Althouse: "What Happened To Black Lives Matter?"

June 21, 2017

"What Happened To Black Lives Matter?"

The title of this long Buzzfeed article is a question I've been asking, but I'm not sure if you'll find much of an answer there.

47 comments:

AllenS said...: They were replaced in the news by white women with pussy hats.; 6/21/17, 6:05 PM
YoungHegelian said...: What's "happening" & happened to BLM is what happens to all the black activist groups that aren't hard-core black nationalist or hard Left --- they get greenmailed out of existence.

I'm sure that the leadership of BLM has, by now, had multiple offers from all sorts of lefty foundations, activist organizations like OFA, & academic institutions. They've been told that "By Golly, we here at blah-blah-blah need folks with your moral courage & connections in the black community. Come help us build social justice. Here's your offer letter."

And, shazzam!, a hard-core street radical has just found his/herself a sinecure for life. Sure beats hustling for nickels & dimes.; 6/21/17, 6:07 PM
n.n said...: [class] diversity followed a progressive path.

Moral imperatives, including: individual dignity and intrinsic value; natural and personal imperatives. Go forth and reconcile.; 6/21/17, 6:09 PM
Michael K said...: Maybe Soros lost interest when Hillary lost.

I always felt they were Astroturf anyway.; 6/21/17, 6:13 PM
Oso Negro said...: "the moral authority of young black activists" was an interesting phrase. I suppose they claimed it for themselves. I will be impressed if they effectively BLM the black in black violence in Chicago. But I would be delighted if another Marcus Garvey emerges. Liberia could be a "safe space" from the old white devils.; 6/21/17, 6:20 PM
rcocean said...: What happened?

Soros took most of the funding and gave it to guys who wear masks, and beat up Conservatives.; 6/21/17, 6:21 PM
gspencer said...: "What happened to Black Lives Matter?"

Why, nothing actually.

It remains the hate-everyone-except-blacks, with particular hatred for Whitey, racist organization it's always been right from its start.; 6/21/17, 6:30 PM
My name goes here. said...: "What happened to BLM?"

There was an election, Ann.

Seriously, did *anyone* (other than the "members" of BLM) ever think they were a real, sustainable organization?

Even if Hillary had won, BLM would have been pushed to the back of the bus.

Let me restate that, *especially* if Hillary has won, BLM would have been pushed to the back of the bus.

Or under it.; 6/21/17, 6:32 PM
Patrick said...: The answer is that the organization ceased being useful to the Democrat party. Or the dems figured out thatBLM wad never that useful to them anyway.; 6/21/17, 7:01 PM
Rae said...: Antifa is the new black.; 6/21/17, 7:04 PM
ThreeSheets said...: The election is over. Against Romney it was the War on Women and against Trump it was BLM. After the election their usefulness is gone. Kind of like Cindy Sheehan.

In three more years there will be another "spontaneous" movement with which to run against Republicans.; 6/21/17, 7:05 PM
Fen said...: The CIA got them all addicted to Meth. Or was that the KGB? I'm having trouble keeping up.; 6/21/17, 7:16 PM
Gahrie said...: I chalk it up to incompetence. The BLM was nothing but a bunch of street thugs and ignorant wannabes, and thus the movement collapsed.; 6/21/17, 7:38 PM
khesanh0802 said...: Funny, I asked myself that question the other day in light of the Not Guilty verdict in MSP. Couple of things: the BLM people no longer have Obama to protect and encourage them; but the real problem is there is not a strong leader to unite the various factions that are spinning around that particular movement - underscores how important Martin Luther King was to the civil rights movement.

Is white on black police violence more important than self-inflicted violence as a rallying point? It's hard to maintain a storyline when there are so many Black and Hispanic cops as well as a large number of black chiefs across the country. There appear to be so many problems in the black community, education probably foremost (but I am white so I'm not sure), that it's difficult to maintain motivation for a relatively small number of instances where "justice" may, or may not, have been served.; 6/21/17, 7:48 PM
Swede said...: They.....went to live on a farm.

With Code Pink.

Where they're both very happy with ponies and goats and chickens.; 6/21/17, 7:50 PM
Gahrie said...: There appear to be so many problems in the black community, education probably foremost

No..that's a symptom. The disease is the destruction of family and faith in the Black community.; 6/21/17, 7:57 PM
Balfegor said...: At the point they started arguing earnestly that it was racist to claim that "All lives matter," they had already lost. They just didn't realise it.; 6/21/17, 8:18 PM
traditionalguy said...: Soros has re-directed the paid Riot organizers for hard to connect loners playing mentally ill snipers. I believe he said one down and 216 to go. He sent a CIA wetwork team on loan to kill Scalise, but he did not get his money's worth.; 6/21/17, 8:39 PM
clint said...: The riots somehow failed to motivate the black voters to turn out with the same enthusiasm that they felt for President Obama.

Go figure.; 6/21/17, 8:52 PM
Bob Loblaw said...: What happened? Same thing as OWS. They were always a creature of the Democrats and the left. They were marketed by free friendly media, they got money from Acorn-style groups, their leaders made money and got advice from experts...

Until it was clear they were hurting the Democrats. Then it all dried up. BLM who?; 6/21/17, 9:49 PM
Anonymous said...: Balfegor:
It would have been so easy to come up with a slogan that would clarify what they sometimes claim to mean: 'Black Lives Also Matter' or (for those who think BLAM would have unfortunate connotations) 'Black Lives Matter, Too'. That would make it clear that they're primarily worried about black lives, but don't mean to imply that non-black lives do not matter. The fact that they insist on excluding all lives except black lives by making it BLM, not BLAM or BLMT, makes it clear that non-black lives do not in fact matter to them.; 6/21/17, 9:55 PM
Unknown said...: The answer is: Who gives a crap.; 6/21/17, 10:45 PM
Fen said...: Oh... I see it now. Most of their activist base is either back in jail or shot down while being "mostly peaceful".

You think I'm joking but...; 6/21/17, 11:13 PM
Fen said...: "Would have been easy to come up with a slogan -"

The Marxists who co-opted the movement would never allow that. It wasn't about saving black lives, it was about driving a wedge into racial relations, to keep us divided while empowering "community organizers".

Same thing with the Marxists behind the Teach Men Not To Rape meme. I had female friends on FB promoting it. I had to ask "all the men we know would take a beat down to pull a rapist off you, they would literally sacrifice their life to save a female stranger from rape, and you have the nerve to lecture them about rape? What on earth made you think this kind of messaging would not be rejected as a vile offense?". In hindsight, it's obvious the meme was intended to pit women and men against women. It had nothing to do with preventing rape. Fuckin Marxists corrupt everything they touch.

"I fucking hate Thenns" - Tibore, Game of Thrones; 6/21/17, 11:23 PM
Fen said...: Edit, pit women and men against EACH OTHER; 6/21/17, 11:25 PM
JAORE said...: What happened to Code Pink when Obama won the White House?
What happened to OWS?

Net value went negative.; 6/22/17, 12:19 AM
Achilles said...: Fen said...
Edit, pit women and men against EACH OTHER

Don't forget shaming women into voting a particular way. Or black people. They rail about white males but they save special hatred and vitriol for women and black people that leave the plantation.; 6/22/17, 12:35 AM
Yancey Ward said...: I am guessing the funding was pulled for what were believed to be more effective campaigns. BLM is one the things that got Trump elected- the funding should have been pulled long before last November.; 6/22/17, 1:50 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: Interesting question. One thought is that BLM was always cynically anti-black, and the black community finally realized it. It had been ginned up to build a stronger black interest/voting block, but they didn't pull through in the 2016 election. Timing was off, peaking too soon. The problem is that BLM hurt the black community. There is a very good reason that the prisons are full of blacks, and the level of violence in inner city poor black communities is many times higher than throughout much of the country. And that is because of the extraordinarily high number of lawless, violent, uncivilized, young black males in these communities. The level of in-wedlock births is almost nonexistent there, which, ultimately, means that the young males are not properly civilized as they grow up. Compounding this is the high number of males killed or in prison, who should be raising their sons instead. The situation in many of these communities is dire. Without proper male role models and control over the next generation, the only thing standing between the young violent thugs and their potential victims, primarily poor black females, young, and elderly, were the police. And the big demand of BLM was for essentially less vigorous policing. Ultimately, they got their demand, their less vigorous policing, and, what shouldn't have surprised anyone, the level of black on black violence increased. The death toll for poor inner city blacks rose. And the attitude throughout much of the country is that if they, as a community, want to live that way, then fine. Just don't bring your gangs and your violence where we all live. But, we will support you if you want the police to start aggressively policing their young black thug male population. And, I think that a lot of those poor black inner city communities are starting to wake up to the reality that their support of BLM has made life in their already shitty communities even shittier. Hard to keep enthusiasm for a movement whose primary result has been more dead community members.

I also suspect that a number of members of those communities realize that their official heroes, like Trayvon Martin, Big Mike Bown, etc, were precisely the type of violent predators whom they needed the police to protect them against. Both those young black men died, in part, because they had callously attempted to kill their ultimate slayers. Not the best poster boys, but, instead, a constant reminder to all of why BLM was so bad for the black community. Yes, they are the sons and baby daddies of black community members. But statistically, most of their ultimate victims, if they had not died young, would have been other blacks.; 6/22/17, 3:50 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: "I am guessing the funding was pulled for what were believed to be more effective campaigns. BLM is one the things that got Trump elected- the funding should have been pulled long before last November."

I think that it is fairly clear that a lot of the Soros (etc) money is now going into the Resistance, Antifa, etc. most of the country doesn't care about poor inner city blacks killing other poor inner city blacks. They do care about the white middle class deplorables who voted Trump into office.; 6/22/17, 4:02 AM
john marzan said...: Dallas?; 6/22/17, 4:09 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: Another issue that was mentioned in an article I read yesterday, is that BLM is now very tightly controlled, top down, and that much of the energy is going into fighting for position in the hierarchy. Which shows, as usual, that the left in this country is not good with organic grass roots activism. Why they cannot generate the equivalent of the Tea Party movement. Whenever a grass roots movement gets going on the left, it is very quickly suborned, formally organized, and become another Dem party constituency, and, I suspect that a large part of it is the money. They have to organize in order to acquire the Soros (etc) millions, because the money comes with strings attached, and distribution of the money inevitably is based on the number of bodies that different leaders can provide, to the voting booth, to the protest line, etc. Top down is great when you are passing out money, but works badly with truly organic, populous movements.; 6/22/17, 4:19 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: "There appear to be so many problems in the black community, education probably foremost

No..that's a symptom. The disease is the destruction of family and faith in the Black community."

One of the things that stuck with me when I started college, almost 50 years ago, was reading the 1965 Moynihan Report (The Negro Family: The Case For National Action). In the linked wikipedia article:

In the introduction to his report, Moynihan said that "the gap between the Negro and most other groups in American society is widening."[6] He also said that the collapse of the nuclear family in the black lower class would preserve the gap between possibilities for Negroes and other groups and favor other ethnic groups. He acknowledged the continued existence of racism and discrimination within society, despite the victories that blacks had won by civil rights legislation.[6]
...
More than 30 years later, S. Craig Watkins described Moynihan's conclusions: Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (1998):

The report concluded that the structure of family life in the black community constituted a 'tangle of pathology... capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world,' and that 'at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.' Also, the report argued that the matriarchal structure of black culture weakened the ability of black men to function as authority figures. That particular notion of black familial life has become a widespread, if not dominant, paradigm for comprehending the social and economic disintegration of late 20th-century black urban life.[8]

In that half century, things have gotten far worse in poor black inner city communities. Very few intact families, which means that not all that many young males grow up under the tutelage of their biological father. Many of them are really never civilized. That is typically done by fathers and male culture. And then completed with marriage and child rearing. Absent that, males tend to run in juvenile packs, terrorizing the larger community.; 6/22/17, 4:51 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: "Also, the report argued that the matriarchal structure of black culture weakened the ability of black men to function as authority figures."

A bit OT, but this got me thinking. It seems that the dream of so many women, and esp feminists, is a matriarchal society. But what is never really addressed in is the question of why do patriarchal societies tend to do better than matriarchal societies? And one answer may be that matriarchal societies tend to do a bad job at civilizing young makes. And part of that may be that adult males are not given the authority and power to properly domesticate and civilize young adult males. So, instead of raising and civilizing the next generation, young adult males are running as juvenile packs, terrorizing their communities. And that is probably a good part maybe of why patriarchal societies seem to do better long term than matriarchal ones do.; 6/22/17, 5:05 AM
Fen said...: Tbats a great point Bruce, making that link. We now have a good body of evidence from these communities - single mothers have a harder time domesticating their male teen children than two parent households with a responsible adult male. Not in all cases, but enough to generate these packs of wildlings.

It's compounded by how young boys favor their mother until, as they become teenagers they push away to develop their own'identity and reject all of their mother's influences. How does a single mother control a teenage son who has no more respect for her. I remember when I was 16 - I thought I knew everything and my mother was the dumbest person in the world.
I didnt pull out of that stupid mindset till my mix 20s.

And in the 3rd world, the most dangerous fighters are male teenagers, because they don't know enough to be afraid. They believe they are invulnerable.

I wonder if this was a recurring them throughout unrecorded history. The rare matriarchal society springs up and creates the very conditions that destroy it.; 6/22/17, 5:46 AM
Jaq said...: Blocking traffic is not a tactic that wins elections? I don't really know.; 6/22/17, 5:58 AM
CJ said...: As multiple others have noted, BLM was simply a completely astroturfed way for the Left to try to rile up minority voters to get them to the polls in November. The people that paid the BLM leaders and protestors couldn't care less about black lives.

We may not see them again until 2019...or ever...as some at the DNC seemed to have realized that turning on minority voters by having BLM riot in various cities turned off lots of white voters.

This is not a cynical interpretation - this is exactly what happened to BLM.; 6/22/17, 5:58 AM
Lloyd W. Robertson said...: BLM still has a presence in Toronto. They have prevented the police, at least in uniform, from appearing in the PRIDE parade. This seems to be partly because the police have a history of being anti-gay, etc., but issues of race and privilege come into it. Here I can only paraphrase, or frankly guess at the progressive view. Even if police are becoming more diverse, their job is somehow to protect white males, especially relatively wealthy ones. One hears that PRIDE has historically been representative mainly of white males; to the extent that they have been open to lesbians, this has still meant mainly middle-class white people. There is ongoing concern that they should be open to trans etc., but this doesn't necessarily reach people of colour. Intersectionality seems to mean discussion and disagreement about which disadvantaged group or group with a grievance comes first, or how to establish a pecking order among them. Some gay or gay-positive police officers would like to participate in PRIDE in uniform, taking pride in careers along with other aspects of their lives.
There is also an issue in Toronto about having police officers present in high schools--I think particularly in high-risk neighbourhoods, or whatever the euphemism is now. There is pretty good evidence that police keep crime down, and the weakest students of any gender or race get the greatest benefit from that; yet there is the suspicion that the very presence of the police suggests and reinforces the view that people of colour (by now meaning people from many parts of the world) can't be trusted. Although mostly unstated, there might be a view that it is better to leave the gangsters in charge--at least they are "our" people.; 6/22/17, 6:18 AM
ELC said...: I'll simply chime in with the others who have noted this isn't an election year. Perhaps BLM will reappear next year (next Congressional election) or in 2020 (next presidential election).; 6/22/17, 6:31 AM
Curious George said...: The couldn't have run out of black people, could they?; 6/22/17, 7:20 AM
Daniel Jackson said...: Final exams; 6/22/17, 7:20 AM
MaxedOutMama said...: It ceased to be politically useful to turn out the voters, and so now it doesn't get much coverage in the news. It was always a Dem electioneering strategy. Probably in some circles BLM is being blamed for losing the election for Saint Hillary.

That's the bald truth. There are more of these groups out there than ever, but the news doesn't cover them.; 6/22/17, 7:31 AM
Curious George said...: They're all CNN anchors now.; 6/22/17, 7:43 AM
bwebster said...: Interesting article that mostly dances around the core issues that tend to undermine "revolutionary" movements (cf. Orwell's evergreen "Animal Farm"). The comments to the article are a bit enlightening.; 6/22/17, 7:44 AM
Danno said...: The BLM is still going in St. Paul with the protests and freeway shutdown that came after the not guilty verdict for the Hispanic police officer who had shot a black man pulled over in a traffic stop.; 6/22/17, 7:52 AM
Rick said...: Nothing "happened" to it. BLM has no legs because it's run by hateful racists. No matter how much people in general support an organization's stated goals only racists will support racists.

Revealing commentary from last week.

link KUOW (Public Radio) article

Summary:

Anyone against BLM or any of its positions is racist because any position other than theirs denies that blacks are at risk.

Response:

It is normal to oppose negative outcomes for blacks using methods consistent with equal protection principles. BLM supporters believe blacks face far more unfairly negative outcomes from various societal contacts especially but not limited to schools and police. Presuming this is true any reform which uniformly reduced unwarranted police violence (to pick one example) would disproportionately benefit blacks, yet BLM deems this a racist position because they demand racially exclusive remedies.

To demonstrate how far from the left's normal positions these assertions are compare this circumstance to their rhetoric on tax reform. In that circumstance they claim cuts must benefit every class by population proportion even if those classes pay no tax. The analogous demand in a police reform example would be that a policy is racist if it disproportionately benefits blacks even if the reform only brings racial injustice to the same level. Not only have the BLM activists dropped that principle they assert the exact opposite: that reforms are racist unless they exclusively benefit blacks.

It should be obvious how repellent these attitudes are to the overwhelming majority of Americans. The belief supporters of reforms which would overwhelmingly benefit blacks are still racist is both illogical and counterproductive. But BLM supporters persist in believing any attitude preserving equal protection is so obviously racist they don't even argue it in these articles. They simply assume it as an underlying fact.

BLM has chosen a path so obviously destined to alienate potential allies you have to presume their goal is not reform.; 6/22/17, 9:42 AM
Saint Croix said...: Black Lives Matter was created by Barack Obama. He was afraid that he was going to lose the election in 2012. He made the campaign decision to gin up racial anger in order to get his voters out there voting for him.

Of course he wanted to turn it off after he was elected. But it can be hard to quiet a mob after you've incited them.

By 2016--another election year--he was sick of Black Lives Matter and all the racial upset. He became a supporter of the police.

The last major riot (I think) was in my town, Charlotte, right before the election.

So I think it' s several factors.

1) Obama inspired it in 2012

2) Obama shut it down in 2016

3) Obama's no longer in office

4) Hillary and Bernie and Jill and Donnie are all very, very white

5) Employment is up and people don't have time for this

6) It's not an election year

7) Organizing and fund-raising for BLM is depressed since there's a fear that it was counter-productive in 2016; 6/22/17, 10:11 AM