Tag: redskins

The Past 24 Hours or So – Protests/Race Relations and Trump Administration News

Read Time: 4 Minutes

Protests/Race Relations

  • A statue of Frederick Douglass, installed in 2018 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolitionist’s birth, was ripped from its pedestal in Rochester, N.Y., on Sunday.

The statue was found about 50 feet away from its base in Maplewood Park, just beyond a fence near the Genesee River gorge. It “had been placed over the fence to the gorge and was leaning against the fence,” Rochester police said.

  • NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace on Monday called for Americans to meet hate with love after President Trump attacked the top racing league’s only African American driver and falsely accused him of carrying out a “hoax” involving a noose found in his garage stall.
  • Trump criticized possible moves by the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians to change their team names as “politically correct,” writing in a Tweet: “They name teams out of STRENGTH, not weakness, but now the Washington Redskins & Cleveland Indians, two fabled sports franchises, look like they are going to be changing their names in order to be politically correct. Indians, like Elizabeth Warren, must be very angry right now!”
  • Authorities in Indiana are investigating after a Black man said he was attacked by a group of white people as he mistakenly walked through private property to get to a public lake shore on Saturday.

Videos of the incident show multiple white men holding Vauhxx Rush Booker’s body against a tree as a few white women stand next to them, telling the men to let him go.

In another video, a shirtless man is seen apparently yelling at a bystander, calling her a “nappy-headed bitch.” A third video shows the same man yelling at bystanders “you invaded us.”

“We were having a great time and you invaded us,” he says. “You stupid fucking liberal fucks.”

  • Police have identified a suspect, a Black man, 27-year-old Cedric Charles Moore Jr. and charged him with second-degree felony assault and first-degree child endangerment, after a 12-year-old White boy was attacked while he was dancing in downtown Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

The incident happened around 11:40 p.m. Friday. The boy was performing with his dance instructor and a fellow student on a sidewalk on Main Street. A man got out of a nearby vehicle, sneaked up behind the boy, hit him hard on the back of the head and fled back to his vehicle. The boy fell to the pavement, and he had to be taken to a local hospital. The incident was recorded in a Facebook Live video.

  • Disney is partnering with former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick to deliver “scripted and unscripted stories” exploring race and social justice, including a documentary series chronicling Kaepernick’s life. The deal will extend across Disney platforms, including ESPN, Hulu, Pixar and The Undefeated, a site dedicated to exploring the intersection of race, culture and sports.
  • Amy Cooper, a White woman who was caught on video calling the police on a Black man who was birdwatching in New York’s Central Park, is now facing charges of falsely reporting an incident in the third degree
  • Restaurant chain Jimmy John’s says it has fired workers who were seen in a viral clip laughing and playing with what appeared to be a noose shaped from dough at one its stores in Georgia over the weekend with a filter reading “Happy 4th of July.”
  • Philadelphia Eagle DeSean Jackson shared anti-semitic quotes attributed to Adolf Hitler on his Instagram story over the July 4th holiday, and continued to use the quotes as a conversation piece during several posts on the social media network on Monday afternoon.
  • The Pentagon is working on a policy that would ban the display of Confederate flags at military bases, according to multiple reports on Monday.

The draft policy, if put into effect, would ban the flag’s display in Department of Defense  workplaces or public areas by service members and civilian personnel.

  • Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has declared a state of emergency and called up the National Guard after what he said were “weeks of dramatically increased violent crime and property destruction in the City of Atlanta.”
  • Kanawha County, WV school board members have unanimously voted in favor of changing the name of Stonewall Jackson Middle School in Charleston.

Administration News

  • President Trump is expected to refile paperwork this week to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that offers protections for thousands of young immigrants after the Supreme Court ruled last month that the administration failed to give an adequate justification for terminating the program as required by federal law.
  • EU lawmakers overwhelmingly backed a proposal on Monday to allow the European Union to retaliate more quickly in trade disputes, with a clear eye on the tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump.
  • The January U.S. drone strike in Iraq that killed top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and nine other people represented a violation of international law, a U.N. human rights investigator said on Monday.
  • Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada confirmed he won’t attend a meeting in Washington this week with President Donald Trump and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico.
  • Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said late on Monday that the United States is “certainly looking at” banning Chinese social media apps, including TikTok.

“I don’t want to get out in front of the president, but it’s something we’re looking at,” Pompeo said.

Sources:  ABC News, The Atlantic, Axios, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, Financial Times, Fox News,The Hill, NBC News, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, NJ.com, NPR, NY Times, Politico, Reuters, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post

The Past 24 Hours or So – Protests/Race Relations and Trump Administration News

Read Time: 4 Minutes

Protests/Race Relations 

  • A WWII-era Coast Guard ship named after the Supreme Court chief justice who penned the majority opinion in the Dred Scott ruling will be renamed.

The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter “Taney” was originally named to honor Roger B. Taney’s service as U.S. Treasury secretary. But Taney’s legacy is defined principally by his majority opinion in the 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sanford, which said slaves were property and African Americans — whether enslaved or free — could not be U.S. citizens.

  • The Washington Redskins today announced a “thorough review” of the team’s name amid mounting pressure to make a change.
  • The Cleveland Indians released a statement that they are considering changing the name of the team. 
  • Police used smoke bombs to disperse Indigenous protesters who blocked a highway as Trump made his way to Mount Rushmore.
  • An Indiana Catholic diocese has suspended a priest from public ministry after he faced backlash for comparing the Black Lives Matter movement and demonstrators to “maggots and parasites.”

Father Theodore Rothrock of St. Elizabeth Seton Catholic Church in Carmel, Indiana, made the comparison in his weekly message on Sunday, The Indy Star reported.

“The only lives that matter are their own and the only power they seek is their own,” Rothrock wrote. “They are wolves in wolves clothing, masked thieves and bandits, seeking only to devour the life of the poor and profit from the fear of others. They are maggots and parasites at best, feeding off the isolation of addiction and broken families, and offering to replace current frustration and anxiety with more misery and greater resentment.” 

  • The Texas Tribune obtained, via a public information request, a voicemail of June 6, left several days after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott activated the Texas National Guard as some of the protests became violent.

In the voicemail conservative power broker Steve Hotze of Houston told Abbott’s chief of staff, Luis Saenz, “I want you to give a message to the governor. I want to make sure that he has National Guard down here and they have the order to shoot to kill if any of these son-of-a-bitch people start rioting like they have in Dallas, start tearing down businesses — shoot to kill the son of a bitches. That’s the only way you restore order. Kill ‘em. Thank you.”

  • Following the resignation of one of the officers involved, three Aurora, Colorado police officers were fired Friday. The four officers shared photographs they took of themselves re-enacting a chokehold officers used to subdue Elijah McClain who later died.

Jason Rosenblatt, who was among the officers who subdued McClain, was fired for responding “HaHa” after receiving the photo.

Vanessa Wilson, interim chief of police in the Denver suburb of Aurora, called the officers’ actions surrounding the death of Elijah McClain, who was unarmed, “reprehensible.” “I am disgusted to my core.”

  • President Trump on Friday during a Fourth of July event at Mount Rushmore lashed out at protesters calling for the removal of Confederate statues, accusing them of wanting to “overthrow the American Revolution” and fundamentally change the country adding that protestors’ goal is to “end America.”
  • “The violent mayhem we have seen in our streets and cities are run by liberal Democrats in every case is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism and other cultural institutions,” Trump said. “Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it weren’t heroes, but villains. The radical view of American history is a web of lies.”
  • President Trump has unveiled an executive order to create a “National Garden of American Heroes” that will feature statues of prominent Americans in response to protesters calling for the removal of Confederate statues or statues of racist figures.

The executive order says the garden will include statues of John Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Jackie Robinson and Harriet Tubman, among others.

Administration News

  • The president’s arrival at his Sterling, VA country club marks the 365th day he has spent at one of his properties since assuming the office.
  • The Senate finalized passage of a sanctions bill to penalize China for its new national security law for Hong Kong that U.S. lawmakers say effectively ends the island’s autonomous legal status. The bill now heads to President Donald Trump, who is expected to sign it.
  • Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned he may skip a summit in Washington next week with President Trump and Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador over the Trump administration’s threats of tariffs and due to the coronavirus pandemic which is raging and seeing record-breaking days in the states.
  • “I have reviewed the classified information regarding bounties, upon which recent news reports are based. This information raises many questions and administration officials should come before the Senate and provide a classified briefing and answer questions from all members,” GOP Sen. Pat Toomey said, demanding a briefing on the controversial reports Russia has been targeting U.S. troops.
  • President Vladimir Putin on Friday mocked the U.S. embassy in Moscow for flying a rainbow flag to celebrate LGBT rights, suggesting it reflected the sexual orientation of its staff.
  • The Pentagon released a report claiming that the Russians have been working alongside the Taliban to drive US troops out of Afghanistan.

The report comes just days after the New York Times reported that Russian intelligence agents were paying bounties to Taliban-connected fighters for killing US troops.

“As of February, the Russian government was working with the central government, regional countries and the Taliban to gain increased influence in Afghanistan, expedite a US military withdrawal,” the report states.

The Pentagon report covers the time period between December 2019 and May 2020.

Sources:  ABC News, The Atlantic, Axios, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, Financial Times, Fox News,The Hill, NBC News, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, NJ.com, NPR, NY Times, Politico, Reuters, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post