Washington, D.C.’s landscape is blighted by a place called Black Lives Matter Plaza, three blocks of 16th Street just north of Lafayette Park. It’s not a pretty site or sight.
South of the “plaza” is a fine equestrian statue of President Andrew Jackson in the park and, beyond that, the even finer North Portico of the White House. It is a prospect to make Americans proud.
But the plaza’s existence, especially in this location, is a disgrace. The city government painted the Black Lives Matter organization’s logo along the street in giant letters from sidewalk to sidewalk in 2020, then for $8 million made a permanent installation with paving stones, supposedly durable yellow lettering, and rows of low lampposts illuminating the whole excrescence.
Today, it’s a semi-ruin. The letters, worn down by cars, are chipped and peeling, lamps lean at drunken angles (some decapitated), and bricks are missing, leaving scars and pockmarks. The monument lends a shabby air of neglect to a federal site Americans visit with respect and awe.
It is not simply the scruffiness that is a disgrace. Black Lives Matter was built on the “hands-up-don’t-shoot lie” and was exposed as corrupt by the Washington Examiner a year ago. Its finances are opaque and its leaders suddenly rich and they employ relatives at exorbitant rates. Money donated by people in a state of charitable or militant anguish after the death of George Floyd in 2020 sluiced into private pockets.
It wasn’t only money that BLM misappropriated. It took a three-word phrase with which all but a tiny minority agrees — most people think black lives matter as much as anyone else’s — and used them as though they contained an idea only militants accepted, which needed to be forced on a recalcitrant nation.
It was rubbish, and BLM fell out of fashion. But like so many left-wing causes that arrive in a spasm of outrage and enthusiasm and then are exposed as fraudulent, corrosive, and dishonest, BLM sank without a peep of contrition from the politicians who gave it unmerited praise and credibility.
The Left doesn’t admit being wrong. It merely sloughs off causes quietly and moves on to new bogus ventures. These unwanted cultural, social, and economic novelties then, as surely as night follows day, are exposed as unfounded, unworkable, and dangerous.
We’re likely to see the same process with transgender issues, which may be cresting. The massive fraud of the gender-bending agenda started in America and spread internationally. Now, unable to stomach the lies any longer, insiders are blowing the whistle. Politicians are paying with their careers, and clinics and doctors will soon be paying litigation settlements. Nicola Sturgeon quit as leader of Scotland’s independence party on Feb. 15, destroyed by her push to lower the age at which minors could “transition” to the opposite gender and for housing a convicted rapist in a woman’s prison because he claimed to be female.
Transgender militants and spineless politicians have wrought something much worse than the shabby BLM con. Look on thy works ye mighty and despair! They’ve disrupted, confused, ruined, and even ended lives. I suspect that this outrage will be one from which the Left won’t be able to walk quietly away.
Reporting from The Washington Examiner.
