California, a Free State, Launches Commission to Study Reparations for Slavery
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state leaders addressed the opening of California’s Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans on Tuesday, stressing the historic importance of the commission.
California entered the union as a free state in in 1850, where slavery was not allowed. Nevertheless, Newsom signed a bill into law last year to study the idea of reparations for slavery for black Americans, using a nine-member commission.
Newsom provided a recorded address, and Attorney General Rob Bonta also addressed the meeting, among others.
A statement on Bonta’s website declares: “The institution of slavery is inextricably woven into the establishment, history, and prosperity of the United States.”
Newsom said that the commission was the outgrowth of the unrest that erupted across the nation a year ago, after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the hands of police. He said that the commission was an opportunity to “move toward a more equal California.”
Secretary of State Shirley Weber said that the topic of reparations in California was relevant because of the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre in Greenwood, Oklahoma, where a middle-class back community was attacked on June 1, 1921
“We were denied an opportunity to prosper in this nation,” Weber said. “What does it feel like to live in a country that never says, ‘I’m sorry’?” she added.
She concluded that “the racism of this country has created an environment that allows … injustice to occur,” and said that racial injustice had continued, making it necessary for California to set an example.
The nine-member commission is largely African American; there did not appear to be any white or Hispanic members.
California Reparations commission (Screenshot / AB 3121 Commission)
California’s Department of Justice is supplying staff resources to assist the commission in its ongoing inquiries.
State Sen. Steven Bradford (D-Gardena) said that California had a moral obligation to provide reparations, even though it was never a slave state, because, he claimed, African Americans were treated as harshly in California as they were in the post-Civil War South.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new e-book, We Told You So!: The First 100 Days of Joe Biden’s Radical Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
BLACKS ARE RACIST, VIOLENT, ANTI-SEMITIC, ANTI-ASIAN, HOMOPHOBIC AND ABORTED.
GRAPHIC VIDEO: NYC Homeless Man Charged in Assault on Asian Woman Has 17 Prior Arrests
A homeless man charged with a hate crime for allegedly punching an Asian woman in Manhattan’s Chinatown on Monday has 17 previous arrests, police said.
“The incident happened in front of 65 Bayard Street around 6:15 p.m., when authorities say the 55-year-old woman was punched in a random and unprovoked attack,” ABC 7 reported.
New York State Assemblymember Yuh-Line Niou shared the surveillance video of the incident dated Monday and claimed she received it from a constituent.
The video showed the woman, wearing a pink shirt and white hat, walking down the sidewalk.
A man wearing an orange hoodie then approached and appeared to hit her in the face. When she stumbled backward and fell to the ground, several bystanders came over to help her.
WARNING – GRAPHIC VIDEO:
The woman was taken to a local hospital with an injury to her face.
The suspect, Alexander Wright, 48, was taken into custody and charged with assault as a hate crime, assault, and criminal possession of a controlled substance.
He was transported to Bellevue Hospital to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
According to police, Wright was arrested on May 10 regarding two incidents on the Upper East Side, the ABC article continued:
First, around 10 a.m., he allegedly threw an object through the front window of Judson Reality at 1065 Madison Avenue. Then, just before 10:30 a.m., he claimed a 36-year-old man and his family was following him before confronting the man at East 72nd and Madison Avenue and scratching his left eye. He was charged with criminal mischief in the first incident and assault in the second.
…
Authorities say he was also wanted for a January 17 incident for allegedly throwing a hot cup of coffee at a traffic agent and her partner at West 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue in Midtown. He charged with that incident when he was arrested on May 10.
Altogether, Wright has 17 prior arrests that include other alleged assaults.
During an interview on Tuesday, New York City Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner Dermot Shea spoke of an incident when a 65-year-old woman was pushed down the stairs in one of the city’s subway stations on Friday.
“What’s the common denominator?” Shea questioned, adding, “People that are arrested multiple, multiple, multiple times and released.”
“We need help with some of these laws. We cannot be just chasing our tail, catch and release, catch and release,” he explained. “What are we doing in society when we’re releasing these people right back onto the street within a half–hour? … It’s putting New Yorkers at risk.”
BLM Anti-Police Activist Who Fought to Get Cops Out of Schools Accused of Abusing Illegal Alien Children
The intersectionality involved in this case would make even a hardened critical race theory expert turn to hard liquor.
The Denver School Board Director Tay Anderson is stepping aside from some of his duties after a DPS parent accuses him of sexually assaulting more than 60 students. These allegations are very serious, but none of them have been reported to police.
Anderson, a Black Lives Matter activist, led a campaign to get police out of schools.
Police officers will soon no longer work in Denver's public schools.
The Denver school board voted unanimously on Thursday to end its contract with the city's police department, which provided school resource officers to work in the district's schools.
Anderson, who also serves as the board's at-large director, wrote in a Facebook post on Friday that the decision was prompted by the higher rate at which nonwhite students were referred to law enforcement.
"It was about dismantling a system that has held children of color down for far too long. I know that this change comes with critics and doubts on our ability to lead this district forward, but together we will craft a brighter future to ensure all students are safe in our schools and are no longer thrusted into the school to prison pipeline."
Good thing the police weren't there to keep children of color from being held down by 'The Man'.
Denver parent Mary-Katherine Fleming, who works with sex-crime victims, had told state legislators last week that 62 students confided in her that Anderson subjected them to a range of unwanted sex acts ranging from forcible touching to “violent” rape. His youngest reported alleged victim was 14.
Fleming, who did not name Anderson at the time, testified that all but one of the victims was either an undocumented immigrant or enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
If these charges do hold up, we'll see if the at-large director can join the school-to-prison pipeline.
Tay Anderson is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and fought to create all-gender bathrooms.
Some of the first accusations against Anderson came through the local BLM chapter.
The local Black Lives Matter chapter says multiple women have made sexual assault claims against Denver Public Schools board member Tay Anderson, who has denied the allegations.
They asked Anderson to issue a public apology and seek professional help for the alleged actions.
These seem to be two separate sets of allegations painting a pretty ugly picture.
True to its insistence on restorative justice, BLM was telling Anderson to apologize to the women who claim he assaulted them. The question is will they stick with that even with Anderson's alleged assaults on illegal alien children?
Probably.
But it certainly raises some questions for the "children in cages" crowd. How outraged are they over actual sexual assaults on illegal alien children compared to their outrage at ICE?
Racist Mayor: Lori Lightfoot
Another Democrat carries the Left's torch of hate.
Shortly after 9 p.m. on the night of May 24, a 17-year-old black youth named Keyshawn Williams was standing on a sidewalk along Chicago’s South Oakley Boulevard when someone in a silver BMW opened fire and killed him in a drive-by shooting.
The night before that, a 25-year-old African American named Ladell Arnold was riding in a vehicle along West Flournoy Street in Chicago at 7:10 p.m. when he was shot and killed by a nearby gunman.
The night before that, a 46-year-old black man named Johnnie Williams was standing on a sidewalk along Chicago’s South Michigan Avenue at 7:30 p.m. when some people riding in two passing vehicles shot him dead while also wounding two others.
And at 11:50 p.m. the night before that, a 15-year-old black boy named Dajon Gater was on the front porch of a West Lexington Street house in Chicago, when two armed males approached and killed him with a gunshot to the head.
Like four tiny grains of sand among many thousands in an hourglass, the names of these four dead victims blend imperceptibly into the long list of African Americans whose lives in recent years have been snuffed out by other blacks in the killing field known as Chicago. During the past 12 months alone, more than 820 people have been victims of homicide in The Windy City. And most of them were blacks killed by other blacks.
Of course, you’ve never before heard of any of the four individuals cited above – nor will you ever come across their names again – for the simple reason that none of their deaths can be traced to the actions of a white police officer – or to the actions of any white person at all, for that matter. Thus, there will be no Black Lives Matter protest marches held in their honor; no $25,000 celebrity-funded golden caskets eternally encasing their bodies in the grave; and no gaggle of reporters or “civil rights leaders” repeatedly recounting, with pained and pious countenances, the tragic stories of how these four individuals died, far too young, in America’s third largest city. No, the only words publicly memorializing these four people will be the names etched silently on their tombstones.
The chief political executive of the hell hole called Chicago is Lori Lightfoot, the latest in an unbroken, 90-year line of exclusively Democrat mayors extending all the way back to 1931. Under Lightfoot’s stewardship, homicides in Chicago increased by an astonishing 40 percent from 2019 to 2020 – a pattern that was seen in a host of Democrat-run cities after George Floyd’s death a year ago. And Chicago’s stratospheric homicide rate has continued well into 2021.
In light of the fact that violent death has become a way of life in Lightfoot’s Chicago, it was nothing short of remarkable to hear her recently announce that “on the occasion of the two-year anniversary of my inauguration as mayor of this great city,” she would be “prioritizing media requests from POC reporters,” an acronym meaning “people of color” -- rather than prioritizing the urgent need to get the city’s murder rate under control. Chicago political reporter Mary Ann Ahern confirmed that according to the mayor’s spokeswoman, “Lightfoot is granting 1 on 1 interviews only to Black or Brown journalists.”
Lightfoot was more than eager to defend her clearly articulated intent to separate reporters into two separate classes, the preferred (nonwhite) and the non-preferred (white). Like the Black Lives Matter racists who felt wholly justified in terrorizing hundreds of American cities and towns last year, Lightfoot is more than proud to display her own particular brand of racism like a badge of honor. In a two-page letter to the media, she wrote that her decision to deny interview requests from white reporters was based on her commitment to “fight for diversity and inclusion,” “break up the status quo” that has been “failing so many,” and pay homage to the “historic reckoning” by which the nation has recently been forced to confront its own “systemic racism” and its “deep-seated legacies around institutionalized racism.” Lamenting “the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of Chicago media outlets,” Lightfoot wrote: “It's a shame that in 2021, the City Hall press corps is overwhelmingly White in a city where more than half of the city identifies as Black, Latino, AAPI [Asian American / Pacific Islander] or Native American.”
“At the two-year anniversary of my inauguration,” Lightfoot told the press, “I am issuing a challenge to you. Hire reporters of color – especially women of color – to cover Chicago politics, and City Hall in particular. If you have only a white reporter covering City Hall, make sure there’s a person of color working with them as well.” In short, Mayor Lightfoot feels justified in dictating to private media companies exactly how they should allocate their limited financial resources, and whom they should hire to do which jobs. As is invariably the case with self-identified leftwing warriors for “racial justice,” the spirit of totalitarianism burns bright and hot in the heart of Lori Lightfoot.
Nor is racial obsession anything new for Mayor Lightfoot. She’s very comfortable with it. Indeed, just three months ago Lightfoot proudly announced that “a racial healing and historical reckoning” initiative known as the Chicago Monuments Project, which the city had launched six months earlier to confront the “hard truths of Chicago’s racial history,” had determined that no fewer than 41 separate statues and monuments situated in various locations across the city could be subject to removal from the public square because they: (a) “promot[e] narratives of white supremacy”; (b) “memorializ[e] individuals with connections to racist acts, slavery and genocide”; (c) presen[t] selective, over-simplified, one-sided views of history”; and (d) do “not sufficiently include[e] other stories, in particular those of women, people of color and themes of labor, migration and community building.” The purportedly offensive statues and monuments include those erected in honor of such notables as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Franklin, William McKinley, Leif Ericson, the French missionary Jacques Marquette, and the cartographer Louis Jolliet.
“This project is a powerful opportunity for us to come together as a city to assess the many monuments and memorials across our neighborhoods and communities—to face our history and what and how we memorialize that history,” Lightfoot said. This was particularly important, the mayor emphasized, in light of “the past year and in particular the past summer that made clear [that America’s racist] history isn’t past.”
The standards by which Mayor Lightfoot is prepared to pass judgment on the alleged moral deficiencies of historical giants and national heroes, stand in stark contrast to the standards by which she judges modern-day leftists.
Consider, for instance, how Lightfoot, in the early days of her mayoralty two years ago, gleefully celebrated the passage of Illinois’ so-called Reproductive Health Act (RHA), which repealed the state's Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act; removed restrictions on late-term abortions and on the imposition of criminal penalties against physicians who perform them; and expanded insurance coverage for abortion procedures. When the RHA initially cleared the state's Human Services Committee and was sent to the full Illinois House for consideration, Lightfoot issued a statement saying, “I applaud the legislators who voted yes tonight on the passage of the Reproductive Health Act…. The time is now to ensure that we preserve access to safe, legal abortion in our state. We won't go backwards.” When the bill was subsequently signed into law by the governor a few weeks later, Lightfoot said: “Today, the state of Illinois sent a clear message that we will protect the fundamental right of residents and expand access to reproductive health care.”
So, Lori Lightfoot’s standard is abundantly clear. Statues honoring white people who made enormous contributions to America and to Western civilization -- but who may have been insufficiently militant, by Lightfoot’s reckoning, in fighting to eradicate slavery -- should be banned from the public square as punishment for the shortcomings of those individuals. But modern-day leftwing zealots who stand in favor of legalizing the killing of fully formed human beings in the womb – in the noble name of “reproductive rights,” of course – are to be hailed and celebrated as champions of liberty.
The Democrat Model for the Future is the Worst City in America
The only things going up are murder rates, STDs and electric car chargers.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Rochester has the second highest urban murder rate in New York with killings up 56% and shootings up 90%. Once the 32nd largest city in the country. Rochester is at number 111 and falling. Its population shrank 6.2% since 2000. The poverty rate is at 31% and the only thing going up is STDs with gonorrhea up 77% and chlamydia rates placing second in the state.
So the Democrats are using Rochester as a model for America.
Hardly a week goes by without someone in the media, who has never been to Rochester and wouldn’t go there at gunpoint, describing it as the first city to conduct some socialist experiment.
Last month, the media was promoting Mayor Lovely Warren’s push to use drug revenue for racial reparations and basic income even though the last thing a city with open air heroin markets needs is the government handing out free money financed by drug sales.
Last week, the New York Times touted Rochester's war on highways under the headline, "Can Removing Highways Fix America's Cities?"
If Rochester is the model for fixing anything then the answer is always, “Hell no!.
But Rochester is always doing something excitingly progressive like defunding the police or being designated by Governor Cuomo as a "model EV city” and setting up electric car charging stations across a city with few electric cars and a plague of deadly carjackings.
The cheapest Tesla costs $35,000. That's also the average household income in Rochester.
Before Rochester became Cuomo’s model city for charging the electric cars it doesn’t have, it was his pick as a "model city" to fight global warming by building 10 miles of bike routes.
Those routes give Rochester’s bike thieves different options for making their getaway after over 100 bikes were stolen from a neighborhood biking program giving away free bikes.
“I just want to ensure that the people that did this know I love them and that our program is open to them,” Mayor Lovely Warren assured the thieves. “We’re just extremely sorry that life’s circumstances led them to a place in which they had to make a decision like this to rob a free neighborhood program of bicycles."
The free bikes program shut down this year.
Fresh off the efforts to make Rochester into a model city for electric cars and bikes, Mayor Lovely Warren embarked on a social justice spree of police defunding and reparations.
In 2020, Rochester police tried to restrain Daniel Prude, a career criminal who had been arrested 37 times and convicted 9 times,who had taken PCP and was wandering the streets. Prude shouted, "Give me that gun". Police tried to restrain him by hooding him and he died.
Morbidly obese white socialists showed up naked in white hoods and sat on the steps of City Hall with “Black Lives Matter” written on their on their bottoms to protest a black mayor.
Not even the most dedicated white supremacist could have come up with anything more racist.
After that the Black Lives Matter race riots and arson almost came as something of a relief.
Mayor Lovely Warren and the Rochester City Council defunded the police, cutting millions from law enforcement in a city with hundreds of shootings. Police Chief La’Ron Singletary warned that this would hurt the black community, but the media cheered Warren’s move. A Black Lives Matter organizer insisted that, “police make neighborhoods more dangerous.” Really?
"Murder, Carjackings, Violent Crime Surge in Rochester NY. Why?" a Democrat Chronicle article inquired this year.
It was a mystery no one could solve. Especially the police who weren’t allowed to solve crimes.
As murders rose 56% and shootings shot up 90%, Rochester decided to offer iPads in exchange for “working handguns and assault rifles”. No questions asked. A week after the “largest gun buyback in Rochester history”, four people were shot in just one day.
Five months after announcing that she wanted to reimagine the police, Mayor Lovely Warren was indicted on campaign fraud charges. Last month, her husband was busted in the takedown of a drug ring. The cops found a semi-automatic rifle in her home. Warren, who had allied with Bloomberg’s Everytown gun control group, claimed that she knew nothing about the weapon.
It couldn’t have been too shocking since her husband had already been convicted of armed robbery.
Mayor Lovely Warren blamed the whole thing on racism. “Things are not that different from the 1860s and 1950s,” she insinuated. It’s just like the 1860s in Rochester under its black female mayor, black female police chief, and 60% black city council with only two white members.
Warren then doubled down on racial reparations and police defunding.
It’s important to “invest in the people, in the neighborhoods that suffered from the criminalization of marijuana," she had claimed earlier.
Rochester isn’t suffering from excessive criminalization, but decriminalization. And the last thing a city overrun with drugs needs is more drugs, or police defunding, EV chargers, demolishing highways, or any of the other “progressive” gimmicks that Democrats keep jumping on.
The media is right. Rochester is a model. And a cautionary tale.
The former booming industrial city is a model for what the Democrats want to do to America, gutting industrial bases, replacing work with welfare, and then using black people as lab rats for radical social experiments like drug legalization and police defunding with deadly results.
Being a “model city” now means having every toxic leftist policy idea tested on you.
Democrats have failed at the most basic elements of governance in Rochester. And yet they keep rolling out exciting new ideas to fight global warming or transform society when they can’t even handle their existing responsibilities.
Rochester is the 5th poorest city in the country. It’s also one of the dirtiest, it has the worst schools in the state and some of the lowest literacy rates. The graduation rate hovers between 40 and 50 percent. 75% of Rochester's children are being raised by single parents.
If Mayor Lovely Warren really wants to “close the wealth gap between Black and Brown people and our White neighbors”, then she might want to start there, instead of writing checks for black people from drug money while turning Rochester streets into war zones with police defunding.
But this is the Democrat model that devastated cities and communities. The only thing that they have added to this mix since the seventies is electric car chargers and police defunding.
And then they blame the corrupt, violent, and impoverished hellholes their economic and social policies created on “systemic racism”. Like the naked socialists wearing white hoods to protest racism, they’re right about the racism, but the naked leftist emperors could use a mirror.
Whatever happens to Mayor Lovely Warren, her city will go on chasing every new progressive policy idea (and the cash and publicity that comes with it) even as life keeps getting worse.
And Democrats will try to turn every city, town, and village into another Rochester.
Report – ‘Woke Culture,’ BLM, Intersectionality Behind Rise of Antisemitism in U.S.
Antisemitism in the U.S. is much worse than it appears and is on the rise because of “woke culture,” intersectionality and parallels with the Black Lives Matter movement, the heads of a major U.S. Jewish group said this week.
Dianne Lob, chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told the Times of Israel on Monday the increase in antisemitism comes from the discourse on the left wing of the U.S. political spectrum.
“I think we can’t underestimate the intersectionality piece,” she said. “The language is very parallel to the Black Lives Matter language.”
According to the group’s vice chairman Malcolm Hoenlein, who was with Lob and CEO William Daroff in Jerusalem, the recent 11-day war between Hamas and Israel was a turning point for adopting intersectionality against Jews.
“I think it’s a very serious moment. I think it represents a shift in the tectonic plates. It’s a fundamental shift,” he told the newspaper.
“I think because you’re targeting the collective Jew, the State of Israel, [claiming] that they oppress a people of color, and colonialism and all the code words that they were using in the woke culture and the cancel culture – a lot of which is antisemitic – to be applied against Jews,” he said.
He also said antisemitism had increased because the majority of incidents go unreported.
“We get reports all the time of it. I see it not only in my own community but from rabbis who call me and others. And often the police will not classify it as a hate crime because then the FBI has to come in, and the FBI doesn’t necessarily want to because it’s a lot of paperwork et cetera… But they’re encountering more hostility and the vast majority of incidents don’t go reported even though the number of reports is increasing sharply.”
The U.S. — and the rest of the world — has seen a major spike in antisemitic incidents in the wake of the conflict.
Synagogues have been vandalized; Pro-Palestinian protested have thrown fireworks from moving vehicles, assaulted and spat on diners at outdoor restaurants in New York and Los Angeles; and individuals wearing Jewish symbols have been attacked on the street. Meanwhile, everyone on the left, from universities to Democratic mayoral candidates, have apologized for condemning antisemitism or professing support for Israel.
Hoenlein pointed to an incident in which Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushed Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang into retracting a tweet expressing condemnation of Hamas and support of Israel, as well as the front page of the May 28 New York Times, which featured photographs of the children killed in the recent war under the title “They Were Just Children.”
Lob said BLM and other movements that promote intersectionality paved the way for Israel to be portrayed in a very negative light.
“I have to say they did a good job of it, through intersectionality, building it up over time; it’s not that it just happened. We saw it in Ferguson, we saw it in other places where they made the link. But the war gave them an opening to portray Israel in this very negative way, and to hold to account people who would speak up for Israel even to the degree that they qualified what they could say on antisemitism.”
William Daroff, Conference of Presidents CEO, echoed her comments, saying BLM and other movements have “been turned through intersectionality into anti-Israel movements” with “strong anti-Semitic components.”
The Conference of Presidents’ remarks come as a new landmark report titled Recognizing Anti-Zionist Antisemitism was released by the International Legal Forum (ILF), an Israel-based legal network committed to fighting antisemitism, terror and delegitimization of Israel.
Speaking to Breitbart, international human rights lawyer and CEO of ILF Arsen Ostrovsky, said: “It is time, once and for all, to dispense with the notion that these acts of wanton intimidation, harassment and violence are anything but Jew hatred and antisemitism disguised as anti-Zionism.”
“Antisemitism cannot be honestly confronted unless civil society, mainstream media and public officials, some of whom have been responsible for fanning the flames of hatred, are willing to recognize one of its most powerful modern manifestations – that vilification of the Jewish state directly results in violence against Jews,” Ostrovsky told Breitbart.
According to Aaron Klein, Breitbart’s former Jerusalem bureau chief who now serves as senior adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, figures in the press, the entertainment industry and diplomacy used their platforms, “wittingly or not, to shamelessly parrot Hamas talking points, promoting the terror group’s false narratives about the causes of the conflict and Israeli self-defense actions.”
“Almost entirely missing from the public debate was Hamas’s obvious motive in starting the Gaza violence,” Klein wrote in a featured contribution to the Times of Israel.
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