You're looking at most of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, WA in a photo I took last week. There's a park just to the left of Pine street (pictured here) where some folks are also camped out, and one more block with leftover police barricades in addition to these two. Folks are doing a lot artwork. There's free food and a medical tent.
And... that's about it really. As Michael Hobbs of Huffington Post said this week, "The CHAZ is the most vibrant public space in Seattle. On a recent afternoon, sunny for the first time in days, families decorated the letters of a giant "Black Lives Matter" mural painted on the street. A pair of women wandered through the crowd handing out free, handwoven face masks. On a corner somewhere nearby, a man in his 60s played a Marvin Gaye song on an electric keyboard."
So much has been written and said about CHAZ already, and so much of that has been maliciously false, that the best way I can tell you more about it is though a Top Five list of what ISN'T happening there.
5. "The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (also known as Free Capitol Hill) is the six-block radius around the East Precinct in Seattle that Antifa, anarchists, and community activists are illegally occupying." - Jason Rantz, mynorthwest.com
A six-block radius? So a circle encompassing everything within 6 blocks of the abandoned police station? That would be a total area of 113 blocks! Wow! Actually, the most expansive definition of CHAZ is 6 square blocks. Good grief, how hard is it to understand what a radius is?
4. and 3. and 2.
Screen shot from Fox News below.
* Is that a picture of Seattle? Nope.
* Were there any "armed guards", "on patrol", limiting entry or checking IDs? Nope, but that hasn't stopped Fox News from photoshopping them in. To be fair, in the first couple of days that the "zone" existed, it was possible to spot someone carrying an AR-15, but the gentleman pictured here is just someone, "exercising his 2nd Amendment rights".
* Did someone demand money from a business in the area? Nope. And wow, was Assistant Seattle Police Chief Deanna Nollette irresponsible when she told reporters: "We've heard, anecdotally, reports of citizens and businesses being asked to pay a fee to operate within this area." The police department has now "retracted" this claim.
1. From Paul Blest of Vice.com:
"In a segment on Fox News’ "The Story" on Friday, anchor Martha MacCallum read aloud a Reddit post that purportedly indicated "signs of rebellion" against Raz Simone, a rapper and organizer in the CHAZ who’s been accused by Tucker Carlson of being a "warlord."
"I thought we had an anonymous collective," MacCallum said, quoting the Reddit post. "An anarcho-syndicalist commune at the least, we should take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week."
What MacCallum didn’t realize is that the post was a joke referencing a scene from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," the rollicking 1975 cult classic that skewers King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
John Cleese, the legendary actor who co-founded and starred in the wildly popular Monty Python movie series, had a laugh at the network’s expense in a Monday tweet."
Here's some more photos of the real CHAZ.
Conversation cafe.
Abandoned police station.
Free Stuff.
