Tue Sep 1, 2020
John Perazzo
48
Editor's
note: In this just-released report on Black Lives Matter, author John Perazzo
exposes the BLM movement as a racist, anti-Semitic, anti-family and
anti-capitalist attack on the very foundations of American democracy.
Read the report below -
and order hard copies HERE .
*
What’s in a Name?
During the run-up to the
war in Iraq in early 2003, a coalition named United for Peace & Justice
(UPJ) played a central role in organizing most of the major anti-war
demonstrations across the United States. The coalition’s name was deliberately
crafted to evoke positive associations in the hearts of the American people.
After all, who could possibly oppose such lofty virtues as “peace” or “justice”?
But United for Peace & Justice’s actual purpose had very little to do
with either of those virtues. At its core, it was a hate-America coalition that
sought to save the regime of one of the monsters of the 20th century, Saddam
Hussein, using slogans that relentlessly accused the U.S. of pursuing a “policy
of permanent warfare and empire-building” around the world.
The co-chair and
principal leader of UPJ was Leslie Cagan, a longtime Communist Party member
and a national leader of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy
& Socialism, a self-identified Marxist entity seeking to bring “a 21st
Century socialism” to America. In the Sixties, Cagan was an
enthusiastic supporter of the Black Panther Party, a gang
that waged armed warfare against the police and engaged in criminality that
included drug dealing, pimping, rape, extortion, assault, arson and murder.
Cagan was also a strong
supporter of the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, whose nation she
described as “not an abstract idea of socialism or revolution,” but as a
society whose principal hallmark was a type of “humane interaction among
people” that she “had never witnessed” in the United States. And she supported
the 2002-03 “Not In Our Name” initiative, a project of the Revolutionary
Communist Party that seeks to achieve a Communist America by means of a
“revolutionary war”—complete with “great bloodshed and destruction”—waged
“right within the belly of this most powerful imperialist beast.”
Obviously, the promotion
of “peace and justice” could scarcely be described as the true, animating
objective of Ms. Cagan and her UPJ coalition.
More recently, another
prominent, enormously influential movement—which just happens to be backed by
this same Leslie Cagan—has similarly adopted a benign sounding name that
resonates quite naturally with people of good will. But that name—Black Lives
Matter—deceptively conceals a radical, racist, and horrifically destructive
agenda.
An Openly and Proudly Marxist Movement
When BLM was established
in 2013, its stated objective was to galvanize a protest movement in response
to the July 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman, a so-called “white Hispanic”
man who was tried for murder and manslaughter after he had shot and killed a
black Florida teenager named Trayvon Martin in a highly publicized 2012
altercation. Before long, “Black Lives Matter” became a rallying cry for
writers, public speakers, celebrities, demonstrators, and even rioters, who
took up the cause of demanding an end to what BLM terms the “virulent
anti-Black racism” that “permeates our society.”
BLM gained additional
prominence following a white police officer’s fatal shooting of an
18-year-old black man named Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014.
Brown’s death, which occurred while he fought with the officer just minutes
after having robbed a local convenience store, set off a massive wave of
protests and riots that grew into a national movement denouncing an alleged
epidemic of police brutality against African Americans.
But BLM’s larger
objective went far beyond matters of interracial violence and police
misconduct. Its overarching mission was to thoroughly discredit the United
States as a detestable and irredeemable nation where black people are
“collectively” subjected to “inhumane conditions” in a “white supremacist
system” that was originally “built on Indigenous genocide and chattel slavery.”
Dedicated to advancing this theme were BLM’s founders, three hardcore Marxist
black women. One of them was Alicia Garza, a self-described “queer”
social-justice activist who reveres the Marxist revolutionary, former
Black Panther, convicted cop-killer, and longtime fugitive Assata
Shakur for her contributions to the “Black Liberation Movement.” Garza is
likewise a great admirer of such luminaries as Angela Davis (another
revolutionary Marxist and former Black Panther) and the late Audre Lorde (a
black socialist lesbian feminist).
Another of BLM’s three
founders was Patrisse Cullors, who in 2015 openly acknowledged BLM’s
subversive objectives, proclaiming on video: “We actually do have an
ideological frame. Myself and Alicia [Garza] in particular, we’re trained
organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super versed on ideological
theories.” In the same video, Cullors revealed that for more than a
decade she had been a protégé of Eric Mann, who in the 1960s and ’70s was a
member of the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather
Underground. Both organizations aspired to topple U.S. democratic institutions
by means of violent revolution, remake the nation’s government in a Marxist
image, and promote America’s military defeat in Vietnam.
BLM’s third founder was
Opal Tometi, who asserts that “the racist structures that have long oppressed
Black people” in the U.S. have perpetuated a “cycle of oppression” and a
permanent climate of “anti-Black racism.” In 2015, Tometi attended a “People of
African Descent Leadership Summit” in Harlem, New York, where she had a warm
meeting and photo-op with Venezuela’s Marxist dictator, Nicolas Maduro. During
a speech which she delivered at that Summit, Tometi thanked Maduro and his
government for having given her an opportunity to speak there. She also used
the occasion to condemn “Western economic policies, land grabs, and neocolonial
financial instruments like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.”
The following year, Tometi praised the Bolivarian Revolution by which
Venezuela’s previous Marxist dictator, the late Hugo Chavez—whose policies
transformed Venezuela from South America’s wealthiest nation into an economic
basket case—had initially come to power.
BLM’s pro-Marxist
orientation was articulated with great passion at a BLM protest in July 2016,
when Cornell University professor Russell Rickford declared: “We’ve got to
build a grassroots, antiracist movement to defeat capitalism altogether, and
it’s not going to happen at the ballot box. There can be no human system under
capitalism. Capitalism is an anti-human system.”
With chapters in 14
separate U.S. cities and 3 Canadian cities, BLM is closely allied with numerous
groups that are fronts for the Freedom Road Socialist
Organization (FRSO), a Marxist-Leninist entity that advocates the
overthrow of capitalism. In an article for Accuracy
In Media , economist and investigative journalist James Simpson has
identified some of these FRSO front groups with BLM ties. They include the
National Domestic Workers Alliance; People Organized to Win Employment Rights;
the Right to the City Alliance; the School of Unity and Liberation; the
Advancement Project; the Movement Strategy Center; Dignity and Power Now; the
Black Left Unity Network; Black Workers for Justice; the Grassroots Global
Justice Alliance; Causa Justa/Just Cause; Hands Up United; Intelligent
Mischief; the Organization for Black Struggle; the Revolutionary Student
Coordinating Committee; Showing Up for Racial Justice; Strategic Concepts in
Organizing and Policy Education; and the Labor/Community Strategy Center
(headed by former Weather Underground leader Eric Mann).
As evidenced by these
numerous links between FRSO and BLM, Black Lives Matter is in essence, as
James Simpson puts it, “one of many projects undertaken by the FRSO.” All three
of BLM’s co-founders have been employed by, or affiliated with, one or
more of FRSO’s aforementioned front groups at various times.
At all of BLM’s public
events, demonstrators invoke the words that their “beloved” heroine, Assata
Shakur, once wrote in a letter titled “To My People.” Those words are: “It is
our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each
other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” (The
fourth line was drawn from the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels.) In Shakur’s original letter, she described herself as a “Black
revolutionary” who had “declared war” against “the rich who prosper on our
poverty,” and against “all the mindless, heart-less robots” who served as
police officers.
Rejecting the Traditional Nuclear Family
In a document titled
“What We Believe,” BLM candidly affirms its preference for identity politics
based on race: “We see ourselves as part of the global Black family.” BLM also
proclaims its desire to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family
structure requirement” and replace it with the socialist ideal of “villages”
serving as “extended families” that “collectively care for one another.” This
is a profoundly significant facet of BLM’s agenda, because it rejects the
singular value that, if it were to be embraced, would offer black Americans the
tools they most need in order to carve out for themselves a prosperous and
fulfilling life. At present, the traditional nuclear family is a statistical
rarity in the black community. Fully 69.4% of black babies today are born to unmarried
mothers in homes where no father is present. This fact alone has a host of
catastrophic implications for those youngsters.
For example,
father-absent families—black and white alike—generally occupy the bottom rung
of our society’s economic ladder. As Heritage Foundation research fellow
Robert Rector has explained: “Out-of-wedlock childbearing and single parenthood
are the principal causes of child poverty and welfare dependence in the U.S….
Children born out-of-wedlock to never-married women are poor fifty percent of
the time. By contrast, children born within a marriage which remains intact are
poor 7 percent of the time. Thus, the absence of marriage increases the
frequency of child poverty 700 percent.” Articulating a similar theme many
years earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Nothing is so much needed as a
secure family life for a people to pull themselves out of poverty.”
Much more recently, the
left-leaning Brookings Institution has identified three basic requirements for
avoiding poverty, regardless of one’s race: “Finish high school, get a
full-time job, and wait until age 21 to get married and [then] have children.”
“Our research,” says Brookings, “shows that of American adults who followed
these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly
75 percent have joined the middle class.”
Children in single-parent
households are raised not only with economic, but also social and
psychological, disadvantages. For instance, they are much more likely than
children from intact families to be abused or neglected; to struggle
academically; to drop out of school; to have behavioral problems; to experience
emotional disorders; to have a weak sense of right and wrong; to be unable to
delay gratification; to conceive children out-of-wedlock when they are teens or
young adults; and to be dependent on welfare when they reach adulthood.
In addition, growing up
without a father is a far better forecaster of a boy’s future criminality than
either race or poverty. Indeed, 70% of juveniles in state-operated reform
institutions were raised in fatherless homes, as were 70% of long-term prison
inmates, 75% of adolescent murderers, and 80% of rapists motivated by displaced
anger. As Robert Rector once put it: “Lack of married parents, rather than
race or poverty, is the principal factor in the crime rate.”
And yet, in spite of all
this, BLM openly calls for a complete dismantling of the nuclear family system.
Why? Because Marxist ideology demands it. As California State University
professor Richard Weikart has explained, Marx and Engels “usually wrote about
the destruction, dissolution, and abolition of the family” as a natural
outgrowth of “the abolition of private property and the introduction of
socialism.” Because Marx and Engels advocated these ideas, BLM dutifully
embraces them as articles of faith. This fact alone serves as proof positive
that BLM cares nothing about the overwhelming majority of black lives.
The only black people whose lives mean anything to BLM are the infinitesimally
small number who happen to die as a result of some type of altercation with a
white person, especially a police officer. Those black
lives are exceedingly valuable to BLM, because their corpses can be exploited
as exhibits to bolster BLM’s claim that white racism poses a grave threat to
black Americans. Thus, BLMers are quite adept at reciting, from memory, the
names of a handful of blacks who, in recent years, died at the hands of white
police in highly publicized incidents. But they are entirely mute vis-à-vis the thousands of blacks whose lives are
snuffed out by black killers each and every year . Those lives, long
forgotten, are of no interest whatsoever to BLM.
BLM’s False Claims About the Police and White-on-Black Crime
Depicting America as a
veritable cesspool of “state-sanctioned violence and anti-Black racism,” BLM
claims that blacks in the U.S. today are routinely targeted for “extrajudicial
killings … by police and vigilantes.” And although this claim has been widely
and passionately echoed by supporters of BLM, it is in fact a monstrous lie, as
has been demonstrated consistently by decades of hard empirical evidence. Some
examples:
A 2011 Bureau of Justice
Statistics (BJS) study reports that between 2003 and 2009, whites
accounted for 41% of all suspects known to have been killed by police during
that 7-year time frame. By contrast, blacks and Hispanics accounted for 31.7%
and 20.3%, respectively. It is also worth noting that during this same
period—when blacks were 31.7% of all suspects killed by an officer—blacks
accounted for about 38.5% of all arrests for violent crimes, which are the
types of crimes most likely to trigger potentially deadly confrontations with
police.
This trend has continued
unabated during more recent years. In 2017, for example, blacks were just 23.6%
of all people shot dead by police, even though they were arrested
for 37.5% of all violent crimes. The following year, blacks were
26.3% of those fatally shot by police, even as they were arrested for
fully 37.4% of violent crimes.
In a 2018 working
paper titled “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of
Force,” Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who is African
American, reported that: (a) police officers were 47% less likely to
discharge their weapon without first being attacked if the suspect was black,
than if the suspect was white, and (b) white officers were no more likely to
shoot unarmed blacks than unarmed whites.
A
2019 study published in Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences shows that white officers are no
more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. “In
fact,” writes Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald, the study
found that “if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken
into account, it is against white civilians.” Specifically, Mac Donald adds,
the authors of the study compiled a database of 917 officer-involved fatal
shootings in 2015 and found that 55% of the victims were white, 27% were black,
and 19% were Hispanic.
Each and every year,
without exception, whites who are shot and killed by police officers
in the U.S. far outnumber blacks and Hispanics who meet that same fate. In
2017, for instance, 457 whites, 223 blacks, and 179 Hispanics were killed by police
officers in the line of duty. In 2018, the corresponding figures were 399
whites, 209 blacks, and 148 Hispanics. And in 2019, the totals were 370 whites,
235 blacks, and 158 Hispanics.
According to Heather
Mac Donald: “The per capita rate of officers being feloniously killed [by
anyone] is 45 times higher than the rate at which unarmed black males are
killed by cops. And an officer’s chance of getting killed by a black assailant is 18.5 times higher
than the chance of an unarmed black getting killed by a cop.”
According to the Bureau
of Justice Statistics, in 2018 there were 593,598 interracial violent
victimizations (excluding homicide) between black and white civilians in the
United States. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90.4%,
while whites committed just 56,394 of them, or about 9.5%.
When white civilian
offenders committed crimes of violence against either whites or blacks in 2018,
they targeted white victims approximately 97.3% of the time, and they went
after black victims about 2.6% of the time. By contrast, when black civilian
offenders committed crimes of violence against either whites or blacks during
that same year, they targeted white victims 58% of the time, and they went
after black victims 42% of the time.
City Journal reports that according to Justice Department data,
blacks in 2018 were overrepresented among the perpetrators of offenses
classified as “hate crimes” by a whopping 50%—while whites were
underrepresented by 24%.
There is not even the
slightest hint of anti-black racism anywhere in
these figures. But when BLMers are confronted with such incontrovertible facts,
they simply do not care. Indeed, they invariably react with the intellectual
equivalent of a collective yawn.
Echoes of the Black Panthers
To improve the allegedly
abysmal condition of blacks in the United States, BLM has issued a series
of non-negotiable demands that are clearly modeled on elements of the famous
“Ten-Point Program” put forth by the Marxist leaders of the Black Panther
Party in the 1960s.
For example,
BLM demands “an immediate end to police brutality and [to] the murder of Black
people and all oppressed people.” The Panthers used language that was
essentially identical, calling for “an immediate end to police brutality and
murder of black people.”
And whereas BLM has
demanded “freedom from mass incarceration and an end to the prison industrial
complex,” the Panthers similarly called for “Black people [to] be released from
the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial
trial.”
But BLM’s demands are not
limited merely to matters involving police and the criminal-justice system.
They also include overtly socialist and racialist agenda items such as the
guarantee of taxpayer-funded entitlements like:
“full, living-wage
employment for our [black] people”
“decent housing” for
black people
“quality education for
all,” including “free or affordable public university” enrollment, with an
emphasis on teaching “the rich history of Black people and celebrat[ing] the
contributions we have made to this country and the world”
Those demands closely
resemble elements of the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program, which called for
assurances of:
“full employment” or “a
guaranteed income” for all of “our people”
“decent housing [for] our
Black community”
“education for our people
that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society [and] teaches us
our true history and our role in the present-day society”
In a number of very
significant respects, BLM is a modern-day reincarnation of the Black Panthers.
BLM’s Rhetoric & Activities
Routinely smearing white
police officers as trigger-happy bigots who are intent upon
killing innocent, unarmed black males, BLM activists have become infamous
for their incendiary rhetoric and behavior. Some examples:
At a December 2014 BLM
rally in New York City, marchers chanted in unison: “What do we want? Dead
cops. When do we want it? Now.”
At a July 2015 Netroots
Nation convention in Phoenix, BLM activists led the crowd in the following
chant:
If I die in police custody, don’t believe the hype. I was murdered!
Protect my family! Indict the system! Shut
that shit down!
If I die in police custody, avenge my death!
By any means necessary!
If I die in police custody, burn everything down!
No building is worth more than my life!
And that’s the only way motherfuckers like you listen!
At a BLM
march in August 2015, protesters chanted: “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em
like bacon.” (“Pigs” was a reference to police officers, and “blanket” was a
reference to body bags.)
On August 25, 2015, a
radio host affiliated with BLM enthusiastically agreed with a caller who
suggested that black people should “find a [white] motherfucker that’s alone,
smack his ass, and then fucking hang him from a damn tree, take a picture of it,
and send it to motherfuckers…. As soon as one person gets hung, people are
gonna have an idea to do that shit some more…. Black people are good at
starting trends.”
During a radio broadcast
on September 1, 2015, another BLM-affiliated host: (a) laughed at the
recent assassination of a white Texas deputy; (b) boasted that blacks were like
lions who could prevail in a “race war” against whites; (c) happily
predicted that “we will witness more executions and killing of white people and
cops than we ever have before”; and (d) declared that “it’s open season on
killing white people and crackas.”
A co-founder of BLM’s
Toronto branch, Yusra Khogali, once posted the following message on
Facebook: “Whiteness is not humxness. infact, white skin is sub-humxn.... White
ppl are recessive genetic defects. this is factual.”
In November 2015, a group
of approximately 150 BLM protesters shouting “Black Lives Matter,” stormed
Dartmouth University’s library, screaming things like “Fuck you, you
filthy white fucks!” and “Fuck you, you racist shit!”
On June 21, 2016—a few
days after a self-proclaimed Muslim jihadist had used an AR-15 rifle to murder
49 people and wound 53 others in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida—BLM posted
an article on its website blaming “the conservative right” for the atrocity.
“[T]he enemy is now and has always been the four threats of white supremacy,
patriarchy, capitalism, and militarism,” said the piece.
In July 2016, a BLM
activist speaking to a CNN reporter shouted: “The less white babies on this
planet, the less of you [white adults] we got! I hope they kill all the white
babies! Kill ’em all right now! Kill ’em! Kill your grandkids! Kill
yourself! Coffin, bitch! Go lay in a coffin! Kill yourself!”
At a BLM rally in Dallas
on July 7, 2016, a black gunman suddenly opened fire and killed five policemen
while wounding seven more. The perpetrator later explained that he had
purposefully set out to kill white people—especially white police. In the wake
of the carnage, a group of dancing, shouting BLM activists in Dallas taunted
uniformed cops who were on duty.
On August 13, 2016, BLM
activists in Milwaukee chanted “Black power!” and engaged in highly destructive
violence after police in that city had shot and killed a black man with a
lengthy criminal record who was carrying an illegal gun that had been stolen in
a burglary five months earlier. Black rioters tried to drag white drivers out
of their cars and assault them, and they set numerous businesses on fire.
In April 2017, BLM’s
Philadelphia chapter banned white people from attending one of its events,
explaining that it was being held in a “black only space.”
In November and December
of 2017, BLM’s Los Angeles chapter organized a “Black Xmas” initiative that
urged African Americans to avoid patronizing white-owned business establishments
for the remainder of the calendar year.
In June 2020, BLM
activist Shaun King declared that all religious statues and stained glass
windows showing a light-skinned Jesus should be destroyed because “they are a
form of white supremacy.”
In a June 2020 interview,
BLM’s New York chairman Hawk Newsome said: “If this country doesn’t give us
what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it.”
On July 15, 2020,
Lawrence Nathaniel, the founder of BLM’s South Carolina chapter and a former
organizer for Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, defended
black television personality Nick Cannon’s recent assertions that: (a)
light-skinned people are “a little less” than darker people whose skin
possesses more melanin, which is a source of “power,” “compassion,” and “soul”;
(b) an insecurity born of melanin “deficiency” has historically caused “Jewish
people, white people, [and] Europeans” to become “savages” with a “conquering
barbaric mentality” that leads them to “rob, steal, rape, kill, and fight”; and
(c) whites are “the true savages” who “are actually closer to animals.” “What
Nick Cannon believes in,” Mr. Nathaniel stated, “is the beliefs of Louis
Farrakhan and Malcolm X who taught the same teachings of what white folks was and
how they are and how they treat Black people.... Personally, I didn’t see
nothing wrong with his comments at all, I just think that he spoke the truth.”
Saul Alinsky’s Influence on BLM
At a Black Lives Matter
conference in Cleveland on July 24, 2015, BLM presented a workshop for radical
agitators titled “There’s A Method To The Movement: Examining Community
Organizing Methods and Methodologies”. Those in attendance were instructed
in the tactics and philosophy of the late Saul Alinsky. Known as the
godfather of “community organizing”—a term that serves as a euphemism for
fomenting public discontent—Alinsky was a communist fellow traveler who laid
out a set of basic strategies designed to help leftist radicals destroy their
enemies and transform society into a socialist paradise.
If such radicals were to
be successful in remaking society, said Alinsky, they “must first rub raw the
resentments of the people” by identifying a particular “personification” of
evil and “publicly attack[ing]” it as a “dangerous enemy” of all that is
decent. The chief “personification” in BLM’s cross hairs today, of course, is
the white police officer.
“Pick the target, freeze
it, personalize it, and polarize it,” Alinsky taught, asserting that the
primary task of radicals is to cultivate, in people’s hearts, a visceral
revulsion to the mere sight of the target’s face. “The organizer who forgets
the significance of personal identification,” said Alinsky, “will attempt to
answer all objections on the basis of logic and merit. With few exceptions this
is a futile procedure.” That is why BLM and its apologists invariably avoid
addressing even the most glaring errors in the anti-police, anti-white
narratives they seek to advance, and why they turn a deaf ear to anyone who
tries to engage them with logic, reason, or empirical data.
Alinsky taught that in
order to cast themselves as noble defenders of high moral principles, radical
activists should take pains to react dramatically—with greatly exaggerated
displays of “shock, horror, and moral outrage”—whenever their targeted enemy
errs, or can be depicted as having erred, in any way at all. Thus, even
though American police officers annually have some 375 million civilian
contacts in which they behave entirely within the bounds of legality and
ethics, BLM chooses to magnify—with choreographed indignation—the significance
of a tiny handful of questionable cases, and to characterize those as emblems
of supposedly widespread police misconduct.
Alinsky advised radical
activists to avoid the temptation to concede that their opponents are not “100
percent devil,” or that they may possess certain admirable qualities. Such
concessions, he said, would “dilut[e] the impact of the attack” and would thus
amount to “political idiocy.” That is why we never hear BLM praising the police
for anything. Instead, it is 100% attack, 100% of the time, against a 100%
devil.
Given that the enemy is to be portrayed as the very personification of
evil—against whom the use of any and all tactics is fair game—Alinsky taught
that an effective radical activist should never give the appearance of being
satisfied with any compromise proposed by the opposition. After all, any
bargain with the “devil” is, by definition, morally tainted. The ultimate goal,
said Alinsky, is not to arrive at peaceful coexistence, but rather, to
completely “crush the opposition” by remaining vigilantly “dedicated to eternal
war.” “A war is not an intellectual debate,” Alinsky elaborated, “and in the
war against social evils there are no rules of fair play.… When you have war,
it means that neither side can agree on anything…. [T]here can be no
compromise. It is life or death.” In perfect fidelity to these principles,
BLM’s foot soldiers make it quite clear that they are constantly aggrieved and
never satisfied.
Alinsky advised the
radical activist to be ever on guard against the possibility that the enemy
might someday propose “a constructive alternative” aimed at resolving some
particular conflict. “You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden
agreement with your demand,” said Alinsky, for such a turn of events would
have the effect of diffusing the righteous indignation of the radical, whose
very identity is inextricably woven into the “struggle” for long-denied
justice. If the perceived oppressor extends a hand of friendship in an effort
to end the conflict, the crusade of the radical is jeopardized. This cannot be
permitted, because “eternal war,” by definition, must never end.
Alinsky also exhorted
radical activists to be entirely unpredictable and unmistakably willing—for the
sake of their crusade—to plunge society at large into chaos and anarchy. They
must be prepared, Alinsky explained, to “go into a state of complete confusion
and draw [their] opponent into the vortex of the same confusion.”
One way in which radicals
and their disciples could signal their preparedness for this possibility,
Alinsky taught, was by staging loud, angry, massive demonstrations denouncing
their political adversaries. Such events—like BLM’s signature protests and
riots—can give onlookers the impression that an already large movement is in
the process of shifting into an even higher gear. A “mass impression,” said
Alinsky, can be lasting and intimidating: “Power is not only what you have but
what the enemy thinks you have.” “The threat,” he added, “is usually more
terrifying than the thing itself.” Putting it yet another way, Alinsky
advised: “Wherever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you
want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.”
That is exactly what BLM
seeks to cultivate in the hearts of its adversaries
Patrisse Cullors, protégé
of Eric Mann, spoke the truth when she famously described herself and her
fellow BLM co-founder, Alicia Garza, as “trained Marxists” who are “super
versed on ideological theories.” Among the most significant of those theories
are the teachings of Saul Alinsky, whose call for relentless, uncompromising,
“eternal war”—geared toward the destruction of America and the creation of a
Marxist utopia—is the spirit that beats in the very heart of the BLM movement.
The Deadly Consequences of BLM’s Rhetoric
In 2013 and beyond, a
number of black criminal suspects who had lost their lives in the course of
confrontations with police officers joined Trayvon Martin as new, martyred
icons of the BLM movement. Prominent among these were Eric Garner (died July
17, 2014 in New York), Michael Brown (died August 9, 2014 in Ferguson,
Missouri), Tamir Rice (died November 22, 2014 in Cleveland), and Freddie Gray
(died April 12, 2015 in Baltimore). High-profile political leaders such as
President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and the Democrat mayors
of the cities where the aforementioned deaths took place, routinely depicted
race as a major underlying factor in those deaths
In December 2014, for
instance, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio—explicitly exhorting New Yorkers to
remember that “black lives matter”—lamented the “centuries of racism” whose
legacy was still supposedly influencing the actions of too many police
officers. And in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death in April 2015, Baltimore
mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake called on the U.S. Department of Justice to
conduct a civil-rights investigation to determine whether Baltimore police may
have been engaging in unconstitutional patterns of abuse or discrimination
against African Americans.
The anti-police rhetoric
of such political figures, coupled with the aggressive, confrontational tactics
of BLM agitators, gave rise to a climate of extreme hostility toward
law-enforcement officers throughout urban America. With an increasingly
militant “criminal element” now “feeling empowered” by this climate, explained
St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson, officers became less proactive in
apprehending lawbreakers, particularly for low-level offenses. This, in turn,
led to dramatic spikes in violent crime and homicide rates in cities across the
United States—a phenomenon that Dotson, citing the highly publicized August
2014 death of Michael Brown, dubbed “the Ferguson Effect.” For example:
In 2015, America’s 56
largest cities experienced a 17% rise in homicides.
Twelve cities with
large black populations saw their 2015 murder totals spike even more
dramatically—e.g., by 54% in D.C., 60% in Newark, 72% in Milwaukee, 83% in
Nashville, and 90% in Cleveland.
The incidence of
robberies surged in America’s 81 largest cities during the 12 months that
followed the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown.
In May 2015, Manhattan
Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald wrote at length about the Ferguson Effect
and its deadly implications:
“The nation’s
two-decades-long crime decline may be over. Gun violence in particular is
spiraling upward in cities across America…. The most plausible explanation of
the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American
police departments over the past nine months. Since last summer, theairwaves
have been dominated by suggestions that the police are the biggest threat
facing young black males today. A handful of highly publicized deaths of
unarmed black men, often following a resisted arrest … have led to riots,
violent protests and attacks on the police….
“President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder … embraced the conceit that
law enforcement in black communities is infected by bias. The news media pump
out a seemingly constant stream of stories about alleged police mistreatment of
blacks…. Almost any police shooting of a black person, no matter how
threatening the behavior that provoked the shooting, now provokes angry
protests…. Arrests in black communities are even more fraught than usual, with
hostile, jeering crowds pressing in on officers and spreading lies about the
encounter. Acquittals of police officers for the use of deadly force against
black suspects are now automatically presented as a miscarriage of justice.”
The spike in urban
violence continued into 2016. During the first quarter of that year, homicides
in the nation’s 63 largest cities increased by 9%, while nonfatal shootings
were up 21%.
In January 2017 the Pew
Research Center released a 97-page report titled “Behind the Badge,”
which—based on the results of a questionnaire that had been sent to thousands
of officers in police departments nationwide—confirmed the reality of the
Ferguson Effect. It found that 85 to 95 percent of law-enforcement officers in
large police departments had become highly reluctant to engage criminals except
where absolutely necessary, and had become increasingly concerned about their
own personal safety.
But the rise in urban
crime was not at all troubling to BLM, because, notwithstanding the movement’s
constant professions of concern for black lives, the reality is quite
different. What matters most to BLM is finding a spark—e.g., allegations of
police vigilantism—that can be used to ignite a race war; to take America back
to the “long hot summers” of the 1960s, when criminals were seen as radical
“heroes,” police had a bull’s-eye on their backs, and the streets of America’s
inner cities ran red with fantasies of “revolutionary violence.”
Support for BLM from President Obama and the Demo-cratic Party
In August 2015, the
Democratic National Committee approved a resolution stating that “the DNC
joins with Americans across the country in affirming ‘Black Lives Matter’” and
its quest to “condemn extrajudicial killings of unarmed African American men,
women and children.” “The American Dream,” added the statement, “... is a
nightmare for too many young people stripped of their dignity under the
vestiges of slavery, Jim Crow and White Supremacy.”
On September 16, 2015,
five BLM activists met at the White House with President Barack Obama as
well as senior advisor Valerie Jarrett and other administration officials.
For one of the activists, Brittany Packnett, this was her seventh visit to the
Obama White House. Afterward, Packnett told reporters that the president had
“offered us a lot of encouragement,” “told us that even incremental changes
were progress,” and exhorted Packnett to “keep speaking truth to power.”
In October 2015,
President Obama publicly articulated his support for BLM’s agenda by
saying: “I think the reason that the organizers [of BLM] used the phrase ‘Black
Lives Matter’ was not because they were suggesting nobody else’s lives matter.
Rather, what they were suggesting was there is a specific problem that’s
happening in the African-American community that’s not happening in other
communities. And that is a legitimate issue that we’ve got to address.”
That same month, the
DNC invited activists from BLM to help organize and host a town hall
forum where the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates could discuss and
debate matters related to racial justice. In a letter addressed to BLM leaders,
DNC chief executive officer Amy Dacey wrote: “We believe that your organization
would be an ideal host for a presidential candidate forum—where all of the
Democratic candidates can … address racism in America.”
In a December 2015
interview on National Public Radio, President Obama lauded BLM for
shining “sunlight” on the lamentable fact that “there’s no black family that
hasn’t had a conversation around the kitchen table about driving while black
and being profiled or being stopped” by police.
In January 2016, BLM
co-founder Alicia Garza was a special guest of Democratic
Rep. Barbara Lee at President Obama’s final State of the Union
address.
In February 2016,
President Obama welcomed BLM leaders DeRay McKesson and Brittany Packnett to a
Black History Month event at the White House. In the course of his
remarks, Obama lauded the BLMers for their “outstanding work” which was “making
history as we speak” and would eventually “take America to new heights.”
On July 10, 2016,
President Obama likened BLM to the abolition, suffrage, civil rights, and
other landmark movements of yesteryear, saying: “The abolition movement was
contentious. The effort for women to get the right to vote was contentious and
messy. There were times when activists might have engaged in rhetoric that was
overheated and occasionally counterproductive. But the point was to raise
issues so that we, as a society, could grapple with it. The same was true with
the Civil Rights Movement, the union movement, the environmental movement, the
antiwar movement during Vietnam. And I think what you’re seeing now is part of
that longstanding tradition.”
On July 13, 2016—six
days after a BLM supporter in Dallas had shot and killed five police
officers and wounded seven others—President Obama hosted BLM
leaders DeRay Mckesson, Brittany Packnett, and Mica Grimm at a
four-and-a-half-hour meeting at the White House. Also invited were such
notables as Al Sharpton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
BLM’s Anti-Israel, Anti-Semitic Orientation
In January 2015, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors joined other
likeminded activists in a ten-day trip to the Palestinian Territories of the
West Bank. Their objective was to publicly draw a parallel between what they
defined as Israeli oppression of Palestinians in the Middle East, and police
violence against blacks in the United States.
In August 2015, Cullors
was one of more than 1,000 black activists to sign a statement proclaiming
their “solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and commitment to the
liberation of Palestine’s land and people”; demanding an end to
Israel’s “occupation” of “Palestine”; condemning the Jewish state’s “brutal war
on Gaza and chokehold on the West Bank”; denouncing Israel’s “injustice
and cruelty toward Palestinians”; imprecating the “colonialism and apartheid”
that provided a forum for Israeli “ethnic cleansing, land theft, and the denial
of Palestinian humanity and sovereignty”; and urging the U.S. government to cut
off all aid to Israel. The statement also “wholeheartedly endors[ed]” the
Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) movement,
a Hamas-inspired initiative that aims to use various forms of
public protest, economic pressure, and court rulings to permanently destroy
Israel as a Jewish nation-state.
BLM has publicly defended
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, one of the most outspoken, unrestrained
Jew-haters in living memory. With a long, well-documented history of venom-laced
references to the “white devils” and Jewish “bloodsuckers” who purportedly
torment America’s black community from coast to coast, Farrakhan has referred
to Judaism as a “gutter religion” and to Adolf Hitler as “a very great man.” In
March 2018, Republican Congressman Todd Rokita introduced a resolution calling
on the House of Representatives to condemn Farrakhan for his then-recent
assertion that: “White folks are going down. And Satan is going down. And
Farrakhan, by God’s grace, has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew and I’m
here to say your time is up, your world is through.” BLM vocally opposed
Rokita’s resolution, along with such organizations as the New Black Panther
Party and Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.
Over the Shavuot
festival on May 30, 2020, BLM members carried out a pogrom in Fairfax, a Los
Angeles community largely populated by ultra-orthodox Jews. The BLMers not only
vandalized five synagogues and three Jewish schools in Fairfax, but also looted
most of the Jewish businesses along the main avenue. Moreover, they
chanted “Fuck the police and kill the Jews.”
At a July 1, 2020
demonstration in Washington, D.C.—an event that was billed as a rally
supporting the Palestinian Authority’s “Day of Rage” activities against Israel
thousands of miles away—BLM protesters repeatedly emphasized that the
Palestinian movement is “intrinsically tied to Black Lives Matter.” Chants
alternated between “Black lives matter!” and “Palestinian lives matter!”
Another popular chant was: “Israel, we know you, you murder children, too.”
At a separate BLM rally of several hundred people in Brooklyn that same day:
Dequi Kioni Sadiki, the
wife of former Black Panther Sekou Odinga, said: “The European Jews who occupy,
slaughter and continue to force millions of Palestinians onto their killing
fields called refugee and concentration camps, are the relatives of the
Europeans … who kidnapped, slaughtered and forced millions of Africans and
indigenous” peoples into slavery.
Activist Nerdeen Kiswani,
who co-organized the rally, said: “The land that Israel exists on is still
stolen. The 1948 lands are still stolen—Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv … was stolen. We
don’t want to go just back to our homes in Gaza and the West Bank. We want all
of it. We don’t want a fake Palestinian state that they give us while Israel
still exists.”
BLM’s Support for Fidel Castro
Shortly after former
Cuban dictator Fidel Castro died on November 25, 2016, BLM published
an article titled “Lessons from Fidel: Black Lives Matter and the Transition of
El Comandante.” Lamenting that “a world without Fidel Castro” would leave many
people feeling an “overwhelming sense of loss, complicated by fear and
anxiety,” the piece stated that “the lessons that we take from Fidel” could
help the bereaved to press forward and “build a world rooted in a vision of
freedom and the peace that only comes with justice.
The article also praised
Castro for having taught people “that to be a revolutionary, you must strive to
live in integrity.” “As a Black network committed to transformation,” BLM
added, “we are particularly grateful to Fidel for holding [the fugitive
cop-killer] Mama Assata Shakur, who continues to inspire us. We are thankful
that he provided a home for [cop killers/airplane hijackers] Brother Michael
Finney, Ralph Goodwin, and Charles Hill[;] asylum to [former Black Panther]
Brother Huey P. Newton[;] and sanctuary for so many other Black revolutionaries
who were being persecuted by the American government during the Black Power
era.” The piece closed by stating: “As Fidel ascends to the realm of the
ancestors, we summon his guidance, strength, and power as we recommit ourselves
to the struggle for universal freedom. Fidel Vive!”
Influencing America’s Public Schools
In 2016, BLM took
steps to move beyond street protests and began to establish a growing influence
in America’s public schools. In October of that year, teachers in Seattle
organized a “Black Lives Matter at School Day.” When the National Education
Association subsequently adopted a resolution endorsing that measure, “BLM at
School Day” was expanded into a full “BLM at School National Week of Action,”
to be held annually during the first week of February as part of Black History
Month activities. In 2018, school districts in more than 20 major cities
incorporated “BLM at School Week” into their curricula.
A key resource for
BLM-related lessons is a textbook titled Teaching
for Black Lives , whose opening sentence reads: “Black students’ minds and
bodies are under attack.” The book is replete with narratives designed to imbue
black students with fear, anger, and resentment vis-à-vis “the continuing
police murders of black people” whose “lives are meaningless to the American
Empire.” The book also includes essays bearing such titles as: “Rethinking
Islamophobia: Combating Bigotry by Raising the Voices of Black Muslims”;
“Plotting Inequalities, Building Resistance”; and “Racial Justice Is Not a
Choice: White Supremacy, High-Stakes Testing, and the Punishment of Black and
Brown Students.”
By 2019, “Black Lives Matter
at School Week” was being observed by thousands of educators in public school
districts across the United States.
Even very young
schoolchildren are targeted with BLM propaganda in many classrooms. An early
childhood teacher’s guide, for instance, emphasizes the importance of using
“age-appropriate language” to help youngsters understand various concepts that
are central to BLM’s philosophy. For example, teachers are urged to cultivate
“transgender affirming” students by telling them: “Everybody has the right to
choose their own gender by listening to their own heart and mind. Everyone gets
to choose if they are a girl or a boy or both or neither or something else, and
no one else gets to choose for them.” And to promote what the guide calls “the
disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics and a return to the ‘collective
village’ that takes care of each other,” teachers are instructed to say: “There
are lots of different kinds of families; what makes a family is that it’s
people who take care of each other; those people might be related, or maybe
they choose to be family together and to take care of each other. Sometimes,
when it’s lots of families together, it can be called a village.”
Funding for BLM
Since 2016, Black Lives
Matter—which also goes by the name “Black Lives Matter Global Network
Foundation”—has been a fiscally sponsored project of Thousand Currents, a
left-wing, California-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. As Robert Stilson
of the Capital Research Center explains, this “fiscal sponsorship” arrangement
means that BLM “does not have its own IRS tax-exempt status but is operating as
a ‘project’ of an organization [Thousand Currents] that does.” As a result, BLM
is legally permitted to receive tax-deductible donations. In 2018 and 2019,
respectively, Thousand Currents funneled $2,622,017 and $3,354,654 in
donor-restricted assets to BLM. Among the philanthropic organizations that have
specifically earmarked contributions to Thousand Currents for BLM are
the NoVo Foundation ($1,525,000 from 2015 to 2018), the W.K. Kellogg
Foundation ($900,000 from 2016 to 2019), and Borealis Philanthropy ($343,000
from 2016 to 2018).
The governing board of
Thousand Currents includes Susan Rosenberg, who in the 1970s and ’80s was a
Marxist terrorist affiliated with the notorious and violent May 19th Communist
Organization. When she was sentenced to prison in the 1980s for terrorist
crimes of which she had been convicted, Rosenberg exhorted her ideological comrades
to join her in “rededicat[ing] ourselves to our revolutionary principles, to
our commitment to continue to fight for the defeat of U.S. imperialism.”
By no means does Thousand
Currents represent the only avenue by which donors can support BLM. For example,
when people seek to contribute money to the movement via the BLM website,
they are transported to the web page of ActBlue Charities, an organization
that facilitates donations to “democrats and progressives.” As of May 21, 2020,
ActBlue had given $119 million to the presidential campaign of Democrat Joe
Biden. The worldwide BLM protests that subsequently erupted in response to a
May 25 incident where a black criminal suspect named George Floyd died after
being physically mistreated by a white police officer in Minneapolis, sparked a
new surge of donations to BLM via ActBlue.
The fact that ActBlue is
a major fundraiser that focuses so heavily on supporting the Democratic
Party—coupled with the fact that BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors candidly
stated in a 2020 interview that BLM’s goal “is to get [President]
Trump out” of office—has led to much speculation that donations to BLM may end
up in the coffers of the Democratic National Committee and its political
candidates. As bestselling author F. William Engdahl wrote on June 16, 2020:
“Now major corporations such as Apple, Disney, Nike and hundreds [of] others
may be pouring untold and unaccounted millions into ActBlue under the name of
Black Lives Matter, funds that in fact can go to fund the election of a
Democrat President Biden.”
Another major contributor
to BLM is the multi-billionaire financier George Soros. Through his Open
Society Foundations (OSF), Soros in 2014 gave at least $33 million to
support already-established pro-BLM groups that, as The
Washington Times wrote, “emboldened the grass-roots, on-the-ground
activists in Ferguson” after the death of Michael Brown. “The financial tether
from Mr. Soros to the activist groups gave rise to a combustible protest
movement that transformed a one-day criminal event in Missouri into a
24-hour-a-day national cause celebre,” said the Times .
2015 brought more of the same, as Soros’s OSF gave $650,000 to “groups at
the core of the burgeoning #BlackLivesMatter movement.”
In the summer of 2016,
the Ford Foundation and Borealis Philanthropy announced the formation
of the Black-Led Movement Fund (BLMF), a six-year pooled donor campaign
whose goal was to raise $100 million for the BLM-affiliated Movement For
Black Lives coalition. Said the Ford Foundation: “The Movement For
Black Lives has forged a new national conversation about the intractable legacy
of racism, state violence, and state neglect of black communities in the United
States.” The Kellogg Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations
also played key roles in helping this new BLMF initiative get off the ground.
On July 13, 2020, the
Open Society Foundations, in support of BLM and its allies, pledged to
donate $220 million to programs designed to help “build power in Black
communities, promote bold new anti-racist policies in U.S. cities, and help
first-time activists stay engaged.” The pledge earmarked $150 million in
five-year grants for black-led “racial justice” organizations, and $70 million
for a range of initiatives such as helping city governments reform policing and
criminal justice by “moving beyond the culture of criminalization and
incarceration.” “This is the time for urgent and bold action to address racial
injustice in America,” said OSF deputy chair Alex Soros, the son of George Soros.
“These investments will empower proven leaders in the Black community to
reimagine policing, end mass incarceration, and eliminate the barriers to
opportunity that have been the source of inequity for too long.”
Another notable supporter
of BLM is the Democracy Alliance, which serves as a funding clearinghouse
through which left-wing millionaires and billionaires can funnel enormous sums
of money to their favored organizations.
BLM has also received
significant backing from Shining the Light Advisors (SLA), a partnership
created jointly by the United Way, the A&E television network, and
iHeartMedia. SLA is a committee of “nationally known experts and leaders in
racial and social justice” that oversees grant disbursements. Among the more
noteworthy individuals who have served as advisors to SLA are Van Jones, the
communist who once served as President Obama’s “green jobs czar,” and the
veteran activist Rinku Sen, who strongly supported the notoriously corrupt,
pro-socialist, now-defunct organization ACORN.
In addition, a multitude
of major corporations have contributed very large amounts of money to BLM.
These include such notables as: 23 and Me, Airbnb, Amazon, Apple, Bad Robot
Productions, Cisco, Disney, Door Dash, Dropbox, Etsy, Fitbit, Gatorade,
Hourglass Cosmetics, Intel, Microsoft, Nabisco, Nike, Pokemon Company, Savage X
Fenty, Scopely, Skillshare, Spanx, Square Enix, Thatgamecompany, Tinder,
Ubisoft, and Unilever.
BLM and the George Floyd Riots and Protests
In the aftermath of the
May 25, 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, many U.S. cities were
overrun by violent riots in which supporters of BLM and Antifa—the latter of
which is a revolutionary Marxist/anarchist militia movement that seeks to bring
down the United States by means of violence and intimidation—played a major
role. By June 3, at least 200 cities had imposed nighttime curfews in an
effort to quell the mayhem, while more than 30 states had activated some 62,000
National Guard personnel to help restore order.
By June 8, two police
officers had been killed in the nationwide riots, while another 700+ officers
in 25 states had been injured. In addition, 60 Secret Service agents and 40
U.S. Park Police had also sustained injuries. Fifteen civilians had died in the
riots as well.
In early June of 2020,
BLM’s New York chairman Hawk Newsome declared: “We pattern ourselves after the
Black Panthers, after the Nation of Islam, we believe that we need an arm
[firearm] to defend ourselves” against police depredations. Lauding the rioters
who were tearing apart so many cities from coast to coast, he added: “People
want to destroy because they’re angry and they’re frustrated. They want to go
out and grab all those things that America told them that they should have, but
they couldn’t have.”
By June 30, at least
14,000 protesters and rioters in 49 separate cities had been
arrested. Many of them had attempted to desecrate and/or topple a wide
array of federal monuments, memorials, and statues. It is estimated that as of
July 3, somewhere between 15 million and 26 million people had participated in
the various demonstrations from coast to coast, prompting The New York Times to run a headline
that read: “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History.”
By the beginning of July
2020, the so-called George Floyd riots were projected to become—in terms of
losses due to theft, fire, vandalism, and other forms of destruction—the
costliest sustained acts of civil disorder in American history. The previous
high was the $1.4 billion worth of damage (in 2020 dollars) that had resulted
from the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Borrowing the Occupy Movement’s Tactics
In early June of
2020, a mob led by activists from BLM and Antifa took over the East
Precinct of the Seattle Police Department (SPD). They characterized the
department as a “terrorist cell,” threatened to burn it down, and finally
renamed it the “Seattle People Department.” The mob also occupied Seattle
City Hall and announced the establishment of a “liberated” area called CHAZ (an
acronym for Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone), which soon thereafter was renamed
CHOP (Capitol Hill Organized Protest). Drawing a parallel between CHOP and the
Occupy encampments of 2011, which likewise had been hostile to capitalism and
traditional American values, one Seattle observer described the scene at CHOP
as follows: “They bar media from entering and screen people coming in. They are
walking around fully armed. Talking about making their own currency and making
their own flag…. This is just like the Occupy movement. Soon we will have feces
and drugs everywhere and people getting assaulted and raped in the
encampments.”
Shortly after setting up
the CHAZ/CHOP encampment, the radical occupiers issued a series of ultimatums
entitled “The Demands of the Collective Black Voices at Free Capitol Hill to
the Government of Seattle, Washington.” Among their demands were: (a) the
“abolition” of the Seattle Police Department and the elimination of “100
percent” of its funding; (b) “a retrial of all People [of] Color currently
serving a prison sentence for violent crime, by a jury of their [nonwhite]
peers in their community”; (c) “the abolition of imprisonment,” especially
“youth prisons and privately-owned, for-profit prisons”; (d) “free college for
the people of the state of Washington … as a form of reparations for the
treatment of Black people in this state and country”; and (e) a requirement
that “the hospitals and care facilities of Seattle employ black doctors and
nurses specifically to help care for black patients.”
Much like the Occupy
encampments of 2011, CHOP quickly degenerated into a filthy pigsty replete with
graffiti, decaying garbage, drug and alcohol abuse, and violent crime. Finally,
on July 1, 2020, Seattle’s Democrat mayor, Jenny Durkan—who initially had
hailed CHOP as a place whose “block party atmosphere” heralded a potential
“summer of love”—issued an executive order designating the encampment as an
unlawful assembly, and it was dismantled by police.
America’s Popular Culture Embraces BLM
As the George Floyd
protests and riots gained momentum in the spring and summer of 2020, a large
number of celebrities in the fields of sports, the arts, fashion,
and entertainment publicly announced their unwavering support for BLM. Former
baseball star Alex Rodriguez and actress Jennifer Lopez, for instance,
participated together in a BLM rally in Los Angeles carrying homemade signs
that read, “# EnoughIsEnough” and “Let’s
Get Loud for Black Lives Matter.” On Instagram, Rodriguez lamented “the
senseless way George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis and … the many brutal,
unnecessary, ugly murders that came before him.” Other luminaries who likewise
stood in solidarity with BLM included Beyoncé, Jane Fonda, Madonna, Trevor
Noah, Rihanna, Keke Palmer, Jamie Foxx, Adam Lambert, Gigi and Bella Hadid,
Ariana Grande, Harry Styles, Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds, Drake, Doutzen Kroes,
Imaan Hammam, Jaz Sinclair, Ross Lynch, Joe Jonas, and Sophie Turner.
The extent to which BLM’s
message had captured the heart and mind of America’s popular culture was on
full display in July of 2020, when Major League Baseball announced that its
teams would be permitted to stencil “BLM” or “United for Change” on the back of
the pitching mounds in each of their respective stadiums. Players would also
have the option to wear either of those same slogans on t-shirts, wristbands,
or patches affixed to their uniforms.
While Major League
Baseball was preparing to implement the measures described in the preceding
paragraph, the National Basketball Association announced that it would paint
the words “Black Lives Matter” on all the courts that would be used for its
upcoming games. Moreover, the league and its players’ union agreed on an array
of “social justice messages” which the athletes could wear, instead of their
names, on the backs of their jerseys. In addition to “Black Lives Matter,” the
approved slogans included:
some that emphasized
black victimization: “I Can’t Breathe” (words spoken by Eric Garner and George
Floyd during their altercations with police); “Say Their Names” (a reference to
the names of blacks killed by police); “Say Her Name” (the names of females
killed by police); “ Enough”;
and “How Many More?”
some that represented
pleas for the type of respect that African Americans were purportedly being
denied: “See Us”; “Hear Us”; “Respect Us”; “Love Us”; “Anti-Racist”; and
“Justice Now”
some that urged political
activism: “Vote” (for Democrats); “Liberation”; and “Si Se Puede” (Spanish for
“Yes We Can,” a slogan with a long history as a rallying cry for Latino
leftists)
some with pro-socialist
themes: “Power to the People” (a slogan rooted in the radical,
anti-establishment politics of the 1960s); and “Group Economics” (a term
connoting either a conscious decision to support black-owned businesses in
particular, or an increased redistribution of wealth as a means of uplifting
the large “group” of America’s poor)
“The Ferguson Effect” All Over Again
During the spring and
summer of 2020, BLM’s police-hating rhetoric, coupled with the violence of the
George Floyd riots, led to a resurrection of the so-called “Ferguson Effect”
cited earlier. Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald dubbed it alternately
the “Ferguson Effect 2.0” and the “Minneapolis Effect,” in light of the fact
that the latest round of anti-police riots had started in Minneapolis.
Specifically, political leaders nationwide reacted fearfully to BLM’s tactics
and began to pledge a variety of police reform and defunding measures as
gestures of appeasement. Meanwhile, law-enforcement officers—worried that their
lives and reputations could be permanently destroyed at any moment by frivolous
charges of racism—became highly reluctant to engage criminal suspects
except where absolutely necessary. The result was a massive increase in violent
crime and homicide throughout urban America. Consider, for instance, the case
of Chicago:
On Sunday, May 31, 2020,
eighteen homicides were committed in Chicago, breaking the city’s
previous one-day record of thirteen, set 29 years earlier. In fact, over the
course of that same weekend as a whole, Chicago police responded to at least 73
incidents in which 92 people were shot, including 27 who died as a result.
“We’ve never seen anything like it at all,” said Max Kapustin, the
senior research director at the University of Chicago Crime Lab. “I don’t even
know how to put it into context. It’s beyond anything that we’ve ever seen
before.”
In another astonishing
wave of gunfire during Father’s Day weekend, June 19-21, Chicago saw more than
100 people shot—14 of them fatally.
During the last weekend
of June, 63 people were shot in Chicago, 16 of them fatally.
On July 21, Chicago
Fraternal Order of Police president John Catanzara lamented that the city was
experiencing a veritable “bloodbath in the street.”
New York City was
likewise turned into a cauldron of violence by BLM hatred:
In a 28-day period from
mid-May through mid-June of 2020, the incidence of murder, burglary
and grand larceny auto crimes in New York spiked dramatically when compared to
the same period in 2019. Particularly alarming was the homicide count—38
murders in 28 days—a total twice as high as the corresponding figure from the
year before.
From June 16-22, the
number of shootings in New York City increased by some 358% compared
with the same time frame in 2019.
Between June 15 and July
2, shootings in New York City soared by 205% above the corresponding
figure for the same period in 2019, while gunshot injuries increased by 238%.
All told, June 2020 became New York’s bloodiest month in 24 years.
The NYPD’s Chief of
Department, Terence Monahan, blamed these trends largely on the fact that “the
animosity towards police has been absolutely unbelievable.” “The violence, the
shootings are up,” he said. “We haven’t seen this many [during a comparable
time period] since 1996.” One dispirited police officer described the situation
as “complete lawlessness.”
And because the
administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio was highly sympathetic to the protesters
and rioters—as evidenced by de Blasio’s fulfillment of a BLM demand calling for
a $1 billion cut to the NYPD’s annual budget—many New York City officers
decided that it was time to get out while they could. During the 30-day period
from May 25 through June 24, 2020, no fewer than 272 uniformed NYPD cops
announced that they were retiring—a 49% increase over the 183 officers who had
filed for retirement during the same period in 2019.
The atmosphere in
Milwaukee was equally grim. According to Milwaukee inspector Leslie Thiele:
“Our homicides are way up. We haven’t seen these numbers since 1991. We have 86
homicides this year, compared to 37 to this point last year—so we have a 132%
increase.” Thiele’s fellow Milwaukee inspector Terrence Gordon said: “Morale
[among police] is terrible.... [I]t’s because they’re afraid that nobody in
this community is going to stand up for them. In 25 years, I’ve never seen it
like this.”
The hearts of police
officers were likewise torn asunder in Washington, D.C., as evidenced by the
fact that in a June 2020 press release, the city’s Metropolitan Police Union
reported that 71% of the members it surveyed were considering leaving the
department. Of those, nearly 40% were planning to leave law enforcement
entirely.
On July 21, 2020, The New York Times reported that
nearly 200 officers in Minneapolis—roughly one-fifth of the city’s police
force—had officially filed paperwork to leave their jobs, citing post-traumatic
stress. “It’s almost like a nuclear bomb hit the city, and the people who
didn’t perish are standing around,” said veteran officer Rich Walker Sr.
regarding the department’s low morale. “I’m still surprised that we’ve got cops
showing up to work, to be honest.”
Meanwhile, there were
strong signals that Democrat-run cities from coast to coast were in danger of
losing vast numbers of residents, and that their respective tax bases would
soon be fleeing to safer environs. For instance, the
Minneapolis manufacturing company 7-Sigma, Inc.—one of 400+ local
businesses that were heavily damaged during the George Floyd riots—announced in
early June that it would be moving, as quickly as possible, out of the city
where it had been headquartered since 1987. Other Minneapolis businesses said
that they full intended to follow suit.
Conclusion
Black Lives Matter’s name
is a carefully crafted deception, designed to draw attention away from the fact
that BLM is a hardcore Marxist movement whose overriding mission is to raze
American society and its traditions to the ground, and to erect a Communist
utopia upon those ruins. Toward that end, BLM works tirelessly to discredit the
United States as an irredeemably racist wasteland founded upon nothing but
slavery, genocide, and all manner of oppression.
It is immensely
significant that BLM’s principal heroine is Assata Shakur, the
Marxist revolutionary and former Black Panther who brutally murdered a New
Jersey state trooper in the 1970s and has spent the past 41 years as a fugitive
protected by Communist Cuba. It is equally noteworthy that the late
totalitarian dictator of that island nation, Fidel Castro, is yet another
revered figure in the pantheon of BLM icons.
A number of BLM’s demands
are very clearly modeled on elements of the famous “Ten-Point Program” put
forth by the murderous Black Panther Party in the 1960s. These include such
overtly socialist and racialist agenda items as the guarantee of
taxpayer-funded housing, education (through the college level), and
“living-wage employment” for all black people.
BLM openly rejects “the
Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” advocating instead the socialist
ideal of “villages” serving as “extended families” that “collectively care for
one another.” In other words, BLM repudiates the singular value that, if it
were to be embraced, would offer black Americans the principal tools they need
in order to create for themselves a prosperous and fulfilling life.
BLM is infested with
Jew-hating anti-Semites who falsely accuse Israel of such abominations as
“colonialism,” “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” “land theft,” and “the denial
of Palestinian humanity.” It also supports the Boycott, Divestment, &
Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Hamas-inspired initiative that aims to
use various forms of public protest, economic pressure, and court rulings to
permanently destroy Israel as a Jewish nation-state.
BLM’s anti-police
rhetoric and violent activities have had devastating consequences for black
Americans as a whole. In the aftermath of protracted BLM protest/riot campaigns
in 2015 and again in 2020, for example, police officers in many U.S.
cities—fearful of having their lives and reputations permanently destroyed by
frivolous charges of racism—became highly reluctant to engage criminal suspects
except in cases where absolutely necessary. As a result, the incidence of
homicide and other violent crimes skyrocketed across urban America. And the
vast majority of both the victims and perpetrators of such crimes were black.
The only black lives that matter to BLM are the infinitesimally small number
that are ended by the actions of white people, particularly white police
officers. Meanwhile, the thousands of blacks whose lives are terminated by
black killers each and every year are never mentioned by BLM—no matter how brutally,
mercilessly, or senselessly those lives may have been snuffed out.
It is indeed a tragedy
that a movement so evil and so ruinous has been able, with the help of a
compliant mainstream news media, to dupe millions of Americans into embracing
it as a crusade for “racial justice.” In reality, BLM is the very embodiment of
Marxism, anti-Semitism, and racism—a trifecta of wickedness capable of
destroying any society.
John Perazzo is the editor of discoverthenetworks.org and
author of The
New Shame of the Cities .
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