The Black Lives Matter movement grew in 2020 to encompasses several tax exempt organizations, a new PAC, and chapters across the United States, while raking in tens of millions of dollars and engaging in grant making activity to like minded organizations around the country.
Originally founded in 2013, and later formed as a 501(c)3 fiscally sponsored by the Tides Center, last year the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) made major impacts in education, elections, and on America’s streets. Their plans for 2021 and beyond are even bigger.
The 2020 Impact Report released by Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) laid out their successes in 2020, and sets even loftier goals for this year and beyond. BLMGNF serves as the parent organization that created two new spinoffs in 2020 – the Black Lives Matter PAC and Black Lives Matter Grassroots.
Throughout the report, BLMGNF reports their successes in defunding school safety across the country and infiltrating school curriculum with pro-BLM lessons. Here are a few examples (emphasis added):
• In calling to defund the police, BLMGNF was also demanding greater investment into our education, mental health, and non-carceral and non-punitive community-led systems and programs. This was our vision. Thousands joined us as we imagined what a nation with alternative options for community safety could look like. [p11]•The drafting of the BREATHE Act this summer marked BLMGNF’s gradual entry into the legislative advocacy space. Under the coalition of the Movement For Black Lives—which includes organizations like the National Conference of Black Lawyers and the Ella Baker Center For Human Rights—BLMGNF supported the unveiling of the act in June.This federal bill calls for a divestment from our policing systems in order to invest in new forms of public safety. Our policing system is fundamentally poisoned; reform is not the answer. In proposing new visions of public safety, we are calling for community investment across education, housing, mental health, food safety, and the environment. [p18]• We also wanted to hone in on the presence of law enforcement in our schools. Apart from this $170 million collective budget reduction at the city level, we successfully won a pledge from Los Angeles Superintendent Austin Beutner to cut $25 million from the school police budget. Students Deserve, a local student activist group, are continuing to push LAUSD to use the $25million to #FundBlackFutures and invest in support and services for schools with large Black student populations. As the second largest school district in the country, the progress set forth by LAUSD can set a strong precedent in favor of our movement. [p32]•We need not relitigate that Black and brown people are targets of the police. This is no different within schools. Our kids cannot learn if they constantly worry about experiencing harm at the hands of school police officers. For this reason, we also look to our schools when thinking through our abolition practices and immediate goals. In 2020, we successfully cut — and in some cases removed the presence of police officers in several public schools, domestically and in Canada.Our babies and young adults deserve to learn in environments they feel safe in. [p35]
The report failed to provide any corroborating data or evidence to show that school resource officers caused excess fear or violence toward black or brown people, but they insist on their removal anyway.
The BREATHE Act marks a significant jump forward in BLM’s effort to have an impact on every aspect of American society, from policing to elementary education to funds for collective health and economic distribution. They call it this generation’s civil rights bill, and a love letter to black people. According to the website,
IMAGINE : Schools free of police and full of trained counselors and restorative-justice programs, where all our children are kept safe and their needs are met.IMAGINE : Easy access to trained, trauma-informed interventionists who can be called on in domestic-violence situations and who are equipped to facilitate long-term safety, healing, and prevention.IMAGINE : 911 operators dispatching unarmed mental-health experts instead of police in situations involving behavioral health crises, and callers being allowed to request responders that connect to the gender identity of the person in crisis.The BREATHE Act offers a radical reimagining of public safety, community care, and how we spend money as a society. We bring 4 simple ideas to the table:
- Divest federal resources from incarceration and policing.
- Invest in new, non-punitive, non-carceral approaches to community safety that lead states to shrink their criminal-legal systems and center the protection of Black lives—including Black mothers, Black trans people, and Black women.
- Allocate new money to build healthy, sustainable, and equitable communities.
- Hold political leaders to their promises and enhance the self-determination of all Black communities.
Uprisings around the country changed what was possible. What felt impossible two months ago is being accomplished now; what seems impossible today is doable tomorrow, and we will be the ones to make it happen. We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams.
The framework of the BREATHE Act has some aggressive goals. In a 13-page summary published on its website, Section 3 talks about the effort to fundamentally change school curricula across America:
SECTION 3:Allocating New Money to Build Healthy, Sustainable & Equitable Communities for All PeopleTHE BILL WOULD:❖Establish a grant to promote educational justice, which:➢Incentivizes jurisdictions to make specifiedequity-focused policy changes, including:
■Altering their school funding formulas so that there is funding equity between schools;
■Creating a clear, time-bound plan for closing all youth detention facilities within the jurisdiction and replacing these facilities with community-based, rehabilitation-focused continua of care; and
■Removing police, School Resource Officers (SROs), ICE, probation, armed security, metal detectors, and other surveillance equipment and practices from schools.
➢Provides resources for programs and investments thatinclude, but are not limited to:
■Developing curricula that examine the political, economic, and social impacts of colonialism, genocide against indigenous people, and slavery;
■Providing voluntary, non-coercive wraparound services that meet students’ social, emotional, and physical needs;
■Promoting innovative programming to better support foster youth, as well as the children of incarcerated parents;
■Providing free, high-quality health services at schools and/or at nearby student- and family-focused centers, which services include reproductive body autonomy
Some of the tens of millions raised by BLMGNF goes to its Black Survival Fund, which they founded because, as they say, “the government hasn’t done enough enough to support Black people.”
Along with these extensive interventions into schools, public safety, economic policy, and activism, BLMGNF brags on their new PAC and credits it with helping to win the presidency, the two Georgia senate runoff elections, and local elections across the country for radical woke Democrats:
Many elected officials remain fearful of the phrase “Black Lives Matter” and refuse to act with all that it takes to sustain Black life and Black joy. We will no longer wait until this moment comes. We will create it. We arecreating it. Thus, our foray into electoral politics began, through the creation of the Black Lives Matter Political Action Committee (BLM PAC). Since its launch in October, the BLM PAC now has two elections under its belt: the 2020 General Election and the 2021 Georgia Special Senate Runoff. Politically, we are just getting started. [p5]
BLMGNF describes their Get Out The Vote (GOTV) operations, their extensive efforts to educate voters in 2020, their massive volunteer organizations, and their funding of candidates. Having raised over $90 million in 2020, they became a grant making operation for other non-profits and local chapters across the nation. They seeded their PAC with millions upon its formation so that it could support radical candidates in races for county DA, school board, state legislature, and US Congress.
And they say their goals for 2021 are even bigger. The Daily Signal reported that BLM has ties with organizations friendly with the Chinese Communist Party, and made widespread impact in 2020 with its radical agenda:
“But defunding the police is the least of the problems BLM causes,” said [Mike] Gonzalez [of the Heritage Foundation], who has written about links between Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza and U.S.-based groups that support the Chinese Communist Party. “Its activism in 2020 has completely changed the country, school curriculum, even sports.”Black Lives Matter also burrowed in at the local and state levels to influence public policy. In South Bend, Indiana, for example, activists won creation of a Community Police Review Board with what the BLM report describes as “investigatory subpoena powers.”
Much more than a mere civil rights movement, the report announces throughout that BLMGNF, BLM PAC, and BLM Grassroots will root out “white supremacy” wherever they may find it. Indeed, everything that motivates them seems to advance the notion that America remains a white supremacist nation:
But we do believe in one thing: white supremacy is currently sanctioned by our systems and even some of our elected officials. By engaging directly with our different political systems—by directly challenging them—we want to communicate and affirm that white supremacy has no space in the ways we govern, cooperate, and live. Remember: this is only one piece of our movement tactics.
With that as a motivation, and the tens of millions of dollars in their war chest contributed by corporations and individuals alike, BLMGNF plans to vastly expand its influence over every aspect of American life in 2021.
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Jeff Reynolds is the author of the book, “Behind the Curtain: Inside the Network of Progressive Billionaires and Their Campaign to Undermine Democracy,” available at www.WhoOwnsTheDems.com. Jeff hosts a podcast at anchor.fm/BehindTheCurtain. You can follow him on Twitter @ChargerJeff, on Parler at @RealJeffReynolds, and on Gab at @RealJeffReynolds.
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