My September 18, 2015 article on FrontPageMag:
The Obama White House rolled out the red carpet this week for leaders of the racist revolutionary Black Lives Matter movement, providing yet more confirmation that the Obama administration supports its members’ increasingly violent activism.
News of the meeting comes after a Southern police chief was given the boot for posting a note critical of Black Lives Matter and of President Obama’s incessant race-baiting.
Black Lives Matter is animated not only by anti-white racism but by a hatred of normal American values, including law and order. Its members denounce the U.S. for imagined institutional racism and discrimination against African-Americans. Members idolize convicted, unrepentant cop-killers Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu Jamal, both of whom are black, and have declared “war” on law enforcement. Its members openly call for police officers to be assassinated.
Black Lives Matter activist Joseph Thomas Johnson-Shanks, a 25-year-old black man, murdered 31-year-old white Kentucky State Trooper Joseph Cameron Ponder last Sunday night. Johnson-Shanks apparently committed suicide-by-cop when troopers caught up with him the next morning. The convicted felon pointed a gun at police and they shot him in self-defense.
The White House love fest Wednesday came after several high-profile attacks on law enforcement across America.
Activists enjoyed an audience with President Obama. Brittany Packnett, a highly influential Black Lives Matter leader, told reporters that Obama personally supports the movement that has inspired violence against police officers and spurred civil unrest.
“He offered us a lot of encouragement with his background as a community organizer, and told us that even incremental changes were progress,” she told reporters following the event. “He didn’t want us to get discouraged. He said, ‘Keep speaking truth to power.’”
President Obama’s senior adviser from Chicagoland, Valerie Jarrett, also met with the activists during the visit.
Jarrett met with Black Lives Matter leaders Packnett, Johnetta Elzie, DeRay Mckesson, Phillip Agnew, and Jamye Wooten. Mckesson has obliquely endorsed the use of violence to effect political change.
Packnett took to Twitter to pose a selfie photo with Jarrett with this text: “honest and action oriented. thank you [for] continuing to engage w[ith] the movement, Valerie.”
In reply, Jarrett tweeted, “Great meeting, Brittany. Truly appreciate your leadership!!”
According to Breitbart News:
Packnett has six recorded entries of visiting the complex long before the protests in Ferguson. She also was among the select group of Ferguson activists that met with Obama in December 2014. “I could tell he is taking this very personally,” Packnett explained after the 45 minute meeting with the president in the Oval Office. “He wants to see some clear, thoughtful action come from this.”
Jarrett, like Obama, has a long history of consorting with black militants and leftist radicals like former green jobs czar Van Jones who was forced out of his job after it was shown he had signed a 9/11 truther petition accusing the Bush administration or orchestrating terrorist attacks.
At this late stage in Obama’s presidency the administration doesn’t mind revealing its ties to radicals and unsavory individuals. The president doesn’t care if the American people see how profoundly anti-American he really is.
White House attendee Phillip Agnew is executive director of a group called Dream Defenders. Kentucky cop killer Johnson-Shanks put a video on his Facebook page that features an appearance Agnew made on PBS last year. (Agnew also visited the White House this past December for a meeting with President Obama.)
“I’m mad at a system every day that stakes its claim on saying that there’s a certain segment of society that is a criminal element,” Agnew says in the video, spewing the stuff of paranoid leftist fantasy.
The Dream Defenders website describes the group as “an uprising of communities in struggle, shifting culture through transformational organizing.” Its mission statement calls for “the destruction of the political and economic systems of Capitalism and Imperialism as well as Patriarchy,” and for “an immediate end to the police state and murder of Black people, other people of color, and other oppressed peoples in the United States, the immediate release of the 2.5 million prisoners of the United States’ War on the Poor, and trials by juries of our peers.”
Meanwhile, newly unemployed Police Chief Mike Halstead of Surf City, North Carolina says he was forced out of his position for (accurately) speaking truth to power regarding the Black Lives Matter movement.
This constructive dismissal came after he wrote a Facebook post in which he called the movement a “terrorist group” and argued that President Obama has created a race problem in America.
“He put that information out, that was intended for his friends and colleagues and peers, but it was a public statement and there are people that were offended,” Surf City Town Manager Larry Bergman told the media.
Halstead’s September 3 Facebook post read:
[T]his Black Lives Matter group is nothing more than an American born terrorist group brought on by the lie of the hands up don’t shoot during the criminal thug Michael Brown incident. The FBI and other Government Law Enforcement groups need to step up and put a stop to this. … When a black thug is killed by police they are all over it as is Mr. Barack Obama. However when a police officer white, black or any race is murdered for doing his job the media is short with its reporting or not at all. When a white person is killed by a black officer you hear nothing. Has our so called President spoke publicly about these murders of police officers by blacks, HELL NO he has not. Step up Mr. President, or step down because we do not need you.
Halstead said the cops under him wouldn’t be intimidated.
I have instructed my officers to be vigilant, if threatened take appropriate action. If that means shoot a thug, then do it and answer for it while you are still alive and not dead. Law enforcement is fed up with this murderous society who want to take out those who protect and serve.
Under pressure from officials Halstead took down the post but that wasn’t good enough for Mayor Zander Guy who called an emergency meeting on Tuesday after he learned of the post.
After being given the choice of quitting or being fired Halstead retired.
“I had to beg for a 60 day severance to feed my family,” Halstead wrote in a new Facebook post. “That was the thanks that I got from those I thought were family, I was thrown under the bus for expressing my 1st amendment rights and speaking the truth and concerns for law enforcement.”
It is unclear if Halstead will file a civil rights lawsuit for discrimination and dismissal for exercising his free speech rights under the First Amendment.
Of course the man who gave Halstead the ultimatum is both a pardoned felon and a big donor to Democrats, Civitas Review reported previously.
Mayor Zander Guy was in the news in 2009 when then-North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue (D) appointed him to the North Carolina Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) Commission.
It was revealed at the time that Guy was an insurance agent until he was convicted of defrauding clients and given a three-year prison term. He had served just three months of the three years before then-Gov. Jim Martin (R) commuted his sentence. Martin later pardoned him.
The report continues:
According to records from the State Board of Elections, Guy has given in excess of $222,000 in donations to Democratic candidates or the state party over the past two decades (including $25,000 to the NC Democratic Party just last year.) Between him, his wife and son, the Guy family has given $27,600 to Gov. Bev Perdue’s campaigns.
The termination of Halstead comes as the Obama administration is ramping up the pressure it places on local police forces to adopt policies that toe the politically correct line on race.
It also comes weeks after hundreds of delegates to a Democratic National Committee convention in Minneapolis voted to adopt a disturbing, demonstrably false resolution that “accuses American police of “extrajudicial killings of unarmed African American men, women and children.”
The DNC resolution also states that the American Dream “is a nightmare for too many young people stripped of their dignity under the vestiges of slavery, Jim Crow and White Supremacy[.]”
Delegates okayed the statement the same day a black male suspect allegedly shot and killed Darren Goforth, a white sheriff’s deputy in Houston, in an unprovoked attack. The next day Black Lives Matter demonstrators marched near the Minnesota state fair chanting violent anti-police slogans and carrying signs reading “End White Supremacy.” Activists shouted “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon,” while walking (protected by police) on a highway south of the fair grounds.
No matter how much violence and mayhem supporters of Black Lives Matter generate, President Obama refuses to condemn the movement. When cops are murdered by those who support the movement, Obama is silent. Apart from some perfunctory, generalized denunciations of violence in general, Obama doesn’t reach out to the public to ask for calm or to deplore the killings.
And if inviting violence-advocating black militants into the White House, especially in the current climate, doesn’t prove that Barack Hussein Obama hates America, nothing will.