“BLACK & BROWN FOLKS BUILT THIS COUNTRY
(AND WE’RE DOING IT AGAIN)
JOIN US OR GET OUT OF THE WAY!”
That was the jarring message on a giant Lamar Advertising billboard greeting commuters driving into Boise on the morning of August 13. Equally disturbing were the graphics accompanying the text: a burning police car and black and brown hands lifting up an image of the Idaho capitol dome and a “deconstructed landscape of Boise.”
Adding to the alarm were the militant in-your-face statements of spokespersons for the unknown sponsors that paid for the troubling ad. The Boise Weekly, a radical-left counterculture tabloid, said of the billboard: “It’s a strong phrase, and activist/organizer Tanisha Jae Newton said they are radically unapologetic about it.”
“This message is for folks within impacted communities to know that people recognize them and see them and their power,” Newton told the tabloid. “These communities need hope and empowerment.”
“The billboard came about,” the Boise Weekly reported, “because Newton and their friends regularly have conversations about getting their message out by ‘any means necessary,’ a nod to Malcolm X. They said they’d been looking on social media to other organizations to get new ideas, and when Newton connected with the artist Morgan Baxter, they said the plan for a billboard came together.”
For those members of the proletariat too busy working for a living, raising families, and paying taxes to study radical-left philosophy and the “woke” terminology of “progressives,” the significance of the “by any means necessary” meme might be missed. However, to LGBTQ-BLM “community organizer” Tanisha Jae Newton (shown) and her comrades, the billboard project clearly has revolutionary meaning. The phrase “by any means necessary” comes from Marxist psychologist and Pan-African revolutionist Frantz Fanon, whose popularized screed The Wretched of the Earth many of us were required to read in college during the 1970s. It is a phrase made infamous by the Weather Underground terrorists (most notably, Barack Obama’s pal Bill Ayers), the Black Panthers, and, as noted in the Boise Weekly story above, Malcolm X. It has been adopted as an organizational name by the violent, communist-anarchist group BAMN, By Any Means Necessary, which has led riots and violent confrontations in Berkeley, Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, and other cities across the United States.
Likewise, the use of deconstructionist rhetoric reveals that the billboard propagandists have been feasting on the indoctrination menu of “deconstruction” and “critical theory” that has served as an essential staple diet at most of our colleges and universities for decades, and is now even being force-fed to high school and elementary-school students. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky, and other Marxist gurus of intellectual chaos and upheaval have trained millions of young people, who are now carrying out the social and political chaos and upheaval that we witness all about us.
According to the Boise Weekly report, Morgan Baxter “works in graphic design, and as an activist herself was happy to provide the artwork. She said she loves the imagery in the billboard, especially how the Black and Brown hands support the deconstructed landscape of Boise from underneath. Many downtown buildings are recognizable, but in the right-hand corner a police car is on fire. Baxter said the group of organizers intended for people have to look twice at the art, and she hopes it reflects the idea that people should take a second look at what’s happening in their community.”
The Real Community Speaks Up
The Boise Weekly story continues: “For Newton, the message was the most important part, and they wanted to come up with the most productive and galvanizing language to Black and Brown people to let them know they’re supported. They said there were a lot of meetings where folks came together to plan the billboard project: ‘It’s really the community’s billboard.’”
Ah, yes, “the community,” the vague, undefined term perpetually invoked to validate every revolutionary action or proposal with a faux democratic patina. Neither the Boise Weekly nor Newton and Baxter bother to identify or quantify the “folks” that they claim speak for the Boise “community.”
Plenty of members of the Boise community, however, were outraged by the billboard and its implicit message of anti-white racism, anti-police, pro-violence, and in-your-face militancy. Twitter, Facebook, and other social media lit up, and not with anonymous trolls (as is so often the case with leftist attacks on conservatives) but with real citizens going on the record with their actual names. Lamar Advertising received hundreds of negative responses to the ad, many of them pointing out the obvious: that in a volatile time, in which cities across the land are engulfed in fire, riots, murder, and mayhem, it is the height of corporate irresponsibility to pour gasoline on the flames.
Among the early responders to the billboard was Code 3 to 1 Retired Police Officers and Fire Fighters in Idaho, which posted a photo of the billboard, along with this alert to members and friends:
This billboard went up in Boise this evening. We can all agree that we need to stamp out racism, however, this photo contains a burning police car. What kind of message does that send? One of our retirees tried to get billboard space to advertise Mayor McLean’s recall, but she was denied because she was told it was too political. A burning police car is ok though? We encourage you to call Lamar company executives and complain. The silent majority should not remain silent any longer. You need to speak up and flooding their office with phone calls is an easy way to help. See the comments for their names and phone numbers. #bluelivesmatter #boiseisnotportland
The silent majority did not remain silent. The Code 3 to 1 posting quickly garnered over 800 comments, nearly all supportive of the effort to remove the offensive billboard.
Lamar Advertising of Boise quickly got the message, receiving nearly 500 (mostly negative) comments about the billboard on their Facebook page, before they closed the comments section and took down the sign.
In a Facebook posting for August 14, Lamar provided the following public relations statement:
Yesterday, we mistakenly displayed an advertisement on one of our Boise area billboards. Had we properly vetted the copy through our sensitive copy approval process, we would have rejected it. Unfortunately, due to employee oversight, the proper procedures were not followed in this case. Once management was made aware of the situation, we immediately removed the ad. Lamar does not endorse the content of the ad, and we apologize for our error in displaying it. We are currently reminding our managers across the country about our copy acceptance procedures to ensure that any and all sensitive copy is reviewed and vetted properly in accordance with Lamar’s policy.
The following comments provide a tiny sample of the outpouring that appeared on the Lamar website:
Marty Hess
Well the employee(s) on the oversight committee should be fired! That was a terrible example of hate! It works both ways, well it use to be that way!
Justin Luking
I call [BS]. They went woke and realized that’s when you go broke. They didn’t count on the backlash. Overplayed their hand. Funny how they rejected a billboard showing support for police because it was “too political”. Funny how that didn’t miss getting vetted.
Sherry Heckathorn
Lamar is taking a lot of heat from this, I’m not sure they understood the level of patriotism and support for our law enforcement in Idaho… I think they get it now.
Christina Bodily
Maybe an “Idaho is too great for Hate” should be posted in it’s place as an apology. Thank you for removing it. So glad there are so many willing to remind your company of our American values.
Kristy DeWalt
You apologized for your error but what about a sincere apology to our officers!! Until that happens I call BS on your mistake. And unless your employee was blind… calling it Oversight is also BS!
Chris-Navil Moriarty
Basically nobody is buying this explanation. If this were concerning other groups, the post would simply be profuse apologies. Also, the explanation, if it were the same, would include specifics about how you crucified the person who didn’t vet properly. I give you and “E” for effort.
Deborah Nelson
From Idaho Press article: “Newton said that for those who disagree with the message, they offer many resources to learn through classes and education, and people who wish to engage in dialogue can look there. Baxter said if people don’t have an immediate positive reaction, they need to ask themselves, “Why not?”
Rickey Forbus
Absolutely unacceptable. A true failure by management. Promoting violence in advertising is irresponsible and dangerous.
Mike Williams
Lamar Advertising of Boise, at the very least you should be displaying an apology on the same billboard to the community and our law enforcement for posting a such a hateful message. You owe us that much. On top of that, I hope you now see what type of people you did business with and make the business decision to never do business with them or anyone associated with them again. Hate speech is hate speech and should not be tolerated.
Unlike so much of the hatred, vulgarity, and vitriol that passes for online “dialogue” these days, all of the comments we viewed showed decency and restraint. Passionate and angry, yes, but respectful. Obviously, these “unwoke” Idahoans need to be sent to re-education camps, like the thought criminals in communist Vietnam, Cambodia, and North Korea. At least that would seem to be the attitude of Newton and Baxter.
“Newton said that for those who disagree with the message, they offer many resources to learn through classes and education, and people who wish to engage in dialogue can look there,” the Boise Weekly article noted. “Baxter said if people don’t have an immediate positive reaction, they need to ask themselves, ‘Why not?’”
“We want to inspire hope for those that see the message as a positive one,” said Baxter. “For those that don’t, it can give them a chance to reflect on their own moral and political beliefs.” Yes, you see, if you disagree with the message, there is something obviously wrong with your thinking. But Newton, Baxter, and comrades are willing to help you correct your “wrong-think” — or mow you down, if you refuse to change.
“If people disagree, I welcome them to come to those types of events to engage,” said Newton. “Until then, they can do what the billboard says and get out the way!”
Newton’s and Baxter’s Black Lives Matter/Antifa cohorts have shown time and again that they are adept at professing nonviolence even while they are being filmed beating bystanders, starting riots, burning buildings, attacking police, and breaking up peaceful demonstrations by their opponents.
LGBTQ Reds Hijacking Blacks for Racial Conflict
One of the most remarkable features of the Black Lives Matter “movement” is the fact that it is actually a Marxist LGBTQ offensive masquerading as a movement of “black” people and other “oppressed” “people of color” who are victims of “systemic racism.” As The New American reported back in 2014, post-Ferguson, the three BLM co-founders, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi, are “three far-left, black, feminist activists who idolize communist terrorist revolutionaries Assata Shakur and Angela Davis, as well as the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Movement.” We also noted that they publicly, proudly identify as “queer Black women” — though they downplayed this as they were attempting to build a popular movement hoping to attract young, black men to use as cannon fodder.
The “queer” leadership dominance of BLM is widespread and is particularly evident in Boise. An interview with Tanisha Jae Newton and two other “activists” on Boise State Public Radio (the Idaho spigot of NPR) sheds some light. Titled “A Look At Intersectionality In The Fight For Racial Justice In Idaho,” the June 16, 2020 interview featured LGBTQ++ “victims” Tai Simpson and Gabby Davis, in addition to Newton.
To many, if not most, listeners, the interview bordered on hilarious, as the three “community organizers” seemed to be almost competing with each other for victim status, checking off the multiple “intersectionality” boxes of race, gender, sexual orientation, and self-identification that qualify them as experts to transform Idaho’s alleged “racist,” “homophobic,” “transphobic” culture. And, as if in a Maoist “struggle session,” they nearly tripped over each other to confess their “privileges.”
Here is an example from Tai Simpson, introducing himself to the Idaho NPR host: “My intersections: I’m a citizen of the Nimipoo Nation, also known as the Nez Perce Tribe. I also identify as a Black cishetero woman. I have a disability. I have a service dog for that disability. A couple of other intersections. I am well educated, financially stable. So there are some significant privileges attached to those things. And let’s see, it’s usually out of the ordinary, especially as somebody who’s just barely made it to middle class, and there’s a story back there. But I’ve traveled the world rather significantly, which also changes my perspective on the world and in some of these issues as well.”
Here’s Gabby Davis’s intro: “Similar to some of the things that both Tai and Nisha said, I have the privilege of education, my whole two Masters degrees and I have a job that can support me financially. My other identities include: I’m a queer person. I am also a person in a fat body. And I am married and half of an interracial relationship. I’m also not from Idaho. My hometown is Detroit. I haven’t been here that long. I have all those different intersections that navigate with me on a day to day basis.”
Tanisha Jae Newton says she has “identities and intersections that align with being queer and trans. I’m also a Black activist here in the area.” She also pays homage to Kimberle’ Crenshaw, the feminist-socialist author and professor at UCLA and Columbia University, who coined the term “intersectionality” and developed it as a victimology battering ram to create an ever-multiplying myriad of “oppressed” minorities that could be radicalized, politicized, and militarized against the capitalist, patriarchal system.
Resistance Is NOT Futile!
Although it may seem like a small victory, it is a positive sign nonetheless, that the BLM juggernaut, a cash cow flush with millions of dollars and benefiting from obscene fawning by the Fake News corporate media, could be dealt a significant setback, as has happened with the Boise billboard experience.
Photo of Tanisha Jae Newton: Instagram
Related articles and videos:
What’s REALLY Behind the Riots? (VIDEO)
Censoring Anti-Mask Billboards Backfires, Birch Society Freedom Message Sails On
BLM Wants to Get Into Schools. Here’s What They Plan to Teach
The Deep (Left) Pockets of Black Lives Matter
Rioting for a Reason: Civil Unrest and Political Opportunity
Al Sharpton: A Lucrative Career Built on Hate and Racial Conflagration
