This month marks the tenth anniversary of events that changed the trajectory of this country, and not for the better. On August 9, 2014, Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Riots erupted the next day and continued for months nationwide. Black Lives Matter exploited the mayhem it had helped cause, helping it swell into a malign global force. The activist model pioneered at Ferguson has had a lasting impact on American politics, as this year’s pro-Hamas demonstrations prove.
The catalyzing event was a personal tragedy, but from a journalistic perspective, it should have been pretty ho-hum. Wilson was a cop, and Brown had just robbed a convenience store, violently overpowering the clerk. When Wilson tried to stop him in the street, Brown scuffled with him, reaching inside his police SUV through the driver’s window. Brown then ran off and Wilson gave chase. At some point, Brown turned around and charged Wilson. That was when Wilson killed him.
The entire encounter, the Department of Justice later said in a revealing report, lasted two minutes. And that’s how long the story would have lasted, too, except that Wilson was white and Brown was black, and had just turned 18 less than three months earlier.
Those with political motivations manipulated the tragedy in several ways. They claimed that Brown had tried to surrender, raising his hands and pleading with Wilson, “Hands up, don’t shoot!” but the policeman still wantonly gunned him down. That fed the narrative that the killing was part of an epidemic of police killing unarmed blacks in America. And this, in turn, reinforced a theme that the country is “systemically racist” and oppressive.
Each of these contentions was false. Some who repeated them didn’t know better, while others deliberately advanced the untruths to bring about political change. Journalists and Democratic members of Congress, for example, beclowned themselves by raising their hands in mock surrender poses. They did not apologize after the DOJ report concluded that Brown had never surrendered. Nor did they admit fault after Attorney General Eric Holder said that it was “essential to question how such a strong alternative version of events was able to take hold so swiftly, and be accepted so readily.”
Not that it would have mattered. Ferguson burned and ten years later has not recovered. The mayhem that began in Missouri eventually engulfed the country and led to crime spikes and cultural chaos that persist to this day.
Marxists and progressive activists descended on the St. Louis suburb from around the nation and the world from mid-August to strategize. They forged BLM into not just a movement but a group of organizations that could receive donations and exercise political and cultural clout.
The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter had been around for a year at that point, arising after the July 2013 acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. But as Travis Campbell of the University of Massachusetts and others have shown, the movement exploded in 2014, when more than 125 cities saw their first BLM protests.
Several militants used Ferguson as a launching pad, including hundreds of Palestinian activists taken there by Hamas front groups. Indeed, the links between BLM and pro-Palestinian activism were underscored in early 2015, mere weeks after the riots ended in Ferguson. That’s when BLM co-creator and self-described Marxist Patrisse Cullors paid a high-profile visit to the West Bank, along with progressives such as Marc Lamont Hill, in a trip sponsored by Dream Defenders, an organization supportive of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Syrian-based terrorist group.
Ferguson thus helped cement a “red-green” alliance that endures to this day. BLM-affiliated groups, starting in 2014, have leveraged protesters’ energy to create a revolutionary network unprecedented on American soil. The pro-Hamas demonstrators who disturbed life on U.S. campuses and cities this spring were supported by the same revolutionary ecosystem that gathered at Ferguson and has supported every anti-American and anti-Western cause since.
In just one telling example of the radical projects that emerged at the Ferguson riots, the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance (NDWA) had sent its “special projects director” Alicia Garza—also a BLM co-founder—to Missouri to organize. The NDWA had been concocted at the founding conference of the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta in 2007, created at the instigation of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez to establish a revolutionary beachhead on U.S. soil.
The George Soros-funded NDWA got its money’s worth. Garza told the Marxist publication In These Times that she used Ferguson to “make sure the organizations and activists on the ground had the capacity to really hold this moment and extend it into a movement . . . I spent some time really sitting with folks and helping them strategize.” Her organizing in Ferguson, she added, was informed by “Third World liberation movements.”
Two key BLM groups, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF), were incorporated in the months after the Ferguson riots. BLMGNF was closely involved in many of the nationwide disturbances of 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd, sending out that year 127 million emails that led to 1.2 million “actions,” according to its own 2020 Impact Report. The 2020 riots were the costliest in U.S. history and turbocharged changes that had been gaining momentum since Ferguson. They prompted our cultural gatekeepers to embrace the “systemic racism” canard, and to “decolonize” museums, libraries, classrooms, offices, and even churches and barracks.
Those riots, too, were based partially on a lie—namely, the idea that America suffers an epidemic of police shooting of unarmed black people. As a Manhattan Institute paper reported, some 80 percent of black Americans and half of white Joe Biden voters believe that “black men were more likely to be shot to death by police than to die in a car accident.” Even one-fifth of “very conservative” respondents believed that “‘about 1,000’ or more” unarmed black men get killed annually by police. The reality, per the paper, is that “confirmed fatal police shootings of unarmed African-Americans number about 22 per year.”
The lies told about police violence in 2020 and 2014 brought devastating consequences. The Ferguson riots helped trigger a sharp rise in the murder rate in U.S. cities with populations over 250,000, where BLM was more likely to have held protests. In these places, “homicides rose by 15.2 percent between 2014 and 2015,” wrote Richard Rosenfeld from the University of Missouri and others in late 2017. “By any reasonable standard, these are noteworthy increases,” they added. Similarly, Campbell found that between 1,000 and 6,000 extra murders occurred between 2014 and 2019 in areas where BLM protested. This increase was caused by the so-called “Ferguson effect,” in which law enforcement disengaged in protest-ridden areas or in communities that embraced the police-shooting epidemic narrative.
Ferguson, in other words, inflicted immeasurable suffering on America, not just in lives lost but in a degraded culture. “Around 2014,” Jonathan Haidt wrote, “something big changed in American society . . . as if a flock of demons was unleashed upon the world.” He places the blame elsewhere, but to me, it’s Ferguson. As the Communist Vijay Prashad boasted, “The ability for mass struggle is here in the United States.”
Americans, most of whom probably do not want to see mass struggle on their soil, have nonetheless allowed all this to happen. Maybe it’s because the media hasn’t told them the truth, or because they fear being called racist or worse if they gripe about it. Or maybe they think the country is already lost. In any case, ignorance is exactly what those who organized Ferguson have counted on—then and now.
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