The cancellation of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King
This week, I've been following a Zoom-based seminar in which learned academics are discussing the fallacies and distortions of the 1619 Project created by the New York Times. This unproven, widely challenged narrative has spread like wildfire into the curriculum of public schools nationwide without so much as a public airing. It is a startling policy departure from the norms of American history.
In one of the sessions, reference was made to Dr. Martin Luther King, perhaps the best known and most revered leader in America's reformation in civil rights. I realized that while I've always been moved by the brief video clips from his "I Have A Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, I had never actually read the entire speech.
So I looked it up and read it all, and I shall do it over and over in the next few days. I was stunned by the majesty of King's words — the human dignity; the eloquence; and the glorious way in which he expounded on why and how "black (Negro) lives must matter" if the American dream is to fulfill its glorious promise. I implore you to read it too in its entirety. In the chaos of today's violence and rioting and shouted demands of all sorts, it takes on a new and profound energy and relevance.
Reading MLK's speech reminded me that I have lived believing that "a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" is the essence of civil rights.
Letting the words sink in will make it clear that the Black Lives Matter movement, only seven years old but seeking overthrow of the American system and culture and replacement with a Marxist regime, sneers at that essential MLK conception. BLM, and its leaders and followers, and their words, demands, behavior, and actions, has intentionally shredded every word, nonviolent impulse, inspiration, and hope of Dr. King. These people defile every thought he so sonorously sent across the Mall to the throngs there in person and those hearing it live on radio and TV. Today's crumbling societal fabric makes that moment all the more powerful.
The simple, unavoidable truth is that BLM has completely inverted the thoughts and sentiments Dr. King embodied that day. To use today's vernacular, BLM has summarily canceled not only his speech, but Dr. King himself. Simply put, BLM and Dr. King are polar opposites. How long will it be before BLM "activists" tear down the signs on every street, avenue, boulevard, hospital, school, church, and other entity named in MLK's honor? When will his statues and other tributes to his legacy be covered with graffiti and other shameless acts of profane dishonor?
Even worse, when will the leaders of BLM, who clearly despise the principles on which Dr. King founded his life, and surrendered it to a hater's rifle, issue formal declarations of their hatred of and disagreement with everything King and his followers stood for and worked for so diligently? How long will it take before the progress made since that historic day is reversed and permanently erased from the "woke history" that fills our classrooms from this day forward? When will they publicly confess that this is what they stand for and unleash waves of sorrow like we've never seen?
Black Lives Matter: Marxist Hate Dressed Up As Racial Justice
A new investigative report from the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Tue Sep 1, 2020
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.
Violent Crime More Important to Voters Than Black Lives Matter
The Democrats are caught in their own political trap.
Tue Sep 1, 2020
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the
Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the
radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Real
crises end with a solution. Fake crises end when they become a real crisis.
Black
Lives Matter began as a fake crisis that used out-of-context viral video clips
to falsely claim that police shootings of innocent black people were a national
crisis. Black Lives Matter became a real crisis when its riots looted, burned,
and beat their way across major cities.
A Pew
poll at the end of July asked voters which issues were most important
to them when deciding who to vote for the big office in 2020.
59%
of voters said that violent crime was very important and another 27% said that
it was somewhat important. Racial and ethnic equality had fallen behind with
52% of voters calling it very important and another 28% describing it as somewhat
important.
86%
of voters see violent crime as a significant presidential election issue while
80% are touting Black Lives Matter. The structural difference here is bigger
than that 6%. While Black Lives Matter has benefited from a non-stop media push,
violent crime has been lightly covered.
How
concern about violent crime became the fifth
most important issue for voters, slightly behind the coronavirus, would be
baffling to anyone who gets their reality from the media.
That
86% of voters aren’t worried about crime based on what they see in the media,
but because they feel personally threatened by what’s going on in their own
neck of the woods.
There
is a huge difference between supporting BLM in the abstract or fearing crime
personally.
The
Pew map of voter concerns shows that the election issues are tilting away from
big picture abstractions and are being dominated by concrete issues that affect
voters personally. With the exception of Supreme Court appointments, the top 5
issues, the economy, health care, the pandemic, and violent crime, are about
the things that personally worry Americans.
Meanwhile
the abstractions have fallen off the pyramid, with racial and ethnic equality
coming in seventh place, economic inequality, a Democrat favorite, falling to
ninth, and climate change and abortion coming in in the tenth and eleventh
spots. All of this is bad news for the Dems.
As
the DNC convention approached, the creaky messaging machine had tilted against
the riots.
The New York Times and
the Washington
Post officially ended the embargo by running negative stories
about white BLM activists in Seattle, Portland, and Washington D.C. And the
media and Democrat officials began openly voicing concerns that the violence
would hurt their chances.
"The
rioting has to stop," CNN's Don Lemon intoned, while writing a
proposed speech for Biden to deliver on the air. "As you know and I know,
it's showing up in polls, it's showing up in focus groups, it is the only thing
right now that's sticking. And the Democrats are stuck with it.”
They
are indeed stuck with it.
Mayor
Ted Wheeler of Portland, which has seen some of the worst of the violent
rioting, appeared to suggest that nothing was working, and that
it "will ultimately burn itself out."
The
people whose businesses are being burnt out may be less sanguine about the
crisis.
But
the Democrats have no answers to offer. Even those national figures who didn’t
explicitly embrace police defunding, a suicidal and unpopular political
strategy, can’t push too hard against it because a sizable section of their
activist base and media have been radicalized.
Democrat
efforts to split the difference, limiting police defunding measures and playing
numbers games, only led to more direct harassment with BLM contingents showing
up at their homes at night, yelling, screaming, and intimidating elected
officials. The pressure may not result in the actual elimination of the police
that the hate group’s activists demand, but they ensure that the Democrats will
continue trying to square the circle, split the difference, and avoid a
decision.
More
crucially, the Democrat donor base is also deeply divided. Rejecting BLM too
sharply would alienate George Soros, whose funding is not only crucial to
Democrat election efforts, but whose infrastructure makes up a vital part of
the American Left, but embracing it would alienate moderate Democrat donors who
want Biden to stop the chaos, not give it a great bear hug.
Unlike
Republicans, the Democrats are deeply conflicted on this issue. And the
conflicts are undermining Democrat messaging and electability. The shift from
BLM to violent crime is particularly significant when it affects the black
voters on whose turnout Democrats depend.
Not
only isn’t BLM effectively mobilizing black voters (though it seems to be doing
a great job of radicalizing white college students and some of their blue
region suburban parents) but black voters are increasingly putting violent
crime ahead of BLM as an urgent issue. That reflects a national trend, but it’s
particularly devastating to the Democrat strategy in this election.
Black
urban voters are bearing the brunt of the violent crime and they’re not hearing
the Dems talking about the issue dominating their neighborhoods and threatening
their lives.
The
Democrats are caught in a trap of their own making.
They’re
no longer able to turn off the violence. And mildly critical media coverage
won’t do it. Even if they could get some of the billionaires who have been
pouring money into radical groups to turn off the spigot, there’s enough money
to keep them going until November. The Democrats barely managed to stop Bernie
Sanders from becoming the nominee. They can’t stop national riots by their
usual backroom tactics. And they’re too ideologically hagridden to use the
police.
Black
urban mayors have shown the most willingness to confront the rioters and have
the most political immunity for cracking down on criminals, but as long as
Portland, Seattle, New York City, and other major cities are controlled by
feckless white progressives, the violence will go on.
And
the riots and crime are not only shifting attention away from BLM, but from the
pandemic.
People
can only focus on one crisis at a time, and the violence and chaos consuming
entire cities is becoming more visible than an invisible virus. If this trend
continues, then the Democrats will lose both of the big issues that they
expected to propel them to victory.
The
Democrats sowed the winds of political terror, they’ve begun to reap the
whirlwind.