Birmingham, ALABAMA — An organization partnered with a George Soros-financed group and led by a radical leftist who is the half-brother of the infamous controversial Rev. Al Sharpton has been diligently working over the past few weeks to register convicted felons across Alabama.
The aim of the effort has been to get as many felons as possible on the roster before last Monday, the deadline to register in order to vote in Alabama’s Dec. 12 senate special election that pits Republican Roy Moore against Democratic challenger Doug Jones. The man spearheading the campaign has stated outright that his effort is meant to ensure a Democratic victory in Alabama.
The thousands of felons reportedly newly registered over the past few weeks were most likely not included in any recent polling on the Alabama senate race put out by major firms.
Jones himself is tied to some of the specific organizations associated with the drive to register felons here. Indeed, as Breitbart News first reported, Jones spearheaded a project for a massively Soros-financed legal activist group demanding full voting rights be given to felons released from prison, including those convicted of murder, rape and other violent crimes.
AL.com reported that Pastor Kenneth Glasgow has been at the forefront of the statewide effort, which has successfully registered thousands of felons across Alabama in recent weeks. Glasgow has been aided in his efforts here by other Soros-financed groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The Village Voice previously described Glasgow, Sharpton’s half-brother, as an “ex-con and recovering crackhead turned street preacher.”
Glasgow is currently president of a group he founded in 1999 calling itself The Ordinary People Society (TOPS). And he is a former leader of another organization, the radical Free Alabama Movement (FAM), which has for years been making inroads into Alabama’s prison population.
Glasgow told AL.com that in the last month alone “I think we registered at least five- to ten-thousand people all over the state” – referring to his efforts here in Alabama.
“I’ve got people all over the state registering people with my TOPS branches in Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, Montgomery, Enterprise, Dothan, Abbeville, Geneva, Gordon, Bessemer, we have a lot,” he added.
Speaking on his radio program, Glasgow charged that “swarming the polls” with newly registered convicts could swing the vote, pointing as a template to the Virginia governor’s race. In that state, Gov. Terry McAuliffe used his executive power in April to restore voting rights for over 200,000 felons.
“We have the chance to do the same thing they did in Virginia,” Glasgow stated. “We can turn it blue. Well not blue, but we can add some color. Make it pink or purple.”
Glasgow has been taking advantage of a change made last May, when Alabama’s Gov. Kay Ivey signed a law that defined a clause in the State constitution denying the right to vote to anyone who has committed a crime that demonstrates “moral turpitude.”
The new law generated a list of about 50 crimes that fit under the “moral turpitude” banner, including murder, kidnapping and sexual abuse. Glasgow was involved in the activism promoting the law.
This means that Glasgow is free to register felons whose crimes do not fit under the state’s definition of a “moral turpitude” conviction.
Glasgow’s activism is intended to fill the void left by Alabama’s legal refusal to actively notify potentially tens of thousands of former felons that they regained their voting rights. A federal judge in July sided with Alabama, affirming that the state does not need to make such notifications after Ivey signed the law restoring rights to some felons.
A Soros-funded group called the Campaign Legal Center filed the lawsuit against Alabama last year calling for a public educational campaign to inform felons of their regained right to vote. The litigation is still ongoing.
“This is not a Democratic or Republican issue; it’s a democracy issue with a lower case d,” Danielle Lang, a Campaign Legal Center lawyer, stated after spending a week earlier this month in Alabama holding educational clinics on the matter.
Besides funding from Soros, the Campaign Legal Center documents that it receives financing from the Soros-funded Tides Foundation and from the Soros-funded Brennan Center for Justice.
Doug Jones himself has spearheaded numerous Brennan projects, including one seeking full voting rights nationwide be given to all felons released from prison regardless of their crimes.
The Brennan Center has been the recipient of numerous grants from Soros’s Open Society Foundations totaling over $7,466,000 from 2000 to 2010 alone.
The Soros-funded ACLU of Alabama also filed a lawsuit seeking to force the state of Alabama to inform convicted felons that they can vote.
The ACLU has also worked with Glasgow’s TOPS to register felons. The groups co-hosted a Voter Rights Restoration training session in Selma, Alabama in July, after the law was first changed. The ACLU dedicated a special section of its website to getting supporters to register for the Alabama senate race. The organization has used its Twitter account in recent days to promote the voter registration drive in Alabama.
The Soros-funded Campaign Legal Center has released an Alabama Voting Rights Restoration Toolkit aiding felons in registering to vote. Soros’s Open Society is listed as a donor to the group.
The League of Women Voters of Alabama has also been advocating for voter turnout. Soros’s Open Society has donated to the League of Women Voters Education Fund.
The Soros-financed MoveOn.org, which advocates for voting restoration to felons, has been heavily active in Alabama, where they claim they have 43,000 members.
In October, Glasgow dismissed a lawsuit against Alabama state officials after they agreed to sign documents indicating they should not have prevented him from entering prisons for the purpose of registering felons. His lawsuit was facilitated by the NAACP, which is financed by Soros.
Earlier this week, Think Progress, a project of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress, suggested that “tens of thousands of newly registered felons could swing (the) Alabama Senate election.”
Glasgow’s TOPS, which has been registering the Alabama felons, is financed by the Open Philanthropy Project, a non-profit financed by Cari Tuna and her husband, Dustin Moskovitz, co-founders of Facebook and Asana.
TOPS is openly partnered with the Soros-financed Drug Policy Alliance, which seeks to decriminalize drug offenses. The Alliance’s main aim, according to its website, is to create a world in which people “are no longer punished for what they put into their own bodies but only for crimes committed against others.”
Soros’s Open Society Foundations gave a whopping $50 million to the Alliance to aid its decriminalization efforts.
Breitbart News previously reported that Jones pushed reduced sentencing for drug offenders in an effort he spearheaded for the Soros-funded Brennan Center. Jones’s project sought to fundamentally transform the role of U.S. Attorneys from one of prosecuting criminals to activists that enact a so-called progressive criminal justice agenda.
Glasgow, meanwhile, has been petitioning for voting rights for felons in Alabama for over a decade, including in 2008 when he used TOPS to push for changes in law. “There would be a lot of difference in our legislators, our elected officials and our presidents that we’ve had,” he said at the time, referring to the possibility of felons voting. “It would definitely change the political spectrum of Alabama.”
Glasgow has been cited by the news media as the spokesperson for the Free Alabama Movement (FAM), a radical network that has been leading activism, including prison strikes, within Alabama’s prison population for years. FAM itself calls Glasgow its “outside” spokesman.
GAM has been advocating for the repeal of Alabama’s three strikes law. The group also demands a re-write of Alabama’s “drive-by-shooting law” to apply only to gang-related activity.
Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun, a founder of the FAM, has peddled conspiracy theories about the 13th amendment, which allows for “involuntary servitude” as “a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Ra-Sun claimed the U.S. uses the 13th amendment “to maintain control” of “black people as tools or machines of production.” Glasgow has also repeatedly preached against the 13th amendment.
Last year, CNN reported on a national inmate strike that began in September 2016 organized by Glasgow’s FAM. Glasgow claimed to the news network that an inmate who had previously gone on a hunger strike was being denied water because of his activism, a charge refuted by the Alabama Department of Corrections. Glasgow told CNN the case drew the attention of activist lawyer Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative.
The Equal Justice Initiative is financed by Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Breitbart News previously reported that the Initiative is listed with five other groups on Doug Jones’s personal website as among organizations that Jones advocates for supporters to “get involved” with on “matters of justice and equality.”
Glasgow’s FAM has worked with the radical Industrial Workers of the World, as well as a slew of other far-left groups such as the Anarchist Black Cross Federation, the Black Autonomy Federation, the Black Militia Nation and the National Lawyers Guild.
The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) is famous for defending protesters from extremist groups who get arrested during disruption campaigns. A notable former member of the National Lawyers Guild is Bernardine Dohrn, the NLG’s first national student organizer. Dohrn was a leader of the Weather Underground anti-American domestic terrorist group along with her husband, former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers.
Doug Jones is currently listed on the Democracy Restoration Act (DRA) information page of the Soros-financed Brennan Center’s website as among the “Groups and Individuals who support the DRA,” which calls for voting to be restored to convicted felons. Listed alongside Jones is the National Lawyers Guild.
Glasgow has been involved with his half-brother Al Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN). Glasgow keynoted a Montgomery, Alabama NAN anti-police demonstration in April 2013 over the Trayvon Martin case. The event was co-sponsored by TOPS.
In 2014, Sharpton opened a NAN office in Birmingham. “We will, out of this office, coordinate our work throughout the South against those new measures that have been designed to suppress the vote,” Sharpton said. “Make no mistake about it, these are designed to suppress the vote and we are here to fight against voter suppression.”
Sharpton’s national group boasts that it is involved in efforts to “support” voter registration while “fighting voter suppression” in numerous states, including Alabama.
The Democratic Party and the liberal left’s obsession with disparate impact race politics crept into K-12 public education. Their latest social engineering experimentation uses black and Hispanic kids in poor urban classrooms as pawns for political power. Education is secondary.
Liberals believe they can artificially wipe away serious behavior problems that are cultural in nature. They do this by labeling reasonable standards of classroom discipline as racist or discriminatory. When urban schools with predominantly black and Hispanic students enacted protocols that create an environment where learning can take place, more suspensions and expulsions resulted, accompanied by a widening of the achievement gap between black students and their white counterparts.
The knee-jerk reaction from liberals was to claim that school disciplinary policies that disproportionally affected black and Hispanic kids were culturally insensitive, discriminatory and evidence of racism. The liberals were confusing correlation and causation. School officials were even discouraged from calling police even in cases of violent assaults – that could also be considered racist.
Social engineers in colleges and universities began drawing up untested experiments using black and Hispanic kids as laboratory rats. They wanted to show that leaving disruptive kids in the classroom, instead of removing them for serious behavior violations including assaults on teachers, would improve scholastic performance.
Instead, disruptions and scholastic performance both got worse. Leaving disruptive kids in a classroom is a danger not only to the teacher but to other students as well. The university professors are nowhere near the classrooms to see the disaster they created with their inane idea, nor are they held accountable.
Not surprisingly, no amount of cultural sensitivity training of school officials will negate the culturally dysfunctional baggage brought to school every day by students.
Too many black kids today do not come to school in a state of readiness to learn. They have not been read to by parents. They are not socially adjusted for a group environment like a classroom, nor have they been reasonably disciplined for unwanted behavior. This emotional baggage is then thrown into the lap of a teacher who does not have the education or skills for handling these serious emotional and behavioral problems.
Kids have an excuse because of their age, immaturity and bad parenting. The parents of those disruptive kids have no excuse. Long ago, parents were absolved of their responsibility to raise their kids effectively. Liberal social dogma told them racism was at the root of their inability to raise kids who were ready for the demands of a school classroom.
Poverty was to blame too. Now liberals had a reason for not just government but economic intervention as well. This gave the left a two-for-one moment to enact expensive government-run tax-supported programs. They could spend more money not just on unproven education experiments but also on new anti-poverty programs.
K-4 programs have become K-3 programs. This further absolves mainly black and Hispanic parents from their rightful responsibility of raising their kids.
We are on our way to kids being taken immediately from the maternity ward to a government school. They are already being fed three meals a day and provided for by taxpayer-funded after-school programs. Why not just start them on the road to government dependency, not to mention indoctrination and exposure to leftist dogma, as early in life as possible?
GOP politicians in Congress have been reluctant to challenge the efficacy of these expensive programs lest they are accused of not caring about black and Hispanic children, or being outright racist. Nothing makes a white Republican politician run like their hair is on fire faster than being accused of not caring about black kids.
Education has always been the traditional vehicle for upward mobility in America. It is even more important in today’s knowledge-based economy.
Blacks who have embraced education are less likely to have kids who drop out of school, commit crimes, join gangs or make other flawed lifestyle choices like drug and alcohol abuse and having children they are ill-equipped to raise.
One of the hallmarks of slavery was criminalizing the education of black children thus keeping them ignorant. I would argue that many of today’s public school policies achieve the same results – they keep kids ignorant.
The goal of social activists is not to fix education problems but to fix the statistics. They are focusing on the wrong thing. Statistics can be exploited not only to make school problems (seem to) disappear, but also to demonstrate the need for the continuation of government programs. The kids who fail in school today are the population that tomorrow will fill jails and prisons and be in need of government assistance.
Former President George W. Bush called these low expectations “soft bigotry.” He was right. Now the left wants to back up the soft bigotry with faulty statistics.
ABC News announced Saturday that Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross would be suspended for four weeks without pay over a botched “exclusive” about former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
During a live “special report” Friday morning, Ross reported that Flynn would testify that Donald Trump had ordered him to make contact with Russians about foreign policy while he was still a candidate. The report raised the specter of Trump’s impeachment and sent the stock market plummeting.
Later in the day, ABC issued a “clarification” to Ross’s report, saying that Trump’s alleged directive came after he’d been elected president. Ross himself appeared on “World News Tonight,” several hours after the initial report, to clarify his error.
In a statement, ABC News said Ross’ report “had not been fully vetted through our editorial standards process.”
“It is vital we get the story right and retain the trust we have built with our audience,” ABC’s statement added. “These are our core principles. We fell far short of that yesterday.”
Bob Mueller Reassigned Peter Strzok: These Bastards Are Corrupt
Special counsel Robert Mueller removed a veteran FBI agent from his team amid an investigation into the agent potentially sending anti-Trump text messages, according to new reports on Saturday.
Three people close to the matter told The New York Times that Mueller reassigned Peter Strzok from the team investigating Russia’s election meddling to the FBI’s human resources department.
Strzok is a veteran FBI investigator who previously worked on the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of State, as well as the investigation into potential connections between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials.
The Times reported that Strzok was removed from Mueller’s team after the Department of Justice’s inspector general launched an investigation into text messages sent by the agent that could appear to contain anti-Trump views.
The agent reportedly exchanged text messages with FBI lawyer Lisa Page, whom he was dating, during the campaign and Clinton investigation that appeared to support the Democratic presidential candidate, people with knowledge of the matter told The Washington Post.
The Post could not reach Strzok or Page.
“Immediately upon learning of the allegations, the Special Counsel’s Office removed Peter Strzok from the investigation,” Mueller spokesman Peter Carr told The Hill. “Lisa Page completed her brief detail and had returned to the FBI weeks before our office was aware of the allegations.”
The news comes just one day after Mueller’s team charged former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn with lying to FBI agents. Flynn pleaded guilty to the charge.
Appearing on ABC’s This Week, National Public Radio’s Cokie Roberts admitted that “for years” the female press corps has covered up sexual misconduct on Capitol Hill.
While speaking about John Conyers and Al Franken, two Democrats facing numerous sexual misconduct allegations, Roberts let this bomb matter-of-factly drop on the left-wing Sunday show, “I mean, we all talked about for years: ‘Don’t get in the elevator with him,’ you know, and the whole every-female in the press corps knew that, right, don’t get in elevator with him.”
Which “him” is Roberts referring to? Conyers? Franken? Are there others?
But back up just a moment– According to Roberts, “every” woman in the press corps knew that there was sexual misconduct going on in congress, knew that it was so brazen and so permissive that not even a female reporter was safe on an elevator, and NO ONE REPORTED IT?
How do things get so brazen that a Conyers or a Franken or a whomever feels perfectly safe groping a journalist on an elevator? I will tell you how — when said groper knows there will be no accountability for his behavior.
I am 51-years-old, and I have seen a bit of the world; I have seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion and I have watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. But something I have never seen is a man grope a woman without her consent.
Yet, according to Roberts, our wonderful, glorious, utterly useless press corps knew for years this was going on in congress and covered it up, said nothing, let it slide, ENABLED IT, and through their silence, encouraged it.
What else are they covering up? What else are they allowing to happen in order to protect scumbags?
Other than the fact that our elites suck, this is my theory…
As we all know, Cokie Roberts is a lefty, as is 99% of the female press corps. Does anyone doubt, then, that the primary elevator gropers are/were Democrats, are/wereTed Kennedy/Franken/Conyers-types who voted the way in which the females press corps wanted them to vote, so a little snatch of media-bootie in an elevator was considered a small price to pay for abortion-on-demand?
And this is why, in my opinion, congress has gotten away with covering up these taxpayer-funded sexual harassment settlements for two decades. The media has known about this. Of course they have. Nothing was reported, though, because the names on that list are primarily Democrat “icons” like Conyers.
Even now, even when we know about this secret fund, the media’s interest in the story, in exposing the wrongdoers, is practically non-existent. This should be the biggest story in the world, the narrative dominating everything else. It is all there — a $17 million slush fund, cover ups, corruption, sex — but the media does not really care. Just last week, the left-wing Politico was downplaying this outrage, hoping to wrist-flick it all away. And I think we all know why…
Democrats sure got it good.
So good, in fact, Cokie is still not being asked to names names.
