Black Lives Matter’s 10th Anniversary
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Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

Black Lives Matter (BLM) marked its 10th anniversary on Thursday. Associated Press (AP) writer Aaron Morrison wrote a puff piece about the organization on Wednesday, but left out some very important facts.

Morrison noted that the organization was founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black teenager. “Martin was one of the earliest symbols of a movement that now wields influence in politics, law enforcement and broader conversations about racial progress in and outside the U.S.,” Morrison wrote.

He said that after 10 years, there is a “renewed push to defund police departments and reinvest in Black communities that have suffered disproportionately from police brutality, unequal treatment in criminal justice systems and mass incarceration.”

He noted that in Los Angeles the anniversary was marked by a festival with a “pop-up garden dedicated to families of people killed by police and white supremacist violence.” Trayvon’s mother was invited to speak, and Cornel West, a third-party candidate for president, gave the festival’s keynote address.

Morrison wrote that the BLM movement was launched in response to the not guilty verdict of Zimmerman, whom Morrison calls a person of “mixed white and Hispanic heritage.” He recalled that then-President Barack Obama commented on the case, saying, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

After Zimmerman’s acquittal (on the grounds of self-defense), Black Lives Matter was founded by Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Ayo Tometi as a “decentralized organization.”

Certainly, there are many sincere individuals who support BLM, believing that its goal is purely to help African-Americans. However, what Morrison left out of his article is why millions of Americans do not and should not support BLM.

First of all, the organization’s co-founder, Patrisse Cullors, has proudly proclaimed that she and Alicia Garza “are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories.” Among those “ideological theories” is the belief that the traditional family should be abolished. “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages.’” (One might recall that Hillary Clinton once said that it takes more than a family to raise a child — it takes a “village.”)

In 2019, Garza told some Maine supporters, “We’re talking about changing how we’ve organized this country, so that we actually can achieve the justice that we are fighting for. I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society, which creates inequities for everyone, even white people.”

Of course, the “organizing principle” of America is the Constitution, which leftists such as Garza routinely dismiss as a racist document that needs to be scrapped. (This is a huge reason that Americans who revere the Constitution and our liberties that it protects should be very wary in our present environment of a “Convention of States” to change the Constitution. As the late Justice Antonin Scalia opined, this would be a bad century in which to write a new Constitution. Leftists such as Cullors and Garza would no doubt love to be delegates to any such convention.)

Despite claiming that “black lives matter,” the organization is strongly pro-abortion. Black infants are disproportionally victims of that grisly practice. Former Congressman Allen West (who is a black American) disputes that it is the police who are committing mass murder of black Americans, arguing, “BLM and the media want us to believe it’s a genocide out there. The real genocide is that 20 million black babies have been murdered in the womb since 1973.”

Ryan Bomberger, a black man who founded the Christian organization Radiance Foundation, denounced BLM as an anti-Christian group. “They have no forgiveness, no reconciliation, there’s no call for that.”

This idea of “no reconciliation” is fundamental to the “Critical Race Theory” that BLM has vigorously supported and that is now being pushed by radicals across the country. Considering that critical race theory is a branch of Marxist critical, or conflict, theory, and the founders of BLM are self-proclaimed Marxists, this should not be surprising.

Cullors was recruited and trained by a former member of the Marxist Weather Underground terrorist organization. While running BLM, she released a video supporting what she called “abolition,” by which, she explained, she meant “getting rid of police, prisons and jails, surveillance, and courts.” In a video, she also praised her mentor, Angela Davis, as one of her “favorite abolitionists.” Davis was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by East Germany (when it was considered among the most vicious of the communist governments of Eastern Europe), and ran for vice president twice on the Communist Party ticket, with Gus Hall as the presidential candidate.

Davis expressed support for the “anti-racism” efforts of the Peoples Temple (run by Marxist Jim Jones), and told members there was a conspiracy against them. She said, “When you are attacked, it is because of your progressive stand, and we feel that it is directly an attack against us as well.” In a letter to President Jimmy Carter, she asked Carter not to try to rescue a child held in South America by Jones, arguing that Jones was “a humanitarian in the broadest sense of the word.” A few months later, Jones caused the death of hundreds of his followers by having them drink poison-laced Kool-Aid. (This is the origin of the expression “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” meaning don’t believe everything some cult figure has to say.)

When Alexander Solzhenitsyn asked Davis to broaden her concern about prisoners to include those political prisoners being held in Communist Czechoslovakian prisons, she curtly replied, “They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.” She also declined to support “refuseniks” imprisoned in the Soviet Union. When requested to do so by law professor Alan Dershowitz, she similarly responded, “They are all Zionist fascists and opponents of socialism.”

This woman is the mentor of the founder of Black Lives Matter.

Grove City College Professor Paul Kengor, in his book The Devil and Karl Marx, noted that “abolition” is a word that has been used by Marxists since the days of Karl Marx himself. In his book The Communist Manifesto, Marx advocated for the abolition of property and the family. He also called for a one-world government, run by Marxists such as himself.

Black Lives Matter has certainly “achieved” much during its decade of existence. Many left-leaning prosecutors have refused to prosecute criminals, and there has been a 35-percent increase in murder rates in 70 American cities. BLM’s support for “no reconciliation” has spread across college campuses and “woke” American corporations (whose executives either support the Marxist goals of BLM or are afraid to oppose them), leading to a rise in racial divisions.

This has always been the goal of Marxists — pit people against each other — in support of their theory that millions of Americans and people in other nations are “oppressed.” Many mistakenly think of Marxism as a mostly economic theory, but in reality, it is focused on the remaking of all of society in the Marxist image. Thus, the traditional family and religion, pillars of society, are in its crosshairs.

But AP writer Morrison neglected to include any of this information in his puff piece.