CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Protesters have torched a police station, looted shops and graffitied public buildings in their calls for justice in Minneapolis – with the sentiment spreading across other cities in America overnight.
The Twin Cities Riots continue to escalate five days after an unarmed and handcuffed black man was murdered on camera by Minnesota police officers on May 25th.
However, politicians and Fox News anchors have been quick to criticise the protests, with conservatives arguing that the hundreds of thousands of oppressed and terrified minorities should find more peaceful ways to highlight their dislike of tyrannical racist structures when they eventually reach boiling point.
President Donald Trump has today been officially censored by Twitter after he urged the shooting of looters in Minnesota, in what many view as a call for military violence against U.S. citizens.
The knee-jerk response by Republicans to bring in the National Guard to begin murdering their own people seems to have been brought on by the emotive images coming out of the main street of Minneapolis, where rioters destroyed a Target Supermarket.
Other prominent wealth-hoarding retail franchises that sell products made by South-East Asian sweatshops, such as Footlocker and AutoZone, have also been destroyed and looted – in what some commentators are describing as ‘despicable’.
Prominent Fox News host Tomi Lahren appears to be at the centre of the anti-rioting debate. Arguing that protestors are achieving nothing but destroying businesses in their own communities, and in turn limiting their own chances of gaining employment within these wage-slave corporations that pay some workers as low as $6 per hour with no health benefits.
Target Workers Unite recently released a survey of more than 500 Target workers around the US, representing 382 different stores in 44 states. Only 12.7% of the workers who responded said they could survive on the wages from Target alone, with 56% of workers citing they have ran out of food while employed at Target, and 12.8% of workers reported experiencing homelessness.
While some may argue that these multinational retail giants may actually have been an intended target for the dispossessed American underclass currently rioting across America, the media has overwhelmingly decided the looting is nothing but opportunism by spoilt black people that just wanted to stock up on basic household items they can’t usually afford.
Target has responded to these concerning images of anti-capitalist mobilisation of the American working class by announcing that it is shutting down more than a dozen stores in the Minneapolis-St.Paul area.
