Tag: protests

‘People’s Arms Embargo’ at Travis Air Force Base

Seventy-five protesters gathered under threatening skies at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California at 6:30 am on Wednesday, November 20. Their mission: to speak out and briefly interrupt the shipment of weapons to Israel from this air base.

For 90 minutes, they showed banners such as “Stop Arms for War Crimes” and “Stop Travis: No US Weapons for Genocide. ” They delayed traffic on the busy six-lane roadway into the base by frequently pressing the button to allow pedestrian crossing.  Fliers were handed out to receptive drivers. The flyers asked “Why are we blocking access to Travis Air Base and messing up your day?”.  It was explained that while November 20 is World Children’s Day, weapons to Israel from Travis are being used to kill children. Bombs loaded onto planes at Travis and other US air bases have killed many thousands of children.

David Vidmar grew up on Travis Air Base. He said, “I am participating in the People’s Arms Embargo to honor my father as he would have been sickened by the indiscriminate targeting, slaughter and starvation of Gazan children and women in Israel’s genocide.”

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Retired Army CPT, Iraq War Veteran, and J6 Defendant Gabriel Garcia Denied Essential Medical Surgery by DOJ So They Can Sentence Him for Walking Peacefully Inside US Capitol Before Trump Is Sworn In

Gabriel Garcia is a retired U.S. Army Captain and Bronze Star combat veteran who attended the rally on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC.

Gabriel walked over to the U.S. Capitol peacefully and patriotically from the DC Ellipse to protest at the Stop the Steal rally. Gabriel walked to the US Capitol filming the entire time.  Garcia entered the US Capitol.  There were no police at the door when he walked in.  There was no alarm going off.

He took video from inside the US Capitol.  Then he left when he was asked to leave. Gabriel told The Gateway Pundit, “I never heard someone get on the loudspeaker and say, hey, you can’t be in here at this time. You’re going to be prosecuted and arrested. None of that. There were no verbal commands for you to disperse.”

For that the Biden DOJ has ruined his life for nearly 4 straight years!

Gabriel Garcia has faced many hardships like the rest of the J6 community since that day. Gabriel Garcia was banned from Airbnb, canceled from Chase Bank, and banned from social media platforms. He was forced to sell his business at the time. Mr. Garcia was put on a terrorist watch list and can’t even go to any military base for health care needs as a military retiree benefit that he has rightfully earned.

Mr. Garcia faces constant harassment by TSA every time he flies, even when traveling with his family that was not in Washington DC on January 6. Mr. Garcia was placed on house arrest immediately following when he returned home from attending CPAC with his attorney at the time in Maryland on March 1, 2023.

Gabriel has also been wearing an ankle monitor for over three years – since the beginning of 2021 – even though he is not a threat to the community or a flight risk.

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Despite Supreme Court 1512 Ruling, DOJ Still Cracking Down On J6 Defendants Like Stephanie Baez — Demonstrating That Lawfare Won’t End Until President Trump Is Sworn In And Cleans Out Deep State

In June, the Supreme Court handed J6 defendants a long-awaited victory by effectively gutting the 1512 obstruction of justice statute.

Leading up to that decision, the DOJ had been using the statute in a context totally unrelated to its original intent and purpose.

The statute was enacted shortly after the Enron scandal of the early 2000s to provide oversight into fraud and corruption within the accounting industry.

The law’s originators never conceived of its use in a presidential certification process, much less against peaceful demonstrators who simply exercised their First Amendment rights to protest a contested election.

Nevertheless, radical lawyers within the DOJ, abetted by outside lawfare groups, took it upon themselves to completely pervert the statute’s meaning.

Rather than fighting accounting fraud, it was now being weaponized by vindictive, bad-faith actors within the DOJ to deny J6 political prisoners of fundamental rights, and in many cases, imprison them with cruel and unusually long sentences.

The statute’s vague wording that was the focus of much of the Supreme Court’s decision in Fischer had previously given the DOJ convenient cover to stretch its construction to absurd lengths.

This is how a statute enacted to limit the tampering of evidence to protect whistleblowers in a proceeding for accounting fraud became twisted and applied in a completely foreign area – namely, the context of punishing J6 defendants.

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What Happens To Jan. 6 Defendants After Trump’s Election Win?

After President-elect Donald Trump won a second term, multiple defendants charged for their roles in the events of Jan. 6, 2021, asked to delay their cases because they anticipate pardons from Trump.

According to data collected by NPR, more than 1,500 people have been charged in relation to Jan. 6, with nearly 1,000 pleading guilty.

At least a dozen cases have been dismissed, while plenty remain with changes following Trump’s election. At the beginning of November, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia announced multiple sentences and guilty verdicts.

Various factors could determine whether these individuals end up avoiding jail time, but perhaps the most important is Trump’s eventual control of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and who will lead that department.

On Nov. 13, Trump announced Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) as his pick for attorney general. Gaetz has been critical of the prosecutions and introduced a bill in July that was intended to prevent prosecutors from retaliating against Jan. 6 defendants for seeking resentencing. Gaetz has also questioned federal involvement, stating that Jan. 6 “wasn’t an insurrection” but that it “very well may have been a fedsurrection.”

Assuming the presidency also grants Trump substantial pardon power under the Constitution: Trump has indicated that he’s open to pardoning those charged but left open the possibility that some would face punishment.

“We will treat them fairly,” he said in January 2022. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.”

More recently, during an event in July, he was asked about individuals who assaulted officers. He said he would “absolutely” pardon the defendants “if they’re innocent” and added that “they were convicted by a very tough system.”

More than 70 defendants have received a mixed verdict, and so far, more than 1,000 people have been sentenced, with 64 percent receiving prison time, according to NPR data. Some defendants have also taken plea deals.

“I think there’s going to be a complete second look at all of the prosecutions,” Robert Ray, a former Trump impeachment attorney, told The Epoch Times, while noting the large number of cases brought. He added that a second look wouldn’t “necessarily yield a favorable result with regard to each and every defendant, but I think there’s going to be a pretty strenuous exercise of the pardon and commutation power to deal with overreaching [by prosecutors].”

John Pierce, an attorney who has represented Jan. 6 defendants, told The Epoch Times he expects a “blanket pardon,” while Trump–Vance transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said the president-elect “will make pardon decisions on a case-by-case basis.”

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Radical Left Activates Anti-Trump Protests As AOC Riles Up Rioters

Not even 24 hours after President-elect Donald Trump won more votes in Illinois this general election than in the previous two, and after winning the US election in a massive red wave sweep, far-left protesters gathered outside the Trump Hotel in Obama’s Chicago.

The protests appear to have been highly organized and well-planned before the election, given the coordination among activists, the hundreds—if not thousands—of protesters—many holding signs—and the likely pre-approved protest routes from City Hall. 

Organizers shouted into megaphones, “Trump is a fascist” and “racist,” echoing hate speech spewed by the defunct Harris-Walz campaign in the months leading up to November 5.

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German Government Collapses As Mass Strikes Grind Economy To A Halt

It’s not a good day for the establishment. Just hours after Kamala Harris – and the Democrats – staggering loss which ushered in Trump as president for the third time and gave Republicans a sweep of Congress, Germany’s three-party ruling coalition which had been on the verge of collapse for months, imploded on Wednesday evening after Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced he will fire Finance Minister Christian Lindner over persistent rifts on spending and economic reforms, a move that paves the way for a snap election at the end of March.

The firing ejects Lindner’s fiscally conservative Free Democratic Party  (FDP) from the troubled coalition, forcing Scholz to call for a confidence vote that he said would take place on January 15. If Scholz loses that vote, which is virtually certain, a snap election is set to take place by March.

The collapse of Germany’s government came just hours after Donald Trump’s clear win in the U.S. election, a result that stunned German political leaders, who depend on American military might for their country’s defense and fear Trump’s tariff policies will hobble German industry.

“Dear fellow citizens, I would have liked to have spared you this difficult decision, especially in times like these, when uncertainty is growing,” said Scholz – viewed as the weakest German chancellor in decades – in a statement at the chancellery.

But the rifts inside the coalition proved too great to overcome. Caught in the middle of an impossible battle, Lindner and his conservative FDP insisted that the German government stick to strict spending rules and cut taxes, even as his left-wing coalition partners wanted to maintain social spending and boost German industry through economic stimulus.

“All too often, Minister Lindner has blocked laws in an inappropriate manner,” said Scholz in a statement. “Too often he has engaged in petty party-political tactics. Too often he has broken my trust.”

Scholz said he had offered Lindner a deal to create an emergency fund to aid Ukraine that would exist outside Germany’s regular budget, but Lindner refused to participate in such fiscal gimmicks that saw the UK recently redefine the nature of “debt.”

“Olaf Scholz has long failed to recognize the need for a new economic awakening in our country,” said Lindner. “He has long played down the economic concerns of our citizens.”

As Politico reports, the FDP is the smallest party in the coalition and is now polling at only four percent — below the threshold needed to make it into the German parliament — meaning its leaders have been mulling a coalition break in order to save their political futures.

Crisis talks in the coalition of Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, the Greens and Lindner’s Free Democratic Party had come to a head after the FDP issued a paper with demands for liberal economic reforms that were difficult for the other two parties to accept.

Lindner’s recent policy paper, leaked to the media last week, called for tax cuts and a scaling back of climate policies in order to stimulate economic growth — both positions that put the party at odds with his coalition partners.

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Licensed to Kill: Not James Bond, But Our Department of Defense

On October 18, 2024, Law Enforcement Today had the following headline, which passed by almost unnoticed: “DoD secretly reauthorizes bill that would allow military intervention domestically…and adds ability to use deadly force.”

The reissue of Department of Defense (DoD) Directive 5240.01 was quietly put into effect on September 27, 2024, six weeks before our presidential election. It is a formalized license to kill.

 Why? Because the Democrat party has determined that civil unrest is bad after condoning the 2020 “mostly peaceful” riots that consumed much of our nation in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. It provides protection for the military to kill under clear cover of authority. Imagine the outcry if this had occurred under Donald Trump. This directive was not necessary.

President Trump argued for the use of National Guard or military assistance during this period of civil unrest as local law enforcement was unable to control the rioting mobs, although he was talked out of using an authority that presidents have used regularly over the last one hundred years:

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Failure of U.S. Leaders Should Precipitate More Efforts at People’s Diplomacy—Like in the Vietnam War Era

On September 19, the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee hosted a webinar focused on the significant impact of women in the Vietnam era anti-war movement.

The first speaker, Vivian Rothstein, who was drawn to anti-war activism after participating in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, spoke about her participation in a conference in 1967 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, with 40 other American peace activists who met with members of the resistance in North and South Vietnam, including Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, a top official with the southern-based National Liberation Front (NLF).

The Bratislava conference was co-organized by Tom Hayden, co-founder of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and provided an opportunity for U.S. peace activists to learn directly from Vietnamese about what the U.S. government was doing.

Rothstein said that the Vietnamese women asked to meet separately with the American women who were part of the delegation. They told them about horrific rapes being carried out by U.S. soldiers, bombing of villages, and parachuting of Vietnamese women onto U.S. military bases to serve as sexual playthings for U.S. GIs.

The Vietnamese women hoped that the American women would go back to their communities to tell people what was really going on, with the belief that they would pressure the U.S. government to end the war.

Rothstein said that the Bratislava conference was very meaningful for everyone who participated in it and a good example of people’s diplomacy—citizens getting together, independent of their government, to build ties and work toward peace.

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U.S. Military Bases in South Korea and Japan Arouse Persistent Protests

On August 12, 2024, around 2,500 Okinawans including the island’s governor staged a demonstration near Marine Corps Air Station Futenma.

The main focus of the protest—organized by the anti-U.S. military political party All Okinawa and two civic groups fighting in the courts to eliminate base aircraft noise—was a rash of sexual assaults allegedly committed against local women by U.S. servicemen stationed at the base.

In March, a senior airman, Brennon R.E. Washington was indicted on charges of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a minor. In June, prosecutors indicted Marine Lance Cpl. Jamel Clayton on attempted sexual assault charges.

All Okinawa co-chairman Susumu Inamine, a former mayor of Nago city, told the crowd that the Japanese government had been hiding information regarding these and other cases, and that even Okinawa’s governor was kept in the dark, which, she said, was “unforgivable.” Other speakers at the rally condemned the recent return of Bell Boeing MV-22 Osprey flights over the island, which are known for making a lot of noise.

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New York high schoolers to stage WALKOUTS in protest of ballot measure that will allow trans athletes to participate in girls’ sports

High school students across New York are planning to walk out of their classrooms on Oct. 24 in protest of a ballot measure that would allow transgender athletes to participate in girls’ sporting events.

New York’s Proposal 1, also known as the “Equal Rights Amendment,” would add language to the New York Bill of Rights to provide that people can’t be denied rights based on their “ethnicity, national origin, age and disability” as well as due to their “sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes and reproductive healthcare and autonomy.”

Campaigners in favor of Proposal 1 are marketing the ballot measure as a pro-abortion measure that would enshrine abortion rights into state law. However, the Coalition to Protect Kids, the main organization that has organized the statewide walkouts, argue that Proposal 1 would not only protect abortion rights but also mandate extreme “trans rights” in New York, including the participation of transgender athletes in girls sports.

The statewide demonstration, dubbed “Walk Off for Fairness Day,” is organized by the Coalition to Protect Kids with support from the Catholic Church, the New York Republican State Committee and the Conservative Party of New York State. (Related: World Athletics bans transgender athletes from competing in female category at international events.)

“Girls are being systematically canceled in this state, and ‘Walk Off for Fairness Day’ will give them a safe opportunity to make their voices heard,” said Coalition spokeswoman Ayesha Kreutz. “So many of these young women are afraid of speaking out, so they’re forced to watch as 50 years of female athletic progress gets washed away by destructive ideologues. Girls are not second-class citizens, so why are they being treated that way?”

Many high school students across New York have spoken out in support of the walkout.

“It’s not right for boys to compete against girls in sports. It’s a huge disadvantage for girls,” said Hannah Pompeo, a 16-year soccer player at Eden High School near Buffalo.

Similarly, Millie McCormack, a dancer from Somers High School, stated that she and her sister would join the protest because they believe transgender athletes threaten the fairness of girls’ sports. “I don’t think it’s right for men to be in our safe spaces. We worked hard for places on our teams. Boys have physical advantages we don’t have.”

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