![]() The broad support for the racial justice protests indicates the issue will not recede anytime soon, putting pressure on lawmakers of both parties to enact police reform. Rather than letting local and state officials deal with the protesters, Trump “doubled down on vilifying a group that had nothing to do with the organization of the protests - not just dog whistling, but calling out his protesters or Second Amendment people to basically get out into the streets and get into the vigilante mode.” But by then, the demands of the CHAZ had ballooned far beyond addressing systemic racism in policing: In an open letter published on June 10, the activists listed several reforms they hoped the city would undertake, including degentrification initiatives, free college programs and investment in community mental health services.Ĭonservative reaction to Seattle’s autonomous zone has a particularly Trump-era undertone to it, Ross said. Over the weekend, Black Lives Matter activists renamed the area Capitol Hill Organized Protest, arguing that the area was not actually aspiring to autonomy or secession. ![]() With no police officers, CHAZ was established. After nearly two weeks of clashes between Seattle law enforcement and protesters - which, at times, included tactics such as tear gas and pepper balls - the police department deployed a drastic de-escalation tactic: They removed officers from the scene and retreated to a perimeter around the zone. These efforts historically have ended quickly after negotiations with political leaders, according to Alexander Reid Ross, an instructor at Portland State University and the author of “Against the Fascist Creep.”īut CHAZ emerged in an altogether different environment, an outgrowth of the recent wave of Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of a black Minneapolis man’s killing at the hands of a police officer. The ideology behind CHAZ dates back to the autonomous Marxist movements of Italy in the 1960s, emerging every so often in Europe among radical leftist movements that attempt to create post-capitalist communes. “We conservatives didn’t realize how far the left had gone towards separating and divorcing us.”Īutonomous zones are nothing new. As a movement conservative, he added, he had given up on trying to find common ground with progressives, blaming them for leaving the right behind and rejecting them. ![]() “What I see is that the left is pretty much setting up a parallel country, a parallel system of law and order and parallel media,” said Neil McCabe, a national political reporter for The Tennessee Star and a former correspondent for the pro-Trump One America News Network. The result is two sides that are increasingly retreating to their respective sides. And Trump - backed by an array of conservative outlets, pundits and far-right groups - has frequently stoked those divisions with fire-and-brimstone rhetoric. ![]() The massive chasm between the two viewpoints shows just how far apart conservatives and liberals have drifted during the Trump era. ![]()
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