William A. Donohue
Over the summer, Raymond Arroyo interviewed me a couple of times on his EWTN show, “The World Over.” On one occasion he asked me what I thought about Black Lives Matter.
“There are people out there who say, ‘Well, I like the idea of black lives matter,’ and if they mean it in the innocent sense that black lives should matter to white people, I have no problem with that. If, however—and people need to get educated—you’re talking about the organization of Black Lives Matter, people should know that Black Lives Matter has the same policy agenda as the Ku Klux Klan.”
One person who needs to get educated is Gregg Popovich, the coach of the San Antonio Spurs basketball team. “People who don’t understand Black Lives Matter, or are offended by it, are just ignorant.” Really? It would be more accurate to say he has been duped. And that’s giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Black Lives Matter was founded in 2013 by three left-wing black women who previously worked for communist front groups. Patrisse Cullors is perhaps its most outspoken activist. She describes herself as a “working class, queer, black woman.” No wonder the organization boasts, “We are a queer-affirming network” bent on “freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking.”
Cullors has admitted that she, and co-founder Alicia Garza, are “trained Marxists.” The person who most influenced Cullors is Eric Mann, a former activist of the Weather Underground, the urban terrorist organization from the late 1960s and 1970s. He introduced her to an extremist left-wing outfit he once ran, one that openly endorsed the “pro-communist resistance to the U.S. empire.”
My comparison of Black Lives Matter to the Klan was no exaggeration. Here is a thought experiment. What if you were hired to devise a plan to keep blacks down, if not destroy them altogether? For starters, you might want to adopt the Klan’s mindset.
The most effective way to destroy any racial or ethnic group is to kill them. This explains why the Klan liked to lynch blacks. A more modern way would be to abort their babies. On the website of Black Lives Matter it says, “we demand reproductive justice that gives us autonomy over our bodies and identities.”
Another way to kill a demographic group would be to aid and abet the criminal element within its ranks. There is no surer way to do this than by getting rid of the cops. “We call for a national defunding of police.” That is also taken from the website of Black Lives Matter.
There are non-violent ways to keep blacks down, too, and one of them is to force black kids to attend public schools, denying them the opportunity to go to private schools. This is what the Klan did a century ago in Oregon, though their target was Roman Catholics, not blacks. In 1922, it succeeded in pushing for a state law that forced every child to attend a public school. Fortunately, it lost in the U.S. Supreme Court three years later in 1925 in Pierce v. Society of Sisters.
In 2016, Rashad Anthony Turner, one of the leaders of Black Lives Matter in St. Paul, Minnesota, quit the organization. “Being that I am all for charter schools and ed reform, and as someone who is seeking educational justice for students and families, I could no longer be under that banner of Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter has been co-opted. The movement’s been hijacked.”
No racial or ethnic group is going to advance if the family crumbles. Every study on educational achievement and upward mobility confirms that children from one-parent families do not perform as well in school, or in the workplace, as children from two-parent families. This is as true of white families as it is black families.
Unfortunately, one-parent families are the rule in the black community. Why is that? It has nothing to do with slavery or discrimination. The black family was far more intact in the first 100 years after slavery than it has been since the 1960s. The welfare state and the dependency it created—inviting the father to leave so his family could do better economically—is at the root of the problem.
Black Lives Matter wants to destroy the family, proudly saying, it strives to “disrupt” what it calls the “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” In other words, it wants to finish the job started by the Great Society’s welfare state. The Klan would be proud.
John McWhorter is a black professor at Columbia University. Here is what he recently said about what’s going on. “In my life, racism has affected me now and then at the margins, in very occasional social ways, but has had no effect on my access to societal resources; if anything, it has made them more available to me than they would have been otherwise.” He hastens to add that his experience is hardly unique.
Beware of the propaganda about Black Lives Matter. Its motives may be different from the KKK, but its policies ensure the same results.
