Conservatives programed to trigger at words "Black Lives Matter" by Russian trolls.

Weeks after the Interior Department halted diversity training to comply with an executive order from President Trump, a top assistant at the agency is under scrutiny for defending Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager accused of fatally shooting two people and injuring a third during a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wis.

The official, Jeremy Carl, a newly appointed deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks, also called peaceful Black Lives Matter protests racist and cited an opinion piece in a white supremacist publication, American Renaissance, to support an argument denouncing the anti-discrimination work of former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr.

American Renaissance, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “has been one of the vilest white nationalist publications, often promoting eugenics and blatant anti-black and anti-Latino racists.” Featured on the publication’s website are articles such as “Twelve Steps to White Recovery: Recovery from white conditioning” and “The Dangers of Diversity: What happens when races mix.”

Carl’s past writings and links were brought to light by HuffPost. Media Matters, which monitors news for misinformation, uncovered the link to American Renaissance in an opinion Carl wrote for the Fox News website.

Attempts to reach Carl were unsuccessful, and officials at the Interior Department declined to say whether any disciplinary action has been considered or taken by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt since his deputy’s actions came under scrutiny. Interior, where racial representation ranks among the lowest in the federal workplace, ended diversity classes in September.

Carl’s conservative writings aren’t the first to be denounced as racially bigoted at the department. Former Bureau of Land Management acting director William Perry Pendley once mused that federal treaty obligations to Native American tribes could end because Indians will cease to exist.

“The day may soon come when Congress and the Supreme Court will be asked to take a serious and very hard look at whether there remains a need for the federal government’s policy of paternalistic protection,” Pendley wrote. He added: “The day may come sooner than many expect given that, with ever-declining blood quantum per tribal member, recognized tribes may soon be little more than associations of financial convenience.”

Pendley was forced to step down as acting director in September when a court found that he had served for more than a year without Senate approval, violating the Constitution. Carl, a former research fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute and Hoover Institution, was appointed to his post the following month.

When Carl joined Interior in early October, he stepped into one of the least diverse agencies in the federal workplace. Black representation on its executive staff ranked last, 5.6 percent compared to 38 percent in Education and Housing and Urban Development.

Twenty-eight members of Congress signed a letter denouncing the comments. Zinke’s spokeswoman at the time denied that he made them. Zinke was forced to resign for other reasons at the end of that year.

“These comments are particularly troubling, because, as the Secretary of the Interior, it is important that you set the tone that diverse voices are critical to the success of DOI,” the letter said. “As a public official, you have a responsibility to ensure that both your agency and the public lands it administers are welcoming and inclusive to all people.”

As assistant deputy secretary for fish and wildlife and parks, Carl oversees the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is led by an African American woman, Aurelia Skipwith, for the first time in its history.

In his opinion condemning Holder, Carl included a link to a January 2015 book review written by Jared Taylor, a leading figure in the alt-right movement who said immigration policy should be tailored to keep the country majority-White.

Taylor once wrote, after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005: “When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”

Like Pendley, Carl ripped Black Lives Matter as a group built on what he believes is a lie that African Americans are disenfranchised.

In his opinion piece denouncing nonviolent protests patterned after the marches of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Carl called their message “slanderous and damaging to our social fabric. The protesters in the streets pretending that there is an epidemic of disproportionate police violence against African Americans are a problem when the data says it is either modest or nonexistent.”

A Washington Post analysis of fatal police shootings between 2015 and 2020 found that the opposite is true. Although half of the people shot and killed by police are White, African Americans are shot and killed at a disproportionate rate.

African Americans constitute about 13 percent of the U.S. population but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of White Americans, 32 per million compared to 13. Latino Americans are also slain by police at a disproportionately higher rate, the analysis found.

Based on his Twitter feed, Carl was agreeable to civilians armed with automatic weapons facing off against unarmed non-violent demonstrators. Carl has locked his Twitter account and viewing it requires his approval, but The Post uncovered several tweets through an archive search.

A day after Rittenhouse opened fire on protesters in Kenosha on Aug. 25, Carl retweeted a video featuring men carrying deadly AR-15 rifles with the caption: “with law enforcement incapable of defending private property … Armed groups have begun protecting the city.”

The Sierra Club is one of several groups that condemned Carl’s writings and his appointment to a key position at Interior despite them.

“That the Trump administration would hire someone to a high position who is associated with white nationalism is shameful, but sadly unsurprising,” said Athan Manuel, director of Sierra Club’s land protection program. “Racism has no place on our public lands, and it has no place atop the Department of the Interior.”

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Nadine Seiler stood before the memorial fence at Black Lives Matter Plaza feeling defeated.

She had spent months outside the White House advocating for Black people like her, and she watched as the fortressed fencing around Lafayette Square went up, then down, then up again. Seiler, 55, watched as the barrier collected protest signs and transformed from a symbol of separation to a space of community healing — a living art gallery to honor those killed by police.

Nearly every day since August, Seiler had driven 45 minutes from her home in Maryland to tend to the wall, becoming an unofficial curator of the memorial. When protest signs fell down, she picked them up. When they became damaged, she repaired them with tape. She organized the mementos there into three exhibits: police accountability, social justice, faces of the dead.

But by Monday night, just days before the bitterly contested Nov. 3 presidential election, her museum was gone.

Twenty-four hours earlier, as newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett was being sworn in by Justice Clarence Thomas at the South Lawn of the White House, three people who said they were acting in the name of Jesus stormed the memorial wall, according to Seiler and video posted on social media. The group — led by a White conservative activist from Texas and two antiabortion Black women from New Jersey — worked for hours in the darkness, pulling away sign after sign.

Seiler and the strangers around her tried to block the signs with their bodies.

But by midnight, the wall was nearly empty.

The religious activists promised they’d be back.

Take down

The tension first started late Monday afternoon, hours before Barrett’s confirmation, according to witness interviews and video. Seiler was holding her daily 5 p.m. rally along the fence and shouting in her megaphone
“Vote him out!” The conservative activists, in town for the Let Us Worship event on the Mall, had come to Black Lives Matter Plaza before heading to the Supreme Court to pray.

‘This is what he lived for’: John Lewis remembered at Black Lives Matter Plaza

The visitors, Kevin Whitt, Bevelyn Beatty and Edmee Chavannes, approached the memorial fence. Whitt later told
The Washington Post he is the assistant director of the Texas chapter of MassResistance, a socially conservative and anti-LGBTQ activist group, and the women said they run an evangelical street ministry.

They briefly argued with Seiler about the mission of Black Lives Matter. Then they left.

But just after Barrett was officially confirmed around 9 p.m., Whitt and the women returned.

The trio, not wearing masks, said they were upset that the view of the White House was blocked by signs. They started snatching, they told The Post.

Seiler started recording on her cellphone while others around her desperately tried to stop the destruction.

Valarie Walker and Laurie Arbeiter, friends from New York who traveled to D.C. to protest, used their hands and feet and a tambourine to protect the signs. Walker said she lost a lock of hair in the bedlam, and Arbeiter said she lost her phone.

At about that time, 23-year-old Tim Hernández rolled up on an Uber bicycle. He had watched Barrett’s confirmation on television with mounting sadness and headed to the Supreme Court seeking progressive community. Instead, he found a church service and turned west toward Black Lives Matter Plaza. As soon as he arrived, he ditched his bike and tried to “take up space,” he said. But Whitt, Beatty and Chavannes turned the memorial into a pile of debris stacked in the trash.

A sign of Trayvon Martin’s face fell. A floral arrangement that said “VOTE” came down. Laminated pages of Black women who had died were thrown to the ground.



One large sign remained. Made of thick white material and spanning the entire height of the fence, it was decorated with bright colors and intricate flowers. “Black lives matter everywhere, every day, all the time,” it read.

The groups clashed again over the final sign, with Hernández and another man imploring D.C. police to stop the teardown.

The trio left at around 11 p.m.

Though Whitt said he briefly felt guilty for tearing down memorials to Black people who had died, he and the women all told The Post they believed the wall should have recognized aborted fetuses and other perspectives.
Beatty and Chavannes said they believe Black Lives Matter does not represent all Black people.

Beatty said their efforts were a “nice little community cleanup.”

Seiler and others started salvaging and picking through the trash for signs that were not destroyed to start rebuilding.

But before they could start to hang them again, Beatty and Chavannes returned. They grabbed the rescued signs and tossed them in the street, shredding them with their hands.

One man sprawled his body across the ground and tucked the signs beneath him.

Still unable to tear down the tall white sign, the women left, returning a final time — with scissors.

On Black Lives Matter Plaza, quieter crowds — and yoga — as D.C. starts to reclaim the street

Beatty and Chavannes sliced through the word “lives,” and the last large sign fell.

This was the scene Caterina Sesana walked into when she and a friend showed up to help.

Seiler did not want to leave the signs unattended, but did not have room in her car because it was filled with her curator supplies — tape, zip ties, posters, paint.

Sesana opened her trunk to store the surviving signs for safekeeping.

They agreed to meet back at Black Lives Matter Plaza the next day and said goodbye around 3 a.m.

Before Seiler went to sleep, she contacted several social justice organizations with a message: Please help.

Restoration and repair

As she had done every day for the last six weeks, Seiler climbed into her car Tuesday afternoon and headed toward downtown D.C. for her daily protest. Though a small crew collected the surviving signs to restore the wall, Seiler was not hopeful.

Don’t bother to bring tape or make new signs, Seiler said on the phone to Karen Irwin, who had been a regular at the fence since joining the William Thomas Anti-Nuclear Peace Vigil this fall. What’s the point, she said, of putting them back up if they’ll just be torn back down?

Just before 11 p.m., Whitt did. This time, he was alone. For more than an hour, he paced along the fence, shouting back and forth with the docents.

“I am a patriot of this country,” he said. “This is my capital. This is my White House.”
Whitt left empty-handed.

Seiler has spent every night since continuing to repair what was broken.

She has wrapped the new signs in clear tape to keep them dry and fortified the old ones with extra zip ties.
Seiler said she is prepared for the conflict that might play out at the fence on election night. And she is committed to maintaining this time capsule of 2020’s racial reckoning.

“We call tell the story on the fence,” she said. “I’m going to keep the story alive as long as the fence is up.”

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WARREN, Mich. (AP) — The events of 2020 already had Eddie Hall on edge.

Then, the troubles of a nation in turmoil landed on Hall’s doorstep in suburban Detroit in September when racist graffiti was scrawled on his pickup truck and shots were fired into his home after his family placed a Black Lives Matter sign in their front window.

“I’m in combat mode. I’m protecting my family,” Hall, a 52-year-old Black man from Warren, told The Associated Press.

Some experts say police brutality, the coronavirus pandemic that has taken disproportionate physical and financial tolls on Black people, and other issues around race have increased anxiety levels among African Americans, like Hall.

The attacks on Hall’s home were investigated as a hate crime and 24-year-old white neighbor, Michael Frederick Jr., eventually was arrested and charged with ethnic intimidation and other crimes.

“We, as Black people, have all of the normal human stressors — work, family, finances — and then we’re inundated with racial pressure at all levels,” said Jessica Graham-Lopresti, assistant professor of psychology at Suffolk University and co-founder of Massachusetts-based BARE — Black Advocacy Resilience Empowerment.

“This idea that, for Black people, we don’t feel — currently in this country — that we have the ability to control our environment and protect ourselves and our families,” she said. “We could still be gunned down in the street. That creates anxiety. That creates stress.”

In May, mostly white men and women protesting Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s orders that closed many businesses and services to stem the spread of COVID-19 openly carried rifles and handguns into the state Capitol.

As many activists take to the streets to maintain public political pressure for change, concern about personal safety is at an all-time high, said Frederick Gooding Jr., an African American studies professor at Texas Christian University.

“Especially in the aftermath of Kyle Rittenhousewalking untouched in full view with an assault rifle AFTER shooting another civilian dead,” Gooding added.

Rittenhouse, a white 17-year-old from northern Illinois, is accused of fatally shooting two white protesters and wounding a third in August in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during demonstrations following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man. Rittenhouse was among a number of armed white men who converged on the city, claiming they were protecting property from arson and theft.

After the gunfire, with his AR-15-style rifle over his shoulder and his hands in the air, Rittenhouse walked toward police vehicles that kept going past him, even as a witness shouted, “He just shot them!” Police Chief Daniel Miskinis has explained the response as officers dealing with a chaotic scene.

Sharon Bethune, 56, of Fredericksburg, Virginia, said the events in Kenosha angered her and other Black people.

“This is mind-boggling,” said Bethune, a retiree who managed government accounts for the Environmental Protection Agency. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

For Black professionals and those in the middle class, the anxiety appears to be more pronounced, said Alford Young Jr., a sociology professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

They wonder “how we got to this moment of national leadership after the civil rights movement,” Young said. “There is just extreme anxiety and frustration that people would not have imagined that the kinds of issues surfacing now would have followed an Obama presidency.”

Many working class Black people see the current political landscape with less dread and more “the way it’s always been,” he added.

Candace Hall, Eddie Hall’s wife, said Republican President Donald Trump shoulders part of the blame for how many African Americans are feeling.

Trump, who claims to have done more for Black people than his predecessors, has been accused of using race to stoke division. He has encouraged police to use a heavy-handed approach on people protesting against racism and police brutality. During his first debate with Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Trump refused to condemn white supremacy.

“He’s opened up Pandora’s box with racism and anger and telling police to beat people up,” said Candace Hall, 55, also an Army veteran.

Ciaran O’Connor, spokesman for New York-based Braver Angels, which seeks to depolarize American politics, said people need to talk to each other, not retreat from tough conversations, as they fight for what they believe in.

“We believe in the power of conversation if you are trying to persuade people in a way to humanize people,” O’Connor said. “If we’re gonna bring positive change, we’re going to have to find ways to have these conversations.”

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Chunky Stool said:

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The Supreme Court sided in separate cases with a Black Lives Matter activist and a Texas prison inmate Monday, and new justice Amy Coney Barrett became the court’s first member to make her debut via telephone.

Follow the latest on Election 2020

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. welcomed the 48-year-old Barrett to her lifetime appointment with a wish for a “long and happy career in our common calling.” The court last met in person to do its work in March — it has been holding arguments by teleconference since May because of the threat of the coronavirus.

Senate confirms Barrett, solidifying conservative control of Supreme Court

Barrett, a University of Notre Dame law professor who served for three years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, sounded confident and well-versed in the details of the technical cases before the court.

One involved whether government documents involving regulation for cooling water intake structures may be kept from an environmental group, and another concerned benefits decisions by the U.S. Railroad Retirement Board.


At the Baton Rouge protest, a police officer identified in court papers only as John Doe was struck by a projectile thrown by someone in the crowd. The officer suffered serious injuries, including to his brain.

He sued Mckesson, even though he did not accuse the activist of throwing the “rock-like” object or even knowing who did. The officer alleged Mckesson was liable because he should have known violence would result because of the protest.

A federal district judge threw out the lawsuit, but a panel of the 5th Circuit reinstated it. The entire circuit reviewed the decision, and the lawsuit was allowed to proceed after a split decision.

Civil rights groups and First Amendment activists were alarmed by the appeals court’s decision and said it conflicted with a 1982 Supreme Court decision, NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., which limited liability for protests.

The NAACP filed a friend-of-the-court brief after the American Civil Liberties Union brought Mckesson’s case to the Supreme Court.

The justices sidestepped the First Amendment question. In an unsigned opinion, the court said the 5th Circuit should have asked the Louisiana Supreme Court whether damages were even available under state law before proceeding to the First Amendment questions and sent the case back for that to happen.

Vera Eidelman, staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said the high court did the right thing.

“Protesters cannot be held liable for the unlawful acts of others that they did not direct, order, or incite simply because they were at the same protest,” Eidelman said in a statement. “We are gratified the Supreme Court has recognized there are important First Amendment issues at stake and has asked the state courts to review whether their law even permits such a suit.”

The organization also released a statement from Mckesson: “Today’s decision recognizes that holding me liable for organizing a protest because an unidentifiable person threw a rock raises First Amendment concerns. I’m gratified that the Supreme Court vacated the ruling below, but amazingly, the fight is not over.”

Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the court’s action in Mckesson v. Doe but did not provide specifics for his disagreement.

In a second case, the justices said Texas inmate Trent Taylor could proceed with his lawsuit against correctional officers whom he accused of detaining him for six days in 2013 in a pair of “shockingly unsanitary cells.”

The first cell was covered in feces, Taylor alleges. “Fearing his food and water would be contaminated, Taylor did not eat or drink for nearly four days,” the court wrote.

He then was moved to a cell where a clogged drain caused raw sewage to spill across the floor, Taylor said. “Because Taylor was confined without clothing, he was left to sleep naked in sewage,” the court wrote in the unsigned opinion.

A 5th Circuit panel agreed the conditions violated the Constitution. But because there was no clear precedent regarding keeping an inmate in such conditions for “only six days,” the panel awarded the officers qualified immunity for their actions. That means they did not have “fair warning” that their specific acts were unconstitutional.

Supreme Court asked to reconsider immunity awarded to police officers

That was a mistake, the Supreme Court said. “No reasonable correctional officer could have concluded that, under the extreme circumstances of this case, it was constitutionally permissible to house Taylor in such deplorably unsanitary conditions for such an extended period of time,” the court wrote.

Again, Thomas dissented without comment. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the court should not have taken up the fact-specific case.

“Every year, the courts of appeals decide hundreds if not thousands of cases in which it is debatable whether the evidence in a summary judgment record is just enough or not quite enough to carry the case to trial,” Alito wrote. “If we began to review these decisions we would be swamped, and as a rule we do not do so.”

But since the court took up the case, Alito said, “I agree that summary judgment should not have been awarded on the issue of qualified immunity.”

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hanimmal said:

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TrippleDip said:

Friendly reminder that trumps message is literally "make america great again" for ALL american citizens. He mostly rejects identity politics which is a staple of the left. Nationalism is better than tribalism which is the message of the left what with biden taking a knee for blm. Identity politics is what has divided the country more than anything and the sooner we can get back to being americans instead of individual racial blocs the better.

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Rob Roy said:

Speaking of NBA players, isn't ironic that many wore BLM stuff during the last half of this past interrupted season?

Those guys are ultimate capitalists and may be not know that BLM has some commie interests.

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Rob Roy said:

I have no problem with people calling attention to inequities in policing and the so called "justice system".

I just think's ironic for capitalists basketball players to support a commie oriented organization. Figured that irony was self evident.

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hanimmal said:

Do you think all (or any relevant portion even) the protestors got a toaster when they opened an account on whatever specific troll of a definition you are pretending means anything to the actual social justice movement?

Because that's the false narrative that is designed to scare people into getting triggered by your obscure propagandist definitions.

Im sure there are all kinds of scams using 'Black Lives Matter', but that doesn't mean that the NBA was doing anything other than supporting the protests and the reason behind them. Which you even 'have no problem' with.

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