Here at the West Side of the Capitol, stage being assembled for “Justice for J6” defendants rally.
Police have two layers of barricades and then a line of cops standing between the rally point and the Capitol reflecting pool.
The one lone counter-protest display adjacent to the rally has a request to investigate a specific state Senator listed on it addressed to the January 6 commission, and the word “loser” on a Trump-style banner.
Frontline officers mostly with normal outfits plus helmets.
Police tell lone counter-protester that they’ll have to leave this entire park area by permit time for event, which extends to adjacent sidewalk.
Media begins to assemble around the rally stage outside the Capitol.
I want to have a pretty complete accounting of today, so while the event won’t be starting for another couple hours, I’m going to begin live feed shortly.
More vid from yesterday: Man with a raccoon hat (which he wanted to be very clear is different than Viking attire or felt) showed up at the "Justice for J6" event and was confronted by counter-protester and press.
"I have little respect for Trump anymore, he's a coward" he said.
The raccoon-hat-man denied that any police had been assaulted on January 6 by Trump supporters.
@JonFarinaPhoto - who filmed this for @N2Sreports - had someone pull up his footage of a cop being crushed on J6 in a doorway by the crowd.
Man says "that's not assault."
Here is the full conversation @JonFarinaPhoto filmed for @N2Sreports of a man in a raccoon hat being confronted yesterday.
A limited version of this same conversation ultimately aired on CNN as well.
Police surround masked man reportedly armed with a firearm.
He tells them where the gun is, and they pull out his badge.
He's undercover law enforcement.
Without disarming or handcuffing him, police extract him from the event.
"Are you undercover?" the officers asked the masked man, who gave them a badge.
I guess not anymore.
The masked man claimed “I’m just here” when asked if he’s undercover as he presented a badge to justify the gun he was apparently wearing, before being pulled out.
Other than undercover, he could have hypothetically been simply masked & off duty with his badge and gun concealed.
IN HIS OWN WORDS: Antifascist activist @JasonRCharter was charged with felonies and misdemeanors and arrested three times amidst civil unrest in 2020.
I sat down with Jason for a wide-ranging interview following his guilty plea to one misdemeanor.
The Trump admin characterized @JasonRCharter as the antifa "ringleader" in an attempt to pull down the statue of Andrew Jackson outside the White House.
Jason tells the story of finding this out from the news while in jail.
"You can't be the leader of an idea," he says.
It was because of President Trump's "10 years for destruction of federal property" executive order that he originally faced 20 years in prison.
THREAD: Tonight protesters led by @ShutDown_DC marched to Brett Kavanaugh's house to protest the court's recent decision not to interfere in Texas's new abortion restrictions.
"My body, my voice!"
"When abortion rights are under attack, what do we do? Rise up, fight back!"
"I am angry," said the first speaker outside Kavanaugh's house tonight.
"They're not stopping abortion. They're stopping safe abortion."
"And all those police standing there, you could be somewhere else, doing your actual job. You're just standing there."
"This moment is not only about productive rights," said @KristinMink_, an activist currently running for Montgomery County Council (this neighborhood).
"This a danger to every fundamental right in this country."
She calls for adding more judges to the Supreme Court.
"I'm totally sympathetic to the Taliban right now," claimed Libertarian, anti-war activist and Iraq War veteran @adamkokesh because, "They're the rebels who just beat the empire."
"We don't need tanks and F-15's to defeat the U.S. government, do we?" is the lesson @adamkokesh says he takes away from the Afghanistan.
"If the U.S. government is as effective in Alabama as it was in Afghanistan, some day, we can drive the U.S empire out of America."
This afternoon, a coalition of anti-war activists led by @codepink held a rally to cut Pentagon funding where they brought a cake shaped as the Pentagon, so they could literally cut it.
@medeabenjamin joked about the billions of dollars that each cake bite would represent.
Sean @SeanBlackmon9 with @pslweb and @answercoalition described the history of the anti-war movement over the past 20 years (receiving "boos" for a mention of Bush).
He describes how even other anti-war activists criticized ANSWER for protesting the war so early after 9/11.
"We have to stop the global violence, we have to divest from global violence," said anti-war veteran andDC organizer @ReddIsAri.
"If they can spend $300 million per day in Afghanistan, they can invest $20 billion to house everybody. That's a one-time investment."