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As recently as yesterday, William Barr insisted in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee that a federal presence was necessary to protect against “violent rioters and anarchists“ who “had hijacked legitimate protests” in Portland, a “mob” that would surely burn the Hatfield Federal Courthouse to the ground in short order were they to leave. Fearing

Trump’s deployment of federal agents to the streets of Portland, and his announced plans to do the same in Chicago, Albuquerque, and other US cities has been widely disparaged as a tactic to reverse his plunging approval ratings and shore up a flagging campaign. Trump himself was quite clear about the partisan stakes involved. “I’m

The murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in the US launched the largest protest movement in the country’s history, growing to encompass an ever-larger confrontation with the institutions and symbols of white supremacy. The movement soon went global, with demonstrations from Senegal to Sweden, Brazil to South Korea. The largest protests after the US

When Trump threatened governors and mayors last month in a Rose Garden speech before using federal officers to attack demonstrators in Lafayette Park, it wasn’t merely a disturbing moment of fascist spectacle. It announced a nationwide campaign of state violence and repression. Acting as a kind of Praetorian Guard (or perhaps Schutzstaffel), Department of Homeland

There have been a number of left-leaning posts on social media today in surprised agreement with a piece by conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat about the trajectory of current protest movement, arguing that it abandons the class focus of Bernie Sanders for corporate multiculturalism. As he puts it: “And so far, as my

Professors Angela Addae, Judson Jeffries, Marisa Chappell and I spoke yesterday about police, protest, and white supremacy in a forum organized by the Oregon Historical Society and the Oregon Jewish Museum. Here is a link to the program if you’re interested: https://ohs.org/events/racism-protest-and-law-enforcement.cfm

Liberal social media is in a lather today about Trump’s accusation that Martin Gugino, the 75 year-old longtime social justice activist brutally shoved to the ground by riot police in Buffalo, is an Antifa provocateur. The outraged on Twitter and elsewhere contrast the image of Gugino as an Antifa militant with the fact that he

In a little more than a week of mass protest and social upheaval of historic proportions, we are now moving in directions that were unthinkable a very short time ago. Not toward useless reforms, but toward the actual reduction of the power, size, and scope of the police and in some cases perhaps even its

In April 1981 riots against police brutality by working-class Caribbeans broke out in London, and then swept towns and cities across the UK, quickly becoming a multiracial phenomenon on a massive scale involving black, white, and South Asian youth. In the riots’ aftermath, members of the Brixton-based Race Today newspaper collective interviewed hundreds of participants