NW Washington News

Pend Oreille County Republican Party Chair Bill Deilke said the city of Seattle’s request for only white employees to complete racial sensitivity training is exclusionary. 

“Do we need to have a special class for Asians,” Deilke told NW Washington News. “Do we need to have a special class for everybody? Training should be across all boundaries and all colors because racism occurs across all boundaries and goes both ways. Training really can't be selective like that but then again with King Inslee anything's possible.”

Deilke was responding to a June 17 tweet on Twitter by Karlyn Borysenko stating, “Fun fact: The city of Seattle is asking its white employees to voluntarily spend their day off in a training about their internalized racial superiority. I’ve got the documentation on it.”

Based on the tweet, Deilke said he’s been discriminated against by pretty women of color he favored because he’s white.

Borysenko’s tweet comes on the heels of protesters occupying a six-block radius in Seattle called Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) where police officers have not been allowed entry since June 8, according to media reports.

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan vowed to disband the group after two shootings last week resulted in at least one fatality. 

“People are crawling all over themselves down there,” said Deilke. “There is no law enforcement. I used to live in that particular part of the city at one time. It's a real shame that Seattle will pay the price in tourism this summer.”

On June 25, 2020, Fox News reported that CHOP zone businesses and residents filed a lawsuit against the city of Seattle accusing them of allowing the occupation.

If he had the chance, Deilke said he’d ask Gov. Inslee why the Lenin statue in Seattle is still standing.

Vladimir Lenin was a communist revolutionary and head of the Soviet Russian government who died in 1924.

“It’s the only statue that CHOP and other protesters have not touched so far as we can tell around the country,” Deilke said. “Somehow, Lenin is exempt from being torn down.”

The occupation in Seattle emerged after the nation erupted into “Hands Up, Don't Shoot” protests led by Black Lives Matter, an international human rights organization that demanded the arrest of Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer who pinned George Floyd, an unarmed black man to the ground with his knee and strangled him to death May 25. 

Chauvin was ultimately arrested and charged with murder on the third day of rallies, some of which have turned into episodes of looting. President Trump and other government officials said the looting was instigated by Antifa, a far-left, antifascist, network of activists who believe more aggressive resistance to the Nazis in pre-World War II Germany would have kept Adolf Hitler from coming into power, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

On June 1, Business Insider reported that the extreme right-wing group, Identity Evropa, called for violence and looting in white neighborhoods on Twitter under the guise of being Antifa members.