In the UK, at least, the worm has turned on Black Lives Matter.
A month ago, you could scarcely move for politicians, academics, sportsmen, showbiz luvvies and other members of the wankerati flaunting their allegiance to this apparently noble cause…
But today, as quickly as they embraced it, it now seems that they can’t dissociate themselves from it fast enough.
The BBC, formerly one of BLM’s champions (obvs.), has now forbidden its presenters and guests from wearing Black Lives Matter badges. (Quite a turnaround given that only last month, the BBC was busy pretending that the violent BLM riots which resulted in the injuries of 27 police officers were ‘largely peaceful’).
Sky News — arguably even more woke than the BBC — has made the BLM badges optional, where before they were compulsory (!) for its sports pundits.
According to the Mail:
Sky Sports allowed their pundits to decide whether to wear Black Lives Matter badges before going on air last night – with Patrice Evra ditching his first, before Jamie Redknapp followed suit, MailOnline can reveal today.
Redknapp and Evra along with host Kelly Cates and commentator Gary Neville were not wearing the badges during Sky’s coverage of Brighton and Hove Albion v Manchester United in the Premier League last night.
It came after the Premier League distanced itself from the movement, but players in yesterday’s match still ‘took the knee’ before kick-off and had ‘Black Lives Matter’ on their sleeves after George Floyd’s death in the US in May.
Among other people and institutions to backtrack, as Victoria Friedman has reported for Breitbart, are Northumberland County Council, Hertfordshire Police, and, of course, Labour opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer (who, less than a month ago, was famously pictured ‘taking a knee’ to BLM).
Meanwhile, Britain’s increasingly woke Armed Forces have shown a rare bit of moral courage by banning soldiers from taking the knee.
This sudden turnaround is pleasing, of course. And a vindication to those of us, such as Nigel Farage, who said right from the start that BLM is a political organisation whose hard-left aims had inexcusably been played down by the mainstream media.
But the question that remains to be answered, surely, is: why did these individuals and institutions ever pledge their allegiance to it in the first place.
There are several reasons why the story is significant. First, Sky — at least in the UK — is the wokest of woke broadcasters. The fact that it is no longer forcing its presenters to wear Black Lives Matter badges, as it did until recently, is an indication that the leftist broadcasting Establishment is fast losing faith in the BLM cause.
Second, footballers are herd animals, not necessarily known for their great intelligence. Yet here are a number of well-known footballers or ex-footballers all deciding to go against the grain and publicly dissociate themselves from the BLM cause. This is despite the fact that on the pitch, Premier League players continue to ‘take the knee’ to BLM before matches and in some cases make the clenched fist black power salute.
Third, is it not particularly interesting — and pleasing — that the first footballer to reject the BLM badge in the above scenario was Patrice Evra? Evra is from Dakar, Senegal — the son of a diplomat — and is most definitely not white. Yet he wants nothing to do with BLM having belatedly realised that BLM has more to do with white Marxist revolution than it does with furthering the interests of black people.
Evra, as the Mail reports, was initially very moved by what he thought was BLM’s positive message against racism.
On June 8, Evra posted an emotional video insists his ‘heart is burning’ as he spoke out against racism following the death of Mr Floyd.
Evra said at the time: ‘Staying silent is a crime. Saying I am not racist is not good enough, because we know to be racist. We know to pretend to be not racist, but let’s learn to be anti-racist because enough is enough.
‘And like I always say, racism comes from the education. No babies are born as a racist, no human being is born as a racist. So we know it is from the education. I experienced racists all my life. I am not here crying, I am not here being the victim.’
The backlash follows some fantastically counterproductive tweets and messages from Black Lives Matter’s UK branch, including the statement that it is ‘guided by a commitment to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people in Britain and around the world’ . These would appear to have disabused many of BLM’s supporters of the notion that BLM is just about combating racial injustice.
Labour Opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer has also sought recently to distance himself from BLM. Not so long ago, he was happy to broadcast photos of himself ‘taking the knee’ to BLM. Now he has started to backtrack, especially on the awkward issue of BLM’s mission to defund the police which – as a lawyer and former director of public prosecutions – Starmer understandably considers a bridge too far.
‘It’s a shame it’s getting tangled up with these organisational issues with the organisation Black Lives Matter. I don’t have any truck with what the organisation is saying about defunding the police or anything else, that’s just nonsense.’
Yes indeed. But couldn’t all the politicians and celebrities who’ve given their support to BLM have done a bit of homework before lending it their credulous endorsement? It’s not as though its Marxist revolutionary impulses and anti-police sentiment weren’t well known and in the public domain long before the killing of George Floyd led to its recent resurgence.
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