At the end of last week, David French wrote an excellent piece on Black Lives Matter, and the see-no-evil media’s ignoring BLM’s“anti-American and fundamentally Marxist demands.” His dead-on analysis meshes well with an important new report by my friendAnne Sorock, the president of The Frontier Lab, which specializes in applying private-sector market research to political and cultural trends (I am on the FL board, and have to warn that its “deep values” techniques — the kind used by major corporations to figure how to better sell their wares — are ignored by the political-consultant class, which considers anything outside of likely-voter polls or focus groups to be weird or cootie-infected).
Anne’s impressive research finds that BLM is the baton dropped by the seemingly vanished Occupy Wall Street movement. Now picked up, BLM has the potential to be broadly appealing, and therefore a tremendous force for the Left, and against what she calls “marketers of freedom.” In essence, “BLM has within its grasp the radical revolutionary goals the Bill Ayers activists of old, and more recent new class of far-left operatives, had before now been unable to attain.”
How she finagled access to BLM organizers, activists, and allies, in order to conduct her research, I don’t know, but Anne did, and her findings are something all conservatives should read, or know about. What’s at stake is described in the report’s introduction:
Black Lives Matter as a movement represents the hopes and dreams of leftist organizers who shared with us that, until now, they had never felt such a sense of hope and excitement that their goal – as one operative put it, “total social upheaval,” and “systemic change” — could be realized in their lifetime. From veteran agitators like the Weather Underground’s Bill Ayers to a new crop of social-media-wielding female and LGBTQ leaders, Black Lives Matter is encapsulating the hopes and dreams of multiple generations of progressives in a way, they say, no movement has before.
The three female founders of the movement have made it clear, and the message has seeded itself as far down the chain as the operatives we spoke with, that Black Lives Matter is the vessel through which all progressive causes can flow. LGBTQ, illegal immigration, abortion, and countless other causes are simmering just beneath the public face of the focus on police violence. Even police violence flows neatly, according to Black Lives Matter, into economic violence — wage issues, workers’ rights . . . The panoply of leftist groups come together under this banner.
It’s a fascinating and consequential report. My friends with big conservative brains would be foolish to ignore it.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/438780/black-lives-matter-report-analyzes-groups-impact
No comments:
Post a Comment