 For more videos on People's Juggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Today we're joined by Eugene Puri, the Party for Socialism and Liberation. We're going to be talking about the arrest of four members of the PSL yesterday in Denver, Colorado. Now these members of the PSL were very actively involved in organizing protests demanding justice for Elijah McLean, who was murdered by the police last year. And these arrests are only part of a larger strategy in the United States and many parts of the United States to crack down on protesters who have been demanding justice for the victims of racist police policies and state policies. Thank you so much, Eugene, for joining us. No, thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure. Eugene, could you first begin by talking about the context of the arrest itself and whether you've been able to get in touch with some of the activists who were arrested and what's happening on the legal scene right now? Absolutely. So what took place was that yesterday morning, a number of, well, actually late last night and yesterday morning, late the night before and yesterday morning, there was a concerted effort by police in the area of Denver, Colorado to single out a number of activists, four members of the PSL, leading members of the PSL. And it appears that perhaps some of our allies as well were also targeted and we're still trying to get the full force of who may have been caught in this drag net, but they were stopping people at work. One of the individuals, Joel Northam, actually had a SWAT team with an armored vehicle show up to his house to arrest him. Lillian House, another one of the activists who was arrested, was surrounded on the road by five police cars and taken in. So they were taken in in a manner that made it seem like they were multi-state criminals or something that had committed a string of armed robberies or whatever it may be, despite the fact that the charges that have been leveled against them are for peaceful protest. And so the context for this really is that over the past two months, there have been a range of protests around the murder of Elijah McClain by Denver, Aurora police, which is just outside of Denver. And the police have been massively embarrassed by this. There have been huge demonstrations, thousands of people, the taking over of a city council meeting at one point and hours of a very poignant testimony being given by the families of many police brutality victims in Denver and in the surrounding area. And so this seems to come really as a, it seems as retaliation for those protests and for that exposure of the police. And it was done in such a way and the charges are such, you know, inciting a riot, kidnapping. I mean, these are completely bogus charges when we could talk more about it. But it seems entirely designed to create the maximum sense of fear, the maximum amount of demonization, and to really try to criminalize the protest movement, because these people are really the most identifiable, or at least some of the most identifiable leaders of this protest movement in the area. And to see them charged like this with these kind of charges and this kind of police response seems to us to be really 100% aimed at scaring people from coming out and continuing to protest and continuing to challenge the police. So far we have not been able to, we've only had limited contact with a few people. They're being held, you know, for people to just understand a little bit more. So there's the city of Denver, which people have heard about, and then there's some surrounding counties. And the charges come from one of the, at least one of the surrounding counties. We're still trying to figure it out because they're, you know, not giving all the information out. And so the Denver police arrested people and said, well, we're holding them for another county, and then they have to come get them and they have to do something. So they're using a bureaucratic process to try to keep people certainly in jail and not able to get out on bond and try to keep them in communicado from us, their comrades, from their families and from the broader public. Right. So in this context, could you also talk a bit about the protests that have been going on? You mentioned it slightly, but also a bit more detail about whether there has been any action against the police officers who were involved in the murder of Elijah McKinnon. It was a very brutal murder. He was, he was put in a strangler hold, he was injected. And so has there been any action against the police officers and what have been the demands that have been going on among the protesters? Well, I'm really glad that you raised that because district attorney Young, who leveled the charges against the protesters, is the same district attorney who in the end of June this year put out a long press release saying that he was not going to charge the three officers who had murdered Elijah McClain. The demands of the protest movement have been that these officers be arrested, that they be charged, that they be convicted. And prior to that, the demand was for the case to be reopened. Now the governor of Colorado is saying he's reexamining it, but this district attorney Young in the 17th judicial district of Colorado is saying that there, even though that the murder of Elijah McClain is on camera, even though it's very clear from the officer's body camera footage that they lied completely about what took place, despite the fact that even this district attorney was at pains to say, well, I'm not agreeing with them. I'm just saying it's not a crime, basically, which is absurd. You know, they have done nothing to bring these people to justice. And so many of the demonstrations that are linked to these charges and there's four specific demonstrations are directly linked to this. There was June 27th, which many people saw around the world because there was a brutal crackdown on a vigil of individuals playing the violin because Elijah McClain was a self-taught violin player. Some of the charges, including believe this are not kidnapping, result from a protest that was large enough that it surrounded a police station. But they were surrounding the police station because a photo had come out the same day of three Aurora police officers mocking the death of Elijah McClain. Now those three officers were fired because this demonstration was so large, so spirited, and there was so much outrage in the area. And the others are sort of protests that people know, including one where there was a right-wing car attack, a right-wing individual who at least we think it was a right-wing individual. It's not 100% clear, but it does seem that way drove their car into a protest there. So there's been a huge movement. And many of these protests have been thousands of people, two, three, 4,000 people. They've taken over highways. They've really made huge news in the Denver area and have brought out a major, broad cross-section of people from the community to protest. But we've seen absolutely no action. So we've got the same district attorney who says the three cops who murdered someone on camera will go free, regardless of whatever any of us may think, but that these activists will potentially be jailed. That's what he wants to do for maybe dozens of years, maybe longer than that. It's an unbelievable dichotomy. And I think it shows how clearly there is no justice for the victims of police murder when those who are demanding justice are more criminalized than the cops caught on camera committing a murder. So what we do have here is the continuous trend where, again, its focus is entirely on the protesters at the end of the day. Were they violent? Were they not? That seems to be the narrative and the rhetoric of the state and the establishment for the very beginning. And in this context, of course, we've also had the top US administration officials over the past two days, both William Barr and Jeffrey Ross, the attorney and deputy attorney generals, stating that even sedition can be used against those protesters who have been demanding justice. So this marks a completely new phrase so to speak. Yes, I think that this is, it really is unbelievable. I mean, there's been about 300 federal prosecutions so far. And Bill Barr's statements, I mean, it's in the way they were reported, it almost, I felt, and much of the mainstream media didn't show how outrageous this is. I mean, his direction to US attorneys across the country is look to charge people even when state and local officials do not want to charge them. And that's why he mentioned sedition, because he said, look for any federal charge you can find. And of course, some of them he mentioned are like the charges they used in Portland that people were allegedly, of course, this is false, allegedly attacking a federal courthouse. But he also mentioned sedition, which in the United States context means using violence essentially against the government authority. So it's unclear if this would even be able to stick, but he's encouraging people to look through any protest or arrested, even if they were not arrested by federal authorities, see what they were charged with and try to see if he could pin something on them. And what we've seen so consistently from Bill Barr, from Donald Trump, from the FBI is that they have tried to criminalize ideology and they've singled out most notably Antifa, which just stands for anti-fascist, of course. So they're basically saying all people in the United States who declare themselves to be anti-fascist are a part of some broad, violent conspiracy and deserve to be criminalized. And I think that's what's so scary about this sedition charge, because what we're really starting to see is a direct and a clear criminalization of political views and political ideology and an attempt not just to arrest people and charge them for things that they allegedly did, but really for thought crimes of being a part of broader ideological political movements that are certainly opposed to racism, certainly opposed to police terrorism in this country, but that more specifically are also looking to fight against the growing threat of these various fascist and semi-fascist forces, many of whom seem to be deeply entrenched and enshrined within the Trump administration and to really bring this into a major way. So I think we haven't seen the last of this yet. I think in the lead-up to the election, we're going to see much, much more of this. And the final thing I'll just say on this, this district attorney in Colorado is a Democrat. And there's almost like an arms race that's happening now, because Trump has said so often, well, we're going to do everything to criminalize the arsonists and the looters and whatever. And so now the Democrats are at deep, deep pains. Joe Biden even released an ad to this effect that they also will crack down aggressively on the movement and that they don't believe in arson or anything like that. And so you see these local district attorneys, the mayor of Washington DC, Muriel Bowser, their Democrats, many of them are Biden supporters, and they're saying, yes, let's go after them. Muriel Bowser, the mayor of DC who painted Black Lives Matter on the street, actually took the federal government to task for not being tough enough on protesters. So we're seeing this interesting competition that's heating up in the context of the U.S. elections to see which party can be most intolerant towards really left-wing political ideologies and can move more quickly to criminalize the actions of communities that have been unheard for so long and are doing whatever they can to enter the political conversation. Absolutely. And it's very important to see that you brought up the elections because as we know, most of the mainstream media is now, like we talked about earlier, completely gotten back on track, so to speak, and is discussing purely everything from an electoral term. So how do we see, how exactly are the movements right now working? Because now when we go beyond the Trump versus Biden dichotomy, how are the movements that over the past few months have really radicalized this space? What are they up to right now in a general sense, of course? I'm sure each movement has its own specificities, its own demands, but how do you see the broader trend that's going on? Well, I can tell you, this is maybe the most interesting electoral year I've ever been a part of. Usually most social movements totally demobilize, but it seems the opposite is actually happening this year. I mean, certainly people saw what's happening in Portland, but you look at Chicago, you look at Louisville, which isn't making any news, but having big protests. Obviously, what was happening in Denver, New York City, where there had been major protests this week around the issue of ICE, and I believe 25 people were actually arrested this week in relationship to that, and this is in relationship to some brutality in the ICE immigration detention camps. But what we're seeing is that people are not demobilizing. I mean, there's certainly quite a bit of disagreement in movements about how exactly to orient towards Biden, whether to support him, whether to not support him, whether to support a third party, whether to not vote. But one thing that people seem very united around is the millions of people who have been coming out into the streets over the past few months is the organizations that have really been driving that are continuing to come out, continuing to push people, continuing to protest, and continuing to fight. And I can say maybe the last time we've seen an election year like that, maybe 1968, 1964, at the height of the civil rights movement where even in an electoral year, the movements actually continue to grow because people recognize that the whole political establishment, even if they preferred one to another, was essentially bankrupt and was not going to answer the demands of the movement and that we had to stay in the streets. So we're seeing quite a bit of mobilization, and I think we will actually see more. There are a lot of calls for people to come out and to really start preparing now for a post-election reality that could be very serious and very contentious. So it's a very interesting set of time of moment right now, and I think it's very interesting specifically because there seems to be a push towards independence from the two major parties and people saying, hey, we are the movements in the streets. We have our own views, our own ideas, and we need to stay out there and have our own agenda and not just be dictated to by someone from on high. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Eugene, for talking to us. Thank you so much for having me. That's all your time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.