Let us call it what it is: fraud. Incompetence is no longer an adequate explanation.
Homeward Bound is in default on their $1 million loan from the city. They have no way of repaying what they owe, or finishing work on the decrepit building looming over a Port Townsend neighborhood. They never did, and they and the public officials who threw money at them knew it all along.
After sitting vacant for three years, the building is showing increasing signs of deterioration. The lot is a mess, a disgrace to the neighborhood. The only residents of the property are the rats seen by one neighbor and a homeless man living in a copse of trees. For this taxpayers are on the hook not only for a $1.4 million bond obligation, but also for the substantial, still unknown costs of what it will take to get rid of the empty, asbestos and lead contaminated, not up-to-code, uninhabitable 70-year old building.
But city leaders and Homeward Bound don’t want to hear the word “default,” because that would mean the time for reckoning has come. Instead, on June 15, 2020 Port Townsend City Council voted to “defer” payments on the loan until October 1, 2020, while “options” are explored. Without that action Homeward Bound was required to make a first payment of $23,000 on July 1.
They had been given a grace period of two years during which they were supposed to complete construction of the building and rent it out to earn income which they would accumulate in a cash reserve to start repaying taxpayers. They never started work on the building except to get it off wooden stacks where it squatted for over two years.
Yet, in November 2019 they were back making a pitch for at least another million dollars, giving the city a chance “to get in on this,” as if “this” were some sweet deal serious players wouldn’t want to pass up. They glibly promised the building would be ready for occupancy by December of this year, well knowing that was a pipe dream.
“Scam” and “con job” are also fitting descriptions for the Cherry Street Project. At one point, nearly the whole city was taken in. But those who snickered at the idea from the start have now been proven the wiser members of our community.
I was at the Road House having lunch the day the building was trucked to its hillside above Cherry Street. City leaders and housing activists were at the Pourhouse celebrating. Men and women at the Road House in oil stained overalls, people who know how to make and fix stuff, were laughing and shaking their heads. They’re still laughing and shaking their heads, but now they’re also angry because it is their tax dollars that have been squandered and they are going to be asked to pay even more.
Homeward Bound: False Hopes, False Front
Homeward Bound has portrayed itself as an organization worthy of great public trust. It has gotten away with the act because it has been a pet project of the politically powerful in our community. The mask has now come off for good.
It was a shell corporation of one person when the city gave it a parcel worth $600,000 and $250,000 to purchase and move the building here. It has gone through several convulsions in the last three years, several presidents, and its leadership group has shrunk from twelve directors to the bare minimum required by its by-laws. Pleas for more people to step up have gone unanswered. They don’t even have volunteers to keep the weeds down and pick up trash.
Homeward Bound describes itself as “a vibrant organization that is a fundamental component of ensuring the availability of affordable housing in perpetuity in Clallam and Jefferson Counties.” The Homeward Bound website and Facebook page say it has an office in Uptown at 616 Polk Street, Port Townsend. This is what is inside that one room office.
Homeward Bound lost its treasurer last year and in January put out a request for another volunteer to fill the position. So far, from all that can be gleaned from its website and Facebook page, no one stepped up.
In February it announced it was looking to hire a bookkeeper [correction: office manager] and would keep the job posted until filled. It is still posted.
Its by-laws require transparency. It stopped posting minutes of its meetings almost a year ago.
But their greatest act of deception has been low-balling the costs and complexity of this project as it sought free land from the city and subsidized loans.
Getting Off to a Bad Start
From two years of reviewing documents obtained by a series of public records requests, it appears that the city agreed to finance purchase of this building without first seeing it. The 70-year old building called the Carmel House was located in Victoria, B.C. and slated for demolition. No one from the City of Port Townsend went there to see it before purchase. The city did not contract with an independent building inspector, as a home purchaser does before closing a sale. Instead, the city relied on someone chosen by Homeward Bound. According to former city manager David Timmons in an April 24, 2017, city council meeting, that person was “a builder in the community” who “came back with a positive report.” You can watch that meeting by clicking on this link.
It was not a formal building inspection where the inspector crawled under the house and up in the attic, walked the roof, took photographs, and offered an expert opinion backed by their guarantee and insurance. After two years of public records requests I have seen nothing of the sort in the city’s files. But I did discover a toxic materials inspection Homeward Bound apparently had from the beginning but did not share with the city until last year. I will come back to that.
This “builder in the community” was not identified by name, but the handout from Homeward Bound for that meeting, a one-page document with a picture of the building on its lot in Victoria, identified Brian Finch of Sustainable Structures NW as Homeward Bound’s general contractor. It appears that the person the city relied upon in loaning the funds to buy the building was a person hoping to get the job of remodeling and finishing the building once it was brought to Port Townsend. This was hardly a professional, disinterested inspection.
Finch and his company left the job, and apparently the area. Homeward Bound has publicly complained that its general contractor just up and vanished. According to the Washington Department of Licensing and Inspections the business license for Sustainable Structures has been suspended.
Homeward Bound presented the projected costs of making the building habitable through its volunteer consultant, Mark Blatter (though he was later compensated by Homeward Bound, according to December 2017 minutes). The year before, Blatter had lost employment with the Bainbridge Island housing authority after abruptly resigning. Blatter told the city council at the April 24, 2017 meeting, linked above, that all the plumbing, carpentry, painting, electrical, landscaping and parking lot work would need only $100,00 to $150,000. He was quoted in newspaper reports predicting the building would be rented by the Fall of 2017.
Homeward Bound quickly realized that those numbers were “completely bogus.” That was the word one of its presidents used to describe the project budget. The entire project, she complained, had been “rushed, slapped together.”
I have not seen in the city’s files any written project budget by Mr. Blatter. He, too, was quickly gone from this project and replaced by a second volunteer project manager, who drew up yet another low-ball project budget.
More Money Wanted, More Misrepresentations
In less than a year Homeward Bound was back before council seeking an awful lot more money. They presented their second project cost estimate and said they needed $834,000. In May 2018 council voted to float a bond large enough to cover that amount. The bond proceeds would then be loaned to Homeward Bound, which would pay it off over 40 years. The total cost of the bond over that time came to $1.367 million, because it included a $451,115 hidden interest subsidy in addition to the interest for which Homeward Bound would be responsible. We revealed that in our first report on this fiasco. With the $600,000 value of the land given to Homeward Bound, a $30,000 organizational grant, free utility work, and other considerations, the real cost of the project within a year had ballooned to more than $2 million.
In September 2019 as Homeward Bound sought construction permits, city staff informed it that under state law it would have to conduct a hazardous materials inspection. Homeward Bound responded by providing a toxic materials inspection report that had been prepared by the prior owner. That report showed that asbestos had been found in flooring and lead in the paint on all walls.
This report was not disclosed to the city until after Homeward Bound had obtained the nearly $1.4 million loan package. The project budget submitted in 2018 as the basis for that loan said nothing about the costs of mitigation, containment, or removal of asbestos and lead.
Painting a Rosy Picture for the Public
Periodically, Homeward Bound would go on a public relations blitz. They were always on track, moving forward and excited to be providing much needed low income rentals for Port Townsend.
But they’ve known all along it was not going to happen. Nothing has been happening. They don’t even take care of the building or grounds. We’ve previously reported city inspectors found holes in floors large enough to swallow a person. Trash is scattered around the property, now hidden by waist high weeds. On our most recent visit we observed that the doors were wide open and the black material protecting the plywood was fraying and torn. Other signs of deterioration around the building are evident. The condition of the building reminds one of an expensive Christmas gift, broken and forgotten, after the child grew bored with it and moved on to new toys that are more interesting and less trouble.
After discovering that the Cherry Street project had its first tenant, in a homeless camp in the trees, on February 27, 2020, I reached out to the group with some questions, such as when they would expect their first tenants inside the building. Homeward Bound president Paul Rice, who is also on the city’s planning commission, responded:
Towards the end of March we’ll be having a public meeting that will hopefully address all your questions. There will be an update on our progress, as well as a Q&A session. We will likely start promoting that next week, and plan to reach out to you directly to invite you once it’s live. Thanks for your continued interest in our CLT and the Cherry Street Redevelopment Project!
Not getting a direct answer, I followed up, asking Rice to respond to two simple questions: 1. When will the first apartments be available for rent? and 2. Will Homeward Bound make its first loan repayment to the city?
Homeward Bound president Rice responded:
As for rentals, we are still working on determining whether or not the units will be rentals or affordable condos for sale to persons earning between 30 and 80% of AMI, or some combination of the two. We are looking to maximize our ability to pay back the note from the City, while still ensuring that the Carmel Building offers affordable housing to Jefferson County. We have not completed our feasibility study with regard to this issue yet, but are actively exploring our options. There will be much more information on these topics at the public meeting. I should be able to share the date and time for that later today, and will do so with you as soon as I am able.
This is an admission that three years since this building was floated across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Homeward Bound still had no plan for how taxpayers could get their money back. Rice never came back with the promised information. Unsurprisingly, the public meeting Rice promised never happened.
I put similar questions to County Commissioner Kate Dean, who has played a leadership role on the board of Homeward Bound since 2017. She didn’t give me an answer but promised she would give me a tour of the building. I’m still waiting for that tour.
Black slavery in Port Townsend. Not its practice, but its products. Cars using cobalt mined by Black African slaves, including child slaves, will drive over the “Black Lives Matter” section of Water Street. This is a stark reveal of the systemic racism of Port Townsend’s liberal, moneyed elites.
Electric vehicles and hybrids (EVs) need cobalt–large quantities of cobalt. Most of it comes from the Katanga Province of the Congo. The large quantities of cobalt needed for EVs cannot be supplied by Australia or other countries. Amnesty International and numerous media outlets from CBS News to the Washington Post have confirmed that cobalt is mined in Katanga by people living as slaves, including tens of thousands of children. They work in horribly unsafe conditions that regularly kill or maim them.
One leading human rights researcher, Siddartha Kara of Harvard University, has concluded that the mines use the forced labor of as many as 35,000 Black children, and nearly a quarter of a million Black adults. UNICEF puts the number of children forced into mining at 40,000.
White liberals committed to a New Green Deal don’t seem to care about this 21st Century slavery. At least none of the liberal, left-leaning organizations and politicians we contacted. We asked the local Jefferson County EV Association, the City of Seattle’s green vehicle fleet director, Coltura–the state’s most powerful EV advocacy group, and Governor Inslee if it bothered them that the cobalt needed for the green technologies they were pushing depended on the suffering and deaths of hundreds of thousands of Black slaves. Most avoided the question. Not one expressed concern.
That article written two years ago was entitled “Do Black Lives Matter When It Comes to Green Cars?” As human rights activists point out, nothing has changed in the past two years. The response to the exposure of this modern day slavery has been window dressing by the European and Chinese middlemen and the industrial users of Black blood cobalt.
The stream of cobalt for those pricey electric cars still comes from the same mines and slave laborers. It is still bought and processed by Chinese and European middlemen. And it still goes to the same cars purchased almost exclusively by First World, affluent, mostly white consumers.
Metal rods replace crushed bones in a young miner’s legs.
Human rights activists have escalated the fight for justice. In December 2019 a landmark lawsuit was filed in Washington, D.C. by International Rights Advocates against some of the world’s largest high tech and EV companies. It alleges they have knowingly utilized forced Black child labor in the Congo to procure the cobalt needed for their products. The photographs for this article come from the complaint in that litigation. The two maimed boys are plaintiffs in the case.
Siddartha Kara worked with African human rights organizations to document the suffering and lay the groundwork for the lawsuit. He says:
This lawsuit is intended to compel the defendants to remedy the horrific conditions at the bottom of cobalt supply chains. Whether our legal system agrees that they should be held to account for the death and injury of these children remains to be seen. Whatever the outcome, it will be the first time that the voices of the children suffering in the dark underbelly of one of the richest supply chains in the world will be heard in a court of law.
The mining operations are protected by one of the most corrupt governments in the world. Local and national politicians are getting wealthy off the slave labor of fellow Black Africans. The military is used to chase away human rights researchers and terrorize workers asserting their rights. When tragedy strikes, the army covers it up. Kara saw this for himself:
I experienced quite viscerally just how deadly cobalt mining can be. I was documenting a cobalt site near the village of Kapata, when I learned that a tunnel dug by creuseurs had collapsed, not 100 meters from where I was standing. I rushed to the site, but the area was already under guard by the Congolese military when I arrived, so it was impossible to gain entry. Bereaved family members wailed with terror. Behind the dust and madness, it soon became clear – no one had survived. According to people at the mine, 63 people were buried alive that day.
This is what goes into those Teslas and BMWs, the Audis and Mercedes running on cobalt. This is the human suffering inside Chevy Bolts and Volts, and Toyota Priuses and hybrid Highlanders.
Tesla, the pacesetter for electric vehicles, made noises it was going to abandon cobalt. It was concerned about high prices, the security of supply and, last, the bad PR it was getting. Elon Musk announced that for his company cobalt would be a thing of the past. But just like other PR stunts from EV manufacturers trying to deflect criticism, Tesla’s promises were lies. It recently announced a long term contract for Katanga-mined cobalt, signaling that a supply chain that starts with slave labor would a major part of its business plan for years to come.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is demanding that companies buying Katanga cobalt do more to end forced child labor. The U.S. Justice Department is investigating Glencore, the huge Swiss corporation, that next to the Chinese purchases and processes the most Katanga cobalt. This company is a direct descendant of the consortium that exported natural resources when Belgium ran the Congo as a slave colony. Britain is investigating another major mining corporation for promoting fraud and corruption in Congo’s cobalt mines.
White silence is violence, we are told by Black Lives Matters activists. Where are the white voices speaking against the Black slavery behind the EVs recharging outside the Co-op?
The push for a total conversion to electric vehicles is strong in this town, coming from the top down. We have a county climate action plan that targets all fossil fuels, and seeks drastic reductions in carbon emissions from transportation that are possible only if people stop driving or replace their existing vehicles with EVs, despite the cost in Black lives.
Unlike the mining camps of the Congo, there is no Black slavery in the Dakota or Texas or Pennsylvania oilfields. Many Black blue-collar workers in the oil and gas industry regularly make six-figure salaries as roughnecks, equipment operators or truck drivers. The industry projects adding nearly 600,000 minority jobs over the 20 years, about a third being in management and professional fields. But the systemic racism behind the relentless drive to go green does not place the benefits for those Black and Brown lives on its scales, just as it does not count the broken Black slaves in Katanga’s hell holes.
Do Black African Lives Matter to Black Lives Matter?
We know that the area’s White liberals don’t care much about the suffering behind their slick EVs.
What does Black Lives Matter of Jefferson County think? Do they see anything objectionable about cars built with slave labor driving over the colorful “Black Lives Matter” lettering on Water Street? Do they think it makes a mockery of the message?
We asked. Like the white, liberal electric car activists we surveyed, they have nothing to say on the subject. Their silence, likewise, is violence.
For more information on the Black slavery behind green cars:
Genocide by abortion. Black Genocide. It is the leading cause of death among Black Americans, greater than all diseases, accidents, suicides and murders combined. Over nineteen million Black Americans have been intentionally killed. In some communities more Blacks are killed than born.
From Black Panthers to the heirs of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Black leaders have cried out for the killing to stop. They have been protesting Planned Parenthood targeting Black neighborhoods for a generation. They say that Planned Parenthood has spilled more Black blood than the Ku Klux Klan.
In an era when the cry of “Black Lives Matter!” rises from our streets, the Jefferson County Public Health Department honored the entity Black leaders hold primarily responsible, today and throughout its history, for Black Genocide. In October 2017, the agency co-sponsored a celebration of 100 years of Planned Parenthood. In doing so, it endorsed decades of eugenicist rhetoric, theories and programs embraced by Adolf Hitler and American racists.
The public officials responsible for this might plead ignorance, though that would be hard to believe. The facts are not secret. It is just that many white supporters of Planned Parenthood choose to ignore them, just as the Health Department did.
This same agency last week declared systemic racism to be a public health crisis. It would do well to reexamine its decision to ignore the charges of racism that have been made against Planned Parenthood. Not all Black Americans stand against Planned Parenthood or are as vocal as, say, Dr. Alveda King, MLK’s niece and leader in the fight to end Black Genocide. She points out that the killing of a quarter of the Black American population has not been from lynching or police shootings, but “from abortionists who plant their killing centers in minority neighborhoods and prey on woman who they think have no hope.”
But by tuning out those voices pleading for the killing to stop–perhaps because “they ain’t Black”in liberal white eyes–the Public Health Department has exhibited symptoms of the systemic racism it says is causing a public health crisis. In this case, the crisis is Black Genocide.
Everything to follow is well-documented. Most of the material comes from Black scholars and leaders. I have listed the sources on which I relied, with links, at the end of this article. This is a necessarily abbreviated treatment of a long, sad and still open chapter in American history. It starts at the conception of Planned Parenthood by Margaret Sanger.
One can support easy access to contraception and gynecological care without celebrating Sanger. One can pledge themselves to the defense of Roe v. Wade. But one cannot celebrate 100 years of Planned Parenthood and hope to avoid embracing Sanger’s racism and abhorrent eugenicist viewpoint.
Turning a White-Privileged Blind Eye to Black Genocide
The goal of reducing and eventually eliminating the population of Black Americans and other “undesirables” gave birth to the eugenics movement. It surfaced in this country in the first decade of the 20th Century about the same time as Margaret Sanger started the local clinics and chapters that culminated in the American Birth Control League. That organization was later renamed Planned Parenthood.
Birth control for Sanger was always about “improving” the “stock” of the American people. Sanger shared the racist eugenics viewpoint that whites were superior because they were more highly evolved. In an essay offering sexual advice to young girls she warned that Blacks could not help themselves from being inclined towards rape. It was in the Black man’s nature because of their low rung on the evolutionary ladder. At the bottom of the ladder was the Australian aborigine, “the lowest known species of the human family, just a step above the chimpanzee in brain development.”
Sanger later launched The Negro Project, an effort targeting Black communities to reduce their birth rates. In an infamous letter that surfaced after her death she detailed a plan for co-opting Black ministers and paying them to spread Planned Parenthood’s disinformation. “[W]e do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” she wrote.
These were also the beliefs of the officers and directors, scholars and journalists of Sanger’s League and publishing arm, and, later, Planned Parenthood. Sanger worked her whole life to get the federal government to adopt her racist eugenic goals. She eventually succeeded with President Richard Nixon. Tape recordings of conversations with his staff reveal that he shared Sanger’s concern about an increasing Black population. He believed that abortion would be an excellent way to “take care of the Black bastards.” Taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood started at his initiative. (You can hear Nixon’s voice in the Maafa21 documentary linked below).
Racism and Eugenics Celebrated by the Jefferson County Public Health Department
In 1921 Sanger declared in a speech to the Pennsylvania Conference on Birth Control that the goal of her work “was to create a superman.” That would be done by eliminating from the gene pool those she and her eugenicist collaborators viewed as “weeds”–a term she applied to people of color. She also advocated having the federal government establish “open spaces” where the illiterate, the poor, the unemployed, and all classes she considered undesirable would be confined against their will until such time as they improved their “moral qualities.”
Contrast Sanger with Dr. Mildred Jackson, the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and co-founder of the National Right to Life committee: “I became a physician in order to help save lives. I am at once a physician, a citizen and a woman, and I am not willing to stand aside and allow the concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged, and the planned have the right to live.
It is unsurprising that Sanger’s organization provided intellectual fodder for Nazi eugenics and the Holocaust. Hitler wrote of his admiration for essays published in the Birth Control Review and considered a book by an American eugenicist, part of Sanger’s circle, to be “his Bible” (Hitler’s words) on race theory.
One of Sanger’s directors participated in rounding up and forcibly sterilizing hundreds of Black Germans and their children. This was Lothrop Stoddard, a man fanatically committed to eliminating black and brown people from the United States. His work introduced the term untermenschen (English: sub-humans) into Nazi ideology. When he returned from Nazi Germany he resumed his collaboration with Sanger’s organization. Little wonder, as he was a founding member and director of Sanger’s League, and thus also a founding member of Planned Parenthood.
The Ku Klux Klan thought highly of Sanger and her organization. In her autobiography she wrote of the pleasurable experience of being the featured speaker at a Klan rally in New Jersey, and how pleased she was to be invited to twelve more Klan convocations. “We are paying for and even submitting,” Sanger once wrote, “to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.” She was perfect for audiences draped in white hoods.
Sanger organized the World Population Conference in Geneva, Switzerland in 1927. She gave a leadership role to Eugen Fischer. He had prior experience running concentration camps for Blacks in South Africa and went to work for Hitler in applying his experience to territory conquered by Nazi Germany. One of his duties was to exterminate Blacks from Europe.
In 1933 the Birth Control Review published “Eugenic Sterilization,” by psychiatrist Ernst Rudin. He later wrote Germany’s eugenics law and participated in brutal racial medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners.
By 1942, the connections between Sanger’s League and Nazis were becoming uncomfortably visible. It was the depths of WWII and America was learning of Nazi atrocities used for population control and genocide. “Population control” had garnered too many negative connotations. The group rebranded itself as Planned Parenthood.
Forced Sterilization
Black Americans know well the history of forced sterilization government programs that targeted their women and girls, some as young as ten years old. Planned Parenthood was an active participant in that evil history, from formulating and publishing proposals for mandatory sterilization to assisting state and local government eugenics boards that forced the procedures upon unwilling Black women and girls. Sanger and her officers publicly called for forced sterilization on a national level, one proposal going so far as to demand the sterilization of a quarter of our nation’s population. Planned Parenthood was such a fierce supporter of forced sterilization that its Iowa executive director attacked the state for reducing the number of poor and minority women forced to undergo the procedure.
This, too, was celebrated by the Jefferson County Public Health Department when it chose to celebrate Planned Parenthood’s entire history, no exceptions, no reservations.
What was the Public Health Department’s motivation in engaging in an event unreservedly honoring an organization with such a repulsive history? This history is so vile it cannot be excused. We certainly would not allow any other organization to whitewash such an evil past.
All Black Lives Must Matter
“If Black lives matter, then Black women matter. If Black lives matter, then Black children matter. If Black lives matter, then Black babies matter.” Black activist Star Parker spoke these words to a crowd of Black Americans outside a Selma, Alabama abortion clinic. They had come there after crossing the Edmund Pettis Bridge, walking in the footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They believe his work is not done and that the greatest threat they face today is the leading cause of death among Black Americans, Black Genocide, or, others call it, race suicide by abortion.
About 13 percent of American women are Black, but they account for about 30 to 35 percent of abortions. They undergo abortions at three times the rate of white women. Black leaders see in those numbers not only a horrific loss of Black life, but also a loss of Black political power, for every Black life ended is one less Black vote. And they see in Planned Parenthood’s targeting of Black communities an extension of the racist eugenics agenda of Margaret Sanger that began with her first writings concerning Black Americans.
“For too long, this very important issue has been dismissed as ‘that’s just white people trying to stir something up,’” says Bishop E.W. Jackson, who led a Black protest against the addition of Sanger’s bust to the National Statue Gallery. “We want people to understand this is a vital interest to Black people.”
Among those who need to understand this vital interest to black people are the white officials of the Jefferson County Public Health Department. Nothing is more systemic about systemic racism than the government holding up for recognition and praise a century-long history of racism.
A Closing Observation
As Sanger’s true character and agenda have received more widespread attention. Planned Parenthood has begun to put some distance between itself and its founder and leader for many decades. It will occasionally say that Sanger’s views were “harmful,” but that’s about it. To this day, Planned Parenthood’s highest award is still called The Sanger Award.
Resources on Black Genocide
The volume of material available is massive, from books to historical monographs to videos. One place to start is the 2008 doumentary “Maafa21: Black Genocide in 21st Century America.” Maafa is a Swahili word for oppression, and refers to the nightmare of slavery. The film is long, 2.5 hours. It takes time to cover everything and display screen shots of the writings of Sanger and eugenists to prove what the film reveals. It also provides the audiotape of Richard Nixon lauding legalized abortion as a way to “deal with Black bastards.” The documentary has gained a wide Black audience, but far fewer whites know of it. It can be viewed online at this link.
PBS’ Frontline in 2018 produced a short-film on the growing Black anti-abortion and anti-Planned Parenthood movement.
A number of videos on Sanger, her Negro Project and eugenicist ideology are available here.
BlackGenocide.org is a leading source for research and essays by Black Americans opposed to Planned Parenthood and what it is doing to their communities.
Here is a list of further resources. Just click on each heading to be linked to the underlying article. You will notice much of the opposition to Planned Parenthood comes from Black churches. That was also the fount of leadership for the civil rights movement. Two of these articles focus on relatives of Dr. Martin Luther King leading the fight against Black Genocide.
What’s with white kids and their parents getting down on both knees on our streets and sidewalks and raising their hands over their heads? And this repetitive call-and-answer chanting of “Hands up!”, followed by “Don’t Shoot!” What’s that all about?
Its practitioners believe it replays a scene of racial injustice and murder. It doesn’t. It never happened.
Believers believe they are reenacting the Michael Brown incident in Ferguon, Missouri. Their catechism is that an unarmed Mr. Brown, accosted without justification by a white police officer, begged to surrender, fell to his knees and raised his hands above his head. They believe that officer then murdered Mr. Brown in cold blood.
This myth is now such a pillar of racialist fundamentalism that bringing out the facts is tantamount to questioning the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. What happened with Michael Brown is nothing at all like what happened to George Floyd, but the two incidents are treated as evidence of a pattern of police violence. That does a great injustice to Mr. Floyd and the police officer who found himself being attacked by Mr. Brown.
The facts are readily accessible in the grand jury testimony. Most of the eyewitness evidence in that proceeding was provided by Blacks who were there and saw what happened. They substantially confirmed the officer’s testimony. Combined with forensic evidence, they told a story of violent aggression by Mr. Brown and a police officer fighting for his life.
You can read the grand jury transcripts here. Give yourself many hours. There are thousands of pages, and nowhere in them does any witness stick to the “Hands up, don’t shoot” mythology.
The facts, not the fable, go like this:
Ferguson, Missouri Police Officer Darren Wilson had just received a radio call of a strong arm robbery at a nearby convenience store (video tape later revealed that robbery involved Mr. Brown). He rolled up on Mr. Brown and another man as they walked down the middle of a street. He asked them why they couldn’t walk on the sidewalk instead. Mr. Brown taunted Officer Wilson and tried to open the patrol car door. He said the officer was “too much of a pussy to shoot him,” and then attacked the officer through the open window. He struck Officer Wilson repeatedly and went for the officer’s gun. Mr. Brown outweighed Officer Wilson by nearly 80 pounds and was an inch or so taller. Much of the right side of Officer Wilson’s face, according to photographs taken that day, showed massive bruising where Mr. Brown punched him. He had other bruises on his neck and chin.
The gun went off as Mr. Brown wrestled Officer Wilson for his gun. A bullet struck part of Mr. Bown’s hand. Mr. Brown’s blood was later found inside the vehicle. Officer Wilson barely managed to fight Mr. Brown off. He said he felt like a child fighting the larger man. Mr. Brown fled. Officer Wilson got out of his vehicle, pursued Mr. Brown for a short distance and ordered him to stop. Mr. Brown turned and charged Officer Wilson.
While witnesses give varying accounts of what Mr. Brown was doing with his hands–balled into fists, under his shirt reaching into his waistband, extended in front–they agree Mr. Brown charged Officer Wilson. Officer Wilson testified that Mr. Brown’s face was contorted with rage and hatred such as he had never seen. Mr. Brown was closing the distance as Officer Wilson fired, striking Mr. Brown in the arm. Mr. Brown did not slow down. Officer Wilson hit him three more times in the arm and still he came on, until a shot to his head killed him, eight feet from Officer Wilson.
Forensic evidence confirmed the eyewitness accounts. Mr. Brown’s DNA was found inside the patrol car and on the gun. Mr. Brown’s finger had gun discharge, confirming Officer Wilson’s testionty that Brown had reached for the gun and his hand was on it or very close when it discharged inside the patrol car. A blood trail showed Mr. Brown covering a distance of approximately 25 yards from where he was first hit in the arm to where he was stopped, and showed he had been running at Officer Wilson.
At no point did Mr. Brown ever offer to surrender, or fall to his knees, or raise his hands and plead, “Don’t shoot.”
Violent, destructive rioting–that destroyed scores of Black owned businesses and took Black lives–spread for weeks from Ferguson across the country. Vowing to “ensure that justice is done,” President Obama ordered his Attorney General Eric Holder to conduct a thorough, independent federal investigation. The Department of Justice and FBI reviewed all the grand jury testimony, reinterviewed witnesses, examined the forensic evidence, and pursued their own lines of inquiry.
The Obama Administration cleared Officer Wilson. The DOJ found no credible evidence that he had murdered Mr. Brown. It found no credible evidence that Mr. Brown had ever knelt, raised his hands and said or implied, “don’t shoot.” You can read the entire DOJ report at this link.
That report was released in March 2015. How much some people forget–or choose to forget–in just five years.
Port Townsend has avoided the mayhem and destruction that has hijacked many of the otherwise civil demonstrations against the murder of George Floyd. Another George Floyd demonstration is planned for Friday, June 5. This event, entitled “Justice for Black Lives: Standing in Solidarity with Minneapolis,” is being organized by high schoolers.
Sequim saw a large demonstration on June 3. Rumors flew about Antifa exploiting that event to wreak mayhem and commit wanton violence against innocent people, businesses and police. Those rumors were shown to be baseless. No violence occurred and local law enforcement handled the situation exceptionally well.
Concerns about possible trouble for Port Townsend’s youth march were brought to our attention, and we passed them along to law enforcement. We learned Port Townsend police had already been alerted and had some of the same information and names that had come to us.
It would have been nice to disregard out of hand worries about people bent on trouble and not justice for Mr. Floyd. But that wasn’t possible.
People already known to the police through past encounters and criminal acts were associated with the concerns. When we put out an inquiry on our Facebook page for more information, what we’d been told over the phone was confirmed in comments and personal messages. A local circle of cop haters held themselves out as part of something called A.C.A.B.. That acronym stands for All Cops Are Bastards. There is no established organization with that name, but they had been using it loosely to identify themselves or give the impression they were part of something larger.
Sadly, we also learned more about a culture within our community that celebrates violence against police. Last year the words “Kill Cops” were scrawled on the side of the Uptown Theater. A woman–whom we were told had held herself out as A.C.A.B.–posed for a photo shoot by that message and the image was picked up by the widely followed Jefferson County Washington Facebook page. Not everybody reacted with disgust and disapproval. The words and photo were defended, even applauded by some. Those who objected found themselves targets for derision.
The woman posing with those hateful words was arrested in mid-April and is facing charges of vehicular homicide. She is charged with killing the passenger in her car when she went off Center Road at a high speed. The Jefferson County Sheriff’s office reported that drugs or alcohol appeared to have contributed to the fatal accident. She is on bail pending further proceedings.
In comments to our inquiry we were told that “there are a lot of youth in this town who don’t like cops” and messages such as “Kill Cops” may have been painted “out of frustration and anger.”
Words matter, especially words that encourage murder. In the past week people with the words “kill cops” on their minds have shot and beat police, set them on fire, run them over, hit them in the head with bricks and sent them to the hospital by the hundreds. The officers who have been murdered were Black, as are many of those seriously injured, a tragic irony against a backdrop of protests demanding that all Black lives be treasured.
It’s not just frustrated and angry youth defacing buildings that make it difficult to dismiss breezily concerns about potential violence here. Some individuals in our community celebrate the idea of murdering police. There is “Murder Police for Satan” clothing designed and produced locally. The artwork depicts a police officer on his knees, apparently begging for life and about to be stabbed with a blade the size of his forearm. He kneels against the background of the anarchists’ encircled five-pointed star. The same “artists” behind that clothing line put out lyrics fantasizing about the bleached bones of murdered police officers. “By logic and reason, it’s always in season to murder police for Satan,” goes one of their lovely ditties.
People among us wear that clothing and listen to those songs.
Suggestions have been offered on local social media on how demonstrators can arm themselves with bricks, street signs, fence posts, even flower pots to “protect” themselves against police. “Happy protesting!” Wink, wink.
“Murder _____________________ for Satan.” Fill in a name of one of the living, breathing men and women who protect our community. Fathers, mothers, wives, sons, and daughters. Your neighbors. Say their names and try to swallow the explanation that these hateful exhortations are “just harmless art.”
With this vile subculture exposed it can better be contained and resisted. It is now highly unlikely there will be any stealth hijacking of a youthful assembly honoring a good and decent man who suffered a horrific, unjust death. [Since I wrote that description of Mr. Floyd I have learned it is far from the truth. While he did not in any way deserve the death he suffered, based on his long criminal record George Floyd was not a “good and decent man.” He was found guilty for a home invasion in which he pressed a loaded gun into the stomach of a pregnant woman. He had an earlier armed robbery conviction as well and a string of drug and other offenses in between. At the time of his death he was under the influence of fentanyl and methamphetamine. To repeat, none of that warrants a death sentence, but I wanted to correct my misstatement as to his character].
The lead organizer for Jefferson County Black Lives Matter issued a statement on Wednesday June 3, that the organization does not condone violence against police. Bravo. That is a step up from his earlier exchange of messages with me in which he had declined to disavow violence against police.
Concern still remains about outsiders. Somehow our “welcoming community” has fixated on outsiders lately. First it was tourists who might bring COVID infections. Now it is Antifa and others who may see Port Townsend as a soft target.
This is no idle concern. The looters and thugs of Seattle’s riots took their act to Bellevue, and then attempted to hit smaller towns where they calculated they could avoid the kind of ramped up law enforcement and National Guard presence now securing Seattle’s streets. Groups of rather heavily armed citizens deterred the criminals from venturing into Marysville, Snohomish and elsewhere. Those citizens had seen that the police could not protect them and formed their own defensive line. It worked and their communities were spared.
We have been informed that a number of Jefferson County residents intend to follow those defensive examples. We won’t know until the day arrives if they will follow through. They say that on Friday while the youth march works it way from the police station to the traffic light at McDonald’s they will take up positions elsewhere at intersections and business locations They tell us they intend to send the message that the violence and looting that has happened elsewhere will not be tolerated here. Jefferson County, they insist, will be a community of only peaceful demonstrations.
Restaurants almost full. Gyms open. The Rose showing movies again. Booklovers at the library. Swimming at Mountainview. Soccer, softball games on glorious Spring days. Open mics, church services, street music. Beer drinking outside at the Pourhouse. Whale watching. Everything not open before now open again.
This could be Jefferson County in a little over three weeks if our County Commissioners don’t again drag their feet.
It could have been Jefferson County this coming week if they had not wasted the chance we earned at an early open. Counties whose leaders weren’t lazy and dilatory will be moving into Phase 3 of the Governor’s reopen scheme this coming week. But not Jefferson County.
It is possible we might again fall behind the rest of the state unless our leaders wake up and work with the same sense of urgency as the people who pay their salaries. You see, we don’t get to move forward unless our Board of County Commissioners wants us to move forward. Phase 3 is no longer automatic. Whether any of the joyous things in the first paragraph happen is all up to them.
To recap: At the end of April Governor Inslee released a list of ten counties with negligible COVID risk and adequate medical preparations that would be allowed, should they request, to move into Phase 2 reopening ahead of the rest of the state. Some County Commissions worked over the weekend and put in their variance request within one to two days. Their businesses were opening by the end of the week.
Jefferson County dragged the process out for three weeks with one meeting after another. About twenty counties were in Phase 2 by the time our county’s Board of Health finally approved a request for variance on Thursday May 21. All county commissioners are members of the Board of Health. In many counties, the commissioners convened immediately following the BOH meeting to approve, in their role as the Board of County Commissioners, the variance they had just approved in their role as members of their respective Boards of Health. They didn’t waste time. They did not forget their communities were hurting.
But Jeffco’s commissioners took an entire 24 hours more to rest and reconvene on the afternoon of Friday, May 22 for all of half an hour to vote the same way they had the day before. They thought that the Washington Secretary of Health would not approve the request until at least the following Monday. He turned it around that evening. Commissioner Kate Dean actually complained about how quickly that happened.
The Governor has abandoned his rigid 4 Phase plan, and will now allow counties to move forward on a case-by-case basis, so long as they demonstrate the required metrics for low virus activity and medical preparedness. As soon as three weeks pass after entering Phase 2, counties may seek to move into Phase 3. It also means that unless county commissioners act to enter Phase 3, the county remains where it is regardless of what happens statewide.
Those counties that acted diligently to move into Phase 2 can ramp up for Phase 3 as early as June 3. But, as crazy and foolish as it looks to anyone else, because Jefferson County’s commissioners approved a plan that made us dependent on Clallam County’s reopening–delayed until June 1–the soonest we could seek going to Phase 3 would be June 24–even though we otherwise qualify right now. That June 24 date depends on the Commissioners acting on June 1, which won’t happen. So our earliest Phase 3 date is more realistically further days, if not weeks later than that.
It remains to be seen how quickly our lethargic BOCC will move. They could again dilly-dally and ignore the pleas of the overwhelming majority of businesses wanting to open quickly. Restaurants, in particular, need fast action. They desperately need to get above the 50% capacity limit in Phase 2 to the 75% allowed in Phase 3. Restaurant margins are incredibly skinny. Very few can operate profitably at half capacity with the recent steep increases in food costs as well as the increased operating costs imposed on them by the Governor’s micromanagement of restaurant operations.
An excellent piece of news that flattens at least one speed bump: the Governor is not requiring action by the Board of Health as a precondition for a county to move into Phase 3, as he did for an early move into Phase 2. If you read our coverage on the dysfunctional, hysterical, unscientific, self-centered, uninformed, hairbrained, and incompetent (and other fitting adjectives and expletives) Board of Health proceedings you’ll understand why the Governor has done us a favor by cutting them out of the process for entering Phase 3.
Here is the Governor’s county-by-county plan press release with a link to the plan itself. Unlike the early phase 2 option, this plan does not explicitly require Board of Health action, and prevent amendment by the county commission.
