I’ve lived in Seattle for 17 years, and in Tacoma for 13 years before that, and the goth nightclub I’ve been going to regularly for 21 years (when there’s not a pandemic) is literally a block outside the CHAZ (or “CHOP” now, apparently).

I’m very familiar with Broadway and Capitol Hill and that section of Pike/Pine Streets.

There are plenty of high-priced condos in that 2×3 block area (plus a couple of city blocks worth of park). But the focus of that zone is that it is Party Central East, much like the much older Party Central West in Pioneer Square. The streets are lined with one bar, nightclub, or restaurant after another, punctuated by skateboard shops, upscale furniture stores, and t-shirt sellers. It’s full of drunk twenty-somethings every weekend night year-round. That’s the reason the police had a precinct right there in the first place.

In the last thirty years that I’ve been visiting Broadway, the demographic has changed. There used to be a lot of the flamboyantly-gay subculture still hanging on from the ’70s and ’80s, but as the years passed they hooked up with stable partners and moved out, probably to gentrify some unsuspecting ethnic neighborhood. Over time, and as the economy has improved and real estate values have gone up, they’ve been replaced by highly-paid tech workers. (The constant has been the “alternative” types — alienated punks, sundry goths, musicians, etc. — and the street people, from runaways to the hardcore homeless.)

So I know lots of people — fellow goths — who live in the area. They are almost universally leftists, but they’re not the hardcore revolutionary types who would conspire to hide the truth.

They are all reporting by posting on Facebook more or less the same thing: there are no armed guards, there are no checkpoints, people can come and go unhindered, there’s no arson or wanton property destruction. One person was asked by an out-of-region friend what was going on and she responded “woke flannel Burning Man”. As far as I can tell from the photos and videos I’ve seen, she’s not really wrong.

Now, it’s possible that just around the corner Antifa thugs are beating up wrongthinkers and condo residents are being looted for food and supplies, but I rather doubt it.

The Seattle PD walked back a claim that there had been numerous complaints of extortion coming from the local residents, and a statement from the Chief about “how will we respond to calls reporting rapes and robberies” was taken out of context to infer that she was saying that there were calls reporting rapes and robberies. On the other hand, the SPD is clearly so politically dominated by the city government that I can’t really trust anything they’re saying.

(Aside: the protestors claimed the SPD initiated violence unprovoked several times; the SPD claims that rocks, bricks, bottles, etc. were thrown at them. The only videos I’ve seen have been from high vantage points. Surely the cops have videos, why haven’t we seen them?)

There’s a Twitter thread that I found off an Instapundit comment, from a guy who doesn’t seem like he’s totally on board with the movement but seems like he’s passing, and is regularly posting videos. There have clearly been some scuffles, like when two white people and two black people marched through flying American flags and got chased off to cries of “white supremacist” (!). But overall, it looks like a lot of political haranguing and virtue signaling, or what you would expect from one of these things. So “festival atmosphere” isn’t really that far off, for certain values of “festival”.

I would consider this not too different from Occupy Wall Street. As much as their sophomoric demands make me roll my eyes until it causes a headache, I think Durkan and Inslee are probably right to just ignore them for now.

Most likely they’ll eventually get bored and start to wander off until it’s just the hardcore remaining. If the lockdown eases enough, I expect that the bars, nightclubs, etc., will — virtue signaling the entire time — start to lobby the politicians to clear out the riffraff so they can get back to selling overpriced drinks to brogrammers and woo girls. Otherwise, I’m actually okay with them stewing in their own idiocy and providing a horrible warning to the swing voters (in other states; Washington is solidly blue majority).

It’s possible it will all go downhill — OWS certainly did. But the filth and disease and petty crime and rape tents and so forth didn’t happen for quite a while.

TL;DR: What you’re seeing on Fox News and the internet rumor mill is largely false. Remember Gell-Mann Amnesia. This is a bunch of dimwit leftists LARPing La Revolución; it’s not a guerrilla insurgency Fallujah-style.

https://www.eviemagazine.com/about/

Millions of women across America have been forgotten by the publishing world. They’re tired of having to go to trashy or politically biased sites and magazines just to get quality reads on health, beauty, and more. For years, these publications have focused on proving how women are great by showing how they can be just like men.

Not us. We focus on women and celebrate what makes us so wonderfully unique. Because men can’t be us. And the ones who know that are the ones who love us the most. With that in mind, we’d like you to meet Evie.

She’s the next-generation digital publication for young women by women covering the most interesting and important subjects of our lives. Her mission is to empower, educate, and entertain you with the highest quality content that affirms your femininity, encourages virtue, and offers a more truthful perspective than the biased agenda of other publications.

I hope they aren’t next on the list for Cancel Culture mau-mauing.

https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/police-brutality-is-a-symptom-of-a-society-that-has-forgotten-the-value-of/
Police Brutality Is A Symptom Of A Society That Has Forgotten The Value Of Life
BY MOLLY FARINHOLT·Jun 11th 2020

It’s now incredibly uncommon to hear any politician or leading figure stress the importance of individual rights. Instead, we hear speech after speech about different economic classes, different races, and different genders. The rise of cultural Marxism has invaded nearly every aspect of our society, and its chief tenet is that group identity outweighs everything else. We’re no longer taught to see ourselves as an individual, but rather as a part of a larger group: immigrant, female, gay, black, etc.

It’s a dangerous game to play because, while on the one hand it can be used to describe systemic racism, on the other it’s the same ideology that allows for the commission of genocide against a group that’s perceived to be problematic to the society, regardless of the actual guilt of any of the individual members of that group.

PS It seems to pass all the “tests” in the previous post that were cited to define opinionated click-bait.

The headline from the Associated Press is a textbook case for this blog post on recognizing fake news (or at least partisan spin). I don’t think the AP story is what Evie contributors and readers usually consider “fake,” but the article is actually pretty even-handed (theoretically), contains good observations, and the main points are spot-on.

https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/how-to-tell-if-youre-reading-fake-news-or-real-journalism/
How To Tell If You’re Reading Fake News Or Real Journalism
BY JULIA SONG·May 22nd 2020

…
It has become clear from recent developments that misinformation is a danger we’re all exposed to, up to a certain extent, and that we can never really tell how much “fake news” we’re actually consuming and which publications are out to trick us.
…
The first thing I should mention is that the spotting of fake news is a skill, and it takes time to master it. But as amateurs in the ways of the lying media, one of the first instincts we may have is to assign the title of Fake Media to any publication we catch in the act of lying, especially if they’re in disagreement with our beliefs. Like an animal’s lair, we expect to find the cave in which all the editors of the mainstream media hide to concoct their lies and then confront them with the truth.

Perhaps a more honest and realistic approach to this issue would be to assume that it’s in the strongest of interests of the mainstream media to play ball with certain rules, to avoid certain topics, and to report on issues that best align with their viewers and advertisers. So, when determining what’s deceptive, I don’t simply revert to “this or that outlet” in order to immediately tag all of their articles as fake.

Rather, I approach it by each individual article. I have seen publications from all sides of the political spectrum produce articles that are misleading and articles with truthful content and accurate reporting.
…
It has become much more difficult to determine if a news article is attempting to deceive you, but we need to remember the one foundation behind news reporting: neutrality. If, by only reading the headline, you don’t feel the need to click on the article and read it in its entirety, and you feel fully informed and have an opinion made about that subject before reading more into it, then that headline was written to deceive you. Oftentimes, once we click and read the article, we can notice very quickly that the assumptions we made from reading the headline can’t be sustained, and sometimes they don’t clarify that until the last paragraph of the article, you know, to cover themselves from lawsuits.

In the age of internet, however, and accounting for how fast headlines travel around and how quickly people move from one subject to the next, most people don’t have the time to sit down and read a full article. They believe the writer has already done all the research and has summarized it for them in one headline.
…
If you feel fully informed, outraged, and that you have an opinion formed about a complex subject simply by reading headlines, and there are several publications with similar headlines with the same agenda behind them contributing to push you into conclusions, that’s a dead sign that you should click on the article and read it in its entirety. But if it’s a fake article, you don’t want to waste your time by reading all of it, right?

If only there were a way to discover if an article is fake in the first couple of paragraphs…
…most people will be looking for a quick, summarized way to stay informed. That is why, when writing papers, the first paragraph is usually a quick summary of what you’re about to read, and if the headline plans on deceiving you, the first couple of paragraphs will definitely cement that.
…
Finally, there is whatever it is that we have today — a hybrid between news and opinion pieces — and the unethical part of it is that they’re not clearly marked as such. The viewer believes they’re reading a news piece, but they’re actually reading an opinion article masked as news. Your first clue: the length of the article.

While opinion pieces must be lengthy in order to explain all the reasons as to why the author holds such opinions, news pieces must be short. That is designed specifically to avoid any unwanted opinions from the author in the news piece. Hybrids, as you can imagine, fall somewhere in between that and have longer paragraphs than normal. Once you see this structure, you should probably stop reading it.

Other Ways To Check for Fake News
Another quick way is to look at the date the source studies were published. Using studies from 10 or 15 years ago may not be as reliable when applied in today’s environment, and it might be used in a blatant attempt to deceive you.

Some publications are also more open about their activism taking priority over their journalism, and those are the ones you must avoid when in search for the truth. Often their social media posts are a dead giveaway.

Cross referencing is another quick way to determine the reliability of the information you’re being given. Are other publications reporting something similar? If not, you’re reading an op-ed.

The most important tool of all against the evils of the Fake News, however, is your gut feeling. How do you feel after you begin reading that article? Are both sides of the story being equally represented? What is the basis for the claims made? Do you trust the sources? Raging emotions on subjects that shouldn’t warrant such reactions, feelings of having your mind made up, and failing to be given any information that could represent the other side of the equation are all clear signs that something is most definitely up.

https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/op-ed/bs-ed-op-0603-letter-cop-protester-20200603-vzznpesjw5fu3p3fwrkxhja3cq-story.html
An open letter to a protester from a Baltimore County police officer | COMMENTARY By SETH TEMPLETON FOR THE BALTIMORE SUN |
JUN 03, 2020 | 4:35 PM

https://gulfcoastcommentary.blogspot.com/2016/07/black-officer-exposes-black-lives.html
“Sorry, the page you were looking for in this blog does not exist.”

Very disingenuous – it does not say, more accurately, “the page…was removed” but implies you got the wrong URL or something.

But the Wayback Machine comes to the rescue.
Caveat: this is a post of an alleged Facebook post; maybe it was removed because it was incorrect or misleading — the internet is full of fake news and “first person reports” — but that addresses a point I made somewhere else, which is that the Left is out to erase anything outside their narrative, including very old posts that are relinked during their current operations (see the Orwell quote on the “demands” thread).

https://web.archive.org/web/20191102123907/http://gulfcoastcommentary.blogspot.com:80/2016/07/black-officer-exposes-black-lives.html
Saved 2 times between April 1, 2019 and November 2, 2019.

Thursday, July 21, 2016
Black Officer Exposes Black Lives Matter Hypocrisy
From Officer Jay Stalien posted on Facebook: I have come to realize something that is still hard for me to understand to this day. The following may be a shock to some coming from an African American, but the mere fact that it may be shocking to some is prima facie evidence of the sad state of affairs that we are in as Humans.
I used to be so torn inside growing up. Here I am, a young African-American born and raised in Brooklyn, NY wanting to be a cop. I watched and lived through the crime that took place in the hood. My own black people killing others over nothing. Crack heads and heroin addicts lined the lobby of my building as I shuffled around them to make my way to our 1 bedroom apartment with 6 of us living inside. I used to be woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of gun fire, only to look outside and see that it was 2 African Americans shooting at each other.

It never sat right with me. I wanted to help my community and stop watching the blood of African Americans spilled on the street at the hands of a fellow black man. I became a cop because black lives in my community, along with ALL lives, mattered to me, and wanted to help stop the bloodshed.

As time went by in my law enforcement career, I quickly began to realize something. I remember the countless times I stood 2 inches from a young black man, around my age, laying on his back, gasping for air as blood filled his lungs. I remember them bleeding profusely with the unforgettable smell of deoxygenated dark red blood in the air, as it leaked from the bullet holes in his body on to the hot sidewalk on a summer day. I remember the countless family members who attacked me, spit on me, cursed me out, as I put up crime scene tape to cordon off the crime scene, yelling and screaming out of pain and anger at the sight of their loved ones taking their last breath. I never took it personally, I knew they were hurting. I remember the countless times I had to order new uniforms, because the ones I had on, were bloody from the blood of another black victim…of black on black crime.

I remember the countless times I got back in my patrol car, distraught after having watched another black male die in front me, having to start my preliminary report something like this: Suspect- Black/ Male, Victim-Black /Male. I remember the countless times I canvassed the area afterwards, and asked everyone “did you see who did it”, and the popular response from the very same family members was always, “Fuck the Police, I ain’t no snitch, Im gonna take care of this myself”. This happened every single time, every single homicide, black on black, and then my realization became clearer.

I woke up every morning, put my freshly pressed uniform on, shined my badge, functioned checked my weapon, kissed my wife and kid, and waited for my wife to say the same thing she always does before I leave, “Make sure you come back home to us”. I always replied, “I will”, but the truth was I was never sure if I would. I almost lost my life on this job, and every call, every stop, every moment that I had this uniform on, was another possibility for me to almost lose my life again. I was a target in the very community I swore to protect, the very community I wanted to help. As a matter of fact, they hated my very presence. They called me “Uncle Tom”, and “wanna be white boy”, and I couldn’t understand why. My own fellow black men and women attacking me, wishing for my death, wishing for the death of my family. I was so confused, so torn, I couldn’t understand why my own black people would turn against me, when every time they called …I was there. Every time someone died….I was there. Every time they were going through one of the worst moments in their lives…I was there. So why was I the enemy? I dove deep into that question…Why was I the enemy? Then my realization became clearer.

I spoke to members of the community and listened to some of the complaints as to why they hated cops. I then did research on the facts. I also presented facts to these members of the community, and listened to their complaints in response. This is what I learned:

Complaint: Police always targeting us, they always messing with the black man.

Fact: A city where the majority of citizens are black (Baltimore for example) …will ALWAYS have a higher rate of black people getting arrested, it will ALWAYS have a higher rate of blacks getting stopped, and will ALWAYS have a higher rate of blacks getting killed, and the reason why is because a city with those characteristics will ALWAYS have a higher rate of blacks committing crime. The statistics will follow the same trend for Asians if you go to China, for Hispanics if you go to Puerto Rico, for whites if you go to Russia, and the list goes on. It’s called Demographics

Complaint: More black people get arrested than white boys.

Fact: Black People commit a grossly disproportionate amount of crime. Data from the FBI shows that Nationwide, Blacks committed 5,173 homicides in 2014, whites committed 4,367. Chicago’s death toll is almost equal to that of both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined. Chicago’s death toll from 2001–November, 26 2015 stands at 7,401. The combined total deaths during Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003-2015: 4,815) and Operation Enduring Freedom/Afghanistan (2001-2015: 3,506), total 8,321.

Complaint: Blacks are the only ones getting killed by police, or they are killed more.

Fact: As of July 2016, the breakdown of the number of US Citizens killed by Police this year is, 238 White people killed, 123 Black people killed, 79 Hispanics, 69 other/or unknown race.

Fact: Black people kill more other blacks than Police do, and there are only protest and outrage when a cop kills a black man. University of Toledo criminologist Dr. Richard R. Johnson examined the latest crime data from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports and Centers for Disease Control and found that an average of 4,472 black men were killed by other black men annually between Jan. 1, 2009, and Dec. 31, 2012. Professor Johnson’s research further concluded that 112 black men died from both justified and unjustified police-involved killings annually during this same period.

Complaint: Well we already doing a good job of killing ourselves, we don’t need the Police to do it. Besides they should know better.

The more I listened, the more I realized. The more I researched, the more I realized. I would ask questions, and would only get emotional responses & inferences based on no facts at all. The more killing I saw, the more tragedy, the more savagery, the more violence, the more loss of life of a black man at the hands of another black man….the more I realized.

I haven’t slept well in the past few nights. Heartbreak weighs me down, rage flows through my veins, and tears fills my eyes. I watched my fellow officers assassinated on live television, and the images of them laying on the ground are seared into my brain forever. I couldn’t help but wonder if it had been me, a black man, a black cop, on TV, assassinated, laying on the ground dead,..would my friends and family still think black lives mattered? Would my life have mattered? Would they make t-shirts in remembrance of me? Would they go on tv and protest violence? Would they even make a Facebook post, or share a post in reference to my death?

All of my realizations came to this conclusion. Black Lives do not matter to most black people. Only the lives that make the national news matter to them. Only the lives that are taken at the hands of cops or white people, matter. The other thousands of lives lost, the other black souls that I along with every cop, have seen taken at the hands of other blacks, do not matter. Their deaths are unnoticed, accepted as the “norm”, and swept underneath the rug by the very people who claim and post “black lives matter”. I realized that this country is full of ignorance [No Jay, YOUR community is full of ignorance], where an educated individual will watch the ratings-driven news media, and watch a couple YouTube video clips, and then come to the conclusion that they have all the knowledge they need to have in order to know what it feels like to have a bullet proof vest as part of your office equipment, “Stay Alive” as part of your daily to do list, and having insurance for your health insurance because of the high rate of death in your profession. They watch a couple videos and then they magically know in 2 minutes 35 seconds, how you are supposed to handle a violent encounter, which took you 6 months of Academy training, 2 – 3 months of field training, and countless years of blood, sweat, tears and broken bones experiencing violent encounters and fine tuning your execution of the Use of Force Continuum. I realized that there are even cops, COPS, duly sworn law enforcement officers, who are supposed to be decent investigators, who will publicly go on the media and call other white cops racist and KKK, based on a video clip that they watched thousands of miles away, which was filmed after the fact, based on a case where the details aren’t even known yet and the investigation hasn’t even begun. I realized that most in the African American community refuse to look at solving the bigger problem that I see and deal with every day, which is black on black crime taking hundreds of innocent black lives each year, and instead focus on the 9 questionable deaths of black men, where some were in the act of committing crimes. I realized that they value the life of a Sex Offender and Convicted Felon, [who was in the act of committing multiple felonies: felon in possession of a firearm-FELONY, brandishing and threatening a homeless man with a gun-Aggravated Assault in Florida: FELONY, who resisted officers who first tried to taze him, and WAS NOT RESTRAINED, who can be clearly seen in one of the videos raising his right shoulder, then shooting it down towards the right side of his body exactly where the firearm was located and recovered] more than the lives of the innocent cops who were assassinated in Dallas protecting the very people that hated them the most. I realized that they refuse to believe that most cops acknowledge that there are Bad cops who should have never been given a badge & gun, who are chicken shit and will shoot a cockroach if it crawls at them too fast, who never worked in the hood and may be intimidated. That most cops dread the thought of having to shoot someone, and never see the turmoil and mental anguish that a cop goes through after having to kill someone to save his own life. Instead they believe that we are all blood thirsty killers, because the media says so, even though the numbers prove otherwise. I realize that they truly feel as if the death of cops will help people realize the false narrative that Black Lives Matter, when all it will do is take their movement two steps backwards and label them domestic terrorist. I realized that some of these people, who say Black Lives Matter, are full of hate and racism. Hate for cops, because of the false narrative that more black people are targeted and killed. Racism against white people, for a tragedy that began 100’s of years ago, when most of the white people today weren’t even born yet. I realized that some in the African American community’s idea of “Justice” is the prosecution of ANY and EVERY cop or white man that kills or is believed to have killed a black man, no matter what the circumstances are. I realized the African American community refuses to look within to solve its major issues, and instead makes excuses and looks outside for solutions. I realized that a lot of people in the African American community lead with hate, instead of love. Division instead of Unity. Turmoil and rioting, instead of Peace. I realized that they have become the very entity that they claim they are fighting against.

I realized that the very reasons I became a cop, are the very reasons my own people hate me, and now in this toxic hateful racially charged political climate, I am now more likely to die,… and it is still hard for me to understand…. to this day.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/06/04/counter-terror-expert-feds-unaware-of-antifa-black-lives-matter-communist-connections-objectives/

“There are citizens who support Black Lives Matter who are in it because … they want liberty, want to make sure things are done right,” he said.

“But the leadership of Black Lives Matter, the entire reason the organization was formed, it was formed as a Marxist-communist organization,” Guandolo, who was in the FBI for 13 years and founded Understanding the Threat, said.

“The activities that it participates in, you’ve got to look at it through that lens.”

Guandolo noted protests appear “spontaneous,” but they are “immediately violent. People are armed. We now know they’re pre-staging pallets of bricks,” and police officers have been targeted.

He said he believes Antifa and Black Lives Matter are seeking to “overthrow the U.S. government.”

Guandolo, a counter-terrorism expert, said Freedom Road Socialist Organization is behind what’s going on across the country, and the media is playing a role, as well.

“When I sit down with senior government leaders and lay this out for them, I mean, their heads explode. And they realize this is as detailed and as ingrained here in the United States as the Islamic movement, the Jihadi movement,” he said.

Guandolo asserted the feds have not been aware of the connections and no one in the federal government has been putting it together.

He said Black Lives Matter wants “the anarchy. They want the chaos. What they’re doing on the streets today is communist doctrine, because when the chaos happens, then, what you get is a need for law and order and communism is a system that brings order to the community.”

…
According to Guandolo, when he left the FBI for the Department of Defense, he was responsible for briefing generals, attorneys general, members of Congress, and others.

“Not a one of them understood anything about the U.S. communist movement,” he said.

Speaking about the radical organizations, Guandolo said, “Their goal is to control the narrative, to control how our leaders understand what they’re doing.”

“When you tell someone in the government that Black Lives Matter is a Marxist-communist movement as a matter of objective fact, they just don’t know this,” he said.

“And then of course they’re like, ‘Well, why are we meeting with them?’ That’s my question.”

“‘Sir, why are you meeting with them? Why are you giving them legitimacy?’” Guandolo said.

Did you read my previous explanation of why I say “left” instead of “Democrats”? It’s not to be nice. It’s because I was criticized heavily for using a euphemism for “left” when I said “Democrats.” That “Democrats” made them sound less leftist and less extreme. So I use “left” now for “Democrats.”