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Police across the country have arrested more than 11,000 people in connection with the ongoing protests against police brutality, while demonstrating again and again why those protests are absolutely necessary.
- We begin with a few very plausible corrections from the Trump administration and law enforcement: President Trump wasn’t hiding in the White House bunker on Friday, he was simply inspecting it. Defense Secretary Mark Esper actually did know that he was accompanying Trump to a photo-op at St. John’s church on Monday, and was not, as he previously stated, under the impression that he was on his way to check out a vandalized toilet. And finally, the Park Police did not use tear gas on a crowd of peaceful protesters outside the White House, they used (checks notes) a different kind of tear gas. Please update your fact checks accordingly.
- Esper said today that he does not support sending active-duty troops to quell peaceful protests, disclaiming Trump’s recent threats: “The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.” That briefing was not warmly received by the White House. When asked if Trump still had confidence in Esper, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany just said, "as of right now Secretary Esper is still Secretary Esper.” Esper has since reversed his decision to call back the troops he deployed to Washington, DC, in a farcical effort to remain Secretary Esper a little longer.
- Here’s the bad news about this current moment: It’s fuckin’ scary. Current and former CIA officials have noted that they see distinct parallels between Trump’s violent response to mass unrest and “what happens in countries before a collapse.” The Justice Department has granted the DEA wide new latitude to “conduct covert surveillance” and gather intelligence on protesters. Fox News is spouting disinformation from white nationalists about Antifa planning a suburban invasion. This is what the Lincoln Memorial looked like on Tuesday.
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Here’s the good news: The protests are working.
- Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has elevated the charges against Derek Chauvin, the former police officer who killed George Floyd, from third- to second-degree murder. Ellison also charged the three other former officers on the scene, Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng, and Thomas Lane, with aiding and abetting murder.
- Minneapolis (and, you know, the entire rest of the country) still has its work cut out for it. The protests there were sparked by Floyd’s death, but they reflect justified anger over a larger systemic problem. Black people make up about 20 percent of Minneapolis’s population, but when the police use force, the subject of that force is black 60 percent of the time. Police have used force against black people at seven times the rate of white people over the past five years, according to the city’s own data.
There are two extraordinary shifts happening right now. One, unfortunately, is the president lunging towards autocracy. But what prompted it could be a civil rights turning point. Protesters are demanding changes in a system where the police are too politically powerful to face accountability for rampant abuse, and in the process, have filmed countless examples of the abuse in question. The result is a rising clamor for substantial police reforms, which today included Barack Obama calling on mayors around the country to review their policing policies. To be a part of that change, we’ve got a great place to start →
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Have you adopted a swing state yet? (Full disclosure, I am on Team Florida—join me, Pitbull, and DJ Khaled if you haven’t already). It’s a fun and easy way to get involved in the states that will decide this year’s election, even while we’re all stuck at home.
When you adopt, the first thing we’ll ask you to do is sign up for Vote Save America’s first training session on Thursday to learn more about digital organizing with Tommy Vietor and our partners at Organizing Together 2020. There are trainings every Thursday in June—sign up to adopt a state and the Vote Save team will send you all the details → votesaveamerica.com/adopt
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The New York Times has published a thorough investigation of what went wrong at the CDC in the early days of the coronavirus crisis, and the short answer is “a lot.” State and local officials struggled to track Americans returning from China in early February as a result of the CDC’s decades-old notification system, and the CDC eventually told local health officials on a conference call to “just let them go.” The missteps continued from there, exacerbated by ancient technology, inadequate funding, and perhaps most importantly, a president bent on ignoring the problem altogether. The scale of the devastation we now face is in large part the result of time the agency lost early on, and the CDC’s inability to gather and share data, under rudderless leadership, at the necessary speed.
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- President Trump’s former defense secretary, James Mattis, issued a remarkable-if-belated statement condemning Trump’s efforts to divide the American people, describing him as a threat to the Constitution, and aligning himself with the protesters. In the statement, Mattis acknowledged Trump's divisiveness has been a hallmark of his entire three year presidency; Mattis resigned a year and a half ago; Trump's impeachment trial concluded in January.
- Shout it from the rooftops: Our most racist congressman, Rep. Steve King (R-IA), lost his primary. King lost to Randy Feenstra, who ran on his ability to better support President Trump’s agenda, so let’s make sure we get to celebrate him losing, too.
- Philadelphia has at long last removed its statue of racist former Mayor Frank Rizzo, after protesters defaced it and did their best to topple it over the weekend.
- Trump originally tried to register to vote in Florida while claiming an out-of-state address. This must be that mail-in voter fraud we’ve been hearing so much about.
- Republicans will move the RNC convention out of North Carolina, after Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) rejected their plans for a full-blown, non-socially distanced event. Officials are looking at prospective sites in Tennessee, Florida, Nevada, and Georgia. The winner gets bespoke riots and a free COVID-19 outbreak.
- A study at the University of Minnesota found that hydroxychloroquine did not prevent healthy people exposed to the coronavirus from getting sick. “As we say in Tennessee, ‘that dog won’t hunt’—it didn’t work,” said a professor who was not involved in the study, but whom we are glad was quoted.
- Snapchat will no longer promote Trump’s account on its “discover” page: “We simply cannot promote accounts in America that are linked to people who incite racial violence, whether they do so on or off our platform.”
- Meanwhile, we now have leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg telling Facebook employees that Trump’s comment “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” has “no history of being read as a dog whistle." If Zuck's next software update could include a history patch and some critical thinking maintenance, that would be great.
- Please enjoy this flawless reporting on Monday’s photo-op debacle. “After a day in which he berated ‘weak’ governors and lectured them to ‘dominate’ the demonstrators, the president emerged from the White House, followed by a phalanx of aides and Secret Service agents as he made his way to the church, where he posed stern-faced, holding up a Bible that his daughter pulled out of her $1,540 MaxMara bag.”
- The K-pop stan activists are at it again, this time taking over a #WhiteLivesMatter hashtag on Twitter to drown out white supremacist posts. The revolution will not be televised but it will be set to a BTS song.
- Lea Michele has apologized for being “unnecessarily difficult” on the set of Glee after a former co-star accused her of making her life “A LIVING HELL.” Let all who are hungry for Twitter drama come and eat.
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President Trump, always hard at work on behalf of the American people, once had White House adviser Jared Kushner pressure National Enquirer to amplify his defamatory Joe Scarborough conspiracy theory. Trump has a long history of accusing the MSNBC host of murder. In 2017, Trump privately asked aides if he should tweet about “the dead girl” to get back at Scarborough, a one-time friend and booster of his, as their relationship broke down. While he largely resisted the urge, he did try to plant the story in his favorite tabloid, and tasked Kushner as the go-between between himself and Enquirer publisher David Pecker. After weeks of investigation the tabloid refused to run the story because reporters couldn’t find even tabloid-level evidence to back up the charge. To sum up, the president has been spouting a debunked, slanderous story that the National Enquirer considered below its rock-bottom publication standards.
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Ella Jones has been elected the first black mayor of Ferguson, MO, and will be the first woman to hold that office.
Minneapolis Public Schools has severed its contract with the city's police department.
The cast of Brooklyn Nine-Nine donated $100,000 to the National Bail Fund Network.
Protests in major cities have gotten most of the media attention, but this is a great thread of what’s going on in smaller cities and towns around the country.
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