Justice in America: Authorities are Cracking down Hard on Black Protesters while Treating White Supremacist Reopeners with Kid Gloves

NB: Sound familar? Read this and the other links beneath this post.. DS
My social media feeds have been full of comparisons between the treatment by police of Reopener mobs, some of whom invaded the Michigan state house while fully armed with assault weapons, and the treatment of protesters in Minneapolis regarding the killing of George Floyd by a policemen who kept his knee on his neck. Why does the Far Right all too often get a pass by American law enforcement?
1. The white supremacists and other far right elements are armed to the teeth. There are about 255 million guns in the US, but something like 75 percent of Americans say they don’t own a gun. So between 22% and 31% of Americans, about 80 to 100 million people, own all the guns. Then 3 percent of the population, some 10 million people, own 100 million guns.

Let me underline that. About 40 percent of all guns in the United States are owned by about 10 million people, some 3 percent of the population. So owning guns is legal, and I’m from a family of farmers who hunted with them, and I’m not knocking gun ownership. And I’m sure there are perfectly innocent hobbyists who collect guns the way other people collect vintage automobiles. But a tiny percentage within that percentage of super-gun-owners are far right wing extremists, and law enforcement is understandably reluctant to get them het up.
2. White supremacists are very good about playing passive aggressive games and nursing and sharing grievances. In the 1990s, Federal agencies like the FBI and Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms were called in to deal with heavily armed white terrorists. A 1992 stand off at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, between gun nut Randy Weaver (whose family was with him) ended in tragedy when FBI snipers took out Weaver’s wife and child. Weaver had refused to show up for his trial on weapons charges (he had sawed off a shotgun, which is illegal in Federal law). Then the following year the David Koresh splinter of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, was investigated for stockpiling weapons, and a raid left 4 ATF agents and 6 Branch Davidians dead, with many agents wounded. That firefight led to an FBI siege of the compound and ultimately to the deaths of 76 members, including Koresh, in fires that they may have set themselves.

Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, both on the fringe of white supremacy and conspiracy theories, cited Ruby Ridge and Waco when they blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklohama City in 1995 with a fertilizer bomb (and ended up targeting the day care center on the first floor). They killed 168 people and wounded hundreds more. They killed more persons per capita than any other terrorists in American history up to that point.

It isn’t usually said out loud, but the Oklahoma City bombing was the most successful act of terrorism in American history. It led the FBI and other Federal agencies, as well as local law enforcement in many instances, to back off the white supremacists, neo-Nazis and kindred groups, leaving them be unless they did something really egregious. Terrorism was defined at the time in the US Federal code as the use of violence by a non-state actor against civilians to change politics. So that worked. ... read more
https://www.juancole.com/2020/05/authorities-protesters-supremacist.html

see also
Safoora Zargar: Why did India jail a pregnant student during Covid-19? By Geeta Pandey


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