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      Eerie quiet in Washington as capital digs in for a tempestuous election night

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      Downtown Washington on election day had the feel of a city digging in for a siege. The White House and the Treasury were surrounded by a high steel fence and in the surrounding blocks, businesses and apartment buildings had covered every square foot of exposed glass with plywood.
      The wealthier and more cautious had laid down sandbags to hold wooden buttresses that in turn held the plywood in place, and the city centre began to empty out in the mid-afternoon. The grid of streets and avenues were eerily free of traffic.
      On Black Lives Matter Plaza, a legacy of the last skirmish in the nation’s capital, an advance guard of the expected army of protesters had taken up positions by the White House fence, which was festooned with anti-Trump placards.

      Derek Torstenson was sitting against the barricade encouraging those around him to vote without fear of intimidation.
      He had crossed the Potomac early from Virginia, as a protective measure. After the confirmation of Donald Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, to the supreme court in October, a moment of triumph savoured by the president, his supporters tore down all the Black Lives Matter posters on the plaza, and Torstenson wanted to make sure it did not happen again.
      “I’m here to protect the fence,” he said. “It’s not just a fence any more. It’s about memories of black people and about Trump also.”
      He saw no way Trump would vacate the building behind him voluntarily and so he expected a battle of popular wills to be played out in the court, and on the streets.
      “I think Joe Biden will win. But Donald Trump always said, live on the news, that he is going to refuse to transfer power. He already has his lawyers around in case that happens, and that’s why we are all going to gather here tonight, so that we can let him know that if you lose – you lose. You can’t challenge an election. That doesn’t happen.”
      A few hundred metres south-east along Pennsylvania Avenue, some more modest barriers had been set up outside the old US post office building which since 2016 has been the Trump International hotel, the other Washington hub of a family empire spanning business and politics with no real divisions between the two.
      Trump International is where foreign dignitaries and US business executives come to stay if they are seeking an audience with the president. It is where ambitious administration officials hold their office parties, helping bolster the Trump Organization.
      In recent months, an opposition group has projected the climbing death toll from coronavirus against the hotel facade and it is likely to be targeted again, as a symbol of the open corruption of the Trump era in the aftermath of the election.
      Trump had been planning to watch the results from the hotel, but he cancelled that plan, instead summoning 400 of his closest supporters to the White House for a party that, whatever the outcome of the election, is bound to become the latest in a string of coronavirus super-spreader events hosted there.
      The White House and Trump International are two outposts in an overwhelmingly hostile city – only 4% of DC residents voted for Trump in 2016 – which are destined to be flashpoints if the battle for power drags on after the election. Depending on how that battle ends, they could provide the setting for Trump’s last stand on the political stage. More

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      ‘Non-scalable’ fence to be erected around White House before election

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      Federal authorities were expected to re-erect a “non-scalable” fence around the White House on Monday, a day before a presidential election many fear may lead to mass protest, civil unrest and even armed insurrection.
      Amid speculation that the election result will not be immediately known and signs Republicans will either declare victory early or mount legal challenges if Donald Trump appears to have lost, multiple news outlets reported the White House plan, citing anonymous sources.
      “The White House on lockdown,” the NBC News White House correspondent, Geoff Bennett, wrote on Twitter on Sunday.
      “A federal law enforcement source tells NBC that beginning tomorrow, crews will build a ‘non-scalable’ fence to secure the [White House] complex, Ellipse and Lafayette Square. Two hundred and fifty national guardsmen have been put on standby, reporting to metro police officials.”
      The barricade will form a square perimeter around the White House, on 15th Street, Constitution Avenue, 17th Street and H street.
      Fencing was put up during the summer, amid national protests against police brutality and systemic racism in the aftermath of the killing by Minneapolis police of George Floyd, an African American man. According to CNN, the new “unscalable” barricade is the same type of fence.
      In the summer, amid protests near the White House at which federal agents confronted and assaulted mostly peaceful demonstrators, it was reported that Trump was taken to a protective bunker under the executive mansion. Trump insisted the visit was brief and for inspection purposes.
      The summer protests also saw confrontations between law enforcement and protesters, and widespread looting, in other major cities. As the election looms, stores in New York, Washington and elsewhere have been boarding up windows in case of trouble.
      Law enforcement agencies are preparing to deploy. Patrick Burke, executive director of the Washington DC Police Foundation, recently told CNN: “If there’s no winner, you will see significant deployments of officers at all levels across the capital.”
      In New York, the police commissioner, Dermot Shea, sent a memo to department members in mid-October, indicating that the majority of officers must report to duty in uniform – and be ready to deploy, including officers not normally in uniform, including detectives. The department said it expected protests could become larger and more frequent into early 2021, NBC New York reported.
      The NYPD has told businesses in midtown Manhattan to ramp up security in the event of mass protests, according to the Wall Street Journal. There and elsewhere in New York City, such as the SoHo shopping district downtown, windows were smashed and stores were looted this summer.
      Curbed noted that other cities, including San Francisco and Washington, saw businesses boarding up windows as a protective measure. More

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      It's not enough for Black Lives Matter to protest. We must run for office too | Chi Ossé

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      Black Lives Matter, the second civil rights movement, was born seven years ago in the wake of the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. It has now come of age. After numerous waves of protest, the 2020 surge marked the largest protest movement in the history of the country. In June, I co-founded Warriors in the Garden, one of New York’s leading protest collectives, and spent nearly every day for months in the streets. This mass mobilization sprang to life following the killings of two more Black Americans, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, at the hands of the police. But the catalyst was not the fuel. Slavery came to our shores in 1619, and has for 400 years defined both the Black experience and the United States. The nation is a powder keg; 2020 lit the fuse.The ensuing explosion has been bright and chaotic, like the final burst of fireworks on the Fourth of July. But powerful explosions, when coalesced, organized and pointed in the same direction, go by another name: a rocket. The protests are not the end but the engine. We are asked where we go from here. We answer that the sky is not the limit, but the direction.There exists a call in the movement to dismantle and deconstruct. Not just racism, but our strongest institutions as well. If for hundreds of years these institutions have served the powerful in quests of oppression, it is argued, then they must be replaced. I choose a more strategic approach, rooted in pride and optimism.The protests are working. Societal opinions of Black Lives Matter have flipped to majority-positive for the first time. As this is still a democracy, we must convert our popularity into political power.Black people built this country. For 400 years, our contributions to its foundations and fabric have been invaluable. Our free labor provided its original riches; our culture brightened its soul; our hard-earned successes gave it a fighting chance to look in the mirror and feel a sense of honest pride.Black people built this country. For 400 years, our contributions to its foundations and fabric have been invaluableWhile the language of the American promise is bold, optimistic, and worth fighting for, our history is more complicated. Our story is one of struggle and perseverance, by progressives against reactionaries, to make true Martin Luther King Jr’s belief that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Changing technology and demographics, combined with society’s long-sought agreement to confront its past, offer this era a glimpse of an end to this fight. At once, the horizon becomes within reach.Over seven years, the Black Lives Matter movement has touched individuals and cities from coast to coast to reshape society. It has illuminated to millions of Americans the suffering of millions of others happening just under their noses. It sparked a re-evaluation of our history and heroes. It shone a spotlight on a swath of artists and leaders who had labored unrecognized for too long.Through this movement, many people – of good intentions but often under-informed – were made aware of their complacency and complicity in grave injustices, and committed to alleviating them. Black Lives Matter has awakened America.There is a belief in this country that a “silent majority” of Americans are conservatives, opposed to progress and loyal to a mythical past. While in Richard Nixon’s era this may have been true, it is no longer. There is no silent majority opposed to progressive change. The majority is with us and it is loud.The next step is to convert these voices to votes. It is from the platform of this philosophy that I launched my own bid to serve as a Gen Z member of the New York city council, and call on a young, multiracial coalition of progressives across the country to step forward as well. Monumental change will come with this coalition at the helm of America’s institutions, including its businesses, schools and the government itself. No longer must we rely primarily on making requests and demands of those in power, nor should we insist the seats of power be dismantled. We will claim those seats.We have invested far too much in this country, both willingly and unwillingly, to not finish the job. We built this ship. It is our right to sail it, and our duty to point it in the right direction.Then our democratic dream can be realized.The political ideology espoused in the streets this summer is not new. But our clear path to enact it might be. With popular support behind us, we stand at the threshold of political revolution. The key lies in merging the utility of democratic government with the tidal force of mass mobilization. If government is the machine, the movement must be its fuel.As Black Americans and our coalition fulfill our role as what Nikole Hannah-Jones calls in the 1619 Project “the perfecters of this democracy”, this second civil rights movement will be the last. The partnership between government and movement is the remedy to heal our historical scars and open wounds, and carry this democracy toward perfection. More

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      Women march against Trump and Republicans in major US cities

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      Thousands of mostly young women in masks rallied on Saturday in Washington DC and other US cities, exhorting voters to oppose Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans in the 3 November elections. The latest in a series of rallies that began with a massive women’s march the day after Trump’s January 2017 inauguration was playing out during the coronavirus pandemic. Demonstrators were asked to wear face coverings and practice social distancing. Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of the Women’s March, opened the Washington event by asking people to keep their distance from one another, saying the only superspreader event would be the recent one at the White House. She talked about the power of women to end Trump’s presidency. “His presidency began with women marching and now it’s going to end with woman voting. Period,” she said. More

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      'We don't have any choice': the young activists naming and shaming US politicians

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      It was a Saturday night in September when 160 or so middle and high school students logged on to a Zoom call about how to confront American politicians using tactics inspired by young civil rights activists fighting for the abolition of slavery.The teenagers were online with the Sunrise Movement, a nationwide youth-led climate justice collective, to learn about organizing Wide Awake actions – noisy night-time protests – to force lawmakers accused of ignoring the climate emergency and racial injustice to listen to their demands.It’s a civil disobedience tactic devised by the Wide Awakes – a radical youth abolitionist organization who confronted anti-abolitionists at night by banging pots and pans outside their homes in the run-up to the civil war.Now, in the run-up to one of the most momentous elections in modern history, a new generation of young Americans who say they are tired of asking nicely and being ignored, are naming and shaming US politicians in an effort to get their concerns about the planet, police brutality, inequalities and immigration heard.The first one targeted the Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell after details emerged about the police killing of Breonna Taylor. In the days following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sunrise activists woke up key Republican senators including McConnell and Lindsey Graham, demanding that they delay the vote on Trump’s supreme court nominee until a new president is sworn in.“Even though we can’t vote, we can show up on the streets and wake up politicians. It’s our future on the line not theirs,” said 17-year-old Abby DiNardo, a senior from Delaware county. The high school senior recently coordinated a Wide Awake action outside the home of the Republican senator Pat Toomey, a former Wall Street banker who has repeatedly voted against climate action measures.The Sunrise Movement was founded by a small group of disparate young activists in 2017 and initially focussed on helping elect proponents of clean energy in the 2018 midterms. More

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      Demi Lovato has made the most damning protest song of the Trump era

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      How do you solve a problem like Donald? Like Nixon, Reagan and Thatcher before him, President Trump has been a great catalyst for protest in the arts but his villainy is so absurd and flamboyant that it is hard to attack him without stating the obvious. Assaulting him head-on is like staring into the sun. It is no surprise that his most effective satirist is the comedian Sarah Cooper, who lip-syncs to his own words rather than writing her own.In music, to sing about the US these past four years is to allude to the elephant in the White House. Trump’s influence is often oblique: his presence seeps into records like poison gas. In songs such as Childish Gambino’s This Is America, Kendrick Lamar’s XXX, the 1975’s Love It If We Made It or Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Pa’lante, he is mentioned briefly or not at all. So who would have predicted that one of the most powerful songs about Trump – Demi Lovato’s Commander in Chief – would come so late in the day, and be so direct?It’s not that it’s unusual for a mainstream pop artist to speak out at the risk of losing fans. The likes of Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Katy Perry have been moved to take political positions and even channel them into songs, such as Swift’s Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince or Lana Del Rey’s Looking for America. Lovato, who describes herself as “a queer, Hispanic woman”, has previously been vocal about issues such as mental health and body image: her most recent hit was called OK Not to Be OK. Still, there is something wonderfully unexpected and bold about the moral clarity of her latest song that she debuted at the Billboard music awards last night. I’ve listened to nothing else since.Produced by Eren Cannata and Billie Eilish’s brother Finneas, the song sounds like a heartbreak ballad. In a sense that’s what it is, as it expresses the emotional pain of the Trump era, and 2020 in particular. While it’s not without lyrical flourishes (“Fighting fires with flyers and praying for rain”), it is largely plain-spoken and direct, conveying grief, resilience and disgust. Lovato has said that she has often thought of writing Trump a letter, or sitting down with him to ask him why he behaves the way he does, but that a song opens these questions up to everybody: “I’m not the only one / That’s been affected and resented every story you’ve spun / And I’m a lucky one / ’Cause there are people worse off that have suffered enough.” In the arrestingly stark video, a diverse range of Americans lip-sync the song before Lovato takes over for the final minute.Commander in Chief opens with a wholesome, relatable line about the values that we are supposedly taught (unless our father is Fred Trump) when we are young. It’s not really partisan. Lovato the protest singer is an exasperated everywoman, interrogating Trump’s failings as a human being as much as a politician: his corruption, his vanity, his carelessness, his sadism. The line, “Do you get off on pain?” reminds me of Adam Serwer’s classic 2018 Atlantic essay, The Cruelty Is the Point. She gets to the fundamental incomprehensibility of Trump’s callousness: “Honestly, if I did the things you do, I couldn’t sleep, seriously.” The gospel-elevated bridge rises above the president’s toxic headspace and turns to the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests: “We’ll be in the streets while you’re bunkering down.” The final line of the chorus (“How does it feel to still be able to breathe?”) references both Covid-19, which has killed more than 215,000 Americans on Trump’s watch, and the BLM slogan “I can’t breathe”. More