Tag: activism

Houston Police Arrested an Animal Rights Protester and Detained Him for 16 Hours, Lawsuit Says

Animal rights activists Daraius Dubash and Faraz Harsini were peacefully demonstrating in a Houston, Texas, public park when park employees demanded they leave. When Dubash insisted that the pair had a First Amendment right to protest, officials called the police, who arrested Dubash and charged him with criminal trespass. 

While Dubash’s charge was eventually dismissed, the pair have now filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the city, arguing that city police clearly violated their Constitutional rights.

“No one should be handcuffed and detained for exercising his First Amendment rights,” said JT Morris, an attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment nonprofit group. “We’re suing because public parks belong to all Americans and their expressive rights, not the personal views of a few.” 

From April to July 2022, Dubash and Harsini demonstrated several times in Discovery Green, a Houston public park. According to their lawsuit, the pair—keeping in practice with Anonymous for the Voiceless, the animal-rights activist group the two pertained to—wore Guy Fawkes masks while playing clips from Dominion, a documentary showing the gruesome mistreatment of animals in factory farms. 

On three separate occasions, park employees asked the pair to leave the park, claiming that the park was private property. (Discovery Green is public property, though it is managed by a private company.) According to the complaint, the pair complied, fearing retaliation.

On July 23, 2022, Dubash and Harsini were approached again. This time, they refused to leave, and Dubash calmly told park employees that he had a right to demonstrate peacefully. However, a park security guard told Dubash that protests were allowed on a “case by case” basis, adding that his “manager is going to come and come look at it.”

According to the lawsuit, when the manager, Floyd Willis, arrived, Dubash informed him that, while the park was managed by a private conservancy, the park was still public property, meaning that the First Amendment applied.

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Like other ‘antiracist’ activists, Ibram X. Kendi proves he’s only in it for himself

The real measure of an individual’s character isn’t what he portrays to the public but how he treats people in private.

Truly righteous people treat others with respect and dignity when there is no one else around and no social credit to be earned for doing the right thing.

This distinction matters — especially for people who’ve made a career lecturing others on the appropriate way to treat people, especially those perceived as having less power in society.

But when no one was looking and nothing was to be gained, it seems Ibram X. Kendi used his power and privilege as the director of a think tank to exploit and mistreat the people who worked under him as if they were people who are beneath him.

Amid confirmation of layoffs being made at Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, former and current faculty have spoken out about Kendi’s mismanagement, “exploitation” and enrichment.

“There are a number of ways it got to this point, it started very early on when the university decided to create a center that rested in the hands of one human being, an individual given millions of dollars and so much authority,” stated Spencer Piston, a BU political science professor. 

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Far-left activist accuses conservatives of ‘violence’ for referring to cross-dressing, BLM-supporting Philly mass shooting suspect as ‘trans’

In the wake of a mass shooting in Philadelphia which claimed the lives of 5 adults, injuring 2 children, far-left activists held a press conference to, in part, correct the media narrative on the alleged shooter’s identity. 

“I want to discuss, very briefly because there is a nasty, violent– in terms of verbal and written words– spewed by the conservative press regarding the shooter,” the activist said.

“There certain pictures that are circulating–some of you may are be aware of those pictures–have the shooter in one pitcher as male and other pictures dressed in female attire or female outfits. They have used those pictures to attack trans people in particularly trans women of color, which are extremely vulnerable to violence in our community,” he continued.

“I want to set the record straight,” he continued, “because language is extremely important when we’re talking about anything dealing with violence and [the] trans community. The suspect or the shooter has not identified themselves as trans. They have only identified themselves as male. And that’s the language that will be used until further developments if they change that type of language.

“But the language that is spewed out by the conservative press is violent and is dangerous and is targeting trans women of color. It’s rallying the community to be violent. And we’re better than that. We’re better than that. We have our trans women and our trans men living in these communities working thriving in the communities. They are not killers, they are the most vulnerable to violence. They want to live their lives, and they have every right to do so. And we will not allow conservative bigots to use that type of language to attack trans [people],” he said, in footage shared by Julio Rosas.

Kimbrady Watson Carriker, a 40-year-old male who is expressed support for the BLM movement on his Facebook page, was arrested on Monday evening after allegedly shooting and killing five people and injuring two children in the Kingsessing neighborhood. Police said they apprehended a male suspect who was wearing a ballistic vest.

Additional photos show Carriker wearing female clothes, though the Facebook page does not indicate that the suspect personally identified as transgender. 

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ATLANTA POLICE ARREST ORGANIZERS OF BAIL FUND FOR COP CITY PROTESTERS

ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, a heavily armed Atlanta Police Department SWAT team raided a house in Atlanta and arrested three of its residents. Their crime? Organizing legal support and bail funds for protesters and activists who have faced indiscriminate arrest and overreaching charges in the struggle to stop the construction of a vast police training facility — dubbed Cop City — atop a forest in Atlanta.

In a joint operation with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, or GBI, Atlanta cops charged Marlon Scott Kautz, Adele Maclean, and Savannah Patterson — all board members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund — with “money laundering” and “charity fraud.”

The arrests are an unprecedented attack on bail funds and legal support organizations, a long-standing facet of social justice movements, according to Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center.

“This is the first bail fund to be attacked in this way,” Regan, whose organization has worked to ensure legal support for people resisting Cop City, told me. “And there is absolutely not a scintilla of fact or evidence that anything illegal has ever transpired with regard to Atlanta fundraising for bail support.”

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Activists Demand Reparations for Latinos for Land Under Dodger Stadium

Activists are demanding reparations for land in the Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles that currently sits under Dodger Stadium, part of a broader movement across California that has focused thus far on African Americans.

The New York Times reported Wednesday on “the growing call for reparations from descendants of the people who lived where Dodger Stadium was built.” It cited reporting earlier this month by Jesus Jiménez, who wrote:

[I]n the early 1950s, the city of Los Angeles began displacing the residents of Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop, through voluntary purchases and eminent domain, with plans to build a housing project in the area.

It was never built, and eventually, after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, the team acquired the deed to the land. A condition was that the team build a stadium with capacity for at least 50,000 people.

…

The last of the families were forcefully evicted by sheriff’s deputies in May 1959. One woman, Aurora Vargas, who was known as Lola, was infamously photographed being carried out of her home by deputies. An article in The Los Angeles Times on May 9, 1959, described the scene as a “long skirmish.” Vargas was kicking and screaming and children were “wailing hysterically,” the newspaper reported.

The activists formed an organization in 2018 called Buried Under the Blue. They drew encouragement from the successful effort to obtain restitution for the original black owners of Bruce’s Beach. As Breitbart News noted:

The owners, Willa and Charles Bruce, purchased the land in 1912 and created a beach resort catering to black clients before the city used eminent domain to seize the property.

The land was dormant for decades until the city built a park in 1960 and later renamed it Bruce’s Beach. Descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce sued, claiming the eminent domain program was racially motivated.

The website for Buried Under the Blue states that the group’s mission is “to preserve our history of our three destroyed communities” and “[t]o empower and educate all people to create healthier communities, sustainable communities, and maintain historical documents for self-determination.” While the Times describes the group as “Latino,” the website refers to the former inhabitants of the area under Dodger Stadium as “indigenous.”

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The FBI Used an Undercover Cop With Pink Hair to Spy on Activists and Manufacture Crimes

THE YOUNG WOMAN with long pink hair claimed to be from Washington state. One day during the summer of 2020, she walked into the Chinook Center, a community space for left-wing activists in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and offered to volunteer.

“She dressed in a way that was sort of noticeable,” said Samantha Christiansen, a co-founder of the Chinook Center. But no one among the activists found that unusual or alarming; everyone has their own style. They accepted her into the community.

The pink-haired woman said her name was Chelsie. She also dropped regular hints about her chosen profession.

“She implied over the course of getting to know her that she was a sex worker,” said Jon Christiansen, Samantha’s husband and another co-founder of the Chinook Center.

“I think somebody else had told me that, and I just was like, ‘Oh, OK. That makes sense,’” said Autum Carter-Wallace, an activist in Colorado Springs. “I never questioned it.”

But Chelsie’s identity was as fake as her long pink hair. The young woman, whose real name is April Rogers, is a detective at the Colorado Springs Police Department. The FBI enlisted her to infiltrate and spy on racial justice groups during the summer of 2020.

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The Empire Gives People The Illusion Of Fighting The Power Without Ever Endangering Real Power

The one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has seen countless emotional news segments and heartstring-plucking articles, wall-to-wall social media posts, and public demonstrations decrying the evils of Vladimir Putin throughout the western world.

For what’s probably the first “anti-war” protest of most of their lives, American liberals gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC over the weekend to bravely condemn the leader of a foreign government thousands of miles away. There they were joined by empire managers like the virulent warmonger Samantha Power, who spoke at the rally opposing Russian warmongering at the capital of the most warlike nation on the planet.

For the last year, mainstream westerners have been using this war to act out their fantasies of being courageous up-punching anti-imperialists, fighting powerful bloodthirsty tyrants in defense of the needful, all while living directly under the thumb of the most tyrannical regime in the world. They mindlessly regurgitate the propaganda of the most powerful empire that has ever existed, parrot the same lines that are already being said all day long by all the most powerful institutions in the western world, all in service of the hegemonic agendas of the largest and most murderous power structure on earth, while pretending to be standing in opposition to the powerful.

The way the war in Ukraine allows mainstream liberals to play-act as rebellious anti-imperialists is a good illustration of how the empire gives people the illusion of fighting the power without their ever opposing the empire.

We saw this same trend take place in the US throughout the Trump administration, where mainstream liberals branded themselves “The Resistance” like they were socialist revolutionaries or insurgents opposing Hitler in Nazi-occupied France. In reality Trump’s presidency had little actual impact on the comforts of their lives, because beneath all the narratives Trump was a fairly normal US president whose most heinous crimes were all of the customary variety we see in all US presidents — including his predecessor and his successor. Democrats just spent four years LARPing as brave revolutionaries, and then he left office and the game ended.

In exactly the same way, Trump’s presidency allowed right wingers to pretend they were part of a movement against the establishment, despite Trump never actually challenging the establishment in any meaningful way. They believed he was fighting the Deep State even after he imprisoned Assange. They believed he was “ending the wars” even as he ramped up aggressions against Russia which helped bring us to where we are today, killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans with starvation sanctions, vetoed attempts to save Yemen from U.S.-backed genocide, worked to foment civil war in Iran using starvation sanctions and CIA ops with the stated goal of effecting regime change, occupied Syrian oil fields with the goal of preventing Syria’s reconstruction, greatly increased the number of troops in the Middle East and elsewhere, greatly increased the number of bombs dropped per day from the previous administration killing record numbers of civilians, and reduced military accountability for those airstrikes. They believed he was draining the swamp after packing his cabinet with establishment swamp monsters.

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Climate change activist goes rogue releasing ‘mini volcanoes’ to cool atmosphere

AMexico-based startup will next week launch sulphur particles into the stratosphere in a “rogue” move to create a “mini-volcano” effect it says could help cool the planet. 

The technique, known as stratospheric aerosol injection, mimics the impact of volcanoes by using a weather balloon to release sulphur, creating a cloud of particles that reflect the sun’s rays and have a cooling impact. 

It is one of several geoengineering techniques being studied as a way to cool the planet to avoid breaching internationally agreed limits on global warming. 

The amount of particles that start-up Make Sunsets plans to release in coming days, up to 2kg, will make a minimal difference to overall warming. 

But experts in geoengineering say the launches set a dangerous precedent for private companies or governments to interfere with the planet’s atmosphere. 

The company is backed by two venture capital funds, and is selling “cooling credits” to the public for $15 (£12), which it says pays for 1g of sulphur, expected to produce enough cooling to offset a ton of carbon emissions for a year. 

It released a first balloon in December in Mexico, but will next week launch from California, after the Mexican government released a statement criticising the first effort. 

Co-founder Luke Isemans said the potential risks of what he is doing are outweighed by the known threat of climate change. 

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Black activists hold armed rally to demand reparations in Virginia

Multiple BLM-affiliated groups held an armed rally in Richmond, Virginia demanding reparations for descendants of former slaves.

Video showed BLM757, BLMRVA, and the Fred Hampton Gun Club participating in the rally on Monday, armed with rifles in the gun-free zone of the State Capitol.

Police did not enforce the gun-free zone. However, the group complied when police told the armed activists to move back toward a sidewalk because they did not have a protest permit. 

According to independent journalist and documentarian Ford Fischer, the group was advocating for reparations as well as the passage of HR40, a congressional bill to study the subject.

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Co-founder of queer Indigenous artists’ collective in Wisconsin is unmasked as a WHITE woman – after claiming she was Native American and two-spirit

The co-founder of a queer Indigenous artists’ collective in Wisconsin who has claimed to be Native American is being accused of being a white woman and has since stepped down from her community positions. 

Kay LeClaire, who also went by the name Nibiiwakamigkwe, also identifies as ‘two-spirit,’ which is a term many Indigenous people use to describe a non-binary gender identity.

LeClaire has allegedly been profiting from the identities of Indigenous peoples, according to hobbyist genealogist AdvancedSmite as reported by Madison365.

She has claimed Métis, Oneida, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Cuban and Jewish heritage, but AdvancedSmite reportedly used online records and resources to find LeClaire’s true lineage – German, Swedish and French Canadian.

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