Recently, I have made some pretty charged statements about Black Lives Matter. In a nutshell, I have argued that the organization is not a pro-black civil rights group. Instead, it is an anti-white anti-free speech mob. Evidence of my contention isn’t very hard to gather. In fact, you have to have your head buried pretty deep in the ground in order to miss it. Consider the following examples:
-In August of 2015, Black Lives Matter protestors overtook a Bernie Sanders event in Seattle. They physically stormed the stage and demanded that they be heard lest they shut the event down altogether. They actually shouted, “Your event will be shut down” as they yelled in the faces of those who were rightfully there speaking. They finally strong-armed the Sanders campaign into relinquishing their First Amendment right to speak – not by using reason but instead by using physical intimidation to take over the stage.
-In the fall of 2015, the Mizzou “safe space” controversy made national headlines. When journalists tried to film their protest, a now-infamous Black Lives Matter activist/professor asked for some “muscle” to physically intimidate members of the press, who were simply seeking to exercise their First Amendment rights on public property. The protestors gleefully complied and strong-armed the reporters.
-In the spring of 2016, pro-lifers at Purdue sponsored an “All Lives Matter” event denouncing the disproportionate abortion of black babies. Black Lives Matter protestors denounced them as racists, shouted them down, and demanded that they apologize – simply for exercising their free speech rights. Predictably, the Purdue pro-life pansies complied and even apologized to the activists for the “crime” of exercising their own civil rights.
-Soon after that, Black Lives Matter thugs stormed the stage while Milo Y-Can’t-I-Pronounce-His-Last-Name was giving a speech at DePaul University. One of the protestors actually assaulted Milo – although he did not strike him hard enough to mess up his fabulously moussed and highlighted hairdo. Muscle trumped free speech on that particular occasion. The thugs then rallied to prevent Milo from coming back to campus later. In other words, they went from physical restraint all the way to prior restraint of free speech.
-Earlier this summer, protestors stormed a stage where LGBT activists were trying to hold a vigil for those slain in the Orlando nightclub massacre. Without any sense of irony, the Black Lives Matter spokesperson began lecturing the audience – but only after expressing apprehension over the fact that most people in the audience were white. For the record, the Orlando shooter was not white, although many of his victims were.
As a free speech advocate, I can say without equivocation that I have never witnessed a more consistently censorious group than Black Lives Matter. Disrupting speech is not just a sideshow for them. It is the principal political tactic of the notorious uncivil wrongs group. It is their primary method of drawing attention to their cause because they lack the intellectual fortitude to persuade people to listen based on the content of their arguments.
It is difficult to avoid noticing the common thread when Black Lives Matter charges podiums, assaults speakers, and rips microphones out of speaker's hands. That common thread is not the subject matter of the speeches. It is the skin color of the speakers. The group does not censor its targets because of their political views, or their religion. Nor is their targeting based on the speakers’ sexual orientation. They select people on the basis of their race in order to accost them for their true crime, which is simply talking while white.
The problem for such racist extremists is that these tactics eventually backfire. By targeting white people with physical assaults and intimidation, they merely reinforce the racist stereotype that blacks are aggressive, assaultive, and violent. It is worth noting that such stereotypes are the alleged causes of black deaths at the hands of white cops in the first place. One might be tempted to say that the group renders itself useless by reinforcing the very notions against which they claim to be fighting.
Of course, to say that Black Lives Matter is useless is an undeserved compliment. They are far worse than useless. By running the police out of black neighborhoods, they are ensuring that black on black violence increases. Predictably, as the slaughter of black males increases, the problem of black fatherlessness increases. Consequently, every single negative social indicator skyrockets along with it. They are therefore destroying far more than their own credibility with their tactics. They are destroying their own communities and helping to kill their own neighbors.
Watching this whole sad, pathetic episode in progressive black history makes it abundantly clear that the principal problem in their community is not white racism. It is black culture. That is why it is imperative that we keep black racists from hijacking the national conversation and thereby keeping our attention focused on imaginary problems, rather than real ones.
True civil rights leaders have always understood that the remedy for injustice is more speech, not less. That is the reason why Martin Luther King succeeded. It is why Black Lives Matter racists will be nothing more than a sad footnote in the dark history of progressive intolerance.