The Fall of a Black Lives Matter ‘Thugologist’

By Daniel Greenfield, @ Sultan Knish Blog

When the Feds finally raided Cedric Dean’s mansion, out front were the words “Thug Mansion” and “Black Lives Matter”.

Inside the homes of the expert ‘Thugologist’ in North Carolina were the fruits of his hard work from allegedly defrauding Medicaid of millions and some ruder types speculate that the author of ‘How To Stop Your Children From Going To Prison’ may soon need a new chapter.

But the BLM adjacent activist has had a lot of chapters in his life that began when he was sent to prison for armed robbery at 16, then locked away for 105 years on charges of operating a crack ring until he was freed by pro-crime sentencing reforms that went easy on crack dealers.

But even while in prison, Dean had invented first ‘Deanism’, which promised to cure criminals, and ‘Thugology’, which claimed that being a thug was a medical condition. Relaying messages to be posted on Facebook from prison, Dean claimed that “we have available thugologists from every region of the country” who were “reformed federal prisoners who sincerely want to make amends” and are ready to “facilitate requests from parents and caregivers” of the thugs.

The NAACP even appointed him as the Executive Director of NAACP Prison Branch 5135.

“Sane Thug Therapy” was hailed as the solution for teaching thugs to “control their misguided thoughts” even while Dean denounced police for shooting criminals, complaining, “BLACK LIVES DON’T MATTER” to them. He published a book titled ‘Thugology’ and was hailed as an un-thuggish model prisoner and utterly reformed from his former thugological practices.

Reformed enough to jettison his ‘life without the possibility of parole’ sentence so that he could “devote himself full-time helping thugs and goons understand the forces behind their thuggery.”

Dean was out in 2018. Next year, Rep. Alma Adams invited him as her guest to President Trump’s State of the Union address.to celebrate the ‘First Step Act’ and its release of criminals. Dean was working to help criminals reform and he told a reporter that “people can change.”

Soon he was billing himself as a “nationally recognized behavioral health expert”, “agitator”, a “violence interrupter and peacekeeper”, a minister, a “social justice expert”, an “entrepreneur”, a “community leader”, a “reentry expert”, a “motivational speaker”, an “educator” and virtually anything you can think of including an advocate for the homeless.

Also he appeared at anti-police protest rallies, recorded a rap video in a “Black Lives Matter” t-shirt with a black power fist, complained about “racial micro aggressions” and ran for city council while billing himself as a “Dedicated Democrat”.

But, like so many dedicated Dems, it’s “helping people” that got Cedric Dean in trouble.

Among the many organizations Dean created was the HELP Program: a supposed homeless shelter. He’s now accused of soliciting Medicaid ID numbers from people at homeless shelters and camps and using those to run up millions in charges for services that were never provided.

A few weeks after HELP took over a shelter, a woman and her 1-year-old were found dead. Dean claimed however that they had already been dead when he got there. Residents complained that Dean was pressuring them to leave and one confrontation ended in his arrest. Another hotel was shut down by a fire marshall after an inspection found “open electrical boxes and wire splices”, no smoke alarms or fire extinguishers and a “burn barrel” in the backyard.

Cedric Dean Holdings billed $14.5 million in services which, according to the government’s allegations, were “exorbitant amounts for services that the conspirators could not, within the bounds of space and time, provide; and conducted billing that was 894% more than the provider that submitted the second highest number of similar claims.” But the government may not understand that “space and time” are nothing to an expertly trained ‘Thugologist’.

The government alleges that the thugologist “billed Medicaid for approximately $1 million of purportedly rendered services per month, but… did not offer any actual services.”

Assuming you don’t count expert thugology as a service.

54 services were reportedly provided to someone who was deceased which is quite an accomplishment even for the most experienced thugologist who has a PhD in gooning.

The money however allegedly went to a good cause, “vehicles, jewelry and properties”, which any self-respecting thugologist needs if he’s going to convince thugs that there’s a better way to live the thug life than shooting each other over some rock when they can just become social justice activists, start nonprofits and teach each other to stay out of prison by turning to fraud.

While billing taxpayers for millions.

The final verdict may still be out on ‘thugology’ or so much else. Their status, like that of Dean’s Yukons and his Silverado seized by the feds, may be up in the air, but the real credit for all this goes to ‘diversity champion’ Claire Rauscher. The former federal public defender represented Dean when he was sentenced to life in prison and continued to work on his case, cutting his sentence down to 30 years, then to 24 years, and then he was out and going all sorts of places.

“He’s doing remarkable things—I always knew he would,” Rauscher, who has been awarded the title of Diversity Champion, gushed. “I’m really proud of Cedric.”

Who wouldn’t be?

The good news for Dean and Rauscher is that the diversity champion is now practicing in the area of ‘white collar crime’ and Medicaid is not a ‘thug’ crime, but a white collar crime.

Why break up the beautiful partnership between a thugologist and a diversity champion?

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

Obama Proves That Black Lives Don't Matter

Susan Daniels Aug 18, 2025 @ Susan's Newsletter

What was once a beautiful refuge for city dwellers, called Jackson Park, a 19.3-acre area on the South Side of Chicago, has turned into a disastrous tribute to the ego of Barack Hussein Obama. Baseball fields disappeared, old-growth trees have been cut down, and a commuter highway has been redirected. No inconvenience is too great for Obama.

Obama’s so-called “presidential library” will not contain a single book but will have a basketball court, other athletic facilities, meeting rooms, and a home for the nonprofit Obama Foundation.

THEN

Building costs have skyrocketed from the initial $350 million to $850 million and are expected to hit a billion dollars before (and if) it is ever completed. Considered a “monstrosity” by nearby residents, it has been under construction since 2021 and has been besieged by poor construction, resulting in a lawsuit by a minority contractor whose work left huge cracks in the floor with rebar sticking through.

The $40 million lawsuit is ironic because the minority business, II in One, is suing the New York-based engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti, which stopped the job because of the poor quality of the work.

NOW

"It looks like this big piece of rock that just landed here out of nowhere in what used to be a really nice landscape of trees and flowers,' Ken Woodard, 39, an attorney and father of six who grew up in the area told Daily Mail."

"It's over budget, it's taking way too long to finish, and it's going to drive up prices and bring headaches and problems for everyone who lives here."

"It feels like a washing away of the neighborhood and culture that used to be here.”

“Tyrone Muhammad, a South Side native, director of Ex-Cons for Community and Social Change and a 2026 Illinois Senate candidate, was among the first to raise the alarm about the project back in 2020.

'To me it's truly the Tower of Babel,” Muhammad said.

“There's a lot of babbling going on with the Obama Center that never seems to get to anywhere. It's disconnected from the community it says it wants to serve. There's this ongoing battle around it that involves policies that never serve or effect change for the community.”

Muhammad called it “disingenuous” and “hypocritical” to destroy the park without input from any of the area residents.

Rents are increasing rapidly as property taxes climb, and the expense for changes in the commuter traffic patterns is expected to cost Chicago $175 million. Democrats are famous for their inability to consider unintended consequences.

Obama insisted on 50% minority participation, and workers complained that the job was “woke” since construction began in 2021, and how they were forced to sit through 90-minute DEI workshops three times.

The concrete fiasco, projected to be completed by 2026, is financed by the Obama Foundation, with the help of Bill Gates, George Soros, and Oprah Winfrey. They should not hold their breath waiting for Oprah to come up with any money. The burned-out people in Lahaina, HI, are still waiting for the $5 million she promised them.

Remembering the 14,000 People Killed by BLM

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

In 2019, the FBI recorded less than 17,000 homicides. After George Floyd died of a drug overdose while violently resisting arrest, we would not see numbers like that again.

4,870 more people were murdered in 2020. Those excess deaths meant that Floyd and BLM killed nearly as many people that year as AIDS. And those nearly 5,000 deaths were part of a total of nearly 14,000 more excess homicides in the FBI crime database since then. (And those numbers are still incomplete because of reporting changes made by the FBI.)

The anniversary of Floyd’s overdose death on May 25th, 2020 led to an outpouring of political

commemorations of his death and musings about the need for yet more ‘racial justice’, none of which accounted for the 2,000 more black people killed in 2020 than in 2019.

The Floyd reckoning killed more black people than Hurricane Katrina did. The real legacy of the BLM race riots were 2,000 dead black people. The real legacy of the fists and kneelings were entire cemeteries filled with dead black bodies over the course of only one single year.

And coffins being placed in cemeteries across the country, planted there by the ‘reckoning’.

More Americans died in the BLM wars than were killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars combined. Or at Pearl Harbor. To find a conflict that was more lethal to Americans, you would have to go back to Vietnam. Far more were killed by the BLM crime wave than perished in Hurricane Katrina, not to mention Sandy, Harvey, Maria, Ike and the California wildfires.

George Floyd’s death was the single deadliest non-drug or disease event of any war or natural disaster in the United States in the last 40 years.

The 14,000 dead, many of them black, are Floyd’s true legacy. Those 14,000 did not tour the nation in golden coffins. There were no multi-million dollar payments to their families. Members of Congress in cheerfully colored outfits did not kneel by their gravesides. Most simply disappeared and became footnotes.

In Floyd’s hometown of Minneapolis, 48 people were murdered in 2019. In the Year of Floyd that shot up to 82, then 94 in 2021, 82 in 2022, 70 in 2023, and 76 in 2024. That adds up to 164 more people murdered in the years since Floyd’s drug overdose. Shootings in Minneapolis increased 105% and the number of gunshot victims nearly doubled in 2020.

Five years later, Minneapolis politicians remember that one accidental death, not the 164 murders that they were complicit in while they promoted a ‘reckoning’ on racial justice.

Murders once again went up in Minneapolis last year even as politicians hail a safer city.

A cottage industry of pro-crime groups has spent the last 5 years denying that there’s a crime wave. The media will periodically run stories accusing the public of falsely believing that crime is a problem even as people are randomly slashed on the New York City subway and dozens of victims die in weekend shootings. The Biden administration tainted the FBI’s data collection so that it can no longer be trusted past a certain point, and yet the bodies do not go away.

The public expresses concern about crime in poll after poll. Voters came out for Trump in 2024 in part because of their worries about crime. The only counter-argument by a party that had told Americans that fighting crime was racist was to tell them that they were imagining the murders.

But no one imagined it when LA and San Francisco booted Soros pro-crime prosecutors.

Five years after their last reckoning killed nearly 14,000 people, caused billions in damage, destroyed small businesses and livelihoods and set back race relations decades, they want another ‘reckoning’.

Americans deserve a reckoning, not with the fictitious claim that racist police officers are roving the streets looking to choke black men to death, but with the forces behind a destructive movement that took a bunch of amateur activists and their hashtag, and used them to destroy the criminal justice system and unleash rioters and criminals on innocent Americans.

A political movement backed by top foundations, including the Ford Foundation, and leading corporations, led to the deaths of the equivalent of the population of St. Augustine, Florida.

That’s the reckoning that should be happening.

If the drug overdose death of one career criminal led to a national reckoning, what should the murders of 14,000 human beings lead to?

We don’t need more racial reckonings, diversity commitments and pledges to end policing that killed 14,000 people. What we need is a reckoning for the reckoning. We need a reckoning with the billionaires and foundations, like Soros and Ford, that led us here. Their radical tax shelters need to be stripped from them, their fortunes garnished to cover the losses suffered by families and shopkeepers across the country. We need a reckoning with every politician that tweeted, attended and enabled the violence that continues to claim lives every single day.

We need a reckoning with the “fiery but mostly peaceful” media that could position a reporter in the middle of a firestorm and still claim that the riots which claimed countless lives were peaceful. And finally we need a reckoning with prosecutors and law enforcement who practiced the two-tier policing that allowed violent criminals to run rampant across entire cities. The ongoing violence by Hamas supporters and whatever shape the riots of tomorrow take are a warning that while the BLM riots have ended for now, they legitimized the idea of rioting.

It will take a comprehensive national legal reckoning to shut down rioting once and for all.

A true reckoning with the 14,000 victims of George Floyd’s legacy will begin with unleashing the police to get back to enforcing the ‘broken windows policing’ and other measures that he[ped make America safe in the 90s, and filling the prisons with career criminals using measures like ‘three strikes’ to end the revolving door crime wave enabled by not only leftists or Democrats, but Republicans who went along with ‘criminal justice reforms’ promoted by the Kochs.

The reckoning of the 14,000 should bury liberal and libertarian pro-crime policies along with those bodies. We should never allow ourselves to be fooled into buying the idea that closing prisons and freeing criminals is a ‘conservative’ policy or good for America. The cost of prisons is cheap compared to the cost of a massive crime wave. The cost of preventing a crime is always cheaper than the crime itself. And when we forget that, criminals will remind us.

May 25th should not be the day we mourn a violent criminal who robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint, it should be the anniversary of the day we pledge to be merciless to criminals.

Because when we are kind to criminals, we are cruel to their victims. When we kneel at the coffins of criminals, they will bury us in them. Forget George Floyd, remember the 14,000.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

The Issue is the Revolution

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

“There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” mobs of college students chant at terror rallies.

What is there to ‘revolt’ against in New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago? The Hamas rallies like the BLM, environmentalist and other radical rallies take place in cities run by mayors and city councils who support their efforts and sometimes even show up to their events.

Even before New York City and other municipalities paid out millions in voluntary settlements to the BLM rioters who had assaulted police officers, the dirty secret of the radical mobs was that the authorities were on their side. And will continue to be on their side no matter what they do.

The revolution is also the thing that it’s revolting against.

Democrats secured control of the country’s major cities only to be faced with the timeless leftist challenge of making the intensification of their rule look like revolution rather than totalitarianism. The USSR and Cuba directed the ‘revolution’ outward by invading, conquering and intervening in other countries. Democrat cities nationalized their politics, building entire campaigns around Trump, abortion and (to their eventual regret) declaring themselves to be sanctuary cities.

As long as Republicans existed anywhere, urban Democrats could not sleep soundly at night.

Democrat control of cities and states didn’t end bipartisan politics, just turned it into a somewhat real and somewhat fake grudge match between the party’s really crazy and less crazy wings. Craziness was a variable like ‘X’ that was defined not by the common sense brakes of intellectual diversity, but by how far the really crazy wing could push the less crazy wing.

In 2010, open borders, freeing all the criminals, men pretending to be women and support for Hamas were fringe positions of the really crazy wing. By 2024, they’re Democrat positions.

The difference between the really crazy wing and the merely crazy wing is not that they have fundamentally different beliefs, but different tactics and comfort zones. It didn’t take long for the next generation to come home for winter breaks and win over the Democrat moms and dads to police defunding, drag queen story hour and the mass murder of Jews. But first the cultural establishment had to make these horrifying things seem respectable and normal.

Had to fit banning cars and Hamas on a lawn sign right under “in this house, love is love”.

What will the really crazy wing of the party normalize next? Check the academic calendar for the next year, social media for the year after and then the protest calendar for the next five years.

The ‘revolution’ is just about the radicals running the streets getting the feckless ex-liberals running the actual show to adopt some horrendous policy derived from the ravings of a 19th century philosopher and then given a glow up by activist academics and public intellectuals.

Classic town hall politics, limited constitutional government, and checks and balances in a bipartisan system would have prevented American cities from turning into the Paris Commune, but urban politics had made a rapid transition from Tammany Hall political machines to corporate consultants to Marxist struggle sessions with little democracy to be found in any of it.

Cities aren’t run by voters but by ‘stakeholders’. Lifelong community activists and their community groups, municipal unions and their members, and a few political clubs harvest ballots, turn out votes and then end up running cities. That 1% actually runs our lives.

A new generation of young radical activists with dot com money backing and social media savvy like AOC found it easy enough to harness the power of hipster grad students living in $3K a month walkups to disrupt the system and carve out their own extremist slice of the pie.

The new red guard, like the old, however had to find something to do besides stealing money.

The lofty promises of universal health care require more money than is available even if the wings of the old crazy party and the new really crazy party stopped stealing all the money. Defunding the police by moving money from law enforcement to their leftist activist social allies is easier. And a good pogrom against Jewish stores and synagogues is a great distraction.

The revolution isn’t about killing Jews (or not just about killing Jews) but wiping out entire classes of people, reactionaries, shopkeepers and whoever else ended up in the killing fields of Siberia, Guangxi and Choeung Ek for the power and profit of a rising new political elite.

The less crazy party thinks it will never have to come to that, but as with its views on men showering with girls or exposing schoolchildren to violent pornography, this is subject to change.

Life as an urban/suburban bourgeoise with regular stops at Starbucks, Crate and Barrel, and Whole Foods before charging the Tesla in the driveway is pretty comfortable, but being a pol commissar with a dacha in the Outer Banks and the power to gulag your enemies might just be better. All of that will require not just one revolution but a cycle of intermittent revolutions.

The causes matter less than the trajectory. One day it’s the police, the next day it’s car owners and then it’s the Jews. (Say what you will, but the Jews are always a popular one.) The issue, as a certain Marxist once said, is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution.

Causes provide narratives. Berkeley professors and Wall Street personal assistants who have no idea where the river or the sea may be are chanting for the destruction of Israel because it’s a nice change of pace. Like all of us, leftists like to feel that they’re growing as people by embracing new murderous causes. Freeing all the criminals didn’t work so well, but freeing all the terrorists to kill Jewish people thousands of miles away feels both heroic and safe.

But the exoticism of chanting for an “intifada” boils down to a call for revolution here and now.

Students for Justice in Palestine tweeted that the ultimate purpose of the anti-Israel BDS movement is “eradicate America as we know it.” Eradicating America as we know it might seem a bit off-putting to the suburban soy dads and wine moms who make up the middle class base of the party, but they’ll come around just like they did on turning Tim into Tammy and Tammy into Tim. What else are they going to do anyway: become Republicans and have people sneer at them in Whole Foods and risk their kids refusing to come home for the holidays?

The revolution is about eradicating America as we know it. A lot of it’s gone already, but there’s still plenty of work of destruction to be done until we’re all on the right side of history. Or dead.

Revolution is all about being on the right side of history. And the revolution consists of old liberals who are terrified of being on the wrong side of it, stammering their way through pronouns and handling popular critical race theory texts like they were the sacred scriptures of a religion they don’t believe in, and young radicals certain that they are on the right side of it.

But ‘revolution’ is also just dictatorship misspelled. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” The dictatorship in urban and sub Democrat areas is already here.

The stream of monthly revolutions make the deepening totalitarianism, the higher confiscatory taxes, the daily government scrutiny of everything from trash content to social media posts (in cities where violent muggings earn thugs no more than a free therapy session) and the ideology tests for employment, seem like liberation. But that’s what the Russians called it too.

Each revolution makes us more enslaved and less free. We are not free to walk the streets, not free to think for ourselves and not free to even work for a living. We are however free to protest.

But only as long as it’s for the revolution of the political machine taking away all our freedoms.

The issue isn’t drug dealers shot while assaulting police officers. It’s not Israel. It’s not oil or illegals. Those are just the levers which make the dictatorships running our lives more extreme. They are also how those dictatorships pretend that there’s a vibrant system of political dissent.

The issue is not the issue. The issue is that the fake revolutions are a tyranny. The issue is that we have become the slaves of a system that keeps promising to liberate us from our freedoms.

The issue is that we cannot go on living this way.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

 

The Issue is the Revolution

“There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” mobs of college students chant at terror rallies.

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

What is there to ‘revolt’ against in New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago? The Hamas rallies like the BLM, environmentalist and other radical rallies take place in cities run by mayors and city councils who support their efforts and sometimes even show up to their events.

Even before New York City and other municipalities paid out millions in voluntary settlements to the BLM rioters who had assaulted police officers, the dirty secret of the radical mobs was that the authorities were on their side. And will continue to be on their side no matter what they do.

The revolution is also the thing that it’s revolting against.

Democrats secured control of the country’s major cities only to be faced with the timeless leftist challenge of making the intensification of their rule look like revolution rather than totalitarianism. The USSR and Cuba directed the ‘revolution’ outward by invading, conquering and intervening in other countries. Democrat cities nationalized their politics, building entire campaigns around Trump, abortion and (to their eventual regret) declaring themselves to be sanctuary cities.

As long as Republicans existed anywhere, urban Democrats could not sleep soundly at night.

Democrat control of cities and states didn’t end bipartisan politics, just turned it into a somewhat real and somewhat fake grudge match between the party’s really crazy and less crazy wings. Craziness was a variable like ‘X’ that was defined not by the common sense brakes of intellectual diversity, but by how far the really crazy wing could push the less crazy wing.

In 2010, open borders, freeing all the criminals, men pretending to be women and support for Hamas were fringe positions of the really crazy wing. By 2024, they’re Democrat positions.

The difference between the really crazy wing and the merely crazy wing is not that they have fundamentally different beliefs, but different tactics and comfort zones. It didn’t take long for the next generation to come home for winter breaks and win over the Democrat moms and dads to police defunding, drag queen story hour and the mass murder of Jews. But first the cultural establishment had to make these horrifying things seem respectable and normal.

Had to fit banning cars and Hamas on a lawn sign right under “in this house, love is love”.

What will the really crazy wing of the party normalize next? Check the academic calendar for the next year, social media for the year after and then the protest calendar for the next five years.

The ‘revolution’ is just about the radicals running the streets getting the feckless ex-liberals running the actual show to adopt some horrendous policy derived from the ravings of a 19th century philosopher and then given a glow up by activist academics and public intellectuals.

Classic town hall politics, limited constitutional government, and checks and balances in a bipartisan system would have prevented American cities from turning into the Paris Commune, but urban politics had made a rapid transition from Tammany Hall political machines to corporate consultants to Marxist struggle sessions with little democracy to be found in any of it.

Cities aren’t run by voters but by ‘stakeholders’. Lifelong community activists and their community groups, municipal unions and their members, and a few political clubs harvest ballots, turn out votes and then end up running cities. That 1% actually runs our lives.

A new generation of young radical activists with dot com money backing and social media savvy like AOC found it easy enough to harness the power of hipster grad students living in $3K a month walkups to disrupt the system and carve out their own extremist slice of the pie.

The new red guard, like the old, however had to find something to do besides stealing money.

The lofty promises of universal health care require more money than is available even if the wings of the old crazy party and the new really crazy party stopped stealing all the money. Defunding the police by moving money from law enforcement to their leftist activist social allies is easier. And a good pogrom against Jewish stores and synagogues is a great distraction.

The revolution isn’t about killing Jews (or not just about killing Jews) but wiping out entire classes of people, reactionaries, shopkeepers and whoever else ended up in the killing fields of Siberia, Guangxi and Choeung Ek for the power and profit of a rising new political elite.

The less crazy party thinks it will never have to come to that, but as with its views on men showering with girls or exposing schoolchildren to violent pornography, this is subject to change.

Life as an urban/suburban bourgeoise with regular stops at Starbucks, Crate and Barrel, and Whole Foods before charging the Tesla in the driveway is pretty comfortable, but being a pol commissar with a dacha in the Outer Banks and the power to gulag your enemies might just be better. All of that will require not just one revolution but a cycle of intermittent revolutions.

The causes matter less than the trajectory. One day it’s the police, the next day it’s car owners and then it’s the Jews. (Say what you will, but the Jews are always a popular one.) The issue, as a certain Marxist once said, is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution.

Causes provide narratives. Berkeley professors and Wall Street personal assistants who have no idea where the river or the sea may be are chanting for the destruction of Israel because it’s a nice change of pace. Like all of us, leftists like to feel that they’re growing as people by embracing new murderous causes. Freeing all the criminals didn’t work so well, but freeing all the terrorists to kill Jewish people thousands of miles away feels both heroic and safe.

But the exoticism of chanting for an “intifada” boils down to a call for revolution here and now.

Students for Justice in Palestine tweeted that the ultimate purpose of the anti-Israel BDS movement is “eradicate America as we know it.” Eradicating America as we know it might seem a bit off-putting to the suburban soy dads and wine moms who make up the middle class base of the party, but they’ll come around just like they did on turning Tim into Tammy and Tammy into Tim. What else are they going to do anyway: become Republicans and have people sneer at them in Whole Foods and risk their kids refusing to come home for the holidays?

The revolution is about eradicating America as we know it. A lot of it’s gone already, but there’s still plenty of work of destruction to be done until we’re all on the right side of history. Or dead.

Revolution is all about being on the right side of history. And the revolution consists of old liberals who are terrified of being on the wrong side of it, stammering their way through pronouns and handling popular critical race theory texts like they were the sacred scriptures of a religion they don’t believe in, and young radicals certain that they are on the right side of it.

But ‘revolution’ is also just dictatorship misspelled. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” The dictatorship in urban and sub Democrat areas is already here.

The stream of monthly revolutions make the deepening totalitarianism, the higher confiscatory taxes, the daily government scrutiny of everything from trash content to social media posts (in cities where violent muggings earn thugs no more than a free therapy session) and the ideology tests for employment, seem like liberation. But that’s what the Russians called it too.

Each revolution makes us more enslaved and less free. We are not free to walk the streets, not free to think for ourselves and not free to even work for a living. We are however free to protest.

But only as long as it’s for the revolution of the political machine taking away all our freedoms.

The issue isn’t drug dealers shot while assaulting police officers. It’s not Israel. It’s not oil or illegals. Those are just the levers which make the dictatorships running our lives more extreme. They are also how those dictatorships pretend that there’s a vibrant system of political dissent.

The issue is not the issue. The issue is that the fake revolutions are a tyranny. The issue is that we have become the slaves of a system that keeps promising to liberate us from our freedoms.

The issue is that we cannot go on living this way.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Anger Privilege

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

 

If you want to know who has privilege in a society and who doesn’t, follow the anger. There are people in this country who can safely express their anger. And those who can’t. If you were angry that Trump won, your anger was socially acceptable. If you were angry that Biden took over, it wasn’t.

Not all anger is created equal. Some anger is privileged rage.

Good anger gets you a gig as a CNN commentator. Bad anger gets you hounded out of your job. Good anger isn’t described as anger at all. Instead it’s whitewashed as “passionate” or “courageous”. Bad anger however is “worrying” or “dangerous”. Angry left-wing protesters “call out”, angry right-wing protesters “threaten”. Good anger is left-wing. Bad anger is right-wing.

Socially acceptable displays of anger, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter riots to the anti-Trump marches to the furious campus protests, are invariably left-wing.

Not all anger is created equal. Anger, like everything else, is ideologically coded. Left-wing anger is good because its ideological foundations are good. Right-wing anger is bad because its ideology is bad.

It’s not the level of anger, its intensity or its threatening nature that makes it good or bad.

And that is why the left so easily slips into violence. All its ideological ends are good. Therefore its means, from mass starvation to gulags to riots and tyranny, must be good. If I slash your tires because of your Biden bumper sticker”, I’m a monster. But if you key my car because of my Trump bumper sticker, you’re fighting racism and fascism. Your tactics might be in error, but your viewpoint isn’t.

There are no universal standards of behavior. Civility, like everything else, is ideologically limited.

The left prides itself on an unearned moral superiority reinforced by its own echo chamber even as it has become incapable of controlling its angry outbursts.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is a symptom of a problem with the left that existed before he was born. The left is an angry movement. It is animated by an outraged self-righteousness whose moral superiority doubles as dehumanization. And its machinery of culture glamorizes its anger.

But monopolies on anger only work in totalitarian states. In a free society, both sides are expected to control their anger and find terms on which to debate and settle issues. The left rejects civility and refuses to control its anger. The only settlement it will accept is absolute power. If an election doesn’t go its way, it will overturn the results. If someone offends it, he must be punished. Or there will be anger.

The angry left demands that everyone recognize the absolute righteousness of its anger as the basis for its power. This anger privilege, like tone policing, is often cast in terms of oppressed groups. But its anger isn’t in defiance of oppression, but in pursuit of oppression.

Anger privilege is used to silence opposition, to enforce illegal policies and to seize power. But the left’s monopolies on anger are cultural, not political. The entertainment industry and the media can enforce anger privilege norms through public shaming, but their smears can’t stop the consequences of the collapse of civility in public life. There are no monopolies on emotion.

When anger becomes the basis for political power, then it won’t stop .

The left likes to think that its anger is good anger because it’s angry over the plight of illegal aliens, Muslim terrorists, transgender bathrooms, the lack of abortion in South Carolina, the minimum wage at Taco Bell, budget cuts, tax cuts, police arrests, drone strikes and all the other ways in which reality differs from its utopia. But all that anger isn’t the road to a better world, but to hate and violence.

Millions of leftists are told every day that Republicans are responsible for everything wrong with their lives, the country and the planet. Despite everything they do, all the petitions they sign, the marches they attend, the donations, the angry letters, the social media rants, Republicans continue to exist and even be elected to public office. Where does that anger go?

Either we have a political system based on existing laws and norms of civility. Or we have one based on mob violence and terror. And there are already a whole bunch of those south of the border.

Leftist anger is a privileged bubble of entitlement that bursts every other election. Its choice is to try to understand the rest of the country or to intimidate, censor, oppress and eventually kill them. 

Daniel Greenfield is a columnist, an investigative journalist and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

The Only Crimes Are Political Now

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

On Wednesday, three teens were arrested for riding e-scooters over an LGBTQ ‘Pride’ mural painted on a crosswalk in Spokane, Washington. One of the teens was charged with a first degree felony and bail was set at $15,000.

On Saturday, in another Washington thousands of miles away, Hamas supporters rioted near the White House. They threw bottles at a park ranger and vandalized national monuments with graffiti reading “Death to America”. Islamic terrorist supporters waved banners and held up signs in support of Hamas. One man in a Hamas headband brandished a bloody Biden mask.

Two Park Police officers were injured in the pro-Hamas violence, but not one arrest was made.

Not a single arrest for the assault on a federal employee (1-20 years in prison), the vandalism of national monuments (10 years in prison) or the support for a terrorist organization (20 years in prison). If only they had done some donuts on a ’Pride’ mural, they might be in jail now.

But as we already learned during the BLM riots and the subsequent eco-riots and Hamas riots, vandalism and even assaulting law enforcement officers is not a crime when done by the right people for the right reasons. Even assaulting Capitol police officers, which up until now has been the only assault on a law enforcement officer that Democrats would condemn, became a victimless crime when Hamas supporters fought police outside Democrat headquarters forcing the evacuation of members of Congress. One of the men slammed a female police officer against a garage door and punched her in the face only to get 48 hours of community service.

Similarly after weeks of antisemitic violence at UCLA, the only serious arrest made was of Edan On, a Jewish high school student, who had been fighting to protect Jewish students after the university allowed Hamas supporters to occupy part of its grounds. Multiple Jewish students and community members had been attacked while campus cops and the LAPD refused to intervene.

CNN however ran a profile “unmasking” the Jewish protesters with a view to getting them arrested rather than any of the Hamas supporters attacking Jews on campus. The 18-year-old’s name now appears as a headline at USA Today, not a single Hamas supporter does.

I have spoken to Jewish community members who were assaulted at UCLA while police watched and refused to do anything, telling them to go down to the station and file a report.

This is the same L.A. in which BLM activists scored millions in police settlements from the BLM riots. And a place where the mayor is a close personal friend of a BLM leader backing the pro-Hamas riots and the Board of Supervisors paid for the defense of UCLA Hamas supporters.

The pattern is everywhere from BLM to J6, from Trump’s arrests to Biden’s pass. Crimes are not defined by laws, but by ideology. Prosecutorial discretion allows the full weight of the law to be brought against political opponents while political supporters will likely not even be arrested.

The evolving shadow legal doctrine that ties it all together is that actual actions, like vandalism or assault, don’t matter, what does matter is their positive or negative political value. A skid mark on a BLM or Pride mural is an act of hate while vandalizing a statue or memorial for BLM or Islamic terrorists is an act of social justice. A protester punching a Capitol police officer has a negative social impact if he is doing it to support Trump, but a positive social impact if he is doing it to support Hamas. And Hamas supporters attacking Jews are fighting for justice while Jews fighting back against them are oppressive Zionist warmongers who must be stopped.

This ‘right side of history’ doctrine is often phrased in subjective language like ‘hate’ or ‘assault on democracy’. These cannot be quantified because they operate purely in the realm of ideological tests. Much as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined pornography as “I know it when I see it”, so too his modern counterparts know who gets a pass and who doesn’t.

What they really know is who shares their politics and who doesn’t. So, increasingly, do juries. A system that could rely on jurors to do their jobs even a mere 5 years ago no longer can. Judges and jurors in ultra-leftist areas have, like career professionals including doctors and lawyers, been told that their duty is not to the law, but to upholding their side of the great ideological war.

Ordinary people, like the teens in Spokane, lack the ideological grounding and unexpectedly discover that what in other circumstances was a minor prank is now suddenly a major crime even while they and their parents watch much more horrific crimes being praised on TV.

What is obviously understood by the Potter Stewarts who prosecute, judge and opine about crimes is confusing to the ordinary citizenry who don’t understand why criminals freely roam the streets while the only crimes that the authorities seem to care about are “threats to democracy”.

The notion of what a crime is has been radically redefined in a matter of years.

At the height of BLM madness, violent offenders were set loose while people could be arrested and tried for new crimes like calling the police on a person of the wrong race. DA Bragg in Manhattan, who prosecuted Trump, came into office with a memo not to prosecute armed robbers. Crimes with clear offenses and punishment were no longer prosecuted, but instead convoluted chains of legal reasoning were used by DA Bragg to criminalize Trump’s opposition.

In Washington D.C., whose city council at one point tried to legalize carjacking, the only people who seem to face serious charges anymore are murderers and Republicans. Murder is more likely to be legalized in D.C. than being a political opponent of the radicals in power.

Political segregation effectively means that half the country no longer enjoys civil rights in places like Washington D.C., Los Angeles and New York City. Attacks on them go unpunished while any offense by them, even in self-defense, will mean the harshest possible prison sentences.

Abuses of power that harken back to the worst days of the early Civil Rights era have become routine. Law enforcement knows whom to arrest and whom not to bother arresting. Cops only intervene when the leftist violence is severe enough that it will reflect badly on them. Faced with individual assaults, they rarely bother intervening, collecting evidence or upholding the law. Even when the assaults lead to serious injury, or as in the case of Paul Kessler, a Jewish man assaulted by a terrorist supporter during a pro-Israel rally in California, death.

Prosecutors, many of them progressives or harboring political ambitions, drop cases against leftists while currying favor with the new establishment by throwing the book at their opponents. Judges, especially in areas where they are elected, are just as bad, and jurors are responding to social pressure to punish political and cultural enemies, and spare their own political allies.

Crimes in free countries primarily punish assaults on property and persons while in totalitarian states they primarily punish crimes against the state. Pro-crime policies effectively decriminalized drug offenses, shoplifting and even some violent assaults because punishing crimes against persons and property was seen as upholding a racist and capitalist system.

But the police were never going to be truly defunded and crime was never going to go away. Instead in the last 5 years, crime has come to be defined as a political and social offense, an act of hate, a threat to democracy and an insult to the values and views of the ruling elite.

America’s justice system is being replaced by kangaroo courts and a banana republic system that selectively arrests, prosecutes and convicts political opponents for opposing the regime.

Whether or not something is a crime does not depend on the law, but on the politics of it. There could hardly be a clearer example of it when the day before Hamas supporters staged their attack near the White House. Steve Bannon joined another Trump adviser, Peter Navarro, in being dispatched to prison for contempt of Congress.

Is contempt of Congress a crime? It depends who is in contempt and who is in Congress.

 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

Gutted BLM Sues Soros-Connected Dark Money Group

Is a door about to be opened into the shadowy world of big-bucks radical activism?

by Joe Schaeffer | May 17, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News, Tags: Articles, Opinion, Politics

 

Having squandered all the money, BLM is now lashing out at one of its biggest Sugar Daddies. After somehow blowing through more than $90 million in corporate donations, “Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation Inc. [BLMGNF] is suing in California state court its one-time partner, the Tides Foundation, saying the fund is withholding and has ‘egregiously mismanaged’ more than $33 million in donations earmarked for Black Lives Matter,” Bloomberg Law reported May 7.

The first thing that needs emphasizing is that Tides is a crucial conduit in notorious progressive billionaire George Soros’ dark money spider web. Soros gave Tides more than $20 million from 1998 to 2018, watchdog website Influence Watch stated.

BLM +Tides = Soros

In July 2020, as the Summer of George Floyd was rampaging across America, Tides partnered with BLM. “Tides Foundation has launched the Black Lives Matter Support Fund, which will support BLM’s grantmaking activities,” Tides announced in a statement. “This unique partnership will further amplify the extraordinary, unparalleled successes of BLM’s chapter-led, decentralized organizational model, while also allowing BLM to build the necessary infrastructure for sustainability.”

That sustainable infrastructure never materialized. Amazingly, despite all the trendy corporate and philanthropic cash thrown its way, by 2023 BLM Global was facing bankruptcy. Where did all the money go? BLM Global leaders splurged on luxury homes, hired friends and associates for lucrative “contracting” positions, and have been accused of treating the organization’s coffers as their personal piggy bank.

Now that the intoxicating ride is over, the BLM bigwigs are turning on the hugely influential Tides operation. “Tides Foundation, which has managed hundreds of millions in donations for progressive groups since it was founded in 1976, has ‘refused to honor its promises and continues to commandeer BLMGNF’s donations,’ according to the 285-page lawsuit filed in California Superior Court, Los Angeles County, on [May 6],” The New York Post detailed.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if BLM is the flawed instrument that ends up exposing the murky underbelly of Soros’ infamous dark money network?

‘Tides Operates With Minimal Regulatory Scrutiny’

“Tides has engaged in deceptive business practices and has operated in a quasi-banking capacity without appropriate regulatory oversight of licenses,” the BLMGNF lawsuit asserted, as The Post reported. “Tides operates with a level of autonomy and minimal regulatory scrutiny that is starkly at odds with the regulatory framework imposed on traditional financial institutions,” BLM claimed. Strong words.

“Tides manages over $1.4 billion in assets – more than many regulated community banks – allegedly acting like a bank without licensing, while preying on black- and brown-led organizations, according to the complaint,” Bloomberg Law related.

“Tides benefits at the expense of black- and brown-led charitable organizations, whose assets the fund holds, by charging donors a disproportionately large percentage for each contribution in fees, according to the complaint,” Bloomberg continued. Very interesting. Can we get comment from Soros on that?

No matter how the BLM suit plays out, Tides is in a mess of its own making. It fully got into bed with Patrisse Cullors, the BLM co-founder who was forced to step down from her leadership post in 2021 after being accused of numerous major financial irregularities.

“At the individual level, people can get involved by buying black,” Cullors told Tides in a fawning February 2021 interview posted on the Tides website. “Shop at your local black-owned small business, support black creators, and consider donating to black movements and organizations across the country. Look to your workplace and ask: Are we supporting the movement?”

Around the same time she was saying these things, BLM Global was reportedly purchasing mansions in Los Angeles and Toronto and paying the father of Cullors’ child $970,000 to “produce live events” and provide “creative services.”

Wasn’t Black Lives Matter supposed to help all black communities?

Wouldn’t it be ironic if Soros’ modus operandi ends up finally shedding much-needed light on what wiggles and crawls beneath the jagged rocks holding up his empire?

Read More From Joe Schaeffer

The Left’s Plot Against George Washington

Daniel Greenfield  @ Sultan Knish Blog 

 

In Portland, the BLM mob toppled a statue of George Washington. Four years later, local leftist activists and officials have continued sabotaging efforts to restore it again. In New York City and Chicago, officials have discussed removing statues of Washington. And the Father of our Country isn’t even safe at the University of Washington where calls to remove him continue.

But the War on Washington isn’t just a recent phenomenon.

The Left didn’t want until George Washington was a statue to topple him. Newspapers like The National Gazette, The Philadelphia Aurora and The New York Time Piece, which were the vanguard of the emerging Democratic-Republican party, depicted him being led to the guillotine.

Democrats today claim that they oppose George Washington because he was a slave owner, but why did Democrats who were not only slave owners then but defended slavery (unlike Washington who favored liberating slaves and whose Washington Benevolent Societies were the organizing network for black conservative voters in the 1800s ) oppose him then?

Long before their relatively recent interest in organizing black people, American leftists were great enthusiasts of the French Revolution and favored bringing it to this country. My book, ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left’, reveals how the Democrats got their start as the “French Party” built around “Democratic Societies” modeled on French radical Jacobin clubs and set up with the aid of foreign emissaries of the French Revolution.

George Washington’s great crime in the eyes of the leftists of his day was his refusal to turn over America to the forces of the French Revolution which was the USSR of its day. “Ten thousand People in the Streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his House, and effect a Revolution in the Government, or compell it to declare War in favour of the French Revolution,” John Adams would later remember.

French Foreign Minister Charles Delacroix had urged Citizen Pierre-Auguste Adet, the French ambassador, to “use all means in his power to bring about a successful revolution, and Washington’s replacement.”

Washington, always a fighter, would not take the leftist campaign against him lying down.

In his address to Congress, President George Washington had warned of the threat of “certain self-created societies.” By those he meant the Democratic Societies. In a private letter he even more explicitly described how “these societies were instituted by the artful & designing members (many of their body I have no doubt mean well, but know little of the real plan),” by an agent of the French government “under popular and fascinating guises, the most diabolical attempts to destroy the best fabric of human government.” The Democratic Societies, he warned, were created to “sow Sedition; to poison the minds of the people of this country.”

First Lady Abigail Adams later wrote at the height of the crisis that, “France has setled her plan of subjugating America” through “Agents and Emissaries, whom with truth & reason she bosts of having thickly scatterd through our Country, saving her Principles, her depravity of Manners, her Atheism in every part of the united States” so that “she will seduce the mind & sap the foundation of our strongest pillars, Religion & Government.”

“And if there be a Nation on Earth capable of going the necessary lengths, and making the proper Sacrifices to stop its course,—it must be one that is already possesed of substantial Liberty, that knows how to appreciate it, & how to distinguish between it, and that Sort of Liberty which France is trying to propogate throughout the World.”

That “sort of liberty” with its depravity, as opposed to American liberty, was the Left.

And in ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left’, I describe the rise of the American Left and its violent and treasonous plots against Washington and America.

Despite the threats and attacks, George Washington not only refused to give in to the Left, but five years away from death and suffering from arthritis and hearing loss, he became the first and last president to lead troops in the field when he rode out to confront the Whiskey Rebellion.

“We are ready for a state of revolution and the guillotine of France,” the leader of the Mingo Creek Democratic Society had declared. But the guillotine proved no match for George.

Washington rode out with the troops because he feared that America was on the verge of falling to “mob or Club government” under which “there can be no security for life—liberty—or Property”. While Washington won the battle, he earned the undying enmity of the Democrats.

In his Farewell Address on leaving office, George Washington warned about the “mischiefs of the spirit of party” which “opens the door to foreign influence and corruption”.

Both the French and their leftist allies in America were furious at Washington’s message.

“If ever there was a period for rejoicing, this is the moment,” the Philadelphia Aurora responded. “This man who is the source of all the misfortunes of our country is this day reduced to a level with his fellow citizens.”

Adet, the French ambassador, sent a copy of the Farewell Address to his government while raging against “the lies it contains, the tone of insolence”. Adet and the French regime launched a campaign of naval terror “to arouse the attention of the public at the moment of choosing the electors who must choose the President.” The campaign was treasonously coordinated “with our friends in Congress” who, according to Adet, “only saw me last winter in secret.”

But attempting to terrorize Americans backfired badly. Adams responded to French attacks on American ships with the Quasi-War and Jefferson refused to end America’s neutrality.

Nonetheless the Democratic Societies influenced the new Democratic-Republican Party and American leftists continued to dream of bringing the French Revolution to these shores.

A toast at the Democratic Society of Philadelphia envisioned France’s revolutionary movement spreading until it will “have the whole earth for its area, and the arch of heaven for its dome.”

That mission outlived George Washington and the French Revolution. It continued on through European revolutions, the Communist takeover of the Soviet Union and it still continues today.

That is why leftists really want Washington to fall.

'Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers' Fight Against The Left' is now out. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Black Cigarettes Matter

Daniel Greenfield December 12, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

The Biden administration has tried to ban cars, gas stoves and oil drilling, but there was only one ban that it backed off on after meeting something scarier than the Bill of Rights.

Biden retreated from a menthol cigarette ban after pressure from Al Sharpton.

Sharpton’s National Action Network claimed that banning menthol cigarettes would hurt black people and issued a press release stating that it had reached this position after “working with Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner” and serial BLM litigator Ben Crump.

During a previous attempt by New York to ban menthols, Sharpton had been thrown into the fight alongside Garner’s mother and George Floyd’s brother.

Last year, ‘Mothers of the Movement’ a group that included Carr, along with “Philonise Floyd” (a brother, not a mother), and Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin’s mother, claimed that they had taken part in a panel at Sharpton’s NAA led by Crump and that banning menthol cigarettes was racist.

The letter to Susan Rice was tweeted out by former NAACP president Benjamin Chavis who added a video hashtagged “#mentholisnotacrime”.

“When you ban a product mostly sold in black communities – as 80% of black smokers prefer menthol cigarettes… you must consider the fairness of such an approach as well as the reality of what will happen to that very same overrepresented community in the criminal justice system,” the family members argued.

The critical race theory logic of disproportionate impact was being used to argue that banning Kool cigarettes was racist.

The new Black Cigarettes Matter campaign linked high-profile deaths that incited BLM race riots to cigarettes. The new Black Cigarettes Matter martyrs included Eric Garner, who died during a struggle with police after selling illegal cigarettes, Michael Brown, who was shot in self-defense after assaulting a local clerk who had caught him stealing cigars, and George Floyd, who died of a drug overdose after he was accused of buying cigarettes with a counterfeit bill.

If only racist regulators hadn’t targeted black tobacco products, they might still be alive.

The Black Cigarettes Matter campaign might seem strange, but the tobacco industry, lacking any other allies, had survived by building a wall around it made out of racial agitators willing to claim that anything was racist for the right amount of money.

Reynolds tobacco has been funding Sharpton’s National Action Network. And Sharpton has delivered by merging pro-crime arguments with a defense of its fundamental product. After a 2016 FDA ruling in favor of a menthol ban, Sharpton held meetings at black churches across the country titled “Decriminalizing the Black Community” arguing against a menthol ban.

The church meetings were dressed up in the rituals of BLM martyrdom and linked Ferguson to a ban on menthol cigarettes. There were chants of “No Justice, No Peace” and claims that cigarettes were an important civil rights issue.

This isn’t a new idea. Before the tobacco industry recruited Sharpton, it had been a major sponsor of the NAACP and linked up with Jesse Jackson.

“I’m not for sale to anybody. Jesse Jackson’s not for sale. John Jacob, Andrew Young, all the rest of the black leaders, Coretta Scott King, we’re not for sale. But if the tobacco companies want to give us some money to help us move black people forward, in the name of god give it,” NAACP boss Rev. Benjamin Hooks had barked at a 1990 dinner funded by a $100,000 check from Philip Morris. “Anybody that asks that question, you tell them they’re racist.”

The pitch hasn’t changed much since except that the NAACP, a shadow of its former self, has moved to the pro-ban side, while tobacco companies had moved on to trendier leaders.

Like Sharpton and random relatives of people killed in encounters with police.

How much money is involved? RJ Reynolds has been buying $15,000 tables at National Action Network events. “Ten thousand dollars or $15,000 would not influence us either way,” Sharpton argued. How much might was left unsaid. One pastor claims to have been offered $250,000 which sounds more like the kind of money that might bring the gang to the table.

Most people still think of tobacco companies as being old-fashioned, but like most corporations, they went woke. Except that wokeness in the tobacco industry is partly a matter of survival.

Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris, announced a $5 million donation to fight “systemic racism” during the BLM race riots and claims that “inclusion, Diversity and Equity (ID&E) is embedded into everything we do.” The Marlboro cigarette manufacter has racial quotas for its executives for not only blacks, gays and Hispanics, but also to have 2% representation for “two spirit” men and women: a form of transgender identity supposedly grounded in Indian lore.

RJ Reynolds claims that “DE&I is an important part of our ESG strategy” and boasts of being listed by the Human Rights Campaign as one of the best places for gay people to work.

The issue is not whether people ought to smoke: it’s the utility of race-baiting.

Racism and most elements of the leftist agenda are destructive at their worst and merely rent-seeking at their best. Blow up BLM and make it a national issue and companies will come to you looking to weaponize your ideology for their own corporate purposes. And Sharpton, like many other members of the “movement”, are happy to play rent-a-racist for the right buyer.

Some big tobacco companies had their roots in slave plantations, but while BLM rioters are beheading the statues of America’s founders, their corporate descendants bought up the racists to lobby for them. What Jesse Jackson and then Al Sharpton demonstrated was that the difference between being accused of racism and being able to accuse others of racism was a big check. Anyone can play the game as long as they write a check of the right size.

And then announce their commitment to ESG and DEI, but mostly to $$$.

Al Sharpton and the “movement” are not sincere crusaders against racial oppression, they’re hucksters who exploit racism because it makes their services more valuable to the companies that once used black slaves to harvest their product. It’s cynical, but no less cynical than the rest of the BLM movement which has spent years fighting each other over corporate cash.

BLM’s original organization is being sued by a splinter group, some of the family members of people killed in encounters with police have been agitating for their share of the cash, and despite massive corporate pledges of hundreds of millions of dollars, no one is sure where all the money went. Behind all the chants of Black Lives Matter, Black Cigarettes Matter because the truth is that Black Checks Matter most of all.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.   Thank you for reading.

Tags: Corporate America, Race, recent