By Tammy Bruce - - Wednesday, July 13, 2016
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Last year I warned my radio audience that the summer of 2016 would be a summer of race riots. They would be violent. The riots would ostensibly be a reaction to a particular event, but that would be a pretext. The real issue, of course, would be the upcoming presidential election.
These days, with smartphones and a video camera in everyone’s hands, any event, out of or in context, would be used to as a call to action (and arms?) against not only a supposedly racist law enforcement, but, they would argue, a racist American society.
Welcome to the summer of 2016, Black Lives Matter (BLM) marches and riots, and the massacre of five police officers in Dallas; policemen who gave their lives defending and protecting people who had been told the police were the enemy.
Why? The left believes when you can’t persuade on the issues (which they never really can), the goal is to intimidate and frighten people into accepting the liberal narrative. It’s also important to keep people distracted because otherwise they may actually begin to ask questions of the liberal politicians and policies that are actually destroying communities and lives.
The message, therefore, must be: You cannot trust yourselves or your decision-making because you’re a bad, bad, racist people and you must prove you’re not. And if you’re a part of the community being destroyed by politicians, you will begin, perhaps, to see your neighbor as the problem instead.
A convenient and handy lie from the people actually responsible for our economic and security disaster.
And how is it the American people can “prove” they’re not racist or bad? By voting for the people who have smeared them as evil.
The sudden emergence of BLM as a supposedly organic result of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, isn’t a surprise. It was coincidentally August 2014, again just prior to the important national midterm elections.
Make no mistake: BLM isn’t some natural entity that sprung from the loins of an innocent and passionate grassroots. No, it actually didn’t have to “spring” from anything at all because it already existed under another name for years: ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
ACORN, a leftist social justice organizing group, came under fire in 2009 when a conservative activist recorded their activists encouraging criminal activity. They “disbanded” in 2010 and filed for bankruptcy, but re-emerged in states under different organizational names, but the activists remained the same.
It was in Ferguson where this link to President Obama’s favorite agitation gang became clear. In May 2015 this newspaper reported on some controversy within BLM as activists complained they hadn’t been paid for the “work” they did in Ferguson as agitators.
“Hired protesters with the Black Lives Matter movement have started a #CutTheCheck hashtag and held a sit-in at the offices for the successor group to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in Missouri after the group allegedly stopped paying them,” Washington Times reporter Jessica Chasmar reported.
“FrontPage Magazine reports that Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) has been paying protesters $5,000 a month to demonstrate in Ferguson. Last week, hired protesters who haven’t been paid held a sit-in at MORE’s offices and posted a demand letter online. MORE is the re-branded Missouri branch of ACORN … MORE and other groups supporting the Black Lives Matter movement have received millions of dollars from billionaire financier George Soros,” Ms. Chasmar noted.
We learned in 2008 that Barack Obama served as an attorney for ACORN in the mid-1990s and even conducted “training events for its leaders,” according to The New York Times.
Just after the Ferguson riots, which were generated not by that community but by BLM outsiders, Mr. Obama met with them and even invited them to the White House.
Last year, as the presidential primary season began to steam up, I had a conversation with a friend of mine with whom I worked as a community organizer for the left in the 1980s and ‘90s.
My friend called and was laughing. “So, how does that Republican lineup look to you? It looks like a bunch of racists to me.” He was laughing because it was a joke, literally. On the left the strategy is this: Everyone on the right is a racist, no matter the truth. Using the term immediately smears the target, and it’s impossible to refute. After all, how do you prove a negative?
He said the “riot machine” was starting up and next summer (this summer) was going to be a doozy. Just prior to the national conventions, here we go.
It was a predictable strategy, and the legacy media would help move the narrative that America is “divided” and we are “unraveling” as a nation, because … racism and the horrible, racist, insensitive Republicans. No matter who the Republican nominee, this would be the narrative. It was against Mitt Romney, and it is this year.
The left is indeed a one-trick pony.
The tragedy of this, of course, is the fact that as a nation we do need to address many social issues, and the need for leadership to bring us together instead of using the issues to divide us.
Liberal politicians and their activists rely on this dangerous and damaging strategy as they much prefer everyone remain distracted by a serious and emotional issue, as it keeps people from noticing the actual liberal policies that destroy peoples’ lives.
• Tammy Bruce, author and Fox News contributor, is a radio talk show host.
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