In his first State of the Union address last month, President Joe Biden declared: “We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police.”

“Fund them,” he continued. “Fund them. Fund them with resources and training.”

As noted by countless media outlets at the time, the comments drew bipartisan applause — including from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise. Given I would rather bathe in my own piss than vote for a Republican, I booed and hissed inside each and every single time such a novelty was mentioned with eagerness. How fitting that one of the few things both major American political parties can agree on is an ambivalence about the state sanctioned deaths of Black folk.

That’s exactly why as I watched Biden receive his standing ovation over his political pandering, I instantly wondered how long it would take before footage of another unarmed Black man being shot to death by a police officer would surface before Biden’s unnecessary boast would come back to haunt him. Not very long at all — a testament to many things but particularly Biden’s own failures to pass police reform in 2021.

On Wednesday, the Grand Rapids Police Department released videos showing a white officer fatally shooting Patrick Lyoya, a 26-year-old Black man, during a traffic stop last week.

The still unnamed officer was on the back of Lyoya before he appeared to shoot him in the head. Before the shooting, the two were seen having a brief exchange in which the officer asked if Lyoya had a driver’s license and proceeded to grab him. Lyoya pulls away and starts to run before eventually being tackled.

However, midway through the struggle, the officer’s body camera stops filming. Speaking with the New York Times, Chief Eric Winstrom of the Grand Rapids Police Department said pressure was applied to the camera to turn it off during the struggle but it was not clear who applied that pressure or whether it was intentional.

How convenient for the unnamed police officer that fatally shot the unarmed Patrick Lyoya all the same. Winstrom showed dashcam, cell phone and the partial bodycam video. Thankfully, we also have the footage taken from the cell phone of a bystander.

“The video clearly shows that this was an unnecessary, excessive and fatal use of force against an unarmed Black man who was confused by the encounter and terrified for his life,” Ben Crump, a lawyer for the family of Patrick Lyoya, said.

They executed him. There is no other way to describe it. They executed him the way they have executed so many of us.

According to Crump’s office, Loyoya immigrated to the United States from the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2014 and had lived in Grand Rapids for about five years. It should be unfathomable that a Black person immigrating from one of the poorest countries on the planet is no less safe from violence because of American law enforcement. But it makes too much sense.

After all, no matter where you came from, if you are Black in America, you are more likely than not to be a target by the police. And no matter when we are stopped by the police, we have every good reason to worry. They target us more frequently and more ferociously without repercussions.

It was only last year that the Grand Rapids Police Department reportedly ignored numerous requests by the city’s police oversight office to provide documentation regarding potential officer misconduct according to the office’s director.

That same year they were given an increased budget in spite of calls to spend less.

In a statement, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer expressed sympathy to the Lyoya family and called for any protests to be peaceful.

“The Michigan State Police will conduct a transparent, independent investigation of the shooting,” Whitmer said. “Then, prosecutors must consider all the evidence, follow the law and take appropriate action on charges. Justice is foundational to safety, and without justice, we are all less safe.”

Whitmer, a former prosecutor, did not call on the Grand Rapids Police Department to be more peaceful. Or to exercise restraint. It’s not like I expected her to demand they not shoot Black people in the head while being on their back, but expressing sympathy only goes so far after so many victims of a known pattern.

The only people who can be so mundane about this cycle of death are the people not facing that type of threat. Fine, but they should be more fearful if for no other reason that their political fortunes depend on it. The Biden administration and this Democratic-controlled Congress can’t permanently curb child poverty, fight inflation, and other factors that actually cause crime but want to pump their chests about giving even more money to the police and expect to garner the kind of voter participation levels they need in order to win.

As much as many Americans may genuinely fear rising crime (partially due to cable news segments about crime based on what millionaire anchors hear is happening at Trader Joe’s or Manhattan or whatever), there are a lot of people who continue to be concerned about how easy it is for a cop to get away with killing Black people. In February, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed the slogan “defund the police is “dead and not Democrats’ position. We know, but the problem with that stance along with Biden’s proclamation is Democrats benefited from the largest social justice movement in American history happening during that election year.

That movement was based on fighting police brutality, and Patrick Lyoya’s killing, in all its casual brutality, is a reminder that Joe Biden and Democrats have not only failed to hold law enforcement accountable, it’s bragging about giving them even more spoils.

If Democrats think this strategy will get them the votes they need to stay in power, they will earn their miserable defeat.

Joe Biden’s Call to “Fund the Police” Will Haunt Him and Democrats was originally published in GEN on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Russia’s claim that it invaded Ukraine to “denazify” it has been thoroughly debunked, but what has received much less attention is Russia’s own neo-Nazi “problem.” I put “problem” in quotes because there’s no evidence Kremlin considers neo-Nazis inside Russia a problem. By contrast, Russia has a history of cultivating and collaborating with neo-Nazis, at home and abroad. Another great summary of Russia’s support of neo-Nazi activity is here. In this article, I’d like to tell you about a Russian ultra-nationalist white supremacy group called the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM). Unless otherwise noted, all the information below comes from Stanford University’s “Mapping Militant Organizations” project (RIM summary page; full report).

In 2020, RIM was designated by the US as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, the first white supremacist group to be assigned this label. Yet RIM operates relatively openly in Russia and, although it does not receive any formal support from the regime, its operations have not been targeted or hampered by the government in any way. Nor is it on Russia’s list of terrorist or extremist organizations.

RIM was founded in 2002 and is based in St. Petersburg. It is anti-Semitic and anti-Ukrainian. More generally, it espouses an ideology of white supremacy and ethnic Russian nationalism and views European and US governments as enemies. As its name suggests, it also advocates the return to Russia’s tsarist regime. In its early years, its activities were largely political: it worked with other far-right groups to form opposition parties and staged demonstrations. One of these attempts involved the creation of a nationalist party called the New Force, which, among other things proposed that only ethnic Russians should be allowed to immigrate to Russia and that undocumented immigrants should be put into labor camps before being deported.

RIM became militarily active in 2014, when it saw opportunity in the then-new conflict in eastern Ukraine. It also started a military training program called “Partizan” (“Guerilla”). The main objective of Partizan is to train Russians in combat skills, but it is also happy to train foreign rightwing extremists. RIM claims to have trained and sent over 300 Russians to eastern Ukraine to fight alongside pro-Russian separatists in 2014–2016. Members of the Imperial Legion (the name of the militant wing) have also fought in Syria and Libya. In 2017, the Washington Post conducted an interview with a Partizan instructor, who spouted a lot of the same anti-Ukrainian sentiment currently being promoted by Putin.

Since 2015, RIM has also collaborated and built ties with a variety of extreme-right organizations around the world in a variety of ways, including by sending its members to the US in 2017 to network with US neo-Nazis, attending a variety of far-right conferences, and, of course, providing military training through its Partizan program. In 2016–2017, two men who had trained in the Partizan program bombed a left-wing bookstore, a shelter for refugees, and a public campground that housed asylum seekers in Sweden. The prosecution cited training by RIM as a key step in their radicalization.

To be fair, RIM is neither huge nor mainstream. But it’s important to shed light on what Putin allows to happen in his own country as he professes to “denazify” others. Moreover, just as RIM was given a boost by the 2014 invasion of Crimea and Donbass, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 may well strengthen it further, as it seems to have done with extreme right groups elsewhere. And while it would be wrong to deny that Ukraine is free from right-wing extremists, if the West helps Ukraine decisively win this war, the US and EU will be able to work with the Ukrainian government to ensure that these groups remain marginalized. The same cannot be said about the extreme right in Russia, unfortunately.

Russia’s Militant White Supremacists was originally published in GEN on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.