Author sees Marxist origins in Black Lives Matter movement

Mike Gonzalez has a message to share about the Marxist origins of Black Lives Matter, but thinks the media doesn’t want to hear it.

The author of “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution” says the Black Lives Matter political organization — as distinct from the slogan and people who adopt it — arose from critical race theory, itself an outgrowth of Marxist legal theories that influenced U.S. law schools from the 1970s to 1990s. Still, he says, the mainstream press outlets refuse to call it “Marxist” in news reports.

“The concept of Black Lives Matter is beautiful, but the people who are behind the organization have millions of dollars they want to use to indoctrinate others,” Mr. Gonzalez told The Washington Times in an interview. “They think capitalism is racist and they want to ‘disrupt’ the family.”

Mr. Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, shared his research into critical race theory during a Wednesday panel discussion co-hosted by the NAACP, Indiana University, the American Constitutional Society and the Black Law School Association.

“The media doesn’t cover BLM, but covers for BLM,” he told the Times. “If you don’t give the context of Marxism, you don’t realize that social justice is a veneer for them.”

The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation Inc. did not respond Friday to a request for comment.

But the organization’s website, which endorses expanding the U.S. Supreme Court to protect legalized abortion and features news releases with phrases such as “Black women are divine,” states that “Black Lives Matter is a central target of disinformation.”

Founded in 2013 following the trial of Black Florida teen Trayvon Martin’s accused killer, BLM describes itself online as “a global organization in the U.S., UK, and Canada, whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.”

At the same time, BLM co-founders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi are former proteges of the Weather Underground domestic terror group and other militant organizations.

“We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many Black folk,” Ms. Cullors said in a 2015 video interview with Jared Ball of The Real News Network.

PolitiFact, the fact-checking website run by the Poynter Institute, notes in an online report that the organization has not responded to its requests for information about whether it considers itself Marxist. The website only quotes sources like Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a Princeton University African-American studies professor and author, as saying the organization is open to people other than Marxists.

“There are definitely socialists within the movement, as there have been in every single social movement in 20th century American history and today,” Ms. Taylor said in one quotation. “But that does not make those socialist movements, it makes them mass movements.”

PolitiFact also quotes this passage from BLM’s list of beliefs: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”

Mr. Gonzalez, who worked for nearly 20 years as a journalist before joining Heritage, said the organization’s nature seems clear from these statements.

“I think the world view that critical race theory created in the academy in the 1990s, especially law schools, deeply affected today’s BLM activists,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “The founders of BLM themselves were recruited, indoctrinated and organized by hardcore Marxists.”

He identifies critical race theory as “a tool to change society” that arose from 1970s critical legal studies, a new left movement inspired by the Frankfurt School’s Marxist analysis and postmodernism.

“It’s got the same tenets as Karl Marx, who calls for the abolition of the family, the nation-state and private property,” Mr. Gonzalez said.

The term critical race theory was first used in 1989 at a conference of Black legal scholars “who wanted to reframe society entirely through a racial prism,” he added.

In his book, Mr. Gonzalez traces how critical race theory diverged from Marxist critical legal studies and influenced U.S. law schools in the 1990s, setting the stage for BLM’s founding in 2013.

“The critical legal scholars were saying the rich and the powerful have written the laws to preserve their wealth and power,” he said. “The critical race theorists said that because all the powerful people were white, it was white supremacy.”

Mr. Gonzalez, who worked 11 years as a writer for The Wall Street Journal, said he’s been stunned to see the U.S. media fail to scrutinize an organization that views American capitalism as structurally racist.

“I think the media has not told the story about these ideologically committed leaders who want to dismantle the organizing principle of society,” he said. “This is not social justice or equality; it’s replacing the United States with another narrative and system.”

Ultimately, he said, BLM wants to “solve the same problem that everyone wants to solve,” but to go about it by radically reinventing the American way of life.

“Nobody wants racial disparities to persist, but we need to address the root causes of disparity,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “Critical race theory and BLM do nothing to address issues like horrible schools and out-of-wedlock births.”