H. G. Wells aptly described the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s as “structurally great gangster systems”. The only difference between the Bolsheviks and the Mafia was the scale of their rapacity. The great Mob epics, like The Godfather, The Irishman, or James Ellroy’s “Underworld USA” trilogy, cast organised crime as the “Secret History” of America. The reality is more likely inverse: the history of American radicalism is the history of gangsters with delusions of grandeur.
That history is being repeated, even now.
Businesses and non-profits in the East Market District of downtown Louisville, also referred to as NuLu (New Louisville), have received letters from left-wing activists demanding that they give in to a list of racial reparations or face having their businesses get negative reviews online.
The activists “sent out a three-page contract to NuLu businesses following Friday’s protest where LMPD says 76 protesters were arrested and charged with obstructing a highway and disorderly conduct,” WAVE 3 News reported. “Some also picked up assault charges, accused of throwing bottles at police officers.”
WDRB News reported that the “demands came with a deadline of Aug. 17, or else protesters would respond by launching negative reviews and social media posts about the businesses.”
“Ransomware” is a particular crime of the internet age. One form is to send someone messages alleging that hackers have acquired evidence showing them in compromising or illegal situations, which will be released unless a ransom is paid. This is regarded as criminal extortion.
The activities of BLM in Louisville are no less criminal extortion.
Local residents that reached out to The Daily Wire were stunned that the story was not receiving more attention in the local media and did not want to be identified because they feared “mob retaliation.” One person said that they felt that this was “criminal extortion.”
BLM can call it “reparations” all they want, but it’s extortion, pure and simple.
The letter’s demands include employing a minimum number of black staff including management – who wants to take bets that the “jobs” will go to BLM cronies? Another demand is, “a recurring monthly donation of 1.5% of net sales to black local organizations”.
That’s nothing more than an old-fashioned shakedown.
At least a BLM activist in Wisconsin is more straightforward in his extortion demands.
According to federal charges, Devonere Armani Johnson threatened downtown Madison business owners that their windows would be smashed if they didn’t pony up cash, food and drinks for him and his associates. When he was arrested, BLM activists retaliated with a night of rioting; including the firebombing of the City County Building, destruction of two state Capitol statues, the beating of a state senator and widespread vandalism in Downtown Madison.
The fact is that BLM are just a continuation of the radical gangsterism of the late 60s. The Black Panthers were little more than a black mafia, described in 2003 by the LA Times as “just a pack of predators”. The Panthers may have posed as political revolutionaries, but their real game was robbery, vice and murder – lots of murder. Weatherman, the SLA and other radical groups funded their campaigns of terrorist violence via a string of bank robberies.
Not that, the LA Times’ rare confession aside, the left-media will tell you that.
“The existence of a Murder Incorporated in the heart of the American left is something the left really doesn’t want to know or think about,” David Horowitz writes.
Even today, such inconvenient stories as a photographer shot and killed by a BLM activist, or innocent people killed in “a hail of bullets” in Portland, are met with a wall of left-media silence.
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