Black Lives Matter leaders have threatened to «burn down the system» if their demands are not met, and are also training black militias. Pictured: Police vehicles burn after being torched by participants in a BLM demonstration on May 30, 2020 in Los Angeles. (Photo by Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images)
Multinational companies, philanthropic foundations and private citizens have been donating tens of millions of dollars to Black Lives Matter (BLM), and a recent survey by the Pew Research Center has found that more than two-thirds of Americans support the BLM movement.
While Gatestone Institute and doubtless many others wish that blacks and all minorities benefit from the equal opportunities and protections offered by the U.S. Constitution, the high level of backing for BLM raises the question: How much does the public really know about BLM?
Part I of this series revealed the anti-American agenda of Black Lives Matter, which, under the guise of fighting racism, seeks to transform the United States into a communist dystopia. BLM’s leaders openly admit that they want to abolishthe nuclear family, police, prisons and capitalism.
BLM leaders have threatened to «burn down the system» if their demands are not met, and are also training black militias.
Part II of this series examines:
- As documented below, BLM has lifted much of its agenda from radical leftist groups active in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. BLM is an ideological descendant of the Black Power Movement, the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground, all of which sought to overthrow the U.S. political system.
- BLM’s innovation is two-fold: 1) it has successfully employed intersectionality and identity politics to stir up a broad range of grievances that extend far beyond race — including class, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, immigration status and other identity markers — thus assuring that BLM offers something for just about anyone claiming victim status; and 2) it has successfully leveraged social media to agitate mob hysteria and funnel societal rage into a political movement with a large online reach.
- BLM’s ideological influences and sources of funding. BLM is at the core of a vast network of Marxist groups whose demands often coincide with those of Antifa anarchists, many of whom have been piggybacking on BLM protests to stir chaos and destruction. Left-of-center foundations including the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Ford Foundation, as well as intermediaries including Thousand Currents, Borealis Philanthropy and the Alliance for Global Justice and have provided tens of millions of dollars to BLM and the Movement for Black Lives, an umbrella group that coordinates BLM activism.
- BLM is a revolutionary anti-capitalist movement masquerading as a civil rights movement. Its focus on racial issues is a smokescreen for a much larger effort to completely dismantle the American economic, political and social systems and rebuild them from scratch — according to Marxist principles.
BLM In Its Own Words
«The ONLY thing that will fix this is a REVOLUTION. Elections aren’t revolutions.» — Tania Faison, co-founder BLM Sacramento, March 5, 2020
«Ain’t no kneeling ass pig gonna stop the revolution!» — BLM Sacramento, June 1, 2020
«Stop getting sad and get angry. We need to fight.» — BLM Sacramento, May 7, 2020
«Revolutions don’t happen just once in a lifetime; may there be countless revolutions in our time towards Black liberation.» — BLM Toronto, March 24, 2019
«DEFUND. DISARM. DISMANTLE. ABOLISH. #DefundThePolice #BlackLivesMatter». — BLM Toronto, June 19, 2020
«Get off our land white man!» — BLM Memphis, July 4, 2020
«CANCEL RENT IN #DC!» — BLM Washington, D.C., June 24, 2020
«Queer black people are working to get the larger black movement closer to an ideology that is intersectional.» — Patrisse Cullors, BLM co-founder, March 8, 2018
«We’re fighting against white supremacist patriarchal society. That’s why you need black women to fight it.» — Shamell Bell, BLM activist, November 9, 2015
«We absolutely have to deal with the way in which capitalism exploits us, and the way in which capitalism exploits Black people in particular.» — Melina Abdullah, co-founder BLM Los Angeles, June 23, 2020
«Capital can and should be used to fund the independence from capitalism and transition into community. But Capital and capitalism shouldn’t be the goal to fix community…. Black dollar is great… but let’s only look at money as a tool to attain liberation through COMMUNITY and not capitalism.» — Tania Faison, co-founder BLM Sacramento, January 31, 2020
«If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. All right? …. I just want black liberation, and black sovereignty. By any means necessary.» — Hank Newsome, BLM activist, June 25, 2020
«This is an uprising. A rebellion. A revolt.» — Melina Abdullah, co-founder BLM Los Angeles, May 31, 2020
«We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children…. We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking.» — BLM’s manifesto
«We are anti-capitalist: We believe and understand that Black people will never achieve liberation under the current global racialized capitalist system.» — Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a BLM umbrella group
BLM’s Radical Ideological Influences
The founders of Black Lives Matter openly admit that they have been heavily influenced by revolutionary groups of the 1960s and 1970s. These groups include the Black Power Movement, the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground, as well as the Marxist radicals associated with those groups, all of which advocated the violent overthrow the U.S. political and economic system. «We were and are their progeny,» BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors wrote in her autobiography.
- The Black Power Movement, active in the 1960s and 1970s, repudiated the non-violent methods of the mainstream civil rights movement, which advocated black integration into a white-dominated society. The Black Power Movement, which embraced militant black separatism, spawned the creation of groups such as the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party.
- The Black Panther Party was a revolutionary political organization established in 1966 by Marxist college students in Oakland, California. The group, which «openly displayed weapons,» supported the use of violence and guerrilla tactics to implement a ten-point program of socialist revolution. A 2016 documentary — «The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution» — juxtaposed the Black Panther Party with BLM. The documentary showed that many of the demands of the Black Lives Matters movement, including abolishing the police and prisons, originated with the Black Panther movement.
- The Black Liberation Army was an urban guerrilla group established in 1970 by disaffected members of the Black Panthers. The Black Liberation Army, whose stated goal was to «weaken the enemy capitalist state,» had a highly decentralized organizational structure similar to the one used by today’s Black Lives Matter and Antifa movements.
- The Weather Underground, a left-wing terrorist group responsible for bombings and riots during the 1970s, sought to achieve «the destruction of U.S. imperialism and form a classless communist world.» The group’s 1974 manifesto, «Prairie Fire,» stated: «We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States…. Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks.» Former Weather Underground terrorists have not only mentoredBLM leaders, but have been involved in BLM’s creation and continuedadministrative and financial support.
BLM’s Radical Leaders and Mentors
BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors was trained to be a Marxist activist by the Labor/Community Strategy Center (LCSC), a Los Angeles-based grassroots training organization founded by former Weather Underground member Eric Mann, a communist revolutionary who has been called the «grandfather of Black Lives Matter.»
Mann and other white revolutionaries, apparently inspired by the late Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse, have stated that they believe that black revolutionaries should lead the fight against capitalism. Marcuse, in his seminal essay «On Liberation,» wrote that «in the United States, the black population appears as the ‘most natural’ force of rebellion.» He elaborated:
«The ghetto population of the United States constitutes such a force. Confined to small areas of living and dying, it can be more easily organized and directed. Moreover, located in the core cities of the country, the ghettos form natural geographical centers from which the struggle can be mounted against targets of vital economic and political importance.»
Mann, in his 1974 book about George Jackson, a black revolutionary who co-founded the Marxist–Leninist Black Guerrilla Family, argued that the socialist revolution in America should begin in the inner cities and that African Americans should take the lead in tearing down the existing system. Investigative journalist Lee Stranahan noted: «It would take almost 40 years for radical activist Mann to see his vision spring to life as the Black Lives Matter movement, created by his disciple Black Lives Matter co-founder, Patrisse Cullors.»
In his 2011 book «Playbook for Progressives,» Mann disclosed that he «recruited» Cullors. In a January 2018 interview with Democracy Now, Cullors said that LCSC was her «first political home» and that Mann is «my mentor.» In November 2018, Cullors revealed that she joined LCSC when she was 17 years old and that Mann subsequently trained her in revolutionary organizing for more than a decade.
LCSC states that it builds «consciousness, leadership, and organization among those who face discrimination and societal attack — people of color, women, immigrants, workers, LGBT people, youth….» In 2018, LCSC elaborated that it was focused on organizing «Black and Latino communities with deep historical ties to the long history of anti-colonial anti-imperialist pro-communist resistance to the U.S. empire.» It added:
«We teach and study history of the Indigenous rebellions against the initial European genocidal invasions…. We appreciate the work of the U.S. Communist Party especially Black communists…. We applaud the great work of the Black Panther Party…. We also have roots in the new communist movement of the 1970s and 1980s.»
Cullors and other BLM co-founders — including Alicia Garza, who has accusedthe U.S. government of perpetrating «genocide» against African Americans — have repeatedly hailed the fugitive domestic terrorist Joanne Chesimard, also known as Assata Shakur, as one of their main inspirations.
Shakur, a former member of the Black Liberation Army, is the first woman to have been named a «Most Wanted Terrorist» by the FBI. She is wanted for escaping from prison in New Jersey in 1979 while serving a life sentence for murdering a police officer execution-style at point-blank range. Shakur fled to Cuba in 1984.
One of the persons indicted for helping Shakur escape from prison was Susan Rosenberg, a member of the revolutionary militant group known as the May 19th Communist Organization. M19’s members were overwhelmingly lesbian and, like the co-founders of BLM, opposed heteronormativity. They were said to share «a disdain for their own whiteness.» M19, described America’s «first and only women-created and women-led terrorist group,» was an offshoot of the Weather Underground.
«M19’s two-year bombing campaign in New York City and Washington, DC, aimed to cast a cloud over what President Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign was promising: a sunny, prosperous «Morning in America,» according to author Mary Kay Linge. «Reagan’s election in 1980 told the remnants of America’s radical left that the country had rejected their call to revolution.»
Rosenberg served only 16 years of a 58-year prison sentence for her involvement in a number of terrorist bombings and murders, including of two police officers, before being pardoned by U.S. President Bill Clinton in January 2001. Her release from prison provoked intense anger from police, including New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, who said: «It sickened me.»
Rosenberg is now a member of the board of directors of the left-wing charity Thousand Currents, which manages the donations made to Black Lives Matter.
BLM’s Financial Ties
Black Lives Matter operates under an umbrella group called Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, which is not a 501(c)(3) charitable group as far as the Internal Revenue Service is concerned. Black Lives Matter uses Thousand Currents, which is an IRS-approved 501(c)(3) organization, as its fiscal sponsor. Donations made on the Black Lives Matter website are processed by the left-wing ActBlue Charities, a donation platform affiliated with the Democratic Party, and then transferred to Thousand Currents, which then distributes them back to Black Lives Matter.
On June 18, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation told the Associated Press that since the death of George Floyd on May 25, it had received more than 1.1 million individual donations, with each donation averaging $33. In other words, Black Lives Matter raised more than $33 million in less than a month.
BLM’s relationship with Thousand Currents dates back to at least June 2016, when the W.K. Kellogg Foundation provided Thousand Currents with a $900,000 grant for «building the infrastructure and capacity of the national #BlackLivesMatter to support and strengthen their local chapters’ organizing capacity.»
In July 2016, the Ford Foundation and Borealis Philanthropy pledged to raise up to $100 million for the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), an umbrella group that coordinates BLM activism among dozens of racial-advocacy organizations.
Funding for M4BL, which supports «young, Black, queer, trans, feminist, immigrant, and undocumented leaders,» is funneled through the Black-Led Movement Fund (BLMF), which transfers money to more than two dozen organizations, including BLM and M4BL, as well as groups including Assata’s Daughters, LGBTQ Black Immigrant Justice Project, Million Hoodies Movement for Justice and The Undocumented and Black Convening.
M4BL’s «fiscal sponsor» is the Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ), an «anti-capitalist» organizing group that also provides financial support to the American Antifa movement.
AFGJ has received substantial funding from organizations often claiming to be the mainstream of the center-left. The Open Society Foundations, Tides Foundation, Arca Foundation, Surdna Foundation, Public Welfare Foundation, the Ben & Jerry Foundation and the Brightwater Fund have all made contributions to AFGJ, according to Influence Watch.
AFGJ, which states that it is opposed to the principles of liberal democracy, also funds «Refuse Fascism,» a radical left-wing organization devoted to promoting nationwide action to remove President Donald Trump from office, on the grounds that his government constitutes a «fascist regime.»
In June 2020, «Refuse Fascism» — an offshoot of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) — took advantage of the death of George Floyd to raise money for a «National Revolution Tour» evidently aimed at subverting the U.S. government. The group’s slogan states: «This System Cannot Be Reformed, It Must Be Overthrown!»
BLM: Training Militias
The leader of BLM’s Greater New York chapter, Hawk Newsome, recently warned:
«If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. All right? And I could be speaking figuratively. I could be speaking literally. It’s a matter of interpretation. I just want black liberation and black sovereignty, by any means necessary.»
Newsome subsequently disclosed that BLM was «mobilizing» its base to develop a highly-trained militia modelled on the Black Panthers. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Newsome said:
«It’s our obligation, it is our duty to provide people with a pathway forward. We want liberation. We want the power to determine our own destiny. We want freedom from an oppressive government, and we want the immediate end of government sanctioned murder by the police.
«And we prepare to stop these government sanctioned murders by any means necessary. We are preparing and training our people to defend our communities.
«We have black Special Forces officers advising us, and we will teach and train people in our communities, the Black Ops department of Black Opportunities….
«We pattern ourselves after the Black Panthers, after the Nation of Islam, we believe that we need an arm to defend ourselves. We will build and train peace officers to keep the peace in our communities, to defend our communities, to keep our communities safe.
«I don’t see us working with police. I see us policing ourselves. I see us teaching black people how to police their own communities. We’ll bring in kids and teach them and train them the way that the Black Panthers used to do.»
BLM’s Communist Idols
While Black Lives Matter claims to oppose police abuse, BLM co-founders Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi have praised Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, whose government, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), is known for its «brutality, torture and political persecution.» The Maduro government has used «extreme and at times lethal force» against anti-government protesters, causing dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries, according to HRW.
- April 2013. Cullors was a keynote speaker at a rally in New York City called«An Urgent Call to Defend Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.»
- December 2015. Tometi met with Maduro in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital. She wore a jacket with the logo of the National Electoral Council of Venezuela, which has been accused of rigging elections in favor of the dictatorship. She tweeted: «Currently in Venezuela. It is a great relief to be in a place where there is intelligent political discourse.»
- December 2015. Writing for Venezuelanalysis.com, Tometi declared: «In these last 17 years, we have witnessed the Bolivarian Revolution [of Venezuela] champion participatory democracy and construct a fair, transparent election system recognized as among the best in the world.»
- November 2016. Two days after the death of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, BLM Global Network eulogized «El Comandante,» who was responsible for the murder of up to 100,000 men, women and children:
«We are feeling many things as we awaken to a world without Fidel Castro. There is an overwhelming sense of loss, complicated by fear and anxiety…. 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!»
The Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ), the anti-capitalist group that funds BLM’s Movement for Black Lives, has repeatedly advocated for the authoritarian communist governments of Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea and Venezuela.
BLM Promoting Racist Black Supremacy
The Marxist co-founder of BLM Toronto, Yusra Khogali, is open about her hatred of white people, whom she has described as subhuman. On Facebook she posted:
«whiteness is not humxness. infact, white skin is sub-humxn…. white people are a genetic defect of blackness…. white ppl are recessive genetic defects. this is factual…. Melanin directly communicates with cosmic energy. this is why the indegeniety [sic] of all humxnity comes from blackness. we are the first and strongest of all humxns and our genetics are the foundation of all humxnity…. white ppl need white supremacy as a mechanism to protect their survival as a people because all they can do is produce themselves. black ppl simply through their dominant genes can literally wipe out the white race if we had the power to. it is why white supremacy as an imperial system thrives. it tries to control, suppress, and destroy our existence in blackness because we are a threat to the genetic annihilation of white ppl.»
Khogali, a Sudanese refugee accepted by Canada, also tweeted about her urge to kill white people:
«Plz Allah give me strength to not cuss/kill these men and white folks out here today. Plz plz plz.»
The co-founder of BLM Los Angeles, Melina Abdullah — whose father reportedlywas a self-proclaimed Trotskyist and whose paternal grandfather was Günter Reimann, a famous German-Jewish Marxist economist from Berlin who fled the Nazis in 1934 and ended up in New York — has also called for violence against white people:
«We’ve been very deliberate in saying that the violence and pain and hurt that’s experienced on a daily basis by black folks at the hands of a repressive system should also be visited upon, to a degree, to those who think that they can just retreat to white affluence.»
Abdullah, who keeps her ex-husband’s surname, regularly lashes out at Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and other white officials whom she accuses of implementing anti-black policies «under the guise of liberalism.» She tweeted:
«As we talk about a white supremacist terrorist like Donald Trump remember that we live in a city that is largely liberal white supremacists. So, when you say ‘Fuck Donald Trump, make sure you say Fuck Eric Garcetti.'»
Abdullah has described blacks who cooperate with whites — including Condoleezza Rice, the first black woman to serve as Secretary of State, and Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey — as «a Black face on white supremacy.»
Abdullah’s daughter, the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Youth Vanguard, Thandiwe Abdullah, has likewise called for violence against white people:
«If you want to set some corporations on fire, you know what? I don’t care about Target burning. I don’t care that capitalism burns. I don’t care that white people in their f***ing office buildings are upset. I don’t care that you can’t go nowhere because you’re stuck in f***ing traffic. I don’t care that you can’t get to your job or your doctor’s appointment or to wherever the f*** you want to go.»
A BLM-affiliated group called Community Ready Corps states that «all white wealth is stolen wealth» and that white people «should make reparations.»
White people have been expressly forbidden from participating in certain BLM activities. BLM Philadelphia wrote: «Please note that BLM Philly is a Black only space.» After a white supporter complained, BLM Philadelphia doubled-down: «Our meetings are black centered.»
BLM co-founder Opal Tometi, the daughter of illegal immigrants from Nigeria, has admitted that BLM was never primarily a reaction to police violence against African Americans. Rather, BLM «was always conceived of as a strategic response to white supremacy.»
BLM is a Pagan «Spiritual» Movement
BLM leaders say that their organization is first and foremost a «spiritual movement» — one that is opposed to the Judeo-Christian tradition. BLM co-founders, Patrisse Cullors and Melina Abdullah are practitioners of paganism, witchcraft and ancestor worship.
- June 24, 2015. In an interview with Religion Dispatches, Cullors said that after consulting her great-grandmother, who was from the Choctaw and Blackfoot American Indian tribes, and her great-grandfather, a medicine man, she developed an interest in Ifa, a West African pagan divination system. She claimed that she was «pushed out» of the Christian church because she is «queer» and the church is «patriarchal.»
- November 28, 2018. In an interview with The Politic, Cullors disclosed that while she was working at the Los Angeles-based Labor/Community Strategy Center, she built «ancestor altars» in her office.
- June 2, 2020. The Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter held a pagan ritual in front of the home of Mayor Eric Garcetti and «invoked the spirits» of the victims of police brutality.
- June 13, 2020. Cullors conducted a «religious» ceremony in which she tried to «resurrect» the sprits of dead people while shredding sheets of paper with the words «police» and «white racism.»
- June 15, 2020. Cullors claimed that she needs «spiritual protection» because Black Lives Matter is being «targeted by the right, by police and by neo-Nazis.»
- June 22, 2020. BLM leader Shaun King encouraged protesters to tear down statues of Jesus:
«Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down. They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been. In the Bible, when the family of Jesus wanted to hide, and blend in, guess where they went? EGYPT! Not Denmark. Tear them down.»
- July 12, 2020. BLM activists are suspected of setting fire to San Gabriel Mission, a 250-year-old Catholic church in California. The mission was founded in 1771 by Father Junipero Serra, a Spanish missionary who brought Roman Catholicism to California, and whose statutes have recently been toppled by activists and protesters in cities across the state.
BLM is Anti-Israel and Anti-Semitic
BLM and its umbrella group, Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) have falsely accused Israel of perpetrating «genocide» against Palestinians. They have also falsely called Israel an «apartheid state.» BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors has referred to «Palestine as the new South Africa.» BLM supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which aims to isolate Israel «economically, culturally and politically.»
BLM has used intersectionality to recast the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a racial issue rather than a dispute over territory — even though Arabs comprise 20% of the population of Israel, where they enjoy equal rights with Jews.
- January 2015. BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors visited the Palestinian territories in the West Bank. Her stated objective was to draw a parallel between police violence against blacks in the United States and what is wrongly called Israeli oppression of the Palestinians in the Middle East.
- August 2015. Cullors signed an anti-Israel statement, again falsely accusing the Jewish state of «colonialism,» «apartheid,» and «ethnic cleansing.» The statement exhorted blacks to support the BDS movement to try to crush Israel economically.
- May 2020. Participants in BLM protests in Los Angeles, California, vandalized at least five synagogues and three Jewish schools with anti-Semitic graffiti. They also ransacked and looted Jewish businesses in downtown Los Angeles and the heavily Orthodox Fairfax district.
BLM’s Obsession with President Trump
BLM’s obsession with U.S. President Donald J. Trump — who, arguably, has done more for African Americans than any other president in recent memory — is strikingly similar to the opposition to U.S. President Ronald Reagan by the domestic terrorist and BLM advisor Susan Rosenberg.
In an August 2017 with the Los Angeles Times, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors said that BLM would never talk with U.S. President Donald J. Trump:
«We wouldn’t as a movement take a seat at the table with Trump because we wouldn’t have done that with Hitler. Trump is literally the epitome of evil, all the evils of this country — be it racism, capitalism, sexism, homophobia…. And if I’m thinking about what I want my children to know in 30, 40, 50 years, I want them to know that I resisted a president at all costs, because this president literally tried to kill our communities, and is killing our communities.»
Cullors recently confirmed that BLM’s immediate goal is to remove President Trump from office:
«Trump not only needs to not be in office in November, but he should resign now. Trump needs to be out of office. He is not fit for office. And so, what we are going to push for is a move to get Trump out. While we’re also going to continue to push and pressure Joe Biden around his policies and relationship to policing and criminalization. That’s going to be important. But our goal is to get Trump out.»
«Here’s the bottom line,» concluded Mary Frances Berry, an academic and veteran civil rights activist. «This whole protest, writ large, is a protest against Trump.»
BLM’s Agenda: Commentary
BLM’s racism, by British author Alexander Pelling-Bruce:
«These cultural entrepreneurs’ livelihoods depend on the continuance of grievance, so they encourage division between groups while suppressing diversity within groups. Black Lives Matter organizers are cultural entrepreneurs par excellence. They are re-racializing society along the lines of white history vs black history….
«I’ve never understood how being defined by skin color can be emancipatory. Isn’t that what the racists want? The opposite of racism is being color blind. Blacks should uphold the idea of society as a shared common possession and support egalitarian measures that would actually improve the lot of impoverished people of all races.»
BLM’s selective outrage, by Guatemalan economist Carroll Ríos de Rodríguez:
«We would say that the value of a human life does not depend on skin color, socioeconomic status, occupation, sex, age or any other particular characteristic: in principle, all human life deserves our respect, period….
«If the Black Lives Matter movement really cared about the quality of black lives, it would defend their right to life by the mere fact of them being people, not the color of their skin…. It would proclaim that victimhood is a demeaning and unethical attitude, since it downplays individual responsibility and self-control.
«Our value as people does not derive from theories of identity, race or gender … these characteristics do not define or determine us. The Black Lives Matter movement should defend the right of all people, of any color, to individual liberty, including their right to outline their own opinions, instead of muzzling or banishing every African American who deviates one iota from the Marxist-progressive and liberal discourse.»
BLM’s cultural revolution to destroy and replace Western civilization, by former Australian politician Peter Baldwin:
«Could any sane, well-intentioned person think this is the way to protect and improve black lives? No, not unless there is a larger goal, which is to dismantle and transform the existing social order by perpetuating and exacerbating racial divisions to the point of societal breakdown, as avowed by some of the openly Marxist ideologues who founded BLM, such as Patrisse Cullors.»
Black Lives Matter as a «political protection racket,» by British author Ben Cobley:
«Black Lives Matter is a masterpiece of political marketing. It’s a slogan with a campaign attached, linked to some pretty heavy racial ideology and propaganda. None of it can be criticized without appearing to oppose the idea that black lives do indeed matter.
«BLM is a classic and effective piece of rhetorical blackmail. Either get on board or you’re a racist: that is the logic of it — a logic driven by fear.»
BLM as an old-fashioned power grab, by American commentator Tammy Bruce:
«In reality, this has nothing to do with black lives and everything to do with liberal Marxist anarchists having hijacked, as they always do, an important social issue with which they will undermine the very communities and people they claim to represent.»
Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute.
