Shades of the Blackstone Rangers
Michelle Malkin exposes a group called "National People's Action." This outfit is an advocacy group with "the usual big government, race card-playing, entitlement mentality." Thus, Michelle tells us, its members try to promote "homeowner security" (more government minority home loans), "workplace rights and training" (more government job programs), "good policing" (a ban on racial profiling), and "security and opportunity for immigrants" (more benefits for illegal aliens).
Two things make them different, though. First, "the group engages in what it calls 'direct action' — publicizing the home addresses of business and government leaders it wants to shake down and then busing in protesters and schoolchildren (using public school buses) to invade their victims' private property and intimidate the families." Most recently, 800 protesters invaded the property, and banged on the windows, of Karl Rove to demand passage of the "DREAM" Act granting amnesty to illegal alien college students and allowing them to receive in-state tuition discounts. Second, the group receives funding from taxpayers. According to Malkin, "the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Environmental Protection Agency and Massachusetts Department of Education have given tens of thousands of dollars in grants to NPA members." Thus, our tax dollars are being used to fund a "left-wing goon squad."
This reminds me of the "community action" component of the War on Poverty during the 1960s. First, Robert Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson became convinced that local political leaders (whom both despised at some level) were too corrupt, indifferent, or incompetent to properly engage in the anti-poverty fight, and that the answer was to empower local activists (often criminals and/or thugs) to intimidate or circumvent these elected officials. This is how former Washington D.C. mayor Marion Barry burst on the local scene here. In Chicago, if memory serves, federal anti-poverty crusaders enlisted the notorious Blackstone Rangers gang. But since the Mayor Daley's of America weren't going to stand for this, the result was to kill the War on Poverty or, more precisely, expedite its demise. Whether today's political establishment is this tough remains to be seen.
