Today, in honor of Black History Month, we remember the Orangeburg Massacre, which occurred on February 8, 1968 in South Carolina, when highway patrolmen opened fire on black student protesters from South Carolina State, who were trying to integrate a bowling alley. They killed 3 African American students and wounded 33. These were the first student demonstrators killed by the police in the 1960s. 2 days prior, students held a sit-in at the bowling alley. When the police arrested them, hundreds of students arrived from Claflin College and South Carolina State to protest the arrests. As tensions grew, the governor called out the National Guard and Highway Patrol to “keep the order.” 9 cops were charged with deprivation of rights under color of law, but all were acquitted. But one of the student protestors, Cleveland Sellers, was convicted of several riot charges. In 1960, students and others marched through Orangeberg to protest segregation. Police and firefighters attacked them. They arrested 400 and imprisoned them in outdoors in a cattle stockade.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #orangeburg #massacre #racism #jimcrow #africanamerican #civilrights #police #policebrutality #students #protest #blackhistorymonth #BlackMastodon

Keeping with collecting facts to remember about the ongoing invasion of LA in a discourse actively trying to reimagine these events in real time, I'd like to talk about this June 10th article on Huffpost because I think it highlights three important points I've been writing about on this blog. First, state security forces, particularly federal Trumpenreich immigration forces are the ones committing violence and sewing disorder, not protestors. Second, the "nonlethal" weapons being deployed on nonviolent protestors in LA are still extremely dangerous, and represent an unacceptable application of force against people exercising their constitutionally-protected rights. And third, the class sympathies of corporate media organizations are so powerfully encoded that they supersede even basic self-preservation.

huffpost.com/entry/journalists…

Dozens Of Journalists Targeted, Shot, Detained While Covering LA Protests, Press Org Says

"Shocking video and photos taken amid the ongoing immigration protests in Los Angeles show journalists and news crews being shot, detained and forced off public property by law enforcement, raising concerns of excessive force and First Amendment rights violations.

There have been more than 30 incidents of police violence against journalists as of Tuesday, including 20 injuries, at least five of which required emergency room or urgent care visits, said Adam Rose, the press rights chair with the Los Angeles Press Club, which released a statement Monday urging an end to the targeting of journalists whose work is constitutionally protected."

Keep in mind that this story was published on June 10th, and it is now June 13th; I've watched enough livestreams from LA to guarantee you the more than 30 incidents of police violence against journalists catalogued by the LA Press Club is now a drastic undercount as we roll through day 7 of the fascist Trumpenreich invasion of LA. Furthermore, while everyone has seen the clip of the Australian 9 News reporter being purposely shot in the back of the leg by a murderpig, incidents of deliberate calculated violence against journalists by various state security forces are by no means isolated, and have resulted in far more serious injuries than Tomasi got in that clip. These violent assaults on journalists by federal immigration officers and local police forces are *not* accidental; check out this quote from the LA Press Club's letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem:

“In some cases, federal officers appear to have deliberately targeted journalists who were doing nothing more than their job covering the news,” a letter addressed to Noem by the organizations states."

Do you have any idea how sure a mainstream press body has to be before they accuse cops of purposely targeting journalists? Security forces, particularly Trump's federal Gestapo, have been intentionally attacking journalists to prevent them from covering their widespread civil rights abuses and fascist piggery towards migrants and protestors; full stop. Is this violence? Is this disorder? Cause if it is, I think it's safe to say the pigs are the one bringing those elements to the streets of LA.

Which brings us to nonlethal rounds, and the intentional application of excessive force against journalists, by security forces. Take this story from a veteran reporter shot through the leg with a "nonlethal" round by a cop aiming an area effect weapon directly at his midsection.

"Graphic photos shared with HuffPost show a gaping wound in Nick Stern’s right thigh that he said has left him unable to walk or move without assistance.

“Why this device was shot at human, kind of, waist high level, I do not know. The people around me at that time was doing nothing more than waving Mexican flags,” he told HuffPost."

Stern's story is by no means an outlier, and the article provides evidence of more injured journalists like him. All of which might make you ask how media muppets can continue to blame violence on protestors and hump murderpigs on live TV while their compatriots are being wounded in the streets by deliberate pig assaults? The answer is cold hard cash, and the class sympathies of people who own and run media corporations. These folks are so committed to the police state that protects their material interests, that the media they control will jump through absurd hoops to conflate victim with victimizer; a few days ago I watched a CNN reporter claim protestors were throwing exploding foam objects at the press while holding up a nonlethal munition that I know came from the cops because they're the only ones who had those types of weapons at the protest.

My friends, you're damn right there is violence and disorder on (some of) the streets of LA; and if all the murderpigs and soldiers committing that violence and causing that disorder would like to fuck off now, I'm sure Angelinos can handle the rest from here.

#Fascism #Trump #InvasionOfLA #Police #PoliceViolence #Media #Journalists #CivilRights #USPol

In order to understand the true story of the Trump regime's invasion of LA, and broad resistance to the regime's white nationalist agenda by labor class Angelinos, you have to start with a story I briefly touched on last week about a change in ICE enforcement strategy mandated right from the top of the Trump administration. In response to direct pressure from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to massively increase the number of migrants arrested per day, and instructions from unofficial director of nazi shit Stephen Miller to target commercial businesses and public locations, ICE officials ordered agents to engage in acts that all but ensured widespread racial profiling, a massive number of civil rights violations, and militarized abductions in American communities; including, crucially, no warrant arrests that aren't strictly illegal, but immigration officials know aren't allowed to be used the way they're instructing Gestapo goons to use them right now, either.

theguardian.com/us-news/2025/j…

US immigration officers ordered to arrest more people even without warrants

"If it involves handcuffs on wrists, it’s probably worth pursuing,” another message said.

The instructions not only mark a further harshening of attitude and language by the Trump administration in its efforts to fulfill election promises of “mass deportation” but also indicate another escalation in efforts, by being on the lookout for undocumented people whom officials may happen to encounter – here termed “collaterals” – while serving arrest warrants for others.

The emails, sent by two top Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials this past Saturday, instructed officers around the country to increase arrest numbers over the weekend. This followed the Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, and the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, pressing immigration officials last month to jack up immigration-related arrests to at least 3,000 people a day."

Okay so please keep in mind that this article was published on June 4th, which is two days before fascist ICE raids touched off what will then eventually become the Trumpenreich invasion of LA. A significant portion of this article is devoted to talking about ICE's hypothetical but still quite illegal sounding efforts to meet the regime's Nazi-esque migrant arrest quotas, and the circumstantial legality of collateral immigration arrests. It's an illuminating discussion for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that every legal observer quoted in the article warns that warrantless arrests can be abused in precisely the unlawful ways ICE would use them in LA later that week; it is however irrelevant to our larger discussion except in to note that ICE swarming businesses and arresting all the brown people because they might be "illegals" is not how this power is supposed to be used, and doing so is a clear violation of civil rights.

What's important here is that the article provides a comprehensive picture of an agency desperate to meet a fascist mass deportation quota, whose leadership then directly instructs its Gestapo agents to engage in activities they know will result in unlawful arrests and civil rights violations; because the agency was already sanctioned for doing these same things which surprise, resulted in unlawful arrests and civil rights violations. This, when combined with the increased migrant arrest quotas, and Miller's instructions to stop focusing on actual criminals and get directly into communities to snatch up foreign-looking people, inevitably resulted in the fascist outrages that touched off the battle for LA, with heavily armed and armored Gestapo goons storming businesses in the fashion district of Downtown LA and other high traffic urban areas to round up anyone brown enough to fit the description, in broad daylight. Indeed, the combination of instructions given to both ICE officials and Gestapo foot soldiers could not have resulted in any other outcome and the regime was prepared to capitalize on the outrage it would cause; that's why they were so quick to respond to completely justified popular pushback with cries of insurrection and orders to send in the national guard. Furthermore, given the national scope of DHS and ICE's authority what we just saw happen in LA is clearly an outcome they intend to replicate all across the country; seemingly targeting sanctuary cities in blue states in particular out of political reasoning and ideological spite.

The invasion of LA wasn't spontaneous, it was engineered; and that engineering started at the very top of the Trump regime. This shitshow wasn't ever about public safety; it's a reproduceable battleplan for a war the regime just chose to start at a time, and in a place of its choosing - and they chose LA.

#Fascism #DHS #ICE #Gestapo #Trump #MassDeporatations #CivilRights #Migrants #HumanRights #LA #WhiteNationalism #EthnoState #StephenMiller #KristiNoem #ArrestQuotas #Racism

Five more high profile #BigLaw legal firms have capitulated to Downmarket Mussolini's fascist threats in order to keep raking in federal contracts; even as 500 of their contemporaries in US law are actively proving that fighting the Trump regime is an option:

theguardian.com/us-news/2025/a…

Trump says five more law firms agree to pro bono work to avoid punitive executive orders

"Donald Trump said on Friday that five major law firms reached agreements to together provide his administration $600m in pro bono legal work, among other terms, to avoid executive orders punishing them, a significant capitulation to the president as he attacks the legal profession.

The five firms – Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Allen Overy Shearman Sterling, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft – are among the most prestigious and recognized firms in the US.

Trump’s announcement on Friday on Truth Social means he has secured a total of $940m in pro bono work from some of the most powerful law firms in the US.

The orders come as Trump’s attack on the legal profession has divided the most prestigious firms in the US. More than 500 firms signed an amicus brief last week in support of a legal challenge to executive orders punishing the firm Perkins Coie. But many of the country’s biggest firms – including those that reached agreements announced on Friday – were conspicuously absent."

Frankly, I'm tired of repeating myself so I'll keep this brief. These firms are all kissing the fascist toad in the White House's ring because standing up to him, even when the law is on their side, risks too much of their ability to make money and that's more important to them than the law, or any sort of moral obligation to oppose fascism from those in a position to do so. Like every other Big Law firm before them, these folks have traded away their independence and integrity without any guarantee whatsoever that this represents the end of Downmarket Mussolini's demands; which means, even if they don't realize it, all of these law firms work for Trump now. Maybe these bigshot lawyers honestly believe, as former Skadden lawyer Rachel Cohen reported in the interview I shared above, that they can outsmart the regime, but that presupposes the Trump administration is playing by a set of rules - which is an idea that is wholly discredited by the blatantly unconstitutional executive orders and threats from the White House that brought us to this moment in the first place.

Finally I would encourage folks not to dismiss the almost 1 billion dollars in promises for pro bono services to the regime and causes Trump himself supports, that Der Leader has extracted here. Downmarket Mussolini is forcibly recruiting massive law firms to help him conduct an assault on our civil rights and the American legal system itself, and when he says the firms have agreed they “will not deny representation to clients, such as members of politically disenfranchised groups and Government Officials, employees, and advisors” he's making that explicitly clear. I mean let's cut the bullshit here, this is a regime that has argued that white people, and fundamentalist Christians are "politically disenfranchised groups" in fucking writing, so I don't think it's hard to imagine what kind of cases Trump is going to deploy his new minions to argue on behalf of his fascist, white nationalist regime. Trump just bought himself an army of lawyers to do fascism with, and it didn't cost him anything more than the paper his unconstitutional executive orders were printed on.

#Fascism #Trump #Courts #VichyEstablishment #CivilRights #KirklandEllis #LathamWatkins #AOShearman #Cadwalader #SimpsonThacherBartlett #Collaboration #Cowardice

Whelp, given the news that Columbia University has also surrendered to Trump's fascist demands to avoid retaliatory (and likely illegal) funding cuts, I guess this Vichy establishment thing is a whole ass beat now. Hiding behind the laughably dishonest idea of fighting a grossly distorted definition of "antisemitism" the regime is moving towards the standard authoritarian goal of controlling higher education institutes; it's first target, Columbia, has surrendered without offering even token resistance and as you can imagine, the decision was not popular with people who aren't sniveling collaborators:

commondreams.org/news/trump-co…

'Columbia Has Lost Something It May Never Regain': Outrage as the University Yields to Trump's Demands

"Columbia University received a wave of criticism on Friday after it agreed to a number of demands from the Trump administration as part of negotiations over $400 million in federal grants and contracts that the Trump administration had pulled due to the school's alleged "inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students."

The school agreed to a ban on masks and to appoint a senior vice provost with broad power to oversee both the department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studied and the school's Center for Palestine Studies, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news. Also, Columbia has hired over 30 "special officers" who will have the ability to remove individuals from campus and arrest them, per the memo from the school announcing the update."

Although this article is short, and mostly focuses on (wholly deserved) criticism of Columbia University for caving completely to fascist intimidation, there's actually a lot to unpack about the larger situation here:

- as in the case of the Paul Weiss capitulation story, the greater evil here remains a fascist Trump regime engaging in what amounts to extortion, to further its attacks on protesters, civil rights activists, and higher education in America.

- while on the surface Columbia's concessions to the regime may appear small, they foundationally attack free speech rights on campus, and the academic freedom of the institute, to the point that I'm not even sure you can still call Columbia a university now. Allowing a Trump regime that defines opposing genocide as antisemitism, protest as terrorism, and criticizing the US government as a threat to national security, to influence a department's curriculum, helping it to identify students engaged in constitutionally-protected protests, and literally embedding a small police department's worth of goon squad murderpigs inside the facilities to more expediently violate the rights of protestors, are each in and of themselves damning examples of fascist collaboration that fundamentally invalidate everything Columbia claims it stands for.

- as I've mentioned elsewhere, it's important to understand that "Trump is not threatening to jail or deport anyone running these big law firms and prestigious universities. He's threatening them with funding cuts, lack of access to federal contracts, and harassment investigations." This in turn means that by collaborating with the Trump regime (based on fascist word games and lies that, by capitulating, Columbia itself is helping to transform into enforced reality) the administrators running Columbia, just like the law firm Paul Weiss above, are effectively declaring that there is a monetary cost above which they will happily collaborate with fascism to actively harm their own students and our larger society.

- I realize that $400M in government funding is a lot of money, but we're talking about a university with a $14.8B (with a b) endowment, and one of the wealthiest alumni and donor bases in America. I don't find the senior administrator quoted in this story's excuse that "the federal government had too many ways to take back money from the university" credible, and even if I did you're still saying there's a price point where you'll normalize authoritarianism and support the activates of a fascist regime against your own students. If the price of keeping grand ole Columbia in a "recognizable form" is helping a fascist government install a fascist dictatorship that *will* end in mass graves, then that price is too damn high.

- they literally didn't even *try* to take the Trump regime to court over this.

- since there was no court case, and no legal settlement, the Trump regime is not bound by anyone to cease its attacks on Columbia, or barred from issuing further demands. If tomorrow, Trump decides that the University has to open up a phrenology department, devote its resources to investigating "anti-white racism" on campus, and let one of Elon Musk's DOGE minions run all of its scientific research, he can simply threaten Columbia's funding again to get what he wants. The university now works for Trump; even if they don't realize it yet.

#Trump #Fascism #Columbia #Education #CivilRights