“Pigs in a blanket. Fry like bacon!” chanted the group, encouraging violence against police officers. That was just five years ago.
Now that group, the once unpopular Black Lives Matter (BLM), enjoys 62-percent approval among likely voters, according to Rasmussen.
That means this radical organization is more popular than the president, Joe Biden, Congress, big business, the media, religious institutions, and even the pope, pointed out Fox News host Tucker Carlson last night. In fact, not only is BLM now essentially a “political party,” averred the commentator, but it may now “be the single most powerful party in the United States.”
Moreover, imagine “a world where you are punished for questioning the behavior of the president or for insulting your local mayor,” Carlson later stated. “You probably can’t imagine that because it’s too bizarre. It is un-American — but that is where we are right now.”
“Black Lives Matter has changed the rules,” the host continued, “and here is the first new rule: No criticizing Black Lives Matter.”
Sound like an exaggeration? Well, consider that in Vermont, Windsor School principal Tiffany Riley is currently on administrative leave and will most certainly lose her job for posting statements to her personal Facebook account that the Mount Ascutney School District Board said reflected “ignorance, prejudice, and lack of judgement.”
Superintendent David Baker went even further. He said he’d he assumed Riley’s account had been “hacked” for her to have posted something with “racial overtones and what I define as pretty much outright racist in my values system.” So what did she say? Brace yourself…
According to the school board, Riley wrote last Wednesday:
I firmly believe that Black Lives Matter, but I DO NOT agree with the coercive measures taken to get to this point across; some of which are falsified in an attempt to prove a point. While I want to get behind BLM, I do not think people should be made to feel they have to choose black race over human race. While I understand the urgency to feel compelled to advocate for black lives, what about our fellow law enforcement? What about all others who advocate for and demand equity for all? Just because I don’t walk around with a BLM sign should not mean I am a racist.
The board then mentioned that the above was “followed later by a follow up Facebook post, which acknowledged no culpability, expressed no specific contrition or empathy, and showed no humility.”
Translation: Riley didn’t take the knee, so she got the boot. The Khmer Rouge would be proud.
But Riley isn’t alone. The same iron-muzzle phenomenon has claimed dozens of people, many high-profile, in recent weeks. Among them is University of Chicago economics professor Harald Uhlig, who saw the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago cut ties with him after he opined that BLM had “torpedoed itself” by embracing the “hashtag defund the police”; and Sacramento Kings play-by-play announcer Grant Napear, who lost his job for tweeting “All Lives Matter…Every Single One!”
So “Black Lives Matter now enjoys almost complete immunity from criticism,” Carlson stated. “This is unprecedented for an American political movement, but Black Lives Matter is more powerful than that. It has singlehandedly revised our moral framework.”
“Affirming the fundamental equality of all people is now considered hate speech,” he further lamented (video below). “You can be fired for saying it. Again, many people have been. This is a dangerous moment.”
Now you know why powerful people everywhere — even many Republicans — are taking a knee before BLM. The message is clear: That there’s “systemic racism” in America, a police war on blacks, and that the country is fundamentally flawed are now articles of faith. Questioning them is heresy — and anyone who does so will be dealt with harshly.
We will hurt you.
We will end your career.
We will destroy your reputation.
Get in line.
“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”
Of course, something that can’t be criticized can’t be properly vetted — and vetting is the last thing BLM wants. Just consider its past actions. In the video below, BLM protesters can be heard chanting “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!” in 2014, and “Pigs in a blanket. Fry like bacon!” in 2015.
Yet its official positions are equally bad. Aside from wanting the abolition of police, they also demand the “repeal of all immigration restrictions,” “the legalization of sex work,” “the destruction of the nuclear family,” and “the forced reallocation of farmland” (à la Zimbabwe), according to Carlson.
There’s more. BLM also wants “race-based reparations specifically, quote, ‘in the form of a guaranteed minimum livable income for all black people,’” the host continued. But this wealth transfer wouldn’t just be for descendants of slaves, but also for African and Caribbean immigrants, “who on average now earn more than native-born Americans,” Carlson adds.
Many of BLM’s radical positions can be seen at its website (at least for now) here. Its older “Guiding Principles“ page, now removed from its site, can be found via an archiving service here.
One of the “lowlights” is found under the latter’s “Black Villages” tab, where it states, “We are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, and especially ‘our’ children, to the degree that mothers, parents and children are comfortable.”
Given that family breakdown plagues the black community — approximately 72 percent of black American children are now born to single mothers — it isn’t just odd that BLM would talk about disrupting the “nuclear family structure requirement.” It’s also curious, given that fatherlessness is a major problem here, that BLM mentions “parents” and then redundantly “mothers,” but not fathers. Do black dads matter?
But none of this matters to the pseudo-elites — nor does the fact that police are actually more likely to kill white than black criminal suspects. For aside from the powerful people taking both a knee and the Fifth on speaking Truth, BLM is also one of many leftist race-agitator groups that recently received $454 million from corporate America.
So burning, looting, and rioting are okay and may even be encouraged by the “space” to “destroy” demagogues. But dare criticize BLM, and the “woke” cancel cultists may come and put you, and your speech, to sleep.
Image: The All-Nite Images/Wikimedia Commons
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
