Climate extremist strikes again, this time apparently vandalizing Trump Tower



Trump Tower in New York City had to be closed to visitors on Wednesday after a man who is believed to be a member of a climate extremist group vandalized part of the lobby.

Shortly after noon, a young man walked into the public lobby of the building, strode over to the seal of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, and proceeded to tag it with the letters "USA" in green spray paint, video from Freedom News TV showed.

The young man then knelt down beneath his apparent act of vandalism, eyes closed, soaking in the attention from the crowd gathered around with their cell phones in hand. He then pulled out a small banner with the message "Game Over" emblazoned on it and held it up for all to see.

Security agents quickly descended upon the individual, placing him in handcuffs and ordering him to leave. As they escorted him out of the building, the man robotically cried out, "This is your country. This is your country. This is our country.

"This is our planet," he continued. "You cannot ruin it without comment. They are ruining the planet for profit."

'All American political parties are equally complicit in inaction which has brought us to this point. Switching to blue is not the solution.'

While agents were busy detaining the young man, an older man wearing a backpack quickly stepped forward and apparently attempted to protect the spray painter from law enforcement. "Don't touch him!" the older man repeatedly barked.

The older man then demanded to know the name, badge number, and police department of the officer placing the younger man in handcuffs. The officer eventually appeared to tell the older man he was with NYPD, but his other remarks are unintelligible on the video.

Officers then cleared the area, claiming that it had to be shut down. Some tourists were not pleased.

"I was standing in line to take a picture. It’s ridiculous," Jeff from Missouri told amNewYork. "There is a lot of division in this country, a lot of whining — it is what it is."

One person can be heard on the video calling the spray painter a "f**king piece of s**t."

James Byrne, a U.S. Secret Service spokesperson, confirmed the incident in a statement. "The U.S. Secret Service is aware of an incident involving a person spray-painting graffiti inside the public lobby of Trump Tower in New York City," Byrne said. "There are no disruptions to protective operations. We thank the NYPD for their immediate response and unwavering partnership."

Trump is not believed to have been at Trump Tower at the time.

AmNewYork reported that the individual responsible for the vandalism is a member of the extremist group Extinction Rebellion NYC. The outlet also shared a statement from him:

I did this because I am an American. It is my duty to stand up for my country, and my Earth, when a government becomes destructive of our right to life. Donald Trump and the regime of private interests he works for — who donate equally to each party — are destructive of your inalienable right to life. All American political parties are equally complicit in inaction which has brought us to this point. Switching to blue is not the solution. Kamala Harris’ climate platform was fracked gas, much deadlier than regular. Decades of inaction have brought about the current climate catastrophe.

The outlet did not provide the name of the suspect or make any mention of the elderly man who attempted to run interference for him.

The detained individual reportedly claimed that he used removable chalk in the attack on Trump's seal. The New York Post, citing sources in law enforcement, claimed that he had previously been nabbed for criminal trespass at Columbia University.

AmNewYork further indicated that Extinction Rebellion had engaged in a series of events of dubious legality to mark Earth Day. Among them included acts of vandalism on a Tesla dealership and a disruption of a performance by the New York City Ballet.

Blaze News reached out to a representative of the group, who plans to host a training session "to learn how XR NYC is confronting the breakdown of democracy and the destruction fueled by Big Oil" on Wednesday evening. Our message was not returned.

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Trans-identifying city council official arrested at Trump Tower protest



A trans-identifying city council official who prefers they/them pronouns was arrested during a protest at Trump Tower last week, and some of his leftist colleagues on the council are coming to his defense.

On Thursday, June Rose, chief of staff of the Providence City Council, joined a raucous group that stormed into Trump Tower in New York City to protest the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, an apparent terrorist sympathizer accused of orchestrating violent, destructive demonstrations at Columbia University last year.

Wearing shirts emblazoned with anti-Israel slogans, a mob of about 150 members of Jewish Voice for Peace burst into a dining area of the Trump building and refused to leave. Nearly 100 of them, apparently including Rose, were arrested as a result.

"Those arrests are for trespassing, obstructing government administration, and resisting arrest by virtue of us having to carry some of the people out of the escalator," said NYPD Chief of Department John Chell.

"We gave warnings on our pager system, and once we did that warning three times, the NYPD with its professionalism, as you saw, went in and made the arrests. There were no injuries. There were no incidents. There was no damaged property."

'We’re making decisions on revenue, where are they? They’re in jail.'

Rose, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family and community and who still considers himself culturally Jewish, was arrested during the incident. He was released the same day and was back in Providence by Friday, Council President Rachel Miller claimed.

According to her bio, Miller has a long history of "economic, racial, and social justice" activism. In her statement about the arrest, Miller implied that Rose had done nothing wrong.

"This is a perilous moment for our democracy, and taking action is not something to be scorned. June was using vacation time today and chose to use their time to defend constitutional freedoms," she stated, according to GoLocalProv.

City Councilor Miguel Sanchez, whose X posts reveal a deep animus toward President Donald Trump's agenda and who was even fired from far-left Democrat Gov. Dan McKee’s Office of Constituent Services for his anti-Israel activism, likewise stands by Rose.

"I’m so proud that we have staff members who not only do so much for our city but also use their voice to fight for a better world," Sanchez wrote. "As the majority whip of the @pvdcitycouncil, June has my full support."

Other council members took a different view. Councilman James Taylor even called on Rose, the highest-paid council staffer, to resign for leaving the city "on the busiest council day of the year."

According to Taylor, last Thursday was "was a big day for the City Council" since the Finance Committee was set to consider a tax-hike proposal from Mayor Brett Smiley.

"All eyes were on the council with the administration, the budget — the most important day, when they’re chief of staff, supposed to be running the council, making sure they get everything they need — the biggest day, we’re making decisions on revenue, where are they? They’re in jail," Taylor said.

City Council spokesperson Roxie Richner confirmed that Rose makes more than $136,000 per year.

Rose came out as bisexual more than a decade ago and as transgender last year. "I always say that my bullies knew I was queer long before I did," he previously stated.

This arrest is the second for Rose in less than a year. He was arrested in Washington, D.C., last June in connection with a protest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s appearance before Congress.

Rose also served as Rhode Island delegate to the Democratic National Convention last summer, and he tried to use his vote as leverage for the Palestinian cause.

"My job has always been about outcomes, about winning," he said in the weeks leading up to the convention in Chicago. "Here, winning means fewer Palestinian children are killed. There would be no greater victory than helping save the lives of Palestinian children living under occupation."

H/T: Libs of TikTok

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NYPD Arrests Dozens After Jewish Voice for Peace Storms Trump Tower To Demand Release of Pro-Hamas Columbia Activist

Police arrested dozens of Jewish Voice for Peace agitators after they stormed Trump Tower in New York to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Hamas Columbia University activist in ICE custody.

The post NYPD Arrests Dozens After Jewish Voice for Peace Storms Trump Tower To Demand Release of Pro-Hamas Columbia Activist appeared first on .

'The Apprentice': Not your average Trump derangement cinema



"You create your own reality. The truth is malleable," Roy Cohn tells a young Donald Trump in the new movie "The Apprentice."

It's a lesson that the starry-eyed scion from Queens will take all the way to the White House.

The crude patriotism expressed by both Trump and Cohn may be self-serving, but it's hard not to see it as preferable to the pessimistic inertia dragging this once great city down.

But it could also serve as a warning to anyone trying to make a film about Trump: The reality-distortion field surrounding our 45th president affects his critics no less than his fans.

Man, myth, monster

Trump is one of the most controversial human beings in contemporary history; a populist messiah or rage-fueled fascist, depending on who you ask.

It is almost impossible to portray him in a neutral or sympathetic light, to grapple with the humanity under the accumulated detritus of five decades of public life.

Past attempts, like Showtime’s “The Comey Rule" — a blatant piece of "resistance" propaganda uninterested in any coherent depiction of the Trump administration's inner workings — don't bother trying.

As a result, most film and TV versions of Trump barely rise above Alec Baldwin's crude "Saturday Night Live" caricature, driven by partisan resentment and mesmerized by Trump's often disagreeable public persona.

Trump in training

“The Apprentice” largely avoids this trap by approaching its subject indirectly. Instead of the fully-formed scourge of democracy, it gives us a portrait of the deal artist as a young man.

Set in the 1970s and 1980s, the film opens on boyish Donald Trump still struggling to break free from his boorish, domineering father and his modest, outer-borough real estate empire.

A company vice president whose duties include going door-to-door collecting overdue rent from disgruntled tenants, the young Trump dreams of turning the family business into something bigger but is hampered by a federal lawsuit alleging racist housing discrimination (a charge the movie suggests is true).

It isn't until a chance meeting with infamous Joseph McCarthy prosecutor and political fixer Roy Cohn that Trump sees a way out from under his father's shadow. Taking the aspiring mogul under his wing, Cohn guides him through the early stages of his career by teaching him the three cardinal rules of winning: attack, deny everything, and never admit defeat.

Sympathy for the Donald

Echoing themes from “Citizen Kane” and classic Greek tragedies, "The Apprentice" presents the rise of Trump as a cautionary tale; director Ali Abbasi and writer Gabriel Sherman are smart enough to understand that their protagonist needs a sympathetic core if his hollowing out is to be effective.

Superficially, the movie isn’t shy about its contempt toward the man and his influences. Family patriarch Fred Sr. is unabashedly racist, Cohn drops homophobic slurs and rambles about liberals and socialists stealing from great men, and one of Trump’s opening scenes is him as a landlord threatening to evict Section 8 renters overburdened by medical bills.

Trump himself is depicted as a venal adulterer who goes as far as to rape his wife (as Ivana Trump alleged and later backtracked on in her 1990 divorce deposition). The movie works overtime to earn its bleak conclusion, in which the student callously discards the master.

Surgical strike

"The Apprentice" emphasizes Trump's ultimate dehumanization and moral degradation in the graphic, close-up shots of scalp-reduction surgery and liposuction (on a patient coyly suggested to be Trump) with which it ends. Evoking both Darth Vader and Dr. Frankenstein's abomination, this clinical, creepy scene makes the movie's subtext clear: We've just witnessed the creation of a monster.

Trump may be a monster, but he's also very much a product of his environment. As "The Apprentice" takes care to establish, the New York City of this era is rotting, with even the iconic Chrysler building in foreclosure. The crude patriotism expressed by both Trump and Cohn may be self-serving, but it's hard not to see it as preferable to the pessimistic inertia dragging this once great city down.

According to Abbasi, his goal was not to portray Trump as “a caricature or a crooked politician or a hero or whatever you might think, but as a human being.” As Politico puts it, he’s an anti-hero. “He’s tragic, not evil.”

High-rise Hamlet

Sebastian Stan brings this tragic note to his portrayal of Trump, especially in scenes with his alcoholic older brother, Freddy (a suitably dissolute Charlie Carrick), summoning a tenderness not often associated with the former president. Stan ably captures his subject's more peculiar eccentricities, speech patterns, and mannerisms — even if the face of the Winter Soldier occasionally proves distracting.

This is a quality film, to use one of Trump's favorite descriptors. But its nuance may well have hurt its commercial prospects. Despite being marketed as "the movie Donald Trump doesn't want you to see" (bolstered by Trump's threats to sue the filmmakers for "pure malicious defamation"), "The Apprentice" hasn't done much business after a week in theaters.

Not much of an October surprise after all. But then, maybe it was too much to ask a well-crafted period piece like "The Apprentice" to compete with the riveting drama playing out before us in real time.

Trump isn't one for dwelling on the past, and neither are those drawn to him, whether out of love or hate. Where's he's been has always been far less compelling than what he'll do next.

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