Many Americans think that Black Lives Matter is a paragon of social justice. And who can blame them? Most of the media have failed to tell them the truth: that the BLM organizations were founded, and are led, by people recruited and trained by actual communists to—in their words—“dismantle the organizing principle of society.”
>>> Heritage Pressure Leads to Amazon’s Reversing Censorship Decision
Even Big Tech helps to cover up the truth. I know this because Amazon obstructed for a week my effort to shine a spotlight on BLM.
I wrote “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution” precisely to educate and expose what the media have kept from Americans. Encounter Books published it Sept. 7—but on Sept. 14, we learned Amazon had blocked our ads for the book.
It’s still been selling very well: It even ranks No. 1 in Amazon’s own Black and African American History category, beating Ibram X. Kendi’s “Stamped from the Beginning” and Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “The 1619 Project.”
Finally, on Sept. 16, Amazon told us that it was reversing its decision, which a spokesman told one of my colleagues was “part of a human error that was being rectified.”
Kudos to Amazon for doing the right thing in the end, but the questions remain: Was the ban the result of an individual who just disagreed with the content of the book? Let’s not forget that Amazon has actually banned the sale of my former colleague Ryan Anderson’s “When Harry Met Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.”
Amazon’s original statement was Orwellian. It said the ad for my book “contains book/s or content that is not allowed. Content that revolves around controversial or highly debated social topics is not permitted. Please remove this content from your ad.”
That beggared belief, sounding as if the tech giant doesn’t want social issues to be debated. What democratic society can subsist without debate?
But wrecking American society is exactly BLM’s leaders’ goal, as they tell us. My book merely provides them and their trainers, allies and funders with the platform that the media, and Big Tech, have for too long denied them. In this sense, I pay them the compliment of taking them and their words seriously.
For example, I quote Alicia Garza, one of BLM’s top founders and leaders, explaining to Maine leftists in 2019, “We’re talking about changing how we’ve organized this country. . . . I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society.”
Regarding the free-market system, Garza told a group of international Marxists in 2015: “It’s not possible for a world to emerge where black lives matter if it’s under capitalism, and it’s not possible to abolish capitalism without a struggle against national oppression.”
Patrisse Cullors, another top BLM leader and founder, is equally outspoken. In 2015, she told an interviewer that both Garza and herself were “trained Marxists.” And she repeated her adherence to Marxism in a 2021 video where she also admits that she doesn’t “know whether it’s worth talking about communism”—Marxism’s better-known synonym—“because it has gotten a bad rap.”
Cullors’ training came courtesy of the LA-based Labor/Community Strategy Center, established by Eric Mann, a former member of the Weather Underground terrorist organization who boasts in his 2011 book “Playbook for Progressives” that his center “recruited” Cullors when she was 17. His center’s goal: “Take this country away from the white settler state, take this country away from imperialism and have an anti-racist, anti-imperialist and anti-fascist revolution.”
Garza was trained in the School of Unity and Liberation, another Marxist preparatory, founded by Harmony Goldberg, a self-described devotee of the early-20th-century Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci and communist revolutionaries in Cuba, China and Chile. It was while interning at SOUL that Garza learned that, as she put it, “social movements all over the world have used Marx and Lenin as a foundation to interrupt these systems that are really negatively impacting the majority of people.”
The two were already well-steeped in socialist organizations long before they set up BLM in 2013. The mayhem they have caused since, especially in 2020, has resulted in billions in property damage, led to the deaths of thousands in extra homicides and has upended all our lives.
Whether this already constitutes “dismantling the organizing principle of this society” or Mann’s dreams of revolution, I leave for the reader to decide—and debate. Having lived in Cuba, where the government censors information about the ruling Communist Party, I don’t recommend us following this path.
This piece originally appeared in the New York Post
