And Then the Dogs Came: Dakota Access Gets Violent.

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https://nodaplsolidarity.org/

We still need help, we need voices, we need people, we need all those willing to boost the signal in every way possible.

Red Warrior put out an all-call for “ALL water warriors around the world to come stand with us, inviting supporters to join us in prayer” during two Weeks of Global Solidarity Actions between September 3 and 17.

Why? Because this is what is happening in response to peaceful protesting:

Opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline, or "water protectors," were attacked with dogs, pepper spray on Saturday near the site of the pipeline route.

Opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline, or “water protectors,” were attacked with dogs, pepper spray on Saturday near the site of the pipeline route.

 

Video streamed live over Facebook showed Dakota Access LLC–employed security guards handling lunging dogs.

Video streamed live over Facebook showed Dakota Access LLC–employed security guards handling lunging dogs.

Courtesy Red Warrior Camp Water protectors reported a violent encounter between Dakota Access LLC security guards, who allegedly used attack dogs and pepper spray against them.

Courtesy Red Warrior Camp
Water protectors reported a violent encounter between Dakota Access LLC security guards, who allegedly used attack dogs and pepper spray against them.

 

Dakota Access pipeline security personnel used dogs to try and stop the water protectors in an action that was streamed live on Facebook. (Photo: Courtesy Red Warrior Camp).

Dakota Access pipeline security personnel used dogs to try and stop the water protectors in an action that was streamed live on Facebook. (Photo: Courtesy Red Warrior Camp).

In a statement released in a live-stream on Facebook, Red Warrior Camp leaders said that at about 3pm on Saturday September 3, “water protectors successfully stopped pipeline construction as it reached Hwy. 1806 through nonviolent direct action and mass assembly.”

As they did so, private security guards working for Dakota Access LLC “deployed vicious attack dogs, pepper spray and physical assault against the water protectors,” Red Warrior said. “According to the most recent update, six water protectors were bitten by dogs, a dozen or more pepper sprayed, while others were physically assaulted, including women. A helicopter was photographed flying over the area.

Full story here. Support Sacred Stone Camp. Legal Fund Help. Support Native Youth.  Sign the Petition. Sign urgent petition.

Sarah Sunshine Manning has an updated story about what is happening at the camps.

Harold Frazier, Cheyenne River Sioux Chair demands answers:

According to many witnesses at the scene, neither state nor county law enforcement officials were at the construction site during the incident. It is extremely suspicious to me that law enforcement became scarce at the exact time when DAPL’s hired guns were planning to attack the water defenders. A press release recently issued by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department insinuates that the peaceful protesters were the provokers of the incident because several individuals allegedly cut a fence and entered the work site. State and local law enforcement officials keep telling the media, without proof, that the protesters are committing unlawful acts. In my opinion unleashing vicious attack dogs on women and children, and spraying dozens of unarmed people simply because they are exercising their constitutional right to assemble, is unlawful.

I am calling on all members of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe to avoid traveling to or doing business in the Mandan-Bismarck area until this crisis is resolved. I fear for my people’s safety. Today’s act of terrorism shows us how desperate DAPL and the State of North Dakota government are to keep things at a status quo. I am concerned about the escalating violence against Natives in that area.

When will Governor Dalrymple step up and meet with Tribal leadership in an open, good faith effort to resolve this conflict? The key to settling this situation is in the hands of North Dakota leadership. I requested a meeting with Governor Dalrymple last week, but as of today has received no response.

Matika Wilbur caught much of this on video (complete story here):

Sunday Camp Story.

Photo: Sara Lafleur-Vetter.

Photo: Sara Lafleur-Vetter.

Mark Sundeen at Outside Online has a long, in-depth, excellent story about the camps and the Standing Rock protest. I’m only going to include a small amount here, you should really click over and read, it’s great!

…I parked alongside a towering teepee on the riverbank, slept in the car, and in the morning met my neighbors, a delegation of Pawnee elders who had driven 18 hours from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. The degree to which I didn’t know what I was getting myself into was made clear when Chief Morgan LittleSun, 58, a warm and affable welder and teepee builder, told me that his biggest concern coming up here wasn’t cops—it was the Sioux tribes.

“Pawnee and Sioux hated each other forever,” he said. Even though the tribes had signed a peace treaty, LittleSun had seen hostility at powwows, and even fights.

I asked when the Pawnee and Sioux tribes had made this uneasy peace.

“150 years ago.”

As far as LittleSun knew, this was the first time since then that Pawnee chiefs had traveled this far into Sioux territory. While dates of Indian wars and treaties are history-test minutiae that most white people (like me) tend to forget, LittleSun was one of many Native Americans I met for whom the past was not really dead, as the saying goes, not even past. They rattled off these 19th-century events like they happened yesterday, and this gathering at Standing Rock was occasion for a new round of history making. The site was called Seven Councils Camp, indicating the first time all bands of Lakota had gathered in one place in more than a century. That afternoon, the Crow Nation marched into camp in war bonnets, waving flags, singing and whooping, bearing a peace pipe and a load of buffalo meat, offering the first real reconciliation since 1876, when Crows were scouts for Custer at Little Bighorn, where the U.S Cavalry got its ever-loving ass kicked by the Lakota. At last count, representatives from more than 120 tribal nations had arrived from as far as Hawaii, Maine, California, and Mississippi.

But when I asked LittleSun, whose tribe historically had a proud tradition of stealing horses, if he’d felt uneasy here, he shook his head emphatically, and a smile spread over his face. “This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. All day long, strangers walked into his camp and offered food and firewood and asked which tribe he belonged to, and when he told them, they didn’t flinch but embraced him as a brother, an uncle, an elder. “But when I raised the Pawnee flag on a pole,” LittleSun added with a laugh, “everyone moved their horses to the other side of camp!”

This is something most people don’t understand. For many Indigenous peoples, history is not old, dusty past, something to be discarded, forgotten with maybe a trip or two back for reference. History is living, it’s a thread of continuity, of stories, of life, of connectedness. Time is all one flow, and if you drop a big ol’ dam down, you lose so much, you cut yourself off, isolating yourself. And yes, of course, in these current times, there’s a need to chop time up into tiny compartments now and then, but if you’re not careful, you do that with all time, and it’s a painful loss, even if you aren’t terribly aware of that right now.

[Read more…]

Invisible 1 & 2.

In1Not too long ago, Jim C. Hines edited personal essays on representation in SF/F, and it was excellent and eye-opening. It was certainly uncomfortable at times, but that discomfort is just panicked relics of oblivious privilege trying to assert itself. I had more than a few stabs of serious guilt in reading this anthology, particularly the one about Albinism. (Having enjoyed that “evil Albino trope” more than a few times in the past, without ever thinking about actual people.) The essays in the first Invisible are:

Introduction by Alex Dally MacFarlane.

Parched, by Mark Oshiro.

Boys’s Books by Katharine Kerr.

Clicking by Susan Jane Bigelow.

The Princess Problem by Charlotte Ashley.

Autism, Representation, Success by Ada Hoffmann.

Gender in Genre by Kathryn Ryan.

‘Crazy’ About Fiction by Gabriel Cuellar.

Evil Albino Trope is Evil by Nalini Haynes.

Options by Joie Young.

Non-binary and Not Represented by Morgan Dambergs.

Representation Without Understanding by Derek Handley.

Shards of Memory by Ithiliana.

I Don’t See Color by Michi Trota.

SFF Saved My Life by Nonny Blackthorne.

In2If you missed Invisible the first time around, I could not possibly recommend it enough. While happily slumbering away under my rock, I was unaware that Invisible 2 had been put together and published. That’s been remedied, and like the 1st, this is excellent reading. As Jim C. Hines notes in the afterword, “They help us to become better readers, better writers, and better human beings.”

So many of these essays resonated, and others were serious wake up calls to stop being so bloody blinkered. Like the first anthology, this one is littered with highlights, bookmarks, and notes. Too Niche, by Lauren Jankowski about the complete invisibility of asexual people in SF/F was one of those that was a good smack on the head. In her essay, she mentions that Stephen Moffat declared Sherlock Holmes can’t be asexual because he’s too interesting. That left me spluttering and outraged. That’s an incredibly wrong, stupid, thoughtless, and insulting thing to say. Other essays which really hit home were Breaking Mirrors, Fat Chicks in SFF, Not Your Mystical Indian, Exponentially Hoping, and Colonialism, Land, and Speculative Fiction: An Indigenous Perspective. 

The Essays in Invisible 2 are:

Introduction by Aliette de Bodard.

Breaking Mirrors by Diana M. Pho

I’m Not Broken by Annalee Flower Horne.

Next Year in Jerusalem by Gabrielle Harbowy.

I am Not Hispanic, I am Puerto Rican, by Isabel Schechter.

No More Dried Up Spinsters by Nancy Jane Moore.

False Expectations by Matthew Thyer.

Text, Subtext, and Pieced-Together Lives by Angelia Sparrow.

Parenting as a Fan of Color by Kat Tanaka Okopnik.

Alien of Extraordinary Ability? by Bogi Takács.

Accidental Representation by Chrysoula Tzavelas.

Discovering the Other by John Hartness.

Lost in the Margins by Sarah Chorn.

Too Niche by Lauen Jankowski.

Fat Chicks in SFF by Alis Franklin.

Not Your Mystical Indian by Jessica McDonald.

Exponentially Hoping by Merc Rustad.

Colonialism, Land, and Speculative Fiction: An Indigenous Perspective by Ambelin Kwaymullina.

Nobody’s Sidekick: Intersectionality in Protagonists by SL Huang.

The Danger of the False Narrative by LaShawn Wanak.

Both these anthologies are excellent, if often uncomfortable, reading. Seriously recommended if you haven’t read them.

Tribal Photography.

© Jimmy Nelson.

© Jimmy Nelson.

How often do you learn a valuable lesson from pissing yourself drunk, besides, “never drink that much again?” While traveling with a Central Mongolian tribe, photographer Jimmy Nelson learned lessons both in reindeer psychology and humor after downing too much vodka and wetting his tent. As the story goes, he woke up to reindeer charging into his bed (apparently they love human urine). Nelson tells this and more stories, accompanied by his majestic portraits of the customs and trappings of indigenous peoples from accross the world, in a new video from the Cooperative of Photography. Like Aesop’s fables, Nelson’s anecdotes have lessons touching on knowledge, vulnerability, and pride. Young photographers can also learn a lot about how to interact with subjects respectfully and purposefully.

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© Jimmy Nelson.

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© Jimmy Nelson.

 

Jimmy Nelson currently has a show at Gallery KNOKKE through September 18. See more of his work on his website. Visit the Cooperative of Photography for more tips, tricks, and interviews with photographers.

Via The Creators Project, where there are more photos.

Ancestors and Descendants.

Robert Geronimo, a descendant of Geronimo, works at the Inn of the Mountain Gods, the tribe’s resort and casino in Mescalero, New Mexico. He became aware of his famous ancestor when he was in kindergarten. Photo by Kerri Cottle.

Robert Geronimo, a descendant of Geronimo, works at the Inn of the Mountain Gods, the tribe’s resort and casino in Mescalero, New Mexico. He became aware of his famous ancestor when he was in kindergarten. Photo by Kerri Cottle.

Meet the family of Geronimo:

Their Apache ancestors were chased, hunted and herded into history. Shaped by decades of war, Geronimo, Cochise, Victorio, Lozen and Mangas Coloradas (and those they ran with) cultivated a genius for survival so their descendants could live on.

But live on, how? By letting the ancestral legacy of greatness and distinction define them, or by wearing the identity lightly? For the living descendants of the Geronimo family of Mescalero, New Mexico, the answer is both.

The first time Robert Geronimo became aware of his famous ancestor was in kindergarten.

“A kid comes up to me and says ‘I want to beat up a Geronimo.’ I said ‘I haven’t done anything to you, you haven’t done anything to me.’ The kid threw a punch and I returned it,” he explained, “and we both ended up in the principal’s office.”

From then on his grandparents taught him to read between the lines of accounts of his great-grandfather as a blood-thirsty killing machine, or even as a “chief” leading his people.

You can read more about the Geronimo family here.

Hazel Spottedbird, seen here with her husband Tommy, is a descendant of Cochise. (Photo by Kerri Cottle).

Hazel Spottedbird, seen here with her husband Tommy, is a descendant of Cochise. (Photo by Kerri Cottle).

Meet the descendants of Cochise:

Their Apache ancestors were chased, hunted and herded into history. Shaped by decades of war, Geronimo, Cochise, Victorio, Lozen and Mangas Coloradas (and those they ran with) cultivated a genius for survival so their descendants could live on.

Cochise (c. 1805 – June 8, 1874) was a reluctant Apache warrior, but a persistent one who survived the Battle of Apache Pass to fight on another decade. His descendants, who live on reservation lands granted after the Indian Wars in Mescalero, New Mexico, are inheritors of that doggedness. By vocation and avocation they continue their ancestor’s fight for Apache survival.

[…]

Hazel Spottedbird’s grandfather Christian Naiche Jr., grandson to Cochise, was born a prisoner of war and lived the first 13 years of his life in the Apache prison camps of the Southeast.

“Grandpa didn’t say a whole lot to us about his early life as a child prisoner, because we were still young ourselves,” Hazel explained. But he was among those Apache elders who provided oral histories to Eve Ball, whose papers are archived in the C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department at the University of Texas in El Paso.

“I am a very proud Chiricahua Apache because of those names Naiche and Cochise,” she declared. “My grandpa lived without fear, my mother also; she would not be told what to do, she had her own mind. I feel like I’m like that now, out of my three sisters I’m the one who’s out there: I dance, participate, I’m not afraid.”

You can read more about the family of Cochise here.

A lot of people make jokes about famous, well known Indians. Pretty much everyone has heard Geronimo’s name used as an adjective and an exclamation. What people don’t realize, or think about, is that these family lines are alive and well, and their ancestors are much loved, in the same way of people everywhere, who love grandparents and great grandparents. So, the next time you might think about joking in that manner, or hear someone else doing it, give a gentle reminder to yourself or another, that these were people, and they still have family who don’t think they are jokes. Why hurt people when you don’t need to, yeah?

Dakota Access: Stand Up!

(Photo: Melinda Lee)

(Photo: Melinda Lee)

Where Movements Meet: Black Lives Matter Organizers Visit #NoDAPL.

 

UN body says Sioux must have say in pipeline project.

 
Support Sacred Stone Camp. Legal Fund Help. Support Native Youth.  Sign the Petition. Sign urgent petition.

Washington State Natives: No DAPL.

Indian Nations from the Pacific Northwest came to support the Standing Rock Sioux. Courtesy Gyasi Ross.

Indian Nations from the Pacific Northwest came to support the Standing Rock Sioux. Courtesy Gyasi Ross.

Standing Rock Sioux Chairman David Archambault II welcomed a delegation of eight Indian nations from Washington State on Tuesday August 30 who joined the growing opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline that threatens the tribe’s water supply and sacred places on Oceti Sakowin Treaty lands.

The Yakama Nation, Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Lummi Nation, Puyallup Tribe, Nisqually Indian Tribe, Suquamish Tribe, Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and Hoh Tribe traveled with a large delegation from the Pacific Northwest with a sacred totem pole to demonstrate spiritual support. After a blessing at the Standing Rock camp near the river, the totem pole will be permanently raised at the Turtle Lodge on the Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba next week.

“Yakama is humbled and honored to stand beside our brothers and sisters of the Standing Rock Sioux. We’re observing a peaceful and prayerful gathering to move an entire country. We stand united in solidarity with the natural laws of this land, advocating for responsible decision making and honorable communications,” said Yakama Chairman JoDe Goudy.

“Together, we express to the U.S. government that now, more than ever, is the time to fulfill the trust obligations laid out within the treaties and historical interactions with the Native peoples of this land. Until such things come to pass, the spirit and voice of all peoples shall unite with Standing Rock. One voice, one heart, and one spirit to speak for those things that cannot speak for themselves.”

[…]

Swinomish Chairman Brian Cladoosby, who also serves as NCAI president, said, “We are a placed-based society. We live where our ancestors are buried. Our culture, laws, and values are tied to all that surrounds us, the place where our children’s future will be for years to come. We cannot ruin where our ancestors are buried and where our children will call home, uproot ourselves and move to another place. We cannot keep taking for granted the clean water, the salmon and buffalo, the roots and berries, and all that makes up the places that our First People have inhabited since time immemorial. Our futures are bound together.”

More than 150 tribes so far have sent resolutions and letters of support to show solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux and the Seven Council Fires of the Lakota’s efforts to stop the pipeline.

“Words can’t express how thankful we are for all of the prayers, support, letters and donations we have received,” said Archambault. “It inspires us every day on our mission to protect this area for future generations and all who use it.

[…]

“I am here to stand with the Standing Rock people because my people are facing the same threats to bear the risk of development for the Puyallup Tribe,” said Councilman David Bean. “It’s an LNG terminal that will be built in the middle of our reservation and threaten our treaty protected resources.”

[…]

“Everyone has heard that this pipeline would be more than 1,100 miles long and would transport more than half a million barrels of crude oil every day across our lands,” said Cedric Good House, a traditional leader for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

“What they don’t know are the irreplaceable sacred places across the landscape and the deep cultural and spiritual knowledge that is tied to them,” he said. “These are the places and the knowledge that make us who we are today as a tribe. I plan on telling my grandchildren about the time when tribes across the country stood up and fought for treaty, culture, and the future. And we fought for the future of safe drinking water for all Americans. No longer is the world watching us, the world is with us.”

Water protectors at Standing Rock. (Photo: Courtesy Steven Sitting Bear/Standing Rock Sioux Tribe).

Water protectors at Standing Rock. (Photo: Courtesy Steven Sitting Bear/Standing Rock Sioux Tribe).

Support Sacred Stone Camp. Legal Fund Help. Support Native Youth.  Sign the Petition. Sign urgent petition.

Dave Archambault Sr. has an excellent column up at ICTMN: Anti-DAPL: Are You a TRAITOR or PATRIOT? – Also, Navajo Nation Lends Support to Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Against Dakota Access.

Via ICTMN.

Trump’s America: Bully Nation.

Student activist protests hateful environment in schools (Screen capture).

Student activist protests hateful environment in schools (Screen capture).

An ad from progressive group Move On shows how around the country, nonwhite and Muslim students are getting bullied by racist whites who’ve been emboldened by the unvarnished racism of the Donald Trump campaign.

Titled “Our Kids,” the video shows excerpts from news stories in which black, Muslim and Latino schoolchildren across the U.S. have been threatened and harassed by their white peers.

In Oregon, vandals hung a banner aimed at Latino students that said “Build a wall” — a reference to Trump’s promise to build a wall along the Mexican border to keep Latino immigrants out of the country.

At a high school basketball game in Chicago, white students chanted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” at black and Latino players and their supporters.

As the 75-second video moves from incident to incident, an ugly picture emerges of what’s motivating Trump voters, no matter what the candidate and his TV surrogates say about “economic anxiety” and “outsider politics.”

“Donald Trump is endangering our kids,” the ad says, before cutting to footage of students describing their experiences.

This country is caught in a whirlpool of shit. This hatred has to stop. Please, share this, get this out everywhere, it’s an important message for all.

Via Raw Story.

Council for National Policy.

Stephen Bannon.

Stephen Bannon.

If you’re like me, you went “who?” Yet another nasty group of people, who revel in extremism, and one I had not heard of before. As it turns out, two Trump henchpersons have not only heard of it, they are part of it. How surprising, right?

According to an SPLC statement, Breitbart.com CEO Stephen Bannon and pollster Kellyanne Conway — hired as Trump 2016’s CEO and campaign manager, respectively — are members of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a highly secretive group that includes a roster of controversial white supremacists and rightwing agitators.

“The CNP is not controversial so much for the conservatives who dominate it — activists of the religious right and the so-called ‘culture wars,’ along with a smattering of wealthy financiers, Congressional operatives, right-wing consultants and Tea Party operatives — as for the many real extremists who are included,” wrote SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok.

The SPLC was able to obtain the CNP’s closely-guarded 2014 membership directory and found that it included “people like Michael Peroutka, a neo-Confederate who for years was on the board of the white supremacist League of the South; Jerome Corsi, a strident Obama ‘birther’ and the propagandist hit man responsible for the ‘Swift boating’ of John Kerry; Joseph Farah, who runs the wildly conspiracist “news” operation known as WorldNetDaily; Mat Staver, the Liberty Counsel leader who has worked to re-criminalize gay sex; Philip Zodhaites, another anti-gay activist who is charged with helping a self-described former lesbian who kidnapped her daughter from her former partner and fled the country; and a large number of other similar characters.”

Conway and Bannon’s names both appear on the CNP’s 2014 membership roster. The SPLC was unable to determine their current membership status.

The Center noted that the CNP has every right to keep its membership secret, but the membership roster opens a window on how purportedly moderate Republicans meet and network with right-wing extremists in formulating their policy agenda and crafting legislation.

The CNP roster of members includes “real extremists, people who regularly defame LGBT people with utter falsehoods, describe Latino immigrants as a dangerous group of rapists and disease-carriers, engage in the kind of wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing for which the John Birch Society is famous, and even suggest that certain people should be stoned to death in line with Old Testament law,” the SPLC said.

Well. That’s terrifying. These are the people the so-called not completely batshit repubs are networking with, and we are now living in interesting times, with the rise of white nationalism and open bigotry. I think I could have lived without this particular knowledge, but it’s best to as knowledgeable as possible these days.

Via Raw Story.

The Last Word: Chairman David Archambault II.

The protests at Standing Rock. Ruth Hopkins has a good column about watching the feds, and why they are so distrusted. If you hadn’t read it before, catch it now. Revos.2040 breaks the news that the Army Corp of Engineers do not have a written easement for Dakota Access. Mike Myers has a wonderful column up on the Ties That Bind, about the Haudenosaunee Confederation’s longstanding treaty with the Sioux Nations.

Josue Rivas is doing incredible work, documenting the protectors and life at the camp.

A young warrior at the opposition to Dakota Access Pipeline.

A young warrior at the opposition to Dakota Access Pipeline.

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School has started for the children at the camps. The 2016 Tribal Summit will take place as planned, and there will be discussion about the pipeline. Pow Wow is on, and Sacred Stone Camp will have information and education booths up.  We stand, not only for ourselves, but for all people. Please, don’t lapse back into resignation, don’t let weariness win. We have been fighting for hundreds of years. The camps in this one resistance have been standing for 5 months now, since April, and we are not going to stop now, so please, don’t you stop either. We must endure, and every voice, every signal boost, every supply, every donation, every person who comes to the camps, you hold us up, you brace the foundation of our obligation to and protection of our earth, our water. We still need help. Holler, shout, spread the word, signal boost, please! Join us, stand with us. Come to camps. If you can’t, please signal boost, send or drop off supplies, or donate. Sign the petitions, whatever you are able to do!

Support Sacred Stone Camp. Legal Fund Help. Support Native Youth.  Sign the Petition. Sign urgent petition.

About this ^ last, because I’m sure someone somewhere will be offended. If you look at Etsy, or any other site where people sell stuff, you will always find a fucktonne of people happily appropriating all things Indigenous. Non-Indigenous people run around wearing Plains headdresses with abandon, people dress up as “Pocahotties” and all kinds of other thoughtless, bigoted isht. If you’re one of those people, this last applies. If you know one of those people, this last applies. If you’re busy making money and taking advantage of appropriating Indigenous culture, the very least you could do is to support those you rip off.

I Saved More Black Lives Than Beyoncé! I Did!

Pop star Beyoncé Knowles at the Mtv Music Awards on Sunday Aug. 28, 2016 (Screen capture).

Pop star Beyoncé Knowles at the Mtv Music Awards on Sunday Aug. 28, 2016 (Screen capture).

Giuliani. Again. Someone needs to get this man distracted into doing something else. Please.

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani reacted angrily to pop star Beyoncé Knowles’ performance at Sunday night’s Mtv Video Music Awards, declaring that his anticrime policies have “saved more black lives” than any black performer.

Politico reported that the Republican mayor and longtime Donald Trump confidant appeared on Monday’s Fox and Friends to decry Knowles’ message and declare that he’s “saved more black lives” than any of the performers featured in the ceremony.

Knowles’ performance featured the group #MothersOfTheMovement — a group of women of color whose children have been killed by police — and stylized depictions of police violence.

“Her dancers were circling around her and one by one, they fell to the ground, and there were red lights underneath them. And that was supposed to symbolize cops killing black individuals,” said Fox and Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt.

“You’re asking the wrong person,” Giuliani replied, “because I had five uncles who were police officers, two cousins who were, one who died in the line of duty. I ran the largest and best police department in the world, the New York City Police Department. And I saved more black lives than any of those people you saw on stage by reducing crime and particularly homicide by 75 percent.”

Y’know, rattling off how many cop relatives you have is irrelevant. I have a cop relative myself, and boy, did I ever hear stories. They weren’t good stories, either. Cops are people, with all their inherent flaws and biases. There are a whole lot of cops who are busy murdering Native People, Black People, and Hispanic people, along with assorted brown people, the key being brown. This cannot be denied, nor can it be denied that cops have been sanctioned to murder people of colour, as they sure as hell aren’t being punished for it in any way.

“Of which, of which maybe 4,000 or 5,000 were African-American young people who are alive today because of the policies I put in effect that weren’t in effect for 35 years. So if you’re going to do that, then you should symbolize why the police officers are in the neighborhoods and what are you going to go about it? To me it’s two easy answers: a much better education and good job, and what the heck have you done like in Baltimore, when they all stood in Baltimore,” Giuliani ranted.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but if I see cops in my neighbourhood, I run away. I don’t want anything to do with them. And please, don’t be pushing the “well, who are going to call if you’re in trouble?” My answer is I don’t know, but my first thought might not be cops.

He went on to attack politicians who stood in solidarity with demonstrators in Baltimore last year who were protesting the killing of Freddie Gray by Baltimore cops.

“I was sick when I saw all the politicians sitting, standing in Baltimore after the police situation and saying, nobody’s done anything for this community in 50 years,” he went on. “Well, that is a heck of a thing to say, because they’ve been in charge for 50 years. And they have failed the community. I didn’t fail Harlem. I turned Harlem around. I didn’t fail Bedford-Stuyvesant, I turned it around. Go there now. Go walk in Harlem. Then flash back to 25 years ago and go to Harlem before I was mayor, and one was a place where crime was rampant and no national stores and now there’s a thriving community in Harlem.”

I don’t live in NYC, but I hear things now and then, like about people being forced out of certain areas by hostile gentrification. They aren’t dancing in the streets, singing high hallelujahs to Giuliani.

Fox and Friends’ Brian Kilmeade opined that Knowles is sending the wrong message to the next generation of black youth, saying, “And Beyonce is an extremely popular and powerful performer, and when she does stuff like that, that message to the next generation is pretty indelible.”

“It’s a shame,” Giuliani replied. “It’s a shame.”

No. No, it’s not a shame, it’s the right damn thing. Just as Indians are standing up and saying no, the same with Black people everywhere. We have that right, and we’re more than a bit tired of our white colonial masters. Perhaps Giuliani has saved a whole lot of Black lives. Beyoncé is letting people know about injustice, about bigotry, and that yes, they have a voice, and a right to use it. I think that’s pretty important.

Via Raw Story.