Posts Tagged ‘Brandon Darby’

Publius

#OccupyWallStreet: We Could See ‘Mace Day’ Coming

by Publius

In the latest video from Lee Stranahan and Brandon Darby’s visit to Zuccotti Park, an activist who has been at Occupy Wall Street “since Day One” talks about why he did not participate in the “mace day” protest in which a group of activists were pepper-sprayed by police.

He says that he could tell activists wanted to “instigate fights with the cops,” and did not want to participate in a military “campaign” that would have felt like a “glory-seeking” expedition.

Searching for the words, he says: “You don’t have to be a fortune-teller to know… that if you leave food out, it goes bad.”


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Publius

Unhappy Campers at #OccupyWallStreet: ‘I’m Leaving Today, Because This Is No Longer Safe’

by Publius

Think it’s a worker’s paradise at Occupy Wall Street? Guess again –there’s strife, dissent and violence. Two people who have been at Zuccotti Park from day one discuss how the internal order hasn’t worked for them.

Sage: I’m leaving today, because this is no longer safe. Like, I had somebody–

Q: I’m still recording.

Sage: Sure. I had somebody in our sanitation team take a swing at me. And then I had like three really calm, friendly individuals telling me that they–that they didn’t just take a swing at me. It was, like, I was just…


Channing: Yeah. I had beef with sanitation ’cause they took my s*** down. They took my, like tent thing down that I made.

Sage: Oh, sure, sure, I was just saying that.

Q: But yeah, yeah, all I–

Channing: Yeah, no–they took my stuff. They–I had like a little tarp tent at the end of the park. Their whole thing was they were trying to clean out some of the people that were doing, like, drugs and stuff. But they started with–

Q: Drugs?

Channing: Yeah. Oh, my God. But they started with my tent. And, like, they threw away my toiletries, my food, and, like, a bunch of papers I had, that were really important from the hospital. And then, like, I tried to get them to help me, like, rebuild the tent or something, and they’re like, “We didn’t do it, it wasn’t us,” and I’m like, “I saw you doing it.” Like, I got called from direct action because they doing it.

Q: But I’ve got–

Sage: Yeah, so–

Q: –let me get you to just finish that, because–

Sage: I’m just gonna say the same thing. I don’t call it corruption anymore, ’cause corruption is when a good thing goes bad. And what I think this is–people go, “Oh, they’re so stupid.” No, they’re not. They’re smart, for their purposes, which are not for this camp to function as a community. (more…)

Andrew Breitbart

‘Crowdsource’ This: Emails Expose #OccupyWallStreet Conspiracy to ‘Destabalize’ Global Markets, Governments

by Andrew Breitbart

We’re in this for the long haul. There are no “solutions” that can be presented quickly to make us go away. And so there will be moments where our presence is no longer an uncomfortable and unknown variable, but rather is normalized and integrated. It’s in those moments that we have to push the envelop [sic], pry open the space of possibility even farther. We go as far as we can to destabalize [sic], but maintain momentum. And when that’s the new “normal” then we go farther. That’s how change happens, how we shift the terrain and the terms of the game.

- Email in “Occupy” archive, “Re: Can OWS be turned into a Democratic Party Movement?”; Wednesday, October 12, 2011

In keeping with the new media notion of crowdsourcing–enthusiastically embraced by the mainstream media when trawling through Sarah Palin’s emails–Big Government will be providing readers later today with links to a document drop consisting of thousands of emails.

The email archive, created by a private cyber security researcher, appears to contain messages shared by the left’s anarcho-socialist activists during the strategic and daily tactical planning of the “Occupy Wall Street” and broader “Occupy” campaign this fall.

Big Government received a tip about the existence of the archive, and we were able to contact the individual who compiled and posted it. He will describe the archive, and how he obtained the emails, later this morning exclusively on Big Government.

Through “crowdsourcing,” the media and the public will then be able to discover the truth behind the “Occupy” movement.

The archive includes emails, for example, from radical anarchist organizer Lisa Fithian, who was profiled earlier this week at Big Government, and who is one of the leading organizers behind the Occupy movement.

In one email, dated October 1, Fithian applauds the launch of “occupations” throughout the country. She also highlights an ACORN-style illegal home occupation in California, linking to a television news story that reveals the involvement of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), which is apparently the reconstituted version of ACORN in California.


OWSMailList_0001-3

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retracto

BREAKING: FBI Whistleblower, Big Government Contributor Brandon Darby Sues New York Times for Defamation and Libel

by Retracto, the Correction Alpaca

Last month, New York Times reporter James C. McKinley Jr. falsely reported that an FBI informant who helped to thwart a left-wing terrorist plot had actually encouraged the conspiracy. In the article “Anarchist Ties Seen in ’08 Bombing of Texas Governor’s Mansion” published February 22, 2011 online and in the print edition a day later, the Times indicated that former left-wing activist and BigGovernment.com contributor Brandon Darby urged two anarchists to firebomb the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota [emphasis added]:

Yet federal agents accused two men from these circles of plotting to make firebombs and hurl them at police cars during the convention. An F.B.I informant from Austin, Brandon Darby, was traveling with the group and told the authorities of the plot, which he had encouraged.

We brought this to your attention on February 24th when we asked the Times to correct the record. We noted that according to the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota, the assertion Darby “encouraged” the plot was patently false. On February 27th, we brought in Matthew Vadum, an expert on the circumstances surrounding the plot, to provide broader context to the Times’s smear.

Still, the error remained uncorrected.

Then, last week, a source informed BigJournalism.com that the New York Times reporter acknowledged the charge they published against Darby was in fact bogus, but still, the Times did not correct the article.

As of this writing, the false charge against Darby remains in tact.

Today, Brandon Darby filed a lawsuit against New York Times for libel and defamation. An official letter from Mr. Darby:



Darby PDF Fix

We’ll be following the story as it develops on BigJournalism.com and BigGovernment.com.

Matthew Vadum

Why Is the New York Times Shilling for Far-Left Terrorists While Smearing the Patriot Who Exposed Them?

by Matthew Vadum

As a wave of left-wing violence threatens to engulf the nation, why is the progressive New York Times running an ugly campaign of character assassination against a real-life American hero who saved lives and helped to safeguard the nation’s sacred democratic process?

Could it be because the newspaper is sympathetic to the goals of the thuggish community organizers and union goons intimidating state legislatures across America and wants to help advance the liberal-left narrative?

The man with the bull’s eye on his back is Brandon Darby, formerly a far-left community organizer. This heroic defector from the Left stands accused by the New York Times and by angry radical groups of becoming an agent provocateur. Unhinged anarchists across the country would love to get their hands on him.

All over the Internet Darby’s name has been dragged through the mud by the Daily Kos and Crooks and Liars crowd. They accuse him of selling out and pushing the wrongdoers hard enough that he essentially became a co-conspirator. Search for his name with the words traitor, rat, or fink and you’ll see what I mean. (more…)

Matthew Vadum

Citizen Soros: Funding Anti-American Film (Part 3 in a Series)

by Matthew Vadum

(Continued from yesterday)

Recap: Radical funder George Soros’s $1 million gift to Media Matters, a left-wing character assassination machine, underwrites its campaign to stigmatize conservative ideas. For weeks Eric Boehlert of Media Matters attacked Glenn Beck because a disturbed viewer plotted to shoot up the offices of the left-wing Tides Foundation. The shooter, Byron Williams, failed, but in December when a fan of Media Matters, the late Florida school board shooter Clay Duke, wreaked havoc, Boehlert and Media Matters remained silent.

Soros is also bankrolling a documentary that celebrates left-wing terrorists who plotted to napalm Republicans at the 2008 GOP convention in Minnesota. Even worse, you too are bankrolling the film through your taxes.

A trailer for the left-wing film Better This World suggests that it depicts David Guy McKay and Bradley Neil Crowder as idealistic activists who, according to the official blurb, “set out to prove the strength of their political convictions to themselves and their mentor.” In fact McKay and Crowder are convicted domestic terrorists who manufactured instruments of death calculated to inflict maximum pain and bodily harm on people whose political views they disagreed with.

You can be sure that if it was right-wing terrorists who were plotting to attack the Democratic National Convention, whoever foiled the conspiracy would be immortalized in film, literature and song as a savior of democracy.

“If you flip the equation around and it had been a group of conservatives threatening to use force to prevent those on the Left from meeting, everyone would expect the government to infiltrate them and they would also expect the FBI to stop them and charge them with crimes,” said Brandon Darby, who helped the FBI thwart the planned attack. (Darby’s essay on political violence appeared on Big Government over the past weekend. Read it here.)

The movie, which is expected to be released this year, attacks Darby, a true American hero who undermined the conspiracy by alerting the FBI. Filmmakers Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega twist the facts to argue that Darby, a former revolutionary activist, manipulated McKay and Crowder into becoming would-be mass murderers.

It’s an easily disproved lie. During sentencing, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis went out of his way to make a specific legal finding that McKay obstructed justice by falsely accusing Darby of inducing him to manufacture the incendiary devices.

McKay and Crowder had made homemade riot shields and were ready to use them in St. Paul to help demonstrators block streets near the Xcel Energy Center. The goal was to shut down the democratic process by preventing GOP delegates from participating in the convention. The shields were discovered and confiscated.

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Matthew Vadum

Citizen Soros: Suppressing Conservative Ideas (Part 2 in a Series)

by Matthew Vadum

(Continued from yesterday)

Recap: Radical philanthropist George Soros gave $1 million to Media Matters for America, a well-funded slander shop that roots out “conservative misinformation.” It’s all part of his campaign to suppress conservative ideas that stand in the way of pushing America even farther to the left.

The left has been hyperventilating about Beck ever since he moved from CNN to Fox News in early 2009 and quickly became the Obama administration’s most vociferous high-profile critic. In particular, liberals could not abide Beck righteously fulminating against the shadowy Tides Foundation, a pass-through entity that allows wealthy individuals to give to radical causes anonymously.
Eric Boehlert, a so-called senior fellow at Media Matters, seized an opportunity when a deranged would-be shooter named Byron Williams jumped into the headlines last year. After a shootout with the California Highway Patrol, Williams said he had been on his way to shoot up the San Francisco offices of Tides in hopes of sparking a revolution. Williams was never actually much of a threat to Tides. When police pulled him over on a Sunday when the Tides offices were closed, the inept insurrectionist was drunk.

Media Matters argued that Beck had blood on his hands because Williams claimed Beck’s program was one of his favorite TV shows. Boehlert blogged that Beck “has routinely smeared the low-profile entity [i.e. Tides] for being staffed by ‘thugs’ and ‘bullies’ and involved in ‘the nasty of the nastiest,’ like indoctrinating schoolchildren and creating a ‘mass organization to seize power.’” Williams “wasn’t able to open fire inside the offices of the Tides Foundation, an organization ‘nobody knew’ about until Glenn Beck started targeting it.”

Aside from the rhetorical flourishes, Beck had provided a more or less accurate picture of the Tides Foundation, its sister groups, and many of its grant recipients.

As Trevor Loudon wrote in the October 2010 Foundation Watch, “The Tides Foundation and Tides Center are the radical left’s best kept secret. Together they provide tens of millions of dollars annually to some of the most extreme, destructive charities in America. Their money has gone to an assortment of questionable groups including ACORN, Media Matters for America, and the Center for Constitutional Rights.” (The Center was profiled in the September 2006 Organization Trends.)

According to David Horowitz’s online encyclopedia of the left, DiscoverTheNetworks.org, the Tides family of foundations has also funded the violent anarchist group known as the Ruckus Society, United for Peace and Justice (a group headed by pro-Castro activist Leslie Cagan), the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), three of whose executives have been indicted for terrorism-related activities, and the National Lawyers Guild.

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Matthew Vadum

Citizen Soros: Manipulating the Media (Part 1 in a Series)

by Matthew Vadum

He has conquered the world of finance and remains firmly on top of it. He writes bestselling books. He dominates leftist philanthropy. He co-founded the Democracy Alliance, an ultra-secretive billionaires’ club that wants to transform America into a European-style socialist state – or worse. He owns the Democratic Party. Now George Soros, who also fancies himself a philosopher, is positioning himself as a media magnate in order to continue his assault on America’s values and institutions.

Like the protagonist in the classic Orson Welles movie Citizen Kane, Soros can never have enough power. But unlike Charles Foster Kane, the haughty, imperious fictional media mogul, Soros views himself as much more than a mere leader. With a straight face he told reporters, “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” (The Independent – UK, June 3, 1993)

Although markets have helped make him a billionaire several times over, Soros has declared war on capitalism. He blames markets and something he calls “market fundamentalism”— and not the suffocating regulations and high taxes his funding of left-wing groups promotes – for the current economic slowdown. “The entire edifice of global financial markets has been erected on the false premise that markets can be left to their own devices, we must find a new paradigm and rebuild from the ground up.”

“The system we have now has actually broken down, only we haven’t quite recognized it and so you need to create a new one and this is the time to do it,” Soros told the Financial Times in 2009. In an interview with Der Spiegel the previous year Soros said European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now. I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful – but also very harmful to our society.”

Only in the twisted messianic fantasies of this octogenarian billionaire whose demeanor is that of a James Bond villain could such phantom armies of marauding free market fundamentalists wreak havoc on America. Perhaps these were the same laissez-faire legionnaires who brought us Sarbanes-Oxley, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government bailouts of private industry, farm subsidies, ethanol mandates, smart growth, and the disastrous Community Reinvestment Act in recent decades.

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Matthew Vadum

The Terrorist-Loving Left Is Trying To Destroy Me: Radical-Turned-Hero Brandon Darby on the G. Gordon Liddy Show

by Matthew Vadum

The hardcore haters of the criminal left don’t forgive – and they don’t forget.

Ever since he saved the lives of who-knows-how-many Americans by thwarting the planned fire-bombing of the 2008 Republican convention by left-wing terrorists, Brandon Darby’s been a target.

Left-wing activists have tried to destroy Darby in the court of public opinion. It’s standard operating procedure when you become an informant and turn against the terrorist left, he says.

BrandonDarby_poster

Darby and I sat down with G. Gordon Liddy on the “G. Gordon Liddy Show.”

Darby summed up the left’s pursuit of him this way:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, they have a program called the human source program, and I’m sure you’ve very aware of the informant program. And these are men and women, some of them have been in trouble and are trying to avoid charges but the vast majority are simply men and women like you and me who have discovered something or realized something bad, they brought information to the FBI and then in order to serve their country they decide to work undercover with the FBI on that matter and when they do so and their name becomes public, defense attorneys and the left have a tendency to completely try to destroy their character before they testify as to what they know and the information they hold.

And this is something that has happened throughout time and it’s something that’s happening right now and when that occurs those informants, for lack of a better term, usually end up changing their name, they usually end up very depressed or sad and they question what they’ve done because they’re attacked so heavily by the New York Times and by the other mainstream media establishment and that’s what I went through. I went through that.

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Matthew Vadum

EXCLUSIVE: Radical Awakening: From America Hater to Hero

by Matthew Vadum

From the April 2010 issue of Townhall magazine: Brandon Darby learned something from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Once a hard-core radical who sided with progressive revolutionaries, Darby prevented a left-wing terrorist attack on the 2008 GOP convention. Now, this America-loving patriot is the target of the domestic extremists he once called “friends.”

hater

Did you know that a courageous former radical helped to avert a planned left-wing terrorist attack at the 2008 Republican National Convention that might have killed who knows how many Americans?

Neither did I until recently.

That’s because if you disrupt a terrorist attack on Americans by Islamic fundamentalists as Northwest Flight 253 passenger Jasper Schuringa did on Christmas Day, you’re a hero; however, if you take the initiative to undermine a terrorist attack on Americans by supposedly well intentioned left-wing fundamentalists, you might as well be a terrorist yourself.

Brandon Darby, who in recent years also refused leftists’ invitations to get involved in Venezuelan communist subversion here in America and in anti-Israeli terrorism in Palestine, learned this unpalatable truth the hard way.

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Mike Flynn

ACORN’s Lifeblood

by Mike Flynn

The investigative journalism of James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles has opened yet another chapter in the corruption-tinged history of ACORN. For most Americans, ACORN is a political organization, running voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts at election-time. With a rather alarming regularity, the pop into the news cycle with allegations of fraudulent voter registrations and, even, voter fraud.

No doubt, the recent undercover videos from ACORN Housing offices in Baltimore, Washington, DC, and, now, New York, are shocking. I’m a long-time observer of ACORNapalooza, and I found myself in stunned, silent disbelief as the interviews unfolded. It wasn’t just the subject-matter. No, it was the fact that not one ACORN employee seemed to even flinch when presented with the ridiculous scenario of a pimp and a prostitute trying to get a mortgage to house a dozen or so underage El Salvadoran child-prostitutes. They just oozed seamlessly into conjecture about whether or not a child prostitute could be considered a “dependent” for tax purposes. What do these employees hear on a daily basis that this scenario was just another problem that needed fixing?

But even these videos, no matter how disturbing, are just part of the ACORN story. As, too, is the pattern of problems with the voter registration system. This past weekend, Brandon Darby discussed his experience with ACORN when he was coordinating relief in post-Katrina New Orleans. ACORN saw New Orleans as their “turf” and targeted Brandon and his colleagues, trying to intimidate them to either submit to their “leadership” or leave. This is a pattern readers of Big Government will soon hear more about.

In fact, in the coming days, you’ll learn a lot about the full ACORN story. It is an amazing story, in its own way. After waiting years for the mainstream media to finally peel back the ACORN layers, Big Government will have to take it upon itself to do so.

To start this, we are publishing an internal quasi-employee manual Big Government has obtained. Given to all ACORN employees, it isn’t your normal manual. It doesn’t discuss things like sick leave or vacation time, but, rather, as the title states, the “Principles and Foundations of ACORN.” How an organization communicates with the public is important. How it communicates to its own employees, however, provides a richer understanding of an organization’s nature.

The whole thing is worth a read. I draw your attention to just one sentence (ACORN emphasizes it with italics):

ACORN’s lifeblood is conflicts with targets outside the organization.

Think about that. ACORN’s lifeblood isn’t empowering disadvantaged communities nor lifting people out of poverty. It isn’t concerned about increasing economic growth to improve the lives of its members. It’s lifeblood is conflict. Conflict with targets. It actually thinks of the world outside itself as targets.

It explains a lot:


Principles and Foundations of Acorn