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Dear BLM…
Dear Black Lives Matter,
I’d like to be able to take you seriously, but I can’t, and I won’t be able to until you make some changes to the things you say and do.
First, you have to be willing to talk honestly about violence and how it impacts black Americans. You and I agree that it’s a tragedy and a crisis but beyond that, we have two very different ideas about what’s going on. We need to be able to talk about the lives of all black Americans, not just the tiny minority killed by unjust police actions. We need to be honest, but you’re cherry-picking offenses in order to spin a narrative. That has to stop.
Secondly, you’ve got to drop all the revolutionary baggage. Your name says “black lives matter,” but your platform is “radical progressive transformation of America,” and I’m not buying into that. I like free-market capitalism, I like free and fair elections, I like being free to reject cultural junk I don’t believe in like the “trans” movement and other progressive nonsense. I like private-sector health care. I don’t want to defund the police. I don’t buy the climate alarmism agenda. I oppose forced confessions of any sort and I won’t be bullied into making one. This is all stuff you’re being radical about, and it doesn’t work for me.
Guaranteeing that black Americans have the same rights and opportunities as other Americans is a worthwhile and noble goal. It doesn’t require transforming my country into some other country, and if that’s what you demand then you’ll get nothing but contempt and resistance from me.
Let’s talk about the lives of black Americans, and how they can be made better without tearing our country apart. That’s an honest discussion we can have.
But right now you’re a radical progressive movement that’s exploiting a lie about police violence to foment anger and create chaos. You don’t deserve my support, nor the support of anyone who understands and loves our country.
Sincerely,
Hank
Correlation is not causation… but I’m pretty sure you’re right. ;)
I asked this question to my Magic 8 Ball and got the following response “My sources say no.”
Yes the organization “Black Lives Matter’ either was co opted right out of the starting gate, or was always about being structured in a way to enforce the larger society to kneel in front of carefully selected fallen “martyrs” for the purpose of instigating riots and other social measures.
The theory behind “Black Lives Matter” is as you point out, quite valid. But once the org became an over-the-top Marxist group dragged out into action only for special purposes set up by the Inner Cabal, it really lost any validity it had in terms of being the designated go to group for real change.
This is from Spin on another thread:
For many if not most people ‘just the facts” won’t cut it.
For a very interesting take on this, listen to this conversation between Kira Davis and Dan Bongino on race and policing.
Republican outreach hasn’t been good enough. It’s improving under Trump, but not there yet.
This comment contains a really important point. Democrats have no trouble recruiting because charlatans are everywhere and willing. Republican politicians themselves are probably mostly not up to doing the actual work required although there are many who profess to champion those efforts. But observe what happens to those who join President Trump in any of his efforts to make improvements for Americans. Real dedication, stamina, and endurance is required.
It seems to me that BLM is like a host of other causes that are glommed onto and exploited by the left. The women’s movement, climate and the environment, the minimum wage, free college, unions, campaign finance, health care, etc. (basically Biden’s entire policy position) are all used to usher in a leftist utopia where we will all (apart from an elite, protected cadre) be equally miserable.
Unfortunately socialism is very seductive to the young. I’ve seen it up close and in person and I know that the great American experiment is far superior, but many are all too ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Yes. And that partially answers a question implied elsewhere on Ricochet today (though I don’t recall where) about why conservatives haven’t been successful in responding to extremists in a compelling way. Generally speaking, conservatives are advocating something resembling stasis: slow down, pause, think about it. Buckley and Chesterton: Stop! and don’t tear that fence down quite so quickly.
None of which is as exciting as setting fire to a police car. Shoot, even I can see that. There’s a reason the young embrace revolution, and it isn’t simply that they don’t know very much about life. They want excitement and change, and that’s something the left is inherently better at offering.
We need more adults who don’t feel a need to be cool, and who are willing to stand up to the young radicals and say “knock it off.”
And today we have to cope with an almost unimaginable pace that the restless want.
You make it sound like the pace is the result of the combined desires of a ground swell of idealistic youth. But the youth have been educated toward socialism, their leaders have been trained in Marxism (two of the three founders of BLM essentially brag about being “trained Marxists”) and who are directed and coordinated from much higher up.
I think that, in large part at least, the pace is simply the result of youth. An urge to do something is the hallmark of the young man. Throw those young men into a society that has long since stopped acknowledging the value of masculinity, and that no longer training (indoctrinates, instills) the masculine virtues into young men, and what you end up with is pent-up young men with all the energy and restlessness and few of the outlets in which to express it. There are too few ways for young men of the 21st century to exhaust themselves.
Plus, I hear that chicks dig revolutionaries. I’m a conservative, so I really wouldn’t know.
Maybe I’m missing the point, but BLM is at least 50% female. And the pace of the protests, lootings, and taking territory is set and coordinated by senior people all over the country, isn’t it?
I think BLM has an onion-like quality. Outermost is a broad population that honestly believes that BLM is noble. I think that’s by far the largest portion of the pro-BLM population, and the shallowest in terms of understanding and embracing the “cause.” (And that’s the population that I think will respond to a message such as the one in the original post.)
Then there’s a fired up class of young activists, all those restless young men and excitable young women who have been taught that America is a horrible place. These are the same energetic ignorant adult children who Occupy Wall Street, the anti-1% crowd, the same foolish people who are confused about their own sexual identities — or at least believe that lots of other people are and that there’s nothing inherently ridiculous about that. These are the fodder of higher learning, the sweet innocent minds trod on by our universities until they’re fairly mush. These are the ones I was commenting on in #42, the dummies.
And then there are the true believers, the nihilists, the universal haters who want to tear everything down. There’s a lot of overlap between this group and the relatively innocent dummies mentioned above: encourage a young sign-carrying punk enough and he might break a window and trash a store; fire up the passion for justice and drama in a ditzy girl and she’ll burn down a Wendy’s. But mostly they’re thugs of opportunity, more interested in the romance of action than breaking heads. The real thugs, the Antifa creeps and the more committed BLM people, set out to break heads. That’s what they’re about, finding a fight and delivering a beat-down.
Finally, under all that, way down in the heart of the onion, there are the people in the limelight, the ones who claim to represent things. They’re the “trained Marxists” we’ve heard about, the radicals who are setting themselves up for a prosperous future in public activism. They’ll shake down businesses and politicians, make demands and be taken seriously by apparently serious people. I don’t think they really have the power they pretend they do, and I don’t think they’re organizing very much. BLM and Antifa are not well-disciplined organizations. But chaos works for them right now, and the kids are out of school and out of work, so it’s a good time.
Of all of those, the only ones worth trying to talk to are the normal people who just don’t know what BLM and Antifa really are. The rest of them can do what they do only because normal people think these organizations are on the side of justice.
[ Anyway, that’s my impression. I could be wrong. ]
I agree with everything you say, but one point and one remark. I think that BLM and anti-fa are extraordinarily disciplined. It is no accident that BLM protests have simultaneously taken to the streets all over the world, without the protesters even really knowing what was going on other than bumper sticker propaganda. And anti-fa has cells and training centers as well, and disciplined agitators who are mobile, in electronic communication within themselves, with other cells, and ultimately with higher up. Anti-fa also is world-wide in scope, see the incidence of aanti-fa riots in France, for example. And where do you think Raz (or whatever his name is) got guns for his security squad in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Occupied Zone (CHAOZ).
And my one additional remark is that Kshama Sawant of the Seattle City Council (the one who unlocked the doors of the police precinct) was an Occupy Wall Street Protester a decade ago, and in that intervening years made her way into the City Council. She may have been an easily led youth ten years ago, but she is a politically well-placed leader today. And there are probably dozens if not hundreds of people similar to her, in government, the Press, tech industry, and corporate positions. We may very well have experienced insurgent operatives, that are well placed by now, and with a history of moving crowds and managing agitators, and who have a good knowledge of the national social communications infrastructure to sway people quickly and easily.
I hope I’m wrong. (I won’t quote Monk and say, ‘but I’m not.’)
And you could be right. I try to throw a lot of “I think” phrases into my comments, because I don’t want to seem to know things I don’t, and I really don’t know how organized these operations are. But my suspicion (see?) is that most of the demonstrations are independent. In the little town where I live (about 25,000 people in the immediate area), we had a few hundred people gathered on a beautiful day a week or two ago. It was peaceful, just a ramshackle gaggle of citizens engaged in anodyne virtue-signaling. In a bigger town with more college kids we’d probably have had more drama. I suspect that’s repeated all over the country, usually without the spark, or perhaps the mass, that makes it turn violent. And I doubt that anyone out-of-town organized our little shindig. Again, just my impression, and you could be more correct than I am.
Finally (I moved this up from the end), read this anonymous debriefing on the Minneapolis action. I’m really interested in what you make of it.
The Siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis: An Account and Analysis
https://crimethinc.com/2020/06/10/the-siege-of-the-third-precinct-in-minneapolis-an-account-and-analysis
***
That’s funny I try to take out every time I begin a thought with I think: I mean, that’s pretty much a given. And what you say may be true world-wide. But I think not. Who knows. I hope you’re right. But I do hear and read snippets of things that indicate coordinated organization, including seeing twitter texts on when and where to protest and engaging others in the protests. Even the DOJ now says that anti-fa is a transnational terrorist organization; how much and what kind of coordination is necessary for this?
And where do the protesters get their megaphones? I don’t have one. And who dreams up filling their cars with the makings of Molotov cocktails and drives around handing them out? And how do people know to pack bricks and fireworks in their backpacks? This has happened in, I think, all the big cities where riots took place.
As far as in your town, I suspect that much of these small-time protests are gravy to BLM and anit-fa, but that does not mean that they are not instigated willfully by them: there is a world of social communication going on that I see only third-hand in right-wing reporting. Virtue signalling may be what the mass of the street level protesters are doing, but I tend to think they’re getting their encouragement and advice on initiating the protests from social media.
The Great Society destroying the Black family. 80+ percent of black kids with no father anywhere to be seen. A Black culture that glorifies thugs, drugs and violence. A Black culture that punishes Black kids who try to learn and escape by calling them “White”.
If you don’t get them the facts as a starting point you have no argument. Period.
And a white culture that praises the black culture as “authentic”.
I see reality in this description, at least in some of the very visible results produced. What is more difficult to see is how this is caused, is there a structure with leadership toward this end as a deliberate action or does it result as a random unexpected outcome of missteps in how something thought to be beneficial to society was implemented?
Maybe we do owe reparations. For the Great Society.
No. I do realize that you are probably being facetious.
First of all, most black voters wanted these programs. So it’s not a we-versus-they thing.
Second of all, Shelby Steele posits that the Great Society, and other programs providing explicit favoritism to blacks, were an attempt at reparations.
Carol, I disagree. The theory behind BLM is a lie. The movement was not co-opted. It was inherently false and rotten to the core, from the very beginning.
MLK’s dream is not a lie. It is a worthy goal. It lasted, as a policy matter, for something like a year in the 1960s, before the movement was changed to a racial spoils system. Then the behavior of fairly large numbers of black folks started deteriorating, most notably in marriage, illegitimacy, and crime. White guilt and cowardice appears to have prevented any challenge to this bad behavior, and for whatever reason, black leadership was not up to the task. Maybe no one could have been up to the task, as there was substantial deterioration in behavior among whites and other groups as well, starting in the 1960s.
I don’t think that any of the terrible problems among black Americans are unique to blacks. Whites, and other races, have the same problems, though generally at lower levels so far.
You got that right.
Whites are now at the level of family destruction with fatherless homes that Blacks were a generation ago.
Society could survive with a minority having 80% single parent homes. It won’t survive when the majority gets there.
Also traditional methods of outreach are now beyond the reach of any traditional liberals, true conservatives or rank and file Republicans. I can think of six or eight newspapers within my area from here in Lake County down to San Jose Calif. My writing a letter expressing anything we discuss here on ricochet would be fruitless. Any time I buy a normal newspaper, the letters to the editor are flooded with screeds from liberals and Marxists about what a horrible person Trump happens to be.
Plus if a person cannot say “All Lives Matter” while at work without risking being fired, how could anyone of us bring up politics in the company lunchroom? With COIVD 19, an illness, now being one of the most politicized health situations in the history of the world, we are beyond screwed.
I wish I could like both these comments a million times.
That was going to be my next question, what do we call all of the resources laid out for The Great Society.
I hope you’re right about this. I think that we’re learning, right now, whether society can survive a significant minority with behavior, and a culture, that is this dysfunctional.
What I’m seeing is that a significant proportion of the white majority is rejecting the good and functional majority culture, because they have been misled into believing that the tragic consequences of the dysfunctional behavior and culture of so many American blacks is not the fault of their own choices and culture, but is somehow the fault of mistreatment by the majority.
I did listen to the most recent Speak-Easy podcast, Is This A Moment or A Movement (here), which was difficult for me, because I think that they are incorrect about important things. But Pastor Darrell Scott did make a good point about this dysfunctional black culture — that it is very difficult to break free from it, when you are born into it. I think that he is absolutely right about this, though I do not think that we can accept this as an excuse for individual bad behavior.
It is very difficult to change a culture. I think that we made a big mistake when we changed laws to accommodate departures from traditional family and sexual morality, and that this is the source of many of our current problems.