Back to... |
| |
Share Our Stories! - Click Here | |
The Tyranny Of The Black Lives Matter Movement
| |
By Joel Skousen | |
My main message this week is that the BLM movement is a front for and an excuse to push through a very dangerous agenda attacking every vestige of liberty we hold dear. In its largest sense, these 'protests' are a war on Western culture, a war on your freedom to judge others, and above all a war on freedom of speech—your speech, not theirs. While preaching tolerance for minorities these radicals are totally intolerant of any differing opinion, shouting people down and demanding the resignation of anyone who won't bow and scrape to the new tyranny. They won't even tolerate a sign saying "All Lives Matter." A sign carried by a BLM protestor read, "No Freedom until We're Equal" —meaning no freedom for YOU until black Americans are equal in outcome to whites, not merely in opportunity—a virtual impossibility in any society. Equality of outcome or results is impossible even within races, let alone between them, so this is clearly an attack on everyone's freedom to choose—and it is a rejection of reality: there is inevitable inequality or consequences that come from good, bad and mediocre choices. Sadly, establishment politicians, media talking heads, corporate leaders, teachers, and even some police chiefs are bending the knee to protestors. Hypocritically, these are the same people who excoriated peaceful protests over the loss of personal liberties in the exaggerated Covid 19 pandemic. The Left, backed by the Deep State, feels they have conservatives on the run, and I don't see an end to this new wave of tyranny. The more politicians and academics genuflect and yield, the more they will demand. It is eery how similar the false pandemic and the BLM riots are in tearing away our individual rights. Both are holding your liberties hostage until we succumb to their demands. BLM activists say no more freedom until you tear down all your justice institutions, defund police, and make everyone equal in wealth, and the Covid 19 dictators say you can't have your freedom back to do business, travel and be free until you acquiesce to constant surveillance, medical scans and taking a dangerous vaccine. And because people will resist, they will continue to threaten these liberties until you give in. All this has happened in less than 3 or 4 months, and it is rightfully making real conservatives wake up, and realize how quickly liberty is lost when corrupt leadership rules across the entire establishment. Mass Resistance organization had this excellent analysis of the hidden agenda behind the BLM movement. Where is the courage to stand up against these two waves of propaganda? We see police bending the knee to join with protestors , or even laying down on the pavement with them . Meanwhile state governors continue to restrict people's liberty and demand people wear masks and stay 6 feet apart—all laughably irrelevant in a false pandemic—and yet pander to massive groups of protestors, only a few of which are wearing masks, including those who want to hide their identity during the violence. Kentucky's governor just agreed to have the state pay for all African American's health coverage . RINO senator Mitt Romney left his Senate office in Washington DC to don the idiotic Covid mask and join the BLM march, but it won him few points. The mainstream media gave him a nod, but conservatives were unimpressed. RT played up how it broke ranks with Trump , Adam Mill commented on the picture of a group of FBI agents in riot gear (half of them women and many dowdy or overweight) supposedly sent to protect the capitol, but were, instead, kneeling with the protestors: Not only are FBI agents being indoctrinated in the "new order" of tolerance but headquarters has been busy covering for Antifa and other extreme Leftist agitators driving the violence, as Big League Politics notes : Meanwhile, businesses are not being protected from mobs as police chiefs are now fearful of being accused of racism by going after the mobs and protecting property. Nothing is more symptomatic of this new permissiveness than the takeover of an entire 6 block Capitol Hill area of Seattle by Antifa. Police are being told to stand down and not attempt to retake control of the area, even as Antifa brandishes arms. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan announced that police at the city's East Precinct would actually abandon their precinct offices and allow Antifa to declare the area an " antonomous zone ." Among their list of 30 demands are, 1. Abolish the Seattle Police Department (says it is "beyond reform.") 2. Police shall henceforth be unprotected. No guns, helmets, shields etc. 3. Release all youth criminals from prison 4. Reparations for all victims (undefined) of police brutality 5. Retrial of all black prisoners by a jury of blacks. 6. Release of all violent protestors in jail and future amnesty 7. Release of all prisoners charged with resisting arrest 8. Abolition of all prisons 9. That police funding be redirected into: "A) Socialized Health and Medicine for the City of Seattle. B) Free public housing, because housing is a right, not a privilege . C) Public education, to decrease the average class size in city schools and increase teacher salary. D) Naturalization services for immigrants to the United States living here undocumented. (We demand they be called "undocumented" because no person is illegal.)" 10. Rent controls and free college for everyone 11. All blacks must be treated in hospitals by black doctors and nurses 12. Anti-bias training for everyone (the end of YOUR free speech and freedom of thought) 13. Remove all confederate names and monuments 14. New local police system run by them In George Orwell's 1984, at least our masters had some sophistication and used deception. These guys don't have a clue about how the real world works. They sound like outright communists from the 60's! What they are describing is a new police state with a minority of blacks running roughshod over everyone else. How fair do you think that is going to be? You can imagine who is going to pay for all the "free education, medical care and housing." Productive people will be the new slaves in this socialist state, if there are any small business owners left after the Covid false pandemic. None of these demands is even worthy of discussion, let alone giving them a media platform and autonomous area in Seattle. What about the rights of the landowners whose property is held hostage there? Shame on Seattle's leaders for allowing this rebel takeover of Seattle. With only the suggestion of defunding police in Los Angeles, the LA Police Department announced on Thursday rapidly rising crimes. Intellihub said that "homicides have gone up a staggering 250% this week as opposed to last week. To boot, the number of people that have been shot has risen 56%." But LA and Seattle are not alone in this anti-police mania. The Socialist Mayor of Portland, Oregon (another part of the "Left Coast" of America) gave all public employees a week's paid " bereavement leave " to "grieve for the 3 blacks killed by police" ...that they personally never knew. How did we get to the point where every black person who dies by police is proof, not of police brutality but of racism? No on is even trying to prove that Derek Chauvin and the mixed race group of officers who caused Floyd's death were in any way motivated by bigotism. So far, the only hint of ulterior motive is that both George Floyd and Derek Chauvin were employed as bouncers years ago at the same bar and had strong disagreements. Witnesses say nothing about racial tension, and it looks more like typical friction between two macho men. Certainly no excuse for this killing, or the riots either. Minneapolis, MN, where this all started, is run by a bunch of leftist City Council members, who seriously debated whether or not to defund the police department. How anyone could hope to survive a future council election after backing such an idiotic proposal is beyond my ability to fathom. The AP has the story : And who will keep us safe from the new violent activists? President Trump vowed there "won't be any defunding of police." Part of this radical movement may be aimed at goading Trump into using federal troops to step in and establish order (which would be unconstitutional—and give the Democrats another reason to attack Trump). The president said , But in the end, the intent of this prolonged series of protests, some violent and some "peaceful" is to enforce a rigid code of speech upon all who have a voice. As John David Davidson writes in The Federalist, This is one of the most important essays written on the subject. He continues, There will be no opting out of the Black Lives Matter movement. You're either for BLM or against it—and if you're against it, you're a racist. You will either support BLM publicly and enthusiastically, or you will be harassed, shunned, and shamed out of mainstream America. If you dare to speak a word against BLM, you will be targeted, mobbed, and probably fired. ...It doesn't matter what your job or profession might be. It doesn't matter if you're in a position of power or prestige—in fact being in a position of power might make you more of a target. The only thing that can protect you from the BLM movement's punitive rage is fealty. Bend the knee, and you might be spared. Then again, you might not. The examples he lists below are growing and happening to highly placed people everywhere. The list of people who have lost their jobs or been suspended for criticizing or even questioning the BLM movement is long—and growing daily. Most prominent on the list is erstwhile New York Times opinion page editor James Bennet, who "resigned" under pressure from woke NYT staffers after he ran an op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton that made the uncontroversial case that the U.S. military should be deployed if police can't get riots under control. Then there was Stan Wischnowski, top editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, forced to resign over a headline of an architecture column that read, "Buildings Matter, Too," which ran after scores of buildings in downtown Philly had been destroyed by rioters. Bon Appétit editor-in-chief Adam Rappoport stepped down Monday after a piece he published genuflecting to BLM was deemed insufficient by staffers who claim there's a discriminatory culture at the magazine. Also, someone posted a 13-year-old photo of Rappaport in a Halloween costume that some people thought was offensive. Claudia Eller, editor-in-chief at Variety, was forced to take administrative leave after she got into a Twitter spat with a woman of South Asian descent who thought a piece Eller wrote lamenting the lack of diversity at the magazine wasn't obsequious enough. On and on it goes. NBA announcer Grant Napear was fired from his sports talk radio program and resigned as the Sacramento Kings announcer after tweeting "all lives matter." A professor at UCLA was placed on leave after refusing to cancel a final exam following the death of George Floyd. A reporter in Wales was forced to step down as Wales Book of the Year Judge after complaining that a BLM protest violated the government's social distancing rules. A cast member for MTV's reality competition series "The Challenge" was fired after writing "people die every f–king day" in response to an Instagram comment about George Floyd. Professional soccer player Aleksander Katai was "released" by the LA Galaxy not for anything he wrote or said, but because his wife criticized BLM on Instagram. A former Canadian cabinet minister lost three jobs after saying on television that he didn't think Canada was a racist country. That's just a partial list. BLM Isn't Interested In Free Speech, It Wants Power As I said at the beginning, this movement is a front for pushing the radical PC and socialist agenda of the Deep State and their allies on the Left. They don't care a whit about black lives, except that they serve as pawns to energize the troops in protesting for "injustice." Black Lives Matter as a political movement—as distinct from, say, thinking that black lives matter, which most Americans do because they aren't racist—isn't interested at all in ameliorating the state of black America, or fighting actual racism, or expanding liberty and justice for all under our constitutional system. This isn't an evolutionary movement but a revolutionary one. It doesn't draw on our tradition of constitutionalism but on Marxism. Its model isn't the American Revolution but the French Revolution—hence the purges, which for now are confined to the workplace. It's fair to say the movement's power and influence are based on ideological purges. Exposing supposed racists is its modus operandi, and what began on campus has now percolated through into the mainstream of American life. Apologies and counter-arguments won't help because the one thing the BLM movement cannot allow is honest discourse or the free exchange of ideas, as Davidson relates: Consider the case of Harald Uhlig, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and lead editor of the Journal of Political Economy, one of the country's top economics journals. A campaign is currently underway to get Uhlig fired for "trivializing the BLM movement" and then insufficiently apologizing for this supposed offense in a Twitter thread. How did he trivialize the BLM movement? He wrote a blog post in 2017 defending the principle of free speech using the example of sympathetic media coverage of NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. Essentially, he posed a diagnostic question about the motivations of journalists. He did this in a somewhat clumsy but provocative way, asking whether these journalists would still defend the players if instead of kneeling during the anthem they waved a Confederate flag and donned Ku Klux Klan gear. Uhlig's point was that you're only really defending the principle of free speech if you're defending views you find despicable , like support for the Confederacy or the KKK. Since most journalists already agreed with the kneeling NFL players protesting police abuse, "this isn't really an act of bravery," he wrote. " This is all about defending the right to speak for those that you agree with in the first place, dressed up as a proud defense of the constitution . This is an act of a majority ganging up on one who is down. What a phony act of cowardice and pretense." Now that is powerful commentary. I recommend you let your older children read this. It through incisive reasoning like this that young people learn to analyze and see errors in logic.
|