Southern Baptist Convention Adopt Black Lives Matter

MEMO FROM MIDDLE AMERICA: Southern Baptist Convention Leaders Adopt Black Lives Matter Heresy. Time For Christians And Patriots To Secede.

 

Allan Wall

07/31/2020

https://vdare.com/articles/memo-from-middle-america-southern-baptist-convention-leaders-adopt-black-lives-matter-heresy-time-for-christians-and-patriots-to-secede?scroll_to_paragraph=6

Earlier: MEMO FROM MIDDLE AMERICA: Woke Southern Baptist Bureaucrats Move To Crush Local Church Rebels. Rebels Fight Back.
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As an evangelical Christian I respect my Southern Baptist brothers and sisters in Christ and the good work they do. I hate to see them led astray, above all by their own treacherous leadership. My advice: Free your local church from the Wokeness that has infected the Southern Baptist Convention: secede!—as your forefathers did; and as many SBC congregations are already doing again.
The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in America, is generally thought of as conservative because it is orthodox on questions of Baptist faith. But alas, it is now “Woke” and a fellow-traveler with the openly Marxist Black Lives Matter movement. (See here, here, and here for what other VDARE.com authors have said about the SBC's Amnesty enthusiasm.)

And, not coincidentally, SBC is declining in membership: “For the 13th consecutive year, the Southern Baptist Convention reported a drop in its membership” [Southern Baptist Convention continues statistical decline, Floyd calls for rethinking ACP process, Staff Reports, Baptist Press, June 4, 2020]. But the Wokeness disease isn’t likely to cure itself because it stems from depraved Southern Baptist higher education.

Thus Dr. Tom Buck, a Southern Baptist minister, has warned that Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS) is now teaching “standpoint epistemology,” which means you can interpret the Bible the “Western way” or the “African way” [BUCK: Cancer growing in Southern Baptist Convention seminaries, Capstone Report, July 16, 2020].
“There is a cancer in our convention, and if we don’t wake up soon it’ll be too late,” Buck warned his coreligionists in a twitter thread. The cancer, Capstone reported, is “radical subjectivism” and a “Biblical hermeneutic that is culturally relativistic.”

 https://twitter.com/TomBuck/status/1283762269931876355?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1283762269931876355%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fvdare.com%2F

Meanwhile, Southern Baptists’ flagship educational institution, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, recently pink-slipped Dr. Russell Fuller after 22 years. A professor of Biblical Hebrew, Fuller literally wrote the textbook used to teach the language, so he was no lightweight.
Fuller’s son, David, revealed why the school’s provost, Matthew Hall [Email him]  canned his father:

David Fuller warned there is a serious problem of radical leftist thinking at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He wrote of his father, “He (Dr. Fuller) is unafraid to take a stand for orthodoxy even if it means losing his job. He condemned publicly the wicked social justice movement that now rages among the faculty and leaders of Southern Seminary.”
[BOMBSHELL: Fired Professor’s Family Breaks Their Silence about Mohler and SBTS, April 24, 2020].

And who is Matthew Hall? Paradoxically, he’s a confessed racist:

David Fuller said, “And in a final twist of irony, he was fired by the man he opposed so forcefully from being promoted to provost for his radically liberal views, the self-avowed racist, Matt Hall.”
Hall is a self-avowed racist. He incredibly claimed on video, “I’m a racist. … I’ll struggle with racism and white supremacy till the day I die.”

Hall has reached “Peak Wokeness,” as One News Now observed.[ Seminary leader reaches peak wokeness: 'I am a racist', August 9, 2019]
In May, Professor Fuller divulged that SBTS is teaching critical race theory [BREAKING: Former SBC Professor breaks silence about Identity Politics at SBTS, Capstone Report, May 16, 2020].

Perhaps even more shockingly, Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, recently expelled student Ashleigh Brock, but not for denying fundamental doctrine or spreading heresy, or even a night of drunken revelry, but for pointing out BLM’s hypocrisy. And that is heresy in the new Church of Wokeness.
On June 24, Brock posted a nine-second TikTok video ridiculing BLM and its fellow travelers. It contrasts the reactions of “People when a BLACK person kills another BLACK person” (indifference) and “People when a BLACK person kills a WHITE person” (indifference), to “People when a WHITE person kills a BLACK person” (fire and outrage) [Student ousted from Christian school for TikTok ‘hate speech’ criticizing Black Lives Matter, by McKenna Dallmeyer, Campus Reform, July 1, 2020].

 https://twitter.com/DanielaIbarraTV/status/1275852239836524544?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1275852239836524544%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fvdare.com%2F

Of course Ashleigh’s video was attacked by Left Twitter. And two days later, HSU President Eric Brentmyer [Email him] addressed the university in a video.
It was a “deeply disappointing and unacceptable social media post by one of our students,” he said, which is “not reflective of the Christian values of our institution.”

https://youtu.be/Jga4RMRVqNU

Never did Brentmyer prove that Brock said or did something biblically or doctrinally unsound or evil, or “not reflective of our institution.” Instead, he intoned “we do not want to condone behavior that questions people’s worth, their value, their dignity, or their equality.”
Of course, this is nonsense. Miss Brock merely exposed the hypocrisy of those who care about some victims but not others.
Capstone summed up the insanity:

Truth is now racist. … Apparently, truth and wit are not “Christian” values at HSU. But throwing a young student to the Woke Mob is. Whatever happened to protecting those under your care? Or tolerance? Oh well, there is a Woke Mob to please and whatever it says is racist is racist. Culture Jihad is right. This is the fruit of the Wokening of the Southern Baptist Convention.
[RACIST! Southern Baptist university cancels student for telling the truth, by Capstone Report, June 26, 2020]

For more evidence of how woke the SBC is, look no farther than J.D. Greear, SBC’s president [Tweet  him] whose photo is at the top of this article. 
In a video address to the entire denomination, the SBC president explained the proper way to think about BLM, its riots, and ideological agenda. Reformation Charlotte aptly explained it in the headline: SBC President Urges Christians to Ignore Facts and Statistics and Instead Chant Marxist Slogans, [June 10, 2020].
After the 11-minute mark, Greear addressed BLM:

[W]e need to say it clearly as a Gospel issue: Black Lives Matter. Of course black lives matter. Our black brothers and sisters are made in the image of God. Black lives matter because Jesus died for them. Black lives are a beautiful part of God’s creation and … we would be poorer as a people without them.
[2020 SBC President’s Message Addresses Diversity, Missions, Unity, Abuse Prevention Word and Way, June 10, 2020]

OK, but what’s Greear leading up to?
“And by the way, let’s not respond by saying oh well all lives matter. Of course all lives matter,” he continued:

[Let’s spare each other the quotation of stats right now. You know if you talk to some black friends, you’ll know that they can tell you about their experiences, how some of them can be quite different from others in our country. We want rights and privileges to be extended to everybody.

What? All lives matter but really only black lives matter?
And “stats” don’t matter? What “stats” might those be?

• The “stats” that show that blacks are much more likely to murder whites than vice-versa, or that the vast majority of murdered blacks are not killed by evil white racists, but by other blacks?
• The “stats” that show blacks are much more likely to kill cops than vice-versa?
• Or the “stats” that belie the charge that police have a systemic bias against black men?
• How about the stats that 70 percent of black births are out of wedlock?

The truth, of course, is that “Black Lives Matter” is a blood libel on white America. But Greear is saying that truth doesn’t matter, a dangerous thing for a Christian leader to say.
So how does J.D. Greear get around BLM’s Marxist opposition to the traditional family?

[T]he movement and the website has been hijacked by some political operatives whose world view and policy prescriptions would be deeply at odds with my own. But that doesn’t mean that the sentiment behind it is untrue.

“Hijacked?” BLM has been Marxist from its beginning [BLM Co-Founder Admits; “We Are Trained Marxists,” Freedom Forum, July 2, 2020].

“I do not align myself with the Black Lives Matter organization,” Greear continued, “and I think saying bold things like defund the police is unhelpful and deeply disrespectful to many public servants.”
But as a practical matter he is aligning himself with BLM.
At SBC’s annual convention in June, Greear urged SBC to “retire” the historic Broadus gavel with which it has opened meetings since 1872. The gavel is named for John A. Broadus, slave-owner who supported the Confederacy and helped found Southern Baptists Seminary [J. D. Greear Urges SBC to Retire Historic Gavel from Slaveholding Preacher, by Adelle Banks, Religion News Service, June 10, 2020].

“Here we were, a convention of nearly 48,000 independent, autonomous churches, meeting in a city that has been filled with [a] horrific history of civil rights abuses, making historic moves in the areas of diversity, abuse, and mission, using a gavel named after a Southern Baptist who owned slaves and was deeply involved in our founding,” he said.

In other words, the leader of America’s biggest Protestant denomination is demonizing his church, founded by sincere Christians who were concerned about real problems, and their country.

 Why the Baptist leadership’s radical shift left? Most likely, elite Baptists yearn for respect from secular society, which they sure won’t get for opposing abortion and same-sex marriage. Thus, they go overboard on the race issue.
And of course, Southern Baptists—Baptist Southerners—have twice as much to prove!

All patriotic members of Southern Baptist churches should be appalled.
There’s a solution: Secession.

Baptists believe in “local church autonomy,” as Greear himself said. SBC does not control the autonomous local congregations, nor does it own their local property—unlike the Episcopal church. A Southern Baptist church in Anytown, U.S.A. can secede from SBC and declare its independence.

My advice to Baptists: Get your local congregation out of the Southern Baptist Convention. Free your local church from the growing “Wokeness” infecting the Southern Baptist Convention.
Become a free congregation, responsible only to God and each other, not to woke charlatans like J.D. Greear and Eric Brentmyer.
Wouldn’t that be great? 
Do it now!
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American citizen Allan Wall (email him) moved back to the U.S.A. in 2008 after many years residing in Mexico. Allan's wife is Mexican, and their two sons are bilingual. In 2005, Allan served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here; his Mexidata.info articles are archived here; his News With Views columns are archived here; and his website is here.

Soeren Kern : Black Lives Matter: "We Are Trained Marxists" - Part I

Black Lives Matter: "We Are Trained Marxists" - Part I

by Soeren Kern

 https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16181/black-lives-matter

 
July 2, 2020 at 5:00 am

Translations of this item:

• Black Lives Matter is a Marxist revolutionary movement aimed at transforming the United States into a communist dystopia. BLM states that it wants to abolish the nuclear family, police, prisons and capitalism. BLM leaders have threatened to "burn down the system" if their demands are not met. They are also training militias.
• "Cutting the LAPD budget means longer responses to 911 emergency calls, officers calling for backup won't get it, and rape, murder and assault investigations won't occur or will take forever to initiate, let alone complete." — Los Angeles Police Protective League, the city's police union.
• "White people are so confused in America.... If there is systematic racism today it is a racism against white people, in the sense that white people are told that they are responsible for all the evils in the world...." — Dr. Carol M. Swain, university professor and advisory board member of Black Voices for Trump.
• "We are all human beings in God's image. Black Lives Matter and Antifa and organizations like that will not help us transcend racism and classism and the 'isms' that they are concerned with. There are things that can be done in the black community, but the most important thing is helping people realize to how important their own attitudes are..." — Dr. Carol M. Swain.
  

Black Lives Matter is a Marxist revolutionary movement aimed at transforming the United States into a communist dystopia. BLM states that it wants to abolish the nuclear family, police, prisons and capitalism. BLM leaders have threatened to "burn down the system" if their demands are not met. They are also training militias. Pictured: A man carries and upside-down US flag with "BLM" written on it, at a protest march in Boston, Massachusetts on June 22, 2020. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that more than two-thirds of Americans support the Black Lives Matter movement. The high level of backing raises the question of how much the public knows about BLM.

On the surface, BLM presents itself as a grassroots movement dedicated to the noble tasks of fighting racism and police brutality. A deeper dive shows that BLM is a Marxist revolutionary movement aimed at transforming the United States — and the entire world — into a communist dystopia.
This is the first of a two-part series, which reveals:

• BLM's founders openly admit to being Marxist ideologues. Their self-confessed mentors include former members of the Weather Underground, a radical "leftwing" terrorist group that sought to bring a communist revolution to the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. BLM is friendly with Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, whose socialist policies have brought economic collapse and untold misery to millions of people there.
  
• BLM states that it wants to abolish: the nuclear family; police and prisons; heteronormativity; and capitalism. BLM and groups associated with it are demanding a moratorium on rent, mortgages and utilities, and reparations for a long list of grievances. BLM leaders have threatened to "burn down the system" if their demands are not met. They are also training militias based on the militant Black Panther movement of the 1960s.
  
• BLM, which is not registered as a non-profit organization for tax purposes, has raised tens of millions of dollars in donations. BLM's finances are opaque. BLM's donations are collected by ActBlue, a fundraising platform linked to the Democratic Party and causes associated with it. Indeed, BLM leaders have confirmed that their immediate goal is to remove U.S. President Donald J. Trump from office.
  
• Most importantly, the main premise of BLM is based on a lie — namely that the United States is "at war" with African Americans. Blacks are not being systematically targeted by whites. Fifty years after the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, more than three in four Americans, including most whites and blacks, agreed that real progress has been made in getting rid of racial discrimination. Scholars have noted that BLM's inability to produce solid empirical evidence of systemic racism explains why its leaders continue to "broaden and deepen" the indictment to include the entire American social and political order.
  

BLM in its Own Words

"We actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia [Garza] in particular, we're trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super versed on ideological theories." — BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors, July 22, 2015.
"If this country doesn't give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. All right? And I could be speaking figuratively. I could be speaking literally. It's a matter of interpretation.... I just want black liberation and black sovereignty, by any means necessary." — BLM activist Hank Newsome, June 25, 2020.
"Stay in the streets! The system is throwing every diversionary and de-mobilizing tactic at us. We are fighting to end policing and prisons as a system which necessitates fighting white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal imperialism. Vet your comrades and stay focused." — BLM Chicago, Twitter, June 16, 2020.
"There's no such thing as 'blue lives.' There is no hue of a blue life. Being a police officer is an occupation. It's a job. 'All lives matter'— it's like saying the sky is blue. I haven't heard how police are on the right side of history." — BLM co-founder Alicia Garza, ktvu.com, March 30, 2018.
"It's hundreds of years of generational oppression and trauma and infrastructural racism that impacts our bodies and makes our bodies more vulnerable to something like a COVID-19." — BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors, Hollywood Reporter, June 2, 2020.
"We say #DefundThePolice and #DefundDepOfCorrections because they work in tandem. The rise of mass incarceration occurred alongside the rise of militarized and mass policing. They must be abolished as a system." — BLM Chicago, June 13, 2020.
"We are anti-capitalist. We believe and understand that Black people will never achieve liberation under the current global racialized capitalist system." — Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), of which BLM is a part, June 5, 2020.
"'All Lives Matter,' is little more than a racist dog whistle that attempts to both delegitimize centuries of claims of global anti-Black oppression and position those who exhibit tremendous pride in their Blackness as enemies of the state. Well, we are enemies of any racist, sexist, classist, xenophobic state that sanctions brutality and murder against marginalized people who deserve to live as free people." — Feminista Jones, BLM activist.
"We stand with Palestinian civil society in calling for targeted sanctions in line with international law against Israel's colonial, apartheid regime." — BLM UK, June 28, 2020.
"We are an ABOLITIONIST movement. We do not believe in reforming the police, the state or the prison industrial complex." — BLM UK, June 21, 2020.
"Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down. They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been. In the Bible, when the family of Jesus wanted to hide, and blend in, guess where they went? EGYPT! Not Denmark. Tear them down." — BLM leader Shaun King, June 22, 2020.
"We are living in political moment where for the first time in a long time we are talking about alternatives to capitalism." — Alicia Garza, BLM co-founder, March 2015.
"Anti-racism is anti-capitalist, and vice versa. There are no two ways around it. To be an anti-racist must demand a complete rejection of business as usual. An end to racism demands transformation of the global political-economic setup." — Joshua Virasami, BLM UK, June 8, 2020.

Brief History

Black Lives Matter began in July 2013, when George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old neighborhood watch coordinator of Hispanic-German descent, was acquitted of homicide charges in the 2012 fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black high school student, in Sanford, Florida.
Alicia Garza, a black woman from Oakland, California, posted to Facebook what she described as a "love letter to black folks." She wrote: "I continue to be surprised at how little black lives matter. Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter." Patrisse Cullors, a black woman from Los Angeles, California, then put Garza's Facebook post on Twitter, with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. After seeing the hashtag, Opal Tometi, a first-generation Nigerian American woman from Phoenix, Arizona, partnered with Garza and Cullors to establish an internet presence. Tometi purchased the domain name and built BLM's digital platform, including social media accounts, where they encouraged people to tell their stories.
The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter gained national attention in August 2014, after the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, by Darren Wilson, a white police officer. The hashtag was ubiquitous during riots in November 2014, when a grand jury decided not to indict Wilson. By 2018, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter had been tweeted over 30 million times.
Since its beginnings seven years ago, Black Lives Matter has grown into a movement with nearly 40 chapters and thousands of activists in the United States, Canada and Great Britain. What began as an effort to seek justice for black people has become far more expansive — and more radical — in its demands.

What's the Agenda?

BLM's worldview is based on a mix of far-left theoretical frameworks, including critical race theory and intersectional theory. Critical race theory posits that racism is systemic, based on a system of white supremacy and therefore a permanent feature of American life. Intersectional theory asserts that people are often disadvantaged by multiple sources of oppression: their race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, and other identity markers.
Black Lives Matter and other purveyors of critical race theory and intersectional theory reject individual accountability for behavior, criminal or otherwise, because, according to them, blacks are systemic and permanent victims of racism. Such racism, according to BLM, can only be defeated by completely dismantling the American economic, political and social system and rebuilding it from scratch — according to Marxist principles.
Black Lives Matter seeks to replace the foundational cornerstones of American society: 1) abolish the Judeo-Christian concept of the traditional nuclear family, the basic social unit in America; 2) abolish the police and dismantle the prison system; 3) mainstream transgenderism and delegitimize so-called heteronormativity (the belief that heterosexuality is the norm); and 4) abolish capitalism (a free economy) and replace it with communism (a government-controlled economy).

Abolish the Traditional Nuclear Family

In its policy agenda, Black Lives Matter states that it is committed to abolishing the traditional nuclear family:

"We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and 'villages' that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable."

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels rejected the traditional family because, according to them, the nuclear family, as an economic unit, sustains the capitalist system. Engels wrote: "The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not."
Many experts have noted that African Americans need stronger, not weaker, families. In March 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an Assistant Secretary of Labor under U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, wrote a groundbreaking report, which focused on the roots of black poverty in the United States. The report linked the many problems plaguing African Americans — crime, joblessness, school failure, out-of-wedlock births — to the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family.
When the Moynihan Report was written in 1965, 25% of black children in the United States were born out of wedlock. Fifty years later, in 2015, more than 75% of black children were born out of wedlock, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
Twenty years after the Moynihan Report, Glenn Loury, the first black economist to earn tenure at Harvard University, lauded Moynihan as a prophet:

"The bottom stratum of the black community has compelling problems which can no longer be blamed solely on white racism, and which force us to confront fundamental failures in black society. The societal disorganization among poor blacks, the lagging academic performance of black students, the disturbingly high rate of black-on-black crime, and the alarming increase in early unwed pregnancies among blacks now loom as the primary obstacles to black progress."

Thomas Sowell, an African American economist and social theorist opined that the Moynihan Report of 1965 "may have been the last honest government report on race." By contrast, African American civil rights activists criticized Moynihan for "blaming the victim."

Abolish Police and Prisons

BLM states that it wants to "defund" and ultimately "abolish" police and prisons in the United States. Police officers would be replaced by educators, social workers, mental health experts and religious leaders, who, according to BLM, would bring down the levels of crime.
In an interview with Newsweek, BLM co-founder Cullors said:

"The freedom of mostly white affluent people is predicated on the unfreedom of black people. So, law enforcement is not actually used to keep black people safe. They're used to patrol, occupy, harass, abuse, often hunt and mostly, what we've seen is kill our communities.
"Policing and incarceration are part of a continuum. The policing is the first response and then incarceration is the last response. And these two systems rely on each other very, very deeply. We have to be working on getting rid of both systems."

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Cullors explained that she is not merely an activist but a modern-day abolitionist:

"An abolitionist believes in a world where police and prisons are no longer weaponized as a tool for public safety."

BLM co-founder Opal Tometi, in an interview with The New Yorker, claimed that policing in America has its roots in managing slavery and therefore is systemically racist. She explained:

"We have been fighting and advocating to stop a war on black lives. And that is how we see it — this is a war on black life. And people understand that this system is filled with all sorts of inequality and injustice, and that implicit bias and just outright racism is embedded in the way that policing is done in this nation — and when you think about it historically, it was founded as a slave patrol. The evolution of policing was rooted in that...."

Washington, D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham has warned that underfunding police departments could cause an increase in excess force by police officers:

"The number one thing that contributes to excessive force in any police agency is when you underfund it. If you underfund a police agency, it impacts training, it impacts hiring, it impacts your ability to develop good leaders."

The Los Angeles Police Protective League, the city's police union, said that budget cuts would be "extremely irresponsible":

"Cutting the LAPD budget means longer responses to 911 emergency calls, officers calling for backup won't get it, and rape, murder and assault investigations won't occur or will take forever to initiate, let alone complete."

Polls show that most Americans — including most blacks — do not share BLM's views on abolishing the police. A recent Rasmussen's report found that 63% of American adults "regard being a police officer as one of the most important jobs in our country today." Furthermore, 64% are concerned that the current anti-police sentiment will lead to fewer people willing to become police officers, and that it will "reduce public safety in the community where they live." Importantly, according to the Rasmussen report, "Blacks (67%) are the most concerned about public safety where they live, compared to 63% of whites and 65% of other minority Americans."

Abolish Heteronormativity

BLM's policy agenda states:

"We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender [a term for people whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth] privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence....

An academic study titled, "The 'Queering' of Black Lives Matter," describes in great detail how issues of sexual identity and gender orientation have taken priority over BLM's original focus on police brutality. The heavy focus on sexuality has led to accusations that BLM is "a gay movement masquerading as a black one."
Two of the three founders of BLM describe themselves as "black queer females." One, Alicia Garza, is married to a biracial transgender male. Patrice Cullors describes herself as "polyamorous." In interview after interview, Garza and Cullors raise the issue of "black trans and gender nonconforming people," often to the exclusion of police brutality.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Garza said that she is not interested in the American tradition of live and let live: "We want to make sure that people are not saying, 'Well, whatever you are, I don't care.' No, I want you to care. I want you to see all of me."

Abolish Capitalism and the "Patriarchal" System

BLM equates capitalism with racism in the same way that its Antifa cousins equate capitalism with fascism. BLM's views on capitalism are based on the concept of "racial capitalism," a term created by the late Cedric Robinson, who posited that capitalism and racism are two sides of the same coin: both are, according to Robinson, dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide.
The British wing of Black Lives Matter UK states: "We're guided by a commitment to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white-supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people in Britain and around the world."
The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), an "ecosystem" of over 170 Black-led organizations, including BLM, states:

"We are anti-capitalist: We believe and understand that Black people will never achieve liberation under the current global racialized capitalist system."

M4BL demands "a reconstruction of the economy to ensure Black communities have collective ownership" and "a progressive restructuring of tax codes at the local, state, and federal levels to ensure a radical and sustainable redistribution of wealth."
M4BL also demands reparations for past and continuing harms:

"The government, responsible corporations and other institutions that have profited off of the harm they have inflicted on Black people — from colonialism to slavery through food and housing redlining, mass incarceration, and surveillance — must repair the harm done. This includes:
"Full and free access for all Black people (including undocumented and currently and formerly incarcerated people) to lifetime education; a guaranteed minimum livable income for all Black people; reparations for the wealth extracted from our communities through environmental racism, slavery, food apartheid, housing discrimination and racialized capitalism."

The demands of BLM and M4BL are similar to those found in the Communist Manifesto, which include:

"Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes; A heavy progressive or graduated income tax; Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan."

BLM's Immediate Demand

BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors recently confirmed that the immediate goal is to remove U.S. President Donald J. Trump from office:

"Trump not only needs to not be in office in November, but he should resign now. Trump needs to be out of office. He is not fit for office. And so, what we are going to push for is a move to get Trump out. While we're also going to continue to push and pressure Joe Biden around his policies and relationship to policing and criminalization. That's going to be important. But our goal is to get Trump out."

Evaluations of BLM's Agenda

In an interview with Chanel Rion of One America News Network, Dr. Carol M. Swain, a university professor, public intellectual, and advisory board member of Black Voices for Trump, said:

"It's very clear to me that the Black Lives Matter organization is about something much bigger than black people, that it really is pushing a socialist, Marxist agenda.
"White people are so confused in America. I hate to say it like that but I don't know any other way to say it: They want to signal to black people that they care and the only way they feel like they can do that is to agree with the slogan, which is a true statement, that black lives matter in the same way that all lives matter. White lives matter, brown lives matter, but they can't separate the slogan, which is a true statement, from an organization that has a goal that I believe is ultimately destructive to America.
"There is something very wrong when they argue that racism is permanent. If it's permanent, then there is nothing you can do about it. That white skin is property that means that people who just happen to have been born white they have property that gives them advantages over blacks.
"If there is systematic racism today it is a racism against white people, in the sense that white people are told that they are responsible for all the evils in the world, that racism is permanent, and the only way they can redeem themselves is by divesting themselves of their whiteness. It involves a shaming of young white people, if you have white skin you're supposed to have all these white privileges. I contend that there is black privilege, brown privilege, that it's really about social class. The sooner we get away from defining everything, even the police brutality, as racism, the sooner we can bring everyone together as Americans.
"We are all human beings in God's image. Black Lives Matter and Antifa and organizations like that will not help us transcend racism and classism and the isms that they are concerned with. There are things that can be done in the black community, but the most important thing is helping people realize to how important their own attitudes are. I would argue that a person's attitudes are more important than race, gender, social class in determining whether or not they are going to be successful."

Columnist Josh Hammer wrote that the American system of governance and way of life is under existential threat by groups such as BLM and Antifa:

"The modern left, in thrall to the anarchists of Antifa and the Marxists of Black Lives Matter, has positioned itself as a political movement that stands athwart the American regime. At an institutional level, Democratic Party leadership is increasingly a dog wagged by the tail that is Antifa and Black Lives Matter. And that tail, as is openly conceded in moments of candor, is resolutely opposed to the idea of America itself. There is no alternative way to comprehend the ardent desire of those insurrectionists who, channeling the very worst of Mao's Cultural Revolution, would deface and demolish societal tributes to the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence (Jefferson) and the man who brought to fruition its ideals (Lincoln). Could we ask for a more clarion demonstration of the dripping disdain with which the left views the entire American project?
"We are now in the midst of a cold civil war between Americanists, proud defenders and preservers of the American regime and way of life, and the civilizational arsonists who seek to burn that regime and way of life into the ether. Yes, we are in a fight for America's soul — but we are also in a fight for America itself."

Part II of this series will examine BLM's ideological influences, its activities and its sources of funding.

Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute.

Guy Millière : A Will to Overthrow the United States

A Will to Overthrow the United States

by Guy Millière  https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16182/overthrow-the-usa

July 3, 2020 at 6:00 am

• The statement "Black Lives Matter" assumes from the start that, for the police, the judicial system and everyone else, black lives do not matter. What is so conspicuous and tragic is that black lives only seem to matter if they were taken by a white person.... Sadly, when it comes to black-on-black violence, no one seems to care.
• Are the politicians who claim to want help distressed communities the very ones keeping the distressed communities distressed -- and in a perpetual state of reaching out to those same politicians for dangled promises of help?
• The mob's destruction or removal of statues appears an attempt to erase the history of the United States... What they are doing looks like just an old-fashioned power-grab. The first law of power-grabbers is that if no one stops them, they keep on going -- often with catastrophic consequences.
• The recent damage inflicted on thousands of people who lost their possessions and businesses -- as well as the many murders and assaults -- shows what happens to a society with fewer police or no police.
• That the name Black Lives Matter is present everywhere, and that everyone seems to ignore or forget what the organization Black Lives Matter really is, shows that a violent, anti-democratic organization, which calls for the murder of police officers and accepts anti-Semitism and anti-White racism, can use threats, intimidation and destruction -- and find public acceptance.
• "Their disruptive and violent behavior is happening because governors, mayors, and police chiefs have over the last decade sent the message that they will not respond with mind-concentrating force in order to restore order and hold rioters accountable...." — Bruce Thornton, Professor of Classics and Humanities at California State University and research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, June 19, 2020.
  

The mob's destruction or removal of statues appears an attempt to erase the history of the United States... What they are doing looks like just an old-fashioned power-grab. The first law of power-grabbers is that if no one stops them, they keep on going -- often with catastrophic consequences. Pictured: Protesters pull down a fence surrounding the statue of Andrew Jackson, in an attempt to topple the statue in Lafayette Square, near Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, DC, on June 22, 2020. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

On May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a police officer, Derek Chauvin, who already had 18 complaints lodged against him, killed a black man, George Floyd, by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Angry protests in Minneapolis quickly turned into riots that ravaged the city. The police did not intervene; the mayor had ordered them to withdraw and do nothing.
More protests soon broke out in major cities throughout the country and rapidly led to widespread disorder. In the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, 1,500 buildings were vandalized, looted or destroyed. Again, the police did little to intervene: the mayors of most of the cities had asked the police to act with restraint.

The rioters attacked churches and synagogues, and looted stores, often belonging to minority owners in distressed neighborhoods.
The riots ended, but the damage was immense. An area of Seattle's city center that was taken over, the "CHAZ" or "CHOP" zone, has since been disbanded, but a copycat effort to take over an area has installed itself in New York, near City Hall.

Statues throughout the country were attacked -- first Confederate statues, then tributes to Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Prominent politicians supported the rioters. The mayor of Boston said he wanted to remove from a city square a statue of Lincoln standing in front of a liberated black man. Members of the New York City Council requested that a statue of Thomas Jefferson be removed from the City Hall. In Portland, Oregon, a statue of George Washington was pulled down and set on fire. Statues of Christopher Columbus were toppled and some beheaded.

The mob's destruction or removal of statues appears an attempt to erase the history of the United States and to treat great men such as Abraham Lincoln, who abolished slavery, George Washington, first president of the United States or Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence, as if they were irredeemably despicable. 
What they are doing looks like just an old-fashioned power-grab. The first law of power-grabbers is that if no one stops them, they keep on going -- often with catastrophic consequences.
"Why do I even worry about some silly little statues coming down or some silly little street names changing?" asked Elizabeth Rogliani, who lived through Venezuela's transition to communism.

"[W]hen I was living in Venezuela. Statues came down — Chavez didn't want that history displayed. And then he changed the street names. Then came the [school curricula]. Then some movies couldn't be shown, then certain TV channels, and so on and so forth....
"We didn't believe it could happen to us. Most Venezuelans — Cubans warned us — and we were like, 'This is Venezuela, we know about freedom. That's not going to happen here.' Yet it happened. And there are literally a lot of people wanting to destroy the U.S."

Two movements have been active in the violence. One is Antifa, which has been called "a revolutionary Marxist/anarchist militia movement that seeks to bring down the United States by means of violence and intimidation." Antifa, although it claims to be antifascist, behaves in a fascistic way.

The other movement, Black Lives Matter, was founded in 2013 by three black women, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors. Cullors declared that she and Garza are "trained Marxists". The Black Lives Matter founding manifesto, published in 2016 (then removed from BLM website), describes the United States as a "corrupt democracy originally built on Indigenous genocide and chattel slavery" that "continues to thrive on the brutal exploitation of people of color" and that perpetuates "the ugly American traditions of patriarchy, classism, racism, and militarism". In December 2014, a slogan at a Black Lives Matter demonstration organized by Al Sharpton's National Action Network, was: "What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want it? Now."

If Antifa is widely rejected, Black Lives Matter is not. Its name has become a slogan on walls, storefronts and restaurants. The posters state: "No justice, no peace."

There are widespread calls for defunding or abolishing the police. The city council of Minneapolis in fact voted on June 6 to disband its police force. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio cut $1 billion from New York City's $6 billion police budget. At least six other cities have also slashed police budgets.

What seems to be trying to gain more influence is a wish -- born before the riots -- to rewrite the history of the United States.  
The New York Times, for instance, on August, 14, 2019, launched "The 1619 Project". Its author, Nikole Hannah Jones, wrote that the United States had been founded on slavery and is therefore -- presumably still -- guilty of "structural racism."
Prominent historians Gordon Stewart Wood, recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History, and James M. McPherson, former president of the American Historical Association, noted that the 1619 Project is based on "misleading and historically inaccurate claims". On June 17, Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, laughably said that the United States had "created slavery".

"Reparations," author and attorney Larry Elder commented on the subject, "is the extraction of money from those who were never slave owners to be given to those who were never slaves."

"Every life matters," said former Speaker of the US House of Representatives Newt Gingrich. If only.

The idea that in the United States there is "structural racism" (defined by the Aspen Institute as "a system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity") has led, it seems, to a form of obsessive expiation. Films have been removed from streaming services. Gone with the Wind will now be shown with five-minute disclaimer. (One minute would not have been enough?)
The film is probably just first on a lengthening list. A reporter from Variety recently listed "10 Problematic Films That Could Use Warning Labels". They include Forrest Gump: for a brief moment, the title character is described, in an ironic fashion, as having been named after a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Consumer product brands, such as Uncle Ben's Rice and Aunt Jemima syrup are abruptly having their names and logos changed. Princeton voted to expunge the name of Woodrow Wilson from its public policy school. Demands have been made that universities and corporations show that they are not racist by declaring their support for Black Lives Matter. Many have bowed to the demand.

On June 12, less than a month after the killing of George Floyd, another white police officer, Garrett Rolfe, in Atlanta, Georgia, shot and killed a black man, Rayshard Brooks. The police officers were arresting Brooks for drunk driving, and after a cordial exchange with the officers, he unexpectedly resisted arrest, and seized a Taser from one of the officers. He began to run, but when he turned and fired the Taser at Rolfe, Rolfe shot and killed him. Rolfe was dismissed from the police force without due process, and charged with felony murder, which potentially carries the death penalty. Although video recordings of the event were widely broadcast, District Attorney Paul Howard tried to claim that Brooks was calm and "cheerful". He added that a Taser is not a deadly weapon – after having said a few weeks earlier that it was.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, between June 12 and June 15 a black man was fatally shot by another black man and 32 others were wounded by gunfire. Sadly, when it comes to black-on-black violence, no one seems to care.

What basically appears to be at work has nothing to do with either black lives or the police. It is a will to overthrow the United States. This desire includes American institutions, everything on which the United States is founded and the United States itself.

The statement "Black Lives Matter" assumes from the start that, for the police, the judicial system and everyone else, black lives do not matter. What is so conspicuous and tragic is that black lives only seem to matter if they were taken by a white person.... Sadly, when it comes to black-on-black violence, no one seems to care.

Normal democratic functioning means that the voters of a city pay taxes and elect a mayor to take care of the city, to ensure the safety of its people and property -- not to let the city sink into anarchy and destruction. When, in the face of violence, a mayor asks a police force not to act, thereby allowing violence to take place, he or she is not only complicit in the devastation, but also delinquent in doing the job for which he or she was elected.

Although most police officers are usually decent and eager to protect the community, and daily put their lives at risk, if they use unnecessary violence, the problem needs be addressed. Unfortunately, at times it is not. Police unions may do a lot of good, but in disputes, they require "arbitration" -- often despite misconduct. In some police departments, it is almost impossible to fire anyone who should be fired; he can, instead, be dispatched to a different precinct. (A similar problem exists with teachers' unions for unacceptable teachers.)
Last week, federal legislation recommending police reforms was proposed by Senator Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina. The House Democrats, refusing even to discuss any of them, blocked the measure. Later the House Democrats came up with a reform bill of their own, however it seemed aimed more at eradicating police forces than reforming them.

"The bill would restrict chokeholds and ban federal agents from conducting no-knock drug raids. It would curtail transfers of military equipment to police, create an officer misconduct registry, end qualified immunity from lawsuits and lower the threshold to federally prosecute officers if they show 'reckless disregard' for someone's life."

What if every officer-involved shooting were followed by a prosecution? Why would anyone ever sign up for a job that put him at such risk in the first place? "Revolving door" policies must already feel so defeating: a police officer puts his life in jeopardy to make an arrest, only to find the person arrested back out on the street soon after. The House Democrats appeared only to want to block the Republicans from having a victory and an issue about which to rail instead of a solution. (The same political thinking also appears to underpin why so many American children are not able to receive a quality public school education.)
The question then arises: are the politicians who claim to want help distressed communities the very ones keeping the distressed communities distressed -- and in a perpetual state of reaching out to those same politicians for dangled promises of help?

Unfortunately, always and everywhere, the absence of police -- for instance replacing them with social workers -- will lead to an explosion of crime and disorder, as most recently seen in Seattle. Furthermore, using a crime committed by a single police officer to claim that all police officers are racist is to lie in order to paralyze the police, to prevent them from doing their work: helping the community and providing safety. To ask to defund the police is to ask for an explosion of violence and pandemonium.

The recent damage inflicted on thousands of people who lost their possessions and businesses -- as well as the many murders and assaults -- shows what happens to a society with fewer police or no police.

Former Governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, had suggested early on, to avoid a confrontation, dismantling Seattle's seized zone. This could be done, he suggested, by disconnecting the water, the electricity, and especially the cellular communication -- and then seeing how long the hostage-takers enjoyed the experience.

Graffiti painted during the riots on the walls of synagogues in Los Angeles revealed, as well, the presence of anti-Semitism: Melina Abdullah, "the lead organizer of Black Lives Matter in LA and a professor of Pan-African Studies at Cal State", is it turns out, a supporter of Louis Farrakhan the anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam. Abdullah calls him "The Honorable Minister Farrakhan." Black Lives Matter, it appears, "is structurally anti-Semitic."

That the name Black Lives Matter is present everywhere, and that everyone seems to ignore or forget what the organization Black Lives Matter really is, shows that a violent, anti-democratic organization, which calls for the murder of police officers and accepts anti-Semitism and anti-White racism, can use threats, intimidation and destruction -- and find public acceptance.

Of course there is still some racism among individuals, but the idea that the United States today is a society where "structural racism" exists is contradicted by decades of political decisions to repair the damage and, as in, for example, affirmative action programs, to favor equality for all Americans. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an American author who fled her homeland of Somalia, wrote:

"The problem is that there are people among us who don't want to figure it out and who have an interest in avoiding workable solutions. They have an obvious political incentive not to solve social problems, because social problems are the basis of their power. That is why, whenever a scholar like Roland Fryer brings new data to the table—showing it's simply not true that the police disproportionately shoot black people dead—the response is not to read the paper but to try to discredit its author."

For many years, American films dealing with racial questions have been explicitly hostile to any racial discrimination, and it would be impossible to find a book put out by a U.S. publishing house supporting racial discrimination, unless it dates from an era long gone. Rewriting history by falsifying it is simply an attempt to replace history with propaganda. Removing films and other information that do not correspond to a predetermined vision of history has long been the practice of totalitarian despotisms. Dictating that universities and corporations face severe consequences if they refuse to bowdlerize the past is simply a fascistic, tyrannical means of coercion. Worse, the submissive attitude of so many universities and corporations is what enables the bullying to continue.
What is taking place has roots.

"The success of America's recent cultural revolution can be measured not in toppled governments but in shattered values," the American commentator, Roger Kimball wrote in his book, The Long March (2000), about upheavals in the 1960s in the United States. Radical people, he observed, had taken power in the universities, and their ideas spread throughout the educational system -- in culture, politics, justice, and the economy. Radicals still dominate most American universities -- now even more than then, and their ideas are now more widespread.

Former President Barack Obama, on October 30, 2008, said, "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." Five days later, he was elected President.

Twelve years later, one wonders: What was he hoping to transform it into?
It would have been hard to imagine in 2008 that a mayor could abandon his or her city to rioters, or that they would accept tearing down and destroying statues of Washington, Jefferson or Lincoln. When will they be coming to tear down statues of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?

It would also have been hard to imagine that a violent organization such as Black Lives Matter would not even be questioned, or that riots similar to those that touched Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, or Baltimore in 2015 would break out and spread across the country.

It would hard to imagine just two months ago that any city council would actually vote to abolish the police force.

The United States seems at a pivotal moment. Bruce Thornton, a Professor of Classics and Humanities at California State University and a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, noted that:

"Indeed, apart from opportunistic thugs and felons, the bulk of the 'troops' who would comprise one side of some civil war are pretty much denizens of the young comfortable classes. Their disruptive and violent behavior is happening because governors, mayors, and police chiefs have over the last decade sent the message that they will not respond with mind-concentrating force in order to restore order and hold rioters accountable..."

The rioters in the U.S. appear to have inspired protester in Western Europe. Angry slogans used in the United States are being used in London and Paris; the same charges against democracies are being made, and statues that were signposts of history are being pulled down.
In a speech on July 6, 2017, U.S. President Donald J. Trump said:

"The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values ​​to defend them at any cost? ... Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?"

Good question.

Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.