"It is not enough to know that there is a shadow government pulling the strings of the visible government- we must also act to expose it, and defeat it!"-Mark Matheny
(Adds interview with organizer of upcoming Pennsylvania protest)
By Michael Martina and Joseph Ax
DETROIT, April 16 (Reuters) - As sweeping stay-at-home orders in 42 U.S. states to combat the new coronavirus have shuttered businesses, disrupted lives and decimated the economy, some protesters have begun taking to the streets to urge governors to rethink the restrictions.
A few dozen protesters, many with young children, gathered in Virginia's state capital of Richmond on Thursday in defiance of Democratic Governor Ralph Northam's mandate, the latest in a series of demonstrations this week around the country.
The protests have taken on a partisan tone, often featuring supporters of President Donald Trump, and critiquing governors whose shelter-at-home directives are intended to slow the spread of a pandemic that has killed more than 31,000 across the United States.
On Wednesday, thousands of Michigan residents blocked traffic in Lansing, the state capital, while protesters in Kentucky disrupted Democratic Governor Andy Beshear's afternoon news briefing on the pandemic, chanting "We want to work!"
States including Utah, North Carolina and Ohio also saw demonstrations this week, and more are planned for the coming days, including in Oregon, Idaho and Texas.
The United States has seen the highest death toll of any country in the pandemic, and public health officials have warned that a premature easing of social distancing orders could exacerbate it.
Trump has repeatedly said he wants to "reopen" the economy as soon as possible and has clashed with governors over whether he can overrule their stay-at-home orders.
In Michigan, where Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer has imposed some of the country's toughest limits on travel and business, some protesters at "Operation Gridlock" wore campaign hats and waved signs supporting Trump.
Whitmer is considered a top contender to be the running mate of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden when he takes on Trump in November's general election.
One of the organizers of the demonstration in Lansing, Meshawn Maddock, said she was frustrated that much of the media focused on a handful of protesters who gathered on the steps of the capitol, including militia group members and a man holding a Confederate flag who she said were not part of the rally.
She faulted Whitmer for dismissing the event as a partisan rally instead of engaging with the thousands of residents who Maddock said have legitimate questions about the governor's stay-at-home order.
"When I'm fighting to (help) a guy who cleans pools or mows lawns, or a women who wants to sell her onion sets or geraniums, I don't care whether they vote Republican, Democrat, or never vote at all," Maddock said.
Maddock, 52, is among seven board members of the Republican-aligned Michigan Conservative Coalition who organized the protest. She is also a board member of the pro-Trump political action committee Women for Trump, but said the Trump campaign had no involvement in organizing the protest.
"The Trump campaign has given me no messaging," she said. "All I know is that I care about Michigan. I've lived here my whole life and I want to help workers get back to work."
She said she had received calls from people in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Virginia and other states asking for advice on planning similar protests.
The political wrangling over the COVID-19 crisis has begun to take on familiar partisan battle lines. Democratic strongholds in dense urban centers such as Seattle and Detroit have been hard hit by the virus, while more Republican-leaning rural communities are struggling with the shuttered economy but have seen fewer cases.
Infowars News September 29, 2018 Owen Shroyer breaks down the supposedly “non-partisan” anti-Alex Jones event in downtown Austin called “Understanding the Rhetoric of Alex Jones and Donald Trump” where Jones himself went to face his accusers and send a message to the Democrats and mainstream media that America is awake and the First Amendment will not be destroyed.
SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS!!! News Mark Matheny September 25, 2017 Mark Matheny and guest Ron Stone discuss the events surrounding the protests in the NFL and more..
“I was given $3,500 to protest Donald Trump’s rally in Fountain Hills,” said 37-year-old Paul Horner. “I answered a Craigslist ad a little over a week ago about a group needing actors for a political event. I interviewed with them and got the part.”
“As for who these people were affiliated with that interviewed me, my guess would be Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” Horner said. “The actual check I received after I was done with the job was from a group called ‘Women Are The Future’. After I was hired, they told me if anyone asked any questions about who I was with or communicated with me in any way, I should start talking about how great Bernie Sanders is.” Horner continued, “It was mostlywomen in their 60’s at the interview that I went to. Plus, all the people that I communicated with had an AOL email address. No one still has an AOL email address except people that would vote for Hillary Clinton.”
A screenshot of the Craigslist ad that Horner says he responded to. The actual ad has since been removed. (Dennis System, File) / ABC News
“I knew those weren’t real protesters, they were too organized and smart,” said 59-year-old Tom Downey, a Trump supporter who attended the rally in Fountain Hills. “I knew there was something up when they started shouting all these facts and nonsense like that. The best we could do was just yell and punch em’ and stuff.” Downey continued, “I think we did a good job though. I was shouting at them the whole time, calling them losers, telling them to get a job or go back home to mommy’s house; I got a bunch of high-fives from my fellow Trump supporters. It was a great time.”
When asked about the other protesters at the rally, Horner said he saw most of them during the interview and training for the rally.
“Almost all of the people I was protesting with I had seen at my interview and training class. At the rally, talking with some of them, I learned they only paid Latinos $500, Muslims $600 and African Americans $750. I don’t think they were looking for any Asians. Women and children were paid half of what the men got and illegals received $300 across the board. I think I was paid more than the other protesters because I was white and had taken classes in street fighting and boxing a few years back”
Sarah Bradley, a spokeswoman for Sock It Forward, a group that provides the homeless and those less fortunate with brand new socks told ABC News that she does not understand why Trump protesters would need to be paid.
“I’ll protest that guy for free,” Bradley said. “Trump is creating a place for like-minded, hate-filled, individuals to gather. You wouldn’t have to pay me anything to protest that.”
Horner said the group had a mandatory six-hour training class that had to be completed before protesting at Trump’s rally.
“During training we were taught chants to shout like ‘Dump Trump’ and ‘Trump Is A Racist’, things like that. We were told how to respond to anti-Trump comments too. If a Trump supporter said something about how great his wall will be, the Latinos in our group would say, ‘We’re just going to tunnel underneath it.’ They even gave me a shirt to wear at the rally which said ‘F*ck Donald Trump’ along with a sign to hold that said ‘Make America White Again’.”
ABC News reached out to Hillary Clinton’s campaign for comment but did not receive a response.
BALTIMORE, Maryland — Racial protests supposed to be peaceful quickly turned into violent riots on Saturday evening, closing down the city of Baltimore for some time—and creating a panic for thousands of people as just 50 miles away elites in Washington partied with President Barack Obama at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Personally, I wasn’t supposed to be on the job tonight as a reporter. After a long news week and as several of my contemporaries lived high on the hog down in D.C. at the so-called “Nerd Prom,” me and my brother left D.C. to go see our Boston Red Sox play the Baltimore Orioles at Oriole Park at Camden Yards I hate the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—it represents everything I think is wrong with Washington, making celebrities out of news media and politicians—and given the fact I grew up just outside Boston I figured seeing the Red Sox play in Baltimore would be a great reprieve from the political culture. Boy was I wrong.
My brother and I arrived in Baltimore just outside Camden Yards about an hour before the game, and went into Bullpen Bar—one of three iconic all-brick building bars right outside the stadium—for a beer before the Sox took on the O’s. I usually make it up here for a game or two every year, and have always found Orioles fans to be pleasant. We’re united in our hatred of the Yankees.
Bullpen Bar sits between Pickles Pub and Sliders Bar & Grill. Outside each of the brick-faced bars, on the days of Orioles Games, each bar puts out barricades about 20 feet from their front doors. Shoulder-to-shoulder crowds of fans from each team—the Orioles, and in the case of Saturday night, the Red Sox—pack into three bars and the barricaded-off space in front before each game. Inside and outside of each, bartenders serve “cheap beer”—or so the $6-per-tall-boy-cans are advertised on big signs—while hotdogs, sausages and other pastime favorites are sold by each and by vendors who set up tents across the street. The blue collar culture—and really friendly people—are what make Baltimore baseball games so much fun, and there’s no better place to kick off an adventure into Camden Yards than here.
But on Saturday night, after my brother and I finished off our beers at Bullpen and began walking across the street to the stadium, planning to make our way to our seats after getting inside, chaos broke out.
Several people across the street from these bars—between there and the stadium, which is less than 100 yards away—were holding signs that said #BlackLivesMatter. They were protesting the death of Freddie Gray, who Agence France Press newswire wrote “died last Sunday from spinal injuries, a week after his arrest in the city’s impoverished west side.”
“In a press conference Friday, officials acknowledged Gray should have received medical help at the moment of his arrest, when he was seen by bystanders — and caught on video — howling in apparent pain,” AFP wrote, providing the background of the simmering tensions in the mid-Atlantic port town. “They also revealed that Gray, contrary to police department policy, was not buckled into his seat in the van, which made at least three unexplained stops on its way to the Western District police station. Gray died Sunday with 80 percent of his spine severed at the neck, lawyers for his family have said. His funeral is scheduled for Monday. Six officers have been suspended with pay as the police investigation inches closer to a May 1 deadline to submit findings to a Maryland state prosecutor, who could decide to press charges.”
All of a sudden—literally as my brother and I walked out of Bullpen—everything went haywire. What were peaceful marchers holding up signs turned into violent rioters. Innocent fans standing by were confronted by the rioters, who physically and verbally threateningly engaged many of them—and then the protesters got even more violent.
All of a sudden, beer bottles and cans, and other projectiles were lobbed by the protesters into the crowds of fans. To get those projectiles, the protesters stole them forcibly from the bartenders and vendors set up outside each of those three bars. One beer can whizzed by my brother’s face, missing him by about six inches, and more flew all over the crowded area.
The crowd of protesters then stopped a blue station wagon carrying a white family as they tried to drive past Pickles, Bullpen and Sliders along a narrow one-way stretch between the bars and the main road. As a horde of them smashed their open and closed fists on the hood of the car—while impeding them by standing in front of them—the driver backed up on the one way pass in a desperate attempt to get out of dodge. Then, stopped on the other side with nowhere to go, protesters ripped open the passenger door of the car and began reaching around inside the vehicle. As hundreds of people looked on, including several police officers who didn’t engage the violent protesters, the white woman in the front seat—middle-aged and a little heavyset with dark hair—was visibly terrified. The group of black men who ripped open the car door suddenly realized they were separated from the larger group of protesters and abandoned their quest to seemingly either carjack the station wagon or rob the people inside in front of hundreds, driving out of the one-way street back onto the main road and presumably out of dodge.
As projectiles continued flying everywhere from each part of the crowd—like a war-zone—another black man then charged into the crowd of Red Sox and Orioles fans standing outside Pickles Pub and tore the metal barricades apart throwing them into the now-crowded one-way pass where the assaulted station wagon was a moment ago.
My brother, at this point, was screaming at the group of five or so police officers. “Why aren’t you doing anything? They’re hurting people! They’re hurting people! They’re violent!” he yelled at them as they continued ignoring him and not engaging or attempting to stop the violence.
I had been trying—unsuccessfully, as I never use my phone for this—to capture some useful videos and photos of what was going on. My reporter gear, including an iPad I specifically use for the purpose of covering this kind of thing, was back in my apartment just outside D.C. and I really never take photos or video with my phone. After I went back through them later, in the middle of the chaos, they all came out blurry and unusable.
Nonetheless, fearing for my safety and for my brother’s safety, at this point I grabbed him and pulled him aside—and said “we need to go, we need to go into the stadium.”
We moved along as fast as we could around Camden Yards to get inside—Orioles officials had closed down several gates that are normally open so we had to go almost halfway around the place to get in—and got through the gate as I Tweeted updates of what I saw and what went down so hopefully other media would pull through and cover the violence that was going on. Well, I’d find out later, of course they wouldn’t—they were too busy praising themselves at Nerd Prom. But my brother and I made it to our seats and hoped it all would be over soon, and the game would go on as planned.
The game started without a hitch, and while fans buzzed and hissed back and forth in discussion about the insanity going on outside, it all seemed to be fine—and mostly under control—so my brother and I went back to enjoying the Sox face off against the Orioles.
As the game progressed, however, the situation outside throughout Baltimore clearly got worse. All of a sudden, several police helicopters took to the skies and fans sitting around us talked about how they got text messages from friends watching the news at home throughout the Baltimore area warning them to get out of the stadium while they still could.
The game was close, and at about 9:45 p.m.—2 hours and 45 minutes into the game—an announcement came over the loudspeaker in the stadium: The mayor of Baltimore, due to a public safety emergency outside, had “asked” everyone inside to stay in the stadium and not try to leave.
The Red Sox had just tied what was a 3-2 Baltimore lead in the top of the ninth inning. It was headed to at least the bottom of the ninth, and perhaps extra innings, so we went to run to the bathroom together real fast and then found the gate right there—E-1—was locked and several Orioles staffers were standing in front of it. I asked one of them if we were allowed to leave, and they said no. We were, along with the 15,000 or so still in the stadium, being forcibly kept there by the Baltimore mayor’s authority. Several people around us lamented that the Orioles should open the bars back up—they stop serving alcohol after the seventh inning stretch—and give out free beer due to the chaos.
My brother and I got back to our seats in time to see the Orioles blow it in the bottom of the ninth and got ready for extra innings. In the top of the tenth, the Red Sox took the lead 4-3 and the Baltimore mayor’s decision to keep everyone in the stadium remained in effect. If the Orioles didn’t exactly tie in the bottom of the tenth—and the mayor’s decision remained in effect—there would be 15,000 people trying to leave who couldn’t. All of a sudden, then, another announcement came over the loudspeaker and on the big screen at the park: the mayor lifted the ban on people leaving the stadium. Thank God, because the Orioles won it in the bottom of the tenth inning with a walk off home run—and right after they hit it, my brother and I bolted out of the stadium and hopped in a Baltimore city cab, which we took all the way back to our apartment just outside D.C. The cabbie told us the protests that were going on all night were “crazy.” After everything that went down, the Red Sox loss hurt much less than seeing a great city–Baltimore–turn into madness.
REUTERS - Thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters marched in French cities on Saturday to condemn violence in Gaza, defying a ban imposed after demonstrators marched on two synagogues in Paris last weekend and clashed with riot police.
French President Francois Hollande said he understood emotional responses to the killing of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in a flare-up of hostilities with Israel but would not allow violence to spill over into France.
"That's why I asked the interior minister, after an investigation, to ensure that such protests would not take place," he told journalists during a visit to Chad.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve justified bans in Paris, the Sarcelles suburb and the Mediterranean city of Nice by saying the security risk was too great, prompting outrage from left-wing and pro-Palestinian groups.
He had asked police in cities to examine security risks city by city and, where necessary, to issue ban orders.
The far-left New Anticapitalist Party, an organizer of last Sunday's rally and the banned one in Paris, urged protesters in Paris to defy the ban, prompting police to issue a warning.
"Those who do not respect the ban, in support of protests or against them, face the risk of being stopped, arrested and handed over to the courts," Paris police said in a statement.
The protesters, carrying placards which read "Rise up against the restart" and "The nuclear era is over," lined the streets around Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's residence in central Tokyo as police watched on, according to an AFP photographer.
The main entrance to the residence was seen guarded by armoured vehicles and barricades of uniformed police.
Organisers quoted in local media estimated turnout exceeded 100,000 people, over double the turnout they estimated at a similar protest last week.
[...]
The demonstration had been called by liberal writers Takashi Hirose and Satoshi Kamata in an online message which spread on Twitter and Facebook in what was likened by a popular tabloid to the "Arab Spring," a wave of protests that topped governments in the Arab world last year.
The crowd blocked off a six-lane road and adjoining streets leading to the Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's official residence in central Tokyo. Police parked five armoured riot control buses in front of the entrance to prevent protesters entering the compound.
Several helicopters circled overhead as the sun went down on a clear, early summer evening.
The protest capped weeks of sporadic demonstrations and was the biggest gathering in central Tokyo since Noda said this month the restart of two reactors in western Japan was necessary to avoid damaging the economy.
All of the country's 50 nuclear reactors were taken off line after an earthquake and tsunami hit the Fukushima nuclear power plant on the northeast coast on March 11 last year, triggering the world's worst atomic accident since Chernobyl in 1986.
Nuclear power had previously supplied nearly 30 percent of Japan's electricity.
The first of the two Ohi reactors operated by Kansai Electric Power Co is scheduled to be reactivated on Sunday.
The crowd, including office workers, mothers with children and elderly people, chanted "oppose restarts" and "exit nuclear power".
The decision to restart the reactors as summer power-cuts loom was seen as a victory for Japan's still-powerful nuclear industry.
But Japanese people have grown wary of nuclear power since Fukushima, with surveys showing that about 70 percent want to abandon atomic energy even if not immediately.
