Multiple sources, local and national, were reporting on Wednesday than one Vaun Mayes, identified as a leading BLM activist in the Milwaukee area, said in (and of) Waukesha that, “It’s possible the revolution has started.”
Vaun Mayes is apparently a troubled soul, currently “on pretrial release on federal charges in the allege (sic) Molotov cocktail plot to bomb a Milwaukee police precinct,” according to WRN (the local link above).
So troubled a soul is he that he apparently rushed to the scene in Waukesha from neighboring Milwaukee and livestreamed his thoughts onto YouTube (here’s the link; I don’t want to embed this one).
His thoughts are clearly confused and the language he uses to describe them is even more so. One gets the impression that his first reaction to the news of the Christmas Parade horror was that “the other side” had done something, but that as little drops of information had become known he was beginning to think—rather hopefully, it seems—that “the revolution has started.”
This is stupid stuff.
Vaun Mayes and his particular brand of activism aren’t important. It’s his words that warrant consideration:
“It’s possible the revolution has started.”
Imagine: you’re sitting at home in Milwaukee and get word that something horrible has happened at the annual Christmas Parade in Waukesha. God only knows what the early local reports must have sounded like, but they catch your ear. And for whatever reason, you choose to rush out to the scene.
You arrive to a scene of ambulances and squad cars. Police tape. Weeping and wailing and cries of pain. Triage. Media.
Rumors are swirling all around you. Maybe you get to talk to an actual witness; maybe you only get to talk to people who talked to witnesses, or people who heard things from people who said they had talked to witnesses.
You hear talk of a car driving into a crowd, of gunshots, of deaths and injuries, —of shoes and ships and sailing wax and cabbages and kings.
You want to provide your many social media followers with a live update from the scene.
And you tell them, “Hey, I wanna be careful what I say here because there are all kinds of rumors flying around, but I think this might be the start of a revolution.”
That’s a peculiar reaction.
I could understand, “This might have been a terror attack,” or “This looks like it might have been deliberate,” or any number of other initial reactions (“this is horrible and I can’t believe it happened here” comes to mind). But the specificity of revolution is jarring.
And not just a revolution, but the revolution. That’s stranger still because it assumes the idea of a revolution already imminent.
I wonder how many “prominent BLM activists”are eagerly awaiting the start of the revolution.
I often emphasize the Marxist roots (and management) of the BLM organization and movement: this is why. A lot of self-identifying Marxists are just chaos-seeking monomaniacs: they’re not happy with their lot in life, and Marxism gives them both a justification for their grievances and the promise of excitement. A revolution would bring some color into their drab, unhappy lives.
They think like that because they’re not very bright. Anyone who finds anything appealing in Marxism or the Communist Manifesto is obviously desperately unhappy and stupid, and that goes double for anyone who thinks a revolution in today’s America would produce anything useful or positive. I acknowledge that there are many intellectuals who speak very eloquently in defense of Marxism: that’s not an argument in defense of Marxism, but an indictment of our intellectual class.
Besides, when push comes to shove they almost never really mean it: look at avowed Marxist BLM founder Patricia Cullors. This USA Today fact check on the claims that she had been accumulating real estate while running BLM sort of misses the point: their verdict is “Missing Context,” and their explanation is worth reading in full:
The claim that Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors bought four luxury homes is MISSING CONTEXT, because without additional information it could be misleading. While some social media users suggested that the purchases were evidence that Khan-Cullors had been enriched by the movement, our research revealed no evidence that Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation funds were used to purchase property. Khan-Cullors has held several other jobs in addition to her work as the organization’s volunteer executive director, including writing a memoir and developing content for Warner Brothers.
(I’d like to see a USA Today fact check on the concept of fungibility.)
Cullors bragged about her background as a “trained Marxist” on television. The website of her Black Lives Matter organization wore its Marxism on its sleeve (until it drew public scrutiny), even going so far as joining Marx in calling for the abolition of the family. Which money she used to buy so much real estate is utterly irrelevant (and fungibility moots the issue anyway): the point is, she bought houses and houses and houses. Money she could have invested in the cause, money she could have spent bettering the lives of the less fortunate—the workers! the farmers! the peasants!—was used to better the life of Patricia Cullors, just as the millions that anti-millionaire Bernie Sanders earned from his book went straight into improvements of Bernie Sanders’s life. There’s a word for Marxists building up real estate fortunes and padding their own nests, and it isn’t Marxist.
Which was, now that I think of it, my whole point: most Marxists are just dilettantes.
If I myself had any sense, as an avowed capitalist who believes that the public is always eager to pay for the privilege of being told how awful it is, I would be writing books extolling the virtues of whatever bad ideas tested best in focus groups. A conscience is an unprofitable thing.
The problem is, these dilettantes provide cover for the real revolutionaries. There probably aren’t very many out there, but it doesn’t take many to create big, serious problems—especially in a world where there are so many hostile foreign actors eager to exploit every weakness in the American system to take it down. Twenty years ago it took fewer than two dozen revolutionists to kill thousands of people and propel the world into decades of war.
So you’ve got a very small, very thin, very crafty layer of crazy and violent revolutionaries hidden deep beneath a thick layer of weekend warrior Marxists: revolutionishists who like to chat about social injustice and class warfare over cocktails and tapas on the decks of their summer houses.
The actual revolutionaries are a real threat: they want to tear civilization down without even bothering to produce a rough draft of what they’ll replace it with. They’re out there and they’re dangerous. They’re willing to kill. Even eager.
And that’s what makes the revolutionishists so dangerous: their play-acting at revolution provides dangerous cover for the violent extremists who genuinely believe the slogans that the dilettantes are only blathering about.
In this respect the Marxists are using the same playbook as the Islamists who embed themselves so deeply among the faithful that it’s almost impossible to call them out without being accused of Islamophobia. Plenty of good and well-intentioned people support BLM because they (wrongly) think they’re supporting a civil rights movement—to the extent that even a sideways swipe at BLM, like saying “all lives matter,” can get you ostracized, shamed, or fired (sometimes all three).
Marxism is a monstrous horror. So is Islamism. They’re horrible ideologies that have produced nothing but misery, and are in fact incapable of producing anything but misery. Anybody advocating either system should be called out for it relentlessly.
Even confused and troubled souls who see the arrival of “the revolution” in a Christmas Parade massacre.