Is the CHAZ a LIVING HECK?

let's get one thing out of the way first the Capitol Hill autonomous zone or Chas is not autonomous it can't survive without assistance from outside that much is clear it's a misnomer that muddies the water of what the Chas is and what it's trying to do that's why there's been an attempt to rebrand the Chas into the chop which stands for depending on who you ask either Capitol Hill occupied protest or Capitol Hill organized protests the latter of which is a very silly name because all protests are organized in some way I'm still gonna call it the Chas though for a couple reasons firstly chop sounds violent and as we'll discover there is a concerted effort by politicians and media figures to portray the Chas as violence in barbaric more importantly accuracy aside the name Chas has stuck it gets attention and once something is named it's really difficult to get people to call it something else so we might as well just go with the name that people already know for clarity sake also very fun to say Chas Chas Chas Chas get used to hearing the word Chas gonna say Chas a lot in this video the Chas for people that somehow don't know is a territory within the Capitol Hill area of Seattle taken and held by protesters who have forcefully kept police out after weeks of violent dispersal tactics by the Seattle Police Department's including the use of tear gas and blast ball grenades towards protesters fighting police brutality after the death of George Floyd the volume of protesters eventually became too great for the police to contain the Chas was established on June 8th after police evacuated the east precinct building which was promptly surrounded and barricaded by protesters making it inaccessible to the police and the epicenter of what came to be known as free Capitol Hill this protest is by design decentralized and leaderless that means that their goals and ambitions can be difficult to suss out on the one hand a list of 30 demands was published on medium.com abolish the police grant amnesty to the protesters give retrials to african-americans convicted of a violent crime with the jury of their peers that type of thing others viewed the protest as essentially some kind of revolution a chance to establish a legally distinct territory from the United States and create a new type of Society one thing most people seem to agree on though was a desire to show the world that they could survive and thrive without a police presence in the area and largely they've succeeded for a time anyway in surviving without a police presence in the area with the notable caveat that security threats are often taken from the chest outside its boundaries for the police to deal with because quite frankly they don't have the infrastructure to do anything else at the moment but in terms of showing people that this is possible that's a bit of a mixed bag turns out it's a lot harder than you might expect turns out a lot of people don't want to see a project like this succeed and a lot of them are politicians cops white supremacists thugs and media figures I don't think I can convince you of the ideological merits of jazz in a twenty minute YouTube video think of them or their tactics as you will what I think is undeniable however is that there's a very deliberate misinformation campaign being concocted around the Chas take a look at this and and I cannot stress this enough unedited segment from tucker carlson tonight our own Kyle Rothenberg ventured in to the nation formerly known as downtown Seattle here's what he found [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] there it is look out everyone this guy's bored and twirling a stick around you're giving this lady a cigarette that's bad for your lungs oh no someone's wearing a unicorn onesie oh I didn't add that music by the way that's the real music from the show that they used Fox News has a lot of fun with the Chas Lake for example airing their shitty photoshop's combining multiple images to make it look more dangerous than it is or using photos that weren't taken within the Chas of urban areas on fire to pretend like people were just setting fires everywhere I guess there's actually a no fire rule in the Chas there are exceptions for like bonfires that people set up in old fountains but don't let a little thing like reality get in the way of your fear-mongering look at all of the graffiti there graffitiing everything well I just want to point out because I keep seeing everybody talking about the horrible graffiti everywhere that the graffiti that's happened is all on the plywood covering the windows this is stuff that's going to be taken down when the shops reopen properly anyway this is not any kind of permanent damage in fact that looks better if you ask me then some random fucking plywood everywhere like this is beautiful actually this is great it's they're not damaging the shop they're not graffiti the brick which would be harder to clean I just don't trust the news okay guys and Trump watches a buttload of Fox News so you know homeboy had something to say about this take back your city now if you don't do it I will this is not a game these ugly anarchists ugly anarchists hey man come on must be stopped immediately first then the mayor responded essentially like I don't know dude doesn't seem like that big a problem sounds like sending in the military would be much worse sounds like that'd be a worse problem and then Trump deleted his tweet he deleted the tweet where he threatened to call the military on Seville Lien's the narrative you've likely heard about the Chazz is that there are roving warlords assaulting journalists and extorting businesses so let's just break down those claims and get them out of the way the warlord in question is a SoundCloud rapper named Raz Simone whose biggest warlord 'action was heading up ar-15s to protesters because and this is a direct quote a man just ran over protesters hopped out and shot one of our young black men this is the fifth time I've witnessed this conservatives don't seem to have a problem with white protestors carrying ar-15s to get haircuts so surely black protesters carrying them to avoid getting murdered shouldn't be an issue you might recall that there was a constitutional amendment about it Washington is also an open carry state so there's that unless for some reason you don't think people should carry around ar-15 skis you seem to like them doing that most of the time now Simone did push a journalist in a video that's the assault in question but then later that journalist filmed a follow-up with Simone where he explains that they have no beef with and the whole thing was blown this is the best thing is two men two grown men weekend forbes actually elicited a tweet by ian miles young fascist goblin as the evidence of this alleged assault young sweet is still up by the way despite the fact that later evidence demonstrates it and by extension he is full of shit also the claims that businesses are being extorted was something that police said they just heard from people and then later had to walk back those statements the very next day because it turns out they couldn't find a single business that this happened to most businesses in fact said that they hadn't been affected or had seen increases in foot traffic since the Chazz began let me repeat that for those of you who are not paying attention the Seattle police had to walk back the claim that businesses were being extorted the next day because there was no evidence to support it after they had made a public statement saying they'd heard about it happening before they got any evidence which is to say they did a lying there was lying done it was an officer involved why am I saying that there is no violence within the Chas that no one is hurting anyone else that it's some beautiful utopia no obviously not there are crimes being committed there is violence there just like there is everywhere there's always violence you might have heard that there have been shootings there were three shootings one on Saturday June 20th the perpetrators fled the scene the second one actually happened outside of the Chas on Sunday June 21st was by a group of white supremacists that shattered a bunch of n-words and then held a man named Juan Young down and shot him and then the police left him to die rather than escort medical personnel close to the Chas not within just close to it so volunteer medics had to drive him in a van to the hospital the third was on Tuesday June 23rd details are scarce it's pretty ridiculous to me to suggest that because people within the Chas have been victims of violent crimes that they are therefore violent or causing violence in all three cases the violence was perpetrated by people who appeared to be from outside the Chas coming in with the express purpose of hurting people within it in one case the shooting didn't even happen within the Chas but it gets tallied among the Chas shootings either way but let's say for the sake of argument let's be totally fair and say that all of the violence could be laid at the feet of the Jazz and the Chas alone not including the chad's shootings there were 22 mass shootings in the United States resulting in six fatalities during the time period over which the Chas shootings occurred look at this list if you don't believe me three in Chicago alone with one fatality and 12 injuries making Chicago more dangerous than the Chas during that time period and that's just between Saturday and Tuesday if we expand to the entire time the Chas has been active that's 53 mass shootings in the United States resulting in 37 fatalities between June 8 and June 24th which is the day that I wrote this the only thing unusual about the shootings in the Chas is that they happened in a novel area this isn't an issue being caused by police lessness because last time I checked there were plenty of police officers in the rest of the country and there are plenty of police officers in Chicago and in both of those places this just happens regularly but you don't got to take it from me I'm some keyboard warriors never even been there easy for me to sit back and tell you you're getting a skewed perspective on them but how would I know maybe it really is a Thunderdome situation where people are cannibalizing one another for fun maybe the Warlord's have scared all the residents and business owners so badly that they've just made it look like the media has been lying about the Chazz the only way we'd know for sure is to have someone on the inside luckily for me Neela a colleague of mine was exactly that she generously agreed to an interview with me and captured the footage you're about to see as well she got permission for it and we've taken precautions to keep everyone safe we've blurred everybody's face because we don't want police or white supremacists to ID people later you got it you got to do that kind of thing don't just record people at protests you are putting them in danger if you do if you do that there's so much misinformation out there and people talking about the direct implications of the chop or jazz I'm gonna continue to say Chazz I guess the goal is to show people the goodness of humanity because the big argument against anarchy and in general that like people are monsters and if you take away law and order they'll be barbaric and I think the you need the chances that people were tremendously kind quick to help each other and protect each other and there were some bad actors but there always will be you know so what so what do you feel like the media is getting wrong about the Chazz or the Chop oh gosh depends on the media combo for which people tend to assume is kind of live girl is actually quite conservative they're pretty good about always making houseless people or homeless people look like the worst they possibly can in any given situation they very rarely report on how some people sympathetically and they're giving such has the same treatment treating it like a scary lawless zone where anybody can do anything and there's no one to protect you and you know just kind of feeding into that Procop narrative just usually that's like scary lawless own people are running amok there's drugs and alcohol and there's no place to go to the bathroom and all this stuff and you know and for a lot of there are places to go to the bathroom a lot of parties and a lot of people just took it upon themselves to clean the porta-potties and I found it really funny that people were just like taping like portable like squirters of hand sanitizer just like taping them to the side of the stalls when they ran out because they couldn't like get the proper things to refill it all over the place everywhere you look there was like hand sanitizer taped to signs and trees and how much how much time have you spent inside maybe seven maybe a full seven days now geez and have you been made to feel unsafe at any point so yes and no on the one hand while I've been there I have felt tremendously safe because every time there is a threat of danger there's always like ten people around to jump up and be like hey none of that and like intervene so I felt very safe by the people around me but I didn't feel safe because the president of the country living was threatening to send the army in so so I guess I guess it's two separate questions I'm kind of asking here because I did kind of want to get into that as well but the the narrative that I'm seeing is that it's this you know lawless place where people are subject to random violence from the I don't know if you'd call them citizens but the occupants of the Chas and then on the other side of that there is the genuine threat of violence from the police or the National Guard or what have you yeah that's what I was most afraid the people I was most afraid of while I was there were not the people who were occupying it it was um it was a proud boy group the local police which are very active other white supremacist groups in the police in the army I was very rarely scared for my safety there was like little moments where they'd be like that person is doing a dangerous thing and like you find out about the threat and then look over and see like 20 people swarming to take care of it okay get the first aid kit and wait and see if anybody needs treatment did that by default cuz that's most of what I did during these protests but there was a set up medical tent and the medics there were like actual doctors so my services were not needed in that way but one kind of sad but wholesome thing that I kept seeing is people coming into the Chas to go to the medic tent and get medical treatment who like weren't staying there who would just people who lived nearby and had like little medical problems that neither looked at and couldn't afford to get seen a lot of people were like the local people everyone I talked to any way seemed to be really happy about it like even people like the old white conservative dudes um couldn't say anything bad what is your sense of the hostilities between I guess more so the the the people who are maintaining this project and the people within the territory that that aren't necessarily maintaining the project most of the people I talked to who live in the area hopes like living the apartments around the the Chas were really grateful when it opened up because it meant that there was no more police and no more tear gas that's a big complaint like like I can breathe again because there's no more tear gas in the air mmm that's the number one thing I heard a lot of people who live nearby liked that they could just like bring their kids and let them run around and not have to worry too much about like tear gas or police brutality especially like the local people of color felt a lot safer letting their kids play in that area than they had before the general sense of a community like even though you didn't know a lot of people there and even though the who was technically leadership was a little bit deliberately nebulous and vague there was still a sense of um just like talked to the person involved and people around you will figure out what to do if there's a situation and like there's one homeless dude who showed up he was having a bad night we don't know why or what was going on we don't know if it was intoxication or if he was having some sort of episode but every time a woman would walk by he'd be like do you want to see my willy and they'll be like nope and keep walking and as soon as enough people found out what's happening they just like kind of corralled them and we're like all right here we're gonna get you checked out by the medics and then they just encouraged him to get into his tent and go to bed and then in the morning I saw I'm walking around in the garbage like if the police had been called that man would have ended up in jail or worse much much much worse like best-case scenario he went to jail for tonight and lost his tent and all of his belongings because they wouldn't let him bring it with him and it wouldn't be there in the morning something they did that police never do is they asked all the women who had been flashed like what they wanted to happen and the consensus was like we just wanted to stop and go to bed you mentioned that the leadership is intentionally nebulous and I was wondering if you could speak to the kind of structure of how things are run everyone who was there largely grew up in America and as a result we all have a very hierarchical sense of thinking and that's how we tend to want to organize things because it's the only system that we really know so when suddenly everything is lateral there's bound to be a little confusion the sense that I got was that the leadership was deliberately nebulous because nobody wanted to be like the figurehead because that made him a target nobody wanted to be like on the top because then that's not a lateral hierarchy so it became a question of like separate people were like the information people you would go to if there was like if if depending on what was going on so if you needed supplies you could go to like shop and see like see what someone giving off shop everything was free she was the one giving out most of the supplies so you could go to her and be like hey what do you need and she would have the most up-to-date information on that or if there was a security problem you could go to some of the folk at the at the barricades and be like hey there's some kids climbing up onto the roof of a nearby building what do you want to do and then they would kind of help with that so there was like different groups of people who you would go to for different things and figuring that out at first was a bit tricky but you could generally ask anyone at a stall and they'd be like oh this is who you talk to you about this and point you in the right direction rather than like a top-down leadership it's kind of organized into different affinity groups a little bit yeah and it happened kind of organically and it just it takes some adjusting and when you grow up in a hierarchical system and suddenly things are lateral it's hard to adjust because you don't think in that way you think like okay well who's in charge of you oh no one because that's not how it works here so you're not being run by local warlords that's heavily not no okay how long do you think this this project can last well given that today the mayor announced that they were going to be sending police in again and wanted people out today I honestly don't know yeah like this morning because of the shootings which for the record I can pin almost completely on the police for that because of some stupid shit they did but I am a pessimist like as soon as I got there I was like we could be raided any minute now I was just tense and unwilling to invest in like structural like I would do it because everybody else was and I felt like it was the correct thing to do but I I'm just a kind of a pessimistic person so I was like oh we could totally plant this sick garden but what's the point when the police are gonna kick us out in the event that it doesn't last in in the future when this type of thing is attempted again because I imagine like given the the wild success like in my opinion like nobody could have predicted that something like this would happen what do you think could be done differently well I think it was I think the it was handled really well as best it possibly could be but the fact is um it's a bunch of people with canned goods and seeds and a lot of determination against the entire police force of the city and the only thing we had on our side for a little while was optics but then that even started to change because of how the news reported on it and for a while when it was like oh these peaceful people are occupying this area of Capitol Hill to deliberately make a safe area for people of color then that's like that looks really good and if the police come in guns out suddenly it looks some it looks really bad they must have known that because they insisted on taking that like a little hunk of the Chas and the path they took out it was um like a little sea where they went on-like xi and turned on pine and it goes right by Cal Anderson Park and as soon as they took that Street and moved to barricades that people could drive through for traffic quote-unquote reasons everybody was instantly very tense they were like we can't see who's gonna drive up now and there's been a lot of threats from like proud boy and what supremacist groups this is the perfect path or not these to do a drive-by if they wanted to and then that happened and now the police have an excuse to close down the top have you have you been since the shootings um yeah I went up to see if they needed supplies and brought some stuff but I didn't ask them the name yeah how has the vibe changed there's not as many normies and the festival vibe it's kind of been diminished but the festival vibe was never something that could be maintained for very long anyway no it was just what happened when a lot of casual and normal people showed up to see what was going on out of curiosity and in all seriousness I don't know what could be done differently I'm not a any kind of expert on this I hope it lasts I really do and I hope that like there were some internal problems like a lot of the people of color were complaining that they were being spoken over by I've been like white guys talk over them all the time and they were getting annoyed with that and that's valid and legit so as soon as they brought that up a lot of people took precautions to make sure that that stopped happening there was like at one meeting I was lucky enough to get to sit in at there was a kind of a no interrupting policy and if you interrupted you had to leave by the end of the like 20 minute meeting there were no white guys left I'm like to be fair most of them were like shit sorry bye and they would just like apologize and leave and be like fuck I did it I'm so sorry and they would like excuse themselves sure that's who I'd be is the person that did it by accident absolutely a lot of the people who are organizing and helping like run things at the the Chaz are people who also work at like how's the shelter's yeah so they have a lot of people there have conflict mitigation strategies that are really like nuanced and this is like a situation to situation basis the vast majority of people who were at the chasm table were kind they were there to help they took a lot of responsibility to help people and gathers applies and spread information and they were the quiet ones they weren't the ones who were behind a mic or who were screaming the most but they were the ones who were there doing the work inherently people are good if there's not a hierarchical structure there will be some confusion while people figure things out but people aren't inherently monsters they're not inherently going to go straight towards barbarism as soon as there's not a jackass with the badge around to enforce some structure I mentioned earlier that there was like I'd find out that there was some danger and then it would immediately be resolved so one evening when I was sitting by my tent with some some friends we hear oh I just heard a woman yell like heads up that guy has a knife and I like turned and there was a guy running with a knife and like seven people chasing him and he wasn't able to stop because if he had they would have caught up and I was sitting next to my friend who on Twitter I had called Kevin because I don't wanna say his real name sure who wasn't listening and he just like looked up and he was like oh we played a tag and they jumps up and takes off but um so yeah I'd hear about a danger like that guy and suddenly it's taken care of or let me to be like watch it out not see what the firework and then there'd be like a boom and like by the time I like looked over there was like five people swarming them and like people have the traffic cones to block it so that when I went off it didn't hurt anyone and it's like okay cool so like I don't know if you guys ever knew how much information is like getting out there out there but like the issue with the shootings basically what went down is that prior to the shooting there was an unrelated like medical emergency and the medics within the Chas had a meet point set up for paramedics to easily get in and get people and get out and after that medical emergency they gave a like little cut of the chest to the cops and to the public so that they could drive through and people were upset about that because they're like oh it makes it really easy to do a drive-by and we've gotten lots of threats from local Nazi groups we have every reason to think somebody's going to try that and so it's a similar happened but once the first shooting had happened the medics got there and we're treating them right away and danger was pretty much immediately resolved like they might extending that that security got the shooter they got them or chased them off its time still unclear about which but the the medics got to the injured person and they were waiting for paramedics to come in but despite the fact that they had made it clear that there was no present danger the police would not give the go-ahead for the paramedics to come in they just point-blank refused so the the medics just took the injured person in a personal car to the local hospital and after that a little while later the police swept the Chas with like guns out and that was incredibly tense and unpleasant I'm told I wasn't actually there for that I think I probably would have been very frustrated had I been there and I would have let my displeasure be known verbally which cops loved yeah so my personal theory is that the slice of the chasse that was given up from eleventh into pine was done deliberately so that it would be easier for the white supremacist groups that were making threats to get in and do violence that way when violence was done they would have an excuse to shut it down there are a lot of local cops who are also part of the proud boys and what supremacist group so it was probably just because partially because they wanted an excuse to come in and shut it down and partially because they wanted to be able to divert people it was just it was really suspicious when they opened up that text mystery everybody was like why though like the proud boys are threatening us hmm other groups are like why are you where are you gonna make it easier for them because it was an area where people in the kalin-san park couldn't see who was about to drive up and so there was no like prep time to be like oh that's clearly a Nazi you know that like the stupid Trump flag and the Confederate flag they're like oh that person's probably not safe let's all like get down or something like there was no time to prepare and no time to do anything and even during that situation that the like running theme the thing I noticed more than anything was was like kindness people helping each other and putting up memorials and mourning and feeding each other and sitting and talking and educating each other and like yeah open smoke but like in terms of everything else going on like security did not care about people who were just having a cigarette you know what some people were upset about the drinking they're like oh nobody should have any alcohol open because it doesn't look good for optics it's like well they're not talking about the alcohol right now they're talking about the supposed warlords so I don't think someone having a beer is really the biggest problem right now but that's certainly an opinion look you don't have to agree with what the people and the Jazz are doing you're free to have your own opinion but I think it's irresponsible to not recognize that there is a considerable sensationalistic portrayal of the area as basically fallout happening in Seattle I'm sure you can find new stories that make all sorts of ridiculous claims about what's happening within but I'd ask that you actually read those stories and evaluate their trustworthiness chances are they're using some qualifier like people are saying or we've heard reports so that they can report dishonest statements that might get clicks without fact-checking and then ask yourself this if the area truly is some hellscape some Mad Max wasteland where the strong rule over the week if it's truly so dangerous that everyone within fears for their lives why do these news outlets feel the need to be dishonest surely if that's the case it would be trivial to present real evidence instead they just put scary music over people in unicorn onesies and run with unsubstantiated reports without evidence if you think you've seen that evidence go back and look a bit more closely and see if maybe you just saw hearsay and fear-mongering masquerading as journalism [Music] hello and welcome to the eyeball zone here in the eyeball zone a distant voices calling listen you can't hear it you can see it eyeballs do not hear they see but between colors between form there lies a warning dare you read it this episode would not have been possible without the hard work of nila who came to me with her footage graciously agreed to be interviewed and helped me get my facts straight about the script you can follow her on tick-tock where she posts videos of her drawing and then the finished pieces on Twitter and also you can she does she draws on twitch to which you can also watch right now she's working on a project where she draws thick girls until she learns to stop hating her own body in her own words and that sounds like the type of thing my audience can get down with I demand that you check her out she did me a real solid do you have a small leftist project you'd like to forever taint with the mark of the eyeball send me no more than one email at thought slime editor gmail.com and perhaps you will find yourself trapped here in the eyeball zone hey thanks for watching this video take a look in the description for Dewan Young's cash up because that's where the ad revenue for this one is going he's got medical bills and the way things are going he's probably gonna have some legal bills for some bullshit reason at some point so let's show him some love and support and remind him that we haven't forgotten about him if you liked the video you know there's if it would be nice if you press the like button I would appreciate that I like it when people do that you can also subscribe to me and hit the bell and all that garbage that helps me get more people to watch my videos so that's why I asked you to do it you can also see more of my videos over at youtube.com slash scaredy-cats TV where I talk about horror movies I also stream on both YouTube and twitch every Thursday 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time you can catch me there get hit the jingle-jangle that bell and you'll get a look notified when I go that's a little benefit for the for the belt then maybe you didn't know about boy it's hot here boy it's hot don't you think it's a little too hot for me thoughts line sweating a lot looking forward to my new apartment with central air that's going to rule you

Channel: Thought Slime

Views: 80,371

Rating: 4.8388658 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: xItaRUSPQXY

Length: 33min 38sec (2018 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 26 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/temporarilythesame]

If you haven't watched this, its pretty good.

[u/SapphicOverload]

Great video, would recommend

[u/MurlockHolmes]

I was born in Seattle and really figured based on what my cousins were saying and the culture of the city as I knew it that most of what the news said must've been bullshit, but i hadn't realized to what degree.

[u/spaceyjules]

The interview was really great!

[u/thedorknightreturns]

The interview is really good, Cha putting the healthcare system to shame, the love, the compassion, nd it all is genuine, and the graffity only on the freeking business windows, easy to get down. And the warlords, who are appearently neonazis let through by the police, or the poice.