Six of the 200 alt-left Antifa extremists arrested on May 1st in Paris were presented before a court this week, with several of the alleged rioters coming from upper-middle class backgrounds.

Around 1,200 masked, alt-left Antifa militants took part in the rioting in Paris earlier this month, which saw several shops heavily vandalised and police officers attacked with firebombs.

Six of the 200 or so extremists arrested were brought to a Paris court this week on charges related to the rioting, allowing the public to see the backgrounds of the people who attempt to remain anonymous through their black bloc tactics, Franceinfo reports.

Several of the arrested extremists have been revealed to have privileged backgrounds, including one 29-year-old who earns as much as 4,200 euros per month as a consultant, and another who is the son of a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research, the country’s largest governmental research organisation.

PICTURES: Paris Burns as May Day Protests Turn to Riots https://t.co/FDvwxbc9rx

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) May 2, 2018

A young woman was also among the alt-left extremists, and admitted to lying about her identity to the police who arrested her, claiming that her name was Anne and that she was from Sweden when her name was actually Andrea and she is French.

The son of the researcher also admitted to giving a fake name to the police, and both were handed four weeks of pre-trial detention by the presiding judge as a result.

The profile of alt-left Antifa extremists often counters the group’s “working class” claims and, more often than not, according to Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the majority are men who live with their parents and do not have girlfriends.

Despite their often upper-middle-class origins, alt-left extremists have become more radical across Europe in recent months.

In France, several Antifa members who travelled to northern Syria recently threatened to return to fight the French state, targetting government officials, police, and intelligence officers while posing in masks with automatic rifles.

The group also said they would sabotage infrastructure in their war against the French state, in response to a series of evictions of alt-left activists occupying universities and other buildings.

In Germany, Antifa extremists injured hundreds of police at last year’s Hamburg G20 summit, and two members of the group were found in possession of a mobile bomb factory and chemicals used to make explosives recently.

 Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com 

 

To the retail giant Amazon, “defending freedom” are dirty words.

That’s the takeaway from the behemoth’s decision to ban the conservative legal firm Alliance Defending Freedom from its fundraising options on the word of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a leftist activist group that uses its mainstream media popularity to remorselessly attack conservative organizations.

But the Alliance Defending Freedom is fighting back.

At issue is Amazon’s reliance on the Southern Poverty Law Center for determining which groups are eligible to participate in a fundraising set-up known as AmazonSmile, which allows its customers to donate “.05 percent of the purchase price of eligible products” to an approved charitable organization.

Within the past several weeks, Alliance Defending Freedom learned that it was no longer one of the approved organizations eligible for donations, according to a news release on the ADF’s website, because the Southern Poverty Law Center was in charge of making the decision.

As the Daily Wire reported, potential donors who tried to use AmazonSmile to give money to ADF received the following message:

“The AmazonSmile Participation Agreement states that certain categories of organizations are not eligible to participate in AmazonSmile. We rely on the Southern Poverty Law Center to determine which charities are in certain ineligible categories. You have been excluded from the AmazonSmile program because the Southern Poverty Law Center lists Alliance Defending Freedom in an ineligible category.”

The ADF is mounting a public relations campaign against the Amazon decision, including publicizing a letter from its president, Michael Farris, to Amazon demanding that Amazon be more transparent about its practices.

“If you are going to rely on a discredited partisan organization like the SPLC to determine who is eligible to participate in AmazonSmile, you should disclose that in your policy and to your customers. Millions of Americans share our beliefs and thousands of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious organizations subscribe to them as well,” he wrote.

“Your customers have a right to know that you’ve placed such an organization as the gatekeeper to participation in a charitable program.”

On Thursday, Kristen Waggoner, senior vice president of the ADF, made an appearance on Fox News to call the decision out the SPLC in brutal terms.

Check out the interview here:

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Waggoner pointed out that the ADF is a legal group that has successfully argued cases in front of the Supreme Court of the United States. (Just last year, it won the precedent-setting Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer” case that found states can’t discriminate against schools because of their religious affiliations.)

The SPLC, on the other hand, she said, “is essentially a group that’s designed to slander other groups, and it’s a direct mail marketing scheme designed to pocket millions and millions of dollars off-shore.”

“They’ve publicly stated they are not a neutral watchdog group, but instead only go after those on the right, and their purpose is to destroy groups that disagree with their leftist ideology,” she said.

Anyone who’s even vaguely followed the news regarding the Southern Poverty Law Center recently knows what Waggoner is talking about.

While its origins may well have been the noble civil rights organization it pretends to be today, SPLC has long since evolved into little more than a weaponized arm of the militant leftst movement, branding conservative organizations as “hate groups.”

Sometimes those activities are simply dangerous – like the case of the “map” the SPLC published of facilities in the United States bearing the names of Confederate figures, deliberately putting school children at risk for “progressive” violence.

Sometimes they lead to violence, like the 2012 attack by a gunman on the conservative Family Research Council’s headquarters in Washington. The gunman, Floyd Lee Corkins II, told investigators he launched the attack because the SPLC had identified the Family Research Council as a “hate group,” according to the Washington Examiner.

And this is the organization Amazon is relying on to decide what groups are worthy of participation in its fundraising application?

Amazon is a private company, and if its CEO Jeff Bezos wants to rely on a soulless, cynical outfit like the Southern Poverty Law Center to make decisions about what charities are eligible for his organization’s help, that is, literally, his business.

But he should understand there could be business ramifications among millions of Americans who realize that to Amazon, “defending freedom” are dirty words.

They’re not to most Americans. And that could end up costing Amazon more than it expects.

What do you think? Scroll down to comment below!

This grandfather might walk with a cane, but he’s quick on his feet.

A video of a Columbus, Ohio, police chase is lighting up social media this week thanks to the actions of a man visiting a public library with his granddaughter, and the action he took to help cops catch an armed suspect fleeing police.

It’s about as smooth as it gets.

Check out a YouTube video here, compiled from police dash cams, body cams, and surveillance cameras from inside the library.

We should all be so agile.

According to a Facebook post from the Columbus Police Department, the incident took place on April 3 when the man identified only as “Bill” was outside the library preparing to leave.

He heard police sirens and saw the chase heading his way. He had to make a choice.

“’Bill’ assessed the situation as fast as he could, cane in hand,” the police post stated. “He heard officers yelling multiple times to drop the gun. ‘Bill’ says with officers lagging a bit behind the suspect he did what he could to help them nab the armed man.

“’Bill’ stuck out a back leg to trip the suspect who was running from police. That move likely saved the 18-year-old suspect’s life. It also allowed police to catch up to him to make an arrest.”

The incident might have been a month old, but social media users were cheering Friday when it was getting publicized on Fox News; heroes like this are hard not to like.

WAY TO GO! Now THAT’S #BackingTheBlue!

— Dwight Worden (@shootist11263) May 5, 2018

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That back step trip up move, on the POS was perfectly timed and outstanding.

You’re a hero grandpa! pic.twitter.com/wnXkI9SM3h

— Dr. Antlerdance (@Ghostrider189) May 5, 2018

That’s just so awesome! A citizen stepping in (or out lol) to assist police in stopping a dangerous thug! More people should have that mindset over trying to damage them!

— MyKidzDad (@KJVBAPTIST) May 5, 2018

That last post nails it. At a time when abusing cops is almost a routine part of any publicized arrest, the man showed how it can work when cops and civilians are on the same side. Too many liberals obviously don’t realize it, but law enforcement needs help sometimes, too.

According to the police Facebook report, cops found a Glock 9 mm handgun loaded with a high-capacity extended magazine carrying 29 bullets.

It wasn’t clear why police were chasing the man, identified as Shawn Briggs, in the first place, but the Facebook report notes that he already has a lengthy criminal record. Since that’s not easy to do by the age of 18, he’s clearly been headed for trouble for some time.

He just didn’t realize he was heading for it when he ran straight at a grandfather with a cane outside a public library.

What do you think? Scroll down to comment below!

No border wall funding, no border. That’s the ultimatum Donald Trump seemed to be giving Democrats at an event in Cleveland this weekend.

On Saturday, the president appeared at a round-table to discuss tax reform, but the conversation quickly turned to the problems with immigration and the border.

Trump stated that more funding was needed to build his much-touted wall — and hinted that if lawmakers didn’t provide it, the entire border could be shut down.

“We are fixing and building walls, but we need much more money and we are doing the job,” Trump said, according to The Washington Examiner.

“We may have to close up our country to get this straight because we either have a country or we don’t,” he continued.

As part of his remarks, the president pointed a finger at Democrats and suggested that their “catch and release” illegal immigration policies were allowing criminals to escape justice.

“You catch ’em, and then you release ’em,” he said.

One of the obstacles to constructing the proposed border wall is something Trump understands very well: dollars.

“We are going to demand Congress secure the border in the upcoming CR. Illegal immigration must end!” Trump recently declared. Funding is the key, but so far Congress has dragged its feet on the issue.

Lawmakers approved $1.6 billion in funding for the border wall as part of the “omnibus” spending bill, but this is just a drop in the bucket compared to the $25 billion amount that the president requested.

The Cleveland remark might have been off the cuff, but Trump said similar words during another stop in Michigan.

“That frustration manifested itself into threats to shut down the government over the issue. During a rally in Michigan last Saturday, Trump threatened to ‘close down the country’ for funds for his border wall,” reported The Examiner.

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Of course, how you would shut down the border without having sufficient border security in the first place is a bit of a mystery. It’s a catch-22: If locking down the entire border for political leverage could be done, the president wouldn’t need to build the wall.

It’s possible Trump was alluding to an overall government shutdown, but that situation is something that both Republicans and Democrats want to avoid.

Either way, it increasingly seems like the president has the pulse of the people and knows there’s support for border security, but lawmakers don’t want to back him on this issue.

The result right now is a sort of stalemate. Trump will no doubt continue to raise the issue whenever possible, as he has since long before the election … but it will take more than words and campaign rallies to make this happen.

Maybe Trump does have a trick or two up his sleeve to push Congress into action — we certainly wouldn’t put it past him.

What do you think? Scroll down to comment below!