Birmingham, ALABAMA — An organization partnered with a George Soros-financed group and led by a radical leftist who is the half-brother of the infamous controversial Rev. Al Sharpton has been diligently working over the past few weeks to register convicted felons across Alabama.
The aim of the effort has been to get as many felons as possible on the roster before last Monday, the deadline to register in order to vote in Alabama’s Dec. 12 senate special election that pits Republican Roy Moore against Democratic challenger Doug Jones. The man spearheading the campaign has stated outright that his effort is meant to ensure a Democratic victory in Alabama.
The thousands of felons reportedly newly registered over the past few weeks were most likely not included in any recent polling on the Alabama senate race put out by major firms.
Jones himself is tied to some of the specific organizations associated with the drive to register felons here. Indeed, as Breitbart News first reported, Jones spearheaded a project for a massively Soros-financed legal activist group demanding full voting rights be given to felons released from prison, including those convicted of murder, rape and other violent crimes.
AL.com reported that Pastor Kenneth Glasgow has been at the forefront of the statewide effort, which has successfully registered thousands of felons across Alabama in recent weeks. Glasgow has been aided in his efforts here by other Soros-financed groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The Village Voice previously described Glasgow, Sharpton’s half-brother, as an “ex-con and recovering crackhead turned street preacher.”
Glasgow is currently president of a group he founded in 1999 calling itself The Ordinary People Society (TOPS). And he is a former leader of another organization, the radical Free Alabama Movement (FAM), which has for years been making inroads into Alabama’s prison population.
Glasgow told AL.com that in the last month alone “I think we registered at least five- to ten-thousand people all over the state” – referring to his efforts here in Alabama.
“I’ve got people all over the state registering people with my TOPS branches in Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, Montgomery, Enterprise, Dothan, Abbeville, Geneva, Gordon, Bessemer, we have a lot,” he added.
Speaking on his radio program, Glasgow charged that “swarming the polls” with newly registered convicts could swing the vote, pointing as a template to the Virginia governor’s race. In that state, Gov. Terry McAuliffe used his executive power in April to restore voting rights for over 200,000 felons.
“We have the chance to do the same thing they did in Virginia,” Glasgow stated. “We can turn it blue. Well not blue, but we can add some color. Make it pink or purple.”
Glasgow has been taking advantage of a change made last May, when Alabama’s Gov. Kay Ivey signed a law that defined a clause in the State constitution denying the right to vote to anyone who has committed a crime that demonstrates “moral turpitude.”
The new law generated a list of about 50 crimes that fit under the “moral turpitude” banner, including murder, kidnapping and sexual abuse. Glasgow was involved in the activism promoting the law.
This means that Glasgow is free to register felons whose crimes do not fit under the state’s definition of a “moral turpitude” conviction.
Glasgow’s activism is intended to fill the void left by Alabama’s legal refusal to actively notify potentially tens of thousands of former felons that they regained their voting rights. A federal judge in July sided with Alabama, affirming that the state does not need to make such notifications after Ivey signed the law restoring rights to some felons.
A Soros-funded group called the Campaign Legal Center filed the lawsuit against Alabama last year calling for a public educational campaign to inform felons of their regained right to vote. The litigation is still ongoing.
“This is not a Democratic or Republican issue; it’s a democracy issue with a lower case d,” Danielle Lang, a Campaign Legal Center lawyer, stated after spending a week earlier this month in Alabama holding educational clinics on the matter.
Besides funding from Soros, the Campaign Legal Center documents that it receives financing from the Soros-funded Tides Foundation and from the Soros-funded Brennan Center for Justice.
Doug Jones himself has spearheaded numerous Brennan projects, including one seeking full voting rights nationwide be given to all felons released from prison regardless of their crimes.
The Brennan Center has been the recipient of numerous grants from Soros’s Open Society Foundations totaling over $7,466,000 from 2000 to 2010 alone.
The Soros-funded ACLU of Alabama also filed a lawsuit seeking to force the state of Alabama to inform convicted felons that they can vote.
The ACLU has also worked with Glasgow’s TOPS to register felons. The groups co-hosted a Voter Rights Restoration training session in Selma, Alabama in July, after the law was first changed. The ACLU dedicated a special section of its website to getting supporters to register for the Alabama senate race. The organization has used its Twitter account in recent days to promote the voter registration drive in Alabama.
The Soros-funded Campaign Legal Center has released an Alabama Voting Rights Restoration Toolkit aiding felons in registering to vote. Soros’s Open Society is listed as a donor to the group.
The League of Women Voters of Alabama has also been advocating for voter turnout. Soros’s Open Society has donated to the League of Women Voters Education Fund.
The Soros-financed MoveOn.org, which advocates for voting restoration to felons, has been heavily active in Alabama, where they claim they have 43,000 members.
In October, Glasgow dismissed a lawsuit against Alabama state officials after they agreed to sign documents indicating they should not have prevented him from entering prisons for the purpose of registering felons. His lawsuit was facilitated by the NAACP, which is financed by Soros.
Earlier this week, Think Progress, a project of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress, suggested that “tens of thousands of newly registered felons could swing (the) Alabama Senate election.”
Glasgow’s TOPS, which has been registering the Alabama felons, is financed by the Open Philanthropy Project, a non-profit financed by Cari Tuna and her husband, Dustin Moskovitz, co-founders of Facebook and Asana.
TOPS is openly partnered with the Soros-financed Drug Policy Alliance, which seeks to decriminalize drug offenses. The Alliance’s main aim, according to its website, is to create a world in which people “are no longer punished for what they put into their own bodies but only for crimes committed against others.”
Soros’s Open Society Foundations gave a whopping $50 million to the Alliance to aid its decriminalization efforts.
Breitbart News previously reported that Jones pushed reduced sentencing for drug offenders in an effort he spearheaded for the Soros-funded Brennan Center. Jones’s project sought to fundamentally transform the role of U.S. Attorneys from one of prosecuting criminals to activists that enact a so-called progressive criminal justice agenda.
Glasgow, meanwhile, has been petitioning for voting rights for felons in Alabama for over a decade, including in 2008 when he used TOPS to push for changes in law. “There would be a lot of difference in our legislators, our elected officials and our presidents that we’ve had,” he said at the time, referring to the possibility of felons voting. “It would definitely change the political spectrum of Alabama.”
Glasgow has been cited by the news media as the spokesperson for the Free Alabama Movement (FAM), a radical network that has been leading activism, including prison strikes, within Alabama’s prison population for years. FAM itself calls Glasgow its “outside” spokesman.
GAM has been advocating for the repeal of Alabama’s three strikes law. The group also demands a re-write of Alabama’s “drive-by-shooting law” to apply only to gang-related activity.
Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun, a founder of the FAM, has peddled conspiracy theories about the 13th amendment, which allows for “involuntary servitude” as “a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Ra-Sun claimed the U.S. uses the 13th amendment “to maintain control” of “black people as tools or machines of production.” Glasgow has also repeatedly preached against the 13th amendment.
Last year, CNN reported on a national inmate strike that began in September 2016 organized by Glasgow’s FAM. Glasgow claimed to the news network that an inmate who had previously gone on a hunger strike was being denied water because of his activism, a charge refuted by the Alabama Department of Corrections. Glasgow told CNN the case drew the attention of activist lawyer Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative.
The Equal Justice Initiative is financed by Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Breitbart News previously reported that the Initiative is listed with five other groups on Doug Jones’s personal website as among organizations that Jones advocates for supporters to “get involved” with on “matters of justice and equality.”
Glasgow’s FAM has worked with the radical Industrial Workers of the World, as well as a slew of other far-left groups such as the Anarchist Black Cross Federation, the Black Autonomy Federation, the Black Militia Nation and the National Lawyers Guild.
The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) is famous for defending protesters from extremist groups who get arrested during disruption campaigns. A notable former member of the National Lawyers Guild is Bernardine Dohrn, the NLG’s first national student organizer. Dohrn was a leader of the Weather Underground anti-American domestic terrorist group along with her husband, former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers.
Doug Jones is currently listed on the Democracy Restoration Act (DRA) information page of the Soros-financed Brennan Center’s website as among the “Groups and Individuals who support the DRA,” which calls for voting to be restored to convicted felons. Listed alongside Jones is the National Lawyers Guild.
Glasgow has been involved with his half-brother Al Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN). Glasgow keynoted a Montgomery, Alabama NAN anti-police demonstration in April 2013 over the Trayvon Martin case. The event was co-sponsored by TOPS.
In 2014, Sharpton opened a NAN office in Birmingham. “We will, out of this office, coordinate our work throughout the South against those new measures that have been designed to suppress the vote,” Sharpton said. “Make no mistake about it, these are designed to suppress the vote and we are here to fight against voter suppression.”
Sharpton’s national group boasts that it is involved in efforts to “support” voter registration while “fighting voter suppression” in numerous states, including Alabama.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
Written with research by Joshua Klein.
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