Disturbing: A preview of WHAT #BlackLivesMatter has in store for the GOP convention

Disturbing: A preview of WHAT #BlackLivesMatter has in store for the GOP convention

A few days ago, LU contributor Joe Newby reported on the threat from Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, to “shut down the GOP convention.”

Now you’ll get to see, as Paul Harvey might say, the rest of the story.

About the time Joe was reporting on Cullors’s threat, the website 100%FedUp was posting an in-depth treatment of video footage from the Black Lives Matter protest at the NetRoots Nation gathering in Phoenix, the weekend of 18-19 July.

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The previous coverage of this protest, aired in a few mainstream media outlets (e.g., MSNBC and NPR), focused on the stage area, where former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, candidate for the Democratic nomination, was trapped in uneasy silence while the yelling occurred.  This MSM coverage showed very little (if any) of what’s in the floor-level video embedded in the 100%FedUp post.

100%FedUp describes it as follows:

In rarely seen angle on the Black Lives Matter mob takeover of a NetRoots Nation Presidential Town Hall last weekend in Phoenix, Arizona, activists from the group scream explicit calls for violence and chaos, using an Occupy Wall Street style call-and-response technique to advocate “burn everything down,” “shut this sh** down,” and “rise the f**k up.”

Here is the video, which has captions so you can follow the “human microphone” shouting.  (100%FedUp has a useful companion commentary to go with it.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raK8kI7oKW0

Here, for contrast, is a longer video covering the entire protest sequence, from the more widely-used camera-pointed-at-the-stage perspective.  (It’s worth watching partly for the interpolated tweets from the townhall audience, a veritable pageant of White Guilt.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d-88-VHrMI

If you never thought you’d feel a little twinge of sympathy for O’Malley, see how the incident strikes you.  He starts out gamely beating time to the initial chanting, but ends up looking totally pwned.  (Which is, of course, the point.  Liberaler-than-thou bloggers lit into each other afterward about their disappointment with O’Malley, his fellow designated doofus Bernie Sanders, and each other.  My sympathy for O’Malley is necessarily limited, of course, considering that he’s the former mayor of Baltimore who left significant parts of it in their current shambles.)

100%FedUp points out that Patrisse Cullors is orchestrating the human-microphone chanting during the most intense passage excerpted in the shorter video.  She also comes up on the stage afterward, as seen in the longer video, to harangue O’Malley.  (The first black woman to come to the stage, in the “Black Love” T-shirt, is activist Tia Oso.)

But there’s more here than meets the eye.  There’s no question the Black Lives Matter group, and others from the radical protest network, can get to the GOP convention next year in significant numbers, and will be able to make some kind of ruckus.

They’ve been going from one incident to another for the last couple of years, showing up in both Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, for example (as well as in the major cities where “sympathetic protests” have been organized).  Cullors and her fellow leaders of Black Lives Matter joined other protest groups from Ferguson in an obligatory trip to the West Bank and Gaza in early 2015 as well.

Basically, they’re strapped in with the usual-suspect radical network that hops from one protest spot to another, funded by George Soros.  They use the human-microphone tactic popularized in the Occupy protests (also heavily subsidized by Soros), and display the same sentiments about civil disruption as Occupy-protest trainer Lisa Fithian (“St. Louis is going down too”), who takes pride in “having no issue with property destruction.”

As Patrisse Cullors’s threat indicates, the traveling radical road show that has fomented unrest around America in the last couple of years has its sights on the Republican National Convention in 2016.  It will undoubtedly target the Democratic convention as well.  Black Lives Matter is just one of the groups we can expect to see trying to disrupt the conventions.  Their tactics are becoming better known by the day.

Republicans will have a choice.  They can react like Martin O’Malley.  Or they, and Cleveland, can be ready to – yes – expeditiously and unapologetically shut down the protests: if they erupt on the floor during convention business, or if they start to visit disruption and destruction on the citizens of Cleveland.

And the Republicans can showcase and celebrate the contributions of the many people who represent all races and backgrounds in the GOP – people whose excellence and character inspire everyone, speak louder than words, and can never be silenced.  Convention security is important, but the good news about conservatism and republican ideals is even more so – and that’s what transcends the divisive narrative of rigorously enforced racial resentments.

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer is a retired Naval Intelligence officer who lives in Southern California, blogging as The Optimistic Conservative for domestic tranquility and world peace. Her articles have appeared at Hot Air, Commentary’s Contentions, Patheos, The Daily Caller, The Jewish Press, and The Weekly Standard.

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