Last Call For Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The Boogaloo Boys got their first cop kill in May in the effort to start a race war.

As protests gripped Oakland on May 29, a white van pulled up outside a federal courthouse. A door slid open, and a man peppered the two security officers outside with bullets, killing one and wounding the other.

For a little over a week, the crime was a mystery. Was it tied to the protests just blocks away? Even after the suspected killer was dramatically caught in the nearby mountains eight days later, his motive was murky.

Now, federal authorities say the man, identified as Air Force Staff Sgt. Steven Carrillo, 32, was an adherent of the “boogaloo boys,” a growing online extremist movement that has sought to use peaceful protests against police brutality to spread fringe views and ignite a race war. Federal investigators allege that’s exactly what Carrillo was trying to do last month.

Federal prosecutors on Tuesday charged Carrillo with murder and attempted murder, and leveled aiding and abetting charges against Robert Alvin Justus Jr., who has admitted to serving as a getaway driver during the courthouse ambush, according to the FBI. Protective Security Officer David Patrick Underwood was killed and a second officer, who officials have not named, was critically wounded in the ambush. Inside the three vehicles Carrillo used, police found a boogaloo patch, ammunition, firearms, bombmaking equipment and three messages scrawled in blood: “I became unreasonable,” “Boog” and “Stop the duopoly.”

“The assassination and injury of federal officers who swore an oath to protect the American public will not be tolerated,” Chad Wolf, the acting secretary for homeland security, said in a statement announcing the charges. “The Department of Homeland Security will continue its mission to end violent extremism in any form.”
Carrillo’s attorney, Jeffrey Stotter, told NBC News that investigators’ claims are “accusations and allegations,” and said his client was “left deeply shaken” by his wife’s suicide in 2018. He also told the Santa Cruz Sentinel that Carrillo, who was an active-duty Air Force staff sergeant at the time of the attack, suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2009.

“All I can ask is that we avoid a rush to judgment as to what occurred,” Stotter told the Sentinel.

The newly detailed alleged motive behind the attack at the Oakland courthouse comes as concerns rise about right-wing violence at Black Lives Matter protests. On Monday, a counterdemonstrator shot a protester during a scuffle in Albuquerque, after a militia group in military-style garb and armed with semiautomatic rifles stood menacingly in the crowd throughout the afternoon. Other boogaloo boys have been charged recently with fomenting violence at other protests.

The actual domestic terrorists are out there killing cops at BLM protests in order to start a larger war that kills thousands, maybe millions of Black folks. They're out there, killing.

At some point, they're going to go all the way.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

We've had Black Lives Matter protests before, and they fell upon deaf ears. Systemic racism was dismissed completely as impossible because "We elected a Black president". It was always followed by white rage and "What more do you people want from us about something that happened 400 years ago?"

This time is different.

The Aunt Jemima brand of syrup and pancake mix will get a new name and image, Quaker Oats announced Wednesday, saying the company recognizes that "Aunt Jemima's origins are based on a racial stereotype."

The 130-year-old brand features a Black woman named Aunt Jemima, who was originally dressed as a minstrel character.

The picture has changed over time, and in recent years Quaker removed the “mammy” kerchief from the character to blunt growing criticism that the brand perpetuated a racist stereotype that dated to the days of slavery. But Quaker, a subsidiary of PepsiCo, said removing the image and name is part of an effort by the company “to make progress toward racial equality.”

“We recognize Aunt Jemima’s origins are based on a racial stereotype," Kristin Kroepfl, vice president and chief marketing officer of Quaker Foods North America, said in a press release. “As we work to make progress toward racial equality through several initiatives, we also must take a hard look at our portfolio of brands and ensure they reflect our values and meet our consumers’ expectations."

Kroepfl said the company has worked to "update" the brand to be "appropriate and respectful" but it realized the changes were insufficient.

Aunt Jemima has faced renewed criticism recently amid protests across the nation and around the world sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.

People on social media called out the brand for continuing to use the image and discussed its racist history, with the topic trending on Twitter. In one viral TikTok, a woman named Kirby discussed the history of the brand, saying "Black lives matter, people, even over breakfast."

Aunt Jemima is “a retrograde image of Black womanhood on store shelves," Riché Richardson, an associate professor at Cornell University, told the “TODAY” show on Wednesday. “It’s an image that harkens back to the antebellum plantation ... Aunt Jemima is that kind of stereotype is premised on this idea of Black inferiority and otherness.”

“It is urgent to expunge our public spaces of a lot of these symbols that for some people are triggering and represent terror and abuse," Richardson said.

In a 2015 piece for The New York Times, Richardson wrote that the inspiration for the brand's name came from a minstrel song, “Old Aunt Jemima,” in which white actors in blackface mocked and derided Black people.

The logo, Richardson wrote, was grounded in the stereotype of the “mammy ... a devoted and submissive servant who eagerly nurtured the children of her white master and mistress while neglecting her own.”

Aunt Jemima is a one hundred thirty-year old brand based literally on a black house slave and America happily continued to use it for decades because everyone was used to it.

Y'all only noticed now that maybe, just maybe, it was insulting to millions of Americans, and Quaker Oats, owned by PepsiCo, owned by Yum Brands, based right here in Kentucky, finally did the right thing.

One hundred thirty years.

Taken down in a less than a month of protests.

Black Lives Matter.

Retribution Execution, Con't

As the Trump regime continues to eliminate federal inspectors general and replace them with loyalists who will do nothing as far as oversight, the last bastion of the IG community is warning that the two trillion dollars in CARES funds being spent by the regime is ripe for massive abuse by Trump and his cronies.

The Trump administration’s intensifying efforts to block oversight of its coronavirus-related rescue programs are raising new alarms with government watchdogs and lawmakers from both parties amid concerns about the anonymity of companies receiving unprecedented levels of taxpayer funds.

Government watchdogs warned members of Congress last week that previously unknown Trump administration legal decisions could substantially block their ability to oversee more than $1 trillion in spending related to the coronavirus pandemic.

In a letter to four congressional committee chairs Thursday, two officials in charge of a new government watchdog entity revealed that the Trump administration had issued legal rulings curtailing independent oversight of Cares Act funding.
The letter surfaced amid growing bipartisan frustration over the administration’s decision not to disclose how it is spending hundreds of billions in aid for businesses. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin appeared to bow to that pressure, saying he would work with Congress on new oversight measures. But some Democrats have said the White House is not taking disclosure requests seriously enough.

“They seem to be saying one thing while doing exactly the opposite,” said Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee. “If the Trump administration is committed to full cooperation and transparency with taxpayer dollars, it is unclear why it is manufacturing legal loopholes to avoid responding to legitimate oversight requests.”

According to the previously undisclosed letter, Treasury Department attorneys concluded that the administration is not required to provide the watchdogs with information about the beneficiaries of programs created by the Cares Act’s “Division A.” That section includes some of the most controversial and expensive programs in the coronavirus response efforts, including the administration’s massive bailout for small businesses and nearly $500 billion in loans for corporations.

Mnuchin surprised many lawmakers last week when he announced he would not allow the names of Paycheck Protection Program recipients to become public after the Trump administration had said for months that the data would eventually be disclosed. 

The letter from the inspectors general and Mnuchin’s insistence that the PPP data will not be released come after the White House has repeatedly rebuffed efforts to scrutinize where the taxpayer funding is going.

In their letter, the inspectors general leading the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), an independent panel created to oversee implementation of the Cares Act, expressed concern about the administration’s legal opinions and their impact on oversight.

“If this interpretation of the CARES Act were correct, it would raise questions about PRAC’s authority to conduct oversight of Division A funds,” Michael E. Horowitz and Robert Westbrooks, the acting chair and executive director of the PRAC, said in a letter obtained by The Washington Post. “This would present potentially significant transparency and oversight issues because Division A of the CARES Act includes over $1 trillion in funding.”

Again, the inspectors general council is flat-out saying "Hey, the Trump regime refuses to let us monitor 12 digits worth of cash here, guys."

When we find out Trump and his gang stole the money, don't say you weren't warned.

StupidiNews!

• An internal Justice Department report on the CIA's suite of top-secret cyber tools falling into the hands of WikiLeaks in 2016 blames "woefully lax security" at the agency for the theft.
• Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis says there will be "no rollback" of planned opening of public areas even as the state's number of new COVID-19 cases are reaching new daily highs.
• North Korea is rejecting envoys from South Korea and is vowing to redeploy border troops as tensions are rising after Pyongyang blew up a joint liaison office established in 2018 this week.
• The Trump regime has filed a civil lawsuit against former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton to prevent the publishing of his White House memoirs next week.
• Vice-President Mike Pence is blaming increased testing for the recent rise of COVID-19 cases and is claiming that spikes in multiple states are a sign that data is catching up to the pandemic being over.