of the country completely disinterested.”
Watson addresses “black people,” telling them that “Black Lives Matter is hurting you. It’s doing incredible harm. Martin Luther King achieved justice and civil rights by championing equality and building bridges with white America.”
Black Lives Matter, on the other hand, demands racial segregation, keeps whites out of its meetings, and urges the killing of police, he adds.
Returning to the situation in Dallas, as of 11:45 p.m. Central time, 11 officers from the Dallas Police Department and the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) system had reportedly been shot. DPD chief David Brown told reporters that two snipers opened fire from elevated positions in downtown Dallas. Dallas mayor Mike Rawlings (D) said the shooting began at 8:58 p.m. local time. Brown added that suspects may have also planted a bomb downtown.
Four of the murdered police officers worked for the DPD. The other deceased officer worked for DART.
The killing spree followed days of media-hyped adverse publicity for police forces in Louisiana and Minnesota.
In its intensifying assaults on American law enforcement the Left seized upon a police-involved death earlier in the week of a notoriously violent criminal in Louisiana who had reportedly menaced an innocent by-stander with a gun.
Recidivist felon Alton Sterling, a black offender well known to local law enforcement, was shot to death by police early Tuesday morning in Baton Rouge following a physical struggle with police in which Sterling may have reached for a weapon. Both officers “believe they were completely justified in using deadly force,” according to the local district attorney.
Although even with graphic video footage of the shooting it’s not entirely clear what happened as the two cops and Sterling struggled, the Left is moving full speed ahead portraying the deceased career criminal as a martyr slaughtered by the evil system that rules a hopelessly racist America.
The Left reveres thugs. It jumped on the bandwagon promoting the lie that Michael Brown of Ferguson, Mo., and Trayvon Martin of Sanford, Fla., were innocent angels unjustly cut down by white executioners. The truth, as we now know, is that both young black men were killed in self-defense by the white men they intended to harm...
The Speaker of the House of Representatives was shouted down by Democratic Congressman as he attempted to regain control of the House of Representatives. Actual U.S. Congressmen behaving like a bunch of giddy Oberlin undergraduates.Hat Tip: Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "THE NEW KNOW-NOTHINGS: “The gullible young radicals covering the White House, and how they got that way,” as charted by Benjamin Weingarten at City Journal:
They had better not give in. Look, on gun control matters, I am generally — generally — more sympathetic to Democrats than to Republicans. But this mob insurrection on the House floor is profoundly unsettling. I have not looked closely at the legislation, so it is entirely possible that I might support the Democratic proposal. But to attempt to get one’s way by showing utter contempt for rules of the House? No. No, no, no. Their passion does not justify their behavior.
This country is in trouble.
Supposedly liberal and tolerant campuses create “safe spaces” limited to certain identity groups and those of a certain ideological inclination. In reality, safe spaces are safe only from the diversity their inhabitants claim to cherish. Activist students decry institutions based in “imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy,” as one group of aggrieved black students at Oberlin described it. One can’t escape the impression that liberal arts schools are more focused on coddling the next generation of community-organizing social-justice warriors than on educating them.Minority Leader Pelosi gives actually gave a shout-out to the leftist media for providing an "echo chamber" for the childish Democrat playground antics.
The end product is a cultural and political elite made up of entitled leftists ill-equipped to deal with the realities of a competitive world. As Ronald Reagan would say, the problem with America’s elites is that they know so much that isn’t so. They see things as they wish them to be rather than as they actually are. They can be easily manipulated because they’ve never examined their own assumptions. And this makes them ripe for the plucking by Ben Rhodes and his ilk...
Black Lives Matter protesters may help elect Donald Trump president, just as their predecessors did for Richard Nixon.Still more, but again, I'm skeptical.
Scuffles broke out at the University of Illinois at Chicago Pavilion on Friday after Trump canceled a rally citing security concerns. Earlier that day in St. Louis, Trump was repeatedly interrupted by demonstrators and police made almost three dozen arrests. On Saturday in Dayton, Ohio, a protester rushed the stage being subdued by security. Trump told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that events such as these would only increase his vote tally.
Trump may be on to something. The scenario evokes the turbulent election year of 1968 when Richard Nixon successfully cast himself as the “law and order” candidate against Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Violent crime had jumped 85% since Dwight Eisenhower had left office. Nixon charged that Democrats had adopted a do-nothing approach to this rising crisis. When Humphrey denounced the "storm trooper tactics" used by Chicago police in suppressing demonstrations at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention, his comment seemed to play into Nixon’s hands. Humphrey was attempting to placate his party’s left wing, but a Gallup poll at the time showed that 62% of Americans approved of the way Mayor Richard Daley handled the situation. Siding against the cops was bad politics.
Nixon’s stance that Democrats were soft on crime had a clear racial subtext, coming as it did in the wake of urban riots in Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Black militancy was on the rise, particularly after Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968. The races were divided on whether police brutality was a factor in the unrest. A 1968 Harris poll showed that 51% of blacks believed it was, compared to only 10% of whites. But Nixon knew where the votes were. Another Harris survey that September showed Nixon with a 20-point lead over Humphrey among respondents who blamed black militants as being a “major cause of the breakdown of law and order.”
Then as now, race and law enforcement were tightly intertwined issues. And, then as now, most people in general support law enforcement. In a June 2015 Gallup survey of confidence in American institutions, the police ranked third behind the military and small business in public esteem, with 52% having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the men and women in blue. Donald Trump made his position clear in January when he said that "Police are the most mistreated people in this country."
This dynamic puts prospective Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in a bind...
VIENNA, Ohio — It had all the trappings of a Donald Trump event, but in the end, something was missing.Keep reading.
Trump took his private, eponymous plane down a runway and parked it behind a stage. He enthralled throngs of fans while speaking at the appropriately named “Winner Aviation” outside Youngstown. He promised to build a border wall with Mexico, to fix a decades-old trade imbalance and to, more generally, “make America great again.” Most of all, he promised repeatedly that he’d win the election.
“I backed McCain. He lost. I backed Romney. He lost,” Trump said. “I said, ‘this time we’re gonna do it ourselves.'”
What the event lacked, however, was even a drop of the drama that defined Trump rallies over the weekend. Without a single interruption, Trump’s speech was a far cry from the violence of his events last week—and the exact opposite of a planned rally in Chicago where clashes between supporters and protesters led to the event being canceled.
Indeed, in the 2016 presidential campaign’s new normal, the rally was among the most surprising things a Trump event can be: normal.
With the protesters absent, the event—which served as Trump’s closing statement to his supporters—centered on the billionaire’s message to his backers: a Trump win in Ohio would all but make him the GOP presidential nominee. The polls suggest that could well happen. Trump and John Kasich are close, and the event here appeared an attempt to snatch a last-minute victory.
“Kasich cannot make America great again,” he said, ridiculing the governor for spending more time in New Hampshire “than Chris Christie,” the New Jersey governor and supporter who introduced Trump...
Missouri and North Carolina have gotten the least public attention among the five states that will vote on Tuesday. But they could be particularly meaningful for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.Still more.
The two states are just about the last on the nominating calendar with large numbers of evangelical Christians, a group that Mr. Cruz has tried to consolidate. After Tuesday, the primary calendar shifts to states with smaller shares of evangelicals.
The evangelical shares of Missouri and North Carolina residents are 36% and 35%, respectively, according to data from the Pew Research Center. The only state with a larger evangelical population that has yet to vote is West Virginia, where 39% of residents identify as evangelical Christians. That state doesn’t vote until May.
Mr. Cruz’s campaign, which emphasizes social conservative values, was supposed to be built for states with large evangelical populations. But seven of the 10 states with the largest evangelical populations, according to Pew, have voted so far, and Donald Trump has won six of them: Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, Mississippi and Georgia. Mr. Cruz won only Oklahoma, which borders on his home state of Texas.
As upcoming primaries and caucuses move north and west, away from the states that were supposed to be Mr. Cruz’s base, he could use a win or two. Missouri and North Carolina would give any winning candidate a boost. Together, they award 124 delegates, more than Florida’s cache of 99, the biggest prize on Tuesday. They award their delegates proportionally, so Mr. Cruz could lose the states but still emerge with a prize.
Mr. Cruz may have greater success in Missouri than North Carolina...
Marginalized populations are not obligated to educate and converse about our experiences, but we did to make this campus more aware.
— ConcernedStudent1950 (@CS_1950) November 10, 2015A lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t pay attention to this type of protest now are because of the solidarity you received from the football team. For those who are just tuning into this story, what do you want them to know?Basically, demands for respect, amid amorphous "racial incidents," shut down a university, and almost derailed a major collegiate football program, with potential financial losses in the million dollar range.
Butler: The campus climate here at the University of Missouri is an ugly one, it’s one that often we don’t talk about and it’s one that, when issues come up, whether it’s sexual assault, whether it’s Planned Parenthood, whether it’s racism, it gets swept under the rug because we want to rest on our traditions and rest on all these values that we hold in high esteem. And I think the message is that underneath all of that there is a lot of dirt and there’s a lot of pain and there’s a lot of hurt. There’s things that need to be changed. And at the end of it all, even if you don’t really understand what I’m saying, even if you can’t really understand systemic oppression and systemic racism, is the fact we can’t be at a university where we have values like “Respect, Responsibility, Discovery and Excellence” and we don’t have any of those things being enacted on campus, especially in terms of respect. I’m on a campus where people feel free to call people the n-word, where people feel free as recently as last week, to used [their] own feces to smear a swastika in a residential hall. Everything that glitters is not gold. We really need to dig deep and be real with ourselves about the world we live in and understand that we’re not perfect but understand that just because we’re not perfect doesn’t mean we don’t start to understand and address the issues around us...
It’s the black poor—the primary victims of violent crimes and thus the people most in need of effective policing—who must live with the effects of these falsehoods. As the Black Lives Matter movement has spread, murder rates have climbed in cities across the country, from New Orleans to Baltimore to St. Louis and Chicago. The Washington, D.C., homicide rate is 43% higher than it was a year ago. By the end of August, Milwaukee and New Haven, Conn., both had already seen more murders than in all of 2014.More.
Publicly, law-enforcement officials have been reluctant to link the movement’s antipolice rhetoric to the spike in violent crime. Privately, they have been echoing South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who said in a speech last week that the movement was harming the very people whose interests it claims to represent. “Most of the people who now live in terror because local police are too intimidated to do their jobs are black,” the governor said. “Black lives do matter, and they have been disgracefully jeopardized by the movement that has laid waste to Ferguson and Baltimore.”
Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina, who won accolades for swiftly moving to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state capitol after the June massacre of nine black churchgoers, sharply criticized the Black Lives Matter movement on Wednesday.Still more.
Citing the unrest that followed the police-involved deaths of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, Ms. Haley, a Republican, said the swelling African-American movement protesting police misconduct was imperiling black lives and property.
“Most of the people who now live in terror because local police are too intimidated to do their jobs are black,” Ms. Haley said at a luncheon in Washington. “Black lives do matter, and they have been disgracefully jeopardized by the movement that has laid waste to Ferguson and Baltimore.”
Ms. Haley contrasted the rioting in those communities with what she described as the reconciliation that took place in South Carolina after the death in April of Walter Scott, who was shot in the back as he ran from a police officer, and the killing of nine members of the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston.
She noted that Mr. Scott’s killing prompted South Carolina to mandate that police officers wear body cameras, the first state in the country to do so, and she recalled her effort to build support for taking down the Confederate flag.
“Some people think that you have to yell and scream in order to make a difference,” Ms. Haley said. “That’s not true. Often, the best thing we can do is turn down the volume level.”
For Ms. Haley, at 43 the youngest governor in the country, her address to the National Press Club represented the next phase of what is essentially an audition to be the Republican vice-presidential nominee next year. Her response to the Charleston killings lifted her national profile and prompted many in the party to suggest that Ms. Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, should be on the short list of the eventual presidential nominee.
Ms. Haley did little to dissuade such talk during a question-and-answer session after her remarks, stating that she was focused on her state for now but that if the party standard-bearer next year approached her about joining the ticket, “of course I will sit down and talk.”
Her 28-minute address illustrated how, in positioning herself for higher national prominence, she is trying to balance her conservative views with a more inclusive brand of politics that could make her attractive in a general election...
"I didn't hear a reflection on her part in perpetuating white supremacist violence." pic.twitter.com/LV2RdHFx9D
— Gabriel Debenedetti (@gdebenedetti) August 11, 2015In a matter of months, Black Lives Matter has become a powerful enough force in Democratic politics that campaign staffers actually accommodated would-be protesters as both worked the media. But what do activists actually want from Clinton?Ouch.
KEENE, N.H. — Standing beneath the hooded entrance to Keene Middle School, as rain hit the parking lot pavement early on Tuesday evening, the three activists exchanged a round of hugs, first with each other, then with the two videographers along to capture it all: another win for Black Lives Matter.
The small contingent, dressed in matching “Bulletproof” t-shirts, traveled from Massachusetts that morning with plans to stage a demonstration in the middle of a Hillary Clinton campaign event. As it turned out, the protest never happened. Instead, the group got 15 mostly private minutes with the candidate.
The activists — Daunasia Yancey, Julius Jones, and Vonds Dubuisson — declared the meeting a success. One, that is, for Black Lives Matter, not Clinton. Her answers, they told reporters afterward, had not been satisfying or sufficiently reflective.
Other Democrats, mostly Bernie Sanders, have already faced protests from Black Lives Matter on the campaign trail. The idea: to interrupt a candidate’s routine event or stump speech, and shift the conversation to questions about structural racism and police violence. This was Clinton’s first such encounter with the group whose name, often written as a one-word hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, has become the powerful avatar of a broader social and racial justice movement.
And what played out in New Hampshire over a single three-hour period, from 3:15 to 6:15 p.m., encapsulated the complicated dynamic between campaign, movement, and media that the other candidates have struggled to navigate in recent weeks.
On Tuesday, under the watch of the national press corps, Clinton took her turn at trying, and failing, to meet the expectations of the activists who have become increasingly influential figures in the Democratic primary.
So much so that when Yancey, Jones, and Dubuisson arrived too late to get into the event, a forum on mental health and substance abuse, Clinton aides tried hurriedly to get the activists into the campaign function they wanted to attend only to interrupt — setting off an unlikely sequence of events, shaped as much by the participants on the ground as by the coverage happening about them, in real time, on Twitter.
By 6:15 p.m., the result of this frenetic rush to manage the arrival of the three Black Lives Matter activists was, ultimately, three dissatisfied Black Lives Matter activists.
The organizers “didn’t hear a response” from Clinton to their direct concerns, according to Yancey, the co-founder of the group’s Boston chapter and the organizer leading the group in Keene. Fifteen minutes later, she said, “our time was up.”
Yancey said she and the other activists asked Clinton questions about her role, and Bill Clinton’s, in 1990s drug and crime policy — and “in perpetuating white supremacist violence.” The activists declined to relay Clinton’s answers — but they did express their disappointment with the exchange on the whole. “I didn’t hear a reflection on her part in perpetuating white supremacist violence,” Yancey said.
“I think she gave the answer she wanted to give.”
The Democratic Party is Officially Leaderless - by @noahcrothman - http://t.co/WmCcSOD3re pic.twitter.com/Qxgri0W0lT
— Commentary Magazine (@Commentary) June 13, 2015WASHINGTON — Hours after President Obama made a dramatic, personal appeal for support, House Democrats on Friday thwarted his push to expand trade negotiating power — and quite likely his chance to secure a legacy-defining accord spanning the Pacific Ocean.More.
In a remarkable blow to a president they have backed so resolutely, House Democrats voted to end assistance to workers displaced by global trade, a program their party created and has supported for four decades. That move effectively scuttled legislation granting the president trade promotion authority — the power to negotiate trade deals that cannot be amended or filibustered by Congress.
“We want a better deal for America’s workers,” said Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, who has guided the president’s agenda for two terms and was personally lobbied by Mr. Obama until the last minute.
The vote that prevented the president from obtaining trade promotional authority now imperils the more sweeping Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed trade agreement with 11 other nations along the Pacific Ocean that affects 40 percent of the global economy on goods ranging from running shoes to computers.
“They have taken their own child hostage,” said Representative Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania, adding, “Does it hurt the president? Of course it hurts the president, but it hurts America more.”
The Democratic revolt left Republican leaders trying to summon support from their own party for trade adjustment assistance, a program they have long derided as a waste of money and a concession to organized labor. Eighty-six Republicans voted for the program, more than double the 40 Democrats who supported it. But the trade adjustment assistance bill failed when 126 voted for it and 303 against.
Republican leaders then passed, in a 219-to-211 vote, a stand-alone bill that would grant the president the trade negotiating authority he sought. But that measure cannot go to the president for his signature because the Senate version of the legislative package combined both trade adjustment and trade promotion...
What part of "Stop selling out America?" don't Beltway crapweasels in both parties understand? http://t.co/v2CugIksCc pic.twitter.com/ObWmAlMXwe
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) June 12, 2015Boehner's transformation into Pelosi is complete: Urges yes vote on Obamatrade...FOR THE KIDS==> https://t.co/7TJBfagNGP
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) June 12, 2015Yep. @SenatorSessions is RIGHT on raw #tpp #tpa deal. Unfortunately, @SenTedCruz is wrong. #StopObamaTrade https://t.co/nCS16cWfY9
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) June 12, 2015It's come to this: Boehner and Pelosi cross-dressing on Obamatrade==> https://t.co/aVe0lKccq7
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) June 12, 2015
