Thinking skin 167

Racism is now the paramount principle of Leftist ideology.

The Left insists that it is even more necessary to be racist – that is, to abominate, despise, persecute, humiliate, torment and destroy white people – than to save the planet from burning up by not eating meat, or to force everyone to destroy their natural reproductive organs and substitute prosthetic imitations of the opposite sex’s genitalia.

While babies are still in the womb – not yet even human enough to be protected from idealistic murder by having its limbs torn off and its inner organs extracted – Biden Record Players must be played continuously through the night, close to the sleeping mother, to message the fetus that if it is white, it is guilty of being a slave owner, an oppressor, unfairly privileged and deserving of utter contempt and severe punishment, and if it is not white, it is a victim of enslavement and oppression by the privileged white race.

If the thing is allowed to be born, and even allowed to survive long enough to become a toddler, the message about it’s color must start being reinforced at toddling stage. Getting it to understand that it is either guilty or wronged, that its proper self-assessment with which it is to go through life is either one of shame and penance or righteous resentment and vengefulness, according to its color, cannot start too early.

Your skin, comrade, is your character. From it issues your thoughts, your abilities. Contrary to the unscientific suppositions of past ages (before November 3, 2020) it is scientifically accurate (because thousands of scientists say so) to believe that it is the organ with which you think. It directs your actions. It qualifies you, or not, to have society’s esteem and access to higher education, specialist medical treatment, a good job, safe housing, banking services, travel, and burial.

All that matters about you is the color of your skin. Skin color is the measure of all worth, the desideratum of morality. White is bad; not-white is good.

That is the Eternal Message of the Skin.

By the time a child starts school, it is ready to learn difficult concepts like “multiracial whiteness“; that police officers are evil even if they are not white; that everything – institutions, corporations, industries, government – must be run by people whose skin is not white (and preferably whose genitals are prosthetic, but that is secondary to skin color).

Katherine Kersten writes at the Center for the American Experiment:

In the name of ending white supremacy and systemic racism, school districts are indoctrinating students with a new radical vision of American society.

In fall 2020, a fourth-grade class in Burnsville read a book that warns students that police are “mean” to black people, but “nice” to white people. “Cops stick up for each other,” it says. “And they don’t like black men.”

At Eagan High School, a 9th-grade class began the 2020-21 school year by watching a YouTube video entitled Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man. In the words of one parent who saw the video and the leading questions students had to answer: “It was white guilt, all the way down.”

In Hopkins, Superintendent Rhoda Mhiripiri-Reed told returning faculty and staff that “to eradicate a pandemic of racial injustice, we need to examine the role that whiteness plays in our macrosystem of white supremacy”.

Hopkins school officials vowed to restructure student learning around the “13 characteristics of white supremacy“.  These include requiring black students to turn in assignments on time, along with any expectations that smack of “perfectionism” or “objectivity” (thinking in a logical or “linear” fashion). Hopkins junior highs have dropped traditional letter grades for a new assessment system since letter grades are linked to “dominant white culture” and thus inequitable, a school staff member told Minnesota Public Radio.

As the 2020-21 school year got underway, abrasive, in-your-face “demands” and name-calling were becoming the norm at school board meetings and on parent websites. In June 2020 in Minnetonka, for example, students and alumni styling themselves the Minnetonka Coalition for Equitable Education issues “11 Anti-Racism Imperatives”, demanding – among other things – that the district adopt “an anti-oppressive curriculum (that is, a curriculum that is not Euro-centric)“.

Students who object to this new racialist ideology hesitate to speak up, fearing they will be denounced as bigots.

They will be so denounced anyway. It is orthodox doctrine that all whites are bigots.

Teachers worry that refusal to give in to groupthink could cost them their job. In District 197 (West St. Paul-Eagan- Mendota Heights), Superintendent Peter Olson-Skog made the threat explicit: “If you think we’re being too sensitive, too politically correct,” he said in a speech to staff, “I would encourage you to look elsewhere for employment as I do not believe you will feel aligned with difficult and uncomfortable work ahead.”

Today, a revolution of sorts is underway in many Minnesota schools. In the name of ending white supremacy and systemic racism, school districts are falling over themselves to promote a radical new vision of American society.

The upside-down thought world of “racial equity” advances in the name of justice and harmony.

Yet its fundamental premise is deeply divisive: It teaches that life is a relentless power struggle, and splits human beings into two hostile camps (white and non-white), labeling whites as perpetual oppressors and BIPOC (“Black, Indigenous and People of Color”) as perpetual victims.

Education Minnesota, the state teachers’ union, is aggressively pushing this ideology. Teaching While White (TWW), an equity organization the union endorses, puts the zero-sum claim this way: “As I [a white person] am elevated, someone else is marginalized or oppressed.”

Which is equivalent to the popular Leftist view that one can only become rich by making others poor.

Racial equity instruction conditions white children to question their ability to grasp reality It warns they can take no pride in their accomplishments because these are merely a function of “white privilege”. It insists they routinely harm their non-white classmates by committing micro-aggressions of which they aren’t even aware. It’s a no-win situation: If they think they aren’t racist, this just proves how racist they are. The message is that white skin is a source of self-deception, guilt and shame.

Indoctrination often starts with the youngest, most vulnerable students. For example, in the Melanin Project, which Edina Highlands Elementary School has used in K-2 classrooms, students trace their hands and color them to reflect their skin tone for a classroom poster that reads, “Stop thinking your skin color is better than anyone else’s.”

The idea that people’s skin color doesn’t matter is [according to the indoctrinators] actually “whiteness-at-work”, a “socialization strategy that perpetuates a racist status quo”.

A reminder there of the orthodox doctrine that racism is only wrong when whites judge people according to their race. When not-whites do it, as we said, it is the paramount principle of the ideology of the Left, now forcibly taught by both whites and not-whites. 

Older students are subjected to more sophisticated propaganda, such as an eight-week course on Critical Theory and “privilege” at Apple Valley’s Eastview High School, or videos on Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man at Eagan High School.

Black children, too, have it drummed into their heads that they lack self-awareness and agency. As victims of “white supremacy” they are told they bear no responsibility for their behavior … They are constantly urged to feel anger and resentment.

Teachers are inundated with the same debilitating propaganda in their school-sponsored racial equity training. Teaching While White is typical, insisting that teachers are hapless victims of false consciousness. “Schools are full of people who without intending to create racial hurdles or hostility, manage to create a fair amount of both,” admonishes a TWW text entitled Being an Ally: The Role of White Educators in Multicultural Education. Clueless white teachers “cannot see what they have done”, it says.

The goal of manipulation like this is to convince students and teachers they must turn for guidance to their enlightened betters – activists who alone can see reality and understand justice – if they are to atone for guilt (whites) or avoid being dupes (blacks).

Leftist ideologues “introduce an alternate system of reality, and restrict access to ideas that challenge it”. The Marxist BLM movement is working to bring this about:

[For K-5 students} the Black Lives Matter at School coalition offers Activism, Organizing and Resistance lessons, which define activism as including “participating in (or leading of) demonstrations, protests or passive resistance”. Projects include … Role-playing a Teachers’ Strike.

For older students, there’s Social Justice Mathematics, which uses “numbers and maps to look at the impacts of housing discrimination, low minimum wage, and the school to prison pipeline”. Students can also study the Black Panthers’ revolutionary socialist ideology and create their own personal versions of the Panthers’ radical Ten-Point Program. That program included demands that black defendants be tried by all-black juries and that “American black colonial subjects” [?] vote in a “United Nations-supervised plebiscite” to determine their “national destiny”.

All this is happening now in America’s public schools:

Today, the agenda of racial identity politics is advancing almost unopposed in our public schools, as cowed school officials bow to activist and union pressure. …

The agenda was proposed by Saul Alinsky, teacher of “community organizing” (aka communist agitating), who influenced Hillary Clinton directly and Barack Obama indirectly.

Saul Alinsky, author of the 1971 Rules for Radicals, pioneered the use of identity politics as a divide-and-conquer strategy. An organizer making a power bid, “must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent and rub raw the resentments of the people“, Alinsky wrote. “Your function [is] to agitate to the point of conflict.”

With both the presidency and the legislature fallen into the hands of the Left since January 2021, the implementation of the agenda will be accelerated and ever more firmly established.

Whites! Learn to think with your skin.

Hear it cry out for abasement. Hear it say: “Remember the doctrine of the Eternal Message: white is bad, not-white is good.”

Capitulate. Burn your culture – it is worse than worthless.

Kneel in its charred remains and throw its ashes over your heads. Your day is done. Your civilization is over.

Antifa: the fascist insurrection 219

Antifa is a revolutionary Marxist/anarchist militia movement that seeks to bring down the United States by means of violence and intimidation.

Those are the opening words of a new booklet, Antifa: A Growing Fascist Threat, published by The David Horowitz Freedom Center. Most of the content can be found online at Discover the Networks. All our quotations in this post come from that source.

Because Antifa is a movement with no centralized leadership, its constituents typically group themselves into autonomous local cells. Some of these cells meet only sporadically to strategize and plan future activities, while others meet as frequently as several times each week. Antifa activists communicate and recruit mostly through social media, using Facebook as their principal forum for organizing protests.

The movement is in alliance with – or swelled by – a dozen or so groups which similarly characterize themselves as “anti-fascist”.

By “fascist” they mean any person, organization, business, creed, movement, system, faction, party, institution that they don’t like because, they allege, he, she, it and/or they are “white supremacists” like the Nazis and the KKK.

They would have it believed that their motivation is idealist, utopian, selfless, supremely moral. They claim to be champions of “the oppressed” whom they identify primarily as “the poor, the black, and the brown”. (Video footage of Antifa riots indicate that the majority of its members are white. Some of their associated groups are predominantly or exclusively black. One such is the Black Panthers.) The oppression, they say, takes the form of “capitalism”, “materialism”, “colonialism”, “imperialism”, “racism”, “sexism”. Of these crimes they accuse all conservatives, Republicans, property-owners, bankers, retailers, patriots, the police, the military, and above all President Trump and the United States. One of their slogans, shouted at a rally in Berkeley, California, in August 2017, was: “No Trump, No Wall, No USA at All!”

The authors of the Antifa booklet declare, with reason, that the motivation is also “base criminal desires, and thrill seeking”.

Their protests against oppression take the form of violent attacks and rioting in the streets, parks, and public square. They attack people marked as their enemies with brass knuckles, poles, chains, clubs, rocks, knives, pepper spray, Molotov cocktails, smoke bombs, bottles of urine, and guns; and the property of their enemies with clubs, rocks, “chunks of pavement”, and fire. They have not yet killed anyone, but many of their victims have needed to be hospitalized. They know they are breaking the law, and that they can get away with it.

When Antifa activists participate in street demonstrations, they often employ a tactic known as “black bloc”, whereby they dress entirely in black and cover their faces with black masks or scarves, so as to make it nearly impossible for victims, witnesses, or law-enforcement personnel to identify any particular individual who has committed an act of vandalism, arson, theft, or assault. As the Antifa website CrimethInc.com explains, “When everyone in a group looks the same, it is difficult for the police or others to tell who did what.” Longtime Antifa activist Scott Crow confirms that the masks allows the activists to “become anonymous”, and thus “able to move more freely and do what we need to do, whether it is illegal or not.”

Who funds the insurgent rioters? Are they motivated at all by expectation of being paid?

One organization that can be definitively identified as a funder of the Antifa movement is the Alliance For Global Justice (AfGJ), which was founded in 1998 by members of the Nicaragua Network, an organization that had been created nineteen years earlier to support the Marxist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. AfGJ serves as the fiscal sponsor of Refuse Fascism, a constituent organization of the Antifa movement.

Describing itself as an “anti-capitalist”, “anti-imperialist”, “people’s think tank” whose activities include “a whole lot of organizing”, AfGJ seeks to train young activists to build a “unified grassroots movement” capable of creating “a socially, ecologically and economically just world” that offers “alternatives” to the “domination of governments, global financial institutions, and multinational corporations which denigrate the world’s peoples and devastate ecosystems”.

In its ongoing “struggle for liberation from Empire,” AfGJ denounces “neoliberal economics”, “corporate globalization”, and “privatization”, contending that “a just society is oriented toward meeting the needs … of its own people, not toward creating vast inequality and mega-profits for those at the top at the expense of the many”. To combat “the concentration of wealth and power [that] is the root cause of oppression,” says AfGJ, there must be a “fundamental change in international and national conditions that disempower people, create [economic and political] disparities, poison the earth, and plunder its resources”. By AfGJ’s reckoning, it is government’s duty to satisfy “the right of people to shelter, sufficient food, medical care, education, employment, [and] leisure”, and to dismantle societal “structures that distribute wealth in ways that deny anyone those basic rights”. 

And who funds AfGJ?

AfGJ over the years has received funding from a number of left-wing philanthropies, including George Soros‘s Open Society Foundations, the Tides Foundation …

… which is also one of George Soros’s organizations. He is the would-be paymaster of universal chaos.

Among the other “left-wing philanthropies” on the list are the Bank of America Charitable Foundation and the Bank of America Charitable Gift Fund.

The Bank of America’s charitable arm supports an anti-capitalist movement? 

Apparently, yes. 

There are mayors of cities where Antifa riots have done harm to people and property, and certain police chiefs, who – perhaps out of sympathy with the insurrectionists – have looked on and let them do their vicious damage. This happened at Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, and at Berkeley on August 27, 2017.

The mainstream media do not want to criticize Antifa.

Over the course of several months in 2017, conservative political commentator/comedian Steven Crowder’s cohort, “Not Gay Jared”, infiltrated an Antifa group and shot a large amount of video while undercover, resulting in a goldmine of damning evidence showing that Antifa is an unwavering supporter of violence. … Local police in Utah were in on Crowder’s infiltration of Antifa, and Jared happily gave them all the footage that he captured as evidence. Crowder then tried to hand over his undercover exposé to members of the local and national media, including ABC News’s Nightline, and they all turned down his offer. “We were delivering a story to local and national news on a silver platter, which included infiltration, violence, and exposing the roots of a national domestic terrorist organization and no one even wanted to give it a glimpse?” Crowder said incredulously.  

And the worst is yet to come.

There is clearly overwhelming evidence that there are growing ties between U.S. radicals and the Islamic State [ISIS], as well as several [ISIS] offshoots and splinter groups.

Ties between three key leaders of the Oakland [anarchist] group met in Hamburg with a leader of the AQAP [Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] and the AQIM [Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb] … The leader from AQAP is an Egyptian-born male who is known to be in charge of finances and recruiting for the group. There is evidence from informants that he is helping the Oakland group acquire the weapons they are seeking, primarily bomb making equipment and toxic chemicals and gasses. 

One of the men from Oakland traveled to Syria to meet with ISIS; the purpose was for training in tactics, but was thought to be primarily a bonding visit to discuss possible massive disruptive attacks in the U.S. While in Hamburg, several of the Oakland-based criminals were photographed throwing Molotov cocktails and wielding iron bars, which have been their weapons of choice, though they are almost certainly on the verge of upping the caliber of their weaponry for use in the U.S. Despite having their faces covered by masks, they were positively identified…. Making some sort of common cause with Americans who are determined to commit violence against the U.S. makes them potentially very useful to radical Islam. 

The authors of the Discover the Networks booklet on Antifa rightly conclude:

In the final analysis, it can accurately be said that the Antifa communists and anarchists who so passionately denounce fascism, are quite literally fascists themselves.

Most importantly, they are terrorist traitors intent on starting a bloody revolution. 

Black Panthers for Trump! 95

From Breitbat:

Quanell X, leader of the New Black Panther Party in Houston, Texas, said this week on a local news program that black Americans should “truly examine” Donald Trump’s outreach to the black community and “re-examine the relationship” that black voters have with the Democratic Party.

Posted under Race, United States by Jillian Becker on Monday, August 29, 2016

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Kompassion for a terrorist 267

How did it ever come about that an unelected official has the power to override the verdict of a court and have a convicted prisoner released? Isn’t this against the rule of law? Doesn’t it undermine the rule of law?

Attorney General Eric Holder wanted a terrorist, who’d been sentenced to 80 years imprisonment, to be released after serving 25 years, and released she was in July 2010. Nineteen days later she died of cancer. So it was a case of compassion overruling justice?

She could hardly have expected it. While she was in prison she wrote poems in which she described the United States as a terribly cruel country. “US koncentration kamps” … “The amerikkan nightmare of life“.

J. Christian Adams writes at Big Government:

Attorney General Eric Holder has a peculiar tendency to set loose militant black panthers. Everyone is already familiar with the dismissal of the voter intimidation case I brought as a Justice Department attorney. There, the DOJ dropped claims against Malik Zulu Shabazz, national head of the New Black Panther Party, and Jerry Jackson, a Philadelphia panther and Democratic Party official. But Jackson and Shabazz aren’t the only militants Holder has set loose.

Marilyn Buck was a Marxist terrorist who participated in conspiracies that led to the deaths of multiple police officers. Buck helped the Black Liberation Army, a violent Marxist offshoot of the black panthers, acquire weapons and ammunition. She participated in the robbery of an armored car where a guard was murdered. If that wasn’t enough, Buck was also charged with the bombing of the U.S. Senate, Ft. McNair, the Washington Navy Yard Officer’s Club and a New York City federal building. In many states, Buck’s behavior might have led to a midnight reservation in the electric chair.

Yet Holder’s DOJ unlocked Buck’s jail cell and set her free last summer. … Releasing Buck reflects an alien attitude that has caused the Obama years to be characterized by an ideological disconnect with most Americans.

The letters which persuaded the Justice Department were stuffed with crackpot arguments and have yet to be reported over the last year. They are full of lawlessness and arguments from extreme fringes of political thought. What’s worse, the letters are on the letterhead of government and private institutions, institutions most Americans incorrectly think are worthy of respect.

Consider Jill Elijah. She writes on behalf of Buck’s release that “a warm nurturing living arrangement is available to Ms. Buck in my home located in Brooklyn. . . . I and my family look forward to her joining our home.” The letterhead? Harvard Law School, where Elijah runs the criminal justice institute.

Also on the letterhead in the Elijah letter to the Justice Department is Charles Ogletree, President Obama’s dear friend and mentor. Having Ogletree’s name associated with such a request was like mailing Buck the keys to her jail cell. Ogletree’s daughter Rashida was recently hired into Holder’s Justice Department as a lawyer.

Note the efforts of James Kyung-Jin Lee. He seeks Buck’s release hoping she can visit Southern California: Buck “would benefit from the refreshing environment and welcoming community, she would also, I believe, enhance the community through her example and fortitude in prison.” The letterhead on Lee’s lunacy? University of California at Santa Barbara, Department of Asian Studies. How reassuring that professors at California’s state university admit they would welcome a Marxist terrorist and feel sufficient sympathy on campus to use school letterhead.

Joseph Velasco, a self described “teacher, storyteller and artist” sent a letter to DOJ arguing for Buck’s release saying: “someone like Marilyn is a role model . . . . I welcome the creativity and intellect that she will bring to our community. . . . Marilyn will find a welcoming home here.” The letterhead on Velasco’s letter to DOJ? The official stationary of the Santa Barbara School District, Santa Barbara High School.

A letter from Das Williams states Buck “participated in many educational and cultural activities. . . . Having her serve any more time is pointless and will accomplish nothing more than wasting of government funds.” Williams sends this letter on the letterhead of the City Council of Santa Barbara, where Das served on city council. Williams now serves in California’s State Assembly.

There are many more. Philip Moffitt of the Life Balance Institute argues in a letter Buck’s release “would be a positive step toward healing the past and our society.” Merle Woo, “retired educator,” tells the DOJ “what a shame she cannot be among us, the public, who could benefit so much from her teachings and great human spirit. . . . With her brilliant human insights, she has given us tools to live better, more enlightened, more conscious lives.” Woo was a professor of woman’s studies at San Jose University. No surprise that she “usually used Marilyn’s poetry and essays in my classes.” Other apologists for the murderer Buck include California attorney Robert Bloom (“loving kind person”), retired math professor Elana Levy (Buck’s “caring for others also continually reminds me of how to live in a compassionate manner.”) and Zaveeni Khan-Marcus , the director of the University of California Santa Barbara multicultural center (“I welcome the creativity and intellect she will bring to our community.”) …

Students of history often wonder how civilized countries can devolve into murderous nightmares. These letters provide a homegrown American example of sophisticates excusing murderous behavior because they agree with the murderer’s political philosophy. Simply, they are chilling.

Also chilling is that the militant and destructive ideas that fueled Buck’s murderous campaigns have gained creeping acceptability in American institutions. Teachers, professors, politicians and lawyers all clamored for Buck’s release. 

Theorists like them brought a real nightmare of life upon the people of Russia, China, Cambodia … But these friends of Marilyn Buck safely dream of their Marxist utopias in a “refreshing environment” unaccountably surviving in amerikka.

“Payback time” at the DOJ 95

Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, does not apparently approve of the rule of law. In fact, he is actively working against it.

An exaggeration?

J. Christian Adams, who was a voting rights attorney at the  so-called Department of Justice tells a story that bears out the accusation. He has resigned because the DOJ will not prosecute the Black Panther thugs who tried to intimidate voters on election day 2009.

Here’s part of an article he has written about it:

On the day President Obama was elected, armed men wearing the black berets and jackboots of the New Black Panther Party were stationed at the entrance to a polling place in Philadelphia. They brandished a weapon and intimidated voters and poll watchers. After the election, the Justice Department brought a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party and those armed thugs. I and other Justice attorneys diligently pursued the case and obtained an entry of default after the defendants ignored the charges. Before a final judgment could be entered in May 2009, our superiors ordered us to dismiss the case.

The New Black Panther case was the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career. Because of the corrupt nature of the dismissal, statements falsely characterizing the case and, most of all, indefensible orders for the career attorneys not to comply with lawful subpoenas investigating the dismissal, this month I resigned my position as a Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney.

The federal voter-intimidation statutes we used against the New Black Panthers were enacted because America never realized genuine racial equality in elections. Threats of violence characterized elections from the end of the Civil War until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Before the Voting Rights Act, blacks seeking the right to vote, and those aiding them, were victims of violence and intimidation.

Based on my firsthand experiences, I believe the dismissal of the Black Panther case was motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law. Others still within the department share my assessment. The department abetted wrongdoers and abandoned law-abiding citizens victimized by the New Black Panthers. The dismissal raises serious questions about the department’s enforcement neutrality in upcoming midterm elections and the subsequent 2012 presidential election.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has opened an investigation into the dismissal and the DOJ’s skewed enforcement priorities. Attorneys who brought the case are under subpoena to testify, but the department ordered us to ignore the subpoena, lawlessly placing us in an unacceptable legal limbo.

The assistant attorney general for civil rights, Tom Perez, has testified repeatedly that the “facts and law” did not support this case. That claim is false. If the actions in Philadelphia do not constitute voter intimidation, it is hard to imagine what would, short of an actual outbreak of violence at the polls. Let’s all hope this administration has not invited that outcome through the corrupt dismissal.

Most corrupt of all, the lawyers who ordered the dismissal – Loretta King, the Obama-appointed acting head of the Civil Rights Division, and Steve Rosenbaum – did not even read the internal Justice Department memorandums supporting the case and investigation.

Most disturbing, the dismissal is part of a creeping lawlessness infusing our government institutions. Citizens would be shocked to learn about the open and pervasive hostility within the Justice Department to bringing civil rights cases against nonwhite defendants on behalf of white victims. Equal enforcement of justice is not a priority of this administration. Open contempt is voiced for these types of cases.

Some of my co-workers argued that the law should not be used against black wrongdoers because of the long history of slavery and segregation. Less charitable individuals called it “payback time.” Incredibly, after the case was dismissed, instructions were given that no more cases against racial minorities like the Black Panther case would be brought by the Voting Section.

Justice in the Obama era 31

Paul Greenberg writes in Townhall:

The outstanding example of … cynical manipulation of justice is how a case against the New Black Panthers, which the Department of Justice described as a “black super-racist organization,” has been quickly and quietly shelved with minimal attention to the law and the Constitution. The evidence is right there on the videos recorded Election Day, 2008, when uniformed members of the Black Panthers showed up at a Philadelphia polling station, one of them wielding a billy club. They shouted insults and made threats: “Cracker, you about to be ruled by a black man,” one of the Panthers informed a voter. Two Republican poll watchers, a black couple, were called traitors to their race …

Thank goodness for modern technology, which can make any citizen with an iPhone and its camera a crusading reporter. When all this made the Internet, not even the Obama administration’s Justice Department could ignore what had happened on Philadelphia’s streets. Particularly after the department’s own investigation revealed that the New Black Panthers had called for “300 members to be deployed” at various polling places across the country.

So early this year, the Department of Justice proceeded to file a complaint against the Black Panthers, and specifically against the stormtroopers who were captured on video. So far, so fair.

A lawyer and survivor of many a legal battle for civil rights, Bartle Bull, filed an affidavit in support of the Justice Department’s complaint. He characterized the incident in Philadelphia as “the most blatant form of intimidation I have encountered in my life in political campaigns in many states, even going back to the work I did in Mississippi in the 1960s.”

But the Black Panthers didn’t even bother to respond to the charges — as if they were above the law. And maybe they are. Because after a court had ordered a default judgment against them, including one of their national leaders, the Justice Department caved. It dropped all charges against the Panthers except one, and that one was settled with a light tap on the wrist…

There doesn’t seem to be any explanation for this perversion of justice except the Panthers’ political pull with this new administration. This case is no longer about the Black Panthers so much as it is about a newly politicized Justice Department. At some point the career lawyers in the Justice Department’s civil rights division changed their minds about pressing charges — or had their minds changed for them. By whom? Why? Those questions need answering. Under oath.

The same voices that once complained about the politicization of the Justice Department under a previous administration have fallen noticeably silent. For once Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s senior nudnik, has nothing to say. And the only excuse the Department of Justice offers for its cave-in is that it didn’t want to interfere with the Black Panthers’ freedom of speech. That “explanation” is scarcely good law, but it deserves first prize for sheer chutzpah — even in a city as full of it as Washington, D.C. Shouting racial imprecations at voters, wielding nightsticks, dispatching bully boys in military-looking uniforms to polling places … all that is now exercising freedom of speech? In America? It sounds more like the kind of electioneering practiced by Iran’s supreme leader and holy fraud.

The leading lights of the Democratic Party in and out of Congress may have turned a blind eye to this outrage, but the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hasn’t. In a letter to the attorney general, it has demanded an explanation for this kind of “justice” from the Justice Department:

“We believe the Department’s defense of its actions thus far undermines respect for rule of law and raises other serious questions about the department’s law enforcement decisions.”

It sounds as if the commission is getting some subpoenas ready for high Justice Department officials, and it should be…

Nothing may actually be done to protect Philadelphia’s voters under this administration, but at least there ought to be a full investigation and comprehensive report by somebody official, even if it has to be somebody outside Congress. The record needs to show just how cynical this president and his attorney general can be when it comes to their promises about upholding the rule of law. Not to mention every American voter’s right to cast a secret ballot without being harassed.

Why hasn’t there been a greater sense outrage, betrayal or just disgust at the administration’s handling of this case? My theory: Because none of this comes as a surprise. What else could be expected when The People in their wisdom elect a president of the United States who’s a product of Chicago’s machine politics?

H. L. Mencken said it: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Posted under Commentary, government, Law, Race, United States by Jillian Becker on Saturday, August 22, 2009

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Overruling the law 79

Michelle Malkin writes:

Two weeks ago, in a highly unusual move, [Attorney General] Holder dismissed default judgments his department had won against two of three defendants charged with violating the Voting Rights Act. On Nov. 4, 2008, a billy club-wielding militant in military-style boots and beret stood outside a Philly polling location with a similarly dressed partner. Citizen journalists from the Pennsylvania-based blog Election Journal captured the menacing duo on video. One of the watchdogs observed: “I think it might be a little intimidating that you have a stick in your hand.”

That was an understatement. Witness Bartle Bull, a Democratic lawyer who organized for Bobby Kennedy and worked for the civil rights movement in Mississippi, signed a sworn affidavit decrying the Election Day brutishness. Serving as a poll watcher that day, he called the behavior of Samir Shabazz and Jerry Jackson “the most blatant form of voter discrimination I have encountered in my life.”

One of them, Bull reported, taunted poll observers: “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker.”

If the pair had been dressed in white sheets, pandemonium would have broken loose. But the ebony-clad thugs were members of the New Black Panther Party who had been dispatched by Malcolm X wannabe Malik Shabazz to “guard” the polls. Translation: Protect them from scrutiny. Shield them from sunlight. Keep independent voters and observers out.

Who is Malik Shabazz? The bespectacled race hustler grabbed the spotlight in the weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks by defending Osama bin Laden, blaming President Bush for 9/11, bashing Israel and blasting our Founding Fathers as “snakes.” His group also infamously rallied behind the Duke University lacrosse rape hoaxer. And on the day before the presidential election last fall, one of Shabazz’s “field marshals,” Minister Najee Muhammad, held a “black power” rally promising to send his forces to polls across the country “to ensure that the enemy does not sabotage the black vote.”

The Bush DOJ filed suit against Malik Shabazz, Samir Shabazz and Jerry Jackson in early January 2009. None of the defendants filed an answer to the lawsuit, putting them all into default. Instead of taking the default judgment that DOJ is entitled to against all of the defendants, the Obama team fully dismissed the lawsuits against Malik Shabazz and Jackson. Jackson, you should know, is an elected member of the Philadelphia Democratic Committee and was a credentialed poll watcher. Witness Greg Lugones told me, “Obama campaign operatives were on site throughout the entire episode.”

Former Justice Department official and voting rights scholar Hans Van Spakovsky added: “I have never heard of the Department dismissing a case it has already won by default. They have … sent the message that hurling racial epithets and slurs at voters and intimidating and threatening voters at the polls is fine with the Holder Justice Department — at least if you are African-American. I seriously doubt that would have happened if the races had been reversed in this case.”

Exactly. And the harassment was aimed not just at voters, but at white poll workers trying to ensure a fair and lawful process in a city infamous for machine politics and street money pollution.

Who are the racial cowards, Holder?

On the heels of this voter intimidation protection plan, the Obama Justice Department issued another decision that undermines electoral integrity — but bolsters Democratic voter drives. The department this week denied the state of Georgia the ability to enact strict citizenship voter verification rules previously approved by two federal courts. As Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel explained: “DOJ has thrown open the door for activist organizations such as ACORN to register non-citizens to vote in Georgia’s elections, and the state has no ability to verify an applicant’s citizenship status or whether the individual even exists.”

On top of all that, Holder recently politicized the legal review process involving the contentious issue of D.C. voting rights. After careful study, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued an opinion that a House bill on the matter was unconstitutional. Holder … overrode his staff lawyers’ ruling — and simply ordered up an alternative opinion that fits the White House agenda.

Posted under Commentary, United States by Jillian Becker on Friday, June 5, 2009

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