"Protestor" who condemned BLM shooting victim arrested for terrorism in Georgia

This is a nationwide network

Last week I posted a series of articles detailing the aftermath of several roadblock shootings across the US. The July 28, 2020 shooting in Aurora, Colorado was preceded by a very sophisticated BLM operation.

BLM organizers gathered hundreds of people to block the nearby interstate highway. Not only did they set up multiple smaller blockades at on-ramps before their main roadblock, they even had several pursuit videos ready to go after anyone who managed to make it on to the highway. The victim (whose name I won’t use because he has received threats), unaware there was a roadblock and trying to drop his friend off at the airport, veered around one on-ramp blockade and found himself being chased by a BLM organizer on a motorcycle.

The victim slowed as he approach the crowd, when another pursuit vehicle, a Ford F-150, rammed him. Members of the BLM mob began to throw objects at the Jeep, then one of them began to chase it with a bat. The Jeep sped up to get away, its path completely clear. However, another BLM activist named Samuel Young pulled out a gun and began firing at the Jeep. He hit the Jeep several times, but missed the victim and his passenger. Several members of the mob were wounded by Young’s gunfire.

I’ll spare you the details of the legal proceedings surrounding this (I wrote an earlier article outlining the other aspects of the incident here). Suffice to say, Young was convicted of all the charges (though his attempted murder charges were reduced to “reckless manslaughter”) but was only given 70 days in jail by a leftist judge.

There is one aspect of the controversy that I missed during the initial article. An observant reader named tugordie pointed out that one of the people who condemned the victim in a story that was linked in my article was arrested in Georgia for domestic terrorism earlier this month.

Shortly after the Aurora shooting, the driver of the Jeep was doxxed and faced many threats. Ehret Nottingham, a young political science major at Colorado State University (which the victim briefly attended) messaged the school newspaper the following:

[The victim] tarnishes the name and reputation of CSU through his actions and CSU should condemn and distance the school from this person… To uphold the Principles of Community, CSU must condemn these actions and continue to take a forward anti-racist stance on issues of injustice and human rights. Anything less is silence in the face of oppression and an embarrassment to all of CSU’s students.

Ehret Nottingham was apparently involved in climate change and abortion protests groups on campus. He participated in the 2019 “Youth Climate Strike” in Ft. Collins.

Nottingham’s name appeared in the news several years after he condemned the victim of the Aurora shooting. Just a few weeks ago, he was one of the 23 far-left activists arrested for domestic terrorism under the RICO statute in Georgia. Nottingham, the charging documents claimed, was part of a mob that stormed the construction site of a Georgia police training facility popularly known as “Cop City.” After overwhelming the local guards, the mob lit fires and destroyed equipment.

The mob numbered in the hundreds, but only 35 have been detained so far. It’s unclear what evidence led to Nottingham’s arrest, though many other members of the mob arrested were also from out of state. Two were foreign nationals.

Notably, a lawyer for the far left advocacy group the Southern Poverty Law Center was also arrested for terrorism. Attorney Thomas Webb Jurgens was acting as a “legal observer” and apparently accompanied the mob during the activities that led to their indictment.

This is a common trend: the blurring of the lines between the legal activist infrastructure that facilitates far-left terrorism and the criminal behavior itself. After a certain point, it’s just too obvious that there is functionally no separation between these groups and they are all part of the same criminal conspiracy. It’s not a mystery what goes on at these events or why respectable non-profits have lawyers follow these people around. They are not protecting civil liberties, they are actively facilitating crimes. Until these people start suffering serious consequences in large numbers for their actions, their behavior will only get worse and worse.

The Georgia RICO investigation is great to see. Although leftists can easily absorb criminal cases when charges are dismissed en masse or reduced to tickets, when arrests go up into the thousands it seriously strains their support network. Every Red state should be charging the organizers and participants of the 2020 riots with something. Many of these people are publicly known. Put them through years of trials.

The most effective way to prevent future riots is to throw the people who planned previous riots in jail. There is a very large but not unlimited number of organizers in these terror networks. The Aurora shooting is a great illustration of all the pre-planning that goes into their events. Given that violence always follows when the mob is defied, it should not be too hard for state legislatures to draft laws that explicitly prohibit this behavior and lay down real punishments to deter future crimes. This is a process that should begin immediately. It’s not something that you are going to be able to figure out on the fly when there are tens of thousands of people on the streets.

I guess we’ll see what comes out about Nottingham at trial. As Herculean of an effort as it’s taken to finally bring charges, I’m skeptical of prosecutors’ ability to overcome leftist jury nullification under the current arrangement. I don’t think the normal criminal justice system can handle so much bad faith engagement from so many different directions.

As I’ve been writing articles on the first Red Scare, I have noticed the same names come up again and again around incidents of leftwing violence. For instance, in an article on the armed takeover of several NYC churches by mobs of socialist IWW members in 1914, a quote from leading journalist Lincoln Steffens was included. Steffans claimed that the church takeovers were really a 1st Amendment issue, and argued that the lead organizer’s charges for inciting a riot should be thrown out.

Steffens’s name also came up in my research on the 1910 LA Times bombing, in which labor organizers blew up the LA Times’s headquarters and printing press. 21 people were killed in the explosion and ensuing fire. Bombs were also planted at the homes of two prominent critics of labor unions, though fortunately those bombs were discovered in time and the victims were able to escape.

Steffans was a close confidant of labor leaders, and the brothers on trial for the bombing confessed to him that they were in fact guilty. Steffans encouraged lead defence lawyer Clarence Darrow to argue that the bombings were actually justified. Darrow himself would use this approach during his own trial for bribery (he was caught red-handed trying to bribe a juror in an attempt to free the bombers), and echoed this feeling in his memoirs decades later.

Steffans would go on to be one of the biggest American apologists for the Bolshevik Revolution and later Stalinism. He would receive direct financial support from the California Writer’s Project, a New Deal agency. His wife, Ella Winter, was also a vocal supporter of Stalinism. She had worked as a secretary for influential far left US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who founded the ACLU and led efforts to gain diplomatic recognition for the Soviet Union.

These guys all know each other. They’re all connected. They cover for terrorist violence because they support terrorist violence. They make it possible. I’m curious about the lead-up to Ehret Nottingham’s letter to his school paper attacking the victim. Did he write it on his own, or was he instructed to? When did he go from a “climate justice” protestor to a member of a terror organization attacking police training facilities? These are sophisticated groups. They know how to create a fake record in the media. They can get fake witnesses to testify to anything they want. Over time, their lies get taken at face value.

The 2020 BLM riots illustrated just how blended the network of “respectable” activists and violent goons is. These networks need to be interrupted with serious state scrutiny on both the perpetrators and the moralizing “civil rights activists” who facilitate their violence and make it palatable to the public. Again, this has to happen before these activists are able to create another national crisis. It will be impossible to craft an effective response in a state of total anarchy.