Mediaboss Marketing

SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER

The documents further confirm that the Open Society last year approved $650,000 to invest in technical assistance and support for the groups at the core of the burgeoning #BlackLivesMatter movement.

The information was contained in a detailed 69-page Open Society report on the agenda of an Open Society U.S. Programs board meeting held in New York October 1 to October 2, 2015.

The report directly states the Open Society views the Baltimore unrest last year as a crisis that can be utilized to carry out the organizations agenda.

The document states:

The killing of Freddie Gray in April helped spawn weeks of peaceful protests by Baltimore residents and allies from the #BlackLivesMatter movement that were temporarily interrupted by a period of unrest that lasted less than 48 hours and resulted in some injuries and millions of dollars in property damage to neighborhood businesses. While many lamented the damage done, the overwhelming sentiment is that the uprising has catalyzed a paradigm shift in Baltimore that offers opportunities for major justice reforms.

In particular, recent events offer a unique opportunity to accelerate the dismantling of structural inequality generated and maintained by local law enforcement and to engage residents who have historically been disenfranchised in Baltimore City in shaping and monitoring reform. Building on our existing networks and programs, OSI-Baltimore will focus investments on: 1) creating a culture of accountability for policing in Baltimore, recognizing the pervasive racism, disrespect and lawlessness that gave rise to recent events; and 2) building the capacity of activists in Baltimore to demand and achieve immediate and long-term reforms.

Later on, the document reveals the extent of Soros funding to the Black Lives Matter coalition:

Recognizing the need for strategic assistance, the U.S. Programs Board approved $650,000 in Opportunities Fund support to invest in technical assistance and support for the groups at the core of the burgeoning #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Another section of the document, titled, Report On U.S. Regional Reserves outlines the stated agenda for the $650,000 in funds approved for Black Lives Matter.

#BlackLivesMatter ($650,000) Per Board consensus at our May board meeting, U.S. Programs supported a series of convenings across the country over the summer organized in response to the immediate outrage and the escalating community mobilization to save black lives following the numerous killings of black men, women, and children by police. The largest of these events took place in July, when activists participated in the Movement for Black Lives convening in Cleveland, Ohio. In November, the Funders Collaborative on Youth Organizing will engage younger activists in Durham, North Carolina. In addition to supporting these convenings, US Programs has provided the groups and attendees of the convenings described here with technical assistance.

The investment was well worth it, it seems. A second document on the Open Society U.S. Programs board meeting February 11-12 of this year relates Black Lives Matter worked to influence the 2016 presidential campaign.

That hacked document states:

Leaders of #BlackLivesMatter and The Movement for Black Lives worked to influence candidate platforms during the 2016 primary season. This came alongside the recent acknowledgement by political strategists that African-American voters may be much more pivotal to the 2016 general election than previously forecasted.

The Open Society meeting last year, meanwhile, called for a discussion on whether it would be appropriate for the Soros group to try to shape Black Lives Matter in the future:

The highest profile events, the #BlackLivesMatter convening in Cleveland and the #Law4BlackLives gathering in New York, yielded a promising critique of efforts to date and a potential blueprint for strengthening the movement going forward.

That support calls into question how we might most appropriately support such efforts; specifically whether we should seek to shape the movement as opposed to facilitate its direct action. How do we confront the reality that such movements frequently flail as they attempt to grow and confront the challenges of institutionalizing themselves sufficiently to extend their reach? To what extent do we believe that we should play a role in helping such movement leaders connect with others that might help deepen policy recommendations or connections to sympathetic, but silent, inside actors? How can we help link such movements to existing grantees and other key actors that provide mutual strengthening?

The 2015 document made clear that the funding to Black Lives Matter followed Soros providing funds to the Occupy movement:

Our support of the #BlackLivesMatter movement follows other investments that have taken very different paths, including the Dreamers and Occupy Wall Street. USP grantee United We Dream (UWD) for example, a youth-led organization formed in 2009 by undocumented students and other advocates, changed the narrative about undocumented people and continues to be a major player in the immigration reform field.

(Note: Emphasis added by this reporter in all citations of the documents).

Aaron Klein is Breitbarts Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, Aaron Klein Investigative Radio. Follow him onTwitter @AaronKleinShow.Follow him onFacebook.

With research by Joshua Klein.

Originally posted here:
Hacked Soros Memo: $650,000 to Black Lives Matter

President Trump is eyeing a Milwaukee sheriff who called Black Lives Matter a "terrorist movement" for a top post at the Department of Homeland Security, Politico reported Thursday.

Sheriff David Clarke Jr., an early Trump endorser, has made headlines in the past for his statements about Black Lives Matter activists, including a 2015 tweet in which he predicted the movement would "join forces with [the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria]."

Before long, Black Lies Matter will join forces with ISIS to being down our legal constituted republic. You heard it first here.

While Clarke has made headlines as an outspoken Trump backer, he faces dwindling poll numbers in Milwaukee. A January poll found that Clarke, currently a Democrat, would almost certainly lose both his party's primary and, if he had made it far enough, the general election.

Clarke has also been criticized for the death of a mentally ill man who was denied water in his department's jail.

Continued here:
Trump considers sheriff who called Black Lives Matter 'terrorists' for DHS post - The Hill (blog)

MINNEAPOLIS The man who shot five Black Lives Matter protesters in 2015 has been sentenced to 15 years in prison, reports CBS Minnesota.

Play Video

The decision not to charge two white Minneapolis police officers in the shooting death of Jamar Clark sparked protests and questions about the ca...

Allen Scarsella, 25, and some friends got into an argument with some protesters who were demonstrating outside Minneapolis' 4th Precinct police station after the shooting death of Jamar Clark by one of their officers. He was convicted in February of a dozen felony counts of assault and riot.

The station reports that Hennepin County prosecutors asked the judge for the maximum sentence, while the defense maintained Scarsella has remorse for his actions, and was acting in self-defense.

Defense attorney Laura Heinrich argued Scarsella was "nave" at the time of the shooting, didn't know what life was like for black people on the north side of Minneapolis, and that his brain may not have fully developed, because he was around 22 years old at the time he put on a mask, went to the Fourth Precinct to live stream, and eventually shot five people.

Scarsella, who has been in county jail for nearly 18 months, addressed Judge Hilary Lindell Caligiuri and asked for probation.

"The fact that others were injured because of something I did weighs heavily on my heart every day," Scarsella said. "The incident touched so many lives and everybody who was involved is now worse off for it."

The judge agreed with prosecutors, who said Scarsella was deeply racist as evidenced by months of racist messages he had sent to friends leading up to the shooting, and gave him 15 years in prison out of a possible 20-year maximum.

One of the shooting victims, Cameron Clark, who is the cousin of the late Jamar Clark, said he is still dealing with physical and emotional pain from the shooting.

"I can't do a lot of things with my kids anymore, I can't work," Clark said. "I'm going to be living with this for the rest of my life."

Cameron Clark said he believes initial charges brought forth by the county against Scarsella should have been more severe, but Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman said on Wednesday that first-degree assault was the highest charge he could bring, given the evidence the county had.

"All of that was lies and he was just trying to make the judge have some sympathy for him," he Clark.

2017 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Visit link:
Minnesota man gets 15 years for shooting 5 Black Lives Matter protesters - CBS News

Christopher J. Lebron seeks to set the movement on firmer conceptual ground

I n June of 1966, Stokely Carmichael exhilarated a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, with two words that declared a more militant phase in the struggle for racial justice: "Black Power." If anyone wanted to know what Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) meant by that slogan, they could turn to a book he published the following year. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (Random House), co-written with a political scientist, Charles V. Hamilton, was both a treatise on institutional racism in America and a blueprint for change.

Nearly 50 years later, three black activists Opal Tometi, Patrisse Cullors, and Alicia Garza coined a hashtag that has come to define what some see as the most significant black social-justice movement since the mid-60s: #BlackLivesMatter. But if you want to know what that movement is about, you wont find a Black Power-like treatise on its philosophical foundations. Youd have to cobble it together from various sources.

I don't put people on streets. I put books on shelves.

"The movement isnt about just ending police violence," Lebron says. "What the movement is about is respect for black lives in all senses. Insofar as I can get to a younger generation and give them a systematic grounding as to what that is, Im hoping to do my small part to make the movement endure more."

Lebron, 42, does not have the persona of a crusader. A tall and introverted video-game enthusiast, the black Latino philosopher labors behind the wrought-iron gates of Yales department of African American studies, where, in a small second-floor office with a brick fireplace, he researches the morality of racial inequality. He writes with a combination of emotional rawness and stylistic austerity that evokes one of his books subjects, James Baldwin.

Black Lives Matter has spawned an expanding shelf of books since it emerged in 2013 after George Zimmermans acquittal in the fatal shooting of the unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Authors who have already published books related to it (or have announced plans to do so) include Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an African-American-studies scholar at Princeton University; Wesley Lowery, a journalist at The Washington Post; and Barbara Ransby, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The May issue of the New Republic carries a cover story on "Why Black Lives Matter Still Matters" by Peniel E. Joseph, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin.

T o appreciate what distinguishes Lebrons approach, start with the speech that first exposed his writing to a mass audience. It was January of 2015, and Lebron was invited to commemorate Martin Luther King Day at a YWCA in the affluent New York City suburb of Greenwich, Conn. Michael Brown had been shot dead in Ferguson, Mo., the previous August. In subsequent testimony, the police officer who killed Brown, Darren Wilson, portrayed the 18-year-old in quasi-bestial terms as a hulking, wild-eyed "demon." The month before Lebrons talk, a New York City grand jury declined to indict the police officer who had choked to death another unarmed black man, Eric Garner.

Lebron decided that the best way to honor King was to question the character of his mostly white audience. He did so by borrowing a page from Frederick Douglass. In one of Douglasss most famous speeches, "What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?" the slave-turned-abolitionist shamed whites for celebrating their freedoms while sustaining slavery. Lebron, like Douglass, opened his remarks by stressing the distance between the world of his audience and his own origins in a Puerto Rican family from the Lower East Side of Manhattan a personal trajectory that, at various points, exposed him to welfare, food stamps, and unemployment. And, again like Douglass, he shamed his listeners for celebrating Kings achievements while blacks continued to suffer police brutality, job discrimination, and the segregation of schools and neighborhoods.

The persistence of these ills "indicates the eagerness with which white Americans have adopted the idea that securing racial justice was a matter of the passing of a law and the martyrdom of a great man," he later wrote in a column based on the speech that appeared in The Stone, a philosophy series in The New York Times. "But this clearly will not do."

That Times piece whetted the publisher interest that led to Lebrons slim but ambitious new book. The studys premise is that the sentiment "Black Lives Matter" represents a desire for civic equality and human respect as old as the push to end slavery. It pivots around a question: How can earlier black struggles for acknowledgment inform that same fight today?

Lebron answers that by extracting a collection of "radical lessons" from eight black thinkers. Through Douglass and Ida B. Wells, an anti-lynching crusader, he highlights the power of forcing Americans to face the gulf between their stated ideals and their brutal treatment of blacks (lesson: shameful publicity). He analyzes how Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston changed perceptions of African-Americans through literature that revealed the richness of black culture (lesson: countercolonization of the white imagination). To get at issues of gender and sexuality, he focuses on Anna Julia Cooper, a civic and educational leader who saw the improved position of black women as central to the betterment of her race, and Audre Lorde, a lesbian poet who stressed the importance of embracing ones full identity (lesson: unconditional self-possession).

"Whether they say it or not, what they really want to do is induce a sense of, Oh man, I guess Im on welfare because it really is all my fault that there are no more jobs in the neighborhood," Lebron says. "No, its not your fault. We didnt build the ghettos. We didnt build housing segregation. The fact that white schools, being in certain tax districts, are almost as good as private schools, while other public schools are in the dump we didnt choose that."

Lebrons unlikely journey from Lower East Side to Ivy League was set in motion by the interest one English professor took in him at the City University of New Yorks Baruch College: Elaine M. Kauvar. She steered him toward a fellowship program aimed at getting minorities into graduate school. At that point in his life, though, Lebron had no interest in becoming, as he puts it, "that black guy doing race." He shifted to the subject in part because of his difficult experience as one of the only brown people in his political-science doctoral program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Lebron is just beginning to talk about those days when his cellphone blares an unusual ringtone. "Cracking the whip!" a female voice says. "Cracking the whip!" The caller is his wife, Vesla M. Weaver, a political scientist at Yale who also studies racial inequality. He answers with a laugh.

After he hangs up, Lebron explains that "cracking the whip" is the phrase Weaver jokingly uses to rally him and their son, Lennox, out the door in the morning. Since she was leaving town for a talk, Lebron had recorded her saying it as his ringtone. That way the boy would hear it when Weaver called home.

I ask Lennoxs age, remembering an article Lebron had written about the intergenerational inheritance of racial anger and sadness. It opens with a question that Lebrons son, sensing his fathers disaffection, asks on a regular basis: "Daddy, are you happy?"

Lebron sighs. "Hes 5 and some change now." He says Lennoxs birth shaped his decision to start writing publicly, a role he never anticipated. He wanted to do what he could to improve the world his son would inhabit. He also writes to cope with his emotions. If Lennox could sense his anger at so young an age, he worries, what will it be like when the boy is 10? Or 17?

Lebron points out how his book ends: with a meditation on Kings and Baldwins beliefs about the role of love in race relations.

"Im trying to figure out how I can maintain something like hope."

Marc Parry is a senior reporter at The Chronicle.

Continued here:
Reframing 'Black Lives Matter' - Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)

DeKALB Students gathered Tuesday for the beginning of the second Black Lives Matter week at NIU, organized by the Black Student Unions civil disobedience committee.

The first Black Lives Matter week happened last semester during the week of Oct. 11. The BSU drew in chalk on sidewalks around campus and organized peaceful protests in order to raise awareness of police brutality.

This semesters event had a similar message and used previous techniques of peaceful protest and chalking. In addition to addressing police brutality, demonstrators addressed other issues of racism on campus and in general.

Freshman psychology major Alyson Godbolt became a part of the Black Lives Matter movement at NIU last semester during the first Black Lives Matter week. She said when they organize these demonstrations, they discuss issues they notice on campus and all over the country in order to decide how they want to protest.

We find demonstrations that will raise awareness, that will start conversation on race equality and the mistreatment of black people in America, Godbolt said.

Friday, the BSU put an announcement on Twitter from the civil disobedience committee that the second Black Lives Matter week would happen Tuesday through Thursday.

Participants met Tuesday morning in Neptune Central to organize before they walked outside to begin the demonstration.

Signs were passed out for demonstrators to wear around their necks, which had statements such as, Give me justice or give me nothing, No more racism and No justice, no peace written across them.

At noon, demonstrators walked outside to the brick circle on the ground near the east side of the Founders Memorial Library. The students stood in a circle in this area to participate in the demonstration, which included chanting, singing and demonstrators speaking.

Darius Parker, senior journalism major and director of civil disobedience for the BSU, read off 30 names of individuals who have died at the hands of police. Names on the list included Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald and Philando Castile.

While Parker read the names, he asked demonstrators to raise their fists in the air and observe a moment of silence in memory of those who have died.

At the conclusion of the protest, Parker asked people to join him in taking a vow of silence for the rest of the day in remembrance of those who lost their lives. Demonstrators who wished to participate in this vow received a piece of tape to wear over their mouths.

Other passers-by stopped to observe the demonstration.

Freshman psychology major Rasean Mitchell was with freshman marketing major Kyle Reynolds at a de-stressing event at Cole Hall when he heard the group chanting, so the two walked over to observe.

Mitchell hadnt seen the Black Lives Matter demonstrations last semester except for the chalking around campus. He said he supports the movement and thinks its good for people to fight for what they believe in.

Im not really a big fan of the, you know, the chanting and shouting and stuff, but I think its right to bring attention to everybody else about whats going on, Mitchell said.

Reynolds said he felt the demonstration and the Black Lives Matter movement shouldnt only acknowledge one race.

I dont not support it, but I understand it. Reynolds said. And I believe that, in my opinion, all lives matter, and we shouldnt be sticking [to or] singling [out] one race. I mean, its a good thing that they all come together, but Should you single out one race? is the question we should be asking.

Passers-by had various reactions to the demonstration. Some of those who passed by expressed their dislike of the demonstration. One instance happened while the group was still in Neptune Central.

We literally just had an incident inside of Neptune Central, Parker said to the crowd once outside. This is probably the most non-violent demonstration weve ever done, and the fact that he was upset that we are united as people of color and black students is a problem. Especially on this campus.

When another passer-by lashed out, Parker calmed the crowds reaction and reminded them to be mindful of what you give your energy to.

Godbolt said that this hate is nothing new. When people express hate, the group tries to keep in mind that it comes from a place of misunderstanding, but its still hurtful.

She said to help this lack of understanding, people should ask questions so they can learn about the movement.

If you dont understand us, if you dont understand why were so angry, if you have questions, if youre not understanding anything, come talk to one of us. Come to one of our demonstrations and come to us respectfully, please, Godbolt said. If you have a question about something, just ask, Hey, Im not quite understanding why this is this ... I dont want to upset you I just want to understand. I want to better understand. And if you dont want to understand, just dont talk.

Read this article:
Black Lives Matter Week Two: BSU leads peaceful protest - Northern Star Online