Indeed, the leaders of
the Black Lives Matter organizations fueling this summer’s disturbances were
trained by self-described Marxist revolutionaries who have long used the plight
of black Americans as justification for overthrowing America’s constitutional
order.
BLACK
LIVES MATTER? OR JUST A HOAX?
The protests that sprang up in the
wake of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis seemed like spontaneous
outpourings of grief and anger. They weren’t entirely. Though many who joined
their ranks may have been moved by outrage at the images of Floyd’s death,
those operating behind the scenes have prepared for this moment for a long
time.
Indeed, the leaders of
the Black Lives Matter organizations fueling this summer’s disturbances were
trained by self-described Marxist revolutionaries who have long used the plight
of black Americans as justification for overthrowing America’s constitutional
order. They
frankly admit that such “organizing” is the key to their goal of world
revolution. Our political leaders owe it to themselves and to their fellow
Americans to understand this blueprint before rhetorically embracing, let alone
implementing, the radical changes that the protesters and rioters are
demanding.
The goal of upending the
American system is, moreover, also evident among the consultants now conducting
“anti-racism training” within major corporations and foundations. These
facilitators of anti-white struggle sessions disdain the capitalist system and
seek its replacement—and the mainstream media cheers them on. In a July New York Times article on the BLM movement, Douglas McAdams, professor
emeritus at Stanford, wrote: “It looks, for all the world, like these protests
are achieving what very few do: setting in motion a period of significant,
sustained, and widespread social, political change. We appear to be
experiencing a social change tipping point—that is as rare in society as it is
potentially consequential.”
But who initiated this
demand for change? After the initial protests following Floyd’s death, public
outrage was channeled—by trained activists working from a playbook—into
manifestations that often grew riotous. The Black Lives Matters Global
Network and Movement for Black Lives organizations have been the nerve center
of the protests. They have been laying the groundwork for years, carefully
cultivating a network of groups that could organize protests when the moment
came and amplify the message through social media.
Consider the BLM Global
Network. The three women who thought up the BLM name in 2013, and then added
the hashtag, later founded the global network. They remain in charge. As the New York Times Magazine explained, “while much of the nation’s attention
drifted away from Black Lives Matter, organizers and activists weren’t
dormant.” One of the three founders, Alicia Garza, said that “the movement’s
first generation of organizers has been working steadily to become savvier and
even more strategic over the past seven years, and have been joined by
motivated younger leaders.”
As the Times report
elaborates, “One of the reasons there have been protests in so many places in
the United States is the backing of organizations like Black Lives Matter.
While the group isn’t necessarily directing each protest, it provides
materials, guidance and a framework for new activists.” Deva Woodly, a
professor at the New School, told a Times reporter that, “those
activists are taking to social media to quickly share protest details to a wide
audience. . . . These figures would make the recent protests the largest
movement in the country’s history.”
Melina Abdullah, of BLM’s
Los Angeles chapter, told an interviewer that the demonstrations in that city
had been strategically planned: “We built kind of an organizing strategy that
said, build black community [to] disrupt white supremacy.” Their targets, she said,
were the neighborhoods where “white affluent folks” lived. “That’s one of the
reasons the marches and the protests were in Beverly Hills.”
A Los Angeles Times story emphasizes the central role that the BLM
organization played, saying: “The unprecedented size and scope of recent
rallies speaks to how Black Lives Matter has transformed from a small but
passionate movement into a cultural and political phenomenon.” Weeks after
Floyd was killed, BLM members were “continuing to channel their outrage and
grief over his killing into a sustained mass campaign for profound social
change. The group has political sway that would have seemed unimaginable just a
few months ago.”
In a 2015 interview,
Patrice Cullors, another of the three founders, said that she and Garza were
“trained Marxists.” Abdullah, of the Los Angeles BLM chapter, was born a
red-diaper baby—“Raised in the 70s, in the picket lines of Oakland, by activist
parents,” as the interviewer put it. Her paternal grandfather was Gunter Reimann,
a member of the German Communist Party. Garza cut her organizing teeth as
director of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), founded by
Marxists Garth Ferguson, Patty Snitzler, Regina Douglas, Brian Russell, and
Steve Williams. To Williams we owe the concept of “transformative organizing,”
which insists “that effective organizing for social
change cannot simply be based on an apolitical and highly specific analysis of
what is possible in the short term.”
Cullors trained for a
decade as a radical organizer in the Labor/Community Strategy Center,
established and run by Eric Mann, a former member of the Weather Underground,
the 1960s radical faction identified by the FBI as a domestic terrorist group.
The “Weathermen” explained in their 1969 foundational statement that they were dedicated to “the
destruction of U.S. imperialism and the achievement of classless world: world
communism.” The ties between the BLM Global Network and the Weathermen run
deep. National Review’s Andrew McCarthy revealed in a recent exposé that Weather Underground supporter Susan
Rosenberg, whose 1984 sentence of 58 years in prison for possession “of 740 pounds of explosives, an Uzi
submachine gun, an M-14 rifle, another rifle with a telescopic sight, a
sawed-off shotgun, three 9-millimeter handguns in purses and boxes of
ammunition” was commuted by President Bill Clinton, serves as vice chair of the
board of directors of Thousand Currents—the radical, grantmaking institution
that until July sponsored the BLM Global Network. Rosenberg was also sought on
federal charges that she aided the 1979 prison escape of Joanne Chesimard, a
Communist now living in Cuba, and whom Cullors quotes approvingly in her book When They Call You a Terrorist. (Since July, the Global
Center has become “a project” of the Tides Center, another donor and supporter
of the hard Left and its ideas).
Mann, who served 18
months in prison for assault and battery and disturbing the
peace, remains committed to overthrowing the American system and achieving
world revolution through organizing. He calls his Strategy Center the “Harvard
of Revolutionary graduate schools,” or “the University of Caracas Revolutionary
Graduate School.” The Center’s purpose, he told a
seminar at the University of California, San Diego in 2008, is “to build an
anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-fascist united front.”
Mann says that the Center
must teach people to organize strategically because “people think they can join
an organization, and go out, and change the most dictatorial country in the
world by just showing up. We don’t think so. Organizing is a skill, is a
vocation.” During the Center’s “six-month, intensive training program,” classes
offer a mix of theory—Mann’s wife teaches a class on “problems of imperialism,
women’s studies, strategies and tactics”—with street activism, where students
are held accountable. “How many people did you organize? How did it go?”
They also teach how to
raise funds. “If we’re going to build a revolution, you gotta ask people for
money . . . the poor must pay for their own liberation, so we need to teach you
to ask for money,” Mann told the students. “I spend my time organizing mainly
young people who want to be revolutionaries,” Mann said. If you’re not in
organizing, “your life is meaningless,” and you risk becoming a “bourgeois
pig.”
The challenge for
students, Mann told the class, was to ask themselves, “Am I making decisions to
change the system? Am I being tied to the masses?” Universities serve as vital
centers of recruitment and radicalization. “The university,” Mann explained,
“is the place where Mao Zedong was radicalized, where Lenin and Fidel were
radicalized, where Che was radicalized. The concept of the radical middle class
of the colonized people, or in my case the radical middle class of the
privileged people, is a model of a certain type of revolutionary.” The goal for
students, he told his class, was to “Take this country away from the white
settler state, take this country away from imperialism and have an anti-racist,
anti-imperialist and anti-fascist revolution.”
BLOG EDITOR: DO A
SEARCH FOR BARACK OBAMA AND BILL AYERS.
In their 1969
declaration, You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows, Bill Ayers, Bernardine
Dohrn, John Jacobs, and other revolutionary leaders of the Weather Underground
spoke of black people not so much as the reason for their push to destroy
American society and institute world Communism, but as a means to achieve their
goals.
American blacks were considered a colonized subject of the United States, along
with the people of Vietnam and Bolivia—another victim of U.S. imperialism.
Their liberation was secondary to the general struggle; seeking black
liberation for its own sake was just a form of bourgeois nationalism. “No black
self-determination could be won which would not result in a victory for the
international revolution as a whole,” the document affirmed.
These are the ideological
sources for what could be the largest radical movement in American history—one
that could lead to real policy changes. One component is street pressure,
driven by the likes of Mann and Cullors. Another takes place in plusher
environments, such as Fortune 500 companies or the halls of Congress. Consultants
like White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo told 184 Democratic
legislators in a conference call in June that their policies hurt black lives.
DiAngelo told The New York Times that “capitalism is so bound up with
racism. … [it] is dependent on inequality, on an underclass. If the model is
profit over everything, you’re not going to look at your policies to see what
is most racially equitable.”
Up to now, the American
system has resisted socialism by offering prosperity and opportunity. Our
politicians today need to understand what they’re facing from the BLM movement
and what is at stake. The “white settler state” of Eric Mann’s fevered mind is
in reality the American constitutional order. The imperialism that Mann,
Rosenberg, DiAngelo, and others imagine is the American free-market system that
has been the most successful weapon against poverty ever devised. Political
leaders of either party feeling pressured to adopt BLM policies or even just
mouth the rhetoric should spend some time examining the movement’s intellectual
sources—and its political goals.
Black Lives Matter Protesters Riot in Rochester, Harass Restaurant Patrons
Black Lives Matter protesters took to the streets of Rochester Friday night, prompting authorities to declare a riot following the escalation of violence and destruction in the area.
Protesters gathered in Rochester on Friday night following the recently released footage of the police-involved death of Daniel Prude, a black man who died of asphyxiation after being subdued and hooded by police in March. Police union head Michael Mazzeo sparked further outrage after stating on Friday that officers were following training protocol.
Demonstrators reportedly attempted to shut down area restaurants and can be seen harassing patrons and throwing chairs.
“We’re shutting your party down,” one protester reportedly shouted at a patron.
Activists reportedly chanted, “If you don’t give us our shit, we shut shit down”:
#HappeningNow the protesters in Rochester NY are "shutting down restaurants", tables are broken, people running off scared #rochesterprotests pic.twitter.com/oxmlZp526w
— @SCOOTERCASTER (FNTV) (@ScooterCasterNY) September 5, 2020
The demonstration continued to descend into chaos prompting authorities to declare it a riot and deploy various munitions, including pepper spray. Protesters reportedly hurled “projectiles and incendiary devices” at officers, three of whom were hospitalized for injuries including cuts and burns to their neck:
Fireworks thrown at officers in Rochester New York during the protest. #ROC pic.twitter.com/1z649UsSNg
— Geoffery Rogers (@GeofferyRogers) September 5, 2020
A bus stop has been set on fire as hundreds of protesters remain on court street in downtown rochester. #roc #danielprude @News_8 pic.twitter.com/3WVcQxSwtR
— Atyia Collins (@Atyia_Collins) September 5, 2020
A bus stop was lit on fire during the protest Rochester New York. #ROC pic.twitter.com/RYmPwu1tom
— Geoffery Rogers (@GeofferyRogers) September 5, 2020
Officers running towards protesters and telling everyone to get out of the area. #ROC pic.twitter.com/ksa3CYXXDv
— Geoffery Rogers (@GeofferyRogers) September 5, 2020
Second fire started in a dumpster some protest are trying to put it out. #ROC pic.twitter.com/vQnj1ClGdW
— Geoffery Rogers (@GeofferyRogers) September 5, 2020
Protest in Rochester declared an illegal assembly. Pepper balls shot into the crowd #HappeningNow #rochesterprotests pic.twitter.com/jkjze9w1c5
— @SCOOTERCASTER (FNTV) (@ScooterCasterNY) September 5, 2020
Tear Gas has been dispatched in Rochester NY #rochesterprotests #protests #HappeningNow pic.twitter.com/NEOwT5XYuQ
— @SCOOTERCASTER (FNTV) (@ScooterCasterNY) September 5, 2020
"If you ain't police do not record crimes" – Rochester rioter https://t.co/S7K0PAR41R
— special agent viti (@selfdeclaredref) September 5, 2020
According to WROC, 11 people were arrested as a result of Friday night’s riot, three of whom were charged with felonies.
Per the Democrat & Chronicle:
- Jaeylon Johnson, 21, accused of first-degree rioting and inciting a riot.
- Jeremy A Yager, 22, accused of first-degree rioting.
- Barry M. Andrews, 25, accused of first-degree rioting.
This week, Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren suspended the seven officers involved in the death of Prude, stating that the 41-year-old man “was failed by the police department, our mental health care system, our society, and he was failed by me.”
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