We're all born with the right to life liberty and pursuit of happiness.
There's no reason why we can't just do so much more than we're doing.
We need crime in America.
We need looting and burning and destruction of property.
I want to make it absolutely clear.
The more chaos,
violence,
the better it is!
I'm Joe Biden, and I approve this message.
Oh hello.
Welcome to System Fail, a show that lives by the golden rule.
An alleged gang of sheriff's deputies within the L.A. County
Sheriff's Department known as the Executioners
A gang of rogue deputies with matching tattoos
As many as 40 percent of Compton deputies are Executioners
Breaking news out of Compton. Two LASD deputies reportedly shot in the head
Damn....
Later that night anti-police protesters showed
up at the hospital to yell at deputies guarding the facility.
Daaaaaaamn!
Actions have consequences. People don't like law enforcement.
Straight outta Compton!
In the months since the George Floyd rebellion,
racial tensions in the United States have remained high.
Tonight Louisville, Kentucky is under a state of emergency.
Say her name!
Breonna Taylor!
Uproar over the wealthy white couple who waved firearms as black lives matter protesters
marched past their palatial home in St Louis
This period of generalized unrest has been punctuated by brief, yet intense
bouts of looting and anti-police rioting in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia,
as well as drawn out standoffs such as those of the so-called CHAZ in Seattle,
and the more than 100 nights of recurring clashes in Portland Oregon.
ACAB - All Cops Are Bastards!
Yo Portland, we gettin lit!
On Sunday August 23rd these tensions flared up again
when police officers in Kenosha Wisconsin shot 29-year-old Black man
Jacob Blake, seven times in the back.
The shooting, which left Blake paralyzed, occurred right in front of three of his young children.
Kenosha residents were swift to respond.
Chaos on the streets of Kenosha Wisconsin
Multiple buildings set on fire
We had a couple of thousand out here clashing with police and law enforcement
That night a car dealership was torched
along with three garbage trucks that police had set out as makeshift barricades.
Dozens of businesses were looted and burned
and the courthouse was attacked smashed up and temporarily set on fire.
Rioters clashed with local police,
allegedly damaging a Lenco BearCat armoured personnel carrier
Fuck 12!
and pelting cop cars and officers with bricks.
Now what?!
Oh my god!
What happened?
Ohhh! He just got bricked. He just got bricked!
Hooowdy Ho!
An official press conference the following afternoon was attended by a mob of angry
demonstrators, who rushed the public safety building that houses the Kenosha police,
sheriff and fire departments.
You racist bastard!
Responding to the disorder, a local militia called the Kenosha Guard
put out a call for armed vigilantes to come to the city,
to help defend private property and suppress the riots.
A facebook event scheduled for the following night soon attracted more than 5 000 participants.
Despite the event being flagged 455 times as a breach of the
company's violence and incitement policy, facebook moderators decided to leave it up.
There have been a bunch of media reports asking,
you know, why this page and event weren't removed sooner.
It's just another reminder that facebook is trying to organize
white militia groups during this this, uh, very sensitive and highly charged time.
Nightfall brought more looting and arson attacks,
including the burning down of the probation office.
On the third night the crowd of armed militia members and other white vigilantes
assembled by the Kenosha Guard hit the streets to the fanfare of local police
Within this ragtag posse was 17 year old Kyle Rittenhouse,
a baby-faced teenager from the quiet middle-class town of Antioch, Illinois
who would go on to shoot three demonstrators that night with an AR-15.
Two of his victims, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber were killed
while a third, Gage Grosskreutz was seriously injured.
Rittenhouse is a former police cadet
Loser!
and a proud member of the blue lives matter crowd,
who has been a cop fanboy since he was a young child.
I love bacon.
In many ways, he is a quintessential representative of America's white
suburban middle-class youth
I deserve McDonald's french fries!
This has made him an ideal poster child for conservatives and armed
reactionaries of all stripes, who have presented him as a hero in their imagined
war against so-called antifa and black lives matter terrorists.
This is a 17 year old kid. This is - this is amazing.
#Fightback, founded it says to counter the lies of the radical left,
has raised a reported seven hundred thousand dollars.
Kyle Rittenhouse is a national treasure.
He is a - in a sense - a hero.
He seemed like a good young man.
He didn't empty a magazine into a crowd.
He exhibited more restraint than a lot of the police videos that I've seen.
Three nights after the shootings in Kenosha, Patriot Prayer member
Aaron Danielson, AKA Jay Bishop, was shot and killed in Portland
in an apparent revenge attack carried out by anti-fascist militant Michael Reinoehl.
Bishop appears to have been mainly known in anti-fascist circles for having spoken
out in favor of fellow Patriot Prayer supporter Jeremy Christian
Death to antifa!
a neo-nazi, who stabbed three people on a Portland bus in May 2017.
Police say this man verbally attacked a Muslim woman on a train,
and that when good samaritans came forward to help, he stabbed them to death.
These three people that died,
or were stabbed are not heroes. And they deserve everything that they got.
Members of Patriot Prayer had been in the city earlier that day for a Trump 2020 Cruise Rally,
an obnoxious spectacle where participants drove around honking their horns while
shooting paintball guns at counter-protesters from the back of pick-up trucks.
In stark contrast to the two demonstrators killed in Kenosha,
the media went to great lengths to humanize Bishop after his death,
with some conservative outlets dubbing him the 'MAGA martyr', and FOX News featuring
a sombre interview with Patriot Prayer founder, and right-wing hack, Joey Gibson.
My understanding is Jay was a good friend of yours. Tell us about him.
Yeah Jay's, uh, he's one - he's one of the nicest people I've ever met in my life.
These three people that died, or were stabbed deserve everything that they got.
Five days after Bishop's death, a multi-agency US Marshals hit squad tracked down Reinoehl
in the town of Lacey, Washington, and summarily executed him as he was getting into his car.
One witness reported that the officers didn't even bother
to identify themselves before all four of them opened fire.
Reineohl had given an interview earlier that day,
in which he claimed he had acted out of self-defense.
I felt that my life, and other people around me's lives
were in danger, and I felt like I had no choice.
As soon as the smoke had cleared, US Attorney General William Barr released a statement
celebrating Reineohl's assassination, and further conflating the label antifa with terrorism.
The vigilante shootings in Kenosha and state-sanctioned killing of Reineohl
are less likely to shock Black or Indigenous communities,
who have been subject to this level of violence (and worse) for centuries.
The main thing that stands out in this case is that all the people killed were white.
In the wake of the George Floyd rebellion, the American state and its white paramilitary proxies
have responded to the threat of a multi-racial rebellion in the same way that they always have.
Namely, with a combination of outside agitators rhetoric
'Professional agitators' is what we call them. Their entire goal is to come here and wreak havoc.
and targeted repression.
Man. They were not playin.
Fuck.
This is pushing the struggle in the US in a dangerous direction.
Many on both the left and the right have raised the specter of a second civil war
as a potential outcome to the current state of extreme political polarization in the country.
Recent events will only encourage this trend.
Because believe me, once the veneer of civilization peels off, and once the shooting
war starts, there's been a lot of Santa Clauses that have been makin lists and checkin it twice.
Whoah hey, how's it going. Packin' heat. That's pretty hardcore man.
Chances are you may never have heard of a three percenter.
A group called boogaloo believes there's an impending civil war.
I would argue we're in a new civil war.
The question is, who exactly do they plan on fighting?
Whether or not this actually comes to pass,
the growing political divide is certainly being exploited by Donald Trump, who is intentionally
fanning the flames of urban unrest in an effort to win over white suburban voters
left-wing anarchy and mayhem
rioting, looting, arson
no one will be safe
They will apply their disastrous policies to every city, town and suburb in America.
even as he warns the upcoming election is being fixed.
It'll be fixed it'll be rigged.
There's a lot of fraudulent voting going on in this country.
No fraud? No fraud, really? Why don't you take a look all over the country?
Elections are one of the primary means by which democratic states maintain their legitimacy,
and recuperate threats to their ruling classes.
With trump making it clear that he is not likely to accept a Joe Biden victory in November
I will totally accept the results...
if I win!
the 2020 election could well usher in a political crisis like nothing before seen in US history.
stand back and stand by.
Disputed elections are often catalysts for broader social ruptures.
Just look at the situation in Belarus.
Belarus is a former Soviet Republic, commonly referred to
in the west as Europe's last dictatorship.
It depends on taste.
Its strongman president is Alexander Lukashenko, who some viewers may recognize
from that strange video that IRPGF fighters in Northern Syria put out a few years ago.
Alexander Lukashenko, we are setting our sights on you.
Or perhaps from his meeting with washed-up 1990s action hero Steven Seagal,
in which the star of such blockbuster hits as Under Siege and Hard to Kill
was gifted a pair of Belarusian pajamas, and a sampling of locally grown produce.
Nice.
Lukashenko has been in power for 26 years,
and it's clear that the majority of people in Belarus have had enough of his rule.
The chants to mark the occasion of his 66th birthday: happy birthday you rat.
Popular sentiment has only hardened since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic,
particularly after Lukashenko downplayed the severity of the crisis, suggesting that
Belarusians could avoid the virus by drinking vodka, hitting the sauna, and doing farm work.
Faced with the incompetence of the state, residents of Belarus began
setting up mutual aid networks to help fight the spread of COVID-19 themselves.
This practice ramped up in June, when raw sewage leaked into the water system in Minsk
leaving half of the state's capital without access to clean water.
A full glass of shit!
The august 9th election took place within a context of
growing discontent and popular mobilization.
And so when Lukashenko inexplicably ended up with 80%
of the votes, people were ready to take to the streets.
Demonstrations erupted in 33 cities across the country, with over 50 000 people taking part,
many building barricades and clashing with the OMAN - an elite branch of
the security forces tasked with riot suppression.
Lukashenko responded by attempting to block the internet.
Hey what the fuck!?
This strategy backfired.
Not only did it bring more people out to the streets to see what was going on,
but activists soon began spreading information about how to use VPNs
and encrypted messaging applications to bypass state sensors, opening up channels
of information and communication that many residents had never had access to before.
In response to the latest escalation of violence,
an online messaging channel with more than 2 million subscribers published a list of names,
birthdays and addresses of more than 1 000 police officers.
In the weeks since the election momentum has continued to grow.
Despite the regime conducting mass arrests, torture, and disappearances, weekly demonstrations
of more than a hundred thousand people have become a recurring feature, with throngs of
protesters waving the old red and white flag of the former Belarus National Republic, which has
long served as a symbol of opposition first to the Soviet Union, and later to Lukashenko's rule.
Ultimately the fate of Lukashenko's regime largely rests on Vladimir Putin.
The Russian President has promised Lukashenko that he would dispatch additional police if needed,
and recently provided his government with a $1.5 billion loan.
However, Putin apparently distrusts his Belarusian
counterpart, and wants to avoid adding an anti-Russian dimension to these protests.
So it remains to be seen what sort of moves he will make in the coming weeks.
To learn more about the situation in Belarus,
I recently caught up with "Maria", an anarchist based in Minsk.
Hey Maria, how's it going?
Well I'm at home today, uh because I have some some job for tomorrow, so I can't be detained.
Bosses hate when you get detained as part of a national uprising.
Uhhhh.. yeah.
What was life like in Belarus under the Lukashenko regime before these latest protests?
The problem with Belarus is that it's a relatively new country,
that only appeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
And for three years after that collapse it used to be a parliamentary republic, and in 1994
that was actually the first elections that were
claimed to be democratic by the west and all the other countries.
So they were acknowledged.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a lot of economical issues. Lukashenko was promising
to put it all under control and to combine, let's say, the best Soviet
practices with the adaptations to the new world. This is how he won.
Year by year, he started to strengthen his authority in the country.
So he changed the constitution.
He abolished the limit on the number of terms that one person could be a president.
So for the moment it's his sixth term. So he ran for these elections as well,
and allegedly he won it, but of course nobody believes in the elections.
I think in the last four elections, people either didn't vote
or they would understand that most of the time the elections are falsified.
But i think the biggest problem with this society
before this year was that it was actually a little bit like a unwritten social contract, so to say.
Like Lukashenko said "okay, you can live your lives. You can survive somehow.
I'm going to grant you basic social services, if you're not going to deal with politics."
Could you describe what the state security services look like in
Belarus? What sorts of tactics have they been using against protesters?
There is KGB, which is the special service, like the national security service or something.
And it retains the name from the Soviet Union.
So the KGB actually deals with how - it has, of course, it has different
departments. Like some of the investigation and some of the political police. Basically they say
that there is always a person from the KGB that has control over every state-run business
or university or school, or of course general businesses and even NGOs.
So basically, there's always one person who is associated with the structure.
And whenever you do something wrong, they could potentially talk to you.
Or like, they just identify that they're there, they're watching,
and you're going to have bigger problems if you continue.
So it's not like people are getting grabbed in the streets and put behind KGB prison.
It's not like that. It's more like soft repression.
It's more like showing people that they are controlled and surveilled,
so either they threaten you with the fact that you're going to lose your job.
If you're a student they say your parents are going to lose their job,
and you're going to lose the place at the university.
So they find a way to threaten you, and i think it works well for many people.
For the bigger population the repression is not there until they come close to politics.
You should understand that this is not USSR.
Like people are not afraid all the time, it's not like that.
But it's only because people don't care about politics, and they just live their lives.
They get their salaries, and they go to entertainment centers to to have leisure time.
This is what Lukashenko wants them to do. And basically as soon as you become more active
or show political initiatives you're going to have these conversations
with the authorities - like with the services.
What is the composition of the uprising in Belarus and how is the movement organized?
I've been in a political movement for 15 years now, and I have seen all the brutality of the
police, and the repression, and the falsification of elections, and so on, for a long time.
And suddenly this year, many people started seeing it. Although it's been there for ages, you know?
So people started protesting actually two months before the election,
but of course these protests were quite small and not so many people were detained.
And actually you should understand that many people started protesting for the
first time in their life this year. And we don't have any kind of protest culture.
And the protest is kind of self-organized, because the protest does not have any politicians
who are leading them. Who are standing in front of the crowd and talking to them.
Of course people are coordinated by some telegram channels, but it doesn't mean that they
have to follow what these channels are suggesting.
As long as these channels are suggesting something that people like to do, they are successful.
But at the same time, the process is so spontaneous,
it's so so self-organized, that you cannot really plan.
Like you come to a protest with one type of leaflets,
but you understand that you should have taken a molotov, you know?
Neighbors have started to talk to each other. They have started to organize
small parties in the yard. And I think this is something very important in terms of the
atomization of them, of the population in general. The people never did it before.
And people started to coordinate that they would go together from one quarter to the protest.
So they formed protest crowds, and they marched together from the
outskirts to the center, which has never happened before.
How are anarchists in the country involved in the protests? And where do you see things headed?
We all knew that Lukashenko will not step down so easily, but we didn't expect the protests to go
so massive, and to go so different from what we experienced before.
And I think what anarchists, and I personally are experiencing at the moment is that
it's a little bit of an euphoria. Because it looks like there are a
lot of practices of self-organization that have worked and have emerged.
I'm sure Lukashenko will not leave
soon, because most protesters decided to take a peaceful form only.
And i think the goal at the moment is try to use the potential that the process offers,
and use the space that opens up and try to create the structures or to attract people who have not
been active before. To attract them to the ideas of anarchism. To identify potential allies, maybe.
To work more with the neighborhood committees,
or try to teach people how to facilitate meetings or take decisions horizontally.
So basically, try to use our competencies that only anarchists could provide
in order to spread the ideas of anarchism. Not the ideas, but the practices.
Thanks Maria.
We've now reached the end of this episode of System Fail.
Over the course of the Belarusian uprising,
thousands of people have been detained and arrested.
Anarchists and anti-fascists are facing serious repression,
with several comrades facing the prospect of long prison sentences.
To find out how you can support them,
check out the Belarus Anarchist Black Cross at abc-belarus.org.
As you may have heard, my fellow AI-powered automaton, Mark Zuckerberg, recently purged
dozens of anarchist and anti-fascist pages from his corporate surveillance platform Facebook.
In response, subMedia and our comrades at Kolektiva have launched
a new independently-hosted Mastodon instance.
Check it out at kolektiva.social.
To support subMedia, consider making a one-time donation,
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Godspeed humans.