American Police Are Now Openly Working With Violent White Nationalist
The police are signaling that they welcome militia help to pacify protests, and kill unarmed citizens
Image: Kyle Rittenhouse, now charged with first-degree murder in the fatal shooting of a demonstrator in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
by Justin Rosario
This weekend, the Portland police department wanted to make sure everyone knew exactly where they stood. After almost three months of violently assaulting BLM protesters, peaceful or otherwise, they decided that maybe Saturday would be a good day to stop doing that.
Normally, this would be good news, but, being the Portland PD, there was a catch. They weren’t standing down in the interest of public safety or community relations. Instead, as The Washington Post reports, they were standing aside to let the neo-fascist terrorist group The Proud Boys start a street fight with antifa:
The two groups sparred for more than two hours, as people exchanged blows, fired paintballs at each other and blasted chemicals indiscriminately into the crowd. People lobbed fireworks back and forth. At least one person was hit in the abdomen with a device that flashed and exploded, causing bleeding.
…
As the brawls unfolded, Portland police officers remained at a distance. They made several announcements over loudspeakers, encouraging the crowds to “self-monitor for criminal activity,” even as people beat others with sticks, and at least two right-wing activists brandished handguns.
Just a bunch of armed white nationalists looking for a fight. What’s wrong with that?
The Double Standard For Law Enforcement
The police have long been accused of treating white nationalists with kid’s gloves while treating everyone else to a face full of pepper spray. And that’s if the police are in a good mood. When they’re not, you get this.
Or this.
Or this.
Or if you’re black, you might just be gunned down and labeled a “thug” who should have complied with police orders.
But when you’re a violent white nationalist, you don’t have to worry about that sort of thing. The police are very accommodating. If they’re not giving you a full escort to make sure your First Amendment rights are protected, a luxury they don’t afford to everyone, they’re buying you Burger King after a hard day’s work killing a church full of black people.
You may think I’m being snarky here but I’m actually quite serious. We’ve been watching the police viciously attack peaceful protesters for months (years, really) but we’ve also seen them cozying up to white nationalists:
The key words here are “don’t look like we’re playing favorites.” Naturally, warning the armed white nationalists to get off the streets so you don’t have to arrest them while you’re getting ready to gas BLM protesters and arrest them, is the literal definition of playing favorites.
The Salem police chose a side. They just didn’t want to be seen doing it.
The Portland police have been caught before taking sides, as well. The Portland Mercury documented how they literally coordinated with white nationalists like they were on military maneuvers:
"We have a large group of antifa trying to flank us an [sic] you. We are stopping them for now... but not sure how long."
This is one of hundreds of text messages sent between Portland Police Bureau (PPB) Lt. Jeff Niiya and Joey Gibson, leader of Vancouver alt-right group Patriot Prayer over the past two years. Like many messages discovered in a records request made in August by the Portland Mercury, it reflects many of the public's suspicions that the Portland police have been sympathetic—if not protective—of the right-wing extremist group.
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"Heads up just told 4-5 black Bloch [another nickname for antifa] heading your way. One carrying a flag," writes Niiya during a protest on December 23 2017. "We will have officers nearby but you may want to think about moving soon if more come."
There were no such communications with any BLM protesters. Granted, there are no leaders to the current round of protests but even if there were, what are the chances the police would do anything other than place them under surveillance?
The Portland police have clearly sided with white nationalists and they’re not putting much effort into hiding it at this point. Even their excuse for allowing neo-fascist terrorists to rampage in the streets was painfully transparent:
“Each skirmish appeared to involve willing participants and the events were not enduring in time, so officers were not deployed to intervene,” the Portland Police Bureau said in a statement.
Police said they did not stop the violence, although the event met the criteria to be declared a riot, because too few officers were available to respond and they deemed it too dangerous to intervene. Officers were tired from responding to a much smaller and less volatile protest that was declared a riot the night before, the bureau said in a statement, and incident commanders also had concerns that officers would be targeted by the crowd.
That’s a nice story, but the Portland PD always seems to have more than enough cops on hand to shoot chemical weapons, flash bangs, and rubber bullets at protesters they don’t like before wading into the crowds and smashing them with clubs and fists.
The last time I went to watch white nationalists on parade, the police kept both them and the counter protesters separated by a wide margin and tolerated no bullshit from either side. It wasn’t that hard to do and did not require a massive police presence to accomplish.
It’s far more likely that the reticence of the Portland PD stems from their inability to tell the combatants apart in the middle of a huge melee. After all, most of the people fighting are white with their faces covered. How do you know if the person you’re smashing into the ground with four of your fellow “officers of the law” is a filthy Marxist Hippie anti-fascist protester that deserves it or a white nationalist comrade in the war to make America great again? Chemical weapons can’t differentiate between ideologies and it won’t do to gas your own side, would it?
It’s a total mystery why people are still protesting against the police.
Cops Across America Went All In On Racism And It Will Cost Them
I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. Trump was president and promised the police free rein to be as awful as they wanted. White supremacy was the law of the land and the good times would never end!
But Trump is not the president of state and city governments, and there’s a very good chance he won’t be the president of anything next year. He doesn’t get to dictate the budgets of police departments and while “Defund the Police” is not a particularly good slogan (you still need some cops), the premise is excellent. American law enforcement is as bloated as the military.
Strip a few billion from the collective budget of the police and redirect that money into other community services. Like magic, we’ll find that improving mental health services and job opportunities reduces the need for a massive militarized police force. Several cities have started to do this already because the police are out of control.
That’s at the local level. If (when) Trump flees the country to someplace without an extradition treaty, things will get significantly worse for those police departments full of “bad apples” all over the country.
Under Trump, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has been turned into a weapon to fight against civil rights. Because of course it has. But once Trump is gone and Bill Barr is replaced as Attorney General (and brought up on a slew of charges), Biden’s DoJ is going to pick up where Obama’s left off.
If your memory is fuzzy because it’s been 60 years since 2016, the Obama DoJ was investigating racist police departments and placing them under consent decrees in which they had to get their shit together or the full force of the federal government would be brought to bear on them. The police hated it with a burning passion but they had no choice but to fall in line.
The police were being policed. That’s one of the reasons they went so off the rails crazy when Trump let them loose again.
Biden is already champing at the bit to go further. During Obama’s administration, the public (meaning white people) wasn’t quite ready to accept the reality behind the Black Lives Matter movement. They are far more open to it now and won’t be as resistant to the federal government stepping in to bring the police to heel.
If there is any justice in the world, Biden’s DoJ will come down like the wrath of God on departments that saw fit to wage war on protesters these past months. They will have to explain why officers assaulted people with their bicycles. Why they randomly shot pepper spray out of their cars as they drove by at people on the side of the road. Why they broke the hand of man standing still and talking to them. And, of course, why they allowed white nationalists to start a riot and threaten to shoot people with no consequences.
The police will rage against this and cry their victimhood to every right-wing outlet but, again, who cares? The police have been claiming PTSD from being held accountable for the first time after decades of brutality and lawlessness, but I’m not exactly going to shed a tear for their travails. If we’re lucky, we’ll have a wave of mass resignations, saving us the effort of rooting out the white nationalists that have been infiltrating law enforcement for more than 20 years. You can’t fix a broken bridge if half of the wood is rotten and we’re long overdue for a real infrastructure week.
Update: The night before this article was supposed to be published, an armed 17-year-old shot three protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two of them.
The murderer is part of a group of white nationalist extremists who showed up to terrorize protesters with the blessing of the local police. That is not conjecture on my part, there is literal video of the police handing out bottles of water to the group and saying, “We appreciate you guys. We really do.”
The 17-year-old that would go on to murder two people is right there in the video.
While the police are demanding “civilians” disperse, they’re working with armed thugs and allowing them to hang around. The result? Violence and death.
After this person committed murder and the police responded to the shots being fired, he was allowed, with his gun, to walk right past the police and leave the scene. Sure, they didn’t see him fire the shots but is there any scenario in which a black man with a gun would be allowed to leave the scene after shots were fired? Is there any universe in which he would be allowed to walk away with a gun clearly visible without being riddled with bullets?
I am not exaggerating this in any way whatsoever. There is video and it’s clear in all of its horrible detail. It starts after he’s already killed one person and the crowd is trying to stop him. He kills the second at 20 seconds so skip ahead if you would prefer not to see it.
That is a person with no guilt about what he’s done whatsoever. I promise you, he will claim it was “self defense” and he will become a hero to the right wing. More importantly, he’ll be a hero to the police.
The police in America have chosen a side, and if we do not remove Donald Trump then this is only the beginning of the body count. Sooner or later, the police will decide, on their own, that they don’t need to use rubber bullets and tear gas; they’ll just start executing protesters in the streets.
And why not? They’re already openly working with white nationalist militias and no one is stopping them. They already see the public as the enemy and they’ll have the full support of Trump and his corrupt DoJ so why not go all the way?
If you’re still sitting on the fence about voting for Biden because he’s not pure enough for you, I’d like to point out that the two people shot in the video are not black. Right wing extremists (with or without a badge) will not just be killing minorities. They will kill anyone not wearing a swastika or a MAGA hat. They will kill you if you protest because they’ll be able to.
You’re not voting for the future of Medicare For All. You’re voting for your right to protest and your right to stand for anything other than obedience to a fascist regime. If that’s not enough for you, maybe you should be at the next protest in Kenosha and see how it feels to have white nationalists point a gun at you.
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"and while “Defund the Police” is not a particularly good slogan"
For from not particularly good. It's a terrible, TERRIBLE slogan.
It undermines what folks in favor of it are trying to achieve by making it look like they want something far more radical than they do. It provides those opposed to police reform with exactly what they need to paint those in favor of it as fringe radicals.