“BLM (Black Lives Matter) has within its grasp the radical revolutionary goals the Bill Ayers activists of old, and more recent new class of far-left operatives, had before now been unable to attain,” writes Anne Sorock, president of The Frontier Lab. The Frontier lab specializes in applying private-sector market research to political and cultural trends, explains NRO’s Jack Fowler.
From Ms. Sorock on how and why BLM, “the baton dropped by the seemingly vanished Occupy Wall Street movement,” has the potential to be broadly appealing:
Black Lives Matter as a movement represents the hopes and dreams of leftist organizers who shared with us that, until now, they had never felt such a sense of hope and excitement that their goal – as one operative put it, “total social upheaval,” and “systemic change” — could be realized in their lifetime. From veteran agitators like the Weather Underground’s Bill Ayers to a new crop of social-media-wielding female and LGBTQ leaders, Black Lives Matter is encapsulating the hopes and dreams of multiple generations of progressives in a way, they say, no movement has before.
The three female founders of the movement have made it clear, and the message has seeded itself as far down the chain as the operatives we spoke with, that Black Lives Matter is the vessel through which all progressive causes can flow. LGBTQ, illegal immigration, abortion, and countless other causes are simmering just beneath the public face of the focus on police violence. Even police violence flows neatly, according to Black Lives Matter, into economic violence — wage issues, workers’ rights . . . The panoply of leftist groups come together under this banner.
Debbie Young
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