The Left's Reign of Terror Continues in Baltimore

My article in FrontPageMag today:

The Left's Reign of Terror Continues in Baltimore

By Matthew Vadum

As Maryland’s largest city grieves for a mother and her 7-year-old son found shot to death, it is becoming clear that criminals emboldened by left-wingers are terrorizing the people of Baltimore like never before.

The city’s radical, left-wing, thug-loving mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D), has emasculated the local police she despises and abandoned her constituents by giving criminals a green light to do as they please. Police officers have been ordered not to do their jobs which is just as well because many of them are quite justifiably terrified of doing their jobs in the current environment. Mobs of as many as 50 people now routinely assemble when police arrive at crime scenes. Are they serving as community watchdogs or are they there to intimidate cops? Maybe both.

At this rate it won’t be long before Baltimore dethrones Detroit as the premier municipal showcase for left-wing urban policy failures. Ominously, this is America’s Mad Max-like future if it continues on the suicidal course set by President Obama, a man whose proudest accomplishment has been to serve as a rabble-rousing Marxist community organizer.

While the still-warm corpses of the city’s newest murder victims were being processed by authorities yesterday, panelists at the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress in the nation’s capital laid the blame for the rising tide of violence in Baltimore on everyone except the perpetrators.

No people of color are responsible for their actions, panelists said or implied. It’s society’s fault. It’s capitalism’s fault. It’s the fault of “white privilege.” There are too many laws. There are too many cops. Corporations are too powerful and they are definitely not people. Campaign finance reform would level the playing field. Things would be better if tax rates were raised. Every left-wing shibboleth and cliche was dusted off and put to use at the agenda-setting think tank founded by John Podesta.

Also discussed was the profoundly racist Black Lives Matter movement that is built on demonstrable lies –for example, that Michael Brown of Ferguson, Mo., was an innocent gentle giant murdered by a black-hating white cop– and gross exaggerations about the state of race relations in America (or at least they were hyperbolic before Barack Obama moved into the White House).

The pro-felon brainstorming session was titled, “Toward a More Perfect Union: Bringing Criminal Justice Reform to Our Communities.”

Saul Alinsky-inspired slogans like “power perceived is power achieved” flew around the 10th floor conference room at the nearly two-hour seminar that was a smorgasbord of untruths, cant, and intellectual junk food.

Dressed in casual clothing and a baseball cap, the fast-talking, social justice peddling Rev. Heber Brown III of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in North Baltimore, is a master of politically correct pap. The community organizing preacher uses tedious phrases like “building power,” “the institutional racism that is manifested in local communities,” “moving out of spaces of privilege,” and “rendering space to others.”

The problem with Baltimore and the rest of America is that “the system” is evil. By “the system,” he meant American norms and the nation’s free institutions.

Obama Amnesty Stays Shut Down

My new article in today's FrontPageMag:

Obama Amnesty Stays Shut Down

By Matthew Vadum

President Obama’s unilaterally imposed immigration amnesty plan will remain suspended for the time being, thanks to a federal appeals court ruling that serves as a desperately needed reminder to Americans that the United States is not supposed to be a one-man dictatorship.

On Tuesday two members of a three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit allowed an injunction to remain in place that blocks Obama from moving forward with his immigration plan.

The ruling effectively extends the stay that was ordered in February by a courageous Texas-based federal judge, Andrew S. Hanen, who found that Obama probably exceeded his authority in unilaterally granting benefits to more than 4 million illegal aliens. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said at the time that the U.S. District Court ruling was a “major victory for the rule of law” and “a major turning point in the fight to stop Obama’s lawless amnesty.”

The Obama administration had asked the panel to lift Judge Hanen’s injunction and whittle down its scope but the appellate court determined that the government would probably lose on the merits when the case went to a full trial in Hanen’s court. The case arose out of litigation filed by Texas and 25 other states against Obama’s immigration initiative.

Hillary the Arms Dealer

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

Hillary the Arms Dealer

By Matthew Vadum

While presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was America’s top diplomat the Department of State that she oversaw approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments forked over millions of dollars to the now-embattled Clinton Foundation.

According to an International Business Times report by David Sirota and Andrew Perez, “at least seven foreign governments that received State Department clearance for American arms did donate to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary.” The article identified the seven nations as Algeria, Australia, Kuwait, Norway, Oman, Qatar, and Thailand.

Mainstream media’s surprisingly probing coverage of the unfolding Clinton Foundation donations-for-favors scandal suggests that reporters have turned on the Clintons in the age of Obama.

And the fact that the IBT piece was co-authored by Marxist author and radio talk show host David Sirota adds to the growing pile of evidence that some of the more ideologically pure progressives in the Democratic Party are ganging up on Mrs. Clinton in order to help as yet undeclared presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Sirota, a former press aide to various left-wing lawmakers such as then-Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a self-described socialist who just launched his own quixotic presidential campaign, isn’t exactly an objective observer. A longtime left-wing activist who hurls invective at conservatives and Republicans, Sirota has slobbered over Warren, calling the anti-capitalism crusader “one of the most promising political leaders in a generation.”

Meanwhile, the $165 billion figure, “derived from the three full fiscal years of Clinton’s term as Secretary of State (from October 2010 to September 2012) — represented nearly double the value of American arms sales made to the those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term.”

Matthew Vadum's appearance on Newsmax TV

Below is the video clip from my May 21, 2015 appearance on the "Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.

We were discussing my FrontPage magazine article, Ferguson Rent-A-Mobs Exposed, which went viral.

Baltimore Cops Indicted in Freddie Gray Case

My article from the May 25, 2015 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Baltimore Cops Indicted in Freddie Gray Case

By Matthew Vadum

Six Baltimore police officers were indicted Friday in the death of Freddie Gray after prosecutors forced a local grand jury to move at what is considered lightning speed in the criminal justice system.

Although there may indeed be police malfeasance in the death of Gray, news of the indictments that the grand jury considered at an unseemly pace is anticlimactic. It’s not like anyone expected grand jurors to toss the charges out in the anti-cop lynch mob environment that now grips Charm City. And there are serious doubts whether the police officers can receive a fair trial in Baltimore City because the petit jury pool there isn’t exactly filled with law-and-order enthusiasts.

This case of what many observers have characterized as scapegoating by an out-of-control prosecutor arose after the suspicious April 19 death of career criminal Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man with a long arrest record. Since then angry mobs, racial-grievance profiteers, and radical leftist agitators have turned Maryland’s largest city into a Hobbesian jungle with the official encouragement of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, a Democrat. The mayor infamously admitted after riots began that she gave space “to those who wished to destroy.”

Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, a Democrat, told reporters Friday that the charges had to be amended to reflect new evidence. “As our investigation continued, additional information has been discovered, and as is often the case during an ongoing investigation, charges can and should be revised based upon the evidence.”

Mosby has also said all six police officers engaged in misconduct by their “failure to perform their duty regarding the safety of a prisoner.” Gray died in a hospital of injuries including a severed spine that he apparently suffered in a police van after being arrested a week after reportedly running away from cops.

Sidney Blumenthal Fathers Yet Another Clinton Scandal

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

Sid Vicious #1 (L) and Sid Vicious #2 (R),
or is it the other way around?

Sidney Blumenthal Fathers Yet Another Clinton Scandal

By Matthew Vadum

Longtime Clinton attack dog Sidney Blumenthal is under fire over allegations that he used his connection to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to promote an unusual business scheme involving Libya and possibly the embattled Clinton Foundation.

Blumenthal, Bill Clinton’s legendary hatchet man who earned the richly deserved sobriquet “Sid Vicious” for his scorched-earth assaults on Clinton’s enemies, is now at the center of yet another percolating Clinton scandal that promises to be, like all Clinton scandals, extraordinarily messy and drawn out.

All the details of Blumenthal’s would-be transactions aren’t yet known, but at first glance his half-assed plotting bears more than a passing resemblance to the cockamamie business deal that the late Billy Carter, President Jimmy Carter’s always embarrassing brother, tried to broker in Libya decades ago.

Needless to say, congressional Republicans are more than a little interested in finding out about Blumenthal’s misconduct.

Benghazi Select Committee chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) has already subpoenaed Blumenthal for what the New York Times previously called “a private transcribed interview.” Reuters obtained a copy of the subpoena which commands Blumenthal to appear before Gowdy’s committee on June 3.

Sources in the know suggest Blumenthal, who knows as much about Libya and military strategy as Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), the lawmaker who said Guam might be in danger of becoming “so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize,” knows about geophysics, gave terrible advice to Mrs. Clinton.

Emails obtained by the Times show that Clinton took Blumenthal’s questionable advice memos very seriously.

Blumenthal possesses a robust self-esteem that in his mind allows him to weigh in on important diplomatic matters, so the fact that he wasn’t even an official State Department employee was not an obstacle. (Obama White House officials torpedoed Hillary’s request to put him on State’s payroll.)

But Mrs. Clinton, like so many other powerful politicians, values loyalty over competence so a way was found for Blumenthal to participate in the ripping apart of North Africa. As the nation’s top diplomat, Hillary forwarded her old supplicant’s amateur pontifications “to senior diplomatic officials in Libya and Washington and at times ask[ed] them to respond,” the newspaper reported. The former Miss Rodham “continued to pass around” Field Marshal Blumenthal’s “memos even after other senior diplomats concluded that Mr. Blumenthal’s assessments were often unreliable.”

Ferguson Rent-A-Mobs Exposed

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

Ferguson Rent-A-Mobs Exposed

By Matthew Vadum

ACORN’s successor group in Missouri has been paying protesters $5,000 a month to generate civil unrest in Ferguson, the troubled St. Louis suburb where black youth Michael Brown was killed by a white police officer last August.

We know this because some of the protesters haven’t been paid and, now, they are demanding what they were promised. They held a sit-in at the offices of Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) and posted a demand letter online.

MORE is the rebranded Missouri branch of the former Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) which filed for bankruptcy in late 2010. That ACORN state chapter reconstituted itself in December 2009 as MORE under orders from ACORN’s national headquarters. President Obama used to work for ACORN and he represented it in court as a lawyer. (See my previous article on MORE.)

MORE has been active in the Ferguson protests and in efforts to free jailed demonstrators so they can continue vandalizing businesses, intimidating perceived adversaries, setting fires, throwing projectiles and human waste at cops, and engaging in the Left’s usual modes of so-called nonviolent protest. MORE believes that protesters should be given a blank check to inflict whatever harm they wish on the community in pursuit of social justice.

The unpaid rent-a-mob operatives complain that MORE stiffed them the same way ACORN did to hired protesters throughout its 40 years of radical left-wing rabble-rousing. The ACORN network’s leadership was always predominantly white while its foot soldiers were mostly non-white, a fact that caused tension within the criminal community organizing outfit.

Blogger Kristinn Taylor reported at St. Louis-based blogger Jim Hoft’s website, Gateway Pundit, that “[b]lack activists held a sit-in at the office of MORE … on Thursday to press their claim that groups led by whites have collected tens of thousands of dollars in donations off of the Black Lives Matter movement without paying the Black participants their fair share.”

One of the angry protesters can be observed threatening MORE executive director Jeff Ordower, a bald white man, in a video posted to the Twitter account of @search4swag on May 14 with the hashtag #CutTheCheck.

“We gonna just fuck you up,” she said to Ordower from across a boardroom-style table.

Ordower, an outspoken vote fraud apologist, previously ran Missouri ACORN and oversaw ACORN’s Midwest operations. He was also an SEIU organizer in Texas.

In his online biography, Ordower boasts that he was “one of a group of founders of the Chicago based organization Gender Just, which merged queer, class and racial justice.”  The bio states that he “is welcoming co-conspirators in attempts to scale up numbers of radical organizers who can financially support themselves in the work.”

In other words, Ordower admits that paying organizers isn’t exactly a priority for him.

Leaders of the Lynch Mob

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

Leaders of the Lynch Mob

By Matthew Vadum

Leaders of the “Black Lives Matter” movement are obliquely endorsing killing cops and rioting as legitimate forms of political activism as the radical community organizers of the so-called Black Spring ramp up political violence and civil unrest.

For example, on-the-record statements by Twitter stars DeRay Mckesson, 29 and Johnetta Elzie, 26, are all over the Internet. Mckesson (Twitter handle: @deray) and Elzie (Twitter handle: @Nettaaaaaaaa) are influential activists who have become legacy-media darlings by using social media to push their racial-grievance agenda.

A very long, fawning profile of the duo by writer Jay Caspian Kang, who in his day job is an editor at The New Yorker magazine, elucidates what they believe.

Both of these community organizers bounce between reverence for nonviolent action and a refusal to condemn violent activism, which this writer would argue is tantamount to endorsing violent activism.

Mckesson and Elzie believe that the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. has been distorted.

“He is held up as an avatar of genteel protest,” Kang writes, “invoked by conservative politicians and leaders in the black community as a way to discredit their movement.”

But they “frequently point out that King was in fact a revolutionary who believed in the power of confrontation, and that it’s a crime against American history to confuse the real King with an appealingly passive one,” Kang writes.

“To make their point, they participated in an action called #ReclaimMLK, which sought to counter ‘efforts to reduce a long history marred with the blood of countless women and men into iconic images of men in suits behind pulpits.'”

“If you bring up nonviolence as the only civilized way to effect change, they will recite King’s words: ‘A riot is the language of the unheard,’ or they will say they don’t condone rioting, but they understand it,” he writes.

The New York Times Magazine notes, almost in passing, that respected activist Ashley Yates “created T-shirts and hoodies that read ‘ASSATA TAUGHT ME’ — a reference to the former Black Panther Party member Assata Shakur — and that became part of the protest iconography.”

Understandably, the article doesn’t bother to explain the historical significance of Shakur, a black fugitive from American justice who was long ago granted asylum by Communist Cuba. Doing so would disrupt the narrative that dogmatically reinforces the idea that Black Lives Matter must be viewed by all as a noble, nonviolent movement and that any suggestion to the contrary is inherently malevolent and racist. The left effected the same kind of whitewash with the rapists and fire-bombers of the ridiculously violent Occupy Wall Street movement even in the face of overwhelming evidence of rampant criminality among its activists and supporters.

The Clintons’ Criminal Board of Trustees

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

The Clintons’ Criminal Board of Trustees

By Matthew Vadum

At least four board members of the highly efficient cash-for-favors trading platform known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation have either been charged with or convicted of serious crimes, including bribery and fraud, according to an eagerly awaited blockbuster of a book.

The book is Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, by acclaimed best-selling author Peter Schweizer. Although it only became available for sale to the public on May 5, on Sunday it was already the 15th best-selling book on Amazon.com. The New York Times calls the meticulously documented opus “the most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle still in its infancy,” and reports that it “asserts that foreign entities who made payments to the Clinton Foundation and to Mr. Clinton through high speaking fees received favors from Mrs. Clinton’s State Department in return.”

Hillary Clinton, of course, is the increasingly radical now 67-year-old presidential candidate who in 2008 somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of what for years before had seemed to pundits far and wide like an “inevitable” victory. She is the unceasingly devious, condescending plutocrat who at the launch of her 2016 campaign told the American people, “Everyday Americans need a champion. I want to be that champion.”

The former first lady is also the individual who botched the U.S. response to an Islamic terrorist attack on a U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, that left four Americans dead. At the time Clinton scapegoated the innocent director of an anti-Islam movie trailer that almost nobody had seen at the time of the assault, claiming that the sophisticated military-style attack arose spontaneously from an angry mob of protesters gathered outside the facility which was in Islamist-held territory. The Benghazi coverup the Obama administration engineered to get President Obama safely reelected in November 2012 has been gradually falling apart.

More recently Hillary revealed that all her government emails from her time at the State Department were routed through her own personal Internet server and that tens of thousands of the emails that happened to be U.S. government property were deleted. Emails were deleted while subject to a congressional subpoena from the Benghazi Select Committee.

This suggests Mrs. Clinton is guilty at a minimum of a species of obstruction of justice known as spoliation of evidence. Although many journalists are now burning up the telephone lines trying to find a so-called smoking gun that incriminates Hillary, they don’t seem to realize they already have it. In legal proceedings the finder of fact is entitled to draw an adverse inference from the fact that an individual destroyed evidence that is relevant to an ongoing or reasonably foreseeable civil or criminal case, something Mrs. Clinton confessed to when she openly admitted her server was scrubbed. This spoliation inference, as lawyers call it, can by itself be deemed to constitute evidence sufficient for a criminal conviction or a civil judgment.

The four wealthy, powerful, and shady men fingered by Schweizer are tech magnate Vinod Gupta, hotelier Sant Singh Chatwal, billionaire Victor Dahdaleh, and energy tycoon Rolando Gonzalez Bunster, Breitbart News reports.

Black Spring: The ACLU Joins the Lynch Mob

My new article in today's FrontPage magazine:

Black Spring: The ACLU Joins the Lynch Mob

By Matthew Vadum

Cooling down the churning cauldron of mob violence that Baltimore has become is not on the agenda of the ACLU which is now preparing to turn up the heat in cities across America.

Following the suspicious death in police custody of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man with a long rap sheet, angry mobs and radical agitators have turned Maryland’s largest city into a Hobbesian jungle. They were already angry at the endlessly sensationalized deaths in recent years of black males such as Trayvon Martin (Sanford, Fla.), Michael Brown (Ferguson, Mo.), Eric Garner (Staten Island, N.Y.), and Tamir Rice (Cleveland, Ohio) at the hands of non-blacks, but the seemingly senseless death of Gray last month pushed them over the edge.

Cries of “No justice, no peace,” the battle cry of leftist rabble hellbent on the destruction of civil society, ring out in the bloody streets of Baltimore. Violent solidarity protests have rocked several other big cities.

And it’s not just demonstrators who are shouting the phrase embraced by racial arsonist Al Sharpton: Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby said she was answering popular “calls for ‘No justice, No peace,'” by laying murder and other criminal charges against six police officers in connection with Gray’s death.

Renowned criminal lawyer Alan Dershowitz has accused Mosby of “overcharging” the three white men, two black men, and one black woman, in order to appease the rioters. Charging a defendant with an excessively serious crime makes it more likely the jury will acquit and when that happens there will be more riots, he says.

The ACLU’s Maryland chapter gushed when Mosby announced the charges.

“For years, victims of police violence, overwhelmingly Black, have sought justice to no avail,” said executive director Susan Goering. “This historic moment is the result of the tireless efforts of families who have lost loved ones to police violence — here in Baltimore, throughout Maryland, and all across America.”

America is rotten, Goering added. “We hope this marks the beginning of a nationwide awakening to the many injustices and inequalities that we have allowed to continue for far too long.”

Maybe the “Black Spring” that ACLU headquarters tweeted Friday about will remedy all these alleged travesties. The group microblogged that the “Black Spring has begun” and urged protesters to learn their legal rights, presumably so left-wingers can riot and loot more effectively during protests about the systemic racial discrimination that they pretend pervades modern society.

Geert Wilders: I Won’t Stop Warning the West About Islam

My article from the May 5, 2015 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Geert Wilders: I Won’t Stop Warning the West About Islam

By Matthew Vadum

After two Muslim lawmakers tried to block world-renowned activist Geert Wilders from entering the country, he defiantly vowed his warnings about the existential threat Islam poses to Western civilization would never cease.

“I know one thing,” Wilders told the audience April 29 at a Capitol Hill reception co-sponsored by Reps. Steve King (R-Iowa) and Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).

“They are very ineffective because I’m here,” he said to laughter and applause.

“It’s really risky to tell the truth about Islam,” said Wilders who has had round-the-clock bodyguards protecting him for more than a decade.

A frightening reminder of just how risky telling the truth about Islam can be was delivered Sunday to Wilders and 300 attendees at an art competition featuring works depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad.

Depicting the founder of Islam in any medium is strictly forbidden and deemed blasphemous in Islam. 

Muslims have a history of killing and maiming those who commit what their religion deems to be blasphemy, especially when it comes to the founder of their faith.

A few days after the Washington speech, two AK 47-wielding would-be assassins were gunned down by police after they opened fire outside the sold-out “Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest,” in Garland, Texas, northeast of Dallas. The dead men, since identified as Elton Simpson, 30, and Nadir Hamid Soofi, 34, of Phoenix, Ariz., were both mosque-attending Muslims.

The contest was organized by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), a group founded by activist and “Atlas Shrugs” blogger Pamela Geller, and by Jihad Watch, a website run by author Robert Spencer that is affiliated with the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which publishes FrontPage. Wilders, Geller, and Spencer attended the event. Wilders delivered the keynote address.

The Anti-Cartoon Jihad Comes To America

My article from today's FrontPage magazine:

The Anti-Cartoon Jihad Comes To America

By Matthew Vadum

Two gunmen were killed by police Sunday night after they opened fire wounding a security officer at a Texas art competition featuring works depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad, a practice that is strictly forbidden in Islam.

As of very early Monday morning, the identity of the two attackers was unclear, but it is hard to believe the assault was not carried out by Islamists. Watchdog group Judicial Watch has claimed the Muslim terrorists of Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS or ISIL) are operating a training camp in Mexico about eight miles from the U.S. border near El Paso, Texas.

The fact the event was attacked is proof that free speech needs protection in America, event organizer and author Robert Spencer told this writer in a late-night telephone interview.

“The shooting shows how much the event was needed,” Spencer said. “The shooting shows freedom of speech is under violent assault in the United States. It shows that the jihadis are willing to kill to enforce our obedience to Shariah law.”