In the midst of all the polical bullshit of 2020, just as people were figuring out that COVID-19 was a political maneuver, a racially-incendiary video hit the 'net, and "racism" became the buzzword of the day. There were violent, racist demonstrations to protest violence and racism. Just about every big company and arts organization jumped on We-Care-Too bandwagon and made some public statement denouncing racism. While I feel anything they said in 2020 June that they didn't say in 2020 May or in 2016, when things were so much worse for American non-whites, was hypocritical approval of violence and hate, I'm more concerned with some of them supporting a domestic terrorism group called Black Lives Matter (BLM).

     Let's look at Black Lives Matter (BLM) three ways, their political views, their party association, and their history.

     This is not a nice organization. They believe in their name-claim support of black Americans over other Americans they're comfortable using violence toward their ends, and they're specifically not fond of Jewish people.

     They burn down houses, blow up cars, hurt and kill people, and loot stores along the way. One BLM fellow burned down his own house so he could sue Ferguson, Missouri, for being "racist" because they sent their fire fighters to houses that weren't burned down by their own owners and some of those people were white.

     It's not about the name. If an organization called Black Lives Matter were out there fighting for equal treatment among races and peaceful coexistence with everybody getting along, then I would be the first to support such a group.

     They also have an anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, anti-Jewish history. Until a year or two ago when they became part of mainstream politics, I'm told by reliable sources their web site had strong anti-semitic content for all to see.

     BLM's vision is one of hate. They hurt whom they dislike, especially non-blacks and Jews, and they take as much as they can from anybody. Their supporters are the ugly side of public politics. That's what I see and I believe others see the same. Shame on anybody who actively supports their views.

     I poked recently at the BLM web site. They were more careful than in the past, the anti-Jewish stuff seems to be gone, but the DONATION tab goes straight to the Democratic Party, a site called ACTBLUE.COM.

     Whatever their views, there's something smarmy about concealing their role as the action arm of a political party.

     It's shameful enough that groups are supporting a specific organization that promotes violence, racism, and anti-semitism. Given that about half the country is Republican, directly supporting the Democratic Party is grotesque. Given that those arts organizations took public money from all political parties, directly supporting the Democratic Party is almost-certainly criminal. (The Democratic Party has a new group of four young women, the so-called "Mod Squad," who are strongly anti-semitic along with their party history of racism and riots.)

     Who is BLM anyway? They are the immediate descendants of a group called the Black Panthers, a violent, racist, anti-semitic action arm of the Democratic Party when I was a child. I remember sometime around 1970 paying fifty cents for a low-budget, printed newsletter with a political cartoon showing a white policeman with the head of a pig kicking a black man lying on the pavement.

     The leap is a little bit longer, but the Black-Panthers action arm of the Democratic Party is descended from a group called the White Knights, a different color, but also a violent, racist, anti-semitic action arm of the Democratic Party. Their full name was the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The flip from white hate to black hate is much more natural than any other explanation for the association of these two violent, racist groups to the same political party, a party with a grotesque history from slavery through the racial divisiveness of the Obama years.

     The transition from white-sheet-hooded KKK members to rioting, looting BLM reminds me of the "Star Trek" episode "Day of the Dove" where an alien entity gets aboard the Enterprise and pits the Enterprise crew and the Klingons against each other with swords and medical miracles so they can keep hating and hurting each other while the entity feeds and grows stronger from their hate. There's no our-side or their-side, just the ever-lasting, ever-growing hate between the two sides, just as we have from these left-wing racial organizations in our American history.

     Let's ignore their compassionate-sounding name. Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a violent, racist, anti-Jewish domestic terrorism group, an action arm of the Democratic Party in the footsteps of the Black Panthers and the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. They're about burning down houses, blowing up cars, setting stores on fire, hurting people, and looting. They're about fear and hate.

     Look closely and understand this: You can believe that black lives matter without supporting BLM. You can be against racism without supporting BLM. You can be against violence without supporting BLM.

     If you woke up tomorrow morning with African-style dark skin and the choice to live any place and time from the year 1 to the present 2020, where and when would you pick? I think it's an easy choice, 2019 in the United States of America. Why America? The black-government countries tend to be corrupt and poor while the non-black countries are far less tolerant of racial differences than ours. Why now? Up through the early 2000s there was more comfort in overt "separate-but-equal" discrimination everywhere from schools to bathrooms and water fountains. There are too many stories about "Good Old Boys" taking their frustrations out on black people (they used a different word) in our history, and I believe that didn't really go away until recently. (It may not be 100% gone, but there's a lot less of that kind of violence than a few decades or even a few years ago.)

     Why 2019 over 2016? I look at the stereotype of poor-family black kids, nineteen years old, no high-school diploma, out there trying to make it. What were their chances in the past? There were no jobs, only dealing drugs, selling sex, stealing stuff, and trying to stay out of prison. I realize that's a stereotype, but how far from truth is it?

     To put it in economic statistics, when the liberal left-wing was in power from 2007 through 2014 the statistic of median family net worth went down a factor of two. It's not an mathematical certainty, but it's statistically overwhelming that the only way that could happen is for the bottom ten percent to have far less wealth in the bank in 2014 than they had in 2006. As bad as things may have been in the Bush years, the Obama years ravaged those struggling in poverty. I would point out that most of those people were people of color, black and Hispanic.

     Wake up in 2019 and, suddenly, there are jobs for these people. My knowledge is more than statistical as I have friends not in the professional sector, not sitting at a desk doing work on a computer all day. These people are finding incredibly more opportunity out there. Not only is there a ladder up the economic scale that wasn't there before, the first step seems far easier to take. Those nineteen-year-old kids with no chance now have a chance. Those jobs don't pay well, but they pay.

     I don't claim President Trump is some kind of magician, but I do note that these things happened on his watch and that his economic positions favor economic growth compared to the positions of his competitors and opponents.

     While economics and race may be separate issues in theory, the reality of the world is that blacks tend to be poor, so making the poor less poor is a racially-positive thing. Things today are better than the past, even the recent past, and they're getting better for black Americans, not counting the shenanigans of 2020.

     "What about profiling and white privilege? Are you suggesting they're not real?"

     Of course they're real. My darker-skin buddies get stopped driving at night a lot more often than I do. The cutsie term we use is DWB for "Driving While Black." One friend who does a lot of night driving and who, therefore, meets a lot of police officers at night, tells me he's respectful and courteous and he almost never gets a ticket and has never been mistreated.

     There was an episode of "Law & Order" about black rage that ends with a black man waiting for a taxi. When Jack McCoy walks to the curb, the taxi pulls up for him and ignores the black fare. I have black friends who have had that experience in line in a store. They're waiting, a white customer comes up, and the white customer is served first. Are they pissed? Sure, but they have a strategy. One fellow presses gently, "Excuse me, I was waiting here." He has already decided whether or not he'll leave the store if the person doesn't serve him first and whether he'll come back. Rage has nothing to do with it. It's a cost of being black in the United States, it's not fair, it's getting better, but that's the way it is.

     I more-intimately realized how it feels when I was sitting in First Class and the lone black flight attendent spent her time chatting with the one black passenger instead of serving all of us. Sure I was irritated to be treated that way, but I figured that's probably how that black passenger is treated the 99% of the time it's a white flight attendent.

     As a Jew I've been around hate and discrimination for a long time. It's not new to me, I don't like it, and I'm thankful when it doesn't involve violence or closed doors. Most colleges admit Jews today and most businesses serve us. My arithmetic tells me one-quarter of all the Jews who have died in the past century (1921 to 2020) have died at the hands of their own socialist government, so I'm doing okay if I can go to college, engage in commerce, own a business, and die of natural causes.

     I'll put it more bluntly. Prejudice, profiling, privilege, preference, and discrimination are annoying and shameful, they're even cause for anger, but they're not between their victims and their victims' success in America in 2019. I believe the best revenge is living well.

     So suck it up, work for change, be appropriately vocal, and accept that the world isn't fair. Do what you can, accept what you must, go along, get along, work peacefully for positive change, and be successful anyway. Some people are handicapped by disability, some are born ugly or stupid, and some are born the wrong color. If I have to be one of these, I know which I would pick in 2020 and I would be thankful to live in an age where there's less of that kind of racist abuse than any other place and time in history.