“If this were just a scam that conned myriad wealthy corporations and celebrities, BLM could have been forgiven. But their influence has been damaging to the social fabric of the U.S.”

Conservative blog America Thinker, in a post by Rajan Laad called “BLM is Imploding”

The post was foretold last week on Ethics Alarms, when it featured “Observations On What Appears To Be An Epic Black Lives Matter Scandal.” The unfolding story has still been tamped down by the news media, further fulfilling its toxic role as “enemies of the people.” Laad has some additional details:

Indiana’s attorney general slammed BLM as a “scam” whose “house of cards may be falling” amid the growing legal attention. The states of Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Virginia have all revoked BLM’s charitable registration, while California and Washington are threatening to hold the nonprofit’s officers personally liable for its lack of financial transparency.

The rest of the article is truly damning, and I can’t find anything substantially inaccurate in it. The review is also infuriating. Ethics Alarms correctly saw this movement/scam for what it was from the beginning. That’s no great accomplishment: it should have been obvious. What was lacking weren’t sufficient clues, but sufficient courage and responsibility by the politicians, journalists, pundits, celebrities, elected official and corporations that enabled BLM’s despicable scheme to succeed. It not only raised millions through virtue-signaling extortion, it got itself endorsed by one of the two major parties, nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and strategically positioned so that any criticism was immediately used to brand the critic as a racist.

For the record, I want to state that those who fell for this con branded themselves as fools. Those who knew what BLM was and still supported it are worse; the label “unethical” doesn’t begin to do them justice.As an ethics blog, Ethics Alarms has tried to keep its readers informed about Black Lives Matter and its cynical, destructive con by casting a harsh light on the movement’s machinations and deceptions as often as possible. It is a measure of my failure that not enough people have been moved to visit here. Ethics Alarms’ efforts to expose BLM for what it is have had, as far as I can discern, no impact whatsoever.

I was using the EA search engine to try to track down the first post here about Black Lives Matter. This was made more difficult than it should have been by the organization/movement/scam’s most brilliant and diabolical strategem, naming itself after a seemingly benign slogan, though it was only benign to weak minds. Thus there are two tags here for Black Lives Matter: the one in quotes, for the slogan, and the tag without quotes, for the organization. I really should go through all of the posts that carried either and add the other one. If Ethics Alarms Mattered, it would be worth the effort.

I did find a post clearly stating the sinister use of the slogan from July of 2015, almost exactly five years before the George Floyd Freakout made BLM the  entity rich, powerful, and poisonous. It began,

“Black Lives Matter” is unethical, and those who use it are unethical. And politicians who grovel to those who criticize them for not embracing it are contemptible.

I was right, for all the good it did. I am posting that essay, “Black Lives Matter” Is Unethical, And So Are Politicians Who Pander To It,” again below.

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That’s the tipping point for Ethics Alarms. “Black Lives Matter” is unethical, and those who use it are unethical. And politicians who grovel to those who criticize them for not embracing it are contemptible.

The Martin O’Malley embarrassment over the weekend clinched it for me. Demonstrators interrupted the former Maryland governor, who is mounting a pathetic campaign against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, as he was speaking at the Netroots Nation conference. When they shouted, “Black lives matter!” a rallying cry of protests that has superseded “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” because that one was eventually exposed as a lie,  O’Malley—the naive, racist fool!!!!— responded: “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter.”

The activists  responded by jeering him and refusing to let him speak. Later in the day, O’Malley, “showing the firm commitment to leadership in the face of adversity that we expect in a presidential candidate,” as one wag put it on Jonathan Turley’s blog—apologized, saying…

“I meant no disrespect. That was a mistake on my part and I meant no disrespect. I did not mean to be insensitive in any way or communicate that I did not understand the tremendous passion, commitment and feeling and depth of feeling that all of us should be attaching to this issue.”

I bent over backwards to defend Smith College President Kathleen McCartney when she apologized for using the phrase “all lives matter” in December of 2014. I wrote:

If an activist says to me, “too many children go to bed hungry!” and my retort is, “Too many people go to bed hungry!”, the unspoken argument is “So stop acting like children are a special problem!” If I say, “We need peace in Syria,” and a friend’s response is “We need to end war, period!”, I view that as an effort to minimize my concerns by launching it from the realm of a specific issue into vague, generic territory.  “Black Lives Matter!” in the context of recent police episodes where African Americans died under circumstances that many believe show police callousness and excessive force against blacks is a distinct assertion that suggests that the law enforcement and justice systems do not currently function as if black lives matter as much as white lives. It is true that “All Lives Matter” includes the larger subset “black lives matter”; it is also true that it blurs the issue at hand, and dilutes the protesters’ point. It is not inappropriate for  President McCartney to apologize in this context…unless, of course, she intended a rebuttal, in which case she is indeed spineless.

I still believe that made sense in December, but “Black Lives Matter” means something very different now, after six police officers were charged with murder to quell a Baltimore mob after Freddie Gray’s death, and after President Obama decided that the merciless shooting of a  young white woman in San Francisco by an illegal immigrant wasn’t worthy of the same attention he has given other deaths when it was a black life that had been lost.

Now “Black Lives Matter” means and is intended to mean that black lives should matter more than white lives, since whites are responsible for the ills of Black America. “Black Lives Matter” makes the demand that police officers shouldn’t try to arrest resisting black suspects, or defend themselves when threatened by them. It means that the law will work differently when a black individual is killed by a police officer, and that the rules of probable cause, due process and reasonable doubt will be suspended to ensure “justice”—for African Americans. If that means wrongly destroying the careers and lives of white police officers, well, too bad. They don’t matter.

I defended Smith’s president because it was obvious that she was completely aligned with the students she had offended, who were—wrongly, like her—citing the deaths of Mike Brown and Eric Garner as examples of black men marked for death by brutal police officers. I defended her because she really wasn’t aware that “all lives matter” was then being used by those who wanted to demean the genuine and valid concerns of the African American community that police forces were excessively callous and violent when black suspects were involved. O’Malley, however, wasn’t speaking at an anti-police brutality rally, and is not running for President of Africa-America. He must believe that black and white lives are equal in value, and that the same standards of law and ethics should apply to both in exactly the same manner.

No candidate for the Presidency should apologize for saying “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter,” nor should any speaker, anywhere, ever, apologize to a crowd that employs the “heckler’s veto” to silence him or her. Someone once said of Hubert Humphrey that he was a decent man who, by the manner of his seeking the Presidency proved himself unworthy of it. That description now applies to Martin O’Malley as well.

“Black Lives Matter” is no longer worthy of respect, if it ever was. It is divisive and racially prejudiced on its face: res ipsa loquitur. Those using it continue to attach the phrase to the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, meaning that it is now code for wearing protest hoodies and shouting “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!”

It is a simple-minded bumper-sticker, hashtag phrase that avoids the complexities of a complex issue by reducing it to three words and pretending that this is all that needs to be said to win a debate. “Black Lives Matter” is the “Better Red Than Dead” of 2015; it is another “Bush Lied And People Died”: misleading, simplistic and lazy. “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” was a lie; “Black Lives Matter” is deceit: in the context in which it is used, it is a statement of fact that is meant to suggest that in the United States, black lives don’t matter to whites, to the government, to policy-makers, the courts and, of course, police.

Any presidential candidate who panders to the so-called African-American base by endorsing this divisive and dishonest slogan and worse, apologizing for saying and believing that all lives matter is unworthy of the office.