VIDEO: Black Lives Matter: racist provocation with radical roots
BLM is the latest and most dangerous face of a web of well-funded socialist/communist organizations that have been agitating against America for decades

The Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) casts itself as a spontaneous uprising born of inner-city frustration, but it is in fact the latest and most dangerous face of a web of well-funded socialist/communist organizations that have been agitating against America for decades. BLM claims to be non-violent. According to its website (BlackLivesMatter.com), "The Black Lives Matter Network advocates for dignity, justice, and respect. … Black activists have raised the call for an end to violence, not an escalation of it. Yet BLM activists are routinely observed screaming violent obscenities and attacking police. For example, this past July, 21 police were injured by rocks, steel pipes, and fireworks during a demonstration in St. Paul, Minnesota, where protesters shut down the interstate for five hours. One officer suffered a spinal fracture after a concrete block was dropped on his head. At a Minneapolis fair protest last summer, BLM activists shouted, "Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon!
“Pigs in a blanket, fry em like bacon” #BlackFair #BlackLivesMatter #FTP #ACAB pic.twitter.com/NaQNehnd5g -- EMP∂$THY (@MrNikoG) August 29, 2015
In her recent book The War on Cops, Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald argues that the BLM movement and the fallout from it have made the inner city much more dangerous, as police forces adopt hands-off policies in response to growing hostility. Some call it the "Ferguson effect, named after the Missouri town where a young black man, Michael Brown, was killed when he tried to kill a white police officer. Cops across the nation are afraid to patrol black neighborhoods and are overly cautious when dealing with black suspects. Despite their diminished forcefulness in high-crime neighborhoods, police are still being assaulted and killed. Crime had been trending down for decades, but in 2015 homicide rates increased dramatically over 2014. In Houston, homicides were up 25.2 percent; in Washington, D.C., 54 percent; Baltimore, 58.5 percent; Milwaukee, 72.6 percent; and in Cleveland, a whopping 90 percent. Overall, homicides increased 17 percent in the 50 largest cities--the greatest increase in 25 years. Capitalizing on inaccurate and sometimes outright deceptive media reporting on police-involved shootings, BLM agitation has provoked numerous police killings, violence, lawlessness, and unrest in minority communities throughout the U.S., culminating most recently with the horrific ambush-murders of five policemen in Dallas and three in Baton Rouge, with many more wounded. If allowed to continue, BLM agitation could lead to greater civil unrest, anarchy, civil war. With the support and sympathy of President Obama, the Black Lives Matter crowd appears to be spoiling for just such an outcome.
Radical Roots
Black Lives Matter began in 2013 with a Twitter hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, after neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, called a "white Hispanic in the press, was acquitted in the killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin. Radical-left activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi claim credit for the slogan and hashtag. Following the Michael Brown shooting in August 2014, Dream Defenders, an organization co-founded by (the ACORN-affiliated) Working Families Party activist and Occupy Wall Street organizer Nelini Stamp, popularized the phrase "Hands Up--Don't Shoot! which has since become BLM's widely recognized slogan. Not surprisingly, former Communist Party USA vice presidential candidate Angela Davis sits on the Dream Defenders advisory board. Garza, Cullors, and Tometi all work for front groups of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, one of the four largest radical Left organizations in the country. The others are the Communist Party USA, Democratic Socialists of America, and the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. Stamp's ACORN--now rebranded under a variety of different names after its official 2010 bankruptcy--works with all four organizations, and Dream Defenders is backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), ACLU, and Southern Poverty Law Center, among others. The Freedom Road Socialist Organization is a hereditary descendant of the New Communist Movement inspired by Chinese dictator Mao Zedong and the many communist revolutions occurring throughout the world in the 1960s and '70s. Freedom Road split into two separate groups in 1999, FRSO/Fight Back and FRSO/OSCL (Freedom Road Socialist Organization/OrganizaciÛn Socialista del Camino Para la Libertad). Black Lives Matter and its founders are allied with the latter. (Future references to "Freedom Road in this article refer to FRSO/OSCL.) And lest anyone think the terms used to describe Freedom Road are too extreme, here's an excerpt from an April 21, 2016 blog post on its website, mourning the death of "our comrade, Tim Thomas, at 71:
Tim was a revolutionary organizer, writer and educator. … At George Washington University, Tim became active in the Black Liberation and Marxist movement that remained his lifelong passion. … Tim was a leader of SOBU (Student Organization for Black Unity) and later YOBU (Youth Organization for Black Unity). He was also very active in the African Liberation Support Committee. Tim joined the Revolutionary Workers League in 1972 and later the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS), a New Communist Movement group that brought together in one organization Asian-American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, African American, and white communists who shared a vision of national liberation as a critical element of communist revolution. After that group dissolved in 1990, Tim and a number of former LRS comrades came into the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, where they continue to advance the theory and practice of self-determination socialism. As Co-Chair of FRSO's Oppressed Nationality Commission, Tim helped us live up to our commitment to building the Black Liberation Movement through its downturns and upsurges. He wrote extensively about Bay area peoples' movements, organizing methodology, and developments in the Black Liberation Movement. Tim saw to completion an extensive update of our Oppressed Nationality Unity Document, which was passed just last month at FRSO's 2016 Congress. Tim also chaired a FRSO working group on immigrant rights. At the time of his death, he was collaborating with comrades on a comprehensive paper about the Black Liberation Movement.Freedom Road is comprised of dozens of groups. The radical-left model is based on building alliances of many organizations, small and large, working separate issues but dedicated ultimately to the same thing: overthrowing our society to replace it with a hardcore socialist (or communist) one. BLM is one of many projects undertaken by Freedom Road. Except for the website, BlackLivesMatter.com, there is no actual organization. The website implicitly acknowledges this, describing #BlackLivesMatter as, "an online forum intended to build connections between Black people and our allies to fight anti-Black racism, to spark dialogue among Black people, and to facilitate the types of connections necessary to encourage social action and engagement.

But today the movement has become so widely recognized that it may receive funding from the Left's granddaddy funder, the radical billionaires' donor consortium known as the Democracy Alliance. Blacks, gays, and women are disproportionately represented among the membership of Freedom Road, which self-consciously emphasizes issues related to those groups. Alicia Garza penned a "Herstory of BLM and is a "queer, black veteran activist of numerous Freedom Road organizations. Her rÈsumÈ includes
- Special projects director, National Domestic Workers Alliance
- Executive director, People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER)
- Board member, School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL)
- 2011 Board chair, Right to the City Alliance
- Board member, Forward Together
- Drug Policy Alliance (over $18.5 million since 2010)
- Center for Community Change ($5.2 million since 2010)
- Equal Justice USA ($800,000 since 2010)
- Gamaliel Foundation ($1.3 million since 2010)
- Make the Road New York ($769,430 since 2010)
- Sojourners ($300,000 since 2011)
- Samuel Dewitt Proctor Conference ($500,000 in 2011--2012)
Mainstream BLM Support
Mainstream funders have jumped in as well. For example, United Way has partnered with A&E and iHeartMedia to create Shining the Light Advisors, a committee of "nationally known experts and leaders in racial and social justice, to oversee grant disbursements. These "advisors include such radicals as Van Jones, Advancement Project co-director Judith Browne Dianis, and Race Forward's Rinku Sen. BLM's mission includes a kitchen sink of favored radical-left causes, including poverty, prisoner deinstitutionalization, illegal immigration, and gay rights. Highlighting Freedom Road's orientation toward gay blacks, it describes how "Black, queer and trans folks bear a unique burden from a hetero-patriarchal society that disposes of us like garbage and simultaneously fetishizes us and profits off of us, and that is state violence. Its wide network of affiliates and partner organizations like the Communist Party USA and the remnants of the ACORN network allows BLM to turn out large crowds. Many participate simply to protest, commit violence, loot, or all three. Freedom Road, for example, was prominent at the Ferguson protests and took video of the event. It even created a Black Lives Matter button. Following are more Freedom Road organizations involved with BLM. (Funding estimates provided when known.) Black Left Unity--A Marxist-Leninist organization that supports favored causes of the communist Left, including unity with Cuba, war against capitalism, and Occupy Wall Street. Black Workers for Justice--A group based in North Carolina which claims to struggle on behalf of "oppressed nationalities. Causa Justa/Just Cause--a Black-Latino solidarity organization allied with the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, the Right to the City Alliance, and others. Its 2013 revenues, $1.6 million, included $689,484 in government grants. Causa Justa has received over $2.3 million since 2010, mostly from the California Endowment, Marguerite Casey, and a few others. As noted above, POWER was absorbed into Causa Justa. Grassroots Global Justice Alliance--"A national alliance of US-based grassroots organizing (GRO) groups organizing to build an agenda for power for working and poor people and communities of color. It has received $20,000 from Ben & Jerry's since 2010. Hands Up United--works for "liberation of oppressed Black, Brown, and poor people through education, art, civil disobedience, advocacy, and agriculture. Intelligent Mischief--its Black Body Survival Guide is in the works and has raised $8,785 to date through crowdfunding website Indiegogo. Organization for Black Struggle is affiliated with the Communist Party USA. Its website claims Black Workers for Justice and the Advancement Project as allies. Chaired by Freedom Road member Montague Simmons, the Organization received $277,955 in revenues in 2014, its first year as a registered 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization. Showing Up for Racial Justice is a "national network of groups and individuals organizing White people for racial justice. Showing Up quotes Garza, "We need you defecting from White supremacy and changing the narrative of White supremacy by breaking White silence. Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education (SCOPE)--had 2013 revenues of $2.8 million. It is led by Anthony Thigpenn, a former Black Panther and board member of the Apollo Alliance. Apollo is a secretive alliance of labor, environment, and other left-wing activists that formulated Obama's trillion dollar "stimulus plan. Board member Van Jones described Apollo "as sort of a grand unified field theory for progressive left causes. Now a project of the Blue Green Alliance, SCOPE has received about $12 million since 2010 from numerous foundations, the most generous being Ford ($1.9 million), James Irvine ($2.3 million), New World ($1.4 million), Hewlett ($1.4 million), and the California Endowment ($1.2 million). (For more on the Apollo Alliance, see Green Watch, November 2012). BLM groups have also joined with the Communist Party USA, the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, Democratic Socialists of America, SEIU, Color of Change, and many others. Anarchist and top Occupy Wall Street organizer Lisa Fithian, who orchestrated the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization riots, trained Ferguson protesters. Fithian says "create crisis, because crisis is that edge where change is possible. Fithian echoes Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the creators of the infamous Cloward-Piven Crisis Strategy, who spent decades attempting to provoke poor, inner-city blacks to riot, because as Cloward said, poor people advance only "when the rest of society is afraid of them. Rasheen Aldridge was a leader of the Ferguson protests. He has participated in numerous Communist Party USA events in 2013, 2014, and 2015. Another prominent Communist Party member active in BLM protests is Michael McPhearson, who leads the Don't Shoot Coalition. Carl Davidson and Pat Fry, co-chairs of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, exploited the revolutionary atmosphere of the Ferguson riots to create an eight-point plan for "Left Unity demanding "a common aspiration for socialism. Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE), is Missouri's rebranded ACORN group. It created an illustrative chart offering a snapshot of the Left's grievance agenda. Capitalism is always the problem. Socialism is always the solution.
Intellectual Genealogy of Black Lives Matter
"We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth. … We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us"--Vladimir Lenin That quote from the Soviet Union's first leader captures the entire essence of the Left's strategy. No matter what the issue, no matter what the facts, the Left advances a relentless, hate-filled narrative that America is irredeemably evil and must be destroyed as soon as possible. The BLM movement is only the latest, but perhaps most dangerous variant on this subversive theme. Communists use language and psychology as a weapon. Their constant vilification of enemies is a form of psychological warfare. It puts America and Americans on trial. The verdict is always guilty. Facts don't matter because the Left does not want to resolve the problems they complain about. They use those problems to agitate and provoke, hoping conflict becomes unavoidable and thereby creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their hatred is tactical. Obama's favorite Harvard professor, Derrick Bell, devised Critical Race Theory, which exemplifies Lenin's strategy as applied to race. According to Discover the Networks:Critical race theory contends that America is permanently racist to its core, and that consequently the nation’s legal structures are, by definition, racist and invalid … members of "oppressed racial groups are entitled--in fact obligated--to determine for themselves which laws and traditions have merit and are worth observing. …Bell's theory is in turn an innovation of Critical Theory, which was developed by Marxist thinkers of the Frankfurt School who were affiliated with the Institute for Social Research, founded in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923. The Institute's left-wing scholars were mostly Jewish and fled Hitler's Germany in the 1930s, relocating to Columbia University's Teachers College in New York. Critical Theory, which discredits all aspects of Western society, rapidly infected the minds of newly minted college professors, who then spread its poison throughout the university system. We know it today as political correctness. One of its most famous purveyors was the Frankfurt School's Herbert Marcuse, longtime associate of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Julian Bond. Marcuse invented the concept of "partisan tolerance," that is, tolerance for leftist ideas and intolerance of all others. The Southern Poverty Law Center applied Marcuse's strategy in developing its "Hate Watch" list, and Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky used it in his own life's work.
White Privilege
The "racist" narrative was turbocharged with the concept of "White Privilege, the notion that whites--the dominant demographic group in capitalist America--are irretrievably racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, fill-in-the-blank-ophobic, imperialistic oppressors who exploit everyone. Whites are the only true evil in the world and should be exterminated. "Dr. Kamau Kambon, who taught Africana Studies 241 in the Spring 2005 semester at North Carolina State University, also said this needs to be done because white people want to kill us.' ("Activist: exterminate white people, by Jon Sanders, Carolina Journal, Oct. 21, 2015.) The "White Skin Privilege idea was created in 1967 by Noel Ignatiev, an acolyte of Derrick Bell and professor at Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. (Du Bois was a black leader who helped found the NAACP and joined the Communist Party in 1961.) Ignatiev was a member of the Communist Party USA's most radical wing, the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party from 1958-66. The Provisional Organizing Committee was the intellectual forerunner to Freedom Road. Writing under the alias Noel Ignatin, Ignatiev co-authored a Students for Democratic Society (SDS) pamphlet with fellow radical Ted Allen titled, White Blindspot. In 1992 he co-founded Race Traitor: Journal of the New Abolitionism. Its first issue coined the slogan "Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity. Its stated objective was to "abolish the white race. More specifically, the New Abolitionist newsletter declared:The way to abolish the white race is to challenge, disrupt and eventually overturn the institutions and behavior patterns that reproduce the privileges of whiteness, including the schools, job and housing markets, and the criminal justice system. The abolitionists do not limit themselves to socially acceptable means of protest, but reject in advance no means of attaining their goal [emphasis added].But do not be confused: "White with an uppercase W does not mean white as most Americans use the word. "White in radical parlance means anyone of any race, creed, nationality, color, sex, or sexual preference who embraces capitalism, free markets, limited government, and American traditional culture and values. These beliefs are deemed to be irredeemably evil, and anyone who aligns with them is "white in spirit and thus equally guilty of "white crimes. Ignatiev still teaches, now at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. The Black Lives Matter movement carries this narrative to unprecedented heights, claiming that only whites can be racists. ("The Result of Victimhood and Lies: Great Evil, by Dennis Prager, National Review Online, Sept. 1, 2015.) And while justifying violence to achieve "social justice, the movement's goal is to overthrow our society to replace it with a Marxist one. Many members of the black community would be shocked to learn that the intellectual godfathers of this movement are mostly white Communists, "queers, and leftist Democrats, intent on making blacks cannon fodder, the shock troops of the coming revolution. James Simpson is an economist, former White House budget analyst, businessman, and investigative journalist. Veteran researchers Trevor Loudon and Matthew Vadum (senior vice president, Capital Research Center) contributed to this report.
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James Simpson——Bio and Archives
James Simpson is an economist, businessman and investigative journalist. His articles have been published at American Thinker, Accuracy in Media, Breitbart, PJ Media, Washington Times, WorldNetDaily and others. His regular column is DC Independent Examiner. Follow Jim on Twitter & Facebook
