Two Years In, Black Lives Matter Has Prompted More Americans To Reject White Guilt

Today marks two years since the killing of George Floyd, and one thing can be said with certainty: the committed Marxists who created Black Lives Matter and orchestrated the violent disorders that upended our cities in 2020 have been incredibly successful at deeply altering life in this country. And not for the better.

That should not surprise in the least those who have followed closely what the BLM founders have said and done. “Changing how we’ve organized this country … dismantling the organizing principle of this society,” as BLM architect Alicia Garza put it in 2019, has always been the goal.

Many people think BLM has gone away. They don’t see riots, looting, or burning in our cities anymore. When they do hear about the main BLM organization, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF), it is mostly about their financial improprieties or mansion-buying sprees.

But BLM doesn’t need to riot anymore. In fact, to do so would be counterproductive. BLM is now inside the door not just with culture-making industries such as the media, Hollywood, and the Academy. BLM now has access to the top reaches of government.

As my colleagues David Ditch, Hans Von Spakovsky, and Erin Dwinell write in a new Heritage Foundation paper, BLMGNF takes credit for helping the Biden administration write the “action plans” released in April throughout the federal bureaucracy.

The plans are designed to impact how every federal agency and department approaches procurement, hiring, and other major decisions. They will make the federal government less efficient, possibly more corrupt, and definitely less able to better the lives of citizens. All in the name of “equity.”

The power BLM has been able to attain in the past 24 months is as vast as it is unknown. This is mainly because a compliant media does more than just refuse to report on BLM — it polices those who do. First, though, let’s look at what BLM has wrought.

Today Americans are at loggerheads over the racist application of “anti-racist” programs in their children’s schools and in their offices. Our military, rather than concentrate on all-out war, now worries about micro-aggressions.

Our corporate boards have gladly jumped on the bandwagon—or at least they did until Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis fought back and punished a “woke” Disney. Even our houses of worship and our sports leagues have become battlefronts. There is no escape.

This is all because of what happened after the harrowing video of Floyd’s killing went viral, and the BLM organizations manipulated the righteous indignation of good Americans. Another BLM co-founder, Patrisse Cullors, captured the zeitgeist with a comment she made about the tens of millions the organization raised in 2020: “That was a lot of white guilt money.”

Indeed, a lot of white guilt brought us to this point. Leaders of institutions threw in the towel and decided to agree with the preposterous proposition that America is an oppressive society in need of systemic overhaul.

By mid-2020, critical race theory huckster Robin DiAngelo was conducting Zoom training of 184 members of Congress, and the Democratic caucus, bedecked in Ghanian-style Kente Cloth, was taking a submissive knee at the Capitol.

The American media has mostly worked to keep the American people in the dark about the true nature of this new force that has already so damaged American polity and society. Former Reuters reporter Zac Kriegman detailed in Bari Weiss’s blog earlier this month how the global news service fired him for writing in the agency’s internal sharing platform about BLM facts he had uncovered.

“I had come to the conclusion that the claim upon which the whole movement rested—that police more readily shoot black people—was false. The data was unequivocal. It showed that, if anything, police were slightly less likely to use lethal force against black suspects than white ones.”

But this information was not permitted. “A pattern was starting to emerge: Reporters and editors would omit key details that undermined the BLM narrative. More important than reporting accurately was upholding—nurturing—that storyline. At some point, the organization went from ignoring key facts to just reporting lies,” wrote Kriegman, who is now suing Reuters.

Instead, what you get are docile reports from court stenographers, as this AP article, which openly reports BLM’s assertions as fact, makes clear.

This is why the vast majority of Americans don’t know that Cullors, Garza, and the other BLM architects were trained for more than a decade trained as organizers by Marxist theoreticians openly interested in gaining power, scaling up from the local to the national and the global, and using members of minorities as revolutionary vanguards.

Mentors such as Eric Mann, the communist who trained Cullors for a decade, have never hid their goal. In fact, they write about it often. All Cullors and the others have done since BLM’s creation in 2013 is implement their plan, as I detail in my 2021 book, “BLM, The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.”

Luckily, the American people have awakened to what has happened since Floyd’s death two years ago today. In the 30 or so cities I have traveled to since then, I have found Americans who love their children, their jobs, and their country, and have realized what the moment is.

That is why, on this grim anniversary, I remain optimistic.

Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at The Heritage Foundation, spent close to 20 years as a journalist, 15 of them reporting from Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He is the author of the new book, “The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics Is Dividing the Land of the Free.”

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