Contents
Page List
Guide
BLM
2021 by Mike Gonzalez
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FIRST AMERICAN EDITION
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Gonzalez, Mike, 1960- author.
Title: BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution / by Mike Gonzalez.
Other titles: Black Lives Matter: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution
Description: First American edition. | New York: Encounter Books, 2021. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021013984 (print) | LCCN 2021013985 (ebook) ISBN 9781641772235 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781641772242 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Black lives matter movementUnited States. Black powerUnited StatesHistory.
Black lives matter movementPhilosophy. | African American radicals. Civil rights movementsUnited States. | African AmericansPolitics and government.
Classification: LCC E185.615 .G66 2021 (print) | LCC E185.615 (ebook)
DDC 323.1196/073dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013984
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013985
Interior page design and composition by Bruce Leckie
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 21
To my sister Lucy
CONTENTS
On January 6, 2021, the holy day of the Epiphany, a few hundred supporters of Donald Trump occupied the Capitol building while Congress met to certify the votes of the 2020 election. The representatives of the people had to be whisked to safety while the protesters marauded through some of the most sacrosanct halls of our nations democracy. Trump, then in his last days as president, was instantly accused and convicted of inciting the crowd by the press, the Democrats, and even some members of his adopted Republican Party. Trump had indeed spoken to the rioters minutes earlier, in front of the White House, some 3.6 miles from Capitol Hill. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard, he told them. He also said, If you dont fight like hell, youre not going to have a country anymore. For that, the House of Representatives impeached the president two weeks later, the first time in U.S. history that a president had been twice impeached. Trump was later acquitted by the Senate.
The January 6 attack certainly was disturbing. An unruly mob of buffoons had invaded the peoples house and threatened Americas elected representatives, sending a signal to the nation and the world that something wasnt quite right with the country. This was, moreover, a political attack.
The attackers did something else that was shameful: they gave some political leaders an excuse not to be frank about the Black Lives Matter organizations and their leaders, a group of Marxists who do not just want to defund the police, empty the prison system, and eliminate the courts, as bad as that in itself would be. I myself saw this at a May 26, 2021 hearing of the House Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in which I testified about Black Lives Matter. My mere mention of the damage BLM had wrought made two members of the Squad, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (Massachusetts) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Michigan) livid. BLMs leaders seek to dismantle the organizing principle of this societywords spoken by the main founder of BLM, as I will explain in this book. Unfortunately, the Capitol attackers validated a long-standing, stubborn liberal axiom that right-wing militancy was a much greater threat than the left-wing version. This reflexive but false belief had been used again and again over the previous seven years to prevent any reasonable discussion of where the BLM organizations wanted to take America. The January 6 attack handed the liberal establishment something to hang on to and use to deflect attention from the real existential danger posed by BLM.
As it was, politicians had already found it impossible to criticize Black Lives Matter because the concept that black lives matter is so unimpeachable. Who could be against black lives mattering? Rancid racists do exist and always will. But Americans by and large are not racist, and they do want justice and equality among the races. This is indeed the reason that the BLM organizations, which are committed to radically changing the way of life of the freest, most prosperous society on earth, use the BLM label. Other labels, such as Red Ideas Matter or Dismantling the Family Matters, wouldnt have worked, though they would more truly represent organizations that advocate policies that make it more difficult for all individuals to succeed and thus close racial gaps.
Making this conversation harder to have is, ironically, the most important impact the Capitol attackers are likely to have on society. Other than that, the groups said to have been involved have very little power over our lives. For all the awful symbolism of the attack, those groupsthe Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Bois, the Three Percenters, QAnondo not have a political action committee, bills in Congress, millions of dollars in hand, a curriculum being disseminated to the countrys 14,000 school districts, a sycophantic media that acts as a press agent, or the cultural cachet that lets BLM partner with the musical Hamilton. Nor do they have economic and foreign policy views, or an academic discipline that underpins their ideas. As this book will inform you, BLM has all these things. It is already changing your life. The January 6 attack, for all the media apoplexy that accompanied it, is already being forgotten, which is why pundits keep bringing it up again and again and calling it an insurrection.
BLM had already changed society when the Capitol was occupied. America on January 5, 2021 was unrecognizable from a year earlierin everything from sports to office work to school curricula to legislationand what happened a day later gave us an emboldened left that felt it had the moral upper hand and a reason to stop, cancel or jail anyone daring to stand athwart BLM and yell stop. The left, and its supporters in the press, immediately seized the moment to cry that an insurrection or even a coup had been attempted. For months after January 6, a media that had been openly supportive of the 2020 mayhem minutely analyzed what they ludicrously built up to be the equivalent of 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Unreported went the fact that January 6 was not the first time the Capitol had been attacked, and that the three previous acts of aggressionincluding terrorists shooting at congressmen point blank from the House visitors gallerywere all perpetrated by leftists who were later released from prison by Democratic presidents.
When Rep. Maxine Waters urged BLM protesters to become even more bellicose in the streets prior to the announcement of the verdict on Derek Chauvinthe police officer who eventually (April 20, 2021) was found guilty of killing George Floydthe media and all the other institutions controlled by the left simply looked the other way. Waters, a radical who represents a district that covers South Los Angeles, told the protesters, We gotta stay on the street, weve got to get more active, weve got to get more confrontational, weve got to make sure that they know that we mean business. The parallels with what Trump said could not have been more blunt (except that Waters did not tell her audience to remain peaceful). The judge overseeing Chauvins trial, Peter Cahill, called Waterss comments abhorrent and disrespectful to the rule of law and the judicial branch, and he warned that they could be used to overturn the verdict. But how did the left, so outraged three months earlier, react? Crickets. Waters was not impeached.