07/09/2021
It's safe to say that using our rights to free speech has now become a reason to prepare against physical, possibly deadly attacks against Omaha students. As shown in the video, three members of COYL were recently threatened by a man who attempted to drive at our tabling outside of Millard South, with his truck being separated from three students by only a few feet, and an unused chair.
Before the video started rolling, the pickup came down Q Street and got into the turning lane, intending to turn left into the church parking lot behind us on our side of the road. Instead of turning across traffic and into the parking lot however, the truck made an almost complete U-turn, ending up in a collision course with COYL's three student members. The car then lurched up onto the sidewalk, still coming right towards the three students, before coming to a stop on the grass, just feet away from running down three minors. At this point, the man could be heard yelling out his window, taunting the anti-police activists to "go ahead and call the cops." It was also at this point that he also began to reverse, still not even close to being on the road, and driving up parallel to COYL's table, fully on the wide sidewalk. It's at around this point that two of the members present start filming, with the longer video being the one attached to this post. As the video starts, the tail end of the threat, "I ought to get out of my truck and beat the s**t out of everyone here," can be heard, a threat directed at a group high school seniors for the crime utilizing their first amendment rights.
While this is the most extreme form of hostility we've received over the course of our public operations, it isn't the only one at all. Just one day after this incident, three more COYL members tabling in the same spot were called "[N-word] lovers" by a passing car, and a week before that a man picking up his kid from school yelled at us, saying that he *would* threaten us, and implying that he would try to get the COYL members there fired from their jobs.
An incident that was less hostile, but more like something out of a corny political cartoon actually happened less than half an hour before the black pickup truck tried to run down COYL's table, when a member of the Omaha Police Department stopped at a red light in front of our table, and proceeded to roll down his window and film us with his phone for around two minutes. With the OPD's history of tyrannically attempting to spy on, silence, and intimidate anti-police voices, the act certainly has its unsettling undertones, especially given what happened less than half an hour later.
No matter what your takeaway is from this post, just know this: Omaha's youth will not be intimidated and threatened into silence, and that every slur and threat thrown our way only causes the mask covering America's fascist core to slip down just another inch, only causing our support to swell.
