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On Thursday evening, as the death toll from COVID-19 topped 180,000 in the U.S., President Trump accepted the Republican Party's nomination in a lie-laced speech on the South Lawn of the White House in front of a predominantly unmasked crowd of over 1,000 people—roughly the same number of people that die each day from the coronavirus in the U.S. Many charged that hosting part of the convention at the White House broke the law by using the federal government to aid the president’s reelection campaign.
In his convention speech, President Trump repeatedly warned of chaos in the streets—blasting protestors—but refused to address why they were there, like this week's police shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man who was shot seven times in the back by a white police officer in Kenosha, WI on Sunday—not to mention the killing of two Black Lives Matter protestors by a white teenage militia member in Kenosha just days later.
Catch up on all of our convention coverage here, or read on for links to our reporting on the RNC; the devastating public health and economic crisis facing the country; police violence against Black and Brown communities and the powerful response of the Movement for Black Lives; and the connection between extreme weather, the climate crisis and environmental justice.
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On Friday morning, Democracy Now! turned to historian Rick Perlstein for analysis of Trump's acceptance speech and the 2020 elections. Perlstein said Trump paints a “picture of the world that bears no resemblance to reality” and that he has driven people to act violently.
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Over the last 20 years, Perlstein has written a four-volume series on the rise of the modern conservative movement, the final volume, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980, was just published.
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Author Jean Guerrero joined us on Democracy Now! to discuss her new book on Stephen Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s unprecedented attack on immigrant communities and the immigration system. She describes the White House adviser as a dangerous man bringing white nationalist ideology to the highest levels of government.
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“Stephen Miller primarily has been targeting families,” asserted Guerrero. “It becomes clear that for Stephen Miller, this is not about national security, this is not about keeping out criminals. This is about reengineering the ethnic flows into this country to keep Brown and Black families out.”
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Democracy Now! also interviewed Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, about the far-right conspiracy theory known as QAnon, which the Republican Party has openly embraced.
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QAnon claims that President Trump is secretly at war with a deep state cabal of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex trafficking operation, among other things. Trump has retweeted messages from supporters of the conspiracy theory and recently spoke publicly about it for the first time, describing QAnon believers as “people that love our country.”
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In 2004, Kenosha police killed 21-year-old Michael Bell in front of his mother and sister. The Kenosha Police Department conducted its own review of the incident, and within two days completely exonerated the officers.
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The reason the police shooting of Jacob Blake has been taken out of the hands of the Kenosha Police Department is because of Michael Bell's father, Michael Bell Sr. He campaigned for years to pass a law requiring an independent inquiry into any police-related shooting in Wisconsin.
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We interviewed Dave Zirin, sports editor for The Nation, about the unprecedented collective action taking place among professional athletes in support of Black Lives Matter.
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“It’s more than a boycott. It’s them withdrawing their labor,” Zirin stated. “It’s not just an example for racial justice protesters around the country. I think it’s a challenge to the labor movement as a whole.”
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Wisconsin State Representative David Bowen joined us on Democracy Now! to discuss the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, WI, as well as the killing of two Black Lives Matter protestors in Kenosha by 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a self-declared militia member and avid Trump supporter. Rittenhouse was arrested in Antioch, Illinois, after fleeing Wisconsin. He has been charged with murder.
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Bowen, who has attended racial justice protests in Kenosha, said he “witnessed firsthand” how freely organized white supremacists targeted protesters without interference from law enforcement, and accused police of giving Rittenhouse the “Dylann Roof treatment,” managing to arrest him without incident, while unarmed Black people are frequently met with deadly force. “This is Exhibit A and Exhibit B of why we need to transform law enforcement and public safety in Wisconsin and in this country,” Bowen stated.
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The police shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man in Kenosha, WI, has sparked massive protests across the country. Police shot Blake in the back seven times as he was getting into his car, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. He was reportedly breaking up a fight before police shot him, and the shooting was witnessed by his three young children.
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For comment and analysis, we turned Wisconsin's first African American Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, who said the police response to Blake was completely unjustified. “There’s no way that any officer could look at that video and say that that’s the way policing should happen,” he said. “We need police departments, sheriff’s departments to acknowledge that there is a real problem in the culture of policing.”
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Hurricane Laura slammed ashore as an extremely dangerous Category 4 storm on Thursday, bringing sustained winds of 150 miles per hour to the Gulf Coast. The strongest storm to hit Louisiana in over a century, Laura made landfall near the border of Louisiana and Texas. At least 14 people have been killed. Residents near Lake Charles were told to stay indoors with windows and doors shut when a chemical fire broke out.
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Democracy Now! interviewed Port Arthur resident Hilton Kelley, winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize. In addition to the hurricane, "people are ingesting all of these dangerous toxins and at the same time dealing with COVID-19 and the extreme heat,” Kelley said.
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As climate-fueled wildfires continued to engulf California, we spoke to Rasheed Lockheart about California's reliance on prison labor to fight fires. Lockheart was a firefighter at San Quentin State Prison until his release in January.
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"You have 600 less firefighters this year [due to COVID-19], and we’re facing some of the largest wildfires that we’ve ever had in the state. These guys are out 24, 48 hours at a time. They're being overworked, and for a dollar an hour. It’s a little bit of a human tragedy. They’re battling COVID-19, and they’re battling wildfires at the same time," Lockheart explained.
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Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former campaign chief and White House adviser, was arrested last week by U.S. postal police aboard a Chinese billionaire’s $28 million yacht off the coast of Connecticut. He's accused of defrauding donors to a private effort to build a wall along the Mexican border.
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We turned to Perla Trevizo and Lexi Churchill, reporters with ProPublica and The Texas Tribune investigative unit, for the story.
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This week we also spoke to John Dean, who served as the White House counsel for President Richard Nixon. His testimony during the Watergate scandal helped bring down Nixon.
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“I worked for the last authoritarian president we had,” Dean said. “Trump is of a different cut than Nixon. … He’s going to make Nixon look like a choir boy before it’s all over.”
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I hope you'll stay tuned to democracynow.org for our continuing coverage of the 2020 elections, uprisings against police violence, the pandemic, the climate emergency—and much more.
None of our work would be possible without you and the rest of our global audience of listeners and viewers. Thank you so much for tuning in to our daily, independent news hour.
Stay safe. Wear a mask. Save lives.
Democracy Now!
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