Next week marks a decade since Black Lives Matter began disrupting our lives. The media doesn’t mention the group much anymore, mainly to avoid embarrassing evidence of its corruption. But BLM has changed the nation in profound ways, perhaps permanently—and continues to do so.
This transformation of America was deliberate. The nation’s newspapers robotically speak of a “racial reckoning” following BLM’s founding in 2013, and especially after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, as if this truly was a movement that forced America to deal with its sins.
In reality, the founders of BLM were hard-boiled Marxists who had been waiting in the wings to revolutionize America for years prior to 2013. Their goal was not the improvement of conditions in black America, but the dismantling of the family, capitalism, and representative democracy.
The media has hidden this truth or lied about it.
Here’s what actually transpired: On July 13, 2013, a Florida jury acquitted volunteer neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman of murdering 17-year-old black teenager Trayvon Martin after a scuffle. That day, the Oakland activist Alicia Garza posted a message to Facebook to express her “deep sense of grief.” The post contained either the assertion “Black Lives Matter” or “Our lives matter.” It isn’t clear which.
What is clear, however, is that Garza’s comrade, Patrisse Cullors, another veteran activist, reacted that night by creating #BlackLivesMatter. Two days later, a third militant, Opal Tometi, reached out to Garza and said, “I’ve seen this emerging hashtag that Patrisse and you put online a day or two ago. I think we need to build a website and I think we need to elevate it and make sure that we’re using it across our network and beyond.”
The hashtag became a movement in the burning streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.
The rest is indeed history. It should be studied as history, with historians carefully unearthing evidence one piece at a time, especially given how widespread the cultural change has been since 2013, and then, more rapidly, since 2020.
Instead, we have hollow incantations such as The Washington Post saying a few months ago, “The protests after the murder of George Floyd led to a society-wide rethinking of America’s policies toward black Americans.” Or The New York Times just last week intoning how programs to hire and promote minorities “have been prominent in corporate America in recent years, especially in the reckoning over race after the 2020 murder of George Floyd.”
“A reckoning” suggests that America is finally being held accountable for its evils.
But these “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs; along with the equally proliferating “anti-racism” sessions; the application of critical race theory and gender theory notions in classrooms; and the imposition of environmental, social, and governance practices on unsuspecting shareholders, have thrived because of a falsehood that BLM successfully implanted. That being the self-evidently farcical idea that America is systemically racist and oppressive.
Elites and the administrators of nearly all our cultural institutions reacted to the shock of hundreds of street riots in 2020 by surrendering and swallowing whole that offending fabrication, which by logical extension means that America is in urgent need of a systemic overhaul. People need to be deprogrammed and then reprogrammed by an army of race trainers. Government, schools, and the private sector must enact race-conscious programs and policies.
Except that parents rose up and began protesting these absurdities almost immediately. They elected Glenn Youngkin governor of purple Virginia in 2021 and gave Ron DeSantis an unheard-of 20-point margin in his reelection as Florida governor in 2022.
States have been eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion from their colleges and universities, while others are banning fund managers that practice ESG from managing state pensions. Congress has also started going after diversity, equity, and inclusion. The business of anti-racism training is down. And the Supreme Court reminded us again last week that race-conscious policies are unconstitutional.
There was no widespread and spontaneous reckoning. When Tometi wrote in July 2013 of using “our network and beyond” to amplify a message, she knew she could rely on an intricate lacework of far-leftist groups to organize protests, as researcher Ariel Sheen has documented.
These organizations included the Labor Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles and the School of Unity and Liberation, which recruited Cullors and Garza at very young ages to train them in the ideological and practical aspects of Marxism.
Through these, Garza, Cullors, and later, Tometi started attending gatherings of wider networks such as LeftRoots, Left Forum, and the U.S. Social Forum. The last one was created by global Marxists in 2007 for the express purpose of planting a beachhead within “the belly of the best.”
A year earlier, Venezuela’s dictator, Hugo Chavez, had joined American Marxists attending the World Social Forum in Caracas to take the battle home. “We count on you, companeros, we count on you!” Chavez said, using the term Cuban communists use for “comrade.” He added that “essential to this formula to save the world are the people of the U.S.”
Garza, at the age of 26, was on the organizing committee of the first U.S. Social Forum in 2007. As she put it to a USSF gathering in 2010, the USSF was created because she and other activists had been told at global gatherings of the World Social Forum, “I need you to go home and talk to your comrades, and your companeros, right? And talk about and figure out what you’re going to do to take your foot off our neck.”
It was at that first forum that the National Domestic Workers Alliance was founded, and it was the National Domestic Workers Alliance seven years later that sent Garza to Ferguson to organize BLM into a global network.
The country has paid a heavy toll since. Civilian homicides rose by 10% between 2014 and 2019 in localities where BLM protested after Ferguson. According to Gallup, pride in being American among Democrats began a steep decline in 2013, when it was at 56%, compared to 29% today. And America is being turned upside down.
But a “reckoning” this isn’t. The founding we mourn next week looks more like the start of an uprising that was organized within our gates.
This article first appeared in the Washington Examiner.
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