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The future of George Floyd Square is in limbo, many Black Lives Matter murals have been erased and policing reforms rolled back. But family members and advocates are determined to protect his legacy.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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The future of George Floyd Square is in limbo, many Black Lives Matter murals have been erased and policing reforms rolled back. But family members and advocates are determined to protect his legacy.

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WTF is "his legacy"?

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Elevation of a street criminal to sainthood? Riots and looting in his name? THAT legacy should be buried. The only thing that should remain: When someone says "I can't breathe" LET UP.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
If you get yourself pulled over for any reason, here's your checklist.

1. Wallet in your hand or at least out in the open where the officer can see everything if you didn't have enough time to already remove your license and registration out of it.

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I've been pulled over in the area of 30 to 40 times in my life.

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
If you get yourself pulled over for any reason, here's your checklist.

1. Wallet in your hand or at least out in the open where the officer can see everything if you didn't have enough time to already remove your license and registration out of it.

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Not a good idea. This may have worked in the past, but cops are smarter now.
You might think it is obvious you are grabbing your wallet as you are trying to outthink the cop, but they might be anxious about that Glock you are pulling from your shorts.
Better to wait for them to tell you to roll down you window, and when they want your DL, tell them about it. "My wallet is in my back pocket - mind if I dig for it?" Let them tell you what they want you to do, let them be in command of the situation.

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I've been pulled over in the area of 30 to 40 times in my life.

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I've had that average just in some years. I worked a job where I barhopped 20-30 bars per night, 4pm-midnight or bar time. Driving at night will get you pulled over, even with the company logo on the vehicle.

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George Floyd died five years ago today, his movement only more recently.

It is no exaggeration to say that his death was one of the most important moments in recent Western history. The viral video showing Floyd having the life choked from him by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin led to a wave of protests, riots and so much more. His death may have been more complex and multi-causal than initially seemed to be the case. However, there was no room for nuance at the time: the national consensus was that a black man had been publicly lynched by a white police officer, a supposedly common occurance.

The event that triggered a whole summer of Black Lives Matter protests occurred on the evening of 25 May 2020, when Floyd was arrested for buying cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 note in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He fell to the ground as Chauvin, along with other officers, tried to put him into a police car. Chauvin pressed his weight on to the back and neck of the prostrate Floyd, who stopped breathing after six minutes and later died in hospital. In April 2021, Chauvin was convicted of murdering the 46-year-old Floyd, largely on the evidence of phone footage taken of his arrest by bystanders, and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison. In 2023, the US Supreme Court rejected the last of Chauvin’s appeals. Two of his colleagues were also imprisoned.

For many Americans, Floyd became a symbol of waning, but real, problems. Indeed, he became a martyr for the cause of racial justice, his name invoked alongside that of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. Thousands attended his funeral in Texas, including actors Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum. The Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, wept while touching his casket. At least three larger-than-life statues of Floyd now exist, including a six-foot bust on a pure white marble base, which currently sits in the centre of New York’s Union Square. The spot where Floyd fell is now a permanent memorial, designated as George Floyd Square.

After Floyd’s death, prominent lawyers wrote books arguing that thousands, or tens of thousands, of innocent black men are killed by policemen, vigilantes or squalid living conditions every year. They joined a collective pledge to stop what they called a ‘genocide’. A national campaign was launched against the presumed epidemic of crime and violent harassment directed at black Americans by whites. Supposed racial profilers, such as ‘Barbecue Becky’, ‘Pool Patrol Paula’, ‘Coupon Carl’ and many others became household names.

‘Scholars’ like Ibram X Kendi and Robin D’Angelo made the temptingly simple argument that all gaps between racial groups must represent ‘systemic’ bigotry. On the strength of such insights as this, Kendi was given more than $45million in donor money in 2020 to fund his Centre for Antiracist Research at the prestigious Boston University.



But within a remarkably short period of time, nearly every major claim made by BLM activists during the ‘racial reckoning’ was exposed as nonsense. Very few innocent and unarmed black men are killed by US police, certainly not the thousands per year or even hundreds per day regularly cited by the media. In the year Floyd died, the total number of males killed by police who were both black and unarmed – according to the excellent database set up by the Washington Post – was 18. Last year, it was 10 – a remarkably low number for a country with a population of 340million, in which three million people die each year.

As I have often noted before, patterns of inter-racial crime rarely fit the mainstream narrative. In a typical year, the violent inter-racial crimes that involve a black perpetrator and a white victim, or a white perpetrator and a black victim, make up only three to five per cent of the roughly 1.2million annual serious crimes recorded by the Department of Justice. Furthermore, among this relatively tiny subset of offences, more than 80 per cent of the violence is black on white.



‘Systemic racism’ is not much more defensible as a general concept than the idea of police genocide. In 1990, the talented economist, June O’Neill, pointed out that a roughly 20 per cent starting gap in wages between white and African American men closed totally following rather basic adjustments for age, region (more blacks live in the lower-income South), years of education and aptitude-test scores. She found essentially the same thing to be true, again, in a different major study conducted almost two decades later.

The systemic-racism argument collapses even further when other factors between black and white America, such as age, are considered. The average white American is 58 years old, while the average black American is 38 – a discrepancy that is obviously relevant to analysis of everything from family wealth to crime rates. According to the Brookings Institution, the average Asian American child or young teenager studies about three times as much as the average black child and two times as much as the average white child – something directly relevant to test scores and college admissions. Taking undisputed empirical realities like these into account makes a great deal of alleged ‘racism’ simply disappear.

Unfortunately, facts didn’t matter to those determined to see Floyd’s murder as evidence that the US is an irredeemably racist country. In the months after Floyd’s death, reason was abandoned as a collective hysteria was unleashed in the name of Black Lives Matter. Towns and cities were destroyed by looting and vandalism, causing up to $2 billion in damage and killing at least 25 people. A number of US cities, including Minneapolis, ‘defunded’ their police departments. Across the country, police took what could best be described as a passive approach to suspected drug and weapons offences, emboldening criminals and leading to a surge in violent crimes. In 2020, the year of Floyd’s death, more than 20,000 murders were committed in the US, the highest number since 1995.

All this disorder pushed the American public in a direction no one would have predicted at the peak of BLM in 2020. Nearly every population group large enough to measure, with the exception of educated and single women, swung hard to the right.



In November 2024, Almost 30 per cent of black males, 46 per cent of all Latinos and an astonishing 65 per cent of American Indians cast ballots for Donald Trump. The Donald was even publicly endorsed by a laundry list of black hip-hop personalities, including Lil Wayne, Ice Cube and Azealia Banks. After winning a high-profile UFC fight in late-2024, champion Jon ‘Bones’ Jones – also black – even did the ‘Trump Dance’ in the octagon.

In this brave new world, a real and unexpected puzzler may become: how do we prevent society from swinging too far toward the obnoxious right? On X and Meta, freed of the staid barriers of censorship, genuinely racist accounts, with titles like ‘Blacks Taking Ls’, are amassing hundreds of thousands of followers.

In fact, there appear to be few views the alt-right isn’t prepared to support, no matter how nutty or crude. ‘Jewish Question’ conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll was a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience in March. He followed writer and podcaster Darryl Cooper, who believes that Winston Churchill was the ‘chief villain’ of the Second World War. There are even petitions and reasonably mainstream articles that now call for the repeal of the 19th amendment to the US Constitution, which gave women the right to vote. What mathematician and writer James Lindsay calls the ‘woke right’ may soon be as big a threat as the woke left, albeit one less backed by the powers-that-be.

We’ll see. But in between the alt-right and the woke left, and the dim activists that used an unfortunate death to justify an unparalleled outbreak of lawlessness, a more sober view of the events of May 2020 is beginning to take hold. Just five years on, those big bronze and marble statues of George Floyd look more than a bit out of place.

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RCPolitics has obtained video of the fight between two women Secret Service Uniformed Division Officers outside former President Obama's residence last week after one officer called a supervisor to come before "I whoop this girl's ass."

The skirmish is raising new questions about whether DEI is still plaguing the USSS despite Trump's directive to abolish it.

The Secret Service has not responded to my inquiries on whether these two officers are being disciplined and/or are still on the job.

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Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Just remember during Maxium Level Covid Lockdowns they had the footage replaying on a Loop for 2 whole weeks and then unleashed the population brainwashed by tv and social media
Pelosi and Sportball idiots taking a knee telling everyone to get out and be angry

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A nonprofit founded by Georgia Democratic politician Stacey Abrams to protect voting rights paid more than $20 million to a lawyer who is a close friend and helped set up two of her private businesses, according to tax and state incorporation filings and other records obtained by RealClearInvestigations.

Abrams’ Fair Fight Action redirected the tax-exempt donations and government grants to Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, her former campaign chair between 2019 and 2023. Most of the funds covered legal expenses charged by the boutique law firm Lawrence-Hardy co-founded, for a failed race-bias lawsuit filed against Abram’s Republican opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp, after she lost to him in Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial election.

In its articles of incorporation, Fair Fight Action Inc. states that “The Corporation will not be operated for the pecuniary gain or profit of any individual.” They also said no revenues will be “distributed” to any individual except when “authorized to pay reasonable compensation for services rendered.”

The nonprofit’s payout to her friend’s law firm, which averaged more than $4 million each year over those five years, raised eyebrows and conflict-of-interest concerns among ethics watchdogs briefed by RCI.

“Twenty million in fees is outrageous,” said Paul Kamenar, counsel for the National Legal and Policy Center. “It may be an IRS violation for waste of nonprofit assets, as well as self-dealing and other ethical and legal breaches.”

“At a minimum hiring her friend as lead attorney presents a glaring conflict of interest, because Abrams’ close association with both the Fair Fight case and her friend provided an opportunity to enrich her friend through the nonprofit’s litigation.”

He and other legal experts say the costs to litigate the case were extravagant compared with other voting-rights cases fought in federal court. The state of Georgia paid less than $6 million total to its law firms defending the state in the case.

The unusually high legal bills helped drive Fair Fight Action more than $2.5 million into debt last year, forcing the group to lay off the majority of its staff.

College Friends

Abrams’ and Lawrence-Hardy’s friendship dates back to their days as students at Spelman College. They have also set up businesses together, state records reveal.

Although there is no evidence that Abrams benefited directly from the fees paid to Lawrence-Hardy’s law firm, Abrams holds an ownership interest in at least two Atlanta-based companies that were incorporated by Lawrence-Hardy. Lawrence-Hardy and Abrams have also shared the same office suite in Atlanta for several years.

Neither Lawrence-Hardy nor Abrams responded to requests for comment.

In her 2022 book, “Level Up: Rise Above The Hidden Forces Holding Your Business Back,” Abrams acknowledged Lawrence-Hardy as someone who has supported her business ventures. “Sustaining the pursuit of a business ambition demands all manner of investment – definitely financial capital, but less often lauded, copious amounts of patience, forbearance and forgiveness,” Abrams wrote. “I appreciate these coming in abundance from those named and unnamed, including … Allegra Lawrence-Hardy.”

The IRS declined to comment on whether it is investigating Fair Fight Action. It has received multiple complaints in the past which outline the blurry lines between Abrams’ connection to nonprofits that appeared to advance her political career. In 2019, the agency received a complaint about the nonprofit from the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) over allegations that Fair Fight was using money raised to advance voting rights to support Abrams’ political ambitions, including paying some of her travel expenses, running $100,000 in Facebook ads featuring Abrams, and supporting a “Stacey Abrams Fundraiser.” The IRS did not say if or how this case was resolved.

Along with the Georgia Senate, the IRS is actively investigating another nonprofit started by Abrams, the New Georgia Project, which failed to report millions of dollars in contributions and spending tied to Abrams’ first gubernatorial bid in 2018. Abrams also lost to Kemp in a 2022 rematch.

The lucrative Fair Fight deal for her friend adds to ethical concerns over Abrams, who has a checkered financial background and yet has amassed millions of dollars in wealth working mostly in the public and nonprofit sectors, as RCI has reported previously. Abrams has presidential ambitions and aims to become the first black female U.S. president by 2040.

Political Allies

Lawrence-Hardy chaired her campaign in both the 2018 and 2022 gubernatorial elections, which means she was litigating the voting-rights case while running her second campaign. Kristen Wilder, Lawrence-Hardy’s longtime chief of staff, previously worked as the senior political manager at Fair Fight Action. Wilder also worked on Abrams’ gubernatorial campaign.

Abrams headed Fair Fight in 2018 when it hired Lawrence-Hardy’s firm as lead counsel in the case, Fair Fight Action v. Raffensperger. The suit claimed that the Georgia secretary of state’s office denied minorities the right to vote. The litigation promoted Abrams’ allegations that she was “robbed” of victory by Kemp, whom she claimed had “disenfranchised” blacks through discriminatory voting rules. During the trial, Lawrence-Hardy argued, “This is a modern-day Jim Crow.” The lawsuit would help turn Abrams into a national political figure and celebrity, a symbol of resistance to President Trump and a leader of the emerging Black Lives Matter movement.

But in September 2022, a federal court disagreed, dismissing the case and ordering Fair Fight to pay more than $231,000 in court costs and legal fees.

The lawsuit was always a long shot. To succeed, Fair Fight had to prove intentional discrimination in the state’s election laws and practices. In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Steve C. Jones – an Obama appointee – ruled that Fair Fight failed to provide “direct evidence of a voter who was unable to vote” because of the state’s allegedly racist election laws.

Nevertheless, tax records show that Lawrence-Hardy’s firm earned a steady stream of fees. In 2019, her Atlanta-based firm, Lawrence & Bundy LLC, billed Fair Fight $3.1 million, according to IRS filings. In 2020, when the nonprofit’s revenues peaked at $51 million, the firm billed the nonprofit its largest fee amount – $6.4 million – for “legal services.” In 2022, her firm was paid an additional $5 million, after receiving $4.4 million in fees from Fair Fight in 2021, despite the case shrinking as Judge Jones dismissed large sections of the lawsuit. According to a 2023 IRS return filed by Fair Fight Action, the latest available document, Lawrence & Bundy LLC received more than $1.3 million in legal fees that year, despite the election lawsuit being dismissed the previous year. Lawrence-Hardy is a founding partner of Lawrence & Bundy LLC.

All told over those five years, Lawrence-Hardy and her firm received $20.2 million largely for their work on a single, losing election-integrity lawsuit against the state of Georgia, which critics called “frivolous” and designed to try to explain away Abrams’ back-to-back gubernatorial election losses in 2018 and 2022.

Abrams was not only involved in retaining Lawrence-Hardy but also helped fundraise for the case until December 2021, when she stepped down from Fair Fight’s board to announce her second bid for governor. As Fair Fight’s CEO, Abrams was paid an annual salary of $80,000.

Cozy Office Space

Lawrence & Bundy LLC, whose website lists 15 attorneys, was founded by Lawrence-Hardy in 2016. Its Atlanta offices are located at 1180 W. Peachtree St. NW, Suite 1650. This is the location where Fair Fight sent the $20.2 million, according to IRS documents. It is the same address for two businesses that are at least partially owned by Abrams.

According to Georgia state incorporation records, one of the entities, Davis Hall LLC, was registered in February 2011 by Lawrence & Bundy LLC; while the other, Hall Davis LLC, was registered in January 2021 by the same agent – Lawrence & Bundy LLC. Both entities are listed by Abrams in her 2022 Georgia state financial disclosure statement as business entities in which she holds an ownership interest of 5% or more. It is not clear what the businesses do. Abrams and Lawrence & Bundy declined to say.

A third enterprise owned by Abrams, Sage Works LLC, lists the same business address as the other companies – 1180 W. Peachtree St. NW, Suite 1650, which is the address for Lawrence & Bundy LLC.

Abrams founded Sage Works LLC as a consulting firm “providing advice to governmental and nonprofit clients on?operations,” according to her?disclosures. Records show she was paid $62,000 in taxpayer money as a consultant on an Atlanta urban redevelopment?project, which raised red flags because she was a state lawmaker at the time.

“These businesses raise more suspicion that Abrams used her nonprofit [Fair Fight] to enrich her friends and herself,” Kamenar said, “which is a clear conflict of interest.”

Lawrence-Hardy is an active member of the Georgia bar in “good standing” with no disciplinary history. She is currently listed as co-managing partner at a larger Atlanta-based firm, Krevolin Horst LLC, where she specializes in “high-profile/high stakes litigation.” She is still featured throughout the Lawrence & Bundy website.

Fair Fight said it hired Lawrence-Hardy because of her expertise in election law, both at the state and federal levels, along with her experience litigating prior Democratic candidate recounts.

Lawrence-Hardy maintained that the lawsuit was always about the voters, not the money. Voting rights is a cause dear to her, according to her website bio, though she did not choose to take the case pro bono as she has other cases.

It remains unclear why the lawsuit incurred such a high cost.

At the time, Lawrence-Hardy said the case required large resources. She led a team of almost three dozen lawyers, including some from outside her firm. During the trial, she said she deposed a “staggering number” of witnesses in the case: “We had more than 3,000 voters or would-be voters submit declarations, 50 witnesses and hundreds who gave depositions.”

Yet despite several years of billing Fair Fight, Lawrence-Hardy found no evidence of voter discrimination, according to the court. Nonetheless, Lawrence-Hardy on her website lists the case among her biggest professional accomplishments, arguing she initially “defeated defendants’ motion for summary judgment.”

The IRS filings do not break down the legal expenses charged in the case. Neither Lawrence-Hardy nor Fair Fight would share billing records to understand the exact nature of the work conducted during the drawn-out legal battle. They also would not reveal the hourly rate charged by Lawrence-Hardy’s firm. Legal fees are normally billed on an hourly basis and appear in a line-by-line accounting on statements to clients.

Now operating in the red, Fair Fight is not happy that the Trump administration is cutting federal spending for left-leaning non-governmental organizations. Earlier this year, the embattled organization protested Trump’s freezing of tens of millions of dollars in federal election-security grants.

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If you want to spend all your attention trying to protect a human trafficker, you can do that.

What I love about this is that in order to find this out, we had to send him to El Salvador, which created this unstable hysteria among camera- chasing Democrats, which forced this guy's crimes into plain view. Suddenly, the Maryland dad, and that's what you call them, was no Ward Cleaver, more like Freddy Krueger, a wife-beating gang banger, human smuggler.

So, if the Dems hadn't run to his defense, we might not have seen how bad they are and how stupid your party is. And it's not about the man says Van Hollen, the Dems compelled us to feel for him. They wanted his name in our heads.

I have seen that picture more times than I've seen pictures of my dog, Gus. Why does the media always use one picture? This guy? I mean, look, the picture is supposed to tell you, hey, he's a normal guy. You know, he doesn't look at child porn, he doesn't embezzle kids. Just look at him with his backward hat.

You know, they wanted, they demanded that we abide by their outrage narrative. What they didn't count on was that their poster child for persecution was actually the persecutor.

And unlike Van Hollen, I am sincere when I say that scumbag is irrelevant, not Van Hollen, but he is a scumbag, the criminal. It's the demand that the media and the Democrats have for us to accept their narrative. They did this with George Floyd. They did this with Michael Avenatti. They did this with Jussie Smollett. They did this with BLM. They did this with Greta Thunberg. They did this with Joe Biden, and they did this with Hamas. Did I say BLM yet? OK.

Every narrative that they feed us turns out to be horribly wrong. They're either a poor judge of character or they don't give an F whether they're telling the truth or not.

The Dems can only blame themselves, Jessica, because they compelled themselves to believe their own narrative. They brainwashed themselves. They weren't prepared for the response. The public refused to believe their fantasy that enraged them even more.

You know, how can you not believe us? We're telling you the truth. No, you've been lying to us forever. Van Hollen has got to be -- has got to do a press conference. He's got -- he spent all his time in front of the campus. He's got to go out there and deal with this now.

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