3/14/23
ost Americans have happily moved on from the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM)-driven ransacking of some 200 American cities, which resulted in as much as
$2 billion in property damage and at least 25 deaths. But that time must be remembered for more than rioting and destruction. The BLM pressure campaigns, harassment, and moral blackmail also amounted to possibly the most lucrative shakedown of corporate America in its history.
Today the Claremont Institute's Center for the American Way of Life published the
most comprehensive database to date tracking corporate contributions and pledges to the Black Lives Matter movement and related causes from 2020 to the present. Companies and corporations pledged or contributed an astonishing $82.9 billion to the BLM movement and related causes. This includes more than $123 million to the BLM parent organizations directly. These figures, while shocking, likely underrepresent the true magnitude of the shakedown as some companies failed to make known their contributions, and many BLM organizations remain unknown.
As a point of reference, $82.9 billion is more than the GDP of 46 African countries...
Alicia Garza, another BLM cofounder and a self-professed "trained Marxist," has acknowledged as much,
stating bluntly that "Black lives can't matter under capitalism. They're like oil and water." "It's not possible for a world to emerge where black lives matter if it's under capitalism,"
she added on another occasion, "And it's not possible to abolish capitalism without a struggle against national oppression and gender oppression."
According to Garza, BLM is not "just one entity." Instead, she explains, "Black Lives Matter is an organization and a network. We are a part of the movement, but we are not the movement." At the head are the two BLM parent organizations, the aforementioned Global Network and the Movement for Black Lives, an even more radical outfit that supports a collective of more than 150 ideologically aligned revolutionary organizations. Further downstream are the local BLM chapters, which do the movement's heavy lifting, and BLM At School, which seeks defeat the "imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy." At the tail are a bevy of social justice organizations including household names such as the NAACP and ACLU, which just so happen to be partners of the Global Network and BLM DC, respectively. Undergirding the movement is a horde of far-left militants and their rabble.