Tag Archives: Black Lives Matter

BLM and The Knee

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I read the other day that someone working for Sky had declared that those critical of ‘taking the knee’ were subhuman. There, I thought, was a prime example of idle hyperbole at best, and crass idiocy at worst. After all there are plenty of ways of displaying your opposition to racism, but taking the knee specifically pays homage to BLM, in the same way as a Hitler salute does to Nazism; and from what I have understood BLM is not the cosiest of clubs. Therefore I leapt at the chance to learn more when I saw that Hillsdale College had in October 2020 hosted a panel discussion entitled The BLM Movement and Civil Rights. I thought this would be a bit of a ‘blog holiday’ for me, not teaching just learning.

I was wrong. If you are a regular reader you will know my obsession with paperless speaking – no script, no notes – and the three panellists in order of speaking went from Paper Prisoner, via occasional glancer, to shooting from the hip, thus offering three stark examples of my case. Furthermore I couldn’t resist other interesting observations concerning their speaking style.

The panelists were Arthur Milikh, Wilfred Reilly, and Robert Woodson. The chairman is Michael Anton.

Of the four names above, Michael Anton is the only one whom I have denied a cyber link to learn about him. That is because he spends the first minute telling us all about himself. I briefly wonder whether he is inordinately nervous or a stammer sufferer who has almost conquered it. I decide upon the latter, which is admirable (it’s a difficult task). He conveys a lovely nature when introducing the others, reading the supplied resumé material but always raising his eyes to add his own personal twist. He’s good.

Arthur Milikh starts at 2:30, and we quickly learn two things. He really knows his stuff and will supply us with a wealth of deeply researched information, but we will have to work harder to absorb it because his audience engagement is lamentable. The reason for that is that damn paper that holds him prisoner. He can obviously communicate well through the written word but he has no idea how to convey it orally. At 9:15 he breaks out of the prison and addresses the audience freestyle, and for half a minute we see how he could be if he threw away his script. For me this is frustrating because I know how easily he’d do that with proper guidance, and how liberating he would find it.

That example is not ideal because it has to cope with transitions from reading to speaking and back again. We see it more clearly during Q&A when he fields a question that begins at 54:55, and thereafter all his speaking is perforce spontaneous and immeasurably better for it. 

For all that, this opening talk is hugely informative. There is a very revealing section that arrives around 13:40 on the theme of the appeasement of the corporate elites, and how BLM engineers it.  Milikh sets us up well for what is to follow.

Wilfred Reilly, talking about ‘Inner-city Crime and the Police’,begins at 19:42, and intrigues me. There is a nuance to his delivery that keeps me constantly wondering whether he is ever being altogether serious. His light touch seems to belie the seriousness of the topic, but he always stays just the right side of acceptability. His face at rest seems to be constantly slightly smiling, which may be just the way it was built by his Maker, though the preposterous beard – which somehow manages to be charming – is his own construction. He does ambush us with occasional flippant comments, excellently timed, and he sometimes protests that he doesn’t want to be glib but…

The glibness is interesting, because when it appears the humour comes direct from his knack of distilling things to a minimal use of words  – e.g. – “My basic one-sentence take on policing is that it’s a good idea”. 

Then at around 33:30 his delivery subtly hardens till at 36:28 the blast of war blows in his ears, and he imitates the action of the tiger. His sentences get shorter as do the words and finally he is serious – except he isn’t. He rounds off the entire speech – which, in passing, is full of some horrendous facts – with a flourish which draws a huge laugh from the audience.

This is one skilled communicator.

Robert Woodson begins at 38:45. He was on this blog only a handful of weeks ago with a full-length speech. Here as there he shoots the whole thing from the hip and is magnificent.  He is such a wise man!

He finishes at 50:30 and receives a standing ovation.  Even his fellow speakers stand.

There follow about twenty minutes of question and answer, and I found that equally riveting.

Anyone, be they footballers, sports commentators, world champion racing drivers, police officers, leaders of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, anyone who defends the taking of the knee – or, worse, attacks those who don’t – should watch this video and know the nature of the revolting movement to which they are paying abject homage. 

Andy Ngo: beaten by brutish beasts

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At a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Franklin, Tennessee, in May 2021, there was a talk by Andy Ngo.

In all the thousands of online speeches I have watched, though a round of applause at the end, and in greeting at the beginning, is the norm I think this is the first time I have heard an audience break out in spontaneous applause at the mere mention of the speaker’s name at the beginning of his introduction.

The introduction is by Timothy Caspar, and it is he that is unexpectedly interrupted by applause on his mentioning Ngo’s name. Caspar’s reaction is excellent, as is the personal warmth that he injects into the introduction.

Ngo comes to the lectern just after 2:30 but can’t begin speaking till nearly the 3-minute mark, because now the applause is turbo charged by cheering. The applause at the end of the speech is more subdued, probably by the chilling story.

O judgement! Thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason.

I already knew some of at least the bare bones of Ngo’s account of his investigations into the activities of Antifa. For the purposes of this posting that was an advantage, because otherwise I would have been gaping at what he tells instead of carefully considering his delivery. If you are coming new to this story, be prepared. This is a brave man.

He begins by uttering a trigger-warning concerning the nature of some of the images he will be showing, and they are shocking. That warning is not sensationalist, nor is Ngo. His account of dramatic incidents is delivered in a calm, matter-of-fact and undramatic fashion, allowing the narrative to speak for itself. The only help he gives to the story comes in the shape of long pauses. It works pretty well, but the real quality of this speech is that the story is even being told.

The story he tells and the images he shows are outrageous, as is the inability of politically shackled police to combat it. But in many ways more shocking still is the role of the press. I often come across people who would classify themselves as well-informed who have at best the faintest, sketchiest idea of the unfettered anarchy that has been going on since last year in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis. This is because the world is told almost nothing, and the little that does get out is ridiculously biased and sanitised. There was last year a notorious piece of video footage of a US TV reporter talking of ‘a peaceful protest’ while behind him numerous buildings were blazing. This news blackout has overflowed to the UK. Proper journalism is, if not dead, at least comatose.

That is why when people like Andy Ngo defy death-threats to spread real news people of good will and espousers of truth break out in spontaneous applause.

Heather Mac Donald’s audience matters

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On 6 April, 2017, Heather Mac Donald was booked to address an audience of students at Claremont McKenna College in California. When the appointed hour arrived, the entrance to the auditorium was blocked by a crowd of chanting protesters, so Ms Mac Donald delivered the speech to an essentially empty hall and a camera which streamed her lecture to be received elsewhere. The camera’s footage also found its way online, thus ensuring that this protest multiplied the lecture’s audience several-fold. Today we increase that audience by a little more.

Disregarding the size of the audience, if I don my rhetor hat Ms Mac Donald has my sympathy. Some years ago I delivered a seminar in London to an international law firm. There were around 250 people in the auditorium. Subsequent feedback was severely mixed; and when I delved deeper it emerged that, without my having been told, an audio feed of my talk had been relayed to other offices worldwide, and every single piece of negative feedback had come from people not in the hall. I remonstrated with the organisers, not for enormously increasing my audience (I was promoting my book!), but for withholding from me the information. There are subtle but significant differences in how you deliver to those who are present and those who aren’t, and my being kept in ignorance of most of my audience, the unseen had been shortchanged.

Ms Mac Donald’s lecture is designed to be delivered to an audience in the hall, and she is here having to build ‘on the hoof’ a communication line to persons unseen and unknown. Let’s see how she copes.

The introduction is made by Sara Sanbar, who is clearly conscious of the absurdity of addressing an empty hall – she even mentions it. The serious side to her introduction is that she evidently disagrees with what she believes Mac Donald will say, but she is defending her right to say it. Some students understand the value of free speech.

Mac Donald begins. She’s talking about BLM (Black Lives Matter). Those three words comprise most of the chanting by the crowds who blocked students from attending this lecture. You might have thought from this that it must therefore be the case that to Ms Mac Donald black lives don’t matter. But in that case you’d be disastrously wrong. Within seconds of the lecture beginning it becomes supremely clear that no one holds black lives more precious than Ms Mac Donald.

The statistics that she hands out should churn your stomach. Here’s an example: black victims of homicide in the USA outnumber white and hispanic combined, by a factor of six. Who kill them? Overwhelmingly other blacks. Who is in between, trying to stop it happening, and then picking up the pieces afterwards? The BLM-maligned police.

You should listen to the whole of her lecture. Those protestors whom we can still hear faintly chanting should definitely have listened to her lecture. They would have learnt something – an activity which used to be the purpose of going to university.

BLM may not know the actual statistics, but they know perfectly well the basic facts. The organisation’s true purpose is not to defend blacks, but to pursue a much darker programme of disruption, the chief victims being blacks. The name is a fraud.

You don’t have to poke very far below the surface to learn that they are just one bunch of many, operating under fraudulent names. Antifa is not anti fascist: it is fascist. Hope-not-hate is consumed with hate. We can see where they learnt this trick: countries have been doing it for years. The communist totalitarian dictatorship of East Germany used to call itself the German Democratic Republic. Even today North Korea styles itself The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Of course black lives matter. Half a century ago, black lives in the USA were in far better shape than they are today. What went wrong is another story for another time.