The right-wing, white supremacist media is using a tiny protest by black nationalists who oppose the Black Lives Matter movement to smear the Black Lives Matter movement. As of Monday evening, this smear campaign has already reached the network evening news broadcasts on ABC, NBC, and others. CBS Evening News, to its credit, covered the shooting, but not the tiny protest.
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| Picture of four protesters at hospital where the wounded deputies were taken. This screenshot was taken from a YouTube video with the misleading title "#BLM and #Anti-Police protesters outside St Francis Hospital in Lynwood, CA" |
The two deputies were taken to St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, where they are presently recovering from surgery. They are now expected to make a full recovery. Four demonstrators came to St. Francis Medical Center with several red-black-green black power flags to, according to them, “celebrate” the shooting of the deputies. LA Sheriffs reported on this tiny protest with a tweet @ 12:02 AM:
To the protesters blocking the entrance & exit of the HOSPITAL EMERGENCY ROOM yelling "We hope they die" referring to 2 LA Sheriff's ambushed today in #Compton: DO NOT BLOCK EMERGENCY ENTRIES & EXITS TO THE HOSPITAL. People's lives are at stake when ambulances can't get through.
— LA County Sheriffs (@LASDHQ) September 13, 2020
These protesters recorded their activities in a rambling 34 minute video. Their message seemed to be basically “F**k the Police,” and the headliner for right-wing media from the stream was when one protester said “I hope they f**king die!” It appears that that three of the protesters were taken into custody, but then quickly released. One was arrested and charged with “obstruction,” but also released. KPCC/LAist reporter Josie Huang was also arrested for covering the protest.
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| KPCC/LAist reporter Josie Huang being arrested by LA Sheriff deputies “Sure you brought enough guys?” |
She was also charged with obstruction of justice for trying to record the arrest of one of the protesters. She was knocked down, and pinned to the ground by five male deputies. Her phone, which fell from her hand, continued to record. In that recording, she can be heard screaming in pain, and repeatedly saying that she was a reporter for KPCC. It also recorded repeated attempts by deputies to stomp it out of existence, but to no avail. The phone just kept on recording, and we now have the evidence. She was released on bail after five hours, and is still facing charges.
After her arrest, LASD tweeted out a lie, saying she “did not identify herself as press.” Not only can she be heard saying she was a reporter for KPCC in the recording the deputies tried to kill, the protester doing the livestream noted during her arrest that she clearly had a lanyard with her press credentials on it around her neck. Police attacks on journalists covering protests is a growing and dangerous trend. This is especially true for non-white journalists like Huang.
The LA Sheriff's department has a long history of being dominated by racist gangs. From the infamous Little Devils, of the 1970s, to the Lynwood Vikings in the 80s & 90s, on to the skinheads of the last decade, it has been an instrument of racist violence and occupation to the African American communities of Compton and Lynwood. Essence titled this 2018 article "LA Sheriff’s Office, Compton Station, is a White Supremacist Gang Incubator." There are many very good reasons LA sheriff's deputies are despised by members of that community.
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| Matching skull tattoos worn by white supremacist deputies in the Compton station |
Although this small band on protesters made no mention of Black Lives Matter, in fact, never said it once in that 34 minute video of their antics, that didn't stop the right-wing media from using this little band to discredit the Black Lives Matter movement. Perhaps this tweet best shows how this mean little protest is being used to discredit Black Lives Matter, the anti-fascist movement, and even the Democratic Party ahead of the election:
This. This is why the morally-bankrupt #BLM, #Antifa, and @TheDemocrats deserve to
lose this November. You guys don’t deserve any form of power.
— Errol Webber For Congress (CA-37) (@ErrolWebber) September 13, 2020
You’ve shown your true colors, and nothing you do or say can redeem you from blocking the ER and chanting that you hope the cops die.
This small band of protesters were kept off of hospital property and never blocked the entrance to an emergency room as Breitbart alleges, but they did include this tweet in their story:‘F**cking Die’: BLM Activists Lay Siege to LA Hospital Treating Officers Hit in ‘Ambush’ Shooting Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters allegedly blocked the entrance to an emergency room at a Los Angeles hospital early Sunday morning where two police officers were being treated for gunshot wounds after an “ambush”, the sheriff’s office has claimed. More...
Black Lives Matter activists confront law enforcement at Los Angeles hospital where wounded officers were taken after they were shot.
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) September 13, 2020
"To their family: I hope they f**king die.”
pic.twitter.com/bPgatQZYRI
In addition to writing for The Daily Caller, Cheong runs the website https://humanevents.com/. It looks to be a pro-Trump, anti-abortion, right-wing website where "Why Is Dianne Feinstein Helping the Chinese Military?" is the number one story, and its coverage of the GOP convention is titled "A Triumph for the President." On the COVID-19 pandemic, it attacks Dr. Fauci, and themes “Too often, public health has been sacrificed to progressivism.” He is well known in the Internet gaming world for excusing the use of the n-word as a "heated gaming moment." This led Matt Christman, of Chapo Trap House fame, to joke about the Holocaust being ordered by Hitler due to a ‘heated gaming moment.’ It has now become a meme among gamers. In commenting on Cheong's infamous chatlog, Julian Williams says “he basically comes out as a Nazi.”
According to another website he contributes to, he was suspended by Twitter on 13 August “for a tweet that supported law enforcement using force to handle rioters in Portland, Ore.” In response to a video about the protests, Cheong retweeted it with the comment “These abject losers need to eat some pepperballs. Put them in their place. Law and order.” Obviously, he wasn't suspended for very long because now he is back with a vengeance. Lately, he has been focused on attacking BLM. What is not revealed by Cheong's rabid pro-Trump, and anti-BLM tweets is that he lives in Malaysia, and not the US. This makes it even stranger that he doesn't believe in climate change, given how Malaysia is being pummeled by typhoons in recent years.
Black Lives Matter had nothing to do with this tiny protest.
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| Kevin Wharton Price |
This little protest was led by Kevin Wharton Price and his Afrika Town Coalition. This coalition seeks to have Leimert Park black-owned, and renamed “Afrika Town.” On the Africa Town, Los Angeles wordpress site it is described as “A Commercial Real Estate Development in a Cultural Framework.” It goes on to say “Africatown is designed to be a major Southern California tourism destination." This website was established in 2013, and its most recent post is April of this year. Price spells his Afrika Town Coalition with a “k” instead of the “c,” so there is likely some divergence between these two efforts.
I have asked them where they got the video, but have yet to receive a reply. YouTube only shows the date a video was uploaded. Thanks to this site sponsored by Amnesty USA, we can determine the exact time. This video was posted at 12:08 AM 13 Sept 2020, or just 6 minutes after the LA Sheriff's department tweet about the tiny protest, so however they got it, Protester Privilege had some very fast footwork.
Kevin Wharton Price does have his own YouTube channel. with 14 subscribers and 31 videos, Five of those videos are howto make a black power flag, like to ones they brought to the hospital. The most recent video is 10 months old, so obviously, this weekend's videos aren't among them. This raises the question of why didn't he post it to his channel, and increases the mystery about where Protester Privilege got the video.
The other “AFRIKA TOWN Kevin Wharton Price” video posted by Protester Privilege on Sunday, is titled AFRIKA TOWN Kevin Wharton Price Announces His Pleasure in Learning 2 LASD Ofcs Have Been Ambushed, and is less than five minutes long. It was uploaded at 2:10AM on 9/13, so two hours after their first one. Again, they are obviously not supporters, and are only posting these to inflame their audience and attack Black Lives Matter. For this video, they claim “Kevin Wharton Price of the AFRICA TOWN COALITION posted this live stream to his Facebook account." I was able to find two facebook accounts for our Kevin Wharton Price, here, and here. On one, the most recent video was five days ago: LABOR DAY BLOCK PARTY IN AFRICA TOWN, which shows he has been actively using this account recently. At that event he was selling black power face masks.
The other facebook account has videos that are a year old, or older. I was also able to find an AFRICA TOWN facebook page associated with the group, and there I found the original 34 minute livestream. He posted this at 10:53 PM on 12 Sept., Protester Privilege must have found it there, and posted it to YouTube 75 minutes later. Very fast footwork indeed! One of the comments to this video warns:
500+ shares of this video in ten hours?? they gotta be bots, popo's and trump supporters yall. Be VERY Aware ppl..the enemy is present and watching...AT ALL Times!!
On the shorter of the two videos, recorded before they go to the hospital, Kevin Price makes clear his contempt and opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement, so all these attempts to blame BLM for this tiny protest are completely disingenuous. At one point Price says:
"I need the people to get out there and take our f**king streets back, because Black Lives Matter, I got to say, don't own these streets, and these god damn white people that are coming up in here, and pushing us out, and Joe Collins mother-fucker, he ain't got no pass to be coming deep into South Central, I don't even know why he is allowed to come down here to South Central like that, you know. So this is how I'm feeling tonight. One more time.”
FYI: Joe Collins in the black GOP candidate running against Congresswoman Maxine Waters in California's 43rd district.
At another point, he says simply, “Black Lives Matter don't own these streets." BLM has recently been protesting the murder of Dijon Kizzee by LA Sheriff's deputies on 31 August. One effect of the row created by this tiny protest is to completely obscure those ongoing protests. So, assuming those who posted these videos actually watched them first, they know they are lying when they try to pin this on BLM.
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| Demonstrators protest against the shooting of Dijon Kizzee by Los Angeles sheriff's deputies, in Los Angeles, California, U.S., September 1, 2020. Photo by Patrick T. Fallon/Reuters. |
Also, I was able to score a brief telephone interview with Kevin Price in which he repeated three times his opposition to BLM, and once he twigged to my support for BLM, he failed to call me back as promised.
Fox News' Outnumbered led with this story on Monday morning. They spent 13 minutes on it, and while they were careful not to say it was a BLM protest, they tried to imply the association by asking, "don't all lives matter?" They called the deputies' survival “a miracle,” and the tiny anti-police protesters “demonic." Mike Huckabee wondered aloud if the protesters could be charged as accessories to the shooting! Attorney Emily Compagno agreed with him. Where did she go to law school?
Fox News' Lara Logan, who most definitely has an agenda, accused the “agitators” of “trying to provoke a race war,” even though these protesters made no reference to the race of the sheriff's deputies, at least one of which looks Latinx:
“The vast majority of people in this country are still white people, if you look at the population demographics, and if you're targeting white people everyday, then there are going to be more and more people who are afraid...”
The claim that BLM is trying to provoke “a race war” is a common theme among the comments to those YouTube videos. She even had the audacity to imply that the Communist Party of China, and Marxists were behind this tiny protest. Whatever Kevin Price and his little band are, they certainly aren't Marxists!
Expect right-wing media to keep harping on this for a while, and it is up to us to set the record straight. So please tweet this article out, because facebook, so friendly to white supremacists, and neo-Nazis, is refusing posts from Linux Beach, for reasons they have declined to acknowledge. This is important. As one commentator to the videos stated:
Who needs a campaign? these simpletons are presenting the president with another 4 years on a silver platter.
There is a lot of truth to that. Whatever the motives of Kevin Price and his followers are, it's clear that the effect has been to deliver the white supremacists a powerful tool to help re-elect Trump, help them stay in power, and deepen the racist oppression that Kevin Price says he opposes.
Clay Claiborne
UPDATES 14 September: All three shows in Fox News' evening line-up covered this story in detail, and they all blamed Black Lives Matter for the Afrika Town Coalition's tiny protest. Both Tucker Carlson and Hannity led with this story, with Carlson most rabid in blaming BLM. Laura Ingraham didn't get to it till the second half of her show, after her usual COVID lies. Between the looping video of the lone assailant, and the livestream of the Kevin Price protest, they clearly believe they have a story they can use bigtime to discredit the Black Lives Matter movement, and help re-elect Trump. It's up to us to fight back with facts.
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