North Idaho has long been home to those seeking to escape the looming collapse of America. This is a region doused in frontier spirit; a land where people openly carry guns, and where bounty hunters still operate, tracking down fugitives hoping to bolt into Canada. It is here, on rugged fringes stalked by mountain lions, bears and wolves, that the American Redoubt was born.

The fired Hunter College professor who held a machete to a New York Post reporter’s neck founded a group behind “f–k police” protests that trashed subway stations in a spree of anarchic vandalism.

Shellyne Rodriguez, 45, is a founder of Decolonize This Place, an anarchist group that vandalized the city’s subway in 2019 with anti-cop graffiti, and occupied the Whitney Museum of American Art for several months in 2018 and 2019.

Today, the Department of Justice declared that New York City, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon, are "permitting anarchy, violence, and destruction."

This isn't just about Attorney General William Barr happily assisting President Donald Trump's re-election efforts by escalating attacks on urban centers. This is yet another attempt to manipulate federal spending on cities in ways that shift the boundaries between the executive branch and Congress.

Despite media reports that everything is fine within the so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle, both business and owners and residents report being afraid. In the occupied six-block area where protestors and the homeless have made camp, businesses have had difficulty getting trucks or other vehicles through the make-shift barricades.

Welcome to the CHAZ, the newly named Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, where most everything was free Tuesday.

Free snacks at the No-Cop Co-op. Free gas masks from some guy’s sedan. Free speech at the speaker’s circle, where anyone could say their piece. A free documentary movie — Ava DuVernay’s “13th” — showing after dark.

A Free Capitol Hill, according to no shortage of spray paint on building facades. And perhaps most important to demonstrators, the neighborhood core was free of uniformed police.

(CNN) - The mayor of Seattle on Wednesday told President Donald Trump to "go back to your bunker," after Trump appeared to suggest he would intervene in the city's growing protests and called for law and order.

Seattle police say they have received reports of armed guards and potential extortion in a self-declared autonomous zone that spans several blocks and includes a now-closed precinct.

“We’ve heard, anecdotally, reports of citizens and businesses being asked to pay a fee to operate within this area. This is the crime of extortion. If anyone has been subjected to this, we need them to call 911,” Assistant Chief of Police Deanna Nollette said on Wednesday.

In Chicago last weekend 82 people were shot, 22 of them fatally. Between May 2019 and late May 2020, homicide claimed the lives of over 300 black men in the city. That’s not a police brutality problem, that’s a problem of insufficient police power being deployed to stop violent criminals. If the death of one man, George Floyd, while under arrest in Minneapolis is cause for nationwide protests, why don’t the deaths of hundreds of George Floyds every year prick the conscience of protesters that much more?