01/28/17

The Media’s Embrace of “Fake News” About Drugs

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

DeForest Rathbone, chairman of the National Institute of Citizen Anti-drug Policy (NICAP), says one of the most notorious examples of “fake news” in the media is the notion that marijuana is medicine. He is so alarmed by the misinformation being spread by the media about marijuana and other aspects of the growing drug problem that he sponsored a full-page advertisement in Monday’s Washington Times, urging President Donald Trump to personally follow through on his promise to address “the growing national public health crisis of soaring drug addiction and overdose deaths.”

“There is virtually no one in America today who does not personally know of a drug-related tragedy among his family, neighbors or friends,” the ad says.

However, Rathbone says the media have played down the serious nature of the crisis. “We have become intimately aware that the nation’s current drug crisis is far greater than is being reported in the mainstream news media,” the ad goes on to say.

The ad expresses support for the President’s commitment to stop the proliferation of drugs across the southern border and throughout the nation.

In his inaugural address, Trump declared that drugs “have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.” On the campaign trail, he repeatedly condemned the illegal drug trade, noting the amount of heroin flowing across the southern border and the rising number of overdose deaths.

The current reporting of annual overdose deaths at 50,000 “represents only about a third of the actual 150,000 total drug-related deaths,” the ad says. “That total includes additional deaths from drug-related illnesses, accident and crime.”

The problem goes beyond heroin and overdose deaths, Rathbone said. The ad notes the growing acceptance by some “Stoner States” of marijuana and its alleged “medical” benefits. However, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently reaffirmed the scientific evidence that there is no medical use for smoked marijuana. “Marijuana is dope, not medicine,” the ad states.

In this case, it’s the far-left marijuana lobby that is truly “anti-science.”

Rathbone told Accuracy in Media that his ad, endorsed by many anti-drug organizations, is part of his effort to counter media propaganda in favor of the drug culture. However, despite his telephone number and email address being featured at the top of the ad, he has yet to receive any calls from the media about the ad and what parents believe needs to be done about the growing drug crisis.

“In the last eight years, owing to a lack of enforcement of federal narcotics laws, marijuana use has escalated from 7 to 13% of the U.S. population,” the ad states. “Fueled by the insatiable demand for all illicit drugs, there are now roughly twice as many gang members in the U.S. as law enforcement personnel, breeding violent crime and civil unrest, mostly focused on our youth.”

This information “needs to be exposed,” Rathbone told AIM. He said the Trump Administration has to be informed and educated about “how bad the carnage is” throughout the country. “This is far worse than anybody is talking about,” he said.

The ad cites the following examples of the damage that is being inflicted on the American people:

A huge number of parents are suffering enslavement to the drug-related mental incapacitation of children who are unable to function independently. Many of these children bully their parents into housing, feeding and supporting them, and sometimes even paying for their drugs. Such incapacitated kids often end up as street people blighting communities.
Today there is a soaring demand for foster parents for abused and neglected children of drug-addicted young parents. One community saw a 400% increase in such tragic cases just in the past year alone. Millions of grandparents are raising these kids.
The nation’s schools are awash in drugs, as cited in periodic youth surveys documenting schoolchild drug use, drug-related violence, bullying, fear and depression, resulting in soaring rates of teen suicide, youth addiction and overdose deaths.
The nation’s cities are suffering a virtual holocaust of murders and other violence caused by the massive proliferation of nuclear strength, psychosis-producing marijuana and other drugs. In Washington, D.C. the entire Metro train system is dysfunctional and racked with violent crime resulting from too many of its employees smoking “medicine” that is being allowed and encouraged by the city’s continuing pro-marijuana political leadership.

The growing drug crisis can be traced, at least in part, to the policies of President Barack Obama, a member of the “Choom Gang” of heavy marijuana users as he was growing up in Hawaii. He brought his soft policies on drugs to the Oval Office. For example, Obama ordered his Department of Justice to stop enforcing federal marijuana laws. As a result, the ad states, a massive marijuana trafficking industry has emerged in states that have legalized the drug, affecting the nation as a whole.

The ad expresses the hope that new Attorney General Jeff Sessions will declare the pre-eminence of federal over state laws and “restore prosecution of violations of federal drug laws.”

Rathbone told AIM that he also believes the Trump administration must declare that the nation’s current drug problems “constitute a national and growing urgent public health crisis.”

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

12/10/16

Obama’s Soros-funded Pro-Dope Policy in Peril

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

It is part of the Obama legacy: more drugs, more psychotic behavior, and therefore more violence.

Deranged potheads, some of them Islamists, are killing people in a series of violent and terrorist incidents on American soil.

In a recent case in Massachusetts, 15-year-old Mathew Borges has been charged with first-degree murder in the decapitation death of a classmate. But you have to read deep into the articles about the case to discover a motive. Police said he told them that he and his victim, Lee Manuel Viloria-Paulino, went away together to “smoke marijuana.”

Don’t expect our liberal, pro-drug media to draw the obvious connections between marijuana, psychosis and violence.

Dr. Christine Miller, who has written about the relationship between marijuana and mental illness, says the documented links between the heavy use of marijuana and psychosis in some people may help explain the gruesome murder in Massachusetts.

Ironically, Massachusetts was one of those states that approved the legalization of “recreational” marijuana on November 8.

President Obama’s administration has encouraged the use of marijuana through its support of state legalization initiatives.

In the Massachusetts case, the body of the victim “was mutilated so badly, including his arms and head cut off, that the autopsy took 11 hours to complete,” said the Boston Herald.

Miller cites another case out of Oregon where a pothead decided out of the blue to drive his car over another person he feared and considered a threat. Moments before he struck and killed a man with his car, the suspect in the fatal hit-and-run incident had smoked marijuana in his car and then intentionally sped toward the victim, officials on the scene said.

The pothead, Dillon Van Diviner, 22, said he had a “strong feeling” that the man he hit, Brad Goad, was somehow a threat. “Brad Goad was a loving boyfriend, father, Son, and uncle,” says the page set up to raise money for his family. “He was a hard worker and wanted nothing but good things for everyone.”

What observers in the media and elsewhere are not seeing is the ongoing evidence that psychosis linked to marijuana can cause paranoia about the intentions of others and spark violence, even murder.

In the states where legalization has occurred, Miller says, marijuana usage rates have gone up. She says that because marijuana is an intrinsically dangerous drug, the most serious results of increased use are chronic psychosis (increased five-fold in regular users) and suicide (risk for suicide increased seven-fold in regular users).

But Dr. Miller and other anti-drug advocates, such as Calvina Fay of the Drug Free America Foundation, are optimistic that President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), will turn things around.

“The news that Jeff Sessions has been chosen by the Trump transition team to be attorney general is fantastic news for our movement,” Miller told Accuracy in Media, “because not only would Sessions be more likely to enforce federal drug laws, but he is familiar with the science concerning marijuana’s mental health impacts and has cited such concerns during speeches in the Senate.”

Fay says that Sessions will have to go up against a “pot lobby” that is “pouring tons of money into the movement along with the billionaires such as George Soros.” She adds, “The anti-drug side cannot even come close to matching their money.”

The pro-drug side is “aided by a current administration that has taken a hands-off approach and has been totally AWOL on the marijuana issue,” she said. “We even have drug prevention coalitions that have had their federal funding threatened unless they remained completely silent about the harms of marijuana.”

She adds, “New research comes out regularly showing the alarming harms of marijuana and yet the public hears nothing about it because the Office of National Drug Control Policy and other government agencies have done absolutely nothing to get the information out.”

One possible problem in the development of a tough anti-drug policy by the Trump administration is the influence of libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and has become the first major investor in a marijuana company.

“It is refreshing that Mr. Thiel bucked the pressure from his liberal friends and supported Trump’s candidacy,” Fay told us. “Obviously, he recognized a Trump administration would provide a stronger business economy than a Clinton administration. It is my hope that the advice that he may have the privilege of providing to the Trump administration will be limited to the technology issue and that he will avoid advising in areas of policy, where he is not qualified, and/or where real or perceived conflicts of interest exist. Since he financially benefits from the marijuana industry, he should not be commenting or advising on drug policy.”

The Soros-funded drug legalization lobby is now scared. “This is looking really bad,” Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said about Trump’s cabinet picks. “First Sessions for Attorney General, then [Rep. Tom] Price at HHS, and now yet another old-style drug war character for Homeland Security [General John Kelly]. It looks like Donald Trump is revving up to re-launch the failed drug war.”

Michael Collins, deputy director of the Drug Policy Alliance’s office of national affairs, denounced Kelly as “a big-time drug war zealot,” adding, “As head of Southern Command he demonstrated that he is a true believer in the drug war, and it’s incredibly worrying that he could now head up Homeland Security.”

What Kelly understands is that failures in the drug war partly stem from a porous southern border which serves as a conduit for many dangerous, illegal drugs coming into the U.S., as well as terrorists and guns.

“We’re going to build that wall and we’re going to stop that heroin from pouring in and we’re going to stop the poison of the youth,” Trump said repeatedly on the campaign trail.

In connection with the alleged medical benefits of marijuana, a condition called Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome is affecting some users, causing them to vomit uncontrollably for as long as 48 hours. “It’s confusing and paradoxical for patients because cannabis use is thought oftentimes to be a relief of vomiting and nausea,” said Dr. Matt Noble, a medical toxicologist with the Oregon Poison Center.

Christine Martinez, who said she used cannabis heavily to treat chronic pain, was quoted by the local TV station as saying the vomiting “scared me to death” about the alleged medical benefits of dope. “Never again,” she said. “I’m through with it.”

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

08/2/16

Hillary Says Obama “Left Behind” White America

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

On a campaign swing through the “Rust Belt” of Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton let the truth slip out, saying that the white working class had been “left out and left behind.”

Mrs. Clinton was appearing in Cambria County, which is more than 94 percent white.

Many cities in Pennsylvania are dying coal towns that are fast becoming what a local TV station calls “coal region ghost towns.”

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, has called for more coal miners to be thrown out of their jobs. “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” she said at a town hall in West Virginia in March.

When he ran for president, Barack Obama promised to bankrupt coal plants.

This is a promise that he has followed through on. In 2012, Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, said then-EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson used executive branch rules and regulations to destroy the coal industry. “The Navy SEALs shot Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan and Lisa Jackson shot us in Washington,” Roberts said.

We reported at the time that Jackson was an environmental zealot who advocates “eco-justice.” In 2010, she had received a copy of a “Green Bible” from the liberal National Council of Churches. Obama ordered her to wage war on the fossil fuel industry in order to build a “green economy.”

Mrs. Clinton promises to continue the transition to a “green economy” with no manufacturing jobs.

While jobs are not flowing into Cambria County, drugs are. Cambria County ranked first in the overdose death rate among all Pennsylvania counties from 2007 through 2011. Many were heroin-related opioid deaths.

With major industries having been destroyed by bad trade agreements, much of Pennsylvania is now facing a “heroin epidemic,” as documented by local TV station WJAC. The number of heroin related deaths in Cambria County tripled in a year, the stationreported.

A multimillion-dollar heroin operation was just busted, resulting in 33 arrests, after a joint investigation by the FBI, the state, and county and city law enforcement. Authorities said 25 bricks of heroin were being distributed per day, primarily in the Johnstown area of Cambria County.

The implications, ignored by the media, are that President Obama, the first black president, has ignored the deteriorating condition of white America, while also turning a blind eye to the drug problem that has subsequently engulfed the region.

In stark contrast to Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump, who appears at public events with thousands of people, Hillary Clinton spoke to “a private audience” of about 200 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania last Saturday.

Ignored by most of the national liberal media were local protesters carrying signs outside that said, “HILLARY THE SNAKE,” “LOCK HER UP!” and even “JAIL OBAMA.”

The Tribune-Democrat captured the image of a sign saying, “Killary Killed Coal & Steel. Vote Trump.”

But the complaints went beyond her indifference to the plight of workers. Local resident Sharon Nagle said, “She had a private server to do our business—our State Department, foreign affairs business—on, and mixed it with her emails and then decides that she has the right to pick which ones are which. No, they’re all ours. They’re ours—not hers—and I want them back. I want to know where our emails are, and I want to know why she had a secret server to keep her business from the people who she serves and works for.”

Another local resident, David Allison, said, “Hillary is a bad choice for president. She should be in jail right now, really. It looks like there’s two standards for citizens in this country. The rest of us and the elite. They have their own set of rules.”

The Daily-American said another local resident, Wes Lauffer, characterized Clinton as a “lying, anti-American, Muslim Brotherhood crony of Obama.”

USA Today said Republican Mitt Romney won 58 percent of the vote in Cambria County in 2012, “despite the fact that registered Democrats outnumber Republicans.” The economic problems have only gotten worse since then.

What’s happening in Cambria County is also the case in other parts of Pennsylvania. The depressed conditions of Mahanoy City in Schuylkill County have led members of Jesus the Divine Word Catholic Church in Huntingtown, Maryland, to make annual mission trips to the region to help local residents. Among other things, parishioners maintain and paint homes, visit shut-ins, and hold worship services at the local Catholic Church, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.

On one trip, 48 homes were fixed by the visiting parishioners.

Mahanoy City is a former coal town. “Mahanoy’s population peaked more than a century ago at nearly 16,000 people, four times the number living there now,” the publication Keystone Crossroads reported. “It never recovered after the coal industry collapsed.”

The situation is so bad that Mahanoy City and others are being labeled “ghost towns,” as a result of people leaving. Local TV station WNEP reports that in Mahanoy City, 26.3 percent of the homes sit vacant. “Just a block from the main street a home is selling for less than a price of a used car,” the station said.

In Shamokin, a city in Northumberland County, there is also a vacancy rate of 26.3 percent. “Afternoon traffic rarely stops on downtown blocks that increasingly see buildings for rent or for sale,” the station reported.

The investigation unit of the station, known as Newswatch 16, looked at the vacancy rates for homes in communities with more than 2,000 people. It said the top 10 were:

Shenandoah 28.9%
Shamokin 26.3 %
Mahanoy City 26.3 %
Mount Carmel 22.7 %
Ashland 22.4%
Lansford 20.8 %
Plymouth 18%
McAdoo 17.2%
Coaldale 16.7%
Frackville 16.2%

Local realtor Erica Ramus told the station that she has a hard time selling property in Shenandoah. She said she shows people downtown properties and they reply, “Why would I want to move my business to a dying old coal town?”

Trump’s campaign has spoken about the population and employment losses in Pennsylvania, promising to bring back manufacturing jobs and stopping bad trade agreements.

Trump has said the nation’s growing heroin problem can be traced to the failure to keep the southern border secure. Heroin is “pouring across” the border, he notes.

In regard to the problem of high-potency marijuana that has been unleashed by Obama’s failure to enforce federal anti-marijuana statues, Trump has indicated that he will reverse course, order enforcement, and crack down on emerging marijuana businesses that profit by poisoning the minds of young people.

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected].View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

05/14/16

Hate Crime Turns Out to Be Death by Marijuana

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

So marijuana is harmless and doesn’t kill people? Consider the case of black Muslim teenager Hamza Warsame, who took a toke and plunged to his death. His friends from the hood blamed it on a non-existent white man who allegedly pushed the kid to his death.

The headline in last December’s New York Times story was certainly ominous: “Assertions of Hate Crime in Seattle After a Somali-American Teenager Falls to His Death.” The paper said, “The death of the boy, Hamza Warsame, has prompted outrage among members of the Muslim community here, amid assertions—it is not clear from whom—that he was beaten and pushed to his death by a white man.”

Notice how a “white man” was blamed, despite the complete lack of evidence. Where did the allegations come from? The Times seemed not to know.

Continue reading →

12/3/15

Planned Parenthood Killer Was a Deranged Pothead

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

The liberals were quick to blame conservative Christians, Republicans, and others on the right for the carnage in the Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic. It turns out the killer was a paranoid pothead who probably moved to Colorado because it offered him plenty of legal weed. The murders were just the latest example of President Obama’s pro-pot policies causing “active shooter” cases in which innocent people get maimed and killed.

While “progressives” hope to capitalize on the killings by stopping investigations into Planned Parenthood, the case of Robert Lewis Dear has backfired on them in more ways than one. Dear, who looks stoned out of his mind in his mugshot, looks like another case of a cold-blooded killer whose actions may be attributed to his heavy use of a substance that many progressives deem harmless and safe.

It’s time for the major media to quit making jokes about marijuana and instead examine its harmful and deadly effects.

Accuracy in Media has been virtually alone over the last several years inuncovering and publicizing evidence of a marijuana connection to several high-profile acts of crime and terrorism, including the Boston Marathon bombings. Our column, “Can Marijuana Fuel Jihad?,” looked at how the Russian terrorists in Boston were members of a marijuana smuggling ring.

While President Obama blames easy access to guns for these acts of madness and death, it appears that easy access to high-potency marijuana is really to blame in the Colorado case. Marijuana is legal in Colorado, which passed a marijuana legalization measure on the state level in 2012, thanks to “progressive” groups funded by pro-drug billionaire George Soros.

Under Obama, a heavy marijuana user in his youth, the Justice Department has refused to enforce federal laws and treaties against the use and cultivation of marijuana. So the Colorado legalization “experiment” has continued.

Hence, Obama’s pro-pot policies may have cost the lives of those in the Planned Parenthood clinic. No wonder Obama wants to blame guns.

Obama was a member of the Choom Gang, a group of heavy marijuana users. Speculation has mounted that Robert Lewis Dear was on “Obama choom,” as it’s known on the street, or “speed weed,” a high potency form of marijuana perhaps mixed with other drugs.

Soros-funded groups like the Drug Policy Alliance proudly point to tax revenue generated by legal pot sales in Colorado, while ignoring the toll the drug has taken on the mental health of young people and the rising number of marijuana-induced violent episodes.

In 2014, a college student jumped to his death in Colorado after ingesting pot, while a Denver man, Richard Kirk, killed his wife with a gunshot to her head after using marijuana. Kirk is blaming the marijuana for his “delirium and psychotic-like symptoms.”

In a more recent Colorado case, a mentally-disturbed man, Noah Harpham, killed three people during a series of random killings on the streets of Colorado Springs on October 31. He was in the habit of smoking pot for breakfast, according to his mother. In a video, he had accused his father of belonging to a religious cult.

Anti-drug activist Dee Rathbone told Accuracy in Media, “News that this Colorado Planned Parenthood shooter, Robert Lewis Dear, was a marijuana freak just adds to the many other documented cases where the mass shooter was a confirmed pot user. The government officials won’t do a hair drug test on the mass shooters to show what they had been using—nor will the media call for it to be done—for fear it might confirm the involvement of high-test violence-inducing pot and jeopardize their sacred cow of marijuana.”

Dear had a 5-acre lot near the sparsely populated mountain town of Hartsel, “where a few of his neighbors grow marijuana and boast solitary lifestyles,” notedThe Denver Post.

In addition to his need for pot, The New York Times reported that Dear posted an online personal ad seeking women in North Carolina interested in bondage and sadomasochistic sex, and sought companions in the Asheville, North Carolina area “with whom he could smoke marijuana.” That was before he moved to Colorado.

Dear was also a visitor to a marijuana website, Cannabis.com, where he offered his views about AIDS, hurricanes, and the religious “end times”—views that reflect the rantings of a paranoid mind heavily influenced by marijuana.

Dr. Christine Miller tells Accuracy in Media, “The scientific literature is clear on the connection between marijuana and violence, from the large review by Seena Fazel and colleagues in 2009 showing the effect of any recreational drug, including marijuana, to increase violent tendencies in those who are already psychotic, to the growing data on marijuana increasing the risk of interpersonal violence in those who are otherwise normal to begin with.”

Miller is a semi-retired molecular neuroscientist living in Maryland who volunteers her time for Project SAM (www.learnaboutSAM.org) by educating the public about the science on marijuana’s mental health impacts.

Although the popular media misconception is that marijuana causes people to “mellow” and become harmless and lazy, Miller said evidence shows that it can “trigger psychotic thinking,” including the belief that one is being surrounded or confronted by hostile people. “A case in point was the defendant in the American Sniper trial, pot-smoking Eddie Routh, who perceived that Chris Kyle and Chad Littlefield were hostile towards him, and thinking they meant to do him harm, he shot them first,” Miller said.

She urged federal and local authorities to do more to examine the influence of marijuana in acts of violence.

“With so very many news reports of random killings where the motive is totally unclear, and where the killer was a heavy marijuana user, the time has come for our Federal Bureau of Investigation to develop a profile on this type of crime and to release their findings to the public,” she said. “In a sense I think they are missing in action, AWOL if you will, at a time that is crucial to the development of an informed public on this topic. I realize that they are charged with fighting terror on many fronts, but they should recognize this type of crime brings its own special kind of terror, even more random and less predictable that that perpetrated by those with extremist ideologies.”

Dee Rathbone said that “spineless government officials don’t want to know” about the marijuana link to mass murder “because then they would have to listen to us endangered citizens and do something to stop the pro-pot legalization madness sweeping the nation today.”

He added, “It’s the law that they test all alcohol-related driving tragedies for presence of alcohol. Therefore, under that precedent we should demand enactment of a federal law to require hair drug testing of all violent offenders to evaluate their level of intoxication and the specific intoxicant used. Without such definitive high technology hair drug testing, government officials and mainstream media can continue to use their feigned ignorance and blame the usual suspects.”

11/2/15

Ted Cruz Breaks With Koch Brothers on Crime Bill

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Before Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) electrified conservatives with his denunciation of liberal media bias at the GOP presidential debate last week, he took a little-noticed position on a major crime bill before the Senate that set him apart from the politically powerful Koch brothers. Taking the side of law-and-order conservatives on an issue that could emerge as a major focus of the 2016 presidential campaign, Cruz came out against the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act (S. 2123) on the grounds that the legislation, which will retroactively reduce the sentences of thousands of federal prison inmates, could lead to the release of violent criminals, some convicted of using weapons while engaged in other crimes. He said the Senate bill would release “illegal aliens with criminal convictions” when a “major crime wave” is already sweeping the nation.

In an extraordinary development, the Koch brothers decided to publicly go after Cruz. Echoing the views of the libertarian billionaires, whose network of conservative advocacy groups was planning to spend $889 million on the 2016 campaign, Mark Holden, Senior Vice President & General Counsel of Koch Industries, Inc., issued a statement denouncing the Texas senator by name. He said, “We are disappointed that some members, including Senator Cruz, who have supported the need for reform and been strong supporters of the Bill of Rights, did not support this bill.”

While Cruz had indicated support back in February for a Senate bill on “sentencing reform,” he voted against the latest version because he said it would lead to more criminals being released from prison and committing crimes against law-abiding citizens and police.

In dramatic testimony, Cruz said that while he had supported the Smarter Sentencing Act, a previous version of the bill, the final version had been changed and had “gone in a direction that is not helpful.” He said it provides “leniency” for “violent criminals who use guns” and gives lighter sentences to criminals already serving time. Cruz said that letting thousands of criminals out of prison at this time makes no sense “when police officers are under assault right now, are being vilified right now, and when we’re seeing violent crime spiking in our major cities across the country…”

Political observers say that the public attack on Cruz from the Koch brothers, who are seeking to influence the selection of a GOP 2016 presidential nominee, could easily backfire and expose the nefarious influence of the libertarian billionaires’ attempt to affect the outcome of the race for president on the Republican side. In addition to the Kochs, libertarian hedge fund operator Paul Singer has entered the Republican contest, endorsing Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and promising him millions of dollars in campaign contributions through his own network of conservative organizations and allies. Singer, whose son is homosexual, wants the GOP to embrace gay rights and gay marriage.

There are very few organizations active in conservative politics that are not financed by either Koch or Singer. Donald Trump, a billionaire in his own right, doesn’t need their support.

Blogger Tina Trent, who writes and lectures about criminal justice issues, hailed Cruz’s decision to come out against the Koch-backed bill, saying the legislation was “a 100 percent giveaway to some of the most radical anti-incarceration activist groups funded by George Soros,” the billionaire hedge fund operator and backer of the Democratic Party. She said, “I’m happy to see Cruz refuse to obey the Kochs on this one vote, but the fact that they came out and chastised him publicly when he did cross them even slightly points to bigger questions—and bigger problems. Will Cruz go further and completely sever ties with the Kochs?”

Libertarians and their Leftist Allies Push Criminal Justice Reform

Though branded by the media as free market conservatives, the Koch brothers are libertarians on social and foreign policy issues and do business with China and Russia. They chose “criminal justice reform” as their latest high-profile cause, even though this has meant collusion with the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations and his grantees.

We noted in a story last March that the Coalition for Public Safety was playing a leading role in this new “bipartisan” campaign for “criminal justice reform,” and has been financed by $5 million from the Koch brothers and other “core supporters,” such as the liberal Ford Foundation. Soros money for this effort has been mostly funneled through the ACLU, a major “partner” in the group, which received $50 million to cut national incarceration rates and release criminals.

The Coalition for Public Safety is run by Christine Leonard, a former Ted Kennedy Senate staffer once affiliated with the left-wing Vera Institute for Justice. We pointed out that the Vera Institute is so extreme that its Project Concern had a National Advisory Board on Adolescent Development, Safety and Justice that included the former communist terrorist Bernardine Dohrn as an adviser from 1998 to 2003.

One Soros-funded group, Critical Resistance, was founded by communist Angela Davis and says it seeks “to end the prison industrial complex (PIC) by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe. We believe that basic necessities such as food, shelter, and freedom are what really make our communities secure.” It got $100,000 from the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations.

An all-day “Bipartisan Summit on Criminal Justice Reform” that was sponsored in part by the Coalition for Public Safety featured former Obama official and Marxist Van Jones as a major speaker. Jones appeared at a podium emblazoned with the company name “Koch Industries.” Obama’s then-Attorney General Eric Holder also spoke to the event.

Cruz was joined in his opposition to the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act by Republican Senators Orrin Hatch (UT), David Perdue (GA), Jeff Sessions (AL), and David Vitter (LA). Nevertheless, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Assistant Democratic Leader Dick Durbin pushed the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act through the Senate Judiciary Committee in a 15-5 vote. A Cruz amendment to fix the bill was voted down.

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning said that Senate Republicans, “in a quest for bipartisanship,” have passed a bill that will “retroactively reduce more federal prison sentences, resulting in an additional flooding of our cities with thousands more convicted criminals out of penitentiaries.” He asked, “Given the volatile mix of massive increases of Muslim refugees, the influx of Central American gangs and Mexican drug cartel members, and the disarming of our police, what could go wrong with releasing tens of thousands of convicted criminals early into the already violent cities? Why would Republicans vote for that?”

Law Enforcement Groups Weigh in on Pending Crime Legislation

Unwilling to let the Koch brothers and George Soros have their way on the crime legislation, organizations representing law enforcement are making their views known. Groups opposing the bill include the National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys, National Sheriffs’ Association, National Immigration & Customs Enforcement Council, Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, National Narcotic Officers’ Associations’ Coalition, National District Attorneys Association, Major County Sheriffs’ Association, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation Agents Association.

Major figures opposing the bill include Ed Meese, Former Attorney General of the United States; Ron Hosko, Former Assistant Director of the FBI; and Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum.

Senator Sessions, a senior member of the Judiciary Committee and former federal prosecutor, quoted Steven Cook, the President of the National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys, as saying that the bill “threatens to reverse many of the gains we have made by making thousands of convicted and imprisoned armed career criminals, serial violent criminals, and high-level drug traffickers eligible for early release.” Cook added that “it would seriously weaken the very tools that federal prosecutors, working with our federal, state, and local law enforcement partners, have used to keep our communities safe.”

“In reality,” Tina Trent told Accuracy in Media, “there is no big public groundswell of support for releasing recidivist criminals back onto the streets. The urgency around this issue has been almost entirely manufactured by paid activists in the leftist and libertarian camps—aided by the media, of course. This is why they’re being so intentionally secretive about the process and the people who would be released and how the releases would be implemented. It’s also why they’re not making it easy, or even possible, to see state-by-state information about the specific inmates who would be released, nor can the public view the full criminal arrest and conviction records for these inmates.”

Taking on libertarian rhetoric about alleged “nonviolent” drug offenders supposedly populating the prisons, she noted there are several ways an offender can be classified as “non-violent” even when he or she has a long rap sheet of arrests for violent crimes and even convictions for violent crimes. In such cases, defense lawyers will have their clients plead to a drug charge in exchange for charges of violent crimes being dropped.

The “Ferguson” Effect?

Despite the serious flaws in the bill and questions about the radicals backing it, aCongressional Criminal Justice and Public Safety Caucus has been created to make similar legislation a reality on the House side. Representatives Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Raul Labrador (R-ID), Cedric Richmond (D-LA) and Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) will serve as co-chairs of this newly-formed body.

Jessica Berry, Deputy Director of the Coalition for Public Safety, thanked Chaffetz and the other Republicans for partnering with Democrats as well as President Obama, for the purpose of “getting criminal justice reform done.”

Berry’s praise for Republicans should give them concern. She is a former top Democratic Party staffer on Capitol Hill, having served as the principal law enforcement and criminal justice advisor to Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and an adviser to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

If the “bipartisan” bill passes Congress, Republicans may eventually be blamed for helping to put more criminals back on the streets, producing more of the “Ferguson effect” that Obama’s FBI director James Comey says has put the lives of police officers and innocent members of the community in greater danger.

The controversy over Comey’s remarks could complicate the President’s push “to loosen the nation’s sentencing laws,” the Hill newspaper reported. Another potential complication is that the outspoken Cruz and others may put pressure on Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (KY) to stop the bill from coming up for a vote so that Republicans don’t further embarrass themselves by partnering with soft-on-crime Democrats in hock to Soros-funded activist groups.

Leftist groups are hoping McConnell will bring the bill to a full Senate vote, in order to demonstrate how Republicans can work with Democrats on an issue dear to the Obama administration.