One of those killed in the riots that followed Floyd’s murder was David Dorn, a seventy-seven-year-old retired St. Louis police captain. He was shot as he tried to stop looting at a friend’s pawnshop. Stephan Cannon, twenty-six, was later convicted of first-degree murder, robbery, burglary, and other charges in Dorn’s killing, and sentenced to life in prison. Both Dorn and Cannon were black, but Cannon clearly never got the message that black lives matter. Dorn’s widow, retired police sergeant Ann Dorn, spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention in support of President Donald Trump’s reelection as she denounced the senseless lawlessness that caused her husband’s death. She called for allowing police to do their jobs and protect the public.23
In a heart-wrenching op-ed published in 2022 on the Fox News website, Mrs. Dorn wrote:
David didn’t agree with or support Black Lives Matter. He never understood Black Lives Matter, because it never actually did anything to help Black lives. The same year David was killed, over a dozen children were shot in St. Louis, and never once did Black Lives Matter show up. Their lives mattered. Fifty-five businesses were looted or destroyed the night David was murdered, many of them Black-owned. Their livelihoods mattered. My husband was a Black man who selflessly served his community for over 40 years. His life mattered.24
While Dorn’s murder and the other deaths resulting from the Black Lives Matter riots garnered media coverage, it was tiny compared to the massive coverage devoted to Floyd’s murder—especially in the liberal media. The media were right to cover the killing of Floyd, of course, but left-wing news organizations dropped the ball by paying far less attention to the deaths of Dorn and others of all races who died in the riots. Perhaps a more appropriate slogan for those causing such death and destruction would be “Only Black lives that we can betray and exploit matter.”
The BLM organizations expertly exploited Floyd’s death for their own financial and political gain, masquerading as a civil rights group focused on opposing police misconduct. Remember the activist telling me that you have to rub salt into a wound? That sometimes you have to make a problem worse to make it better? For the left, and Marxists in particular, there is every intention to make things worse, but their monumental fraud is they have no intention of making things better. Maintaining fear, pain, suffering, and victimhood is their mission. The BLM organizations used fear as a weapon to coerce government to adopt and support policies to its liking, including “no bail” policies and defunding the police, despite horrifically negative consequences for urban areas and communities of color in particular. And as we say, that is the point.
Moreover, BLM entities are dedicated to fomenting racial divisions among our population as part of the Marxist obsession to overthrow our capitalist system. It seeks to generate fear of whites among blacks, of blacks among whites, and fear between every other tribe using the scourge of identity politics. It seeks to make Americans fear police by portraying law enforcement officers as dangerous criminals, and demanding that police departments be defunded and abolished. As we are seeing across the country, this is a disastrous strategy for all of us, sending crime,25 including homicides,26 skyrocketing and making Americans even more fearful of the growing dangers around them.
Have you ever asked yourself how they benefit from more crime and more fear? When things get bad enough—and when people fear their lives will get even worse—they are willing to accept previously unimaginable, even revolutionary, change. This is how the communist regime came to power in Russia. It is how both Hitler and Mussolini came to power. An America crippled by divisions and crime would be ripe for a radical new government controlling everything. But like how cancer exists just to perpetuate itself, ultimately killing the host, Marxists never really think about the reality of their end-game catastrophes. They feed on the excitement of the destruction, and then become observers of the cataclysm. It’s pathological, and no, they don’t mean well, nor are they “misguided.” They know exactly what they’re doing.
In his second appearance in our discussion, the title of this section, “The BLM Effect,” is borrowed from an important statement in 2020 from Senator Tom Cotton, in which he details how the “poisonous ideology” of BLM has made American cities more dangerous. He noted, “[in 2020] our nation experienced the largest single-year increase in murder in American history and endured some of the worst riots in a generation. It’s no coincidence that this appalling death and destruction surged at the same time as the virulently anti-law-enforcement ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement became more popular, powerful, and pervasive. The consequences of the ‘BLM Effect’ continue today.”27
Cotton points to data from major cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, which have seen significant spikes in homicides and other violent crimes in the wake of the protests as politicians reacted by implementing one of the main “demands” by the Marxists running BLM—weakening and defunding the police. “The BLM Effect caused an even more shocking drop in policing, paired with a stunning rise in murder. From last summer to this winter, police in Chicago made 53 percent fewer arrests compared with the same period in 2019. Murder in the city rose by 65 percent,” Cotton continues. “In New York, police made 38 percent fewer arrests and murder rose by 58 percent. In Louisville, Ky., police made 35 percent fewer arrests and murder rose by 87 percent. In Minneapolis, Minn., police made 42 percent fewer arrests and murder rose by 64 percent.”28
He closes by noting the disgraceful irony of the BLM effect, a hallmark of the Marxist and leftist movements in general—that what they claim to be working against is exactly what they propagate. “If, as they claim, racist policy is defined solely by racially disparate outcomes, then their weak-on-crime proposals are in fact breathtakingly racist. When it comes to the morality of the rule of law, we should never take lectures from those who coddle criminals.”29
Democrat policies have made it harder to recruit and retain police officers in recent years. Budget constraints have also made it more difficult to fund effective law enforcement initiatives. Additionally, the current climate has created a hostile environment, making it tougher to incentivize officers to take risks. Why stick your neck out to stop a crime if BLM is there to chop it off, and local politicians don’t have your back? Whether it be ending cash bail and allowing criminals to roam freely, handcuffing the police so they are unable to arrest those who make life a living hell in urban areas, or creating a hostile environment making it impossible for cities to find those willing to serve in law enforcement, Democratic policies are now the handmaiden of the Marxist hellscape.
Who suffers the most? While every American is impacted by the menacing bedlam produced by leftist governance, people of color living in urban areas of major cities continue to be the main victims of Marxist madness.
The Democrats’ Marxist controllers are crippling our economy, destroying jobs, and spreading lawlessness to bring us closer to abandoning capitalism. This nightmare is exactly what the Marxist leaders of BLM dream of, and it is a goal shared by others on the far left as well.
Make America Marxist
The BLM movement is in the business of generating fear to rake in tens of millions of dollars while collecting sociocultural clout and power. Like the proverbial ambulance-chasing lawyer or a vulture, it swoops down to benefit from the suffering of others. It is far more concerned with green—as in the color of money—than it is with black lives. It throws gasoline on the fires of racial division to make bad situations worse, because if racial division ended, the movement would go out of business and stop hauling in big bucks, and they would have no chance of achieving their ultimate goal—the deconstruction of American society.
The movement, founded in 2013, consisted primarily of two organizations that work in coalition: the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation and the Movement for Black Lives, as well as local chapters. On the BLM website30 the movement says it was founded by “three radical Black organizers—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi” (who now calls herself Ayo Tometi), and operates in the US, Canada, and Britain. Cullors candidly admitted in a 2015 interview that she and Garza are “trained Marxists.” Garza, who has a background in the labor movement, said in 2015: “Black lives can’t matter under capitalism. They are like oil and vinegar.”31
Rather than condemn the violence that marked the riots following the murder of George Floyd, these and other BLM leaders defended the rioters. Cullors said rioters were “expressing righteous rage.” Tometi minimized the destruction caused by rioters, saying: “I’m not really concerned about broken glass.” Ariel Atkins, an organizer with BLM in Chicago, said items stolen by looters were “reparations” and added that “winning has come through riots . . . I will support the looters . . . Anything they want to take, take it.”32
The violence associated with BLM did not start in 2020. In April 2021, Vox reported on the work of researcher Travis Campbell, a PhD student in economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and his analysis of 1,600 BLM protests from 2014 to 2019, prior to the murder of George Floyd. His research tracked the protests across the country, “largely in bigger cities, with nearly 350,000 protesters. His main finding is a 15 to 20 percent reduction in lethal use of force by police officers—roughly 300 fewer police homicides—in census places that saw BLM protests. Campbell’s research also indicates that these protests correlate with a 10 percent increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests. That means from 2014 to 2019, there were somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 more homicides than would have been expected if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests.” This was before including data from the George Floyd riots.33
The more we investigate, the more it becomes clear that the 2020 summer of riots was no more organic or natural than anything else the Marxists vomit up as they target our families, our values, and ergo, our country. Republicans benefit from problems with practical solutions. Democrats benefit from problems too big for any solution other than turning everything over to the technocrat elite. That’s why crime has to be reframed as a valid response to systemic racism that would be racist to solve with more cops.
What we also know is that Cullors trained for a decade as a radical organizer at the Labor/Community Strategy Center headed by Eric Mann, a former member of the Weather Underground who spent eighteen months in prison after being convicted of assault and battery and disturbing the peace. He has said he now wants to overthrow the American system and achieve world revolution through organizing. He calls his strategy center the “Harvard of Revolutionary graduate schools.”34, 35
The FBI has labeled the Weather Underground (formerly known as the Weathermen) a terrorist group that sought to start a communist revolution in the US.36 The group operated from 1969 through 1976 and claimed responsibility for twenty-five bombings, including at the US Capitol, the Pentagon, a police station in New York City, and the office of the California attorney general. In their foundation statement in 1969, the Weathermen said they were seeking “the destruction of U.S. imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism.”37 Not exactly subtle.
To call either the Weather Underground or the BLM machines radical would be an understatement. In addition to advocating for defunding and abolishing police departments, the platform for the Movement for Black Lives calls for “an end to all jails, prisons, immigration detention, youth detention and civil commitment facilities.”38 Really. Instead, the platform says government should: “Invest in making communities stronger and safer through quality, affordable housing, living wage employment, public transportation, education, and health care that includes voluntary harm reduction and patient-driven, community-based mental health and substance abuse treatment.”39
BLM also calls for decriminalizing drug use and prostitution and “a full and comprehensive reparations package for people, families and communities” harmed by the criminalization of drugs and prostitution. The platform demands that communities “[r]emove police and surveillance from schools” (good news for would-be school shooters) and calls for schools to instead invest in “violence prevention and transformative responses that create a nurturing and positive school climate for all students.”
The platform also calls for eliminating all restrictions on convicted criminals that limit their eligibility for jobs, parental rights, housing, education, and civil rights. This could pave the way for pedophiles and rapists to work in child care centers and schools, robbers to work in banks, surgeons convicted of medical malpractice to operate on patients, drunk drivers to get jobs driving school buses, and other nightmare scenarios.40
One thing you’ll no longer find on the BLM website is a commitment to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” Apparently this was too transparent and was costing the movement support. However, the page remains archived by the Wayback Machine, a nonprofit initiative that has preserved over 788 billion web pages.41
Abolition of the family was a central tenet of communism, specifically called for by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto. The pair said that under communism, the state would be in charge of educating children rather than their parents, and the “exploitation of children by their parents” would end. Marx and Engels denounced the “bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child” as “disgusting.”42
All of this sounds horribly familiar, doesn’t it? Parents have been pushing back on the disgusting frenzy by teachers’ unions to cleave the relationship between parent and child43 using reasoning that would make Marx and Engels proud.
The lunatic idea of abolishing the family is as much a disaster today as it was in the early Soviet Union some hundred years ago. Families, after all, have been around throughout history and have been vital to support and educate children in a stable environment, and to give them a sense of moral values. Writing in the Atlantic almost a century ago in July 1926, someone identified in her byline only as “A Woman Resident in Russia” wrote: “When the Bolsheviki came into power in 1917 they regarded the family, like every other ‘bourgeois’ institution, with fierce hatred, and set out with a will to destroy it. . . . A law was passed which made divorce a matter of a few minutes, to be obtained at the request of either partner in a marriage. Chaos was the result. Men took to changing wives with the same zest which they displayed in the consumption of the recently restored forty-per-cent vodka.”44
The writer went on to quote officials who said men were impregnating wives they stayed married to for only a few weeks or months, taking no responsibility for their children. She said there were 300,000 homeless children in Russia. “It is claimed by many Communists that the break-up of the family is responsible for a large percentage of these children,” the writer added.45
The abject failure of communism in the Soviet Union and everywhere else it was imposed had no impact on Soviet efforts to spread the destructive policy around the world. After World War II, the Soviets shoved communism down the throats of their Eastern European neighbors with military force, and helped prop up communist regimes in China, Cuba, and elsewhere. The founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, sought to spread communism among black Americans and use them to launch disturbances and eventually a communist revolution in the US. The effort went nowhere, even though the Soviets brought prominent Black Americans to Russia—including poet and author Langston Hughes, and actor and singer Paul Robeson—in a propaganda ploy to portray communism as intolerant of racism.46 Fast-forward to today, and you’ll see that Black Lives Matter movement leaders are doing their best to Make America Marxist, fulfilling Lenin’s dream.
The Real Threat to Black Lives: Crime and Criminals
A Heritage Foundation review of FBI crime statistics from 2011 through 2020 found that while black people make up about 14 percent of the US population, they accounted for about 33 percent of reported violent crime victims and about 54 percent of reported homicide victims in the nation.47 And despite the intense media focus on police killings of black people, far more black people are killed by civilians in the US each year.
For example, in 2022, police fatally shot at least 225 black people (compared with 389 whites, 120 Hispanics, 22 people of other races, and 344 people whose race or ethnicity were unreported), according to data provider Statista.48 But 12,179 black Americans were killed with guns in 2020, compared with 7,286 white Americans, according to the Center for American Progress. This means that black Americans died in 61 percent of all gun homicides, and were ten times more likely than white Americans to die in gun homicides.49
It only follows that anyone who sincerely believes that black lives and the lives of people of all races matter will want to see more police funding and more officers on the street to better protect law-abiding citizens from gun violence and other crimes. This isn’t to deny that some police officers engage in brutality, and injure or kill people of all races, as happened in the murder of George Floyd. Such officers should be fired, charged with crimes, convicted, and imprisoned if found guilty. But there are more than 800,000 federal, state, and local law enforcement officers in the United States.50 The overwhelming majority never kill anyone over the course of their careers and never even fire their weapons on duty.51 Violence is rare in the millions of interactions law enforcement officers have with civilians each year.
The question comes up over and over: Why does BLM want us to believe that violence is the norm? Because the goal is to convince people the only solution is massive social engineering, and you need to believe society is collapsing and the old solutions are worse.
This is absurd. We’ve all seen news reports about pedophile priests, doctors who rape patients, lawyers who swindle clients, pharmacists who are illegal drug dealers, and people in other professions who break the law. When caught, these people are charged with crimes, and convicted whenever there is enough evidence to prove their guilt. But we don’t hear calls to defund churches, medical care, the justice system, and pharmacies. For the same reason, the notion of defunding the police because of the misconduct of a relatively few officers benefits no one except criminals, which is exactly why the BLM movement has so enthusiastically promoted this poisonous plan.
The demonization of police officers has several harmful effects that make communities less safe and cause the loss of innocent lives. It discourages many qualified people from becoming police officers, is demoralizing for officers trying to do their jobs, and prompts some officers to quit. It also makes officers reluctant to go after criminals and stop crimes from taking place, for fear of being accused of using excessive force and being prosecuted. And it endangers the safety and lives of police by convincing some people to resist and even attack officers.
Irresponsibly disregarding public safety, Democratic mayors and city councils put funding for their police departments on the chopping block. Then-mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Council agreed in June 2020 to cut a staggering $1 billion from the city’s $6 billion police operating budget in America’s most populous city, but was criticized by Ocasio-Cortez for not cutting even more.52 Los Angeles cut $150 million from its police budget in November 2020.53 But that was just the tip of the iceberg. In all, 24 of the 50 largest US cities cut their police budgets in 2021, Bloomberg News reported. Other police budget reductions included an 11.2 percent cut in Seattle, a 33.2 percent cut in Austin, a 14.8 percent cut in Minneapolis, and an 8.8 percent cut in Denver.54
These budget cuts weakened the ability of police to protect their communities because they caused manpower shortages. In Austin, for example, callers to the 911 emergency line had to wait on hold for an average of two and a half minutes to speak to someone in late 2022—far longer than the national standard of fifteen seconds or less. Two to three minutes may not sound like a long time, but it becomes a lifetime when you’re facing an emergency situation.
An Austin city councilwoman had to wait twenty-eight minutes to speak to someone to report an emergency in early 2023. A Texas state law enacted in 2021 required Austin to restore the cuts it made to the police budget, but even with money restored, the police department had a hard time filling vacancies.55 After all, why would someone want to be a cop in a city where no one has your back?