The demands of the Collective Black Voices at Free Capitol Hill
Here are the demands of the radical leftist group that has taken over a neighborhood in Seattle.
The operative word in their document is demand. They demand this and they demand that. To list just a few demands, they demand the abolition of the police and the “attached criminal justice apparatus” (that would be the court system, jail system, prison system). No ICE in Seattle, and the police won’t be getting any pensions, either, when they are prematurely fired.
I’m not going to list all the group’s demands, because the document is long; I’ll just list some of the more interesting. One is that all people of color currently in prison for violent crimes be retried by juries in their own communities. It doesn’t mention whether there will be judges, or lawyers, and who they might be, or whether the rules of evidence will be followed. Pretty easy to guess, though.
Another especially interesting demand is the “de-gentrification of Seattle.”
And then there’s this: “We demand the hospitals and care facilities of Seattle employ black doctors and nurses specifically to help care for black patients.” Note that they haven’t consulted their fellow black citizens, although that omission should come as no surprise.
I’ll skip the rest, but you get the idea.
Some of the responses to the document in the comments are pretty sarcastic. A sampling:
You forgot the demand for separate water fountains for blacks only.
I thought the whole point of being an Autonomous state was to make your own laws / culture? Why are you making demands to a foreign nation (the usa)?
But this is the one that expressed the question I’d like to tackle here: “Or else what?”
How can they demand anything of anyone? What power do they hold over the rest of society? I believe they think their power comes from the following:
(1) They’re used to using accusations of racism to demand things of people who feel guilty and who will acquiesce. We’ve seen a lot of this lately, so I don’t think it’s delusional for them to expect it to work.
(2) They are in Seattle, and they know that a lot of people employed in local government are very sympathetic to them.
(3) Because of (2), they don’t think the police or even the National Guard will be called to clear them out, nor will other sensible approaches such as cutting the electricity be used.
(4) Many of the local residents are sympathetic as well.
(5) What’s more, even if draconian measures were to be used by the Seattle government, it will be documented by the group and word (and photos) will be sent around the world showing them to be the victims of Seattle’s terrible and oppressive leaders.
(6) Likewise, if federal troops are sent in, the same. Plus, in that case, the group can demonize Trump and they know the entire Democratic Party and MSM will leap to their aid.
(7) The minute any violence is used against the group (they have weapons, by the way, which they will claim they only use in self-defense), they’ll spread the word that “the whole world is watching” (Chicago, 1968), and they think the world will be on their side. And perhaps it will, the way things have been going these days.
Right now, government at all levels seems to be waiting. And yet how can this be allowed to go on? Perhaps the idea is to allow the area to descend into chaos, hoping the group will self-destruct. However, I think this sets an absolutely horrendous precedent.
If you want to read the whole story of how the group managed to secure this area in the first place, please see this.
[NOTE: Even though the method and scope were very different, I am reminded of the kidnappers of Patty Hearst, the Symbionese Liberation Army, who made some demands, too, when they first held Hearst hostage in 1974:
According to testimony, the group’s main intention was to leverage the Hearst family’s political influence to free two SLA members who had been arrested for Marcus Foster’s killing. Faced with the failure to free the imprisoned men, the SLA demanded that the captive’s family distribute $70 worth of food to every needy Californian – an operation that would cost an estimated $400 million. In response, Hearst’s father took out a loan and arranged the immediate donation of $2 million worth of food to the poor of the Bay Area, in an operation called “People in Need.” After the distribution descended into chaos, the SLA refused to release Hearst.
You have some of the same elements: a demand for prisoners to be released, another demand couched in social justice language, and resulting chaos.
But the SLA was small, and society as a whole hadn’t yet been sufficiently radicalized to consider them heroes. In the end – although it took a long time to play out – most members of the group lost their lives in a gunfight with the government.]
The Capitol Hill “autonomous zone” (taken over by the Fa) in Seattle had its first incident of police brutality (by the FA police against indigenous resident engaged in peaceful graffiti) nearly immediately.
https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2020/06/10/capitol-hill-autonomous-zone-first-incident-self-appointed-police-violence/
Well, the world is watching. There is little more dangerous than to show weakness to evil. If this is allowed to stand for even a short period, it invites copy cat events on the domestic level; and God knows what from the likes of Iran, or others.
There seems to be so many levels at which the Federal government can, and should, act.
First, if this isn’t insurrection; then the term needs to be redefined. Insurrection is a federal matter.
Second, I have seen reports that people are not allowed to enter–or leave– the zone. Of course you never know what is true; but, if true then they are holding hostages. Hostages make it tough; but, we do have organizations that specialize in that sort of thing. One of he better ones is called Delta Force; another is called Seal Team Six. Even the FBI, back when it was a viable organization, had a Hostage Task Force. (Ask the folks in Waco or Ruby Ridge.)
I think this is a defining moment for Trump. In the privacy of my home, I have accused him of a recent pattern of bluster without follow through in several instances (I am admonished for that.) This time he must follow through if the State does not resolve this quickly. Since the Governor professed ignorance some 24-48 hours after the take over; I am not optimistic that the state will do anything but negotiate surrender. The state’s surrender that is.
Militant conformist nazi KKK oppressors of the people!
Why shouldn’t the governor of Washington own this mess?
Why should the rest of the country have to ride to his rescue on an issue he purports to not even know about?
I remember watching Rachel Maddow years ago when she had a gay rights activist on. They guy literally started yelling, almost at the top of his lungs, about how horrible Barack Obama was on this thing or some other. I wondered how he thought verbally abusing at a high volume the most pro-gay President in U.S. history was going to accomplish anything.
Then I realized that guy, and people like him, spend their entire lives always assuming someone else was going to be reasonable. They could throw the most childish, irrational, counter-productive tantrums and expected other people would always act like adults and do the right thing anyway.
What’s going on in Seattle and in most of this antifa nonsense is simply that same mindset with a dose of testosterone.
Mike
“This time he must follow through if the State does not resolve this quickly.”
It’s not the federal government’s job to handle local law enforcement. There is absolutely no reason city and state authorities cannot handle this. If they choose not to, that’s a matter for their citizens to deal with. It is not up to the President to save fools from their own foolishness.
Mike
Unfortunately, Article IV, Section IV of the Constitution provides that the president can only suppress domestic violence when requested by the Legislature, (unless it cannot be convened) which obviously will not happen as long as the Dems hold the house.
Richard Saunders:
Insurrection Act. Please see this.
I read the demands and they are rather interesting….
They want all black people to suffer no consequences for their actions unless they are judged by a special group of chosen people and that includes all of them who are currently paying a price for past misdeeds.
Freed college education with a special curriculum and special professors with no white culture grading system so perhaps no test nor required attendance but a degree will be earned that will make them able to make a better living since it has been shown that those with college degrees will earn more.
Free health care with selected black docs and nurses and who is going to pay the medical staff and as said above where do they come from.
The stuff goes on and on like a check list made by people smoking crack and doing meth and meantime there is private property in the area they are holding under duress while they run out of food and they are acting like metro asphalt pirates with pre-teen maturity levels of competence.
No way the Federal Government can look good if they get stuck in this ‘tar baby’ (terrible metaphor) so this should all be left up to the local city Seattle and state of Washington, step back and watch the stuff boil over.
The “Black Doctor” who took the place of Alan Bakke at UC Davis all those many years ago, was subsequently convicted of second degree murder for gross negligence. Just a thought.
Wall them off with 82nd and 101st airborne. Cut off all utilities. Nothing and no one goes in or out. Survivors will be treated as domestic terrorists and taken to Gitmo,, and waterboarded until they cough up the names.
I’m torn about this. As far as I can see, the scale of this doesn’t approach Detroit in 1967 or Los Angeles in 1992, so whether or not to intervene with federal forces is a matter of choice.
I happened to arrive at Wayne State University on the day the riots started for a 3 day conference on journalism. What an experience. Being young and dumb I would slip through the lockdown each night to witness the chaos and violence. For the first 5 days and nights gunfire, sirens, and the tred of armored personal carriers and tanks were constant.
On the 7th day we were allowed to take buses back home. Good to be back home in Iowa.
The BLM junior varsity mindset found on campuses in the past few years has entered the wider world. Now it’s BLM Varsity. The quality of their demands are the same but it’s aided with violence and international support. Black Indignation was never a first-class theory alongside Gender and Queer Studies.
What I witnessed remains painful to state. Excessive LEO use of force and militant use of force by blacks in a nutshell. Bad time, shaped my mind to this day.
F*ck them and f*ck Seattle also. The two deserve each other.
Seattle is a truly sanctimonious Leftist place.
I wonder what the Boeing CEO and Bill Gates are thinking tonight.
Boeing owns a hell of a lot of real estate there, some 70 million square feet ( 2.5 square miles, or about 3+% of Seattle), including of course its own airfield, though it moved its corp. office to Chicago (!) some tears, er years, ago. So Boeing must pay a huge property tax unless, of course, a deal was struck with governance.
I also want to add that the “signature” of BLM in that demand, acknowledging the Native Americans who first settled into what is present day Seattle, is the same tone and similar verbiage used by one of my cousins who is a leftist. I noticed his signature when replying to an email of his. It was slightly strange, though given his background I wasn’t too surprised.
He’s a doctoral candidate in information technology (or something of that sort) working to help Native Americans access the internet. His signature even listed his pronouns. It seemed like he was fully on board the “woke” train – not missing a step with the demographic he was working with (I’m not sure if they even cared).
A few weeks later I found myself talking to him on my mobile where the discussion veered into politics. He proclaimed the town where he was living as he completed his doctorate was racist. I asked for some examples. He stumbled and didn’t name any. I briefly mentioned political spectrums – he didn’t like conservatives so I moved on asking what he thought about libertarians. Surely they were more of the “middle ground” types, wanting to leave people alone (a rough generalization of course), so I assumed he was more friendly towards them than the supposed doctrinal right, but no. His tone was clearly irked when I mentioned libertarians. He didn’t like their stances or their policies.
>de-gentrification of Seattle.
I bet those who patronize coffee shops and little boutique stores brought to the neighborhoods by hipsters and occupied by yuppies will be rather disappointed. There is immense irony to this given the politics of hipsters and yuppies.
>employ black doctors and nurses specifically to help care for black patients
This is a common mentality I have found carried by those who believe in the oppression and malignant of blacks (or, the woke way to African-Americans, Blacks) who are in some way interest in mentorship. Same color to address same color. I, a non-black, was a mentor to a young black teenager some years ago. The mentoring program I was volunteering with was invited to participate in a conference focusing on urban blacks and their achievement. Straight forward enough. During one of the discussions in break-out groups one participant turned to me and the teenager I was mentoring. He said that though I might be a good mentor to the young man that he’d benefit more if his mentor “looked like him” aka was black. At the time I didn’t think much of it. Today I still don’t think much of it besides “black fragility.” The participant, I believe, was a PoC who was earning a masters in either psychology (non-clinical) or criminal justice. Of course.
Two quite disparate thoughts on the ongoing situation. First I see the larger game as consistent with the idea that Blue State administrations – state and local- are not putting an end to the civil unrest to try to force Trump into acting the Tyrant – which they naively believe him to be. Destroy Trump by not ending the lockdown. Destroy Trump by not ending the riots. Victor Davis Hanson said at the end of a recent interview that he knew that Trump was being advised to not overreact on Twitter. Indeed. (Aside – this morning I opened my Kindle here in Australia – in Australia for God’s sake – and found a WaPo article on Trump being pushed at me. I just laughed.)
Second, like Jordan Peterson, I see a lot of human behaviour as arising from deep biological roots. Just as he famously points out that lobsters sort themselves into hierarchies through physical confrontation to establish dominance, I am reminded by these antifa types of a book I read many years ago entitled “The Red Lamp of Incest”. (Howzat for a catchy title?) In it the claim is made that in some primate species and by extension in ours that if the dominant males succeed in completely monopolizing sexual access to the females, the young males rebel and destroy the social order. I think something like this kind of biological process underlies Toynbee’s historical observation that civilisations fall when the dominant elite becomes tyrannical and loses the support of the internal proletariat, who cease to defend the dominant elite against the external proletariat. In 2016 many pointed out the surface commonality of the dissatisfaction of both the Bernie and Trump supporters, but now the phenomenon has metastasized causing me to look for deeper biological and historical roots. To me the old American working class saw they were living in a tyranny where the elites had monopolised all the goodies (in part through a faux degree based meritocracy) , and voted Trump in. Now the disenfranchised youth – among other things lured into $200K debt with no goodies – are unleashing chaos. Of course the two groups are different – the former rebellion was accomplished by democratic means, the latter is Jacobin (to put it politely) to its core. Still the dominant elite thinks they can retake power and buy off or suppress both groups. Good luck suckers.
“Destroy Trump by not ending the lockdown. Destroy Trump by not ending the riots.”
I, too, thought that this was a two-pronged case of “damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t”, which is of course true and extremely “useful” for all those kids and adolescents out there (from eight to eighty).
But there’s actually a third option, as well, which I think is the one that is being used here and that will be used increasingly and with devastating effect (but for whom!?)
And that is, the old “war of attrition” trick. In this case, it’s “All Trump All the Time”. IOW Trump doesn’t have to do anything. Not a single thing. Because in any event, it’s his fault, period. Covid, “racism”, mayhem, chaos, looting. Economy. China. It’s TRUMP.
And it will always be TRUMP.
Senior citizens die en masse in NY because Cuomo sends Covid patients to senior citizens homes? No problem: TRUMP!
de Blasio delays and dawdles as Covid closes in; and then with his natural flair loses control of his city? No problem: TRUMP!
Inslee isn’t aware (supposedly) of what’s going down in central Seattle? “What’s that? What’s happening? Are you sure?”: TRUMP!
The mayor of Chicago has a wee problem of black-on-black violence that’s metastasizing (and has been for years and years)? No problem: TRUMP—with an added elegant expletive for effect! (Actually, she seems pretty capable as far as expletives go—if that gem of a “dialogue” with the Hispanic Chicago alderman who pleaded with her to help protect the city, more specifically his district, from destruction is any indication—so she’s not totally feckess.)
The mayor of Minneapolis and the Gov. of Minnesota are clueless as Minn-St. Paul go up in smoke? Hey, but that’s TRUMP’s fault. After all,, he’s the one responsible for the zeitgeist.
Etc.
Such is the earnestness of the political (and ethical!!) elites….
And with the media blasting this home all the time, well, TRUMP doesn’t have a chance come November.
(Or does he?….)
@Barry Meislin I completely agree – they have achieved peak anti Trump – even through my Kindle this morning 13,000 miles from The Swamp. I see Trump, as a fellow New Yorker, as a superb counter puncher but he will have to do it well to prevail. He is a flawed one eyed king fighting a blind mob. His great advantage is that they are completely blind. His greatest weakness is that he tends to overreact. Chaos is by its nature unpredictable and can turn into its opposite in a moment. It will take fine judgement to pick the right moment to restore order. And luck. Or perhaps Grace.
So I was told people think fascism will land in America, buti t always ends up landing in Europe, right.
Right, antifa?
Seattle? Milwaukkk?
I have been constantly haranguing people here about Trump. I doubt they paid much attention to that. The Deep State is a lot stronger than people thought. Voting a guy like Trump into DC to “clean the swamp” or drain the swamp, isn’t going to do much by itself. Help him instead of argue about the usual bullsh stuff here? Naw, people got better things to do than that.
How about we provide you a motivation to do so in 2020?
Welcome to Ymar’s world.
After 4 years Yammer finds his p.
Neo — Insurrection Act, sure, but if Trump invoked it, there would immediately be a petition(s) for injunctions filed against using the Act on the grounds that it is unconstitutional. ((I’m sure the complaints are already prepared.) And you can be sure that some lefty federal judge in Seattle or elsewhere would grant them! Bank on it.
Richard Saunders:
I’m not suggesting he should use it. I’m saying it’s constitutional and he could.
NO USE the INSURECTION ACT..
its not needed… this force is not organized nor strong enough nor smart enough
Take this from a young man who had spent time in communes..
it can be ended easily by refusing to let goods enter or leave..
embargo of sorts..
food eventually will be scarce…
the people will eventually get hungry and want to leave
not only will it end it peacefully…
it will sort the people out from the fun idiots and the serious nasties
the blue meanies will hold out as long as they can
the weak will leave once its no more fun and it gets serious
nothing else required than patience…
the press is lucky that they didn’t start with them..
but this ultimately will not end in their favor as people want decent lives without terror, and they are not willing to starve like is starting in Venezuela who cant process the oil they have and so, cant grow crops any more.. (while blaming the US sanctions – though you have to be a special kind of stupid to blame an external force for an internal problem)
food will not last long..
and with it goes their will…
I have French-Shawnee blood on my maternal side. My great maternal grandfather looks like an Indian. That doesn’t mean I lay claim to aboriginal statusbased upon blood. However, I am a native American simply because I and my ancestors were born here dating back to the 1740s. I Am A Native American.
Black Lives Matter is a money laundering scheme for the Democrats.
I’m sure you are all surprised to hear that.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/06/11/exploited-again-financial-contributions-to-black-lives-matter-are-being-funneled-to-biden-campaign/
The transit is through ActBlue, a donations portal for the DNC.
Via the commenters, I picked up a couple of items of interest.
Candace Owens has a long line of tweets about BLM’s funnel into the DNC coffers, and some earlier comments about George Floyd and white supremacy, plus some videos of black people pushing back against the leftist narrative.
What a fighter!
https://twitter.com/RealCandaceO
I can’t vouch for this Sowell tweet (there was no blue check), but the observation is valid even if apocryphal.
https://twitter.com/ThomasSowell/status/1271048691839877121
And it never hurts to hear from Orwell.
https://i.postimg.cc/GhswcB3C/DCDAA30-D-8666-4571-B284-E4-EEE630421-D.jpg
GRA
During one of the discussions in break-out groups one participant turned to me and the teenager I was mentoring. He said that though I might be a good mentor to the young man that he’d benefit more if his mentor “looked like him” aka was black. At the time I didn’t think much of it. Today I still don’t think much of it besides “black fragility.” The participant, I believe, was a PoC who was earning a masters in either psychology (non-clinical) or criminal justice. Of course.
The local paper had an article about the claim that black teachers were better for black students. One of the people the paper interviewed was the principal at a school where I had substituted and later taught for a year. The principal replied that the color of the vessel was not important. What was important was the content of the vessel. The school was 2% white; the principal was black.
I’m surprised the list of demands didn’t include this.
https://babylonbee.com/news/911-operator-asks-caller-being-assaulted-if-hes-checked-his-white-privilege
Not all black people are buying in.
https://www.weltwoche.ch/amp/2020-24/weltwoche-international/death-of-george-floyd-die-weltwoche-ausgabe-24-2020.html