Month: June 2020

One of the most high-profile founders of the Black Lives Matter organization – now one of the most influential and powerful political movements on the planet – has a long history of supporting Venezuelan socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro.

Maduro has presided over one of the world’s most repressive regimes since 2013 when his predecessor Hugo Chávez died. Under Maduro, Venezuelan police forces have committed a long list of human rights atrocities including the torture, kidnapping, rape, and killing of unarmed protesters. Under Maduro, Venezuela has become an especially dangerous place for minors.

In light of the prominence of Black Lives Matter – a global non-profit currently receiving millions in donations – photos have begun to circulate of Opal Tometi, a founder of the organization, hugging Maduro at the 2015 People of African Descent Leadership Summit in Harlem, New York, where several high-rank officials of the Venezuelan regime also participated. Maduro, currently banned from the United States, was in town for the annual United Nations General Assembly.

Tometi appears alongside Maduro on a Venezuelan government propaganda site’s news report from the event, raising a fist and embracing him. The photo appears to be taken in front of a giant photo of Maduro’s face.

Tometi spoke at the summit, standing in front of a Venezuelan flag for the speech and thanking Maduro’s government for the opportunity. Among her targets during the speech were the government of the Dominican Republic for deporting Haitians and “Western economic policies, land grabs, and neocolonial financial instruments like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund” for, she argued, creating the Mediterranean migrant crisis.

“I am aware that justice also has to do with racial aspects,” assured Tometi, according to Venezuelan state media. “What we are experiencing is the manifestation of anti-black racism and this is state violence. It must be called by its name. Police brutality, the murders of blacks, violence against the Afro-descendant community, all is proof of the violence of the State,” said the Black Lives Matter founder.

Tometi also quoted Joanne Chesimard, a radical Marxist convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper in 1973 who has lived for decades as a fugitive in Cuba, as urging, “you must fight until all black lives matter.” Tometi referred to Chesimard, who renamed herself “Assata Shakur,” as the summit’s “dear exiled sister.”

The Black Lives Matter non-profit identifies Tometi, no stranger to red carpets as a result of her activism, as one of its founders, a “student of liberation theology and her practice is in the tradition of Ella Baker, informed by Stuart Hall, bell hooks and Black Feminist thinkers.” On her own website, Tometi claims to be a “human rights advocate” and pro-immigrant activist.

In addition to meeting with and applauding Maduro at the New York summit, Tometi also served as an election observer in socialist Venezuela during the 2015 legislative elections. She praised the socialist dictatorship as “a place where there is intelligent political discourse” on Twitter during one of the bloodiest years of police brutality in the country.

Her praise remains online at press time. Since the election, widespread evidence of fraud on the part of Maduro’s regime during that election has surfaced.

Tometi also applauded Venezuela in an article that year stating, “in these last 17 years, we have witnessed the Bolivarian Revolution champion participatory democracy and construct a fair, transparent election system recognized as among the best in the world.”

Tometi’s ideology does not appear to be an outlier within the Black Lives Matter movement. In a eulogy, the organization mourned the passing of brutal Cuban dictator Fidel Castro in 2016.

“There is an overwhelming sense of loss, complicated by fear and anxiety. Although no leader is without their flaws, we must push back against the rhetoric of the right and come to the defense of El Comandante,” a eulogy by the official “Black Lives Matter” organization read.

After some thoughts on revolution, the piece ends: “As Fidel ascends to the realm of the ancestors, we summon his guidance, strength, and power as we recommit ourselves to the struggle for universal freedom. Fidel Vive!”

Cuba is socialist Venezuela’s closest ally.

Few governments in the Western Hemisphere have engaged in police brutality to the extent that Maduro’s regime has, especially against underprivileged Venezuelans of indigenous and African descent. One year prior to Tometi’s celebratory tweet, Maduro’s regime corps killed 43 protestors and incarcerated over 3,400 during the wave of protests that took over the country demanding Maduro’s ousting.

That same year, the Venezuelan Penal Forum, an NGO, documented 138 cases of torture. One of the most shocking cases was Juan Manuel Carrasco’s, who was raped with a rifle by several Bolivarian National Guard officers. Between Maduro’s rise to power and 2019, he has detained at least 388 political prisoners, including Americans since freed through pressure by President Donald Trump. For comparison, Chávez, who founded the deadly regime, reportedly only held 161 known political prisoners.

Maduro’s totalitarian state particularly harms underaged Venezuelans. Nearly 1,500 minors died in violent circumstances in 2018, most of them at the hands of police or collectives, Maduro’s paramilitaty gangs. Nearly 10,000 died two years prior; in 1997, that number was 440.

Tometi has largely kept silent on Maduro’s police brutality. She did not speak out when Maduro’s colectivos shot 17-year-old Carlos Moreno in the head, or when police shot 14-year-old Kluiverth Roa dead for being near the vicinity of a protest while walking home from school.

The links between Black Lives Matter, the organization, and the Maduro regime are particularly concerning given that White House said last Friday it has information that individuals linked to Maduro have incited violence at protests in the United States spurred by George Floyd’s death, according to an article in the Miami Herald.

Rafael Valera is the Communications Director of the Venezuelan conservative movement Rumbo Libertad.

This whole CHAZ idea is starting to grow on me. Border walls. High-capacity weapons. Federal and state governments no longer exist. A neighborhood in charge of itself, creating its own laws, its own mores, its own economic and justice system. The left like it. The media freakin’ love it. If you think about it, what’s not to like?

As I write this, Black Lives Matter and Antifa have created their own confederacy and seceded from the union with the establishment of a Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, right in the heart of Seattle. They have seized six city blocks, built border walls, and are running around with guns in a community that reflects their values and their desire to live their lives in the way they choose to live their lives.

This includes high-capacity weapons and vigilante groups that punish vandalism with a good, sound beating.

The best part is that the CHAZ residents are refusing to allow “biased media” to enter their country. That sounds like paradise to me.

As far as I know, anyone who wishes to exit the Seattle CHAZ is allowed to exit the CHAZ, so what’s the harm? If you want to live under a warlord, you can live under a warlord.

Obviously, there are some issues here. Within the CHAZ you have about 500 residences, people who might not want to be part of the CHAZ. You also have property owners who are probably a little worried — and for good reason.

But is this really the worst idea in the world?

I’m not calling for armed insurrection or anything, but let’s be adults for a second and talk about the concept…

I don’t know anyone on the left or right who isn’t fed up with the one-size-fits-all madness coming out of Washington DC, the courts, and state governments.

The left is frustrated and angry over abortion restrictions, laws that allow corporations to donate money to political campaigns, and voter ID. What’s more, they want guns, the police, prisons, and charter schools outlawed and pot legalized. They want green energy, CEO pay limited, more socialism, lockdowns during pandemics, speech restrictions, and biological men to be allowed to compete in women’s sports. What the left resents more than anything is having their lives shaped by executive orders signed by Donald Trump and whichever way Clarence Thomas votes.

The left believe in centralized authority.

On the other side, there’s the right, who oppose abortion, public schools, and the war on their sacred religious rights being waged by the sexual revolution. We want to hunt, fish, worship, judge people based on their personal character as opposed to identity… We want unlimited speech and artistic freedom, as well as a level playing field that allows us to achieve as much personal freedom, wealth, and success as power.

The right believe in individual liberty within the framework of “live and let live” and the Ten Commandments.

Does a workable CHAZ not sounds like a possible solution to massive divide?

Thomas Jefferson envisioned a nation of farmers, where everyone owned their own little piece of America and basically governed themselves: an agrarian society that grew its own food, hired its own teachers, built its own churches, and left the neighboring societies alone. If you didn’t like the way your town was governed, you were free to vote with your feet and move to a place more to your liking. That might sound less than visionary when you consider how technology — cars, planes, mass media — changed everything, but you have to keep in mind that from the beginning of civilization to the day Jefferson died in 1826, there was almost no real technological advancements.

But basically, Jefferson described a CHAZ, no?

The Southern Confederacy was a CHAZ, no?

Obviously, we cannot allow for a CHAZ where slavery is legal or NAMBLA has its way with young boys, but maybe there’s a way for Blue and Red America to agree to just leave each other the hell alone.

Maybe we can agree that the federal government should protect us from foreign invaders and otherwise stay out of our business.

New York City can be its own CHAZ.

Wyoming can be its own CHAZ.

Southern California can be its own CHAZ.

Northern California can be its own CHAZ.

If the Austin CHAZ wants an abortion clinic on every corner and rural Texas wants abortion outlawed… Well, there you go.

Tear down or erect all the statues you want!

A CHAZ can be as large as a state and as small as a compound.

The more we eliminate central control and authority, the more we balkanize into societies governed by laws, mores, and rules that reflect our own personal beliefs, the happier we will all be and the less concerned we will be with how others live because it’s no skin off my nose if you legalize pot in your CHAZ and teach homosexuality in your schools, and it’s no skin off your nose if my CHAZ legalizes prayer in school.

Honestly, what’s wrong with that idea?

You go your way. I’ll go mine.

We’ve already self-sorted and migrated into Red and Blue enclaves where this could be pretty quickly put into place.  

The federal government and some state governments are now so overbearing and powerful, every political decision is a bitter battle because we’re forcing our values and ideas on one another.

Remove that stress, and things can only get better.

I’m just saying think about it…

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.