When a British BLM activist admits to fraud, it’s hard not to wonder what really came over us in the summer of 2020.
Remember the Black Lives Matter demonstration in Bristol? The one where the mob toppled the statue into the harbour? In court this week, one of the organisers admitted fraud, after £30,000 in donations from Black Lives Matter supporters went missing.
This is what Michael Deacon wrote in The Telegraph in September 2023. In other words, he was wondering what was coming over us at the time.
Us? Well, even though Justin Trudeau and the entire Premier League acquiesced, the police in all Western countries largely let the BLM mob do as they pleased, many of us saw through the scam from the start.
In Norway, BLM was allowed to demonstrate even though the children’s parade on 17 May was cancelled, and State Secretary Saida Begum (H) took part.
The most spectacular was when an English team knelt in a World Cup match against the US, long after the US had stopped marking BLM. The US was left standing in front of a kneeling British team.
Many enlightened people rejected the entire Black Lives Matter movement the first time US footballer Colin Kaeperknick took a knee during the playing of the US national anthem, joined by a number of other athletes.
But after George Floyd died following an arrest in Minnesota on 25 May 2020, BLM exploded. First in the US, then Canada, the UK and much of Western Europe.
Whatever one thinks of George Floyd’s death, it’s not easy to understand why it provoked such violent reactions in countries far away.
I think it was an unconscious reaction to the lockdown. Young people had been locked up in their homes for two long months. They had gone crazy.
Deacon has a point, of course. Remember: these demonstrations took place while virtually the entire West was in lockdown due to panic over a pandemic that turned out to be fairly harmless. In fact, the so-called vaccines were more dangerous than COVID-19: The medicine turned out to be a bigger threat than the disease.
A lot of people realised this very early on as well.
The BLM hysteria was yet another example of how woke had infected our part of the world. A week after Deacon wrote his article, came the terrorist attack on 7 October. Today, Hamas terrorists are being supported on various campuses, and the situation has far from improved.
Universities around the world have focused on decolonisation for many years. In the US, they have an annual Black History Month. In an exhibition, the Smithsonian described hard work, punctuality, family values and good maths skills as an example of white privilege.
Robin DiAngelo wrote a book, White Fragility, which became a bestseller, in which we learnt that all whites are racist but are too vulnerable to admit it. Critical race theory first took over the universities, then high school. This was followed by secondary and primary schools, before attacking kindergartens.
BLM was just part of the total mass hysteria that characterises our Western culture, as Mattias Desmet so elegantly and mercilessly describes it in his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism.
BLM was a perfect tool for anyone suffering from the self-loathing and self-hatred of Western culture, which the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton labelled oikophobia many years ago.
But not everyone is infected by this disease. Reading Document is like a vaccine against this kind of madness. It’s also often a vaccine to talk to ordinary people who haven’t been marinated in the media, academia or rotten politics. A carpenter does not kneel for BLM. Not even if he thinks Harris will be a better president than Trump.
In the headline, Deacon declares: It’s time to admit it: The Black Lives Matter hysteria made fools of us all.
I must protest. There were many people, probably a solid majority of ordinary people, who weren’t infected by the hysteria of BLM ideas. Oddly enough, these are often the same people who also don’t panic about climate change or are too keen on the LGBTQ2S marinade.
You’re still allowed to think for yourself, while it lasts.