There is probably a continuing number of non committed 'q' fans jumping the trump ship because of none of the 'q' conspiracies have come true. This will weaken their base and the hard core believers will be far smaller, with a larger part of the 'q' remaining publishing are the grifters just making money off their websites. Matter of opinion, almost all well known influencers on the internet are all making money off their poison. Some may not believe it themselves and you don't see a single money making pundit at these rallies.
Wonder why that is. Why didn't dobbs or hannity show up for trump? Because they are phony cowards who should be sued for everything they own.
And one can draw a pretty direct line from the failure of the Civil War Reconstruction to the trumph mob at the Capitol.
We need to get the justice first, unity after right this time.
Learning from the Failure of Reconstruction
Q&A By Isaac Chotiner January 13, 2021
Last Wednesday, January 6th, a day after Georgia elected its first Black senator, a mob encouraged by Donald Trump and his false claims of election fraud stormed Capitol Hill, resulting in at least five deaths. Despite widespread condemnation of these events, the F.B.I. revealed on Monday that it expects protests at all fifty state capitals in the days leading up to next Wednesday, when Joe Biden will be inaugurated as President. These events have drawn comparisons to coup attempts around the world, but also to the Reconstruction era, when white mobs inflicted violence on citizens and legislators throughout the South.
To better understand the lessons of Reconstruction for our times, I recently spoke by phone with Eric Foner, an emeritus professor of history at Columbia, and one of the country’s leading experts on Reconstruction. During the conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed the use of Confederate imagery by those who stormed the Capitol, balancing unity and punishment in the wake of terror, and the historical significance of the two Georgia Senate runoffs. The most common historical parallel over the past four years has been to European fascism, for a variety of reasons. But there have also been references to American history going back to Jim Crow and the Civil War. How does what we’ve seen in the past week, and specifically what we saw on Wednesday, fit into the larger American story and make those American comparisons especially vivid or interesting in your mind?
Well, I guess the sight of people storming the Capitol and carrying Confederate flags with them makes it impossible not to think about American history. That was an unprecedented display. But in a larger sense, yes, the events we saw reminded me very much of the Reconstruction era and the overthrow of Reconstruction, which was often accompanied, or accomplished, I should say, by violent assaults on elected officials. There were incidents then where elected, biracial governments were overthrown by mobs, by coup d’états, by various forms of violent terrorism.
There was the Colfax Massacre, in 1873, in Louisiana, where armed whites murdered dozens of members of a Black militia and took control of Grant Parish. Or you can go further into the nineteenth century, to the Wilmington riot of 1898, in North Carolina. Again, a democratically elected, biracial local government was ousted by a violent assault by armed whites. They took over the city. It also reminded me of what they call the Battle of Liberty Place, which took place in New Orleans, in 1874, when the White League—they had the courage of their convictions then, they called themselves what they wanted people to know—had an uprising against the biracial government of Louisiana that was eventually put down by federal forces. So it’s not unprecedented that violent racists try to overturn democratic elections.
Did the rhetoric of that time include the idea that those democratic elections were unfair? Is it similar to the rhetoric we’re hearing now, or was there no pretense of saying that they were trying to correct an unfair election, and it was just straight-out violence?
It was straight white supremacy. Maybe one might say there were two different tacks. One was to say that the Reconstruction government was corrupt or dishonest or their taxes were too high, things like that. That was meant to appeal to the North to not intervene, and say that these people were trying to restore good government in the South. But mostly it was straight-out white supremacy: Let the white man rule, this is a white Republic. I mean, racism was totally blatant back then. Today, they talk about dog whistles or other circumlocutions, but back then, no, it was just that armed whites in the South could not accept the idea of African-Americans as fellow-citizens or their votes as being legitimate.
It also reminds me of when President Trump first launched his political career and was pushing the idea that Obama was not really an American and, therefore, could not be president. And the idea that Black people are actually aliens in a certain way—that they are not truly American, that the only true Americans are whites—that’s been around for a long time in our history. And it does link what we saw the other day to Reconstruction and the battles over that.
Was there any symbolism used by the people rioting last week that stuck out to you or made you think back to this period, in addition to the Confederate flag?
It was also that there were people carrying these American Revolution flags, “Don’t tread on me,” that sort of thing. So they identified themselves with the Confederacy, obviously, with their flags. They also identified themselves with the Patriots of 1776. After all, the United States was founded by a revolution that overthrew the existing authority, the British. But, last week, these were fantasy revolutionaries. They weren’t really in a position to overturn the government, but they were trying to put themselves in the tradition of the people who overturned British rule here.
How was the Revolutionary flag used by Confederates?
Well, the Confederates claimed to be in the tradition of the American Revolution. After all, the Declaration of Independence says that the people have a right to alter or overthrow the government if they don’t like it. They said, “We are in the tradition of 1776.” Of course, they also rejected another famous part of the Declaration of Independence, the idea that all men are created equal. That did not appeal to them very much. Alexander Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederacy, very famously gave a speech saying that white supremacy is the cornerstone of the Confederacy—that Negroes, as he put it, that their natural state is being a slave. According to Stephens and most other Confederates, they certainly were not equal to white people. So this is a racialized view of the right to resistance in American history. It excludes African-Americans, but it includes these violent white people.
For a long time, the story of Reconstruction was taught in a lot of history books and was popularly understood as a period of “Northern aggression,” to use a loaded phrase, but you know what I’m talking about. And we still have an evolving understanding of it. What I’m interested in is the mistakes that were made about teaching Reconstruction, and why it’s so important to understand what happened on Wednesday and to understand it clearly, considering how poorly Reconstruction was taught.
First of all, I think how we think about history is very important. So, as a historian, I do believe that strongly. The mythology, I’d have to say, about Reconstruction was not just a question of teaching it wrongly. It was an ideological part of the notion of the Lost Cause, that Reconstruction was a vindictive effort by Northerners to punish white Southerners, that Black people were incapable of taking part intelligently in a democratic government. And therefore, the overthrow of Reconstruction was legitimate, according to this view. It was correct because those governments were so bad. This was part of the intellectual edifice of the Jim Crow system, that if you gave the right to vote back to Black people—and it had been taken away by the turn of the century—you would have the horrors of Reconstruction again. This image of Reconstruction, as the lowest point in the saga of American history, was very much a vindication and a legitimation of the Jim Crow system in the South, which lasted from the eighteen-nineties down into the nineteen-sixties.
So history was part of that legitimation. The motto of the historian is generally, “It’s too soon to tell.” But I do think eventually people will have to see January 6th, I hope will see it, as really a very serious violation of the norms of democratic government. It was not a fly-by-night operation. It was not a misguided group who got a little out of hand or something like that. It was really an attempt to completely subvert the democratic process by violence. And I think that the lesson, if we want to get a lesson out of it, is the fragility of democratic culture. I don’t know how many there were, but the thousands who stormed the Capitol do not believe in political democracy when they lose. They believe in it when they win, but that’s not democracy. So I think we have to be aware of this strand in our history, which is perhaps, what can I say, less worthy than the strands we tend to talk about more, the notion of equality, the notion of opportunity, the notion of liberty, democracy. You get a lot of talk about that in our history classes. You don’t get a lot of talk about the antidemocratic strands in American history, which have always been with us. And this is an exemplification of it.
So I think January 6th was an interesting day from a historical point of view, because it began, if you remember, with people talking about the victory of these two candidates in Georgia, a Black man and a Jewish man, and realizing that’s an amazing thing for Georgia. Georgia has a very long history of racism and anti-Semitism. That’s how it began. Four or six hours later, you have an armed mob seizing the Capitol building. You have these two themes of American history in juxtaposition to each other. That’s my point. And both of them are part of the American tradition, and we have to be aware of both of them, not just the more honorable parts.
I want to ask this next question carefully, but there was something absurd about January 6th. I’m obviously not talking about the people who died, and what it meant to our democracy. But you see some of these guys, you see some of the things they’re wearing, you see them taking photos with statues, you see them with their feet up on desks. You see the fact that it was obviously not going to work. And I think some people say, “There’s something ridiculous about this”—as indeed there’s been something ridiculous, as well as awful in many ways, about the last four years. And I’m curious if that has any precedent in the Confederacy, too.
I think these people are living in a world of fantasy. That’s why it seems absurd. They thought, honestly, that they would be able to overturn the election. They thought that by seizing the Capitol, they would somehow get President Trump reëlected. I mean, President Trump has been living in a world of fantasy for the past couple of months, as we know, insisting that he won the election in a landslide and that the result was not fixed and could be overturned. And these are his followers, who have been soaking up his lies and fantasies for four years. So it looks ridiculous to us.
All right, they got in there. Well, what are they going to do to stop the certification of the electoral vote? But no, they believed they would do it. They believed this was actually going to overturn the government. So it’s absurd on one level, but it’s also kind of worrisome, particularly because many of them were armed and there was a lot of violence involved. In other words, I think, yes, it’s a sort of play-acting at revolution. It’s not a real revolution. It’s a kind of a theatrical, performative revolution maybe. Nonetheless, this is what the President has been doing for four years.
There’s been a lot of talk about a kind of reconciliation and unity, especially from Republicans, in the past few days. And there’s been a lot of talk about punishment for this bad behavior, both for the people that did it and for President Trump. What does Reconstruction teach us about that?
I think the lesson of Reconstruction, sadly, is that it requires a lot of vigor, I suppose, to actually enforce a kind of a new regime. Reconstruction in our modern terminology was an attempt at regime change. Remember how we used to talk about regime change in Iraq and that kind of thing? Changing a regime based on slavery to one based on racial equality, that was a pretty big job to do. And it required force. President Grant was elected in 1868 with the slogan, “Let us have peace.” He wanted reconciliation. Three years later, he’s sending troops into South Carolina to crush the Ku Klux Klan. You can’t have peace when the other side is out there acting as a terrorist body, assassinating people if they try to vote and things like that. So the tragedy of Reconstruction is that the commitment to enforce it waned much too soon.
It was a national problem, not just a Southern one. And eventually, with the acquiescence of the North, with the acquiescence of the Supreme Court, you get the overthrow of this ideal of equality and the imposition of a new system of white supremacy. It’s not the same as slavery, it’s different, but it’s still a deeply unequal system in the South that then lasts well into the middle of the twentieth century. So, yeah, reconciliation is a wonderful idea, but it takes two to tango. And if Southern whites were irreconcilable, that made it very difficult.
You alluded to Georgia. And, as you said, there is something incredible and kind of inspiring about an African-American being elected to a Senate seat in Georgia. What specifically struck you about that?
Well, it is important. I mean, Georgia, like much of the Deep South, had a long history, first of all, of slavery. It was one of the major cotton-producing slave states. In Reconstruction, it had a very active Klan, which was very brutal and violent toward African-Americans and toward whites who coöperated with them. Later, it disenfranchised Black voters for a long time. In the middle of the twentieth century, you have leaders like Herman Talmadge there who were just absolute outright racist. You also have the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent in Georgia in the early twentieth century. So anti-Semitism was also pretty well entrenched.
I’m giving you a litany of bad things, but what’s actually important is that people are able to overcome this. That with that history hanging over you, you still can elect a Black man and a Jew to the Senate from Georgia. So I think that’s cause for optimism. We teach history, but history is not determinism. We don’t have to just relive our history over and over again. It’s possible to move beyond it, and I think what happened in Georgia is a little step in that direction.
'A fanciful reality': Trump claims Black Lives Matter protests are violent, but the majority are peaceful
"Post-ABC poll: Overwhelming opposition to Capitol attacks, majority support for preventing Trump from serving again "
--- Conversation with one still supporting Trump.
"“The protesters that stormed the Capitol didn’t represent anything, and they were such a small handful of people,” mentioned William Palma, a retired New York City transit employee and Trump supporter. “Their objective was to make the real Trump supporters look bad. The majority wasn’t Trump supporters; a few of them may have been.”
“They stood outside the doors and chanted and raised their flags,” Smith mentioned. “A young woman was shot and killed — if she had a weapon, that was her ignorance. It’s a whole lot more peaceful than Black Lives Matter.”"
But five people died. Oh, ok. Anyway, that's how i feel. -----
The USA TODAY Network talked to residents in Portland, Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago and Louisville to find out how protests have affected their cities.
Grace Hauck, Trevor Hughes, Omar Abdel-Baqui, Ricardo Torres and Hayes Gardner, USA TODAY Updated 10:01 a.m. AEDT Oct. 26, 2020
Demonstrators raise their hands during a peaceful protest on July 31, 2020 demanding justice for the murder of Breonna Taylor. Chants of 'Say her name...Breonna...
Matt Stone, Louisville Courier Journal
CHICAGO – Hours after a 14-year-old boy was fatally shot, dozens of young people held a mile-long "love march" through the city's South Side Englewood neighborhood last Saturday, holding images of people lost to gun violence and calling for investments in grocery stores, schools and health services in their neighborhoods.
"I've lost 34 friends to gun violence and police brutality, and it pushes me to keep going and show love," said resident Juanita Tennyson, 23, who has hosted three of these marches and a series of food drives since George Floyd's killing on Memorial Day .. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/10/07/derek-chauvin-george-floyd-death-released-jail/5911593002/ . "People think protests are bad and violent, and they're not. They can be beautiful and peaceful and calm."
President Donald Trump speaks Wednesday evening, Oct. 21, 2020, as he held a rally outside under the stars at the Gastonia Municipal Airport in North Carolina. Mike Hensdill, The Gaston Gazette
From left to right, Amari Hawkins, 14, Riley Goins, 15, Kaleigha Kendrick, 14, and Tierra Gibson, 14, hold signs on the newly renamed "Black Lives... Hannah Gaber, USA TODAY
Demonstrators did not engage in violence or destructive activity in more than 93% of the more than 7,750 demonstrations across thousands of locations in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., between May 26 and late August, according to a report by the U.S. Crisis Monitor .. https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-violence-in-america-new-data-for-summer-2020/ , a joint effort including Princeton University that collects and analyzes real-time data on demonstrations and political violence in the U.S.
To be sure, demonstrations were violent or destructive in about 220 locations, instigated by protesters, counterprotesters, police and other armed people, the report said. People from those groups, as well as bystanders and journalists, have been injured and killed, and buildings, vehicles and more have been damaged.
So what's really going on in cities? The USA TODAY Network looked into what's happening on the ground in Portland, Oregon; Detroit; Milwaukee; Louisville, Kentucky; and Chicago. This is what residents said.
* Portland: 'It's clearly being done for political aims'
But five-year Portland resident Greg Sutliff said most people are now going about their daily lives unaffected by the protests, which have largely been confined to areas around the police department, federal courthouse and city hall.
"Really it's just normal life for most of us in Portland," said Sutliff, 34. "... It's not tense. The vast majority of the protests have been extremely peaceful. The only significant violence that I've witnessed has been enacted by the police and federal law enforcement."
Mothers stand arm-in-arm outside the Justice Center in downtown Portland, Oregon, on July 18 during another night of protests. Activists and lawmakers expressed outrage over... Mark Graves, The Oregonian via AP
Overall, violent crime against people in Portland is down, and the number of homicides in the past 12 months remains the same compared with the previous period, according to city data. Even the highest daily spikes in violent crime this summer did not exceed the record daily count from 2015 to 2019, according to statistics from the University of Pennsylvania .. https://citycrimestats.com/covid/ .
But there were 15 homicides in July – more than double the monthly average going back to mid-2015, according to city data. August 2020 was the second-highest month for homicides, according to preliminary data, with seven recorded. At the end of that month, a man was fatally shot in the chest .. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/09/04/portland-protest-shooting-suspect-dead-aaron-jay-danielson/5713769002/ .. after a pro-Trump caravan of vehicles faced off with counterprotesters. Since 2015, the city has rarely recorded more than three to four homicides in a single month.
Sutliff, who helps run a small nonprofit and has previously lived in Chicago and Milwaukee, rejected the idea Portland is in any way dangerous or violent.
"It's extremely frustrating that the president has been trying to divide the country into hostile camps and painting an entire city as a place that's uninhabitable and violent, when that's not the case," Sutliff said.
Sarah Iannarone, who is running for mayor in Portland's nonpartisan election, said she wants partnership from the federal government, not criticism.
Federal agents use crowd control munitions to disperse Black Lives Matter protesters near the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse on Monday, July 20, 2020, in Portland, Oregon. Noah Berger, AP
Iannarone said Trump masterfully takes accurate but isolated examples of violence, like a flag being burned or a window being smashed, and then spins narrative fitting his political purposes. That, she said, is to be expected from a former reality TV show host.
"He will look for that seed of truth and create a fanciful reality around that. And I believe that's why his rhetoric resonates with his supporters."
Still, Iannarone said, the high-profile protests have prompted elected officials across the country to move more quickly toward police reform than they might have otherwise. "You have to give the protests nationwide credit for moving policymakers to move with urgency to address this situation," she said.
Tourism is a key industry in Portland, where last year visitors spent $5.6 billion, generating $277.8 million in state and local tax revenue, according to Travel Portland, the city's official destination marketing nonprofit. Overall, Portland's tourism supports about 37,000 jobs, the group says.
"The president's comments are unhelpful but I don't think anyone in Portland listens very carefully to him," said Jeff Miller, president and CEO of Travel Portland. "... People are incredibly frustrated with the political violence because it's taking away from the peaceful protest that thousands and thousands of Portland residents are participating in."
The Portland Police Bureau didn't respond to requests for comment, and the mayor's staff said he was unavailable for interviews.
Detroiters have also protested since May, but, unlike in many other major U.S. cities, there was no looting or widespread property damage.There were, however, several instances of violence between police and protesters in the early days of the protest movement.
A demonstrator shouts the protest chant, "hands up, don't shoot," as he and other protesters march through southwest Detroit to protest police brutality and the death of George Floyd on Monday, June 1, 2020. Kimberly P. Mitchell, Detroit Free Press
A federal judge in September temporarily banned Detroit police from using batons, shields, gas, rubber bullets, chokeholds or sound cannons against peaceful protesters.
"That's what makes moments in history. I imagine people felt the same way, especially in the South, in the midst of the civil rights movement," Taylor said. "What it also means is people can't turn away from the issues that bring people out."
Although protests in some form continue to be held daily in Detroit, they don't consistently bring out hundreds like they did in May and June.
Since the first day of protests, violent crime and homicides have risen sharply in Detroit, and several days recorded more violent crimes than the daily record from 2015 to 2019, according to statistics from the University of Pennsylvania. Violent crimes peaked July 5, when the city recorded 72, and again on Aug. 15, with 67.
[Men Who Allegedly Plotted to Kidnap Michigan’s Governor Celebrated Violent Far-Right Extremism "The Far-Right Revolution Was Waiting for an Opportunity. Now, It’s Here. "'No Blame?' ABC News finds 54 cases invoking 'Trump' in connection with violence, threats, alleged assaults. "Leaked Documents Show Police Knew Far-Right Extremists Were the Real Threat at Protests, Not “Antifa”""" https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=158817560]
* Milwaukee: 'The whole purpose is to be a disruption'
Five months after protests began in Milwaukee after Floyd's death, there is little sign of a city "under siege."
There have been clashes with police and nights of violence in Milwaukee, especially early on, and more recently in Kenosha and suburban Wauwatosa. But local officials and residents say the protests have been marked more by determination than destruction.
Giannis Antetokounmpo and Bucks teammates march at a protest in Milwaukee. Mark Hoffman, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
In the first days, thousands of protesters crisscrossed Milwaukee and surrounding suburbs in long, daily marches. Unrest broke out near two police stations late at night as some people looted nearby stores and drove recklessly through the streets, and police used tear gas and pepper spray to break up crowds.
Milwaukee Common Council President Cavalier Johnson said those marching regularly are committed to seeing real change carried out and are "fighting for the founding creed of this nation." But a small number of others who join late at night and who are unorganized and destructive "turn the tide of the conversation from one that's positive to one that's negative."
Some residents have been critical of the protesters' tactics, particularly in suburban Wauwatosa. Protesters have shut down Mayfair mall on several occasions. They’ve marched to the Wauwatosa Police Department and the mayor’s home, often late at night. They’ve packed city hall meeting rooms.
Protesters march in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, past boarded up businesses on their way to City Hall on Oct. 6, 2020. Earlier, District Attorney John Chisholm... Rick Wood, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"The whole purpose is to be a disruption. Because injustice has been a disruption in the lives of many Black and brown people," organizer Khalil Coleman said in August.
Police fired tear gas on crowds on at least three nights, citing an unlawful assembly after curfew, and National Guard members stood outside city buildings.
Sarah Griffie, a member of local activist group Tosa Together, lives in the areas that saw the most activity in Wauwatosa and, now more than week after the intense protests, she says "things have mostly gone quiet."
"Most of the stores appear back to normal, and the sidewalk chalk has washed away," Griffie said. "The many Black Lives Matter yard signs remain."
But a count by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, part of the USA TODAY Network, shows Milwaukee is on pace for a record homicide year. There had been more than 155 homicides as of Oct. 18, according to the count. The city had 99 homicides in all of 2019.
Milwaukee saw its greatest number of violent crimes, 70, on June 21, with subsequent peaks around the July Fourth holiday and at the end of July, according to statistics from the University of Pennsylvania .. https://citycrimestats.com/covid/ . But none of the peaks exceeded the highest number of daily violent crime incidents seen between 2015 and 2019, when the city recorded 73 violent crimes in a day.
Twenty-five people have been charged with firearms-related offenses under Operation Legend, and four have been charged with other violent crimes.
In nearby Kenosha, after a police officer shot Joseph Blake in the back at close range in late August, that community became a national focal point, with visits from Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden.
A Justice for Jacob Blake March and rally in Kenosha on Aug. 29, 2020, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Mike De Sisti/ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel-USA TODAY NETWORK
The most intense clashes took place at the Civic Center Park, outside of the Kenosha County Courthouse in downtown Kenosha and lasted for three days. But protesters have kept marching and organizing in the weeks after the incident.
Kenosha resident Porche Bennett, an Army veteran, has become one of the faces of change in the city. She has met a number of times with Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian and has been added to his task force on police and community relations.
"There’s been more transparency going on," Bennett said. "I can honestly say, even though it's sad that it took this to happen, there has been a change."
* Louisville: City 'functioning as best as it can function under the pandemic'
Louisville never stopped protesting.
Protests began in Kentucky's largest city May 28, the day a frantic 911 call was made public from the night Breonna Taylor was killed and three days after Floyd’s death.
A protester holds up the hand of King Louis XVI after it was torn from the statue during a demonstration on Thursday, May 28, 2020. Louisville broke into protests following the murder of Breonna Taylor. Michael Clevenger, Louisville Courier Journal
And protesters continue to call out the number of protest days like a badge of honor. Before a march to the polls Oct. 13, one leader asked in a megaphone, "What’s today? 100 what?" and a chorus came back with the answer: "139!"
Although the protests are continuous, Louisville is not under siege. When onlookers stumble upon a march, they're often surprised to see it, and the main sign of ongoing protest is occasional blocked traffic, an occupied downtown park and wooden boards affixed to windows of some nearby businesses.
Charles Buntyn, 6, raises a fist in the air in solidarity with passing protesters as they marched down Baxter Ave. during a demonstration to honor Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky. on Oct. 6, 2020. Sam Upshaw Jr., Louisville Courier Journal
"Besides COVID, most parts of Metro Louisville are functioning as best as it can function under the pandemic," said well-known community activist Christopher 2X.
There have been 887 arrests tied to the protests as of Oct. 15, according to Louisville police, but they typically stem from what organizers call "good trouble." Demonstrators have blocked bridges to traffic, shut down a city block to host an impromptu block party, and organized a massive sit-in on Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s front lawn.
Louisville Metro Police officers stands guard outside the home of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron as protesters sit in his front yard on July 14,... Matt Stone, Louisville Courier Journal
Separately, Louisville has experienced more homicides this year, already, than any year prior. As of Oct. 11, there had been 130 criminal homicides, surpassing the record of 117 from 2016. Violent crime as a whole is up, too. From January to August, there were 4,378 reported instances of violent crime, compared with an average of 3,093 over the past five years.
2X says he sees no evidence that the protest movement is correlated to the increase in homicides. Instead, he calls it a continuation of a trend. From 2012 to 2019, homicides have gradually trended upward, but 2020's total is still an outlier.
Sadiqa Reynolds, president and CEO of the Louisville Urban League, leads chants from a convertible during a march for Breonna Taylor. Oct. 10, 2020 Bailey Loosemore
Mayor Greg Fischer said in September that the city had to address the "horrifying increase in homicides that we’re seeing in our city, many of which are connected to the illegal drug trade."
Other local leaders have pointed to circumstances stemming from the coronavirus pandemic – like joblessness and no in-person school – as contributions to increased violent crime.
* Chicago: 'I don't believe the protests had anything to do with the looting'
Police Superintendent David Brown said in late September that officers believed there was a "coordinated effort over the summer to embed agitators in peaceful protests."
[GOOD. It's about time, in such a long and detailed article as this one, the infiltration provocateur model of the political right was mentioned.]
There was also violence associated with two rounds of looting this summer, which took place largely after dark. At the end of May, hundreds of police officers clashed with a group of people who threw rocks and bricks, set fires and looted businesses .. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/01/george-floyd-protests-police-chicago-dc-los-angeles-philadelphia/5313132002/ .. in the Magnificent Mile shopping district and other parts of the city. There were nearly 200 incidents of violent crime on May 31 – the most in a single day all summer and more than any daily record from 2015 to 2019, according to statistics from the University of Pennsylvania .. https://citycrimestats.com/covid/ .
Protestors march down Martin Luther King Drive on the south side of Chicago on Jun 2, 2020. Jasper Colt, USA TODAY
Businesses in neighborhoods across Chicago are still operating through plywood-covered storefronts, and more than a dozen along the downtown Magnificent Mile shopping strip and Loop area – ranging from luxury retailers to CBD and sushi shops – have posted plywood or ad-covered temporary barriers.
Tess Porter, 54, owner of a Tess's Place Style Shop in Englewood, had her front windows shattered in the first round of looting, and her beauty products and equipment were stolen. The loss was "heartbreaking," Porter said, but she didn't blame protesters.
"I don't believe the protests had anything to do with the looting. It was an evil thing people just took the opportunity to do at the time," Porter said. "I see them marching. I see them holding signs, walking in groups. I haven’t seen one protester jump out of the protest line and start banging up windows."
Dozens of storefronts in downtown Chicago remain boarded on Oct. 14, 2020. Grace Hauck, USA TODAY
Tennyson, who organized the "love marches," said she saw the looting as a cry for help. Like many people in her neighborhood, Tennyson, who had been working at a McDonald's, lost her job when the pandemic hit. After the looting, Tennyson decided that she'd use her free time to fundraise and organize drives to give out free goods, such as snacks, detergent and paper towels.
"A lot of youth are dying because we don’t have resources in our communities," Tennyson told USA TODAY as she passed out tampons and canned beans on a sidewalk in the city's South Shore neighborhood, across the street from an empty retail corridor. "Resources weren’t there before, and the looting made it worse."
Juanita Tennyson, 23, gives out donated food and household supplies in the South Shore neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago on Oct. 14., 2020. Grace Hauck, USA TODAY
Thirty-six people have been charged with firearms-related offenses under Operation Legend, and four have been charged with other violent crimes.
Like Tennyson, Ahriel Fuller, 25, a resident of the South Side Auburn Gresham neighborhood, started running a free supplies drive over the summer, mainly through donations of lightly worn clothing. Fuller said it's "ironic" that Trump characterizes protests in Chicago as violent.
"People want to say that protesters are violent, but you have to look at the people who are in charge of violent systems," said Fuller, as she gave a book to a man who passed by her folding table. "Poverty is violence, and we're responding directly to poverty. This is a protest. It's my protest."
Grace Hauck reported from Chicago, Trevor Hughes from Portland, Omar Abdel-Baqui from Detroit, Ricardo Torres from Milwaukee and Hayes Gardner from Louisville.
Contributing: Sophie Carson, Molly Beck and Evan Casey, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Originally Published 10:56 p.m. AEDT Oct. 24, 2020 Updated 10:01 a.m. AEDT Oct. 26, 2020
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
