Justification for our own murder
Are you not as sick as I am of being lied to?
Every single day is like the parable of the man on the deserted island refusing to be saved by boat or helicopter because he's waiting for God's help to arrive but instead it's about any Democrat with a backbone and an iota of charisma refusing to take the opportunity to become the next president by simply describing reality as it is.
Are you not as sick as I am of being lied to every hour of your life?
What a small ask that is right? I'm not even talking about The Truth – although that would be nice – but merely the truth.
And how grateful we would be for the pittance. To have someone in a position of power accurately observe and then accurately explain what has happened and why it is wrong. What has long been wrong. Hell I'd settle for a news outlet capable of and willing to do that.
One of those corrupted things is the longstanding double standard applied to cops of any kind in this country. How fucking convenient it is that they get to "fear for their lives" anytime they want to absolve themselves of anything they might do and yet when we actually fear for our own lives specifically because of them and do anything a scared person would reasonably do it's used as a justification for our killing.
How I would love for a week to go by where I didn't feel the impulse to share this one again.
There is a category of people in this country that are supposed to be composed in high stress situations. They train for them in fact and get paid well for it and are given very broad leeway on how they react. Still they shit their pants constantly and cry about how scared they are all the time. And we're supposed to venerate them as our sainted warrior class.
Cowards to a man. As I've written in here before they're "barbarians and martyrs at once. ... Crying and hitting you and crying and hitting you and crying and hitting you."
There have been countless examples of police summarily executing the scared and helpless over the years but the one I keep thinking about today is the 2016 killing of Daniel Shaver. He was shot to death by a police officer at a hotel in Arizona after being commanded to perform a series of confusing physical tasks. Weeping on his knees and stomach. It's an excruciating thing to watch never mind be forced to do yourself.
Luke O’Neil
Don't you drive a little tightly and perhaps poorly when there's just a normal cop standing there as you go by? Tense up. Imagine a bunch of them with guns pointed at you? You would of course not be calm and collected.
Renee Nicole Good, a 37 year old mother, who was executed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis yesterday – and by all of ICE and by Kristi Noem and by Donald Trump – was a poet among many other beautiful things. She won a prize for a piece of hers while in college. I'll share it in here down below.
I just went back to look at something I wrote five years ago yesterday. In the aftermath of the assault on the Capitol.
Luke O’Neil
I don’t want the police to shoot them like they shoot us, I want the police to not shoot us like they don’t shoot them...
I don’t want new laws protecting legislators from protests and confrontation I just want them to not drag disability activists out of their wheelchairs and to not brutalize anti-war and clean water and medical care protestors like they don’t do to their natural right wing ideological allies.
I guess I didn't get that wish.
And now schools are closed throughout Minneapolis for the rest of the week. To protect the children from the government.
I'm going to turn it over to Kim Kelly now. She writes about the parallels between the killings of Good and Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in 2017.
Help pay our writers please and thank you. They are good and decent and do not lie.
To die a politicized death in America is to be forever denied peace
by Kim Kelly
A woman died yesterday. Women die every day in America, in all kinds of ways: from illness or accidents, in childbirth, from neglect, at the hands of a lover or a stranger, or if they’re extraordinarily lucky, of old age. This woman was not lucky. She was shot four times in the face by a masked government agent and left for dead. Her murder was caught on video by bystanders, including her own wife, who cried out as they heard the gunshots, saw her body slump forward, and heard the ICE agents yell angrily at a doctor who tried to help the dying woman. Photos of the bloodied airbag and stuffed animals spilling out of her car’s glovebox hit social media within an hour of her death. The President of the United States and a bevy of his federal lackeys began smearing her publicly as a “violent rioter” and a “domestic terrorist.” Dueling narratives struggled for primacy. Videos of the shooting circulated. The governor talked about activating the National Guard. Her poetry went viral.