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In the wake of the Virginia congressional baseball practice shooting by James T. Hodgkinson, a former Sanders volunteer who targeted Republican Congressman Steve Scalise in early June, trend piece-giddy journalists rushed to publish horseshoe theory takes on the rise of the extreme left and how it too poses a threat to the fabric of society. In many of these articles, civil rights organization Anti-Defamation League was there to reinforce this false balance and populate its articles with warnings of emerging left-wing violence.

Take, for starters, this recent scare piece in Vice:

I think were in a time when we cant ignore the extremism from the Left, said Oren Segal, the director of the Center on Extremism, an arm of the Anti-Defamation League. Over the past few months, the ADL, which hosts regular seminars on homegrown extremism for law enforcement officials, has begun warning of the rising threat posed by far-left groups, most recently at a seminar just this past Sunday. When we have anti-fascist counterprotests not that they are the same as white supremacists that can ratchet up the violence at these events, and it means we can see people who are violent on their own be attracted to that, Segal said. I hate to say it, but it feels inevitable.

This posturing was undermined by the followup sentence in the next paragraph: The evidence is so far largely anecdotal.

Anecdotal, as in not proven to exist in any meaningful sense. The ADL, to maintain its just calling balls and strikes image must denounce extremism on both sides and though it sometimes notes right and left violence are not equal, it is happy to help frame the problem as such.

Warning of the potential for another Greensboro Massacre a 1979 street battle in North Carolina between communists and the KKK that left five leftists dead ADLs Mark Pitcavage told Politico, My big concern is sooner or later is that were going to have another Greensboro Massacre type of event.

The Vice article went on to call the Black Panthers a left-wing extremist group. Its unclear if the rampant institutional racism, police brutality, and the ongoing skilling of hundreds of thousands of Indochinese by the U.S. government the Black Panthers fought to undermine is also considered extremist in their calculation, but the parameters of acceptable violence have been laid out, no matter how arbitrary.

Nowhere in any of these reports, and nowhere in the ADLs official statement, was Hodgkinsons history of domestic violence noted, a trait thats afar bigger predictor of mass shootings than liberal ideology. Also left unmentioned was that in addition to being a Sanders fan, Hodgkinson wasobsessedwith the Trump-Russia collusion theory, a narrative that spans the center-left to the neocon right. Hodgkinson had to be jammed into a vague far left label and any evidence that ran counter to this narrative was ignored by both the ADL and the reports its quotes help populate.

Smearing Black Lives Matter activists

Another tendency of the ADL is to smear Black Lives Matter activists who couple their struggle with those of the Palestinians.

In an op-edlast weekin Time magazine titled Anti-Semitism Is Creeping Into Progressivism, ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt went out of his way to smear the Movement For Black Lives, a confederation of grassroots Black Lives Matter organizations, as anti-Semitic:

Last summer, a plank in the platform of the Movement for Black Lives bizarrely accused Israel of genocide. . .We were outraged by the baseless accusations made against Israel in the M4BL platform released last summer.

Nowhere in his drive-by potshot does Greenblatt specify what he found objectionable, other than vaguely alluding to the Movement for Black Lives claim that Israel was committing genocide against the Palestinian people.

No rebuke is necessary, no understanding of the broader context of their grievance. M4BL had a 32,000-word manifesto and put Israels violence against the Palestinians in the broader context of U.S. military aggression against black and brown people throughout the globe, a common anti-imperialist critique leveled by everyone from Noam Chomsky to Malcolm X. Whether or not the charge of genocide is appropriate is debatable, but theres no evidence it was coming from a place of hatred against Jews.

But so it goes with the ADL which, by its own admission, makes little distinction between criticizing Israel and libeling Jewish people. It allows for legitimate criticism of Israel around the margins, but never clearly defines what this is or how polite nudging among liberals will ever compel right-wing forces within Israel to cease settlement activity or recognize Palestinians right to self-determination.

Anti-BDS lobbying

The ADL has a history of doubling as a pro-Israel public relations firm. Earlier this year, the ADL co-authored a report with hard line Israeli think tank Reut Institute highlighting how to combat the growing Palestinian solidarity movement and establish what they called a pro-Israel network to defend the legitimacy of Israel as Jewish state.

Does this sound like the activities of a civil rights organization or a lobby acting on behalf of a nation-state? To the ADL, its both it makes little distinction between Zionism and Judaism and thus little distinction between meaningful criticism of Israel and irrational hatred of Jews. Nonetheless, its ideological aims are clear. While ADL does do important workhighlighting and documentingright-wing extremism, its broader aim is running spin for Israel. A search of the ADL website makes this clear. Israel returns 29,300 results, whereas white supremacist returns 6,560, KKK 777, African American 2,490, and islamophobia a paltry 361.

ADL president Greenblatt spends a considerable amount of time attacking the boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) movement designed to isolate Israel over its 50-year military occupation of the West Bank. So lets see BDS for what it is, he wrote last year, a continuation, a modern version if you will, of an irrational hatred of the Jewish people.

Greenblatts smear continues:

Linda Sarsour, a leader of the womens rights movement, has lambasted Zionismas incompatible with feminism and advocates for the exclusion of pro-Israel Jews from activist groups. And some in the anti-Israel movement have accused Israel of pink-washing, claiming that Israel and its supporters celebrate freedoms enjoyed by the LGBTQ community in Israel to divert attention from Israels treatment of the Palestinians.

For an organization like the Anti-Defamation League, which was founded both to combat anti-Semitism and protect the Jewish people but also to secure justice and fair treatment to all Americans, these manifestations are upsetting.

Nowhere does not Greenblatt specify what Sarsour or critics of pink washing said that was anti-Semitic. He just asserts they are and and moves on. The reason he doesnt, of course, is that to drill down on their arguments one would see Sarsours criticism of Zionism isnt rooted in hate, but rather an objection to a specific ideology and the policies of a specific country. Instead Greenblatt is given free rein to pin on her and other activists the most vile of labels without consequence.

The BDS movement rose out of necessity. With an automatic U.S. veto at the U.N. on behalf of Israel, a corrupt Israeli-sanctioned Palestinian leadership with little legitimacy and 50 years of humiliating military occupation, Palestinians had no other recourse. Despite vague, decades-long appeals to a bilateral peace process which the ADL always insists they try Jewish settlements in Palestine grow geometrically, rendering a contiguous Palestinian state a physical impossibility. Greenblatt puts the bulk of the blame on Palestinians he says have practiced rejectionism, whatever that means. Meanwhile, the occupation goes on and the lack of progress is always blamed on some broad moral failing within Palestinian society manifested as mindless anti-Semitism.

Denounce terrorism and practice nonviolence, Palestinians are told. After doing just this via BDS they are then told that this, itseslf, is racist hate speech. Palestinians cant win and the ADL is on the ideological vanguard setting out to make sure they never can. How, one is compelled to ask, does this serve the cause of civil rights?

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Media allows bogus civil rights group ADL to smear Israel critics and Black Lives Matter activists - Salon

COLLIER COUNTY, Fla -

A Collier County man is facing several charges after a scuffle with sheriff's deputies.

It happened after a routine traffic stop Wednesday for a seat belt violation at the corner of 47th Street Southwest and 25th Avenue Southwest.

"At the beginning everything was quiet, and turned violent," said Ben Gonzalez, who witnessed the confrontation.

According to the police report 34-year-old Anthony Denson Jr. asked deputies "Why the F*** did you stop me?"

When the deputy asked him for his license, registration and insurance, he told them he was afraid to reach into the glove compartment because he would be shot.

The deputy then ordered Denson out of the car so he can arrest him for obstruction of justice after he wouldn't give him his driver information.

"They kind of got physical, started arguing, fighting with the guy," said Gonzalez.

He watched from a distance as Denson fought with deputies, throwing one of them onto the hood of his car as he tried to cuff him.

Once Denson was restrained he yelled "Black Lives Matter" on his way to the jail.

Once he arrived he told deputies: "If I get out tonight that officer is going to get it, I will get him." And continued to yell "Black Lives Matter.

"It surprised me, I've never seen this in the neighborhood, I lived for not too long in the neighborhood and you don't see this often," said Gonzalez.

Denson is facing several charges including threatening to kill a law enforcement officer.

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Suspect yells "Black Lives Matter" on the way to jail - Fox 4

Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Network, leads a gathering at The Underground Museum in Los Angeles in memory of Charleena Lyles and other police shooting victims. Michael Radcliffe/NPR hide caption

Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Network, leads a gathering at The Underground Museum in Los Angeles in memory of Charleena Lyles and other police shooting victims.

It's been almost four years since Patrisse Khan-Cullors helped birth the hashtag #blacklivesmatter. Those three words gained national attention for demonstrations against police brutality and grew into a movement.

But progress has been slow, admits Khan-Cullors, a Los Angeles-based activist who co-founded the Black Lives Matter Network.

"The local is where the work is. If we're looking at just the national, it's pretty devastating. But if you zoom into cities, to towns, to rural areas, people are fighting back and people are winning," she says, pointing to one example in Jackson, Miss., where voters recently elected a progressive new mayor in the Deep South.

Other Black Lives Matter activists around the country, who are part of a decentralized movement, are also focusing on local activism.

"We go to locations where people generally ... don't have to think about or don't want to think about white supremacy and patriarchy and how that's affecting black people," says Mike Bento, an organizer with New York's NYC Shut It Down, a group which considers itself part of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Mike Bento (center), an organizer with NYC Shut It Down, leads a march in honor of a black transgender person who was recently killed in New York City. Hansi Lo Wang/NPR hide caption

Mike Bento (center), an organizer with NYC Shut It Down, leads a march in honor of a black transgender person who was recently killed in New York City.

The group started holding weekly demonstrations around New York City two years ago to honor mainly people who have died at the hands of police. On a recent Monday evening, about two dozen protesters gathered outside a restaurant in downtown Manhattan, where diners sipped wine at bistro tables on the sidewalk.

While a protester held up a sign saying "MX BOSTICK, REST IN POWER," Bento started a call-and-response describing the recent death of a black transgender person who was found unconscious on a sidewalk after being struck in the head in May. A suspect is now charged with manslaughter.

"We're here tonight because while you are dining, black trans people are dying," Bento shouted at the restaurant patrons.

Still, it's not all about protesting in the streets. Sometimes, Bento and other Black Lives Matter activists go underground and into New York's subways. They pay for people who would otherwise try to get on a train without paying, which could earn them a misdemeanor.

"This is all connected," Bento says. "This is all part of how we get a system of mass incarceration. And so we start with basic things that we can do to keep our brothers and sisters out of that system."

Other basic forms of activism include standing outside the courthouse to support people charged with low-level offenses and helping to serve dinner to homeless people.

In Washington, D.C., April Goggans, an organizer with Black Lives Matter DC, is holding meetings with other local activist groups to figure out how they can make communities facing high crime rates more self-sufficient.

Goggans says she's been following the recent police shooting of Charleena Lyles, a pregnant, black mother in Seattle, as well as the not-guilty verdicts for police officers involved in the deaths of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Sylville Smith in Wisconsin. They've all reinforced her conclusion, she says, that any type of reform will not improve police departments.

"I don't even know that I would put my effort into charging and imprisoning individual police officers because it's just not gonna happen very much and that kind of justice, it's not a deterrent for other police officers," says Goggans, who says she is focused on getting rid of the current system of policing in the long term.

Khan-Cullors says she is also taking a long view when thinking about how the Black Lives Matter movement will tackle issues black people have been living with for decades.

"We are not new to police brutality. We are not new to police violence. We are not new to people dying inside jail cells and prisons," she says. "What is new is the visibility. What is new is that they become headlines."

Khan-Cullors helped birth the hashtag #blacklivesmatter. Starting campaigns to change laws and policy, she says, is the obvious work. But staying together as a movement is harder. Michael Radcliffe/NPR hide caption

Khan-Cullors helped birth the hashtag #blacklivesmatter. Starting campaigns to change laws and policy, she says, is the obvious work. But staying together as a movement is harder.

She says she's always been concerned about how the movement can sustain itself when social media is inundated with photos and videos of black people killed at the hands of police and victories for the movement seem hard to come by.

With the U.S. Supreme Court reinstating part of President Donald Trump's travel ban and Congress considering substantial cuts to Medicaid, she's worried that the current political environment is becoming even more overwhelming for activists.

"If you can't fight the state, and you can't fight for the things that you need, then you take it out on each other," says Khan-Cullors, who cautions that infighting could destroy the movement.

That's why gatherings like a recent candle-light vigil at The Underground Museum in Los Angeles for Lyles and other police shooting victims are important to Khan-Cullors, who wants to keep activists energized and encourage them to work together.

Starting campaigns to change laws and policy, she says, is the obvious work. But staying together as a movement, that's the hard stuff.

Shaheen Ainpour contributed to this report from Washington, D.C.; Michael Radcliffe contributed from Los Angeles.

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Amid 'Devastating' Progress Nationally, Black Lives Matter Engages ... - NPR

The two ladies left from the original TLC trio, Chili and T-Boz, have had some shaky sentiments on social politics, namely the Black Lives Matter movement.

After the devastating shock of hip-hop icon Prodigys death and the cause of his fatality, however, T-Boz is shaking a finger at the movement for what she believes is a cold shoulder to other issues affecting the Black community.

Spoken via Twitter, T-Boz sent her condolences to Prodigys family and discussed raising awareness for the disease that claimed the Mobb Deep legends life: sickle-cell anemia. Among other groups she believes should be collaborating with her to stand at the forefront of issues like sickle-cell anemia, such as Sickle Cell Disease Association of America (SCDAA), she argued that BLM also has a stake in the problem, too.

I hate it takes the death of a celebrity to bring even more notice to something I talk about almost in every interview for 25 years, she tweeted. #BLM THIS disease is PREDOMINATELY an African-American disease so black lives have mattered over more than just one topic or issue.

As a socially-activating movement that advocates against systemic racism, health-institutionalized included, Black Lives Matter has long stood on the grounds of providing social, financial, political and racial equity and justice among the Black community in America.

We need to support one another over all compassion for people as human beings, not objects and lab rats, but help to find a cure, she said. SAVE OURSELVES.

See all of T-Bozs thoughts on the matter in the tweets below.

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TLC's T-Boz is Calling Out the Black Lives Matter Movement - BET

A bill passed unanimously last month by the New Jersey Assembly that would require schools to teach young people how to properly interact with police and avert confrontations mirrors The Talk that many African Americans say they often have with their children, according to a sponsor of the legislation.

But the effort is drawing resistance from Black Lives Matter.

The group and other critics fear that the bill, approved during a time of high-profile police-involved shootings and the failed prosecutions of many of the officers involved, would do little more than create a scapegoat for police brutality.

Look, Im just trying to save lives, said Assemblywoman Sheila Oliver (D., Essex), co-sponsor, of the motivation behind Assembly bill A-1114, which passed in a 76-0 vote on June 22.

Alexis Miller, lead organizer for the Paterson, N.J., chapter of Black Lives Matter, said the groupis wary of the bills concept. Black Lives Matter is calling for a no vote when the legislation reaches the Senate.

Camden County Police officers grilled hot dogs and hamburgers and gave away T-shirts and stickers in South Camden on Saturday, July 1, 2017. The event was part of outreach efforts by the police department to build bonds with the community. Nazheem Williams, 11, proudly tries on one of the officers hats.

She said the bill ultimately places the onus of police interactions squarely on citizens while allowing police to continue to evade accountability. Black Lives Matter is urging its supporters to sign a petition against the legislation and to call their state senators to discourage them from approving it.

This bill is clearly designed to create a scapegoat for police brutality, and that scapegoat is New Jerseys children, Miller said. It does nothing to address the laws already in place that protect the immense power of police departments. Students children are expected to master the idea of respectability politics in order to protect themselves from officers.

Oliver, who is African American, said The Talk has long been a private conversation that many black parents have had with their children, especially as the children become old enough to begin driving and may have their first interactions with police in traffic stops.

A lot of times kids want to know if they get stopped if they have the right to call their parents, Oliver said. Can the police search their car? Do they have to get out of the car? They have questions like these with the backdrop of being black and interacting with police. There may be a lot of fear instilled in them, a lot of potential panic.

Bringing that discussion into the schools and out into the open may ultimately better prepare children of all races and ethnicities for such encounters, she said.

This is not a bill to teach kids to be subservient to police but to empower children, and ultimately adults, about their rights and their role in interacting with law enforcement, Oliver said. I think young people need to have their consciousness raised about these issues.

Akin Olla, organizer of the Tubman-Hampton Collective, based in New Brunswick, said the bill continues to allow police to evade accountability and is not a means of stemming police brutality.

Olla was among about 75 people who protested against the bill at the Statehouse on Friday.

We want the public to really look at this bill and see it for what it is, Olla said. If it does nothing beyond a civics lesson [about making] the streets safer for everyone, its pointless.

Not until activists criticized the bill as previously written was a new component added that would require that students also be taught about their rights when interacting with officers.

The American Civil Liberties Union said it worked with Oliver and other legislators to recast the original version of the bill, introduced in 2016, that would have required only that children be taught about the role and responsibilities of law enforcement in providing public safety and an individuals responsibilities to comply with a directive from police. The new version would require that students be taught about the officers responsibility and proper behavior, their own rights as citizens, and how to file a complaint, if necessary.

The bill has come a long way in its current form from where it was, said Portia Allen-Kyle, a lawyer for the ACLUs New Jersey office in Newark. As it stands now, we feel that there is an opportunity here to really empower students and educate them about their rights.

Allen-Kyle said the agency will keep close tabs on how the curriculum is developed by a specially appointed committee if the bill is signed into law.

The vote in the Assembly came a week after Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of second-degree manslaughter inthe July 2016 fatal shooting of Philando Castile during a traffic stop after the motorist informed the police officer he possessed an open-carry permit for a gun he was carrying. The shooting, which occurred within seven seconds of Castiles having informed the policeman about the gun, was captured on cellphone video by the victims girlfriend, who was in the car with her 4-year-old daughter.

According to the Washington Post, 963 people were killed by police in the United States in 2016, down from 991 in 2015. On Saturday, in a mid-year report, the Post said there were 492 police-involved killings in the first six months of this year.

Of those killed in 2016, 169 were unarmed civilians, six were under age 18, and 36 of them were between the ages of 18 and 24, according to the ACLU.

There were also 135 police officers killed in the line of duty last year, the moston-the-job officer fatalities in five years, according to an analysis by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.

Law enforcement officials and legislators across the country are looking into ways to work with communities to try to stem the tide of bloodshed.

Texas recently enacted a measure to require high school students, as part of their drivers education classes, to learn how to conduct themselves during a traffic stop. Illinois and Virginia have passed legislation mandating that drivers ed courses for all ages include that information. Mississippi, North Carolina, and Rhode Island are considering similar laws.

Oliver said the number of police-involved shootings has created mistrust of police in communities across the nation, and her bill, which must also pass in the Senate and be signed by the governor to become law, is meant to help rebuild trust in police while simultaneously empowering the communities they serve.

Oliver said currentprograms that visit schools and encourage police and youth interaction sponsored by organizations such as the New York Civil Liberties Union, the National Association of Black Law Enforcement Officers, and Jack and Jill of America, a service group formed during the Great Depression to strengthen African American children have helped, but are not enough.

Patrick Colligan, president of the New Jersey State Policemens Benevolent Association said his organization supports the Oliver legislation and calls it a good policy that can benefit everyone.

There is no training no learning about something that cant be a benefit to everyone involved, Colligan said. I think something like this provides everyone with the opportunity to look at, and perhaps understand, the situation from an entirely different perspective.

To restore balance in schools, teacher code of ethics needed Jun 21 - 12:15 PM

A lesson in black liberation for Philly students May 30 - 5:53 PM

Published: July 3, 2017 5:54 AM EDT

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Black Lives balks as NJ lawmaker wants to legislate 'The Talk' - Philly.com