Black lives matter

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As Vice President Mike Pence put it during his keynote speech on Wednesday, “in the midst of this global pandemic ... we’ve seen violence and chaos in the streets of our major cities.” Pence’s speech highlighted a single law enforcement officer, strongly implying that this officer was the victim of left-wing radicals opposed to police officers and to President Trump: “Dave Patrick Underwood was an officer of the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service, who was shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California,” said Pence, before acknowledging Underwood’s sister, who was in the audience.

Underwood’s death is tragic, but it has nothing to do with left-wing radicals. Underwood was killed just blocks away from anti-police violence protests in Oakland, but federal authorities say he was killed by Steven Carrillo, an Air Force staff sergeant and a follower of the “boogaloo boys,” a right-wing extremist movement that, according to the Washington Post’s Katie Shepherd, “has sought to use peaceful protests against police brutality to spread fringe views and ignite a race war.” Carrillo was taken into federal custody, and he faces murder charges.

The “boogaloo” movement, which emerged on the website 4chan, is a bizarre mix of in-jokes, conservative gun culture, and Civil War nostalgia. It derives its name from the 1984 breakdancing film Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, a film that is sometimes used as a sarcastic shorthand for an unnecessary sequel. The idea is that the Boogaloo movement hopes to bring about a sequel to the Civil War. As Vox’s Jane Coaston writes, the movement is “a loosely connected anti-government movement that has included some white nationalists who believe in an ‘accelerationist’ ideology that encourages spurring civil disorder to eventually foment the breakdown of the political system entirely.”

The most shocking line in Vice President Pence’s 2020 RNC speech  - Vox

• Once again, the left gets blamed for violence (murder, that is) on the right, by the vice president, no less...
  

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On December 30, 19-year-old teenager Christian Hall experienced a mental health crisis, and his family called the Pennsylvania State Police to help him as he stood on a bridge considering suicide. Instead of helping, they shot the teen as he appeared to raise his hands in the air in a gesture of surrender. While the incident occurred at 1:30 p.m. local time on December 30, it is more recently coming to light because the young man's family is being represented by Ben Crump, the racial justice attorney who represents George Floyd's family. Crump shared a video of the shooting this last Wednesday. “He was having a crisis," Crump said, according to Yahoo! News. "There is a suggestion that he was contemplating suicide. He was crying out for help," Crump added. “Christian Hall needed a helping hand, but yet he got bullets while he had his hands up." Hall died at a hospital, and the police released a statement saying that he had a firearm, a weapon he might have used on himself considering his distraught mental state. Cops told him to drop the weapon, but they said he allegedly became uncooperative, retrieving the gun from the ground and pointing it at officers, which caused them to fire. But the viral video of his death shows that their version of events may not be true. Hall seems to have had his hands up when police began firing at him anyway.

Family called police to help a mentally ill teen -- cops shot him to death after he surrendered - Alternet.org