Death in Minnesota and Weather Underground

Black Lives Matter is a scam, of course. It is a pretext rather than a reason for the protests around the world but, at the same time, it is a heartfelt, passionate critique of an unjust world. It makes people who want to overthrow the established order feel they have an obvious justification, one with which everyone who is not malign must agree. 

It is genuinely revolutionary, like the protests and riots of 1968, but also the ideology of the authorities. No politician or journalist wants to look racist by questioning the protesters. Anti-racism is a permanent revolution, of the sort desired by Marx and Engels.

A lot of the reason for the protests and for the violence that often accompanies them is the frustration of the poor and the well-off due to lockdown. Yet before Covid-19 appeared there had been a mood around the world for protest, riot and violence: in Hong Kong, Beirut, Santiago, Catalonia, Iran. It's as if the world is ready for revolution.

A very long article in the Atlantic in January 2016 called 'Why America Is Moving Left' said the Democratic Party establishment's attitudes to the Black Lives Matter protests were evidence of how far left America, especially young America, had moved since the 1990s. 

It pointed out that Eisenhower in effect ratified the New Deal and expected Marco Rubio, if he became President, to ratify Obama's left-wing USA.

Because if George W. Bush’s failures pushed the Democratic Party to the left, Barack Obama’s have pushed it even further. If Bush was responsible for the liberal infrastructure that helped elect Obama, Obama has now inadvertently contributed to the creation of two movements—Occupy and Black Lives Matter—dedicated to the proposition that even the liberalism he espouses is not left-wing enough.

..In the 1960s, African American riots and the Black Power movement sparked a furious white backlash. In April 1965, note Thomas and Mary Edsall in their book Chain Reaction, 28 percent of nonsouthern whites thought President Lyndon B. Johnson was pushing civil rights “too fast.” By September 1966, after riots in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Cleveland, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s turn from racial integration toward Black Power, that figure had reached 52 percent.



This time, however, the opposite is happening. In July 2014, the Pew Research Center reported that 46 percent of Americans agreed with the statement “Our country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites.”

By July 2015, after the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore and the rise of Black Lives Matter, that figure had risen to 59 percent. From the summer of 2013 to the summer of 2015, according to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who declared themselves “satisfied with the way blacks are treated in U.S. society” dropped from 62 percent to 49 percent. In 2015, public confidence in the police hit a 22-year low.

Much of this shift is being driven by a changing mood among whites. Between January and April alone, according to a YouGov poll, the percentage of whites who called deaths like those of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray “isolated incident[s]” dropped 20 points. There’s even been movement within the GOP. From 2014 to 2015, the percentage of Republicans saying America needs to make changes to give blacks an equal chance rose 15 points—more than the percentage increase among Democrats or Independents.

The article also contains these lines that demand quotation.

According to Microsoft’s betting market, Predictwise, Democrats have close to a 60 percent chance of holding the White House in 2016. That’s not because Hillary Clinton, whom the Democrats will likely nominate, is an exceptionally strong candidate. It’s because the Republicans may nominate an exceptionally weak one. According to Predictwise, in early November Marco Rubio—widely considered the GOP’s strongest general-election candidate—had a 45 percent chance of winning his party’s nomination. But according to Predictwise, there was also a 37 percent chance that Donald Trump, Ben Carson, or Ted Cruz would win the nomination. And if any of them did, Clinton’s election would be all but assured.

This is the backstory to this week's protests and riots across America. They are a continuation of the earlier BLM protests, which met a very different response from the riots of 1968 which brought Richard Nixon to power, before in July 2016 a sniper in the BLM crowd shot dead several (white) policemen.


I imagine the recent riots will help Donald Trump win re-election, but the voters who made up Nixon's Silent Majority are now aged over seventy and their grandchildren are much more alarmed about racial inequality, despite the huge progress made to redress this issue. 

Even if Donald Trump does win in four years' time America may very well be a lot more left-wing despite or because of him.


Two very important reasons why America is moving left are a sharp decline in religious belief and a rapidly dwindling proportion of the electorate that is white and Protestant. The percentage of those saying they had no religion was 5 per cent in 1972 but 25 per cent in the 2010s, including 39 per cent of millennials. The future for the USA looks social democratic, godless, in a word European, though with a very much stronger economy than any in Europe.

The religious right have been forced to endorse the unrighteous Donald Trump because no-one else will give them what they want. He has been punctilious in trying to do what he can for them, but theirs is a losing cause.

Bernadine Dohrne and the Weather Underground were amateurish terrorists in the 1970s who invented the phrase 'white skin privilege'. They were considered extreme leftists but today a BBC presenter was suspended for questioning whether white privilege existed. 

The Weather Underground's ideas have become mainstream and they ended up as ardent supporters of Obama, whose political career started with a fundraiser held in Bill Ayers' and Bernadine Dohrne's drawing room. 

Many of Lenin's idea are now mainstream (think anti-colonialism, feminism, anti-racism, sexual liberation, divorce and abortion on demand) and so are many of the Weather Underground's. Their ideas are what are driving today's riots. 


The Weather Underground issued a manifesto known as the “Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism” in 1974 which said that one of the group’s objectives was to “attack and dethrone God.” #attackanddethronegod is currently trending on Twitter.

I feel like quoting a post I wrote about the reaction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) when the mass murderer Charles Manson died. The Weather Underground was the terrorist offshoot of the SDS. Bernadine Dohrn, the Weather Underground's beautiful young leader, celebrated the fork stuck into the heavily-pregnant Sharon Tate's belly during a discussion about whether killing white babies was a revolutionary act.

“Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!”


This was at a meeting held just after the Manson murders to decide a strategy for using violence to take over America in the name of Vietnamese and Africans. One of the SDS leaders announced that fascism, his word for a Communist dictatorship, would be necessary to wrest control of America from white Americans.

The SDS talked a lot about 'white skin privilege'.


The Weather Underground or Weathermen were angry about U.S. imperialism, the Vietnam War and racism in general. Whites, they thought, stole the resources of non-whites and all whites were culpable, including the working classes.


The Weathermen were extremists and terrorists and numbered about 800 people but these attitudes were general on the left during the Vietnam war. At first opposition to the war was confined to a small minority of Americans but the anti-war left won. This was a very important moment in the history of anti racism, an ideology which has transformed America and the world.


Here we see why, forty years later, the far left sympathised with Islamists and Muslim reactionaries. 

And also why many immigrants in Western Europe harbour some degree of anger and resentment towards the countries in which they live.