You've heard our President's grandstanding about the "thousands and thousands of heavily-armed soldiers" he planned to sic on protestors, not long after using rubber bullets and tear gas on protestors in D.C. so he could do a photo op holding a Bible in front of a church. And our President also deployed a thousand "mystery troops" in our nation's capitol who would only say they were with the Department of Justice! Nothing to see here, amirite? But the fact is, our Governors have also put National Guard troops in our streets, supposedly to stop violence, but we all know that some of these looters we've been hearing about are agents provocateur out there to make protestors look bad, and, ah, some of these National Guard troops are causing the violence themselves! You could ask David McAtee, shot by National Guard and Louisville police in Kentucky a week ago and left in the street for half a day, except he's dead now. Win Without War helps you tell your state Governors to pull National Guard troops off our streets now and stop militarizing our public spaces.
Meanwhile, Congress failed to pass a PATRIOT Act reauthorization last week, even though they'd twisted it into the kind of freedom-killing bill they love to pass under the guise of TEH NASHUNUL SECURITIEZ!!!!! Hence we have another opportunity to tell our Congressfolk to pass legislation stopping our government from spying on our internet search and browser histories without a damn warrant, as Demand Progress helps you do. No, really, it's simple: if an Administration can convince a judge to allow law enforcement to snoop on our browser histories and we have no complaints, but they better not do it on their own. And I do appreciate Demand Progress's reminder that our President tried to get the IP addresses of over a million people who committed the heinous crime of visiting a website that opposed him! You know, because someone broke a window on Inauguration Day. You've heard that you shouldn't give government more spying powers because you don't know what a bad government would do with that power? You know now.
In other news, you may have heard the story of Anthony Swain, paralyzed from the waist down and suffering from cystic myelomalacia, who sat in jail for four years until he got the coronavirus like so many other prisoners have. So what did he do? Nothing! Literally nothing, because he hasn't been put on trial yet! That's right, police arrested him on drug charges in 2016, and then the judge set his bail at $650,000, and since like most people he doesn't have $650,000 lying around, he was trapped in prison. This is why we fight cash bail, and sadly, when folks like Philadelphia D.A. Larry Krasner make moderate reforms to the bail system, a lot of police officers complain they can't do their jobs anymore! If your job relies on putting paraplegics in jail for four years without them even getting a chance to face their accusers like it's a damn Kafka novel, then maybe you should get a new job. Color of Change helps you tell Florida's Attorney General to let Mr. Swain out of his damn cage already. You know, before they kill him.
Finally, Fight for the Future helps you tell your Mayors and City Council members to end all partnerships between Amazon and police departments. In the old days we imagined that our government would push surveillance on us, but we welcomed corporate surveillance into our homes willingly! We welcomed Amazon's Alexa into our homes, and let Alexa record our conversations; we bought Ring doorbells, and let Amazon record whatever was happening in front of our homes, and then Amazon developed their nefarious Rekognition (with a "k," how fucking pretentious!) software that can hardly tell black people apart, and now they furnish police departments with that data, warrants be damned. And Jeff Bezos calls himself a libertarian! Of course Amazon is trying to win the PR battle by saying that they, too, believe that black lives matter! Given their record, one could reasonably ask: how about acting like it? And you can do that, by letting Free Press help you tell Amazon to cut its ties with law enforcement, including local police departments and the notorious Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE).
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