{"id":10000,"date":"2020-05-31T04:57:54","date_gmt":"2020-05-31T11:57:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=10000"},"modified":"2020-05-31T05:00:51","modified_gmt":"2020-05-31T12:00:51","slug":"america-is-a-tinderbox-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=10000","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;America Is a Tinderbox&#8221;, The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By <span class=\"css-1baulvz last-byline\">Michelle Goldberg,\u00a0Opinion Columnist, May 29, 2020<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>Scenes from a country in free fall.<\/em><\/p>\n<div class=\"css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\">The last two and a half months in America have felt like the opening montage in a dystopian film about a nation come undone. First the pandemic hit and hospitals in New York City were overwhelmed. The national economy froze and unemployment soared; one in four American workers has <a class=\"css-1g7m0tk\" title=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2020\/05\/28\/economy\/unemployment-benefits-coronavirus\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">applied for unemployment benefits<\/a> since March. Lines of cars stretched for miles at food banks. Heavily armed lockdown protesters demonstrated across the country; in Michigan, they forced the Capitol to close and legislators to cancel their session. Nationwide, at least 100,000 people died of a disease almost no one had heard of last year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\">Then, this week, a Minneapolis police officer was filmed kneeling on the neck of a black man named George Floyd. As the life went out of him, Floyd pleaded that he couldn\u2019t breathe, echoing the last words of Eric Garner, whose 2014 death at the hands of New York policemen helped catalyze the Black Lives Matter movement. Floyd\u2019s death came only days after three Georgia men were arrested on charges of pursuing and killing a young black man, Ahmaud Arbery, whom they saw out running. A prosecutor had initially declined to charge the men on the grounds that their actions were legal under the state\u2019s self-defense laws.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\">In Minneapolis protesters poured into the streets, where they met a far harsher police response than anything faced by the country\u2019s gun-toting anti-lockdown activists. On Wednesday night, peaceful demonstrations turned into riots, and on Thursday Minnesota\u2019s governor called in the National Guard.<\/p>\n<div class=\"css-bsn42l\"><picture><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"css-11cwn6f\" src=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2020\/05\/30\/opinion\/sunday\/30Goldberg1\/30Goldberg1-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&amp;auto=webp&amp;disable=upscale\" sizes=\"((min-width: 600px) and (max-width: 1004px)) 84vw, (min-width: 1005px) 80vw, 100vw\" srcset=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2020\/05\/30\/opinion\/sunday\/30Goldberg1\/30Goldberg1-articleLarge.jpg?quality=90&amp;auto=webp 600w, https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2020\/05\/30\/opinion\/sunday\/30Goldberg1\/30Goldberg1-jumbo.jpg?quality=90&amp;auto=webp 1024w, https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2020\/05\/30\/opinion\/sunday\/30Goldberg1\/30Goldberg1-superJumbo.jpg?quality=90&amp;auto=webp 2048w\" alt=\"A demonstrator in Minneapolis injured by rubber bullets during protests Thursday over the death of George Floyd.\" \/><\/picture><\/div>\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\"><span style=\"font-size: 8pt;\"><span class=\"css-16f3y1r e13ogyst0\">A demonstrator in Minneapolis injured by rubber bullets during protests Thursday over the death of George Floyd.<\/span><span class=\"css-cnj6d5 e1z0qqy90\"><span class=\"css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0\">Credit&#8230;<\/span>Carlos Barria\/Reuters<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\">For a moment, it seemed as if the blithe brutality of Floyd\u2019s death might check the worst impulses of the president and his Blue Lives Matter supporters. The authorities were forced to act: All four of the policemen involved were fired, police chiefs across the country <a class=\"css-1g7m0tk\" title=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/crime-law\/2020\/05\/27\/police-chiefs-react-with-disgust-minneapolis-killing-try-reassure-their-own-cities\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">condemned them<\/a> and William Barr\u2019s Justice Department promised a federal investigation that would be a \u201ctop priority.\u201d Even Donald Trump, who has <a class=\"css-1g7m0tk\" title=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.usnews.com\/opinion\/thomas-jefferson-street\/articles\/2017-08-29\/donald-trump-is-the-police-brutality-president\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">encouraged police brutality<\/a> in the past, described what happened to Floyd as a \u201cvery, very bad thing.\u201d<\/p>\n<div class=\"css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\">But on Thursday night, after a county prosecutor said his office was still determining if the four policemen had committed a crime, the uprising in Minneapolis was reignited, and furious people burned a police precinct. (One of the officers was arrested and charged with third-degree murder on Friday.) On Twitter, an addled Trump threatened military violence against those he called \u201cTHUGS,\u201d writing, \u201cWhen the looting starts, the shooting starts.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\">Whether Trump knew it or not, he was quoting a <a class=\"css-1g7m0tk\" title=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2020\/05\/29\/864818368\/the-history-behind-when-the-looting-starts-the-shooting-starts\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">racist phrase from the 1960s<\/a> used by George Wallace, among others. The president later tried to tamp down outrage by saying he was just warning of danger \u2014 the Trump campaign has hoped, after all, to peel off some black voters from the Democrats \u2014 but his meaning was obvious enough. This is the same president who on Thursday <a class=\"css-1g7m0tk\" title=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.buzzfeednews.com\/article\/juliareinstein\/gabby-giffords-trump-dead-democrats-video\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">tweeted out a video of a supporter saying<\/a>, \u201cThe only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\">The Trump presidency has been marked by shocking spasms of right-wing violence: the white nationalist riot in Charlottesville, Va., the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the mass shooting targeting Latinos in El Paso. But even as the country has simmered and seethed, there hasn\u2019t been widespread disorder. Now, though, we might be at the start of a long, hot summer of civil unrest.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\">So many things make America combustible right now: mass unemployment, a pandemic that\u2019s laid bare murderous health and economic inequalities, teenagers with little to do, police violence, right-wingers itching for a second civil war and a president eager to pour gasoline on every fire. \u201cI think we\u2019re indeed in a moment where things are going to get a lot more tense before they get more peaceful,\u201d said the University of Michigan historian Heather Ann Thompson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2016 book \u201cBlood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<div class=\"css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\">Already the Minneapolis protests have spread to other cities. On Thursday night, someone fired a gun near a crowd of demonstrators in Denver and more than 40 people were arrested in New York City. Seven people were shot at a <a class=\"css-1g7m0tk\" title=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/8d411463f159e217fed1f7654f9060a0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">protest in Louisville, Ky.<\/a>, where crowds had turned out to demand justice for Breonna Taylor, an unarmed black woman who was shot by police in her own apartment in March.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\">These demonstrations were sparked by specific instances of police violence, but they also take place in a context of widespread health and economic devastation that\u2019s been disproportionately borne by people of color, especially those who are poor. \u201cSociologists have studied collective behavior, urban unrest for decades, and I think it\u2019s safe to say that the consensus view is that it\u2019s never just about a precipitating incident that resulted in the unrest,\u201d Darnell Hunt, dean of social sciences at U.C.L.A., told me. \u201cIt\u2019s always a collection of factors that make the situation ripe for collective behavior, unrest and mobilization.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\">Keith Ellison, Minnesota\u2019s progressive attorney general, told me that lately, when he goes out walking or running in Minneapolis, he feels a \u201ccoiled sort of anxiousness ready to spring.\u201d Many people, he said, \u201chave been cooped up for two months, and so now they\u2019re in a different space and a different place. They\u2019re restless. Some of them have been unemployed, some of them don\u2019t have rent money, and they\u2019re angry, they\u2019re frustrated.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\">That frustration is likely to build, because the economic ruin from the pandemic is just beginning. In some states, moratoriums on evictions have ended or will soon. The expanded unemployment benefits passed by Congress as part of the CARES Act run out at the end of July. State budgets have been ravaged, and Republicans in Washington have so far refused to come to states\u2019 aid, meaning we\u2019ll likely soon see painful cutbacks in public jobs and services.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\">\u201cWhere people are broke, and there doesn\u2019t appear to be any assistance, there\u2019s no leadership, there\u2019s no clarity about what is going to happen, this creates the conditions for anger, rage, desperation and hopelessness, which can be a very volatile combination,\u201d said <a class=\"css-1g7m0tk\" title=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2020\/05\/29\/opinion\/george-floyd-minneapolis.html\">Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor<\/a>, an assistant professor of African-American studies at Princeton. \u201cI would not at all be surprised to see this kind of reaction elsewhere over the course of the next several months.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\">But if America feels like a tinderbox at the moment, it\u2019s not just because of pressure coming from the dispossessed. On Wednesday, the journalists Robert Evans and Jason Wilson published a <a class=\"css-1g7m0tk\" title=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.bellingcat.com\/news\/2020\/05\/27\/the-boogaloo-movement-is-not-what-you-think\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fascinating and disturbing<\/a> look at the \u201cboogaloo\u201d movement \u2014 \u201can extremely online update of the militia movement\u201d \u2014 on the investigative website Bellingcat. \u201cThe \u2018boogaloo Bois\u2019 expect, even hope, that the warmer weather will bring armed confrontations with law enforcement, and will build momentum towards a new civil war in the United States,\u201d Evans and Wilson write. They add, \u201cIn a divided, destabilized post-coronavirus landscape, they could well contribute to widespread violence in the streets of American cities.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\">The boogaloo movement\u2019s surreal iconography includes Hawaiian shirts \u2014 often mixed with combat gear \u2014 and igloos. (The idea is that \u201cluau\u201d and \u201cigloo\u201d sound like \u201cboogaloo.\u201d) People associated with the subculture had a significant presence at the lockdown protests, but some, motivated by hatred of the police and a love of bedlam, took part in the Minneapolis demonstrations as well. (According to Evans and Wilson, while much of boogaloo culture is steeped in white supremacy, there\u2019s a \u201cvery active struggle within some parts of this movement as to whether or not their dreamed-of uprising will be based in bigotry.\u201d) Ellison told me he saw boogaloo bois holding a flag with an igloo on it at the Wednesday night protest in Minneapolis.<\/p>\n<div class=\"css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\">Most American presidents, faced with such domestic instability, would seek de-escalation. This is one reason civil unrest, for all the damage it can cause to communities where it breaks out, has often led to reform. Change has come, said Thompson, when activists have \u201ccreated a situation where the people in power actually had to act in order to bring back some meaningful public peace.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\">Now, however, we have a president who doesn\u2019t much care about warding off chaos. \u201cIn every other time when protest has reached a fever pitch because injustices very much needed to be remedied, the country ultimately tried to find a new equilibrium, tried to address it enough to reach some sort of peace,\u201d said Thompson. \u201cWe now have a leadership that\u2019s been crystal clear that it\u2019s perfectly OK if we descend into utter civil war.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\">Some of the tropes are familiar, but we haven\u2019t seen this movie before. No one knows how dark things could get, only that, in the Trump era, scenes that seem nightmarish one day come to look almost normal the next.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-158dogj evys1bk0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2020\/05\/29\/opinion\/george-floyd-protests-minneapolis.html\">The New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Michelle Goldberg,\u00a0Opinion Columnist, May 29, 2020 Scenes from a country in free fall. The last two and a half months in America have felt like the opening montage in a dystopian film about a nation come undone. First the pandemic hit and hospitals in New York City were overwhelmed. The national economy froze and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10000"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10000"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10004,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10000\/revisions\/10004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}