What the federal government is doing in Portland is an abomination
Federal overreach has taken on a whole new meaning, and it's tearing the country apart.
This newsletter is produced w/ Zach Peterson (@zachprague). The image above is from the front page of The Skanner, one of the most important Black publications in the Pacific Northwest. Publisher and cofounder Bernie Foster will be a guest on Sree’s daily, global Covid19 show on Monday at 9 pm ET. Last Monday, we did our first show on Portland and it was eye-opening.
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The BLM protests in Portland, Oregon, have turned into much more than social and racial justice actions — they've become the front line in what could only be described as the Trump administration's last-gasp effort to fully destroy America.
Federal troops (and they are “troops,” just look at the photos) have been deployed to quell the ongoing protests. They are unidentified, wear no badges, and are driving around in unmarked vans scooping people up and threatening the lives of anyone who gets in their way. It’s been nothing but tear gas, violence, and scenes that look like they are pulled from a movie about a dystopian future.
Walls of moms, walls of veterans, and masses of just regular people like you and me, have taken to the streets, at great risk, to fight back. The fight may be expanded, as the president threatens to deploy 75,000(!) federal officers in cities around the country.
Any thinking person can see how wrong this is, but the president certainly doesn’t care, and so many of his states’-rights-touting Republican cheerleaders do not appear to care either.
Setting aside the violence, this is what really gets me. We’ve heard from the GOP for decades about federal government overreach, big-government liberalism, and the necessity of state and local control of…pretty much everything. And yet, here we are. Senator Tom Cotton’s fever dream of a military intervention on the streets of America — his articulation of which cost two high-profile people to lose their jobs editing the NYT Opinion section — is becoming a reality, and the vast majority of Republicans support it. In this case, the lack of any sort of resistance to these actions equals support, and that’s how you should see it too.
Sure, The Lincoln Project has some flashy ads. And, kudos to Mitt Romney for at least saying something. But, let’s face it, Trump is poisoning everything about the presidency, and now he’s killing Americans on two fronts — his feckless Covid19 response and via state violence.
The thing is, Trump is very likely doing this all for show. But the consequences are very real.
My advice to anyone who thinks Trump can't/won't be reelected: WAKE UP AND DON'T UNDERESTIMATE HIM AGAIN.
We are 100 days from the November election, and I see pundits, media folks, over-confident Democrats and liberals, and everyday Americans haven’t learned much from 2016. The laws of electoral physics don’t apply to Trump, and just because Joe Biden is ahead today doesn’t mean much with the chaos all around us.
- Sree
Read Something
There’s little doubt that the federal presence in Portland — soon to be the federal presence in more cities, it seems — has only served to escalate violence, not reduce it. As it turns out, this is the case more often than not with police — federal or otherwise.
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Tech Tips w/ @newyorkbob
Delighted to announce that my friend (and tech journalist w/ 1.2 million Pinterest followers) Bob Anthony will be writing a tech tip here every Sunday. Thanks, Bob!
Lights, camera, action! Want to look more professional in your next video meeting or event? Add lighting. A sunny kitchen may look good as a background, but you may end up looking like a talking silhouette. Adjustable-brightness LED lights like the tiny Lume Cube Panel Mini can change that, and bring you out of the shadows.
Follow Robert S. Anthony at @newyorkbob
Watch Something
Last week, we had three conversations on my Covid show, on successive days, that show the breadth of topics we cover, the range of guests we get and exactly why we have been on the air for 137 straight days!
Wednesday: Brand Trust w/ Edelman’s Tonia Ries and David Bersoff.
Thursday: Maria Ressa, pioneering journalist in the Philippines and 2018 Time Person of the Year, fighting for press freedom.
Friday: Netflix’s “Indian Matchmaking,” we interviewed Executive Producer Smriti Mundhra and Vyasar Ganesan, one of the stars of this global top 10 hit. Part of our new monthly partnership with our friends MR Rangaswami and Indiaspora.
Odds & Ends
🗞 My Sunday #NYTReadalong, executive produced by Neil Parekh (@neilparekh), where we read the print NYT out loud every week, 8:30-10:30 am ET: Our guest this week is Anthony DePalma, a long-time writer for The New York Times. He spent 22 years as a reporter and foreign correspondent focusing much of his attention on Latin America, especially Mexico and Cuba. He has a new book published by Viking, "The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times." Catch it in my YouTube archives.
The Readalong is followed Sundays 11 am-noon ET by a new medical show I’m co-executive producing with surgeons Sujana Chandrasekhar, M.D. (@DrSujanaENT), and Marina Kurian, M.D. (@MarinaKurian), called She’s On Call (watch live or later).
The Sunday #NYTReadalong is sponsored by Muck Rack, Magic Bus USA and Strategy Focused Group. Interested in sponsorship opportunities? Email sree@sree.net and neil@neilparekh.org.
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Recent highlights:
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The fact that the vehicles were unmarked is proof that these were not government vehicles. It means the troops were not government troops. These troops must be a private security company like Black Water. This not only insane, it is perhaps unconstitutional. Imagine using out of control troops on our own people.