The Supreme Court Has Ruled to Let Louisiana Keep Hunting DeRay McKesson [View all]

https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/supreme-court-deray-mckesson-blm-protest/

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https://archive.li/VjWUU

As Donald Trump appears in court this week for yet another trial—this time over his alleged hush money payments to actress Stormy Daniels and his attempts to cover the trail—it is common for white-wing sycophants to say Trump is being “persecuted.” He’s not, of course. Trump is being prosecuted for his various alleged crimes and misdeeds. If he’d like to be prosecuted less, my suggestion would be to stop committing so many crimes or things that look like crimes.

If you want to see somebody who is being persecuted, I suggest you look no further than DeRay McKesson. McKesson is an activist dedicated to ending police brutality. He’s been involved in the Black Lives Matter movement for nearly a decade, and for those efforts, he’s been relentlessly harassed by whites in the state of Louisiana and on the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Court. Now, the Supreme Court has given the harassment its blessing.

In 2016, McKesson helped to organize a Black Lives Matter protest near the police headquarters in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, after the cops there murdered Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old Black man whom they shot six times, despite having pinned him to the ground and utterly immobilized him. During that protest, somebody threw a rock. That rock struck a police officer, severely injuring him.

Nobody knows who threw the rock. McKesson doesn’t know. I don’t know (though, if I did, I wouldn’t tell you, because I am too pretty for stitches). The rock-thrower has never been found. For all we know, the person who threw the rock wasn’t even aligned with the protesters: It could have been a counterprotester with poor aim throwing rocks at Black Lives Matter, or it could have been a false-flag person trying to incite violence to make the protesters look bad. Or it could have been a protester trying to throw rocks at the police. We don’t know.

*snip*