Editor's note: This piece was co-authored by Tom Patterson.
Black Lives Matter claims to be fighting for things it calls “social justice” or “black liberation” and “black sovereignty.” It’s conveniently unclear how anyone would know when those goals are met. Meanwhile, they do promise to “burn down the system” if they don’t achieve success. Some of these conflagrations are easily perceived.
Black Americans, no, Americans, already enjoy legal equality and civil rights protected by law. Polls reveal police are well regarded by 70% of minority community members, who lament weakening and defunding law enforcement. Charges of excessive black deaths at the hands of police have been debunked statistically time after time.
So what’s really going on here? Mass media certainly hasn’t illuminated the subject. BLM was founded by proud Marxists with the avowed intent of spreading Marxist ideology. In a 2015 interview, co-founder Patrice Cullors broke the code, stating “myself and Alicia [Garza, another co-founder] in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.” Nothing said or done since provides cause for doubt.
With media’s help, many well-intentioned Americans and the corporate class have bought into the notion that BLM is a populist movement dedicated to combatting police brutality against blacks, and promoting the welfare of a black underclass. But Marxism is nothing of the sort—it is an ideology devoted to the destruction of democratic capitalism and the eventual triumph of a group-think dictatorship. Corporations funneling buckets of guilt tribute to the organization are financing their own destruction, vainly hoping as Neville Chamberlain did to appease the beast’s maw.
Like other totalitarian movements throughout history, it has never been that concerned with the plight of minorities or the public, though it may expediently profess to be. In fact, the liberals of Marx’s time were a major source of irritation to him—liberals in this sense are those dedicated to Enlightenment values like reason, liberty and equality.
So now BLM starts to make sense. Totalitarians don’t tolerate criticism. Critics of BLM, as we have seen, have been attacked and lost their jobs, some for simply not showing adequate enthusiasm, or for departing from the party line.
If black lives mattered to BLM, they now have the funding to do enormous good (blindly supplied by terrified or misguided and extorted donors on bended knee, even members of Congress supplicating and prostrating themselves on national TV). BLM could establish community watch programs, create opportunities for black children with education initiatives like charter schools and provide rewards for the apprehension of the murderers of black children.
But that’s not their interest or style. Their street “protests“ inevitably degenerate into terrifying, demoralizing riots with looting and burning that couldn’t possibly benefit blacks. Erasing the nation’s past is in the Marxist playbook, flatly stated by communists and written into the Congressional Record on January 10, 1963. It was the heart and soul of the Cultural Revolution perpetrated by Mao in China, and now taking root here.
Death to religion, the family, art, culture, comfort and the rest. Promote ugliness as art. Statues reflecting our history and past are toppled, and American values are denigrated even though again they have nothing to do with helping today’s blacks or what matters. Manhattan is a boarded up wasteland hidden from you by the hopelessly corrupted “news” media.
Some of the BLM‘s stated goals are nominally concerned with actual black lives, but even these include such dated nonsense as “ending the war against black people.” That “war” put a black man in the White House—for two terms—made Oprah a multi billionaire, generated the Black Congressional Caucus which you better not decry as segregated, discriminatory, non-inclusive and racist, especially while daring to call for a white equivalent.
Now BLM explicitly demands the dissolution of police and prisons. That’s not even rational, and Congress is cowed into awkward silence. They want a “radical and sustainable redistribution of wealth through the tax code.” In America, you want money, you go out and earn it, like Oprah and all the other rich people of color and no color did.
Redistributing people’s wealth—which is done by force at the point of a gun—is the corrupt communist way. We don’t do that here, hear? Then there’s that left-wing totalitarian staple, the “disruption of the western-prescribed nuclear-family-structure requirement.” Now they’re treading on really dangerous ground. What’s next? Maoist style abortions or death to all female newborns? Eugenics to solve the fatherless birth problem destroying the “community”? And the latest—copy editing and objectivity as news standards are obnoxious tools of oppression and must be discarded (WSJ, 2/1/23, WaPo 1/30/23).
The BLM movement bears no resemblance to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. MLK’s followers believed their campaign was a moral witness that should be conducted with dignity. Protestors were non-violent, wouldn’t brook pillaging, arson and wanton destruction. They didn’t hate America like these malfeasants do.
No, they sought to be part of the dream in a fully realized way. Unlike today’s radicals, they faced real racism embedded in the institutions and laws of the time. But they followed their dreams with high ideals, a just cause and in the end proved profoundly effective, joining America’s wealth-creating engine.
BLM followers are the diametric opposite—sharing a core belief that America is irredeemably racist and therefore deserves destruction. We are the greatest force the planet has ever seen, for eliminating poverty and improving the human convention, and BLM only sees horror! Shelby Steele, a veteran of the civil-rights movement, points out that they have to search hard for signs of actual racism, instead resorting to complaints of “micro-aggressions” and “cultural appropriation” as well as endless hoaxes and myths. Cultural appropriation is merely Newspeak for “the melting pot” that has made America wealthy and strong. America, a work in progress, is among the most tolerant nations on Earth. Would BLMers prefer Nigeria, or Cuba, Russia or Venezuela, perhaps communist China? Make it so, buy a ticket to ride. They won’t. America is the promised land.
The bright future promised by the civil-rights movement is materializing. Slowly but steadily, against consumption by the twin toxins of black victimhood and white guilt, aggressively exploited by BLM. It is perverse advancement of Marxism, socialism, communism, and destruction of the greatest system of governance ever devised.
BLM isn’t here to help and heal. Everything it does serves to divide us and pit Americans against each other, in classic Marxist class-warfare style. By their own words, they are here to destroy us unless we bend to their intolerant tyrannical will.
Stand firm America, let not the unholy forces of the dark side of human nature overtake the bright white light of all we have and will continue to accomplish in this, the greatest nation on God’s Earth.
Tom Patterson, past President of The Goldwater Institute, is a retired medical doctor and former President of the Arizona State Senate. Alan Korwin, the author of 14 books and long-time contributor to Townhall.com, has been writing as The Uninvited Ombudsman since 2006.