Back in college I knew a guy, a friend of a friend, who drove a city bus in Detroit. When my car was broken down, which happens a lot when you buy a junk car for $400 off someone your parents know, I’d have to take the bus downtown to class and every once in a while I’d find myself on a bus he was driving. I’d sit in front and talk with him because I knew him. Because I knew him, I knew he was crazy – a crazy Marxist.
But he was a real Marxist. I remember one drunken discussion with him at our mutual friend’s flat where I asked him why, if communism was so wonderful, the Soviet Union had collapsed. His answer was a version of the answer I’ve heard countless times since: that the Soviet Union wasn’t “true communism,” that they should have embraced Trotsky and not Stalin. If they had done that, it truly would have been the workers’ paradise communism promised.
There’s always some kind of “that wasn’t true communism” excuse from these people, coupled with an “if this person had done this it would’ve been different” spin. It’s masterful as propaganda and manipulation because, while it can’t be proven, it can’t be disproven either. And when you’re desperate to hold on to a failing belief you will grasp onto anything.
I don’t know whatever became of that guy, I don’t even remember his name (just his job, beliefs, and combat boots), but I suspect he didn’t end up wealthy. He was already older (not too many exceedingly young city bus drivers around) and he was committed to the anger and misery that always accompanies extreme leftism. Well, not always…
They guy I knew was a grunt, at best, in the “movement.” A true believer who toiled away while waiting for the revolution to come and improve his life somehow. Leadership, naturally, doesn’t restrict itself to living the way they want to impose on others.
The people of North Korea are starving, just as people in the Soviet Union were. Kim Jong-Un is fat, as was nearly every leader of the USSR. This wasn’t due to some weird quirk in communist dictators that caused a glandular problem, it’s because they were living well while their people suffered. North Koreans are eating dirt, Kim is eating whatever the hell he wants and as much of it as he can stuff in his bloated pie hole.
The leaders of Black Lives Matter are committed Marxists. They’re also fabulously wealthy. There’s big money in leftist victimhood. There’s big money in Marxism. Bernie Sanders has more houses than you do, for example. He has more houses than most families. It is true that he and BLM leaders, like all extreme leftists, want to “spread the wealth around,” they just never say whose wealth.
It’s not their wealth they want to spread around, it’s everyone else’s.
Patrisse Khan-Cullors, one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, has control over tens of millions of dollars suckers and corporations have flooded the organization with. The group isn’t sharing their riches with local chapters, or seemingly anyone except real estate agents.
Since founding the group, Khan-Cullors has become quite the mini-Donald Trump, snapping up properties across the country, and possibly around the world, snatching up millions of dollars’ worth of houses.
These are only the transactions people have been able to trace to her, and she’s only one of the three co-founders. In addition to the co-founders, there are likely advisors, consultants, and employees plus hangers-on and who knows what else. The group has been famously secretive about what they’re doing with the money, but it sure doesn’t seem to be spent on reward money in places like Chicago to bring murderers of black lives to justice.
Speaking about the cause, even with conviction, rarely translates into actively giving a damn about it, especially when piles of money are involved. As the Lincoln Project showed, there’s a lot of money in pretending to be fighting for lies the political left is conditioned to believe are true.
Black Lives Matter is just the latest in a long line of grifts and hypocrisies the extremist left use to rile people up while getting rich in the process (anyone remember Occupy Wall Street?) You’d think people would catch on, sooner or later, but they don’t. They’re all still driving their own version of that bus in Detroit, making up excuses for why they’re still hungry while each batch of new leaders gets fat.
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!), host of a daily radio show on WCBM in Maryland, and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.