Just a few days after BLM and Antifa set fire to a church outside the White House in the summer of 2020, the mayor of Washington D.C., Muriel Bowser, issued an emergency order. This wasn’t an order about restoring law and order to the streets of the nation’s capital, or punishing the vandals who had just destroyed property and assaulted Secret Service agents, or anything like that. Instead, Bowser made the decision to hire an elite team of eight artists — yes, eight artists — to meet up at around 3:30 a.m. in the morning. These artists’ mission, if they chose to accept it, was to paint the words “BLACK LIVES MATTER” on two blocks of road, in giant fifty-foot-tall letters, just a few blocks from the White House. This street painting would be referred to as a “mural,” to give it some sense of grandeur, even though it’s really graffiti. Nobody knows why it required eight artists to paint three words in Times New Roman font. Maybe they needed one to do the painting and the other seven for spell check. It’s not clear.
But it was clearly a very deliberate decision to have this graffiti painted in secrecy, under the cover of darkness, like they were planning the Bin Laden raid. Apparently the reasoning was that white supremacists would be less likely to jump out of the bushes on 16th street and mess up the paint at 3:00 a.m., because as we all know, at that hour the white supremacists are too busy hunting for the cast of “Empire” in Chicago. So the BLM graffiti could be painted in peace. And then, by morning, everyone would awaken to see “BLACK LIVES MATTER” on the ground, and racism would be defeated. All of the klan members in Washington D.C. would see the words on the street and say to each other, “Geez, you know what, black lives really do matter.” And then they would throw off their pointy hat hats and go get jobs at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Of course, the actual plan was a lot more modest than that. The real goal was simply to annoy Donald Trump and impress “The Resistance,” which applauded any effort — no matter how petty — to advance the BLM scam. To that end, Muriel Bowser renamed the area with the alleged “mural” as “Black Lives Matter Plaza.” And then she posted this message on social media: “We turned on the night light for him so he dreams about #BlackLivesMatter Plaza.” Yes, according to Muriel Bowser, the plan was to have Donald Trump “dream about” some words they painted on the ground. And people loved it. This is the kind of tweet that, on Old Twitter, got tens of thousands of “likes” and non-stop praise in the replies. Anyone who disagreed was banned for hate speech.
Given that recent history, it’s actually kind of astonishing to see how Muriel Bowser and Democrat activists have reacted to Republicans’ latest effort to get rid of BLM Plaza and the street graffiti. Congressman Andrew Clyde of Georgia recently introduced legislation that would strip D.C. of most of its federal funding unless they eliminate BLM plaza, rename it “Liberty Plaza,” and get rid of the graffiti. And instead of fighting back in any way, Democrats are rolling over. Muriel Bowser has already announced that the BLM writing is going to be removed from the street. Apparently the current plan is to replace it with artwork commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which is coming up next summer. And as various local news outlets are reporting, it’s not just the mayor who’s fine with this. One of the artists involved in creating the so-called “mural” doesn’t really seem to care either. Watch:
At this point, you have to go out of your way to find anyone in D.C. who cares about this graffiti being wiped away. The people who created it are now distancing themselves from the whole idea. So are a lot of local activists. We went from Mitt Romney saying “Black Lives Matter” as he marches along with Left-wing activists, to watching Left-wing activists pretty much disavow the whole thing. And it only took a few years.
To be fair, I did find at least one woman who seemed upset that this beautiful mural is being erased. Here’s what she told a local news station. As you’ll see, this woman is wearing a shirt about D.C. statehood, and she begins by talking about DEI, so it’s safe to say that the BLM mural isn’t exactly her primary focus. But she eventually gets around to implying that erasing the big yellow words on the street is a really bad idea. Watch:
It’d be interesting to get this woman’s take on all the statues that Democrats have torn down over the years. That’s the kind of history she wants to see “erased.” But some words painted on a street five years ago — a monument to the total disaster of the BLM movement — is something that we supposedly need to preserve at all costs.
Of course, most people in the Democrat Party don’t think that way. They’re trying to distance themselves from this “mural” as quickly as they can. BLM — which was once a core, unifying pillar of the Democrat Party — has suddenly become a major political liability for Democrats. They can’t run away from it fast enough. This is progress, of course, in one sense. It’s a sign that Democrats are abandoning a movement that caused more than a billion dollars in property damage, resulted in multiple murders, suspended the right of self-defense in parts of the country, and kickstarted a nationwide de-policing effort that made this country far more dangerous.
At the same time, Democrats are not abandoning BLM because they’ve adopted a new, coherent ideology to replace it. They’re not committing themselves to a more responsible platform or anything like that. Instead, they’re flailing around in a state of total disarray, without any guiding principles whatsoever. They have no leadership and no direction of any kind. We are witnessing anarchy in the Democrat Party, after years of lockstep, disciplined messaging. And it’s not just the downfall of BLM Plaza that illustrates the chaos that’s unfolding.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
Last night the Left-wing outlet Axios reported that, in the wake of Donald Trump’s address to Congress, Democrats in Washington are now fighting among themselves about how terribly they came across. Apparently Democrats’ leadership in Congress didn’t want any kind of props to be used, nor did they call for any kind of interruptions or heckling. And of course, all throughout Trump’s speech, Democrats were waving their little paddles around, making noise, turning their backs to Trump, rushing out of the chamber, and so on. So there was a complete breakdown of leadership, by all accounts. Axios quotes several Democrat congressmen, including Jared Golden and Tom Suozzi, as saying the outbursts were a major mistake. One Democrat put it this way: “Not standing for Trump would have been a fine strategy, but you need to separate him from the kid with cancer.”
But that’s the way it played out, because the Democrats are totally beholden to the most radical elements of their party. This is “ideological capture,” and the consequences are a lot more far-reaching than Democrats might like to admit. The issue for them is not simply that voters find their party to be completely unappealing, even though that’s obviously a serious problem. The bigger issue for Democrats is that voters are now going back and re-assessing how Democrats got to this point. Voters are thinking about everything else Democrats have said over the past decade or so. They’re wondering what other scams the party has been running.
That might explain why, according to a recent poll from The Economist and YouGov, only 48% of Americans support the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage. 38% of Americans oppose it, and the rest are unsure. To restate: Less than half of adult Americans want same-sex marriage to be recognized nationwide. Among political “moderates,” support for the nationwide legalization of gay marriage sits at just 51%. Among conservatives, it’s down to 20%. This is from a poll that was conducted just a few days ago, in the first days of March. Even among self-described liberals, support for gay marriage isn’t unanimous. It sits at around 84% in that demographic.
Just three years ago, YouGov measured much stronger support for gay marriage, when people were asked the same question. A majority of Americans backed it. In other words, things are now so bad that Democrats are even losing ground on an issue that they thought was settled. They viewed gay marriage as a stepping stone to gender ideology, without realizing that the insanity of gender ideology would eventually make people take a closer look at gay marriage. And that was a major tactical error, because when it comes to the culture war, no argument is ever really settled. People on our side have said for years that the marriage debate is over. We lost. There’s nothing we can do. But that’s not true. It’s never over. After all, the “traditional” definition of marriage — which is to say the actual definition — was settled for thousands of years. Until it wasn’t.
The reality is that, just as quickly as America was overtaken by the moral panic of BLM and the emotional blackmail of trans activists, we can return to some semblance of sanity. It doesn’t take much. What conservatives need to do, as quickly as possible, is to capitalize on Democrats’ weakness and start passing laws that reverse the derangement that’s been so dominant for so long. If conservatives do that, they might be able to drag more concessions out of Democrats than we ever thought possible. After all, no one thought they’d cave on the BLM movement as quickly as they have. But they did. And it stands to reason that they can be beaten on gender insanity and voter ID and open borders and all of their other “must-have agenda items” just as thoroughly. All Republicans have to do now is take advantage of their position of power and apply pressure, just like the congressman from Georgia did. In response, Democrats might howl and stomp their feet and wave paddles around. But in the end, they will lose.
