Big Lies Matter

By Patrick Hall

Some Black Lives Matter more than others, should be their refrain. The now mainstream Black Lives Matter Movement has gained support from many within the political class. In addition, Hollywood celebs, professional athletes like LeBron James and Megan Rapinoe, as well as funding from various private, foreign, and corporate sponsors like George Soros, Chinese Communist Party (via Huawei), Walt Disney, the Ford, Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Gates Foundations, have all been willful contributors to the dreadful lie that is the Blacks Lives Matter Global Foundation. Add to this, an organization directly responsible for rioting, burning, and killings of law enforcement officials, since its inception in 2013, has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, is beyond explanation. But then again, the Nobel was awarded to the murdering Middle Eastern terrorist, Yasser Arafat (1994). The Nobel Prize's increasing perfidy in recent years was also on display when in 2009, less than two months into his Presidency, Barrack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for, well…I’ve never been quite sure.  I guess it was one of those equity things.
 
BLM claims to care about the struggle for racial justice for Black Americans. Still, at its core, it is just another Marxist inspired and directed movement whose real purpose is to undermine and destroy our Republic.  Its founders have admitted as much. They do not attempt hiding their affiliations, yet, nobody seems to care. I surmise those who now identify themselves as “Progressives” are too busy digesting the left-of-center-news (an oxymoron), from CNN-NPR-BCC and the Facebook news cloisters. Over the last four years, even the Fox News Network, now owned by Walt Disney, is gradually relinquishing its “equal time” role, juxtaposed to the greater corporate media culture.

In concert with other ossified polities like the NAACP, National Action Network, and the Congressional Black Caucus, Black Lives Matter have stood idly by offering very little to confront the chaos of black-on-black crime in Democrat run cities. However, Black Lives Matter is extremely adept at offering slogans in lieu of any concrete proposals to alleviate the black underclass's so-called disenfranchisement. The National Basketball Association, as well as NFL Players, will done slogans like, “I can’t Breathe”, “Justice Now”, “Anti-Racist”, or “Say Her Name”, a hagiographic reference to the accidental shooting of Breonna Taylor, a woman who once rented a car for her drug-running boyfriend, that later contained a dead body in the trunk. But in her defense, that could’ve happened to any of us. Right?

It is just part and parcel of the “I’m-really-helping-black-people-delusion”, that the cultural left and their supporters have been feeding minority communities in the Post-Civil Rights Era.

 However, the Black underclass can’t eat slogans, nor do these catchy political semantics do much to address the socio-economic stasis, which grips many inner-city communities.

For example, Black Lives Matter does very little about supporting school choice initiatives so that families can have their children’s education options. This despite the millions of dollars being secured by BLM officials from its growing corporate sponsors' list. Instead, Black children are condemned to the credentialed and over-paid incompetence of government schools. Black Lives Matter has predictably picked-up the dialectic from the teacher unions and Democrats like Vice-President Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, (D-CA), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez(D-NY), that public education and inner-city schools need more money.  But as many of us pointed out decades ago (1),  there is no convincing evidence that higher spending produces better schools.  Pouring more money into government schools' existing structure (especially in the inner-city) only makes mediocrity and failure more expensive.

Like the Teachers’ Unions, Black Lives Matter and their many Democrat supporters view public schools primarily as a jobs program for adults. Black children’s education is a tertiary concern at best.

The breakdown of the black family in Post-Civil Right America is another fairly recent phenomenon. It is not a legacy of slavery, as many BLM constituents, along with tenured race-alchemists like Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, Derrick Bell, Henry Louis Gates Jr, have been mouthing for decades.  Many black children are raised in a single-parent household, headed largely by nominally educated females. According to recent census stats, over 70% of black children are raised in households without a father figure, much less two responsible adults. Compare this with Pre-Civil Rights America, when blacks faced “real racism and discrimination," unlike the perpetually offended snowflakes that populate Black Lives Matter. The numbers were just the opposite of where they are today. Over 75% of black households had both parents present.

In other words, two-parent households were much more common in the black community in the period running up to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Thirty years ago, with the publication of Williams Julius Wilson’s seminal work, The Truly Disadvantaged, he made the salient point that today's black neighborhoods are more chaotic than the inner cities of the pre-1970s.   Other public policy scholars like Thomas Sowell, Abigail Thernstrom, Heather MacDonald, and the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), underscored the point that you don’t need racism, institutional, micro, or otherwise, to account for the ongoing social pathologies of the black underclass.  The breakdown of the black family, and the growth of the welfare state since the 1970s, did more to undermine far too many communities.

Even the economist Milton Friedman once opined that the Blacks survived the horrors of slavery, and later the injustices of Jim Crow and blatant racial segregation. However, many African Americans did succumb to the carnage caused by the Post 1970s welfare state.   It is sad, if not utterly pathetic that blacks run many of the most violent, welfare-dependent, and socially dysfunctional cities in America in concert with the Democratic Party.   One would hope that Black Lives Matter and all the protestors screaming about racial inequality, equity (code word for reparations),  police brutality (2), and defunding law enforcement would take these facts seriously. But of course, we all know this will never happen. There is too much money and political power to be garnered by keeping the black underclass ignorant, dependent, vexed, and perpetually angry at Republicans, Conservatives, and America.

 The Marxists that control the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation are employing the canard of police brutality for their larger goal to take down this country and establish governance that would be unrecognizable to the Founders.  BLM and many of its dangerously naive supporters are crafting a future that will only result in an “equality of misery” for all Americans.  
   
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1 See., Hall, Patrick.  A Note on School Vouchers:  Conservative Review , Nov/Dec 1997, pp 2-3.
 2 See.,  Hall, Patrick.  Against our best interests: An ambivalent view of affirmative action, American Libraries, October 1991, pp 898-902.  

[Patrick is a retired University Library Director. He is graduate of Canisius College and the University of Washington where he earned Masters Degrees in Religious Studies Education, Urban Anthropology and Library and Information Science.  Mr. Hall has also completed additional course work at the University of Buffalo, Seattle University and St. John Fishers College of Rochester New York. He has published in several national publications such as Commonweal, America, Conservative Review, Headway, National Catholic Reporter, and American Libraries. He has published in the peer reviewed publications, Journal of Academic Librarianship and the Internet Reference Services Quarterly. From 1997 until his retirement in January 2014 he served on the Advisory Board of Urban Library Journal, a CUNY Publication.]