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"Online activists exposed the identities of a few white supremacists, leading to charges from local law enforcement due to public pressure. But there have been no felony rioting charges, no charges of guilt-by-association, no police raids, no sweeping investigation." (Photo: ACLU Nationwide/Facebook)
On the morning of President Trump's Inauguration, police trapped and arrested over 230 people. Some were anti-Trump demonstrators; some were not. The next day, federal prosecutors charged them all with "felony rioting," a nonexistent crime in DC. The prosecution then launched a sweeping investigation into the defendants' lives, demanding vast amounts of online information through secret warrants.
Prosecutors eventually dropped a few defendants, like journalists and legal observers, but simultaneously increased the charges against everyone else. The most recent indictment collectively charged over 200 people with felony rioting, felony incitement to riot, conspiracy to riot, and five property-damage crimes -- all from broken windows. Each defendant is facing over 60 years in prison.
The prosecution next obtained warrants focused on anti-Trump organizers. One sought a list of all visitors to a website that organizers used to promote Inauguration Day protests. A second sought information on all Facebook friends and related communications of two organizers, the host of a coalition Facebook page, and those who simply "liked" that page. Despite legal challenges, a court recently decided to enforce the warrants, requiring only that personally-identifiable information be redacted for "irrelevant" material.
This unprecedented prosecution follows a drastic change in local law enforcement's response to protest. The DC Office of Police Complaints issued a report critical of the mass arrest, noting the departure from Standard Operating Procedure and the likelihood that police lacked individualized probable cause to arrest everyone. This is exactly the type of action new policies and statutes enacted in DC were meant to avoid, following a 2002 mass-arrest that caused the District to pay over $10 million in settlements.
Compare this crackdown to the government's response to the pre-planned, armed violence and rioting by white supremacists and private militia groups in Charlottesville, VA. Instead of a sweeping online dragnet to identify organizers who conspired to plan, promote, and carry out violence in Charlottesville-- violence against people, not property; instead of rounding up participants and charging them with felony conspiracy to commit rioting; and instead of charging all the participants as accessories to Heather Heyer's murder, federal prosecutors have done little to nothing. Online activists exposed the identities of a few white supremacists, leading to charges from local law enforcement due to public pressure. But there have been no felony rioting charges, no charges of guilt-by-association, no police raids, no sweeping investigation.
Other riots have gone unchallenged by law enforcement. In 2006, Steelers fans rioted after their team won the Super Bowl, causing over $150,000 in damage (by comparison, prosecutors allege the inauguration defendants caused an estimated $100,000 of damage on January 20 --most of which was attributable to a limousine fire that occurred after the mass arrest. Police charged some Steelers fans with individualized offenses, but no riot charges. In 2015, University of Kentucky basketball fans rioted after their team lost to Wisconsin; once again, some arrests, but no riot charges.
How do prosecutors decide when to dust off the rioting statutes and whom to charge? Apparently, the reasons for the alleged rioting are important. Sports riots are "people letting off steam." Riots by white supremacists evidently occur with no criminal consequences. And why should law enforcement behave differently? Neither scenario threatens the state itself. When people stand in opposition to the government, like the demonstrators did on January 20, the analysis changes; suddenly conduct becomes "rioting," deserving of a lifetime in prison.
This is classic content-based discrimination of freedom of speech and assembly, and selective prosecution; the state cracks down when it disapproves of the reasons why a riot occurs, but holds back when rioters are not responding to state violence and oppression. Notably, the first time prosecutors used the riot statutes in DC was to punish protestors following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.
All this raises the questions--who gets to define "violence," and what of the permissibility of state-sanctioned violence? Does the state not commit violence when it brutally attacks anti-Trump protesters and arrests them without probable cause? Does the state not commit violence by trying to put hundreds of people behind bars for decades? Does the state not commit violence by failing to intervene against armed force exacted by white supremacists? Does the state not commit violence when it protects hate speech and punishes government critics?
Trials for the inauguration protesters begin mid-November and will continue for a year. As media ramps up coverage, do not forget what these trials are about--not rioting, not broken windows, but punishing dissent.
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On the morning of President Trump's Inauguration, police trapped and arrested over 230 people. Some were anti-Trump demonstrators; some were not. The next day, federal prosecutors charged them all with "felony rioting," a nonexistent crime in DC. The prosecution then launched a sweeping investigation into the defendants' lives, demanding vast amounts of online information through secret warrants.
Prosecutors eventually dropped a few defendants, like journalists and legal observers, but simultaneously increased the charges against everyone else. The most recent indictment collectively charged over 200 people with felony rioting, felony incitement to riot, conspiracy to riot, and five property-damage crimes -- all from broken windows. Each defendant is facing over 60 years in prison.
The prosecution next obtained warrants focused on anti-Trump organizers. One sought a list of all visitors to a website that organizers used to promote Inauguration Day protests. A second sought information on all Facebook friends and related communications of two organizers, the host of a coalition Facebook page, and those who simply "liked" that page. Despite legal challenges, a court recently decided to enforce the warrants, requiring only that personally-identifiable information be redacted for "irrelevant" material.
This unprecedented prosecution follows a drastic change in local law enforcement's response to protest. The DC Office of Police Complaints issued a report critical of the mass arrest, noting the departure from Standard Operating Procedure and the likelihood that police lacked individualized probable cause to arrest everyone. This is exactly the type of action new policies and statutes enacted in DC were meant to avoid, following a 2002 mass-arrest that caused the District to pay over $10 million in settlements.
Compare this crackdown to the government's response to the pre-planned, armed violence and rioting by white supremacists and private militia groups in Charlottesville, VA. Instead of a sweeping online dragnet to identify organizers who conspired to plan, promote, and carry out violence in Charlottesville-- violence against people, not property; instead of rounding up participants and charging them with felony conspiracy to commit rioting; and instead of charging all the participants as accessories to Heather Heyer's murder, federal prosecutors have done little to nothing. Online activists exposed the identities of a few white supremacists, leading to charges from local law enforcement due to public pressure. But there have been no felony rioting charges, no charges of guilt-by-association, no police raids, no sweeping investigation.
Other riots have gone unchallenged by law enforcement. In 2006, Steelers fans rioted after their team won the Super Bowl, causing over $150,000 in damage (by comparison, prosecutors allege the inauguration defendants caused an estimated $100,000 of damage on January 20 --most of which was attributable to a limousine fire that occurred after the mass arrest. Police charged some Steelers fans with individualized offenses, but no riot charges. In 2015, University of Kentucky basketball fans rioted after their team lost to Wisconsin; once again, some arrests, but no riot charges.
How do prosecutors decide when to dust off the rioting statutes and whom to charge? Apparently, the reasons for the alleged rioting are important. Sports riots are "people letting off steam." Riots by white supremacists evidently occur with no criminal consequences. And why should law enforcement behave differently? Neither scenario threatens the state itself. When people stand in opposition to the government, like the demonstrators did on January 20, the analysis changes; suddenly conduct becomes "rioting," deserving of a lifetime in prison.
This is classic content-based discrimination of freedom of speech and assembly, and selective prosecution; the state cracks down when it disapproves of the reasons why a riot occurs, but holds back when rioters are not responding to state violence and oppression. Notably, the first time prosecutors used the riot statutes in DC was to punish protestors following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.
All this raises the questions--who gets to define "violence," and what of the permissibility of state-sanctioned violence? Does the state not commit violence when it brutally attacks anti-Trump protesters and arrests them without probable cause? Does the state not commit violence by trying to put hundreds of people behind bars for decades? Does the state not commit violence by failing to intervene against armed force exacted by white supremacists? Does the state not commit violence when it protects hate speech and punishes government critics?
Trials for the inauguration protesters begin mid-November and will continue for a year. As media ramps up coverage, do not forget what these trials are about--not rioting, not broken windows, but punishing dissent.
On the morning of President Trump's Inauguration, police trapped and arrested over 230 people. Some were anti-Trump demonstrators; some were not. The next day, federal prosecutors charged them all with "felony rioting," a nonexistent crime in DC. The prosecution then launched a sweeping investigation into the defendants' lives, demanding vast amounts of online information through secret warrants.
Prosecutors eventually dropped a few defendants, like journalists and legal observers, but simultaneously increased the charges against everyone else. The most recent indictment collectively charged over 200 people with felony rioting, felony incitement to riot, conspiracy to riot, and five property-damage crimes -- all from broken windows. Each defendant is facing over 60 years in prison.
The prosecution next obtained warrants focused on anti-Trump organizers. One sought a list of all visitors to a website that organizers used to promote Inauguration Day protests. A second sought information on all Facebook friends and related communications of two organizers, the host of a coalition Facebook page, and those who simply "liked" that page. Despite legal challenges, a court recently decided to enforce the warrants, requiring only that personally-identifiable information be redacted for "irrelevant" material.
This unprecedented prosecution follows a drastic change in local law enforcement's response to protest. The DC Office of Police Complaints issued a report critical of the mass arrest, noting the departure from Standard Operating Procedure and the likelihood that police lacked individualized probable cause to arrest everyone. This is exactly the type of action new policies and statutes enacted in DC were meant to avoid, following a 2002 mass-arrest that caused the District to pay over $10 million in settlements.
Compare this crackdown to the government's response to the pre-planned, armed violence and rioting by white supremacists and private militia groups in Charlottesville, VA. Instead of a sweeping online dragnet to identify organizers who conspired to plan, promote, and carry out violence in Charlottesville-- violence against people, not property; instead of rounding up participants and charging them with felony conspiracy to commit rioting; and instead of charging all the participants as accessories to Heather Heyer's murder, federal prosecutors have done little to nothing. Online activists exposed the identities of a few white supremacists, leading to charges from local law enforcement due to public pressure. But there have been no felony rioting charges, no charges of guilt-by-association, no police raids, no sweeping investigation.
Other riots have gone unchallenged by law enforcement. In 2006, Steelers fans rioted after their team won the Super Bowl, causing over $150,000 in damage (by comparison, prosecutors allege the inauguration defendants caused an estimated $100,000 of damage on January 20 --most of which was attributable to a limousine fire that occurred after the mass arrest. Police charged some Steelers fans with individualized offenses, but no riot charges. In 2015, University of Kentucky basketball fans rioted after their team lost to Wisconsin; once again, some arrests, but no riot charges.
How do prosecutors decide when to dust off the rioting statutes and whom to charge? Apparently, the reasons for the alleged rioting are important. Sports riots are "people letting off steam." Riots by white supremacists evidently occur with no criminal consequences. And why should law enforcement behave differently? Neither scenario threatens the state itself. When people stand in opposition to the government, like the demonstrators did on January 20, the analysis changes; suddenly conduct becomes "rioting," deserving of a lifetime in prison.
This is classic content-based discrimination of freedom of speech and assembly, and selective prosecution; the state cracks down when it disapproves of the reasons why a riot occurs, but holds back when rioters are not responding to state violence and oppression. Notably, the first time prosecutors used the riot statutes in DC was to punish protestors following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.
All this raises the questions--who gets to define "violence," and what of the permissibility of state-sanctioned violence? Does the state not commit violence when it brutally attacks anti-Trump protesters and arrests them without probable cause? Does the state not commit violence by trying to put hundreds of people behind bars for decades? Does the state not commit violence by failing to intervene against armed force exacted by white supremacists? Does the state not commit violence when it protects hate speech and punishes government critics?
Trials for the inauguration protesters begin mid-November and will continue for a year. As media ramps up coverage, do not forget what these trials are about--not rioting, not broken windows, but punishing dissent.
While acknowledging that "hunger is a real issue in Gaza," the US ambassador to the UN repeated a debunked claim that the world's leading authority on starvation lowered its standards to declare a famine.
Every member nation of the United Nations Security Council except the United States on Wednesday affirmed that Israel's engineered famine in Gaza is "man-made" as 10 more Palestinians died of starvation amid what UN experts warned is a worsening crisis.
Fourteen of the 15 Security Council members issued a joint statement calling for an immediate Gaza ceasefire, release of all remaining hostages held by Hamas, and lifting of all Israeli restrictions on aid delivery into the embattled strip, where hundreds of Palestinians have died from starvation and hundreds of thousands more are starving.
"Famine in Gaza must be stopped immediately," they said. "Time is of the essence. The humanitarian emergency must be addressed without delay and Israel must reverse course."
"We express our profound alarm and distress at the IPC data on Gaza, published last Friday. It clearly and unequivocally confirms famine," the statement said, referring to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification's declaration of Phase 5, or a famine "catastrophe," in the strip.
"We trust the IPC's work and methodology," the 14 countries declared. "This is the first time famine has been officially confirmed in the Middle East region. Every day, more persons are dying as a result of malnutrition, many of them children."
"This is a man-made crisis," the statement stresses. "The use of starvation as a weapon of war is clearly prohibited under international humanitarian law."
Israel, which is facing a genocide case at the UN's International Court of Justice, denies the existence of famine in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Court of Justice for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder and forced starvation.
The 14 countries issuing the joint statement are: Algeria, China, Denmark, France, Greece, Guyana, Pakistan, Panama, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, Somalia, and the United Kingdom.
While acknowledging that "hunger is a real issue in Gaza and that there are significant humanitarian needs which must be met," US Ambassador to the UN Dorothy Shea rejected the resolution and the IPC's findings.
"We can only solve problems with credibility and integrity," Shea told the Security Council. "Unfortunately, the recent report from the IPC doesn't pass the test on either."
Shea also repeated the debunked claim that the IPC's "normal standards were changed for [the IPC famine] declaration."
The Security Council's affirmation that the Gaza famine is man-made mirrors the findings of food experts who have accused Israel of orchestrating a carefully planned campaign of mass starvation in the strip.
The UN Palestinian Rights Bureau and UN humanitarian officials also warned Wednesday that the famine in Gaza is "only getting worse."
"Over half a million people currently face starvation, destitution, and death," the humanitarian experts said. "By the end of September, that number could exceed 640,000."
"Failure to act now will have irreversible consequences," they added.
Wednesday's UN actions came as Israel intensified Operation Gideon's Chariots 2, the campaign to conquer, occupy, and ethnically cleanse around 1 million Palestinians from Gaza, possibly into a reportedly proposed concentration camp that would be built over the ruins of the southern city of Rafah.
The Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) on Wednesday reported 10 more Palestinian deaths "due to famine and malnutrition" over the past 24 hours, including two children, bringing the number of famine victims to at least 313, 119 of them children.
All told, Israel's 691-day assault and siege on Gaza has left at least 230,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, according to the GHM.
"What would the reaction would be if an Arab state wrote this about synagogues and Jews?" asked one critic.
Israel faced backlash this week after its Arabic-language account on the social media site X published a message warning Europeans to take action against the proliferation of mosques and "remove" Muslims from their countries.
"In the year 1980, there were only fewer than a hundred mosques in Europe. As for today, there are more than 20,000 mosques. This is the true face of colonization," posted Israel, a settler-colonial state whose nearly 2 million Muslim citizens face widespread discrimination, and where Palestinians in the illegally occupied territories live under an apartheid regime.
"This is what is happening while Europe is oblivious and does not care about the danger," the post continues. "And the danger does not lie in the existence of mosques in and of themselves, for freedom of worship is one of the basic human rights, and every person has the right to believe and worship his Lord."
"The problem lies in the contents that are taught in some of these mosques, and they are not limited to piety and good deeds, but rather focus on encouraging escalating violence in the streets of Europe, and spreading hatred for the other and even for those who host them in their countries, and inciting against them instead of teaching love, harmony, and peace," Israel added. "Europe must wake up and remove this fifth column."
Referring to the far-right Alternative for Germany party, Berlin-based journalist James Jackson replied on X that "even the AfD don't tweet, 'Europe must wake up and remove this fifth column' over a map of mosques."
Other social media users called Israel's post "racist" and "Islamophobic," while some highlighted the stark contrast between the way Palestinians and Israelis treat Christian people and institutions.
Others noted that some of the map's fearmongering figures misleadingly showing a large number of mosques indicate countries whose populations are predominantly or significantly Muslim.
"Russia has 8,000 mosques? Who would've known a country with millions of Muslim Central Asians and Caucasians would need so many!" said one X user.
Israel's post came amid growing international outrage over its 691-day assault and siege on Gaza, which has left more than 230,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and hundreds of thousands more starving and facing ethnic cleansing as Operation Gideon's Chariots 2—a campaign to conquer, occupy, and "cleanse" the strip—ramps up amid a growing engineered famine that has already killed hundreds of people.
Israel is facing an ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, are fugitives form the International Criminal Court, where they are wanted for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder and forced starvation.
European nations including Belgium, Ireland, and Spain are supporting the South Africa-led ICJ genocide case against Israel. Since October 2023, European countries including Belgium, France, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, and Spain have either formally recognized Palestinian statehood or announced their intention to do so.
"This is unfathomable discrimination against immigrants that will cost our country lives," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
The Trump administration is reportedly putting new restrictions on nonprofit organizations that would bar them from helping undocumented immigrants affected by natural disasters.
The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is "now barring states and volunteer groups that receive government funds from helping undocumented immigrants" while also requiring these groups "to cooperate with immigration officials and enforcement operations."
Documents obtained by the paper reveal that all volunteer groups that receive government money to help in the wake of disasters must not "operate any program that benefits illegal immigrants or incentivizes illegal immigration." What's more, the groups are prohibited from "harboring, concealing, or shielding from detection illegal aliens" and must "provide access to detainees, such as when an immigration officer seeks to interview a person who might be a removable alien."
The order pertains to faith-based aid groups such as the Salvation Army and Red Cross that are normally on the front lines building shelters and providing assistance during disasters.
Scott Robinson, an emergency management expert who teaches at Arizona State University, told The Washington Post that there is no historical precedent for requiring disaster victims to prove proof of their legal status before receiving assistance.
"The notion that the federal government would use these operations for surveillance is entirely new territory," he said.
Many critics were quick to attack the administration for threatening to punish nonprofit groups that help undocumented immigrants during natural disasters.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) lashed out at the decision to bar certain people from receiving assistance during humanitarian emergencies.
"When disaster hits, we cannot only help those with certain legal status," she wrote in a social media post. "We have an obligation to help every single person in need. This is unfathomable discrimination against immigrants that will cost our country lives."
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said that restrictions on faith-based groups such as the Salvation Army amounted to a violation of their First Amendment rights.
"Arguably the most anti-religious administration in history," he wrote. "Just nakedly hostile to those who wish to practice their faith."
Bloomberg columnist Erika Smith labeled the new DHS policy "truly cruel and crazy—even for this administration."
Author Charles Fishman also labeled the new policy "crazy" and said it looks like the Trump administration is "trying to crush even charity."
Catherine Rampell, a former columnist at The Washington Post, simply described the new DHS policy as "evil."