Cities Brace for Nationwide Day of Rage - Matthew Vadum

by Matthew Vadum

The shadowy group Anonymous says trouble is on the menu.

Leftists, Black Power, and Black Lives Matter activists may be planning violent national “Day of Rage” protests in cities across America today.

The original Days of Rage were the Weatherman-organized riots over three days in October 1969, a follow-up after the “success” of violent protests at the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago in 1968.

Now the “hacktivist” group Anonymous is reportedly calling for nationwide Day of Rage protests today.

“We are calling upon the citizens of the United States in conjunction with the Black Lives Matter movement as well as other civil rights activists to participate in a day of action against the injustices of corrupt officers,” the group says in a video.

Protests are scheduled for 37 cities across America including Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, Des Moines, Memphis, Little Rock, Miami, Seattle, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, and Detroit. 

Also on the list is Cleveland, the city where the Republican National Convention officially gets underway Monday. Local blogger Mike Cernovich makes the alarming claim, allegedly based on inside information, that Cleveland police have “issued a stand down order to officers.” He writes that Cleveland cops do not intend to defend Trump supporters who are attacked, citing the city’s seemingly weak plan to use police on bicycles to keep rival protest groups separated. 

Cleveland’s mayor is Frank G. Jackson (D), a gun-grabber and a member of Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns Coalition.

Jackson won’t be winning a profile-in-courage award anytime soon. After the city was sued in connection with the 2014 police-involved killing of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy who brandished a toy pistol, the mayor apologized for standard legal language that the city used in defense pleadings.

“Plaintiffs’ decedent’s injuries, losses, and damages complained of, were directly and proximately caused by the failure of plaintiffs’ decedent to exercise due care to avoid injury,” and that the child’s injuries “were directly and proximately caused by the acts of plaintiffs’ decedent, not this defendant,” that is, the city, read the legal boilerplate.

Jackson quickly caved in to criticism, absurdly apologizing for legal drafters’ “poor use of words.”

“We used words and phrased things in such a way that was very insensitive,” he whimpered.

This linguistic silliness brings to mind the forcing out of District of Columbia government official David Howard in 1999 over the word “niggardly,” which some city employees mistakenly believed was some kind of racial epithet. In fact the 500-year-old word, which Howard used in the context of a budget discussion, means miserly or stingy. It has no racial connotations.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army is taking the Day of Rage threat seriously. It has advised all military personnel to stay away from the 37 cities identified. 

“For security reasons, we don’t discuss force-protection measures that we put into place at our Army installations or the specifics of cautionary advice we provide to our soldiers,” said Army spokesman Lt. Col. Jason Shropshire.

“However, the advisory was to provide situational awareness for all Army personnel within the U.S. Northern Command area of responsibility who may find themselves in the vicinity of any protests (planned or spontaneous),” he added. “At this time, we do not have information regarding any specific threats to [Department of Defense] personnel.”

An Army notice states that the list of cities constitutes “a list of places NOT to be on Friday the 15th.” It continues, while the video “does specify nonviolence and denounces the actions taken against police officers that were not involved in these deaths, with the tagline ‘Day of Rage’ it is safe to expect emotions to be running very high on both sides of the line. No matter how great your empathy might be for those who have unjustly lost their lives, these protests are not safe places to be.”

The notice also states that “being anywhere near these protests greatly increases the chance that you could become a victim of violence. When the mob mentality takes over, normally decent people can commit heinous acts.”

Of course, the Army is assuming Black Lives Matter supporters and leftists are good people underneath. It’s a risky assumption.

The Anonymous video announcing the protests opens with the title, “EMERGENCY RESPONSE CALL TO ACTION #FridayOfSolidarity JULY 15 2016.” It is followed by graphic cellphone footage of Alton Sterling being shot and Philando Castile in his final moments after being shot. The video demands prosecution of the cops who killed Sterling and Castile in separate incidents last week.

A computer-generated voice states:

“We are infuriated as we watch day after day another human murdered because an irresponsible, corrupt system allows free rein to cops that continuously abuse their power. Thus we are calling upon the citizens of the United States to rise up and stand in solidarity with the people of Dallas, Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights, as well as Baltimore and Ferguson. We are grieving for the lost lives that were taken by the hands of a corrupted authority.”

The voice also warns law enforcement:

“To police departments across the United States, we are not your enemy; however, it is in your hands if you want us to stay that way or not. We will not be silenced and we will not be intimidated.”

The video specifically threatens police departments in Minnesota and Louisiana.

“To the St. Anthony and the Baton Rouge police departments, we’ve already launched attacks on your virtual infrastructure. We are prepared to release every single piece of evidence that will expose your corruption and blatant disregard for human life.” 

It should be noted that the St. Anthony, Minn., police department seems to have been mentioned because it is under contract to patrol Falcon Heights where Castile was shot. Falcon Heights mayor Peter Lindstrom says as a result of the shooting that contract is under review.

The debunking website Snopes is skeptical of the threat this new call for a Day of Rage presents to the public. The site says Anonymous supposedly called for a nationwide Day of Rage on Aug. 21, 2014 after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. There were certainly many protests across the country around the time about Brown’s death but whether they were worthy of being described with the rather scary-sounding moniker Day of Rage is debatable. The more intense and violent demonstrations that were accompanied by riots generally came later.

On the other hand, remember that Day of Rage was the name of the event that launched the hyper-violent Occupy Wall Street movement in lower Manhattan on Sept. 17, 2011.

So it is dangerous to assume the Day of Rage that may be planned for today is a hoax.

While race-related turmoil rises in the U.S., a new Harvard study led by a black economist found that there is no racial bias in police-involved shootings, the New York Times reports.

“It is the most surprising result of my career,” said Harvard professor Ronald G. Fryer Jr., of the study that looked at more than a thousand shootings in 10 large police departments in California, Florida, and Texas.

In the shootings studied, cops were more likely to discharge their weapons against whites without having first been attacked. Black and white civilians involved in such shootings were equally likely to have been armed.

In Houston, Texas, police were roughly 20 percent less likely to shoot when the suspect was a black person. In New York City black suspects were more likely to be subjected to nonlethal police force than non-blacks.

President Obama’s race-baiting has taken its toll on Americans.

A recent poll shows 69 percent of Americans believe race relations are awful, the worst they’ve been in more than two decades, according to the poll that was conducted from July 8, the day after the Dallas massacre.

The latest New York Times/CBS News Poll finds that “[r]acial discontent is at its highest point in the Obama presidency and at the same level as after the riots touched off by the 1992 acquittal of Los Angeles police officers charged in [Rodney] King’s beating.”

“Relations between black Americans and the police have become so brittle that more than half of black people say they were not surprised by the attack that killed five police officers and wounded nine others in Dallas last week. Nearly half of white Americans say that they, too, were unsurprised by the episode, the survey found.”

Nor will many Americans be surprised when President Obama blames the nation’s law enforcement community for future terrorist acts committed by Black Lives Matter supporters.

Matthew Vadum, senior vice president at the investigative think tank Capital Research Center, is an award-winning investigative reporter and author of the book, "Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers."

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/263514/cities-brace-nationwide-day-rage-matthew-vadum

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