It’s telling that Black Lives Matter celebrated an anniversary yesterday, and hardly anyone noticed. After all, they are now broke and largely defunct – at least until they can be revitalized for the next presidential election.

Ten years. Ten long years of a racially divisive piece of rhetoric. And we don’t yet appear to have learned any lessons — at least not those of us in the mainstream media. As Aaron Morrison, a New York-based member of the AP’s “Race and Ethnicity” team, breathlessly writes, “The Black Lives Matter movement hits a milestone on Thursday, marking 10 years since its 2013 founding in response to the acquittal of the man who fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.”

We’d almost forgotten how Black Lives Matter got its start. But there it was: Trayvon Martin.

Morrison continued, “Gunned down in a Florida gated community where his father lived in 2012, Martin was one of the earliest symbols of a movement that now wields influence in politics, law enforcement and broader conversations about racial progress in and outside the U.S.”

Got that? The sweet-smiling young kid in the red Hollister shirt whom the media kept telling us was “gunned down.” No mention of the fact that he was actually six feet and 160 pounds of muscle at the time, and that he was bashing frumpy George Zimmerman’s brains into the sidewalk when he met his untimely end.

As fearless Ann Coulter noted just after the “white Hispanic” man’s acquittal: “It’s becoming painfully obvious why no charges were brought against Zimmerman in this case — until Al Sharpton got involved. All the eyewitness accounts, testimony, ballistics and forensics keep backing up Zimmerman.”

Remember how our first post-racial president, Barack Obama, inflamed tensions and put his elbow on the scales of justice back then? “If I had a son,” he said, “he’d look like Trayvon.”

As our Mark Alexander wrote in response to the mob-like calls for justice:

If race hustlers were really interested in the Truth versus manufactured hate crimes hoaxes, they would have been too busy focusing on Obama’s hometown of Chicago, which, between the date of Trayvon Martin’s death and verdict in Zimmerman’s trial, recorded more than 700 murders of black residents, almost all of whom were killed by other black or “black Hispanic” gangbangers. But Obama and his racist cadres never mentioned a single one of those deaths, or thousands of such others across the nation, because those murders did not fit their political agenda.

But, still, that’s how Black Lives Matter got its start. That’s how three self-professed Marxists — Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Ayo Tometi — with an eye for design and an ear for a cool-sounding name got rich beyond their wildest dreams: by saying something that didn’t need to be said.

Of course black lives matter. Just exactly like everyone else’s lives matter.

And if, as Black Lives Matter insists, a discussion of racism in America is needed, then by all means let’s have a discussion. But let’s be sure to have a thorough discussion, a legitimate discussion, an honest discussion — rather than a politically correct one that blames whitey and blames the cops and blames “systemic racism” while avoiding the inconvenient and troubling truths of urban black culture and the violence and criminality that it seems to foster.

This sentiment, though, always seems to fall upon deaf ears whenever, in those rarest of instances, a white cop kills an unarmed black man. Such was the case in 2014, the year after the Trayvon Martin case, when a big thieving thug named Michael Brown was shot and killed in self-defense by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri.

Cue the riots, and cue the pernicious “Hands up, don’t shoot” lie.

And then came 2020, the death of George Floyd, the riots that started in Minneapolis and moved across the country at the behest of Black Lives Matter, and the long hot summer, the incessant and insipid calls for defunding the police, and the media’s complicity, and the explosion of cash into the BLM coffers. All for a martyr who, like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown before him, ultimately seemed unworthy.

The Big Lie in all this is that cops are to blame. But as researcher and author Heather Mac Donald points out, police officers fatally shot 1,004 people in 2019, most of them armed or otherwise dangerous. Blacks accounted for about a fourth of those killed, 235, a ratio that’s been stable since 2015. Further, as she notes, the police fatally shot just nine unarmed blacks in 2019. Nine. Which doesn’t mean they posed no threat to police, by the way. And given that more than 7,600 blacks were murdered in 2019, the math is irrefutable: For every unarmed black person shot and killed by a cop, more than 800 other blacks were murdered, mostly by other blacks.

Thus, BLM has perpetrated the vilest of lies and done the deepest of disservices to the very lives it purports to value. By calling for the defunding of our law enforcement institutions, BLM called for the pulling back of the cops from the very neighborhoods where they’re needed most.

But let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good get-rich-quick scheme. And boy, did those three women, those three capitalistic Marxists, ever get rich — so rich, in fact, that the AP’s Morrison barely mentions them in his lengthy article. Instead, he tiptoes around the scandalous grift and the cop-hating, money-grubbing, family-wrecking Marxist pressure group that BLM became:

In 2020, an unprecedented wave of donations to the movement following protests over George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police meant that BLM needed more infrastructure.

Amid disputes with grassroots activists about the direction of the movement organization, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation Inc. has been steward over a charitable endowment worth tens of millions of dollars. BLM Grassroots Inc. operates separately.

So you see, it’s a charitable endowment, not a clever marketing operation through which a bunch of mansions were purchased by its founders while requests for funding from their affiliates in desperately needy urban areas often went unanswered.

And back we come to Black Lives Matter, to its inception, and to its reason for being. As Coulter suggested 10 years ago: “Instead of turning every story about a black person killed by a white person into an occasion to announce, ‘The simple fact is, America is a racist society,’ liberals might, one time, ask the question: Why do you suppose there would be a generalized fear of young black males? What might that be based on?”

It’s a tough question. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be asked.

If we keep asking it, we might all find ourselves wondering, another 10 years from now, how we ever got suckered into that sleazy, slippery Black Lives Matter grift.

And America might end up being a better, stronger, more harmonious place.

(For the record, if Democrats really believed that Black lives mattered, as Mark Alexander has noted, they would be focus on their failed statist policies which have resulted in the daily black-on-black slaughter.)