People march in a Black Lives Matter rally in Oklahoma City, Sunday, July 10, 2016. Police estimated the crowd at the rally as 2,000 to 2,500 people. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
During a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas– in response to the police shootings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota– people didn’t expect the protest would end with someone shooting five police officers dead and injuring nine more.
But no one was surprised that it happened either.
That’s because movement activists have intentionally increased their inflammatory anti-white racial hatred since Black Lives Matter was created and officially organized in the last couple of years. It has peddled lies regarding the numbers of “unarmed blacks” shot by police in the face of clear statistical evidence to the contrary. It has defiantly increased its anti-cop rhetoric — “What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want them? Now,” “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon!” — and has taken to taunting and assaulting officers as these racial extremists “demonstrate” and demand “justice” for blacks who have been, in many cases, rightly shot by police.
Though the shooter, Micah Xavier Johnson — himself a black radical — wasn’t an official member of Black Lives Matter, he acknowledged having been influenced by their program of black racial solidarity. He was attracted to their anti-white and anti-cop rhetoric. He was upset that blacks continued to be unjustifiably shot by police and decided to retaliate in kind, telling police negotiators that he wanted to “kill white people, especially white officers.”
Black Lives Matter was the catalyst for Johnson to act on his racial anger and paranoia.
Black Lives Matter is the same group that President Obama — a former community organizer and social agitator — has frequently praised and defended and invited to the White House. The last invitation — and meeting — occurred only hours after the memorial service for the Dallas police officers in which Obama himself delivered his politicized eulogy.
With all of this in mind, people need moral clarification.
Some have suggested that Black Lives Matter is simply an extension of the civil rights movement, attempting to extend moral justification to an immoral group. To claim so is offensive, and it trivializes the character, sacrifices, risks, and accomplishments of what civil rights activists achieved with fewer resources and fewer rights in a much more racist society. But the past week’s events should have answered that suggestion with unblemished certainty. The Black Lives Matter movement isn’t a successor to the civil rights movement. Black Lives Matter lacks the moral authority present during the civil rights movement. Again, it calls for violence against cops. With its determined resistance to facts and evidence related to the police-involved shootings of blacks, Black Lives Matter has morally failed to convince the consciousness of those outside its racialized bubble as to the sincerity of the cause.
Black Lives Matter encourages violence and chaos, and its activists and supporters rarely condemn it. Instead, these blacktivists consistently seek to provoke, antagonize, frustrate and offend the people they claim to need to hear their message. It’s an organization of belligerent, wannabe revolutionaries, who take to rioting, pillaging, and burning down local businesses as they did in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore when activists “march” for “justice.” In essence, it has no moral agenda.
Black Lives Matter isn’t a civil rights offshoot — not even close. Instead, it is the ideological, racial, and theatrical offspring of the 1960s-era black power movement. Black Lives Matter’s aggressive and contentious tactics demonstrate as much — the raised black fists and the regurgitated revolutionary chants, the celebration of black racial pride and solidarity, and their increasingly violent demands for varying definitions of “justice.”
The social disruptions of Black Lives Matter are simply hostile demonstrations of racial identity politics and the look-at-us melodrama that descends directly from the black power movement. Despite its claim that “black lives matter,” the only black lives that matter to these racial radicals are members and supporters of Black Lives Matter — at the expense of everyone else.
Notwithstanding its professed concern about the small percentage of black criminals, suspected criminals, and other blacks shot by police, at its core, Black Lives Matter is a pathologically narcissistic movement just like its’ 60s-era predecessor.
The lack of courageous condemnation of Black Lives Matter by good and decent people ensures more shootings of police officers in neighborhoods that desperately need their presence to ensure the safety of those who cannot afford to leave.
Things are going to get worse before they get better.
Derryck Green is a political commentator, writer, and member of Project 21, a national leadership network of black conservatives. He earned his Master of Arts in Theological Studies from Fuller Theological Seminary and his doctorate in Theology and Spiritual Leadership with a concentration in Identity Formation from Azusa Pacific University. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.