Tag Archives: Tawana Brawley

Pot, Meet Kettle

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On January 24th, The Guardian posted the following headline:

Tim Scott’s behaviour around Trump is ‘humiliating’, says the Rev Al Sharpton

Not only is the criticism undeserved, the fact that it comes from Al Sharpton is ridiculous.

Just to refresh your memory, here is part of an NPR article from August 2013:

It was 1987 when a black teenager, Tawana Brawley, said she had been raped and kidnapped by a group of white men in Dutchess County, N.Y.

Her story of being attacked, scrawled with racial slurs, smeared with feces and left beside a road wrapped in a plastic bag made front pages across the nation — especially after the Rev. Al Sharpton took up her case.

But, as The Associated Press reminds readers, “a special state grand jury later determined that Brawley had fabricated her claims, perhaps to avoid punishment for staying out late.”

In 1998, Steven Pagones, who was the county prosecutor at the time, won a defamation suit against Sharpton, Brawley and Brawley’s attorneys. They had accused Pagones of being among Brawley’s attackers.

“Sharpton has since paid off his [$65,000] debt with money raised by his supporters,” the Village Voice says. Brawley was ordered to pay $190,000.

It’s been 15 years. With interest, the judgment against the now 40-year-old Brawley has grown to more than $430,000. Finally, the Poughkeepsie Journal reports, Pagones is receiving some of the money: $3,700, or about 1 percent of what he’s now owed.

Snopes also notes:

Sharpton himself owes New York state $806,875 and has federal liens for unpaid personal income taxes against him totaling $2.6 million, records show.

The Harlem-based NAN owed $813,576 to the federal government at the end of 2012, according to the most recent filings for the group.

Sharpton’s company, Rev-Al Communications, owes $447,826 to the state. His Bo-Spanky Consulting firm has only $18.21 in outstanding debt, according to state records.

This is the person who is criticizing Tim Scott. This is also The Guardian giving credence to that criticism. Always consider the source when it comes to news.

 

If The Shoe Fits

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Before I write this article, I want to share a little history about Al Sharpton. Some people may be too young to remember this or may have simply forgotten.

In July 2019 Newsweek reported the following:

Al Sharpton’s controversial support of a woman who lied about being raped by a gang of white men in the 1980s has resurfaced amid the civil rights activist’s ongoing feud with President Donald Trump.

In 1987, 15-year-old Tawana Brawley claimed she’d been abducted and raped by a group of white men in Dutchess County, New York. Brawley, who is African American, was found by police with the letters “KKK” written on her chest and a racial epithet written on her stomach. She told her lawyers that two of the assailants were law enforcement officials.

Reverend Sharpton took up Brawley’s case early on, and became one of her most outspoken supporters. Sharpton called then-Governor Mario Cuomo a racist and accused state officials of being complicit in the crime.

But the incident turned out to be a hoax: After seven months of investigation, including over 6,000 pages of testimony by 180 witnesses, a grand jury found that Brawley had lied about the attack. Six months after the trial, he former boyfriend told reporters she invented the allegations to avoid being punished for running away from home.

After the scandal died down, Sharpton reinvented himself as a more mainstream civil rights activist. He founded the National Action Network, which is a civil rights organization in New York.

Asked about the Brawley incident in 2011, Sharpton told 60 Minutes, “whatever happened, you’re dealing with a minor who was missing four days. So it’s clear that something wrong happened.”

It amazes me that Al Sharpton still has any credibility at all. He now hosts MSNBC’s PoliticsNation.

The U.S. Sun recently reported:

LONGTIME civil rights activist Al Sharpton has accused President Donald Trump of “trying to make Black Lives Matter look like ‘hoodlums and thugs.'”

The 65-year-old host of MSNBC’s PoliticsNation denounced the president on Thursday afternoon as he pointed out the differences between Joe Biden and Trump’s visits to Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The article notes:

Sharpton slammed the president for “projecting those that are violent” and said “he tries to act like Black Lives Matter and Antifa is the same thing.”

Antifa is the left-wing political protest movement that gained prominence after the white supremacist Unite the Right rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

The Black Lives Matter movement is the civil rights group that came about in response to extreme police brutality.

“We had this big March on Saturday, tens of thousands of people, not one arrest, no violence, all of the families there, you didn’t hear one tweet from the president,” Sharpton said on MSNBC.

“[Trump] never mentioned it. Because he cannot afford to deal with it when he can’t make you look like hoodlums and thugs.

“How do you have a mass march of that size, less than a mile from where he was at and he never tweets one thing about it.

“Because he wants to project us as violent and out of control when we’re not that and that’s what Joe Biden showed today by going to a family and going to church, talking to people. That’s who we are.”

Black Lives Matter has a website. This is the link to what they believe.

Included in their beliefs:

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).

The nuclear family is the foundation of western civilization. This is not a peaceful group. President Trump’s description of Black Lives Matter is much more accurate than Al Sharpton’s.