Daily Archives: June 11, 2020

06/11/20

Meet the Law Firm(s) Representing Black Lives Matter

By: Denise Simon | Founders Code

It is important as a primer not to conflate ANTIFA with Black Lives Matter, although there is certainly video evidence that ANTIFA has allied with BLM in many situations. By the way, for your pleasure, here is the author of  The Anti-Fascist Handbook, Mr. Mark Bray.

ANTIFA does however receive grants from Soros and likely Tom Steyer.

Anyway, so the objective here is to concentrate on Black Lives Matter as the movement has become much more aggressive and radical.

George Floyd and Black Lives Matter Protests: Live Updates - The ...

Meet the National Lawyers Guild.

According to historian Harvey Klehr, the NLG was allied with the Communist Party; in the 1930s a significant number of NLG founders had been members or fellow travelers of the Communist Party USA,[14] including Riemer and Joseph Brodsky of the CP’s International Labor Defense auxiliary.[10] During the McCarthy era, the NLG was accused by Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. as well as the House Un-American Activities Committee of being a Communist front organization.[15]

In 1937, Allan R. Rosenberg joined the NLG and remained a member as a late as 1956 during his second appearance before HUAC.[16]

Page scan of sequence 227

And that same radical platform is here today:

The National Lawyers Guild DC Chapter is involved in progressive, radical, and left-wing struggles, causes, and movements right here in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Legal observers and mass defense attorneys have assisted the Black Lives Matter movement, the Occupy DC protests, environmentalists opposed to area fracking and oil pipelines, immigrant rights activists, anti-war demonstrations, labor unionists and workers. The Chapter testified on behalf of marijuana legalization in D.C. and has launched a major investigation into mistreatment of prisoners at Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison.

Guild attorneys, legal workers, law students, and other members continue to collaborate in sharing experience and expertise in the form of working groups, study groups, and social groups. Chapter events like happy hours and the annual Disorientation workshop for law students at area law schools, provide an environment where progressive, radical, and left-wing attorneys can network, share experience, and pass on wisdom.

Guild members are defending activists, representing immigrants facing deportation, testifying in federal and state legislatures against civil liberties cutbacks. They are using their experience and professional skills to help build the 21st Century grassroots movements that are and will be necessary to protect civil liberties and to defend democracy now and in the future.

There are chapters across the country. When San Francisco elected Chesa Boudin to District Attorney when he is a member of the NLG, you must determine if the DA in your area is as well. You see, they have events where Chesa Boudin is a keynote speaker:

Progressive Law Day is a free day-long conference, organized and led by law student members of the National Lawyers Guild, San Francisco Bay Area Chapter, and open to legal workers, lawyers, activists, and anyone interested in learning about radical lawyering and legal work.

Radical is right, in fact, it is referenced on several of their associated websites.

NLG Legal Observer Blair Anderson at #FergusonOctober. (Photo: Cece McGuire)

The Mass Defense Committee (MDC) is a network of lawyers, legal workers and law students providing legal support for political activists, protesters and movements for social change.

MDC members in chapters across the country provide trainings, assistance in setting up temporary legal offices and legal support structures, and materials for supporting activists engaged in mass protests.

Mass Defense Support

The National Lawyers Guild can provide the following legal help to progressive organizations:

  • “Know your rights” trainings/workshops;
  • Meetings with, and advice to, organizers about protest actions, and legal consequences;
  • Legal Observers® at protests and other actions;
  • Help with setting up and running jail and bail support programs;
  • Legal representation in case of protest arrests.

Did you notice the item of legal observers? Well, the NLG does dispatch several observers to protests to not only advise but to capture video in or out of context at protest or demonstration events.

After training you can request observers…

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Need to request Legal Observers?

Please email the Mass Defense Committee at [email protected]

Then there is the ubiquitous debate, rather attack on ICE:

WRITE LETTERS TO DETAINED FOLX VIA NEW ONLINE FORM — #FlattenICE Tuesdays

May 12, 2020

In addition to calling and tweeting at ICE to demand the release of individuals in detention, for which you can use this FlattenICE toolkit (bit.ly/flattenICE), you now can write letters — no stamps or envelopes needed — with this Google Form!

While acting to #FlattenICE, use this great sustainable call-ins graphic (thanks to Havannah and Hien from APSC, also on p. 8 of the FlattenICE toolkit) and remember to TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF.

Perhaps you are beginning to understand this all now right? Hold on there is yet another law firm you should know about.

But first, we need to once again introduce Soros in the mix, of course. A nefarious division of his work is the Center for Popular Democracy. Got it? Okay, read on.

Trump demands Gov. Jay Inslee, Mayor Jenny Durkans 'take back' Seattle USA Today

There is this law firm known as Law for Black Lives. Law for Black Lives is a national community of radical lawyers and legal workers committed to transforming the law and building the power of organizing to defend, protect, and advance Black Liberation across the globe. Now you know why the protests went world-wide, they are coordinated.

The Executive Director is Marbre Stahly-Butts.

Marbre Stahly-Butts is a former Soros Justice Fellow and now Policy Advocate at the Center for Popular Democracy. Her Soros Justice work focused on developing police reforms from the bottom up by organizing and working with families affected by aggressive policing practices in New York City. Stahly-Butts also works extensively on police and criminal justice reform with partners across the country. While in law school, Stahly-Butts focused on the intersection of criminal justice and civil rights, and gained legal experience with the Bronx Defenders, the Equal Justice Initiative, and the Prison Policy Initiative. Before law school Stahly-Butts worked in Zimbabwe organizing communities impacted by violence, and taught at Nelson Mandela’s alma mater in South Africa. Stahly-Butts is a city council designee to the Board appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio.

***

Law for Black Lives and the Center for Constitutional Rights hosted a webinar on April 16th focused on the use of militarization, criminalization and surveillance during times of crisis. While many of us work tirelessly to support our families and communities, the Government is laying the groundwork to turn this health crisis into a criminalization crisis. We have already seen the DOJ request additional detainment powers, Congress funnel almost a billion dollars to local law enforcement agencies and cities across the country to use police to enforce stay at home orders. Join us for  a discussion about the current response. Panelists will provide insight about past abuses of power- from Katrina to 9/11. Together we will explore how lawyers and organizers have mobilized to mitigate the harms of criminalization and the way forward in this moment. If you missed the webinar, check out the recording below!

The rest is up to you to connect more of what you find. Perhaps since the United States fought wars to defeat communism, it may be prudent to demand the IRS terminate the non-profit status of the National Lawyers Guild as just a start and counter-measure.

Meanwhile of course, while Black Lives do Matter, the same goes for any life in America. One has to consider if the BLM movement is at the expense of all other races or classes and is a threat to civil society. Just take a long look at Seattle, Oakland, or New York to answer that question. Maybe even the University of Miami Law School can shed some light on the subject. They teach a course.

In Spring of 2018, the School of Law will be convening an interdisciplinary course called “Race, Class, and Power: University Course on the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.”

The course will engage the multiple lenses through which the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and racial justice in the United States might be explored, including policing and criminal justice, comparative inquiry regarding race and identity, theories of social movements, education reform, cognitive psychology, healthcare and medicine, education and child welfare, incarceration and public health, literature and artistic expression, law and legal reform, environmental justice, and more.

06/11/20

The Law and Order President is Failing America

By: Cliff Kincaid

Conservative Christian broadcaster Brannon Howse told me this week that it doesn’t look like President Trump wants to win the presidential election. “He had better get his act together or else he’s going to lose to a guy that doesn’t even know who his own wife is,” he said. Howse and many other conservatives are frustrated by the (lack of) response of the Trump-Pence Administration to the riots.

Other than clear some protesters and rioters out of Lafayette Park across from the White House, in order to hold up a Bible in front of a burned-out church, Trump has done almost nothing except make threats. He Tweets about restoring law and order but does nothing except protect the White House.

His Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray were blindsided by what is happening. It’s clear they don’t have any clue about the Maoist-style communist revolution underway in America. As a result, Trump is quickly losing support from the conservative side of the political spectrum. One citizen wrote to me through my website America’s Survival saying, “Unfortunately, our fearless leader, Trump, is not fearless and is not a leader. Basically, he’s useless.” Another said the president and Barr were acting like Abbott and Costello, the comedy duo.

But America isn’t laughing, as their lives and businesses and country are increasingly at risk.

Meanwhile, the Maoist-style cultural revolution is going full speed ahead, as one professor has been suspended for not giving black students a day off from final exams in honor of Black Lives Matter, the Marxist group that honors cop-killer Joanne Chesimard.

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, a conservative critic of Black Lives Matter and Trump’s response to the revolution, is under attack by Maoists pressuring his advertisers to drop his show one by one. Before too long, he will be off the air, in the same way that “Gone with the Wind” has been dropped by HBO and the shows “Cops” and “Live PD” have been rejected by cable channels and networks.

Anybody who thinks independently of the Maoist mob is being targeted.

The New York Times, sounding like a modern-day version of the People’s World, calls all of this “the growing movement for change.” Change came to the Times when an editor resigned after he approved a Senator Tom Cotton op-ed for the paper calling for the deployment of troops to restore order.

No dissident voices are permitted in the paper, or society at large, as the Maoists assert control over all sectors of American life.

Millions of people depending on Trump’s Twitter feed for the blunt truth are now getting a lot of empty threats.

As this column is being written, Trump has sent out another “Law and Order” Tweet demanding that the authorities in Washington State and the city of Seattle restore law and order. In defiance, they told him to return to his White House bunker. Trump looks weak.

Trump threatened to restore law and order through the Insurrection Act and when his own Secretary of Defense Mark Esper undercut him, he backed off. Who is in charge anyway? Now, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark A. Milley has in effect denounced Trump for including him in that photo-op in front of the church. Why does Milley still have a job? This seems like a “Seven Days in May” scenario where the top brass revolt against their Commander-in-Chief.

In the movie, the president wins. In real life, who knows?

The Trump 2020 campaign has just sent out an email message from the president personally asking for money that declares, “It’s past time for Democrat Mayors and Governors to get tough. Violent thugs are running rampant – these people are ANARCHISTS. While the Fake News has been inciting hatred and chaos, President Trump is working around the clock to restore LAW AND ORDER in these communities where liberal leadership has FAILED.”

The words “law and order” were placed in all capitals and underlined. But it’s all talk.

It’s absolutely clear that Trump is NOT working around the clock to restore law and order. If so, he would have fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper for insubordination by now. He would have explained to the American people why Attorney General Barr and FBI director Wray were caught unprepared for the riots in Minneapolis and other cities. My friend Trevor Loudon has all the information they don’t have about the communists running this revolution. His article at Epoch Times even documents the involvement of pro-China communist groups.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) has posted a video of its leader Eugene Puryear addressing the 100,000 strong crowd in Philadelphia on Saturday, June 6. “This isn’t a riot,” he said. “It’s an uprising! It’s a rebellion! And successful uprisings and rebellions become REVOLUTIONS.”

Mr. President, please share that video with Mr. Barr and Mr. Wray, will you?

On the Brannon Howse program, I not only questioned Trump’s “leadership” but the tendency by conservatives like Rush Limbaugh to play into the hands of the radicals. He had the black radio host “Charlamagne Tha God” on his show to talk about “white privilege.” Another Brannon Howse guest, Alex Newman, went into detail about where this is all heading – federal and even United Nations control of police forces once considered under the jurisdiction of local communities. Senate Republicans seem to be going along with this.

I thank Brannon Howse for doing the programs that need to be done about this unfolding disaster for our country. He’s one of the few commentators honest enough to provide the details that are being withheld from the president by his closest aides. As the author of Marxianity, about left-wing infiltration of the churches, he shows real courage.

Tragically, many conservatives remain mum about Trump’s bluster and ineffective response. They suppress conservative views out-of-sync with their own pro-Trump editorializing. But ordinary people with common sense don’t buy it. They will not excuse Trump for failing to take military action to protect people, their lives, and homes.

I saw one story about whether Trump would benefit from the riots. Is this the political calculation in the White House? I’m told he thinks his political rallies will turn things around. It’s true that a backlash is underway. But waiting for a backlash doesn’t justify inaction by federal authorities as lives are lost and property is destroyed.

*Cliff Kincaid is president of Americas Survival, Inc. www.usasurvival.org.

06/11/20

Twitter’s Jack Dorsey Worse Threat To Democracy Than Russia’s Putin

By: Daniel John Sobieski

Election meddling, anyone? By “fact-checking” just one tweet by President Donald J. Trump, Twitter  CEO Jack Dorsey shows he and other social media giants like him have both the power and the desire to swing elections and the power and desire to swing the 2020 election away from Trump and toward the incoherent Joe Biden who probably thinks tweeting is what those honking geese were doing outside his basement window.

That action, along with tagging another Trump tweet commenting on the need for law enforcement and civil and state authorities to confront rioting in Minneapolis as possibly promoting violence interferes with the 2020 election in ways that Vladimir Putin could only dream of. By controlling what we see and hear and know and think about, the Dorseys of the world can influence massive numbers of votes, more than could ever possibly be stolen by fraudulent mail-in voting schemes. Yes, these were in-kind contributions to the DNC and the Biden 2020 campaign, but they were also the tips of a political iceberg that threatens to sink our democracy. No amount of troll farms, hacking, planted bits and the like can interfere in our elections like Twitter, Google, and Facebook have already done and will continue to do unless President Trump gets reelected and controls both houses of Congress to take the necessary remedial legislative action.

Having had one Twitter account permanently suspended for being ardently, and effectively, pro-Trump, with a second account currently temporarily suspended (this piece should do it), I can personally attest to Twitter’s ability and propensity to throttle, censor, and delete conservative thought. Through techniques and tools such as “shadow banning” and ”deboosting” you can pretty much end up tweeting to yourself, or a small limited group of followers.

Nearly two years ago, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz suggested that Twitter’s ongoing censorship amounted to an in-kind contribution to liberals and Democrats worthy of FEC sanctions  Gaetz has suggested that the biased treatment of conservative politicians on Twitter and “errors” that do not seem to affect progressive socialist Democrats may amount to an “in-kind” political contribution:

Rep. Matt Gaetz is considering filing a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over Twitter’s alleged suppression of his account, the Florida Republican told The Daily Caller News Foundation on Wednesday.

Gaetz was one of several prominent conservatives, including members of Congress and the chair of the Republican National Committee, whose accounts Twitter suppressed by making it harder to find in the site’s search function, a Vice News investigation published Wednesday found.

“Democrats are not being ‘shadow banned’ in the same way,” the report concluded, noting: “Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same situation in Twitter’s search.”

Twitter announced in May that the company would rely on “behavior-based signals” to boost the visibility of some accounts and to suppress the visibility of others as part of a step “to improve the health of the public conversation on Twitter.”

And what behavior-based signals would Twitter use? Conservative pro-Trump hashtags or themes perhaps? Indications of conservative support may already be employed in triggering shadow bans:

Covert (and overt) censorship of conservatives and right-wingers has been a reality on Twitter for some time. In January, Twitter employees were caught on camera discussing “shadowbanning” some conservative accounts, and classifying others as “bots” if they made too many tweets about “God, guns, and America.”

Thanks to James O’Keefe of Project Veritas we know some of the details of, methods, and reasons for Twitter’s pro-active censoring of conservatives:

Twitter direct messaging engineer Pranay Singh admitted to mass-banning accounts that express interest in God, guns, and America, during a Project Veritas investigation.

“Just go to a random [Trump] tweet and just look at the followers. They’ll all be like, guns, God, ‘Merica, and with the American flag and the cross,” declared Singh, who was secretly recorded by Project Veritas reporters. “Like, who says that? Who talks like that? It’s for sure a bot.”…

“So if there’s like ‘American, guns,’ [in the account bio] can you write an algorithm to just take all those people out?” asked one undercover reporter.

“Umm, yeah, it’s actually how we do it,” Singh replied. “You look for ‘Trump,’ or ‘America,’ or any of, like, five thousand, like, keywords to describe a redneck, and then you look, and you parse all the messages, all the pictures, and then look for stuff that matches that stuff… You assign a value to each thing, so like Trump would be .5, a picture of a gun would be like 1.5, and if the total comes up above a certain value, then it’s a bot.”

Does Twitter shadowban users who constantly say “Impeach 45” or “Trump is Putin’s puppet?” Planned Parenthood and its ilk are not affected so why should pro-life Christians who support the Second Amendment be? Twitter only shadowbans conservatives. Twitter has also been known to play curious favorites, like the notorious Harvey Weinstein.

Twitter recently exercised its power to censor thought it doesn’t approve of by banning a pro-life ad from then-Tennessee GOP Rep. and Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn because it considered Blackburn’s pro-life rhetoric and denunciation of Planned Parenthood “inflammatory”: These are campaign contributions Jack Dorsey’s thumb is on the election scale tilting it towards liberals and Democrats. Yet nobody is shouting “Twitter, Twitter, Twitter!” like they shouted “Russia, Russia, Russia!”

Jack Dorsey, who has lied to Congress about both his motives and intentions, is not alone in trying to manipulate election results, He has had help in Facebook’s duplicitous Zuckerberg. Facebook once famously censored and branded as “dangerous racists” the iconic Internet duo Diamond and Silk. And don’t forget the wonderful folks at Google who cried the night Hillary lost her inevitable victory. Together, they, not the Russians, pose a threat to our democracy by censoring and deleting information searches and exchanges. As Professor Robert Epstein, Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, former editor-in-chief of “Psychology Today,” and Founder and Director Emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Massachusetts stated… we quite literally won’t see it coming. As Epstein noted in an interview with Mark Levin on his Fox News show:

If Google’s search results for any reason, are biased to favor one candidate or one party for any reason; that will shift a lot of opinions about that candidate, and that will shift a lot of votes. And in fact, it can shift millions of votes.

It doesn’t matter whether an employee or an executive at Google did this deliberately. The algorithm alone, a computer program could be doing this and it will still affect the outcome of elections. …

In 2016, I set up the first-ever monitoring system that allowed me to look over the shoulders of a diverse group of American voters. There were 95 people in 24 states. I looked at politically oriented searches that these people were conducting on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. I was able to preserve more than 13,000 searches and 98,000 web pages.

And I found very dramatic bias in Google search results — not Bing or Yahoo, just Google’s — favoring Hillary Clinton whom I supported strongly. But the point is, I reported that. I reported what I found and that level of bias was sufficient, I calculated, to have shifted over time, somewhere between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes to Hillary without anyone knowing that this had occurred…

Twitter has gone beyond enforcing rules of civility to enforcing its view of political correctness, punishing conservatives who use social media, particularly those who are good at it.

It is no accident. It is not an “error.” It is intentional.  Ever since Twitter’s co-founder expressed regret in inadvertently helping Trump get elected, Twitter has mounted a deliberate campaign to make sure it doesn’t happen again in 2020.

In the age before cable, there was an iconic sci-fi program called The Outer Limits whose opening featured a series of test patterns, flickering screens and a narrator who solemnly intoned, “Do not attempt to adjust your television set. We will control all that you see and hear.” Today that is a chilling reality as social media giants like Twitter routinely censor what people can see and hear on their sites.

Twitter and the other social media giants need to know that George Orwell’s “1984” was a warning, not a technical manual.  Its insidious form of censorship goes beyond what even Big Brother could have dreamt of.

* Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.