Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: Trump Takes Us to the Brink

Will weaponized racism destroy America?

Last fall Bob Kroll, the head of the Minneapolis police union, appeared at a Trump rally, where he thanked the president for ending Barack Obama’s “oppression of police” and letting cops “put the handcuffs on criminals instead of us.”

The events of the past week, in which the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody led to demonstrations against police brutality, and these demonstrations were met by more police brutality — including unprecedented violence against the news media — have made it clear what Kroll meant by taking the handcuffs off. And Donald Trump, far from trying to calm the nation, is pouring gasoline on the fire; he seems very close to trying to incite a civil war.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that America as we know it is on the brink.

How did we get here? The core story of U.S. politics over the past four decades is that wealthy elites weaponized white racism to gain political power, which they used to pursue policies that enriched the already wealthy at workers’ expense.

Until Trump’s rise it was possible — barely — for people to deny this reality with a straight face. At this point, however, it requires willful blindness not to see what’s going on.

Eugene Robinson: We are the governed. We no longer consent to let the police kill us.

This coast-to-coast uprising is not about terrorism, foreign or domestic. It’s not about arson, looting or carpeting streets with broken glass. It’s about a powerful phrase in the Declaration of Independence: “the consent of the governed.” Police in this country no longer have our consent to kill African Americans unjustly and with impunity.

Is that clear now?

What’s striking about the protests over the killing of George Floyd is not just the intensity of the anger the protesters express but how widely that anger has spread. Citizens have held demonstrations, marches and vigils in more than 60 cities across the country and in nearly every state. And in the week since a Minneapolis police officer ended Floyd’s life by kneeling on his neck, as Floyd pleaded “I can’t breathe,” passions have not diminished. If anything, crowds have become more ardent.

To me, this feels less and less like just another iteration of the set-piece drama we’ve lived through so many times — an unjust killing, a few days of protest, a chorus of promises of reform, a return to normal, an all-too-brief interlude until the next unjust killing. This eruption feels like a potential inflection point, a collective decision that “normal” is no longer acceptable.

That message is being delivered in every major American city. Whether it is being heard and understood remains to be seen.

Amanda Marcotte: Trump has reshaped law enforcement: Endless cover-up for him, brutal clampdown on dissent

Trump puts himself above the law, but encourages police to assault anyone who objects to his criminal regime

Despite headlines and news reports replete with loaded terms like “looting” and “riots,” the real story of this past weekend was not the behavior of people on the streets protesting police violence. It was a story of numerous local police departments, emboldened by a wannabe fascist president, turning brownshirt against the ordinary people they are supposedly there to serve and protect. Make no mistake about it: This is a police uprising against American citizens. That’s the true narrative.

As my colleagues at Salon spent the weekend documenting, the police assaulted, arrested, shot and gassed journalists, and even ran over peaceful protesters in an outburst of rage at the public for objecting to unchecked police power. In doing so, they were, egged on by Donald Trump. Police in Minneapolis set the tone by using tear gas against peaceful protesters on Tuesday, and ever since cops across the country have been doing everything they could to shift the headlines away from “protest” to “riots” by attacking protesters until they fight back or turn to property destruction.

Meanwhile, Trump isn’t even bothering to hide that this is is more exciting to him than a fourth trophy wife and a barrelful of Viagra. He kicked things off early by encouraging police violence with a tweet promising “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a direct quote from a notorious Miami police chief of the 1960s. He spent the weekend spooning out more turgid and sadistic tweets cheering on police brutality and calling for “Law & Order” against “Radical Left Anarchists,” even though it was the cops who were roaming through neighborhoods shooting rubber bullets at people who were often doing nothing but sitting on their porches.

Part of this is the unsavory fact that Trump gets off on violent, racist fantasies, even though he’s personally a coward who likes to hide behind others willing to do the hard work of actually assaulting people. Another part of it is that Trump thinks or hopes this is his political Hail Mary, that could distract the voters from 40 million unemployed and more than 106,000 dead from COVID-19.

 
Michelle Goldberg: The de Blasio Disappointment

He began with such progressive promise. Now it’s in tatters.

On Saturday, during the demonstrations sparked by George Floyd’s killing, two New York Police Department SUVs drove into a crowd of protesters in Brooklyn who were pelting them with projectiles. The cars knocked several people over. In aerial footage, the road behind the vehicles was mostly clear — it looked as if they could have backed up instead.

It was one of several scenes of New York Police Department violence caught on video over the last several days. On Friday, State Senator Zellnor Myrie of Brooklyn, who told my colleagues he went to a protest to try to serve as a mediator with the police, was pepper-sprayed and arrested. Video showed a police officer violently shoving a young woman to the ground; she ended up in the hospital. The next day, a cop approached a young black man who was standing with hands in the air, yanked down his mask and pepper-sprayed him. [..]

But late Saturday night, addressing the unrest in New York, de Blasio seemed to see the confrontations almost entirely through the eyes of law enforcement. “I’m not going to blame officers who were trying to deal with an absolutely impossible situation,” he said of the cops in the two SUVs. The next day he called for an investigation into the incident, but praised the N.Y.P.D. for showing “tremendous restraint.” It took him until Monday to forcefully condemn it. [..]

What happened? In part, it could just be a shift in perspective. The mayor has an obvious interest in keeping order, and some of the protests have devolved into looting and vandalism. But in several cases it’s the police who have instigated violence. If de Blasio has been reluctant to call them out, perhaps it’s because he’s been subdued by years of unremitting police hostility.

The mayor’s relationship with the N.Y.P.D. has been poisonous almost from the beginning, and now he’s caught between the demands of his base and a police force whose cooperation he needs. His mayoral legacy, already badly damaged by his handling of the pandemic, is collapsing.

Jennifer Rubin: We saw it with our own eyes: Trump wants to go to war against America

President Trump somehow imagined it was a good idea to unleash law enforcement on peaceful demonstrators before the 7 p.m. curfew Monday night as he stepped into the Rose Garden to give a knockoff version of Richard M. Nixon’s “law and order” message.

The president who called NFL protesters peacefully taking a knee “sons of bitches,” lied when he declared that he is a friend of peaceful demonstrators. The police firing rubber bullets and launching tear gas at protesters in Lafayette Square in front of the White House said otherwise. Then, as if the scene was not evidence enough of his desire to raise the level of violence, he pledged to deploy the U.S. military on U.S. soil, against U.S. civilians, if governors did not heed his incendiary advice to fill the streets with National Guard troops. It was later revealed that Trump instigated the assault on protesters specifically to make a gesture of walking to St. John’s church.

Nothing could be more representative of the dangerous narcissism of a president in over his head, resorting to threats of violence against a country he ostensibly is supposed to lead. The deliberate instigation of violence for his own photo op tells Americans how deeply twisted and deformed his character is.

Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Butler: Policing in the US is not about enforcing law. It’s about enforcing white supremacy

Police treatment of two CNN reporters at a George Floyd protest shows the US has opposite systems of justice – one for white people, one for people of color

On Friday the CNN journalist Omar Jimenez was arrested on live television as he covered protests of police brutality in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Jimenez identifies as African American and Hispanic, and when the cops confronted him, he did just what minority parents tell their kids to do. Jimenez cooperated; he was respectful, deferential even. He said: “We can move back to where you like … We are getting out of your way … Wherever you want us, we will go.”

It didn’t matter; the police officers put handcuffs on him and led him away, and then came back to arrest his crew. Jimenez narrated his arrest as they led him away. His voice is steady. His eyes, though. Jimenez is masked so his eyes are the only clue to what he’s feeling. His eyes are perplexed and terrified. I get it. When a black or brown person goes into police custody, you never know what is going to happen. You just know that when you leave police custody, if you are lucky enough to leave, you will be diminished. That is the point. [..]

But what’s most interesting is what happened to Josh Campbell, a white CNN journalist who was in the same area as Jimenez and not arrested. Campbell said his experience was the “opposite” of Jimenez’s. The cops asked him “politely to move here and there”. “A couple times I’ve moved closer than they would, like, they asked politely to move back. They didn’t pull out the handcuffs.”

It’s a cliche that the US has two systems of justice, separate and unequal, but I prefer the word Campbell used. The US has “opposite” systems of justice – one for white people and another for racial minorities, especially African Americans, Latinx and Native American people.

White progressives love to focus on class subordination (I see you, Bernie Sanders!) but there is something sticky about race. Jimenez’s professional status and calm demeanor did not stop the police from treating him like a regular black dude – the subject of their vast authority to detain and humiliate. They didn’t have an actual reason and they didn’t need one. Jimenez’s dark skin was the offense.

Mark Joseph Stern: The Supreme Court Broke Police Accountability. Now It Has the Chance to Fix It.

George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police officers shows the damage the court has wrought.

The video of George Floyd’s death that emerged on Tuesday is both shocking and distressingly familiar. Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, is lying on the ground as a white police officer pins him to the ground by the neck. We hear Floyd begging the officer to stop, telling him repeatedly: “I cannot breathe.” But the officer does not let up, and his colleagues taunt Floyd as he dies. “You having fun?” one asks. “You a tough guy,” another says. “Tough guy, huh?” After killing Floyd, the officers falsely claimed he had “physically resisted officers,” necessitating their brutal response.

We’ve seen this before, over and over and over again: police officers, usually white, killing black people who pose no threat to their safety. Although we have only recently begun to witness these executions ourselves thanks to smartphones, they are not a new phenomenon. For as long as law enforcement has existed in the United States, white officers have murdered black people. After the Civil War, Congress sought to address the problem by letting victims and their families sue abusive government officials. But the Supreme Court has butchered that law to prevent countless victims of police brutality from seeking justice through one of the only state-sanctioned avenues available to them. At their conference on Thursday, the justices will have an opportunity to begin unraveling the catastrophic case law that allows so many officers—including, apparently, Floyd’s killers—to murder civilians with impunity. The court has an obligation to fix what it broke.

Robert Reich: Fire, pestilence and a country at war with itself: the Trump presidency is over

A pandemic unabated, an economy in meltdown, cities in chaos over police killings. All our supposed leader does is tweet

You’d be forgiven if you hadn’t noticed. His verbal bombshells are louder than ever, but Donald J Trump is no longer president of the United States

By having no constructive response to any of the monumental crises now convulsing America, Trump has abdicated his office.

He is not governing. He’s golfing, watching cable TV and tweeting. [..]

Since moving into the Oval Office in January 2017, Trump hasn’t shown an ounce of interest in governing. He obsesses only about himself.

But it has taken the present set of crises to reveal the depths of his self-absorbed abdication – his utter contempt for his job, his total repudiation of his office.

Trump’s nonfeasance goes far beyond an absence of leadership or inattention to traditional norms and roles. In a time of national trauma, he has relinquished the core duties and responsibilities of the presidency.

He is no longer president. The sooner we stop treating him as if he were, the better.

Charles M. Blow: Destructive Power of Despair

The protests are not necessarily about Floyd’s killing in particular, but about the savagery and carnage that his death represents.

Despair has an incredible power to initiate destruction. It is exceedingly dangerous to assume that oppression and pain can be inflicted without consequence, to believe that the victim will silently absorb the injury and the wound will fade.

No, the injuries compound, particularly when there is no effort to alter the system doing the wounding, no avenue by which the aggrieved can seek justice.

This all breeds despair, simmering below the surface, a building up in need of release, to be let out, to lash out, to explode.

As protests and rioting have swept across the country in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis, it’s evident that America has failed to learn that lesson yet again.

The protests are not necessarily about Floyd’s killing in particular, but about the savagery and carnage that his death represents: The nearly unchecked ability of the state to act with impunity in the oppression of black bodies and the taking of black life.

Jennifer Senior: What Trump and Toxic Cops Have in Common

It’s us versus them.

In his first Inaugural Address, and hopefully his last, Donald Trump talked about American carnage. He got it this week. What we couldn’t have known in January 2017 is that he wasn’t here to save us from this carnage, but to perpetuate it; that incitement wasn’t just a feature of his campaign, but of his governance. When historians look back at the Trump era, they may very well say his presidency was encapsulated by this moment, when a sadistic cop knelt on the neck of an African-American man for almost nine minutes in plain view and the streets exploded in rage.

Derek Chauvin was by no means the first cop to gratuitously brutalize and lynch an African-American. But he embodied something essential about Trumpism: It’s us versus them. That’s the poison ethos at the heart of police brutality, and it’s the septic core of our 45th president’s philosophy. Neither a toxic cop nor Donald Trump sees himself as a servant of all the people they’ve sworn to protect. They are solely servants of their own. Everyone else is the enemy.