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When people and organizations throw money at identity politics, do they know that the causes they support conflict with their purported goals?
Black Lives Matter (BLM) cloaks itself in garb of justice and morality. By its very name, well-intentioned people are compelled to support it. After all, who does not think the lives of black people matter? Uninformed yet impassioned Americans are unaware that the organization’s name is a rhetorical facade that masks a Marxist core.
The truth is that the three people who founded BLM include two avowed Marxist organizers and an activist sympathizer. Beyond supporting more “mainstream” leftist positions, such as socialized health care and dramatically increased taxes, BLM’s platform has historically called for more radical policies. These include creating collective ownership in black communities, instituting reparations including for illegal aliens, defunding the police, and “disrupt[ing] the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”
The Evil Underpinnings of BLM
BLM, like the Women’s March, has from its start been ardently antisemitic. Members of BLM carried out a pogrom in the Los Angeles area in May during the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. You probably never heard about it because in the intersectional left-wing milieu, Ashkenazi Jews sit at or near the apex of the privilege pyramid.
That is, the descendants of Eastern European Jews, 6 million of whom were massacred during the Holocaust, are considered by BLM and its ideological cohorts to be the world’s greatest victimizers. For the like-minded media, covering such atrocities would only undermine the narrative and hurt the cause, so they remain silent. For BLM, antisemitism is not a cancellable offense.
As we have seen across America these past weeks, like other left-wing, antisemitic movements, BLM justifies violence and resorts to it. Marxists using race as a cover for revolution ought to be condemned for cynically exploiting the deaths of Americans. They are not condemned, however, as too many people consider it politically unacceptable to do so. Meanwhile, the “antiracist” ideology, rooted in a concept of “white fragility,” further dupes the ignorant but impassioned.
BLM poses a cleverly designed dichotomy and demands people choose a side. It defines the world as bifurcated between racists and antiracists, and commands that you must stand with the latter and attack the former. But the antiracists are themselves racists. People like Robin DiAngelo cast whites as evil on the basis of their skin color, and call for them to spend their lives atoning for their inherent sins as determined by their pigmentation.
This is to say nothing of the fact that their proposed “remedies” for societal racism — namely compensating for past discrimination with present retributive discrimination — would destroy any notion of true liberty, equality, or justice. This is intentional, as their objective is to heighten racial strife. It has devolved almost to the point of parody: White women are paying nonwhite women to browbeat them over dinner about their alleged transgressions.
People of good faith who reflexively support Black Lives Matter and “antiracism” should know they are affirming movements collectively rooted in and devoted to Marxism, Jew hatred, violence, racism, social discord, and the undermining of our founding values and principles.
Fake Corporate Courage and Virtue
To what can we attribute the fact that businesses that have historically run from radical movements are now falling over themselves to subsidize BLM? Beyond the true-believing, often white, woke elites who head many of these firms, fear drives corporations to lavish money on BLM for “protection.” Corporate contributions to leftist movements more broadly, and the BLM and “white fragility” racket in particular, seem to be part of a social justice shakedown. It has proved effective on a smaller scale before.
That corporations would pay for such protection is both cowardly and shortsighted. In the short run, these concerns are merely funding continued violence and antisocial behavior by those who wish harm to our broader society. In the long run, they will find themselves no more secure, as the radical left wishes to destroy the economic and political system from which corporate America has so richly benefited. Feeding the communist crocodile in hopes it will spare you in the end is a losing bet.
Moreover, contrary to popular perception, throwing money at left-wing agitators, posting black boxes on social media, or literally prostrating oneself in the public square requires no courage and demonstrates no virtue. It does nothing to ameliorate the problems ailing blacks in American inner cities, let alone people of all colors across the country.
If the underwriters of wokedom actually want to improve America, what should they do instead?
How to Do the Most Good
Consider first what not to do. The leaders of major urban areas across the country have failed their black constituents for decades by imposing less radical versions of the same policies BLM wishes to institute, which will only perpetuate poverty and misery.
More socialism will weaken personal initiative, thwart entrepreneurship, and stunt opportunity. Fewer police cannot possibly protect all innocent Americans, who are already being stripped of their Second Amendment rights. Ideologically driven public education will continue leaving kids confused and underserved. And expanded statist policies will further erode the family.
The reality is that if the left is trying to make a case for systemic racism, little could better describe it than the policies that have prevailed under Democratic rule in America’s inner cities for nearly 60 years, self-evidently contributing to their destruction. The only beneficiaries of such policies are the purported representatives of such districts, who foster increasing dependence on the state they control, therefore accruing ever-greater power. This is what supporters of the woke are funding.
Breaking the leftist stranglehold on America’s cities would be a worthwhile societal project. Nothing could be further from what has transpired.
Since most everything begins with education, I propose one simple task for those who truly wish to support their fellow man. In honor of Thomas Sowell, who just celebrated his 90th birthday, let us devise a plan to get “Charter Schools and Their Enemies” into the hands of every American.
This should be wed to a national campaign for excellence in education — real education, not social justice indoctrination — through school choice. Arguably no single public policy could more effectively reverse leftist ruin and empower the country’s most vulnerable, too many of whom are watching the academy compromise their potentiality.
Finally, those acting as woke white saviors ought to drop this corrosive superiority complex. Such a mentality reflects a soft bigotry of low expectations that is infantilizing, dehumanizing, and ultimately destructive to the human spirit of those who are ostensibly being helped. We should all strive to treat each other as equals and to judge others on their merits.
This ideal is the heart and soul of our country, which is why the woke are explicitly targeting it. Americans of good faith must stop aiding, abetting, and enabling them.