June 5, 2020

This Is the Most Powerful Video I’ve Taken of the Protests So Far

Mother Jones/Mark Helenowski

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I’ve filmed a lot of protests this past week. I captured video inside the NYPD-fueled mayhem in Flatbush last weekend. I covered a peaceful twilight demonstration two nights ago where protesters defied curfew. On Twitter, I’ve documented Black Lives Matter protests when I’ve seen them. 

But this might be the most powerful video I’ve captured of the protests so far. Here’s a snippet:

Full video is at the bottom of the page. Scrub around the video—or watch it all the way through. The sheer scale is impressive.

Thousands of New Yorkers marched in the rain today, which would have been Breonna Taylor’s 27th birthday. At one point, two conductors on a passing J train blared their horns. A roar went up in the crowd. Both conductors stuck their fists out the window.

The full march took over 12 minutes to wind its way past me. It took so long, in fact, the battery on my phone died near the tail end of the demonstration. In the final seconds, you can just make out the phalanx of police cars that typically trail these protests.

If you thought the protests would lose steam or wind down, there are many thousands of wet Brooklynites right now arguing against you with their feet. And the weekend is only beginning.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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