Believe it or not, Brittney Griner perfectly exemplifies the rolling disaster of BLM in America. In this regard, she is more of a victim than many conservatives, made hostile by her disrespect for America, realize. Thanks to the BLM effect, Griner may have lost her sense that there will be negative repercussions when a Black person commits a criminal act. And in carrying that mindset to Russia, she turned herself into a perfect pawn for Putin.

In the 21st century, race relations in America have plummeted. According to Gallup, in 2013, 72% of White and 66% of Black adults said race relations were good or somewhat good. In 2021, the percentages were 43 and 33, respectively.

It’s not a coincidence that this unprogressive trajectory correlates with BLM’s success. Brittney Griner’s prominent BLM activism, combined with her drug use and her impassioned plea to Biden (who promised to “pursue every avenue” on her behalf) made her a perfect tool for Putin. After all, BLM activism is everything Putin’s Russia abhors: anti-police, pro-LGBTQ, anti-white, and anti-law and order. Griner was the perfect propaganda for stoking racial divisions to further weaken a drug-crazed American superpower.

Both Putin and Xi fear the existential threat from political and racial divisions within their own countries. They surely celebrated the Democrats’ zealously executed strategy to recapture and retain the White House and Congress by politically and racially dividing America.

BLM was central to the Democrats’ success. Founded in 2013, BLM’s fortunes rose in 2020 when George Floyd died, and this alleged victim of racism became the centerpiece of the Democrats’ strategy. The media were supportive. To succeed, Democratic politicians encouraged BLM activists to blanket the streets. Violent riots destroyed over $2 billion in property and killed 25 people. Candidates Harris and Biden applauded the chaos, calling them “civil rights protests.”

Image: Brittney Griner (edited). YouTube screen grab.

BLM supporters seized the moment. They dusted off 1989’s intentionally unvalidated Critical Race Theory and encouraged teaching divisive assertions in primary and secondary schools. The 1989 White Privilege checklist, created from the musings of a liberal Wellesley College professor, entered the mainstream. Soon, misconstrued implicit (i.e., unconscious) bias became mandatory training in private and public sector institutions. The error-strewn, White-bashing, journalist-created 1619 Project began to be adopted en masse in schools.

Pro sports also embraced BLM. The NFL solidified its alignment with a commitment to sing the Black National Anthem at every game. The WNBA dedicated its 2020 season to honoring BLM, while Griner vacated the court during the national anthem.

The odd bedfellows of the Marxist BLM and the Democrats chanted racism, racism, racism in perfect unison. It was an odd spectacle. Every race, ethnic and religious group in America has experienced racism, but none chanted about it; instead, they addressed it. Fortunately, in America, unlike Russia, where non-whites must learn to live with racism, the formula for draining away racism is as simple as adopting the nation’s core values: self-reliance, valuing education, English language skills, and observing the law.

An individual’s orientation for success and failure has always been part of an American upbringing, but BLM and the Democrats did something unprecedented in American history: they held one group of Americans accountable for the behavior-driven outcomes of another. That is, Whites are responsible for disproportionately negative Black outcomes.

Fact-driven people tried to debunk disproportional claims. For example, the insistence that police singled out Blacks on racial grounds fell before statistics showing Blacks were committing crimes disproportionate to their numbers. Lower educational and income outcomes reflected a Black aversion to “acting White“ and the high percentage of Black children (64% vs an average of 34%) living in single-parent households. Higher negative health outcomes were tied to bad health habits leading to obesity (less exercise; more unhealthy foods). However, those non-racist reasons explaining disproportionate outcomes—reasons that could be addressed with behavioral changes—were dismissed as racist and silenced.

Instead, federal, state, and local politicians accepted and addressed the fake racist rationale for disproportionate claims by lowering the bar for all Americans. School boards lowed educational expectations, with some even accommodating African-American vernacular in schools; policies normalizing obesity encouraged further reliance on government services; and legislatures destroyed the rule of law by passing laws tying incarceration to color and ethnicity rather than crime, and police were defunded to lower arrests and incarceration.

BLM played an influential role in the Democrats’ success in the 2020 elections. Then, when Biden came into office, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors said, “we want something for our vote.” In 2021, Biden became the champion of a BLM priority—Black LBGTQ rights, and the Biden administration pushed The 1619 Project as a priority. That same year, twenty major cities defunded their police forces.

Congress also gave Blacks an independence day separate from America’s Independence Day: Juneteenth. Their own flag may be next. Utah’s BLM leader called the American flag a symbol of hatred and those that fly it racist.

Proving that the Democrats’ strategy has worked, political divisions are tracking with racial divisions. The strategic centerpiece has been January 6. The media circus surrounding Trump and his White supporters on January 6 is matched with the inattention given to 557 BLM riots over 100 days. The Democrat Congress won’t investigate the BLM riots despite two-thirds of Americans saying they wanted Congress to investigate them, which is higher than the 49% that supported a congressional investigation into January 6.

BLM again demonstrated its utility for the Democrats by branding Republicans and Trump as racists. It ran ads equating the January 6 protesters to White supremacists and the KKK. Among BLM’s Seven Demands, five are related to J6. A recent Harvard study found that over 70% of respondents thought the J6 participants were extremists. BLM supporters were 1.5 times more likely to label them extremists. Ironically, only 0.02% of J6 protesters (244 of 120,000 ) were affiliated with alt-right extremist groups.

If not for alleged widespread fraud, BLM could have done more to divide the country. Addressing the fraud allegations, Cullors said: “This is money that came from White guilt, White corporation guilt, and they just poured money in.” Yet Biden and Harris insist BLM is a civil rights movement. Is it any wonder that race relations are in the abyss?

In America, we now have two sets of standards: One for Blacks and one for the rest. It’s justified with the drivel of Blacks as victims of biologically-driven White oppression, supremacism, racism, and privilege. The Democrat-aligned National Education Association supports this ideology by indoctrinating children to believe America is systemically racist. Meanwhile, a Harvard poll found that 61% of voters do not want this counterproductive nonsense taught to their colorblind children.

Double standards, an open season on Whites, and a closed season on Blacks are the root causes of plummeting race relations. Non-Blacks who embrace America’s central values and care nothing about someone’s skin color are offended at being regularly defamed and sidelined. People are also angry at BLM’s signature “Defund the Police” and equity in education initiatives. They feel less safe and see racially divisive and unchallenging schoolwork damaging prospects for their children’s futures.

Brittney Griner is the center of the Venn diagram in which all these trends overlap. A prominent BLM activist, African American, lesbian, and WNBA superstar, Griner could have believed she was relatively immune to prosecution for a little cannabis. This made her a perfect pawn for Putin. Her globally publicized sentence of nine years in a Russian penal colony gave Putin the opportunity to stoke political and racial divisions to further weaken America and to remind his people of the need for cultural unity overriding race, even while humiliating a powerless superpower. Putin isn’t done leveraging Griner.