The Patriot Post® · Black Lives Matter Makes Its Marx
If fans flipped on their TVs hoping for an escape from the madness of 2020, the return of major league baseball wasn’t it. Americans who tuned in to Friday’s season openers, desperate for a return to something normal, were forced to witness another protest: the players’. In some ballparks, like the Washington Nationals, the politically-charged messaging was everywhere — from the Black Lives Matter “unity” ribbons to the “BLM” stenciled on the back of the pitchers’ mound. But when the entire league is kneeling, it only takes one player to stand out. And for the Giants’ Sam Coonrod, there was never any question.
“I’m just a Christian," he said after the game. "I don’t think I’m better than anybody,” he tried to explain. “I chose not to kneel. I feel if I did kneel, I’d be a hypocrite. I don’t want to be a hypocrite.” Unlike a lot of Americans, Sam knows that there’s a lot more to the Black Lives Matter organization than the slogan. “[I] just can’t get on board with a couple things I’ve read about Black Lives Matter. How they lean towards Marxism and … they said some negative things about the nuclear family.” At the end of the day, Sam explained, he doesn’t mean any “ill will.” But it’s time, he would argue, for our country to realize what's really behind the hashtag.
Ordinary people in this nation, well-meaning Christians even, want to believe that Black Lives Matter is just a crusade for racial justice. That it’s a peaceful group, if not a passionate one, fighting for civil rights. They buy into the sentiment, not realizing that what they’re really adopting in those three words is a violent revolution with one goal: annihilating America. This isn’t the stuff of posters and wristbands. These are extremists with a profoundly chilling vision. And they’ll be the first ones to tell you so.
Co-founder Patrisse Cullors has been surprisingly open about the group’s real agenda for years. “We are trained Marxists,” she warned. “We are super-versed on ideological theories.” During a candid interview in 2015, Cullors explained that BLM has “really clear direction as to where we want to take this movement. I don’t believe it’s going to fizzle out,” she said, somewhat prophetically. “It just gets stronger…” And violence is just one way they intend to be heard.
“If this country doesn’t give us what we want,” Greater New York Black Lives Matter President Hawk Newsome warned, “then we will burn down this system and replace it.” But it might surprise the majority of Americans to know that “what they want” isn’t an end to police brutality or racism. It’s an end to freedom, speech, religion, and true equality. “All you shopkeepers putting signs in your stores, you schoolteachers programming your students to lock arms, you men and women of the cloth preaching about unity, you civic leaders urging community action… [beware]," Brent Bozell writes. To the Christian leaders, anxious to show their sympathy, "While you’re sermonizing about the need to show support for their movement, BLM leaders are sermonizing about destroying yours.”
How many Christians plaster “Black Lives Matter” across their social media pages not realizing that they’re supporting a group that wants to abolish the nuclear family? Or that the movement they’re identifying with justifies cop killings, prostitution, anti-Semitism, anarchy, and the suppression of speech and religion? Too many people have been taken in by this whitewashed version of the BLM movement in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, not realizing the dangerous agenda lurking beneath. That’s a mistake, FRC's Ken Blackwell argued on “Washington Watch.” “This is about the Left advancing a strategy to fundamentally change our country. And to effect this change, they first want to destroy it. They want to make sure that there is no positive interpretation of our historical narrative that includes anything that makes us uniquely American.”
There are a lot of good people in this country who think by embracing this cause and repeating its mantra that they’re somehow ascribing value to the lives of African Americans. Far from it. “Black lives don’t matter to Black Lives Matter,” Ken insists. “It cares about promoting a toxic ideology.” And the church — and more broadly, the nation — need to wake up to that reality. This is a crusade so menacing, Dan McLaughlin points out, that even Democratic leaders “warned their own party privately in 2015 against associating with the group.”
Of course, Americans are terrified that if they don’t embrace Black Lives Matter, they’ll be labeled as bigots and racists. The extremists are counting on that fear to give them cover as they march, unchallenged, through our cities. But if Christians and other citizens care about this great nation, they need to take a page out of Sam Coonrod’s book and find their voice. Because if we actually follow this revolution to its conclusion, Mike Gonzalez and Andrew Olivastro warn, black lives — and all lives — would be harmed. “Theirs is a blueprint for misery, not justice. It must be rejected.”
Originally published here.
Life in Lincoln: A Vote to End the Violence
It’s a form of abortion so gruesome, so barbaric, that when it was described on the Nebraska Senate floor, one Republican said, “If you don’t have a tear in your eye from watching that, you’re coldblooded.” We’re talking about a procedure, Dr. Anthony Levatino explains, of “reaching into a woman’s uterus with forceps and ‘grabbing whatever is there. Maybe you rip off a leg, which is about four-inches long,’ then you pull out ‘an arm, the spine. The skull is the most difficult part. Sometimes there’s a little face staring up at you.” It is, he insisted, an “absolutely brutal procedure.” One that Nebraska, as early as this week, hopes to outlaw.
Dismemberment abortion is something a lot of doctors never get used to. Dr. Levatino certainly didn’t. When he and his wife lost their five-year-old daughter, the grief of destroying other people’s unborn children gradually overwhelmed him. He quit those abortions. And he’s hoping — along with so many others — that Nebraska will as well.
Late last week, the Cornhuskers got one step closer to that goal — using a special maneuver to send state Sen. Suzanne Geist’s (R) bill out of the Judiciary Committee and onto the floor. Friday, on “Washington Watch," she told Sarah Perry that she was thrilled that not only did she have the 25 votes she needed, but five more to spare. To the critics, who say that there are better ways to spend the state’s time, Suzanne insists there’s nothing more important than human dignity.
"First, let me just clarify that what we’re doing is banning a procedure that takes place during the second trimester of pregnancy — so between weeks 12 and 24. We’re not going earlier than that. [This is] a very narrowly crafted bill. And what it would do is it would not allow an abortion physician to dismember, or actually pull the arms and legs off of a living baby.” If LB814 passes, Suzanne explains, it would be a class four felony with a fine of $10,000 if a physician in the state commits this crime. It’s a strong penalty, she agreed, but it “needs teeth” if it’s going to deter people.
The legislation, she told listeners, could be on the floor as soon as today. “We do things a little bit differently in Nebraska,” Suzanne said. “For our filibuster, it’s a six-hour debate.” But under this speaker’s rules, after three hours, Republicans have to prove that they can get at least 33 votes before they continue to the other three hours of debate. Is she optimistic? “We do see a positive pathway to get at least 33 votes. Now, I do not have iron-clad [commitments] yet… So I do feel — I don’t want to say 'very confident,’ that’s stepping too far — but I’m very encouraged that the possibility is [that we] could actually get this passed.”
You can help! If you live in Nebraska, call or email your state senators and tell them to end the atrocity of dismemberment abortion. For more information on the dangers of this practice — not just to babies, but to mothers, check out FRC’s Issue Analysis here.
Originally published here.
ACLU Fights to Keep the Cities Burning
It is, former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy pointed out on “Washington Watch,” a temporary restraining order. But the idea that a federal judge would try to stop the president from protecting our cities is ridiculous — even for an Obama appointee! President Trump, he insists, has every right to keep people safe if their local leaders will not. “To the commonsense American who looks at what’s going on in Portland and realizes that there are… radicals outside [the federal courthouse] firebombing it — with human beings inside,” this is “a security mission.” And a constitutional one at that. Hear why he thinks so in this conversation with FRC’s Sarah Perry.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.