13th in a series.
Editor's note: This is the 13th part in Frontpage Mag's series on Racist Mayors. (See previous parts below this article). Stay tuned for more installments. Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Mary Norwood of Buckhead, who had lost the mayoral election against Bottoms' corrupt predecessor, Mohammed Kasim Reed, by 714 votes, had described how Democrats steal elections by bringing in “thugs” and pay people to vote.
Bottoms claimed that the word “thugs” was racist.
Even after winning by a margin suspiciously similar to that of Reed, who had endorsed her, Bottoms went on complaining about racism, and claiming that being accused of corruption was racist and “it was still shocking to me in Atlanta. I thought that we were way beyond that”.
After George Floyd’s overdose death while in police custody, Bottoms showed up on Oprah and told the racist billionaire celebrity that, "My mother recently said to me that this America didn't feel like 1965 to her. It felt like something before 1965.” A black mayor in a city with an uninterrupted string of them for generations was claiming that segregation was back.
When Rayshard Brooks, who had an extensive criminal record, was shot after struggling with police, Mayor Bottoms wasted no time with a press conference a few days later that falsely claimed, “we saw the murder of Rayshard Brooks” and cracked down on Atlanta police.
Bottoms played the race card, describing his death as "so personal to so many people of color."
"That could have been any one of us," the Atlanta politician, and daughter of the R&B singer behind "Monkey Time" who used to open for the Beatles, claimed. Keisha Lance Bottoms spent years growing up in England and then back home in upscale Collier Heights until her father, Major Lance, who had sold millions of records, got addicted to cocaine and wrecked the family.
The “us” rings hollow coming from the daughter of a superstar who had spent time studying at Cambridge University. Much as it did from Barack Obama and still does from Kamala Harris.
But when she was running for office, Bottoms hit Mary Norwood with an attack ad for not “immediately” agreeing that racial profiling existed, sneering, “Mary and I live very different lives” and falsely claiming that the police were endangering the lives of her three sons.
“I live in southwest Atlanta,” Bottoms declared, neglecting to mention that she lives in a massive 5,000 square foot mansion in a neighborhood described by real estate agents as “upscale” and “prestigious” that’s a far cry from the modest rundown home of her grandparents where she stages interviews to act like she can relate to her poor black constituents. .
While Bottoms enjoys her mansion, she’s pushing for an end to single-family zoning.
The Democrat campaign to urbanize Atlanta suburbs and other suburbs across the country is meant to shatter middle class communities transforming homeowners into renters. That won’t affect Bottoms’ mansion, but it’s another reason why Buckhead is fighting to escape Atlanta.
Destroying Atlanta’s black and white middle class by eliminating homeowners would kill what’s left of the city’s civic culture and allow the Democrats a tighter grip on power. Even as they are finishing up destroying the cities, the Democrats are moving to wreck the suburbs.
Mayor Bottoms has overseen another burning of Atlanta while hiding behind racism smears. Atlanta’s new mayor, like other inauthentic Democrat elites, is adept at playing the race card.
The death of Brooks led to another in a series of BLM riots and the site of the Wendy’s became the epicenter of a lawless zone occupied by criminals. BLM barricades were used to confront drivers who faced a choice between being terrorized or driving through the mob.
Those who drove through the mob went to jail.
In one of the cars was an 8-year-old girl named Secoriea Turner. As the car tried to turn around, the men at the BLM barricades opened fire killing the little girl.
"They say Black Lives Matter. You killed your own this time," Secoriea's father said. "You killed my baby because she crossed a barrier and made a U-turn? She's a child. She didn't do nothing to nobody."
It was July 4th. That weekend, 31 people were shot in Atlanta. The violence was so extreme that Gov. Brian Kemp declared a state of emergency and sent out the Georgia National Guard.
The lawyer for Julian Conley, one of the alleged gunmen, claimed that he was just "peacefully protesting".
Secoriea's family sued Mayor Bottoms, along with other city officials, for having "negligently performed their ministerial duties relating to the protection of the public’s health and safety, by omitting to act and clear the area of the barricade and the violent armed civilians that surrounded it." The officer wrongly fired over Brooks' death also sued Bottoms.
Bottoms began her rise through the political ranks as a speechwriter for Attorney General Thurbert Baker. The first black Democrat AG in the state, despite having a partisan agenda on ObamaCare and redistricting, was popular because he was tough on crime. Three strikes weren’t good enough for Baker: he championed “Two Strikes and You’re Out”, electrocuting criminals , and advocated abolishing parole. Bottoms however championed criminals.
When Black Lives Matter racists took to the street demanding police defunding, Bottoms claimed that she had already been defunding the police for years. Atlanta jail’s was going to be shut down and turned into a community center. Police defunding, like all pro-crime policies, always gets results and it was no different in Atlanta where murders shot up 60% .
After the BLM riots, the chances of being murdered in Chicago and Atlanta were the same.
Shootings went up 51%, while rapes and aggravated assaults rose by double digits after arrests dropped by over 40% . As the violence spun out of control, the suburb of Buckhead announced that it was planning to secede from a city that was hitting rock bottom under Mayor Bottoms.
As Atlanta burned, Bottoms reversed course from talking police defunding to hiring 250 more cops. Councilman Michael Julian Bond, who is black, blamed Bottoms for anti-police moves. “Everybody watches the news and that includes the criminals. So if they know Atlanta is perceived to be soft on crime, they are going to come to Atlanta to cut up."
And Mayor Bottoms decided to blame Gov. Kemp and Republicans for reopening the state along with "systemic issues of gun violence" and people with "mental illness" buying guns.
It was the latest in a series of desperate excuses in which Bottoms tried to blame everyone else.
The same gun laws, a typical Bottoms excuse, were there in 2019. And Atlanta’s crime wave began with the BLM riots, not with the reopening of the state. Secoriea Turner, as her family’s lawsuit testifies, was not murdered because of mental illness or gun laws, but because Bottoms turned over Atlanta to criminals in the hopes of moving up the political ladder of the Democrats.
Her hopes have been dashed.
Once touted as a potential Veep pick for Biden, Bottoms is not even running for reelection. But Kasim Reed, her predecessor, is thinking of making a comeback.
As Buckhead, the home of Mary Norwood, ponders secession, it may become impossible for anyone except the same old mafia to win Atlanta. But Norwood’s narrow losses and the allegations of corruption will make it just as urgent for Bottoms’ successor to cry racism.
Bottoms ran a racially charged campaign to dissuade black voters, some of whom were thinking of voting for Norwood. Before the election, voters across Atlanta received a call telling them, "Keep Atlanta black. Vote Keisha Lance Bottoms.” Bottoms denied any involvement.
Growing up, Bottoms described a world in which she believed that there were no white people in America. One magazine article described her surprise "as a preschooler at seeing a white woman working at a grocery store. Up to then, she’d thought only black people lived in the United States. England was for whites." It’s doubtful that Bottoms experienced much racism, but playing the race card to distract from her privilege has been her only political gambit.
In the previous election, a black strategist described black voters saying , “‘What the [heck] has a black mayor done for me?’ They are the ones saying, ‘Let’s give white folks a chance.’”
Any Democrat candidate who succeeds Bottoms will have to race bait even harder. And hope that black voters put racism ahead of the violence in the streets and the poverty in their homes.
Previous Parts of the Series: Part I: Chicago's Lori Lightfoot . Part 2: LA's Eric Garcetti . Part 3: DC's Muriel Bowser . Part 4: KC's Quinton Lucas . Part 5: SF's London Breed. Part 6: Philly's Jim Kenney. Part 7: St. Louis' Tishaura Jones . Jackson's Chokwe Antar Lumumba . Seattle's Jenny Durkan . Minneapolis’s Jacob Frey . Part 11: Charlottesville's Nikuyah Walker . Portland’s Ted Wheeler.
BLACKS ARE THE MOST VIOLENT AND RACIST SUBCULTURE IN THE WORLD!
More than 70 people were shot, 13 of
them fatally, over July 4th weekend in
Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s (D) Chicago.
ABC 7 / Chicago Sun-Times reports that a total of 72 people were shot over the holiday weekend, including numerous children.
Among the injured were a 6-year-old girl, a 5-year-old girl, a 12-year-old girl, and an 11-year-old boy.
There were 13 shooting fatalities over the holiday weekend, with the deceased ranging from ages 19 to 40.noted that 32 people were shot Thursday alone in Lightfoot’s Chicago, and a one-month-old girl was among the wounded.
The Sun-Times pointed out there were over 1,892 shootings in Chicago January 1, 2021, through June 28, 2021, a 12 percent increase over the same time frame last year.
The paper also noted more than 330 people were killed in Chicago during the first six months of 2021.
Nearly 70 people were shot in Lightfoot’s Chicago during the weekend of June 25-27, 2021.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins , a weekly newsletter focused o n al l things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins . Reach him at awrhawkins@breitbart.com . You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange .
THE TYPICAL BLACK MAN DROPS OUT OF SCHOOL UNABLE TO READ OR WRITE. HE QUICKLY PICKS UP A COUPLE OF FELONIES AND CAN'T GET A (LEGAL) JOB. ALL WHITEY'S FAULT. BEST GO OUT AND MURDER A FEW BLACKS THIS WEEKEND LIKE THEY DO IN CHICAGO.
One-month-old among 32 people shot in Chicago as gun violence continues to rise
We see constant examples of real racism, largely against White people. The evidence is indisputable. Along with the racism comes a colossal double-standard, which should be enough to make your blood boil. In America today, anti-White racism is not only accepted but even fashionable!
Has there ever been a nation in history with more opportunities for Black people than the USA?
We hear a lot about Critical Race Theory and how America is a systemically racist country. Everything is all about skin color and which group — oppressor or oppressed — you belong to. I hesitate to write this article because to even broach the topic of race these days or to offer an honest critique runs the risk of being labeled a racist and being canceled.
We see constant examples of real racism, largely against White people. The evidence is indisputable. Along with the racism comes a colossal double-standard, which should be enough to make your blood boil. In America today, anti-White racism is not only accepted but even fashionable!
Take, for example, recent statements made by Jalen Rose, a Black former professional basketball player, about current NBA player Kevin Love, who is White, being included on the Olympic basketball team. Rose said , "Kevin Love is on the team because of tokenism."
Rose is upset that Love was the lone White player selected on an otherwise all-Black team. I thought liberals were all about "Inclusion!" Does Jalen Rose still have his commentator job? Yup.
Now just imagine for a moment that some retired White NHL player came out with the exact same comment about a Black hockey player being included on the Olympic hockey team. It would be utter chaos. He would be branded a racist for life and almost certainly lose his job with whatever sports network he worked for.
But that's only the tip of the racist iceberg! What about the recent story about a New York psychiatrist (POC) who told a Yale audience about her fantasies of killing White people and then doubled down on it when asked to clarify? How does she still have her job or credibility?
How about Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot's recent announcement that she was going to resume giving interviews to the press, but not to any White reporters? What if Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida came out and said he wouldn't give interviews to Black reporters? How long do you think it would take for him to be (rightfully) out of a job?
On a weekly basis, I see reports of attacks by young Black people against Whites and Asians, usually in Democrat-run utopias like New York City and Philadelphia. These attacks are intentional, targeted, and often accompanied by anti-White racist slurs. Where is the outrage?
If you want to identify real racism to fight, you need look no farther than the current resident of the United States. Joe Biden's history of blatantly racist comments is long and undeniable. Google Joe's classics, like his "racial jungle" or "poor kids are just as smart as White kids" remarks. Then imagine the reaction if President Trump had made any of those comments. Biden gets a pass because he's a leftist.
At least the old standard racist organizations — the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, the United Negro College Fund, BET, and Ebony Magazine How — could claim to be trying to help Black people in some way. (But just imagine if there were "White Entertainment TV" or "Ivory Magazine"!)
So we're to the point where White people are fair game, and our kids are being taught that they are racists simply because they were born White. Even if they are not consciously aware of their alleged racism, they are still racist because they are White . The solution to racism is...apparently...stronger and even more blatant racism? Gotcha.
Moving on, let's talk a little about how terrible it is in America today (and for the last several decades) to be Black. There are simply no opportunities for Black Americans; no jobs; no career paths; no ability to get an education. Nothing. I don't know how they get by! Oh, I guess you have to exclude the preferential treatment given to black applicants over Whites and Asians at nearly every major university in the country. How about the many government loan programs that are exclusively for Black-owned businesses? Or scholarships that exist exclusively for Black students? How about the fact that grading standards at many colleges have been lowered, which in and of itself is racist and does far more harm than good to those who are accepted? Lowering the bar does not raise anyone up; it only brings us all down.
Most decent people are all for equality of opportunity. They just don't buy into the equity of outcome nonsense. If a student or job applicant is qualified , most don't care what color he is. No one wins when the standards are ignored or lowered just to check off a box that says, "Yup, we've got some of those. We're woke!"
Nowhere on Earth or in history does there exist a place or a time where Black people have had more opportunities than they do right here and right now. The true outrage should be toward those people and policies that espouse the belief that Black people can't succeed without the help of others, that they can't achieve at the same level, that they're not good enough without help from Whites. Black people being fed a constant diet of victimhood and "Us versus Them" is what holds them back.
Image: Andy Witchger via Wikimedia Commons , CC BY 2.0 .
To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here .
Schooled in Hate Teaching black kids in public schools to hate the police.
Fri Jul 2, 2021
Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., a Freedom Center Journalism Fellow in Academic Free Speech and President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, is the author of Dispatches From the Campus War Against Israel and Jews.
When some 200 parents crowded into a highly charged, heated Loudoun County, Virginia school board hearing on June 22nd to air their displeasure with curricula and teaching in area schools, they were expressing the same discontent that parents across the country have more increasingly begun to feel as they witness the radical ideology that informs much of public-school education today. Though one teacher did give a powerful statement on how she disagreed with the hijacking of education by a core group of teachers with a leftist, extreme ideology, the school board, and presumably a majority of the district’s teachers, were obdurate in their defense of current practices in public school education.
At hand in this case was a debate about transgender policy proposals requiring Loudoun County Public Schools employees to use students’ preferred names or pronouns. The use of artificial pronouns, randomly chosen by children or adults who arbitrarily decide to shift their gender, and the whole emphasis on transgender rights and how they impact decisions about school bathrooms, among other items, is part of the chronic indoctrination taking place in schools where woke teachers, captivated by paroxysms of tolerance, virtue signaling, and political correctness, have attempted to deflect parental opposition and tailor instruction so that students receive a highly-politicized, radical education—much of what passes for learning being little more than in-school training for activism and a new generation obsessed with race and their role as either oppressed or oppressor,
The scene at the Loudoun County meeting has been playing out with increasing frequency around the country, with parents expressing similar sentiment about their unhappiness with the content and ideology behind much of what passes today as pedagogy. Rather than being understanding of parents’ concerns, teachers and school boards are increasingly combative, pushing back against parental complaints, rejecting suggestions for more transparency with curricula and teaching materials, and expressing outright indignation at the notion that parents—the very taxpayers who pay the salaries for teachers and bloated school system bureaucracies—should push back against the practices of the Nanny State, a society in which the government, not the family, instructs on morality, culture, race, sexuality, and faith—much more than the reading, writing, and arithmetic that public school education was nominally created to teach.
More troubling is the fact that educators keep pushing the boundaries of acceptable content for curricula, widely incorporating, as one current problematic topic, critical race theory (CRT) into teaching so that black students are taught they are victims and oppressed by virtue of their blackness alone and white children taught that they are the privileged oppressors by virtue of the color of their skin.
CRT has gained traction by race-obsessed educators seeking “restorative justice” or racial equity, with the unproven assumption that making permanent victims out of minority students and guilt-tripping white kids because of their alleged privilege somehow ameliorates and transcends racism, but many are unconvinced that CRT is anything more than leftist ideology designed to shift power to marginalized groups by maligning and labeling the white majority as irredeemable racists.
The obsession with race in public school instruction gained even more oxygen with the ascent of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the renewed focus on racial injustices exposed by the death last year of George Floyd gave new urgency and justification to further indoctrinating children about racism, and, after several of the high-profile police shootings of black suspects, law enforcement’s interaction with black America.
As part of National Black Lives Matter at School Week, an ethnic studies “Identity Lesson” from the Seattle Public School system, for example, “Do Black Lives Matter in America?,” designed for use with 4th and 5th graders, had the obviously biased theme of “Police Violence” and was clearly designed to instill in young minds a mistrust of and contempt for police officers.
The lesson plan instructs that “Students will use current statistical data to determine whether black people are being treated fairly by American law enforcement” after they have been helpfully provided with a one-sided view of police-involved shootings on a website called Mapping Police Violence are committing crimes, so-called police violence is actually “not about crime” because “Levels of violent crime in US cities do not determine rates of police violence.”
Is this a productive and useful message to drill into young students’ minds: that police are predominantly racist murderers who randomly kill black young men without any justification? That there is an epidemic of so-called police violence in America’s urban centers that focuses almost exclusively on black suspects?
Is mistrust of law enforcement a positive message for any students, and especially for black students in inner-city neighborhoods where their interaction with police officers is statistically more likely? Will not these preconceived, ill-advised, and factually incorrect attitudes about police behavior be likely to make black adolescents disrespect law enforcement? Might it subtly encourage them to resist arrest in the event they are stopped and questioned? Make them more apt to believe that criminal behavior is justifiable if the law enforcement establishment is itself immoral, murderous, dangerous to minorities, and acts in illegal ways on a regular basis?
In fact, the narrative that white police officers are killing unarmed, innocent young black men at a rate that is excessive and based on racism is a complete inversion of the truth. There are approximately 10 million arrests annually and out of that number only 1000 suspects are shot and killed by police; a Washington Post database indicated that actually, since 2015, ninety-one percent of black men killed in police shootings were armed and that only 2% of the victims of police shootings were unarmed black men.
The Washington Post’s database also revealed that, far from there being an epidemic of killings by police of unarmed black people, as the media and BLM movement have been widely and loudly claiming, in 2019, there were actually only 14 unarmed black victims (compared to 25 unarmed white victims). And those 14 black victims, while being unarmed, may well have been resisting arrest, assaulting the police officer, going for a weapon, or about to harm either himself or others. That they were unarmed did not mean they were not engaged in, or had previously been engaged in, criminal behavior.
Apparently, the conclusion that teachers wish children to come to, revealed by the Seattle lesson plan as one example, is that there is widespread, blatant racism in the behavior of white police officers that compels them to use disproportionate deadly force against black people in an unjust, illegal, immoral way.
There is, of course, an alternate interpretation of those facts, one which is actually the truthful conclusion that one would come to when honestly reviewing that data. Black people, it is true, are only 13% of the U.S. population, but they also make up 60% of prison populations. Are those high numbers the result of racism on the part of the entire criminal justice system, including police officers, or could it be something else? Could it be that black men are killed in interactions with law enforcement because they are more likely to be involved in criminal activity? That would also explain why they are over-represented in prison populations, as well. But this has nothing to do with the racism of white police officers and everything to do with the behavior of black men.
So, instead of having an elaborate graph indicating the national locations of police shootings where a black person was shot, educators’ way of driving home this misleading and false narrative of police racism toward black people, it might have been just as instructive, for instance, to have a graph indicating the frequency and location of shootings where black people were killed, not by police, but by other black people. Unlike the minuscule percentage of instances where white police killed black men, the percentage of black people killed by other black people, according to the FBI's Universal Crime Report, i s a staggering 90%.
Instead of instilling fear in impressionable children about murderous police officers looking for black victims, they may be better served by understanding that black-on-black crime is a far more grievous and prevalent problem than the rare, though still unfortunate, instances when unarmed suspects are shot by the police. In Cook County, home to Chicago, for example, out of the 875 victims who died from gun violence last year, 78% were black, even though only slightly more than 26% of Cook County’s residents are black. A 2019 report by the Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute noted that while the number of adolescents killed by a firearm in Chicago in 2016 was approximately three times the national rate, for Chicago’s young black men between the ages of 15 and 19, that rate was nearly 50 times the national rate between 2013 and 2017.
Perhaps some of these young black men, who frequently grow up in fatherless homes (estimated to include over 57% of black children) and join gangs as part of their adolescent development, would be less likely to enter that life and embrace criminal behavior if they were taught personal responsibility, morality, a striving for academic and professional success, and a desire to become a productive member of society instead of being indoctrinated in classrooms by counter-factual information about an endemically racist, murderous law enforcement system which is not to be trusted and which has malign intentions whenever it interacts with the black community.
Obviously, police brutality, and especially if it is inspired by racism, is something that should be universally denounced, just as it generally is—including by law enforcement itself which does not wish for its ranks to be tarnished by the misbehavior of a very few bad actors. But an elementary school curriculum that portrays all law enforcement as being capriciously violent; that asserts white police officers target and disfavor black suspects in the enforcement of justice; that suggests that police officers unnecessarily use deadly, dangerous tactics against suspects during arrests, particularly with black suspects; that promotes the notion that incarcerated minorities are in prison without justification and as a result of their skin color; that lends credibility to the naïve and dangerous idea that “restorative justice” requires defunding police departments and substituting them with some kinder, gentler form of social protection; and that convinces black children to never trust law enforcement and the justice system because it is irredeemably racist and will never treat them fairly—all of these ideas, clearly articulated in the Seattle school system example, serve absolutely no purpose in helping minority children prepare for roles as citizens in what should be a color-blind society.
When did it become the appropriate role of public school teachers to be social activists who promote a left-wing, radical view of law enforcement to impressionable children? Why are these biased, toxic views of police being taught at all to grammar school-aged children, particularly when so much of the content is either lacking context, contorted, or counter-factual? Why the obsessive focus on black interaction, and only black interaction, with law enforcement and the one-sided approach which vilifies and condemns white officers?
If teachers want to assume the responsibility for teaching morals and tolerance, they might better concentrate on building a child’s self-esteem in a way that, instead of labeling them as a perennial victim in a racist society controlled by white privilege, encourages the development of productive individuals with the ability to embrace opportunity in a color-blind society in which they can prosper and co-exist with their non-minority peers.
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