The George Floyd riots that have precipitated great changes throughout American society were not spontaneous events. Americans did not suddenly rise up in righteous anger, take to the streets, and demand not just that police departments be defunded but that all the structures, institutions, and systems of the United States—all supposedly racist—be overhauled.
The 12,000 or so demonstrations and 633 related riots that followed Floyd’s death took organizational muscle. The movement’s grip on institutions from the classroom to the ballpark required ideological commitment. That muscle and commitment were provided by the various Black Lives Matter organizations.
This audiobook examines who the BLM leaders are, delving into their backgrounds and exposing their agendas—something the media has so far refused to do. These people are shown to be avowed Marxists who say they want to dismantle our way of life. Along with their fellow activists, they make savvy use of social media to spread their message and organize marches, sit-ins, statue-tumblings, and riots. In 2020, they seized upon the video showing George Floyd’s suffering as a pretext to unleash a nationwide insurgency.
Certainly, no person of good will could object to the proposition that “black lives matter” as much as any other human life. But Americans need to understand how their laudable moral concern is being exploited for purposes that a great many of them would not approve.
Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy in Washington, DC, where he writes on critical race theory, national identity, diversity, multiculturalism, assimilation, and nationalism, as well as foreign policy in general. He spent close to twenty years as a journalist, fifteen of them writing from Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He left journalism to join the Bush administration, serving as a speechwriter for Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, before moving on to the State Department’s European Bureau, where he wrote speeches and op-eds.
John McLain is an award-winning storyteller with over 200 audiobook credits. He delights in narrating across many genres: detective noir, suspense and thrillers, westerns, nonfiction, biography, and more. John is a SOVAS Voice Arts Award winner, a two-time nominee for the prestigious Audie Award, and a winner of the Audiobook Reviewer Listeners' Choice Award.