Black Lives Matter is just another racket. By Douglas Murray.
It often takes time to recognize a racket. Think of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. For years, they preyed on decent, praying Americans, defrauding them while presenting themselves as people of faith. … These over-surgeried televangelists claim they can only build their spanking new church if you hand over your hard-earned dollars. … All the time, they stock up their personal empires or splash it out on overpriced hookers.
Now we have new religions, and a whole new religious caste. Like the worst hucksters of old, they prey on our new vulnerabilities. In our time, few groups are as guilty of this as the people who run the Black Lives Matter movement.
Like the most fraudulent pastors, the heads of BLM take advantage of good people. They present an undeniably good cause. They prey on people’s hopes and fears. After all, who in America does not believe that black lives matter? Who wouldn’t have sympathy with, or support, a group that claims to want to help people fight injustice?
Reality intrudes:
Firstly, they lie about reality. In the case of BLM, they pretend that black people in the United States in 2022 can be killed at any time by the police. They pretend that racism is a pandemic in this country and that everything and anything must be done to tackle it. …
The American public has been misled about the real state of race in this country.
A poll in 2020 asked Americans how many unarmed black men they think are killed by the police in America the previous year. More than a fifth of people who described themselves as “very liberal” said they thought it was over 10,000 unarmed black people in America killed by police every year. Among self-described “liberals,” around 40% said they thought that the figure was somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000. The actual figure was around 10. …
Liberals in America […have] a completely wrongheaded idea of what America is actually like. …
BLM enriched themselves by lying:
They present a false reality and then present a false solution. How convenient for them that the solution just happens to enrich themselves. …
They presented America as irredeemably racist and then said only they could redeem this country. How the money rolled in.
And it wasn’t just credulous individuals, but huge corporations, companies and the super-rich who paid up. Like guilds paying off the church of old, large financial institutions made vast payments to BLM. In part like some kind of protection racket. “Our company can’t be racist because we support BLM,” they said. “So make sure that next time there are riots the mob moves right on by us and burns the place next door. For we are the chosen ones.” …
It is now a year since the New York Post revealed the real-estate empire of BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors. …
Now the rest of the media is catching up with the story. This week, New York magazine detailed BLM’s purchase of a swanky new $5.8 million mansion in Southern California.
How did Cullors, the high priestess of BLM, respond? Why with accusations that the story was “racist and sexist,” of course. She tried to shut it down, just as she had earlier worked with the social-media companies to try to subdue the reports in The Post’s revelations about her grand lifestyle.
If Cullors was a corrupt televangelist, she would be claiming that her critics were sinning against God. In today’s racial religion, Cullors claims that her critics are sinning against BLM. It is a clever way of operating. But it is also very familiar.
This racket was only made possible by the sea change from promoting color blindness to promoting diversity/non-white-people, accelerated by Obama from 2009.
