The Southern Poverty Law Center does not regard Black Lives Matter as a “hate group” despite their rhetoric against the police. Black Lives Matter is a movement which, according to their own website, was begun by three black activists, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullers, and Opal Tometi in 2012 after George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of black teenager Trayvon Martin, but it wasn’t until after the Ferguson, Missouri shooting that they became a force in the politics of the country. With no central leadership, the movement consists of individual groups around the country and countless individuals who are drawn to their demonstrations though internet postings. They claim to be standing for the hundreds of Blacks who are gunned down each year by police across the country. But in fact, there are many problems with the organization, its stated goals, and its propaganda.
- The organization is based upon a lie.
George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin and three separate investigations, one of them done by President Obama’s own Justice Department, found that the shooting of Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri was justified in that Brown was attacking the police officer when he was shot. In addition to the forensic evidence which clearly exonerated the officer were several eye-witness accounts by Black and bi-racial bystanders who reported seeing the incident unfold just as Officer Wilson had reported. Brown was neither shot in the back nor with his hands in the air attempting to surrender as Black Lives Matter contends. Their “hands up, don’t shoot” mantra was a total lie, perpetrated by Brown’s partner in crime and by others who later admitted that they hadn’t seen the shooting at all.
- Their contention that police officers randomly and regularly shoot innocent black citizens out of a frenzy of racist hatred is totally and provably false.
In an interview with Megyn Kelly, Black Lives Matter activist Cherno Biko told Fox News that “Every 28 hours, a black person is murdered by police. It feels like we’re in a war.” But statistics, routinely quoted by Black Lives Matter activists have been proven to be false. Black political commentator and contributing editor to National Review Online, Deroy Murdock, wrote, “the notion that America’s cops simply are gunning down innocent black people is one of today’s biggest and deadliest lies” (Deroy Murdock. “Black Lives Matter Numbers Are Bogus,” 9 November 2015). He goes on to quote statistics by University of Toledo criminologist Dr. Richard R. Johnson who examined the latest data from the FBI and Centers for Disease Control. Dr. Johnson found that between 2003 and 2012, an average of 429 people were killed per year in what he called “legal interventions” by police officers and that only a few were innocent people, far more dying due to reasonable use of force.
Joseph Cesario, a psychologist at the University of Michigan’s Social Cognation Laboratory, has also done an extensive study of police shootings. He reports that in 2015, twice as many whites were shot by police as blacks: 524 white citizens were killed by police and only 261 Black citizens were killed by police. The obvious counter argument here is that since Blacks make up a smaller portion of the general population, the percentage of the Black population killed by police is higher than the percentage of the White population killed by police. However, if we consider individuals who are arrested for murder, Whites are still more than twice as likely to be killed by police. With other violent crimes the rate is closer, but Whites are still shot 1.3 times more often that Blacks.
His conclusion is that “Black citizens are not more likely to be killed by police gunfire once the frequency of criminal or suspected criminal activity is taken into account. “Greater proportional deaths at the population level appear to be consistent with Blacks’ greater interaction with police in a criminal context and likelihood of escalating conflict with police during an arrest” (Joseph Cesario).
- In their zeal to portray Blacks as victims of White racism, they ignore the fact that Blacks are more likely to come into conflict with police in a criminal setting than Whites.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, white offenders committed only 45 percent of homicides recorded between 1980 and 2008 while 52 per cent of the homicides were committed by black offenders (Patrick Worrall, “Do Black Americans Commit more crime?” 2014). Worrall goes on to conclude, “While it would be naïve to suggest there is no racism in the US criminal justice system, victim reports don’t support the idea that this is because of mass discrimination” (Worrall).
In a more recent report, the FBI concluded that young black males are nine times more likely to commit murder than young white males (John R. Lott, Jr. New York Daily News 2014).
- In order to play the race card, Black Lives Matter also ignores the fact that most Black victims die at the hands of other Blacks, not at the hands of police officers or white racists.
Laird Wilcox in his 1994 book, Crying Wolf: Hate Crime Hoaxes in America, relates the incident of a black group who ran a television ad in black communities in order to urge them to deal with the Black on Black violence in their communities. In part, the ad reported the statistics that between 1960 and 1991 “at least 20 Blacks” had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, but that in 1991 alone, “Black gangs (had) murdered at least 1,300 Blacks.” Anger from Black activists forced the group to take down the ad.
Dr. Johnson of the University of Toledo using statistics from both the FBI and the CDC reports that: Between January 1, 2009 and December 31, 2012, on average, 4,472 black men were killed by other black men each year. On average only 112 black men per year were victims in both justified and unjustified police-related deaths (qtd. in Murdock).
Black Lives Matter obviously ignores the real source of death among young black males, (and young black children as well!) in order to focus on what they choose to call racist murder of innocent Blacks by police officers. No group who ignores facts in order to advance their own agenda can be considered a legitimate protector of black Americans!
- Black Lives Matter uses intimidation and fear to achieve their aims.
Black Lives Matter activists in Portland, Oregon entered a restaurant where predominantly white families were eating, many with children, and marched between their tables chanting, and forcing them to show solidarity for Michael Brown.
Black Lives Matter activists tries to intimidate news media. In Philadelphia they tried to segregate them, forcing the Black media to the front and the White media to the back(Fox News Insider). In Cleveland, a Black Lives Matter demonstrator got in the face of Brandon Blackwell, a white reporter and told him “I got 800 black people behind me. What the fuck are you gonna do?” (Lee Stanahan, Cleveland, OH 28 Jul 2015).
While their intimidation of the news media did not always turn out as they hoped, Black Lives Matter was extremely successful in their intimidation of Democrats, basically because the Democrats need their votes. Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders were the featured speakers at the Netroots Nation Conference in July of 2015. Dozens of Black Lives Matter activists took over the stage, demanding the support of O’Malley and Sanders for their cause. When O’Malley famously said “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter!” he was booed by the protestors. He later apologized for his remarks.
A Black Lives Matter group from Seattle, led by their co-founder Marissa Johnson, invaded the stage during a speech by Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on August 8, 2015, took the microphone away from him, and called his supporters racists and white supremacists.
In February of 2016, two Black Lives Matters activists protested at a private fundraiser for Clinton, demanding she apologize for statements she made in 1996 referring to some young people as “super-predators” and for President Bill Clinton’s 1994 criminal reform law.
Caving to the pressure and obviously frightened of losing a large segment of the Black vote, the Democratic National Convention passed a resolution supporting Black Lives Matter in August of 2015, and on July 26, 2016, the DNC invited a group called Mothers of the Movement, which included the mothers of Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner and others whose “unarmed African-American children have been killed by law enforcement or due to gun violence” to address the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
- Black Lives Matter is a hate group that promotes violence against law enforcement.
Although the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group which in my last blog I called out as a hate group themselves, emphatically refuses to name Black Lives Matter as a hate group, many others, including many in the Black community itself, label them as such. The SPLC in one article admitted that BLM protestors in Minnesota had in fact chanted “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon,” but they insisted that this was a single incident of incitement toward violence against law enforcement. As usual, they were only telling part of the truth.
The same slogan was chanted in Ferguson when they learned that a man had shot and killed two NYPD officers while they were eating lunch in their patrol car. The assassin had posted on his Instagram page “Going to put pigs in a blanket” (police in body bags) before carrying out his murders.
More than a hundred protesters were arrested in St. Paul, Minnesota for using an overpass over Interstate 94 to throw rocks and rebar at police injuring 21 officers. When one officer was injured, protesters cheered: “One piggly-wiggly down!”
Black Lives Matter’s Twitter feed shows pictures of activists wearing shirts that read “Assata Taught Me.” Assata Shakur, aka Joanne Chesimard, shot and killed a New Jersey State Trooper in 1973 was convicted and sentenced to prison but escaped to Cuba where she has lived ever since. She is on the FBI’s most wanted terrorism list, but Black Lives Matter glorifies her as a hero, using her writings as training materials and invoking her words at all its events. At an event for female bloggers, BLM leaders had the crowd chanting lines from a letter Shakur had written that included at least one reference to the Communist Manifesto.
At the death of communist dictator, Fidel Castro, Black Lives Matter posted the following tribute to “El Comandante:” “As a Black network committed to transformation, we are particularly grateful to Fidel for holding Mama Assata Shakur, who continues to inspire us. We are thankful that he provided a home for Brother Michael Finney, Ralph Goodwin, and Charles Hill, asylum to Brother Huey P. Newton, and sanctuary for so many other Black revolutionaries who were being persecuted by the American government during the Black Power era” (David French. National Review, 19 July 2017).
Shakur, Finney, Goodwin, Hill and Newton are all cop killers and hijackers.
The result of the hatred and violence promoted by BLM is that, according to The Daily Telegraph, gun murders of police last year increased by an astounding 56 percent. 21 of those deaths were ambush-style shootings. “In a leaked internal document last year, the FBI explicitly blamed BLM and the media for the increase in attacks. ‘Law enforcement officials believe that defiance and hostility displayed by assailants toward law enforcement appears to be the new norm’ read the report” (Miranda Devine. The Daily Telegraph, 2017).
- BLM is a racist group which views all governmental agencies as intrinsically violent against black Americans.
The website of Black Lives Matter founders Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza write “#BlackLivesMatter is working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.”
They go on to list their grievances as:
How Black poverty and genocide is state violence.
How 2.8 million Black people are locked in cages in this country is state violence.
How Black girls are used as negotiating chips during times of conflict and war.
How Black folks living with disabilities and different abilities bear the burden of state sponsored Darwinian experiments that attempt to squeeze us into boxes of normality defined by white supremacy, and that is state violence.
They miss the fact that the 2.8 million Black people locked in cages are criminals. What they mean by black girls being used as negotiating chips during times of war or disabled black people bearing the burden of state sponsored Darwinian experiments is incomprehensible to me. If such things have happened, they have been the best kept secrets of the past century!
Some black civil rights leaders, such as Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray, Najee Ali, and Earl Ofari Hutchinson, have criticized the tactics of BLM. Author and minister Barbara Anne Reynolds, has criticized the confrontational tactics of BLM. Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a civil-rights leader, WND columnist and author of the book The Antidote, stated that “Without a doubt, Black Lives Matter is a hate group.” Larry Elder, a black talk show host explained the Democratic support of BLM. “Democrats require blacks to believe they are victims of oppression – and that they are oppression fighters,” explains Elder. “It’s standard operating procedure. But this has real consequences” (WND).
And indeed there have been fatal consequences, not only for murdered police officers, but also for the very black Americans that Black Lives Matter claims to champion. This year to date homicides are up 8.3 percent in New York, 10.2 percent in Chicago, 51.5 percent in St. Louis and 52.5 percent in Baltimore. Most Blacks, especially those who remember the Civil Rights Movement of the past century with the peaceful marches by black Americans, do not support Black Lives Matter, according to The Washington Post. But for the Democratic Party and for the news media, Black Lives Matter is a boon. They create news for the “If it bleeds, it leads” media, and votes for the DNC that needs a black population that feels downtrodden and victimized whom the Democrats and only the Democrats can save. How is it then that the cities like Chicago and Baltimore which have had Democratic governments for decades have blacks living in the worst, crime-ridden conditions in the country?