Ferguson Bombers Sentenced

My article in today's FrontPageMag:

Ferguson Bombers Sentenced

By Matthew Vadum

A foiled plot to use bombs to assassinate the police chief, county prosecutor, and other officials in troubled Ferguson, Mo., and also blow up the iconic Gateway Arch in nearby St. Louis, has ended in federal prison terms for two New Black Panther Party members.

In a sweetheart plea bargain deal, Olajuwon Davis and Brandon Orlando Baldwin, both radical black Muslim men in their twenties, received mere seven-year custodial sentences last week from U.S. District Judge Henry Autrey when they could have been sent to prison for decades. The men were sentenced "on charges of planning and conspiring to ignite explosive devices during the Ferguson protests and procuring firearms for convicted felons," according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri.

U.S. Attorney Richard Callahan congratulated law enforcement for preventing what might have been a major disaster. "The disruption of this plot ... undoubtedly saved lives. Luckily for all of us, we’ll never know just how many," he said.

Davis and Baldwin met when they participated in the protests in Ferguson that followed the Aug. 9, 2014 death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man. Brown was killed by white then-police officer Darren Wilson when he charged Wilson after trying to wrest his service weapon from him. Brown's death sparked riots in Ferguson and across America. Soon after meeting, Davis and Baldwin began plotting to arm fellow demonstrators and destroy the Gateway Arch.

The sentencing comes as black nationalists and members of the Black Lives Matter movement escalate calls for violent attacks on police, while the Obama administration responds by sitting on its hands. Last month Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan called for "10,000 fearless men" to come forward and slaughter white Americans. Black-supremacist King Noble is calling on blacks to murder whites and police. "It's not safe no more to be white in America," Noble announced in a viral YouTube video. "Lurking behind any corner could be an angry black man ready to take yo ass out."

It also comes as the terrorist-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) throws its lot in with the increasingly violent Black Lives Matter movement. Breitbart News reports that "CAIR leaders and members joined Black Lives Matter in a march on the California State Capitol on [Sept. 2], targeting Gov. Jerry Brown’s office over a new bill that, in part, would expand bans on racial profiling to include perceived ethnicity." The fact that CAIR is siding with violent activists against police "creates a serious problem for CAIR’s defenders, which argue that its associations with Islamic extremism can be overlooked because it helps law enforcement work with, and within, the Muslim community."

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.