BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution

by Mike Gonzalez

The George Floyd protests that have occasioned great changes throughout American society were not spontaneous events. Americans did not suddenly rise up in righteous anger, take to the streets, and demand not just that police departments be defunded, but that all structures, institutions, and systems--all supposedly racist--be overhauled. The 12,000 or so demonstrations and 675 related riots took organizational muscle. The ideological grip on all things from the classroom to the ballpark required ideological commitment. That muscle and commitment were provided by various Black Lives Matter organizations. The leaders are avowed Marxists who say they want to dismantle our way of life. They and their activists make savvy use of social media to spread their message and organize the marches, sit-ins, statue-tumblings, and riots. They seized on the video showing George Floyd's suffering to unleash nation-wide the insurgency. This book will look at who exactly these leaders are, something the media has so far refused to do.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Sociology, History

264 pages, Hardcover

Published September 7, 2021

Reviews

[Petra X]

Update Spoiler removed because on the new book page, clicking spoiler didn't work, just left it blurred. What is GR hoping to achieve with that? "From BlackLivesMatterUK Twitter - Is UKBLM a Marxist organisation?

A: No, we are not a Marxist organisation. While some of the members of UKBLM are Marxists, not all members are. We are however, all anti-capitalists, and are committed to dismantle class as well as gender and racial domination."

In other words, they like the founders of BLM are Marxists.

That wasn't what I signed up for after the murder of George Floyd. I thought it was about Black people's lives and how little they matter to the police and justice system in general, how much harder it was to get on for Black people and how much more dangerous life was in general. I thought it was about trying to extend all the privileges and advantages White people take for granted to everyone else who isn't White.

I didn't think, back then, it was a Marxist movement cynically using racism as a way of destruction of democracy, although I knew that two of the founders were (in their words) "trained Marxists" One of them resigned when it became known she had a recently-acquired $3M multi-house property business, but as in Animal Farm those who run things always think they are above the rules they enforce on the workers. That applies to all political parties everywhere. Poly - many, ticks - nasty, blood-sucking bugs.

You only have to look at how the USSR was, how China is - if you should even give any sign that you do not agree with what is the 'correct' way to think, it is denounce (in the media) deplatform (don't allow any debate) and cancel (simply make them disappear from public life). Discussion of different viewpoints is anathema to Marxists.

Since my sons are Black, I was really involved with the idea of BLM, but we are from a small, well-off little island in the Caribbean, where democracy, the free market and free speech are valued, there are few here that support how BLM is now. Although the Democrats, since the beating back at the border in Texas, of the Black Haitians (but not the Latinos) have acquired a local name, Demorats.

And to cap it all, I was reading in a book I got for the shop, The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice, "There can be no trans liberation under capitalism. This is a fact.". No it's not a fact just because you say so. But the Marxist-Leninist ideology of China, Cuba, Russia, Venezuela has not extended much tolerance or equal rights to LGBGT folk, so what makes the author, Shon Faye, say something like that?

Is America going to embrace Marxism, is the Democratic party, which is far more capitalist than it is socialist but acceptable people-oriented socialism anyway, going to move so far to the left that it will in effect be a new party, one concerned with the destruction of organisations and political parties as well as edifices? Marxism is an authoritarian political movement, it does not include voting. The end game is an appointed President, Comrade....

The UK isn't going to go that way. Shadow prime minister, Jeremy Corbyn and his Momentum Marxists lost the last election with a dramatic loss of seats. In part because of their extreme anti-Semitism. Corbyn laid a wreath to the fallen heroes of Hamas on Holocaust Day. In Hamas' charter is this, "Day of Judgment will not come about until [Muslims] fight Jews and kill them." No pussy-footing around 'Zionists' there.

Anti-Semitism though is something that unites far right and far left, and is the last form of racism that is acceptable to those sort of people , Marxists and White Supremacists alike. The present Shadow prime minister and leader of the Labour party is centrist and married to a Jewish woman which one left wing rag of the Labour party, Canary, said was a 'conflict of interest with the aims of the Labour party'. No pussy-footing there either!

Please don't assume that I'm pro any UK or US party, I'm not. The only vote I have is on the island I belong to and where party politics are on issues and not right or left philosophy. But I look at world politics, particularly US and UK although I don't vote in either and so I pick and choose what issues I think are good and who seems to be solving them, or not.

[Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

4+ stars

So 99 percent of us all agree that black lives matter. That’s not the issue here. The problem is people exploiting this highly charged issue for profit. The biggest of these is the Black Lives Matter Global Network and affiliates. This book researches the company, its founders, its connections, and its agenda.

This group has done nothing to improve black lives while its founders have gotten filthy rich. They aim to destroy the nuclear family when it’s proven that marriage (especially before having children) is the number one antidote to poverty. They fight school choice, condemning inner-city and poor kids, many of them black, to failing schools. And they fight to keep black criminals on the streets, which only victimizes innocent blacks, especially black women and children.

The organization was founded by proud “trained Marxists,” the book examines those Marxist roots. It’s a philosophy that rejects liberty, objective truth, personal responsibility, individual tastes and preferences, and equal justice. Because it has to discredit America’s founding, it has worked to rewrite history and get this revised history taught as truth in schools.

Mr. Gonzalez is a great writer and researcher. This is another stellar work, meticulously documented. Much has happened since the book was published; the organization’s founders are being investigated for fraud among other things. Mr. Gonzalez has a followup article here:
here.

Also check out here and here

I highlighted a ton of stuff:

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The left, and its supporters in the press, immediately seized the moment to cry that an “insurrection” or even “coup” had been attempted. For months after January 6, a media that had been openly supportive of the 2020 mayhem minutely analyzed what they ludicrously built up to be the equivalent of 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Unreported went the fact that January 6 was not the first time the Capitol had been attacked, and that the three previous acts of aggression—including terrorists shooting at congressmen point blank from the House visitors’ gallery—were all perpetrated by leftists who were later released from prison by Democratic presidents.

While only the deranged can take issues with the sentiment that black lives matter, the agenda of the organizations that have astutely appropriated that slogan is far different. This is important for Americans to learn—before they agree to a wholesale change of everything around them.

Critical theory directly produced critical legal theory in American law schools, and critical legal theory inspired other academics to create critical race theory. Like its predecessors, CRT submits all previous norms, traditions, and institutions to relentless criticism. This constant disparagement is intended to weaken the foundations of society, the better to replace them. All three theories deny the existence of metaphysical truth, let alone transcendent truth. Instead of absolute truth and established historical fact, CRT sees only competing narratives that are all equally subjective. Such a view denies that what has happened (history) actually happened; it therefore ignores Aristotle’s famous dictum that “this alone is lacking even to God, to make undone things that have once been done.” According to CRT, what has been taught as the American Way is nothing but white supremacy.

As the historian C. Bradley Thompson writes, the abolitionist movement in the North “based its moral philosophy on the principles of the Declaration.” Eventually, therefore, “proslavery thinkers came to realize that the greatest intellectual obstacle to promoting slavery in the United States was the Declaration of Independence and its psychic hold on the minds of ordinary Americans, including patriotic Southerners.”

That Constitution was ordained and established by the people of the United States, through the action, in each State, of those persons who were qualified by its laws to act thereon, in behalf of themselves and all other citizens of that State. In some of the States, as we have seen, colored persons were among those qualified by law to act on this subject. These colored persons were not only included in the body of “the people of the United States,” by whom the Constitution was ordained and established, but in at least five of the States they had the power to act, and doubtless did act, by their suffrages, upon the question of its adoption. (Justice Curtis’s dissent in Dred Scot, quoted by Lincoln)

Yes, slavery was a powerful institution in 1787. Yes, most white Americans presumed African inferiority. And in 1787, proslavery delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia fought to inscribe the principle of property in humans in the Constitution. But on this matter the slaveholders were crushed. James Madison (himself a slaveholder) opposed the ardent proslavery delegates and stated that it would be “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.” The Constitutional Convention not only deliberately excluded the word “slavery,” but it also quashed the proslavery effort to make slavery a national institution, and so prevented the enshrining the racism that justified slavery. (Historian Sean Wilentz)

Part of the reason that the woke complex today dismisses the Constitution, in fact, is that, as it has been written and amended, it stands in the way of many of the things they want to do, from instituting group rights and racial privileges to suppressing the rights to speech, property, and conscience.

All these turning points that so outraged Lincoln—taking away from free blacks the right to vote or even to learn how to read, the ability to extend slavery to the new territories and states, the restraints on emancipation—were then the result of the fear of liberty that the Declaration and the Constitution had instilled in the hearts of racists and slavers. If the Founding had enabled slavery, as BLM, the 1619 Project, and others insist, that wouldn’t have been the case.

If your purpose in the twenty-first century is, however, to destroy America’s institutions and its very view of itself, in order to introduce a new “narrative,” and a new way to constitute America, then the Founding must be indicted as being intricately tied to slavery, not as the fountainhead of the arguments and principles that finally led America out of it, and then on to civil rights in the 1960s. So you set out to describe all of American history as a trail of tears, and insist that the country starts in 1619, when the monolith of slavery supposedly begins. This argument is not history, nor even a different interpretation of it, however. This pushes aside established facts and introduces a revisionism based not on fact but on a political purpose.

Over and over, down to the present day, we see this Marxist attempt to put the demands of world revolution and the destruction of capitalism ahead of the individual self-interests of black Americans, a push that naturally has always met resistance among black Americans.

The slaves who were emancipated in 1863 were largely illiterate. They owned almost no land. They had virtually nothing. By the time you get to the 1910s, we see one of the historically most impressive transformations of literacy in a population that have been observed in the modern world. Go to south-eastern Europe and find some population of poor white people and you can’t find anything comparable to that. We actually made ourselves—this is Booker T. Washington’s language, but it’s actually accurate—“fit for citizenship.” The newly emancipated slaves were a very disadvantaged and underdeveloped population. By the time you get to 1910, you’ve got a wholly different profile of the African American population. (Glenn Loury)

A … problem with any movement led by thinkers, poets, artists, journalists, and activists is that they can easily succumb to what Raymond Aron called the opium of the intellectual: Marxism. Being removed from the welfare of ordinary men and women, intellectuals are vulnerable to an abstract theory that purports to care for the people but in fact create conditions that impede individual improvement and always ends in tyranny.

To [Marcus] Garvey, “the only convenient friend the Negro worker or laborer has in America at the present time is the white capitalist. The capitalist, being selfish, is seeking only the largest profit out of labor—is willing and glad to use Negro labor wherever possible on a scale ‘reasonably’ below the standard white union wages.” Thus only capitalism was flexible enough to help black workers get on the ladder of success; it was the system that rewarded, and therefore encouraged, hard work. Communism was the opposite, thought Garvey.

Guilt is no small part of the answer. Christianity no longer brought atonement, just happy talk. So, the left offered a deal: renounce your nations, your churches, and your heteronormative families, and we will set you free of your guilt. That’s where we are today. In the early years of the civil rights movements, black students wanted to have the right to read Shakespeare in college along with the white students. Today, identity politics wants to erase Shakespeare. (Joshua Mitchell)

David Azerrad writes that today’s identity politics is a direct outgrowth of the Black Power movement, because in it one can find “the core components of what we now call identity politics: the indictment of America as a fundamentally and irredeemably racist country; the hostility, bleeding into hatred, toward whites; the rejection of assimilation and integration in favor of cultural separation; and the demands for color-conscious recognition, preferential treatment, and positive rights rather than equal rights under color-blind law.”

The mayhem [2020 riots] left more than two dozen people killed and between one and two billion dollars in damage.

Buried inside the ACLED report—because its authors plainly buried the story—journalist Joy Pullman of The Federalist discovered that BLM activists were involved in 95 percent of the 633 incidents that ACLED coded as “riots” for which the identification of the participants was known.

[Alicia] Garza … was hired to organize opposition to building a Walmart in Oakland. As Scott Walter of the Capital Research Center put it, “She didn’t care that poor black residents actually wanted the Walmart, nor that the local labor council supported the new store, which did open.” This is something we find again and again with leftist leaders who say they are fighting for the people but disdain the people’s actual choices.

As Simpson wrote in 2016, “The Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) casts itself as a spontaneous uprising born of inner city frustration, but is, in fact, the latest and most dangerous face of a web of well-funded communist/socialist organizations that have been agitating against America for decades. ... Its agitation has provoked police killings and other violence, lawlessness and unrest in minority communities throughout the U.S. If allowed to continue, that agitation could devolve into anarchy and civil war. The BLM crowd appears to be spoiling for just such an outcome.”

Purged, too, from the BLM GNF website is one of its most outlandish demands: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear-family-structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ and collectively care for one another.” ... the Global Network scrubbed its website of its most offensive material in September 2020.

It is hard to overstate, too, the importance of Ferguson for the political transformation that convulses America to this day. Lest we forget, Garza, Cullors, and Marxists from across the country had converged in the mostly black St. Louis suburb on October 10 for a “Weekend of Resistance” to organize a nationwide movement with revolutionary demands that expanded well beyond police reform. And the FBI was certainly not wrong about the potential for mayhem. Travis Campbell of the University of Massachusetts tracked more than 1,600 BLM protests nationwide between 2014 and 2019 and published the results on May 13, 2021. Campbell found that “civilian homicides increased by 10% following protests.” Vox, by no means a conservative outlet, put the impact this way: “That means that, 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.”

Woke district attorneys elected across the United States consistently refused throughout 2020 to file charges against rioters and looters and simply released them back on the street to create mayhem once again. The rogue prosecutor movement seeks to replace district and state attorneys with new “progressive prosecutors” whose goal is to end prosecution of a variety of crimes, many of which are often associated with political violence, no matter what the law says.

Critical theory, which emerges in Horkheimer’s 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory,” married the dialectical approach of philosopher G. W. F. Hegel to Marxism’s emphasis on class conflict, Nietzschean nihilism, and Sigmund Freud’s work on the subconscious. It simply amounted to a barrage of criticism of all the institutions of America and Europe, in order to bring down the entire edifice. ... Under the watchful care if these committed Marxists, critical theory became a tool, sometimes sharp, sometimes blunt, with which to constantly either bleed or bludgeon all the institutions of Western society—the family, the church, the capitalist system, and the concept of a nation-state that beckons patriotism. All had to be destroyed, criticized to death, the better to substitute in their place new institutions that would suit the goals of Marxism: central planning, a command economy, the obliteration of the individual, the death of God.

Like BLM, CRT sees everything through the lens of race, and all societal disparities as a result of racism. CRT practitioners take from CT the criticism of all cultural institutions in order to fundamentally transform society but use race as the target. Indeed, the existence of disparities proves that racism is at play, and to deny this is racist. ... That CRT is a descendant of CT should be clear from its name alone, but journalists never mention the link when they write about it, because they would then have to admit that CRT is Marxist.

Exponents of CRT are also openly in opposition to liberal democracy and other Enlightenment values and offer the theory as a radical departure from the civil rights movement. Richard Delgado, a professor at the University of Alabama who is seen, along with [Derrick] Bell, as another leading proponent of CRT, writes that “Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

[Ibram X.] Kendi and [Robin] DiAngelo are examples of an improvisation that CRT has managed to pull: so-called anti-racism trainings that blossomed in 2020 following the death of George Floyd. Kendi and DiAngelo may be anti-capitalist, but they charge anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000 for sessions that can be as short as an hour or two. Their clients include corporations, which rob their shareholders to pay for these sham modern-day versions of Red Guard struggle sessions in Mao’s Cultural Revolution; Congress, which robs the taxpayer in this instance; and even school districts, which rob this time not only the taxpayer but also the schoolchildren who will have to go without other resources so that Kendi, DiAngelo, and their ilk can get paid.

Some of these CRT “trainings” teach young children that traits needed for success, such as punctuality, love of the written word, or hard work—attributes that used to be considered virtues—are functions of something called “whitism,” and therefore to be eschewed. The purpose here is not to succeed by joining the system, but by failing and then blaming the system, a grievance to be nurtured so that the aggrieved will then have enough built-in bile to overthrow the system.

There’s the recommended curricula and books of the far-left nonprofit Teaching for Change, which includes the writings of Howard Zinn and James Loewen—who wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me—both of whom are dedicated to tarnishing America’s Founding Fathers. One can also find the “Social Justice Standards” of the organization Learning for Justice, a project of the Southern Law Poverty Center. The Learning for Justice curriculum promises that, in grades 3 to 5, “Students will know that the United States was founded on protecting the economic interests of white, Christian men who owned property. In the process, it protected the institution of slavery.”

CONTINUED IN COMMENTS

[Brent Soderstrum · Rating 4 out of 5]

There appears to be a problem here. Either not enough people are reading this book or even though a lot of people are reading the book, they are afraid to write a review because others might call them names. Both possibilities are sad.

I had not even heard of BLM until George Floyd died in the Spring of 2020 in Minneapolis at the hands of a bad policeman. Then the riots and looting started throughout the United States in the Summer of 2020. Wait...they were peaceful protests right? No, the were not. Many people died and millions of dollars of damage were done. These riots were organized by BLM and ANTIFA. Not to protest the treatment of a drug addicted black man who didn't deserve to die, but to take advantage of that to bring about societal change to our nation. To bring about the Communist system that the founders of BLM have always been striding for. To destroy the nuclear family.

BLM's founders were brilliant in naming their organization. Do black lives matter? Of course they do. Anyone who disagrees with that is not a good person. Is BLM a good organization? No, they are out to destroy our country. But, if you criticize BLM you are labeled a racist. This book steps out and pulls back the curtain on what BLM really is. The main stream media will not tell you the truth about BLM because it doesn't fit their narrative. Tony Fauci should have named his science experimental organization Cute, Cuddly Puppies. Then he could have used puppies in torturous experiments and avoided the backlash he is now facing.

BLM and ANTIFA should be named domestic terrorist organizations. Instead, our country focuses on parents who go to school board meetings and speak up about the education of their children. Those people are the domestic terrorists. Our country is severely messed up and we are moving to exactly where BLM wants us to move to - a Communist nation.

[Leonard Janke · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a real mixed bag. Although there is good information about BLM and the some of the history of its founders there are also many problems.

To start with, the good:

The author definitely makes the case that all three of BLM's co-founders were avowed Marxists. Gonzalez also show that the current leader of BLM Grassroots is a Black Nationalist and documents the influence former members of the violent Weather Underground, along with out in the open Marxists like Angela Davis have had on BLM's founders. There are literally schools in the United States where radicals are trained by the likes of Eric Mann: a former Weatherman. Some of BLM's co-founders attended these. Gonzalez names the schools and provides sufficient footnotes to verify that this is true.

Gonzalez also presents interesting history of the Communist attempts to win over black people in the United States. Gonzalez emphasizes, however, that these attempts never came close to succeeding. Black people saw communists as just wanting to use and even sacrifice some of them as pawns in a bigger movement. Gonzalez discusses Marcus Garvey who actually thought white capitalists were more of a friend to black people than communists: capitalists, after all, did not care about anybody's race and just wanted to pay them to get some work done and make them a little money. Gonzalez emphasizes that black people have typically rejected violence and nationalism and that, historically, they have much preferred those seeking assimilation: Those, like Frederick Douglass, who admired the ideals of The Founders as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution but wanted to see them applied consistently.

Other interesting, though more recent, history is how BLM was able to successfully pressure DC into getting the FBI to back off investigating violence surrounding BLM protests or inspired by growing anti-police rhetoric. Because of this, Gonzalez suggests, we are not able to know much about how organized the 2020 protests were. At the same time, Gonzalez does provide evidence that they were far from being as "spontaneous" as was claimed. Along similar lines, Gonzalez documents how what he calls "rogue prosecutors" are reluctant to bring charges against those involved in criminal activity during the 2020 riots.

The book contains good information on how BLM's funding works: at least to the extent that it is possible to know given the elaborate structures set up to obscure where the money is coming from, how much is saved up and how it is being spent.

Although it is starting to get better known by folks on the right there is also good information on the history of critical studies and the influence of Marcuse in particular. One of the BLM co-founders was a student of Marcuse. Gonzalez documents how Marcuse emphasized that appeals to America's middle class had and were likely to continue to fail. As such Marcuse emphasized appealing to America's underclasses and its excluded. Gonzalez has some interesting speculation on Marcuse's ideas for attacking American through attacks on its sexual mores and its notions regarding family. Gonzalez feels that BLM is putting these ideas into practice.

As for the problems:

Unfortunately, the books starts off showing its bias rather quickly by implying that Trump did not want to see violence at the January 6 riot. Gonzalez is able to quote a sentence from Trump saying this but anyone who honestly looks at the big picture of the day can see otherwise. For example, Trump delayed tweeting out for the mob to go home when it was clear violence was underway and he actually took glee in what was happening. Implying Trump was not hoping for violence that day is a disingenuous way to start a book that, presumably, the author wants folks across the political spectrum to read.

There are other more major problems throughout the book. One is a claim that it is false that the Founders saw black people as inferior. Unfortunately, they did. Although most of the Founders not in the South were opposed to slavery it did not follow that they regarded black people as equal. Jefferson, for instance, wanted to see slavery end. He also thought that although black people were morally equal to white people they were not intellectually equal. This was a common view throughout the United States even after the Civil War and never seriously began to recede until well into the last half of the 20th century.

A particularly problematic chapter is the one covering "Critical Race Theory". Here Gonzalez sets up several claims regarding Critical Race Theory that he does not back up. He claims that CRT advocates insurrection and the notion that any disparity across races is due to discrimination. He does not provide references to back this up. Although I read all of Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement and I was paying close attention for it, I never saw any advocacy of violence. Similarly, there was no claim that disparity, by itself, is sufficient to prove discrimination.

The mistake Gonzalez makes is to lump Kendi and DiAngelo in with critical race theorists. Neither of them are. Gonzalez could argue that they are "CRT adjacent" or part of what has become "CRT praxis" but, if so, he would need to explicitly call out this distinction. Also attacking CRT as being Marxist needs some further explanation. Although CRT is indeed a type of critical studies which originated with Marxist thinkers there is no typical Marxist rhetoric in CRT writings. This is even if you, wrongly, include Kendi as a critical race theorist. Although calls for wealth redistribution through reparations and affirmative action are central to CRT Gonzales does not document who should own the means of production. Even Kendi's proposals to try and achieve greater wealth equality are explicitly qualified as being temporary. Now, it could be that despite this CRT is still rightly regarded as Marxist or that it would inevitably lead to Marxism if implemented but Gonzalez needs to pro-actively deal with such objections before concluding CRT is Marxist.

Despite the problems, I feel that there is much good information in this book regarding BLM. As Gonzalez says the Marxist origins of BLM are not widely know since the media does not really cover BLM honestly but rather "covers" for them. At the same time the deficiencies in the book are going to cause problems with political partisans which most people, honestly, are. Right wing partisans will not be able to identify the errors and will pick up some false beliefs. Left wing partisans, by contrast, will easily be able to identify the problems but will use them as an excuse to dismiss the whole work. There seems to be the basis for a much better book here. Maybe somebody will pick up that project at some point?

[KYLE LLLLOWRY · Rating 5 out of 5]

its bigger than black and white... its the problem with the whole way of life.. WE CANT CHANGE OVER NIGHT✊🏽✊🏽✊🏽✊🏽

[Mark Rimelspach · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book focuses on BLM and CRT and how this could lead to Marxism in the United States. I do not agree with this concept and do not believe the data and facts support it either. The US is never going to be communist, Marxist or socialist which is what conservatives fear monger will happen whenever anyone questions the current system and suggest things could be more fair. Under the current system, 10% of the population control 70% of the wealth in this country. There are a few who have moved up from poverty into this group but most were born with wealth and maintain that status. The US allowed slavery for a century and Jim Crow for decades after that which insured many of the black population are without wealth. Without wealth, the current system does not provide fair opportunities for education, health, housing and other basics to move up from poverty. Things could be more fair such as the wealthy paying more taxes to help those in poverty which is reasonable but that does not imply we are going to become communist.

As far as CRT goes, the teaching of US history should contain both the good and the bad. To hide hide or gloss over slavery, Jim Crow and other mistakes is wrong. We should recognise the mistakes and learn from them. This does not traumatise but makes us more aware that things can and should be handled better for all of us in the future.

We proclaim we are a melting pot and provide an opportunity for all to improve but we have not lived up to that motto. BLM and CRT are the results of the US not offering economic opportunities for all. Is all they want is a fighting chance to improve by having the basics opportunities afforded to the top 10%. This is not a call for communism but just a call for a level playing field. Violence breaks out when despair sets in when there is no hope to improve or move up which the current system lets happen to many groups. Improve the current system so all have a chance. This is not a call for communism but for basic human compassion and fairness.

Communism is not going to somehow sneak in the back door.

[John F · Rating 1 out of 5]

Right wing claptrap, fabrications. The author in his declining years has become a Koch sycophant, fabricating stories in the vein of Julius Streicher who got the noose at the Nurnberg trials. (Yes, back in the forties HATE speech could get you into serious trouble). The largesse of the Koch empire is a welfare organization for many writers like the author who otherwise, would be performing menial manual labor of which they have a mortal fear. Books like this are swallowed up by those who have a need for this kind of drivel.

[Robert G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A “must read” for all favoring BLM as meritorious

Well researched and clearly laid out are the origins of CT, CRT, and BLM. The baleful impact of supporting seemingly positive efforts to correct societal ills must be understood if progress is to be made.

[Kathleen Vogt]

Awesome read!

Because the author told the whole truth about America and the danger that we face in America. We do not to fall to Marxism or Communism or Socialism.a

[Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is not the "new" civil rights movement. It is a revolutionary Marxist organization that aims to dismantle the founding principles of the United States and is firmly planted in the revolutionary ideas of the New Left and the Black Liberation Movement. Heritage Foundation scholar Mike Gonzalez does an outstanding job in his latest book, BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution uncovering the truths about the BLM movement that has held the attention of Americans since 2014.

Do You Agree With Dred Scott?

In the US, our founding documents have been dominated by two historical streams of thought. The prevailing view is that “all men are created equal” and are endowed with “unalienable rights” from "their Creator." The second view holds that all [white] men are created equal, and they are the only race entitled to unalienable rights.

For most, the understanding that our founding documents apply to all men was settled during our Civil War and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Yet, as Gonzalez highlights in chapter 1 “The Founding v. Slavery,” some still hold to the view that affirmed the Supreme Court's worst decision to date, the 1860 Dred Scott decision.[1]

This was a brilliant way of shedding light on the current dialogue surrounding BLM and Critical Race Theory (CRT). According to Chief Justice Taney's twisted view, “The doctrine of 1776, that all (white) men ‘are created free and equal,’ is universally accepted and made the basis of all our institutions.”[2] CRT scholars and BLM activists today seem to still agree with Chief Justice Taney.

Communists of the 1920s

Following the opening challenge to the idea of institutional racism, Gonzalez does an excellent job laying out the roots of BLM with a brief history of communist activity in the US from the 1920s through the Civil Rights movement of the ‘60s.

The United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) worked to break the US in two during the 1920s, as it later did with Korea and Germany. The USSR attempted but failed to use Communist Party USA (CPUSA) to grab hold of a mass movement.[3] A part of this effort was to use black intellectuals of the time to stir division. Claude McKay (1922), Langston Hughes (1932), and Paul Robeson (1950) all visited the USSR in the early 20th Century. The USSR and these black luminaries took active roles in linking the liberation desires of oppressed blacks to the political objects of the Soviets.[4] In the early 20th Century, the NAACP was quoted in an FBI report as saying, “If Communists gained influence among” America’s blacks “they would not hesitate for a moment to foment racial strife and dissension,” according to Gonzales, the seeds of division planted a century ago are bearing fruit today.[5]

1960s Revolutionaries

During the 1960s, the idea of America’s founding as being for only “white” people or “all” people continued. This division was seen in the mutual hostility between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, who dismissed MLK as a “20th Century or modern Uncle Tom.”[6] These men were leaders of two different movements. MLK was the image of the Civil Rights Movement, while X was the image of the Black Liberation Movement.

BLM is a continuation of the Black Liberation Movement, as Alicia Garza, one of the founders of BLM likes to repeat, “BLM, BLM” noting the ties to the original BLM.[7] These ties are important in understanding Black Lives Matter philosophy and worldview. The Black Liberation Movement of the ‘60s was heavily shaped by Marxist and Maoist ideas, just as the earlier generation was influenced by the USSR’s efforts through CPUSA. The ideas of the ‘60s New Left born out of the Frankfurt School and lived out through the Black Panther Party and Weather Underground carry on today through BLM’s activities.

A significant influence on the founders of BLM is Angela Davis. Davis studied Critical Theory under Herbert Marcuse after meeting him at a Cuban Missile Crisis rally. Marcuse was one of the Frankfurt School scholars that developed Critical Theory, which aims at demolishing Western institutions to induce communism.[8] Davis said, “I have always been a communist,” critical theory disciplines are to be used as “the intellectual arm of the revolution,” and that multiculturalism should be a weapon to dismantle “racist, sexist, homophobic, economically exploitive institutions.”[9]

Black Lives Matter

In the last third of BLM, Gonzalez explores how BLM-Global has a political action committee, bills in Congress, millions of dollars in hand, a curriculum being disseminated to 14,000 school districts, a foreign policy, and a sympathetic media.[10] BLM is well organized, and their aim is to overthrow the existing constitutional order by dismantling “the organizing principle of this society” in order to abolish the free-market and liberal democratic system and remake America along Marxist lines.[11] This was clear following the murder of George Floyd. Across the nation, there were approximately 11,000 demonstrations and 570 riots.[12]

These violent demonstrations should be no surprise, as BLM has ties to pro-Maoist organizations, and similar to Mao’s Red Guards during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, they had the government’s support. For example, in Portland where local officials rejected federal help with riots, and prosecutors tossed out the cases and released the rioters associated with BLM and Antifa.[13] The Maoist tactics were likely passed on from the New Left Weather Underground members that mentored BLM leaders. For instance, Weatherman Eric Mann trained BLM’s Patrisse Cullors for ten years at the Labor/Community Strategy Center, which Mann describes as the “Harvard of Revolutionary graduate schools,” that seeks to build an “anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-fascist united front.”[14]

The activities of BLM did not go completely unnoticed by Law Enforcement. In 2017 the FBI wanted to look into “Black Identity Extremists” (BIE) such as BLM, but the media, Congressional Black Caucus, and other liberal groups pressured the FBI to not pursue their investigation.[15] Four years later, it looks like the political will to investigate BLM is all but gone, with the highest leaders in our land beating a drum against far-right “extremist” organizations.

Conclusion

Gonzalez’s work in BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution is well worth the time to read. This review only touched on a limited amount of the material presented. He also includes an enlightening chapter on Antifa and how it became the safe space for politicians to criticize the unrest of 2020. He further goes into great detail on BLM-Global’s sources of funding. By the end of the book, it is clear that BLM is not the “new” civil rights movement. It is a revolutionary Marxist organization that aims to dismantle the founding principles of the United States.

For more reviews please go to: https://www.findinglifeintheword.com

Notes

[1] Mike Gonzalez, BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution (New York: Encounter, 2021), 5, https://www.amazon.com/dp/1641772239/....
[2] Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1860), https://www.loc.gov/resource/llst.022.
[3] Gonzalez, BLM, 37.
[4] Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: New York Review of Books, 1967), 34, quoted in Gonzalez, BLM, 37.
[5] Gonzalez, BLM, 46.
[6] Deneen L Brown, “Martin Luther King Jr. met Malcolm X just once,” Washington Post, January 4, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/r....
[7] Gonzalez, BLM, 65.
[8] Ibid., 66.
[9] Mike Gonzalez, “Angela Davis and the Distortion of Diversity,” The Heritage Foundation, May 4, 2018, https://www.heritage.org/civil-societ....
[10] Gonzalez, BLM, xi; 176.
[11] Ibid., xv-xvii.
[12] Roudabeh Kishi and Sam Jones, Demonstrations and Political Violence in America: New Data for Summer 2020 (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, 2020), https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demo....
[13] Gonzalez, BLM, xx; xix.
[14] Ibid., xxv.
[15] Ibid., xxvii.

[Nancy Bandusky · Rating 4 out of 5]

In reading Gonzalez’ informative BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution, all the experiences I’d heard directly from students at community colleges, public universities, and private universities made sense. It is not a question of a few (or rather many) “got-an-issue” professors, but rather it is the attempt of the BLM organization to destroy the United States of America and replace it with a Marxist foundation.

Gonzalez explains how the leaders of BLM are “self-avowed Marxists-Leninists”, who want to eliminate natural rights: speech, conscience, and property. They use Critical Race Theory (and other Critical Theories) as a tool to destroy “all the institutions of Western society”; their targets are the “family, the church, the capitalist system, and the concept of a nation-state”, all while claiming to care about black lives. But BLM does not care about black lives. They don’t want black people to succeed, instead they want black people to fail, to then blame the system, to nurse that grievance so they will attempt to overthrow the system.

The book takes the reader through history to present day, explaining how we have been lied to by BLM and the media; along with explaining Critical Theory, in particular Critical Race Theory, the author provides suggestions on how to fight this Marxist revolution. To stand against them comes with a price, but the alternative is too terrifying to contemplate.

The truth must be told because the emperor has no clothes.

[Katie Hilton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very important book. America is being attacked by new Marxist groups, one of the most successful being BLM. The name-calling masks a serious agenda on the part of a small but powerful group.

[Kennard V · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well researched and written warning about the avowed Marxists who founded Black lives Matter and their supporters. I would recommend it to all level headed conservative and liberal thinkers.

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The message is worthy but between the bad editing and overwhelming amounts of names and dates it just gets lost.

[Judy McDonnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a reckless terrorist organization

The damage from the BLM race riots surpassed several billion dollars. It wiped out countless businesses, crushed neighborhoods, and communities, and took more lives and dreams than will ever be accounted for, but that’s nothing compared to the $17 billion that Netflix blew on programming in just one year. Much of it was paid for by ordinary Americans, insurance companies, and non-industry types.

BLM is a racist and Marxist organization which doesn’t value reason, nor does it want coexistence. It promotes anarchy and total dominance of the society that soon may find friends on the left that would include Islamists who may have their own agenda to use this momentum to promote their own religious ideologies. BLM does not need sympathy; it needs to be treated severely for the crimes they commit with enhanced strength for law enforcement.

[Randy Derby · Rating 5 out of 5]

BLM - M stands for Marxism

Mike Gonzalez has done a great job explaining what BLM and CRT are really about. It’s a smokescreen for disinformation and lies. Progressives, socialists, and their adherents hide under the umbrella of Communism. The Culture of the Lie, the Culture of Death and a massive campaign of disinformation is what Black Lives Matter is really about. I have nothing but contempt for the founders of BLM! I love the United States of America. Semper Fi!

[Terrance D Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

BLM - Equity v. Equality

I grew up the turbulent times of the '50s and '60 and personally saw first hand racism especially in the south where I saw the "white and black only signs" attached to various buildings. I've served on Civil Rights and Fair & Impartial committees. This BLM book is well researched, written, and will enlighten the reader of what BLM really is and is doing to our country and worldwide!