Charlie Foxtrot

Protests widened once again in solidarity with Portland’s ongoing clashes with federal hired guns. Tense situations flared around the country in the third week of July. Austin, Aurora, Louisville, Oakland, Chicago, Seattle. The Black Lives Matter movement protests for racial justice widened their scope, expanding campaigns to resist the ‘surge’ of federal forces sent to hot spot protest cities.

Garrett Foster, an anti-racism protestor, was pushing his fiancée along in her wheelchair when he was shot to death in Austin, Texas, at a downtown BLM protest when a car drove into the crowd. As demonstrators gathered around the vehicle, someone inside the car opened fire on the group, striking Foster, who himself, according to the New York Times, was carrying an AK-47. In Texas, it’s legal to open-carry guns of all kinds at protests. If that’s not a recipe for calamity, I dunno what is.

Yeah, yeah, I know. ‘Merica.