Leaders of the Lynch Mob
By Matthew Vadum
Leaders of the “Black Lives Matter” movement are obliquely endorsing killing cops and rioting as legitimate forms of political activism as the radical community organizers of the so-called Black Spring ramp up political violence and civil unrest.
For example, on-the-record statements by Twitter stars DeRay Mckesson, 29 and Johnetta Elzie, 26, are all over the Internet. Mckesson (Twitter handle: @deray) and Elzie (Twitter handle: @Nettaaaaaaaa) are influential activists who have become legacy-media darlings by using social media to push their racial-grievance agenda.
A very long, fawning profile of the duo by writer Jay Caspian Kang, who in his day job is an editor at The New Yorker magazine, elucidates what they believe.
Both of these community organizers bounce between reverence for nonviolent action and a refusal to condemn violent activism, which this writer would argue is tantamount to endorsing violent activism.
Mckesson and Elzie believe that the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. has been distorted.
“He is held up as an avatar of genteel protest,” Kang writes, “invoked by conservative politicians and leaders in the black community as a way to discredit their movement.”
But they “frequently point out that King was in fact a revolutionary who believed in the power of confrontation, and that it’s a crime against American history to confuse the real King with an appealingly passive one,” Kang writes.
“To make their point, they participated in an action called #ReclaimMLK, which sought to counter ‘efforts to reduce a long history marred with the blood of countless women and men into iconic images of men in suits behind pulpits.'”
“If you bring up nonviolence as the only civilized way to effect change, they will recite King’s words: ‘A riot is the language of the unheard,’ or they will say they don’t condone rioting, but they understand it,” he writes.
The New York Times Magazine notes, almost in passing, that respected activist Ashley Yates “created T-shirts and hoodies that read ‘ASSATA TAUGHT ME’ — a reference to the former Black Panther Party member Assata Shakur — and that became part of the protest iconography.”
Understandably, the article doesn’t bother to explain the historical significance of Shakur, a black fugitive from American justice who was long ago granted asylum by Communist Cuba. Doing so would disrupt the narrative that dogmatically reinforces the idea that Black Lives Matter must be viewed by all as a noble, nonviolent movement and that any suggestion to the contrary is inherently malevolent and racist. The left effected the same kind of whitewash with the rapists and fire-bombers of the ridiculously violent Occupy Wall Street movement even in the face of overwhelming evidence of rampant criminality among its activists and supporters.
