It has been a time of reckoning for the far left that held sway over the country for four long, miserable years. While plentiful evidence abounds that the nation is coming to its senses and re-embracing traditional American values, nothing better epitomized and cleared the path to the sinkhole into which the country descended than Black Lives Matter (BLM). But following a powerfully symbolic act last week, the BLM era has all but officially crashed and burned.
Few will ever forget what happened to the nation following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. In the twinkling of an eye, a racial reckoning overtook the culture. White Americans were forced to apologize for their whiteness and bend the knee to the self-proclaimed morally superior radicals declaring the country systemically and irredeemably racist.
Calls to defund the police were unhesitatingly embraced by Democratic politicians. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi convinced her leftist colleagues to get on their knees in the US Capitol. Even the quintessential establishment Republican Mitt Romney marched in the streets demanding social justice.
Anyone daring to challenge the newfound supremacy of the radical left was shouted down, disgraced, and canceled. Long-standing historical monuments were toppled. Conservative speech was branded inherently racist. The mass of once-liberal universities evolved into full-blown cultural Marxism. School curricula were hastily revised to reflect the new paradigm embodied by left-wing critical race theory (CRT) and the 1619 Project, which declared that the nation was founded for the distinct purpose of advancing slavery.
Heading the revolt was the previously little-known group Black Lives Matter. In a few short weeks, BLM, founded after the Trayvon Martin affair in 2014, was showered with a whopping $90 million in contributions, largely from suddenly guilt-ridden institutions and organizations.
It seemed not to matter that BLM’s founder, Patrisse Cullors, was a self-avowed “trained Marxist.” And in the most symbolically representative sign of the times, a public square adjacent to the White House was renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza, complete with a massive BLM mural emblazoned on the street. In a famously leftist city with a large black population, it seemed that name would become permanent, standing as a reminder of the troubled, pandemic- and violence-ridden days of yore.