OPINION:
On Monday, Feb. 14, Black Lives Matter activist Quintez Brown walked into the office of mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg in Louisville, Kentucky, and opened fire with a 9mm handgun. Fortunately, Mr. Brown’s aim was worse than his op-eds in The Louisville Courier-Journal, where he was a social justice columnist. No one was hurt, and police picked him up within minutes of the shooting.
Mr. Brown has been charged with attempted murder, though the motive remains unclear. His social media posts show black supremacist and Black power content. According to The Daily Beast, Mr. Brown met with the representative of a Black nationalist paramilitary group the week before the shooting and showed interest in joining them.
But Mr. Brown was cooling his jets on home arrest by Wednesday evening. The Louisville Community Bail Fund had cut a $100,000 check to spring him from jail that afternoon. “It would be a very reasonable and permissible conclusion for the judge to reach that this person would pose a danger to the community and doesn’t need to have bail available at any level,” said NKU Chase College of Law professor Ken Katkin, reacting to the news.
However, these are not reasonable times, and jailbreak groups backed by billionaires are making communities all over America less safe. Little things like homicidal criminals won’t slow them down.
These groups are often “astroturfed,” appearing like grassroots efforts. Indeed, they tend to partner with local activists who become their public face. However, a closer look can be very revealing. The Louisville Community Bail Fund, for example, is actually a fiscally sponsored project of the Alliance for Global Justice, which receives financial support from billionaires like George Soros. NGO Monitor also notes its support for convicted terrorists, including members of Al-Qaeda and FARC.
The AFGJ’s 2019 tax filings show that it paid $278,000 to Fronterizo Fianza Fund and $227,024 to Assata’s Daughters. The former is dedicated to open borders and facilitating illegal immigration. The latter is a Black power group committed to abolishing the police. It is named after Assata Shakur, a former member of the Black Liberation Army who murdered a New Jersey State Trooper in 1973. The Louisville Bail Fund understandably would like to mute these associations through its mutual benefactor.
A second organization in the area is the Louisville Bail Project. Again, though it appears grassroots, it is one branch of a national nonprofit, the Bail Project, which has received millions in funding from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey alone. The group is known to release dangerous criminals, like Christopher Stewart.
Prosecutors in Illinois charged Mr. Stewart with being an armed habitual criminal after he shot a pistol into the ground at a 6-year-old’s birthday party and threatened to kill the boy’s mother. The Bail Project posted $5,000 to free Stewart. “A month later,” the Chicago Tribune reported, “Stewart was charged with attempted murder after he allegedly set fire to the ex-girlfriend’s apartment while she was inside.”
Mr. Stewart isn’t an outlier.
The Tribune identified scores of people charged with felonies released by the Bail Project and the Chicago Community Bond Fund. Among them were three people charged with murder, “10 accused of attempted murder, 32 felons allegedly caught carrying a gun and 22 defendants charged with being an armed habitual criminal—a person who has at least two convictions for certain types of dangerous or serious felonies and is then caught with a gun.”
Now, the group continues its good work in Louisville.
In Sept. 2020, The Courier-Journal reported that a “majority of those it helps have a felony charge.” At the time of that story, it had facilitated the bail of several BLM protestors, which members of the project have assisted in more ways than one.
Just days before The Courier Journal’s glowing profile, images of the Bail Project’s Holly Zoller surfaced amid Louisville’s BLM demonstrations that connected her to a U-Haul loaded with supplies for protestors. The project described Ms. Zoller as one of its “Bail Disruptors” and the founder of Louisville Books to Prisoners.
PolitiFact confirmed that Ms. Zoller had rented the truck and that protestors offloaded shields, signs, and face masks, some of which bore symbols associated with Antifa. The Bail Project also confirmed that Ms. Zoller had rented the vehicle but said she had done it in a “personal capacity.” Around the time the images of Ms. Zoller surfaced, two officers had been shot and wounded during the violent demonstrations.
Ms. Zoller and the Bail Project made headlines again more recently, when Black Lives Matter supporter Darrell Brooks deliberately drove his SUV into a Christmas parade last November, killing six people and wounding more than 60 in Wisconsin.
After a judge set Mr. Brooks’ bail at $5 million, Ms. Zoller attempted to raise the same amount through GoFundMe with Milwaukee Black Lives Matter. Ms. Zoller claimed that the money would go toward providing “free bail assistance to thousands of low-income Americans every year, reuniting families and restoring the presumption of innocence.” But when people connected the timing, amount, and location, Ms. Zoller shrewdly lowered the target fundraising goal to $4 million, The Post Millennial noted.
Americans need not surrender control of their communities to thugs and ideologues. The fix could be as straightforward as states and localities passing legislation for no-bail provisions, which is how it works on the federal level or expanding existing ones to a limited number of other crimes.
The problem of astroturfed jailbreak groups could be addressed by outright banning them, subjecting them to more oversight, or imposing strict limits on who and how many people they can assist. Kentucky Rep. Jason Nemes and Indiana Sen. Aaron Freeman have already proposed bills to these ends.
Of course, these efforts are always portrayed as evidence of that mythical boogeyman: institutional racism. Mr. Brown has some words of wisdom here.
In his final column for The Courier-Journal, Mr. Brown wrote that when you see the “mythical boogeyman” for the illusion that it is, you can “begin to truly understand who the true perpetrators of crime in your community are.”
It’s criminals. And more importantly, it’s billionaire-backed jailbreak funds.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.