An investigative report on Black Lives Matter (BLM) published four and half years ago foretold current events in many respects.  The report, Reds Exploiting Blacks: The Roots of Black Lives Matter by James Simpson at the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, is the best source I've found as to BLM's origins, tactics, funding, and goals.

The report begins with this:

The Black Lives Matter movement casts itself as a spontaneous uprising born of inner-city frustration, but is, in fact, the latest and most dangerous face of a web of well-funded communist/socialist organizations that have been agitating against America for decades.  Its agitation has provoked police killings and other violence, lawlessness and unrest in minority communities throughout the U.S. If allowed to continue, that agitation could devolve into anarchy and civil war.  The BLM crowd appears to be spoiling for just such an outcome.

After reading the report, one has to wonder how many protesters and demonstrators carrying BLM signs and sharing and liking the same online actually know what they're endorsing.  For the sake of maintaining my sanity, I choose to believe that the number of well intentioned though uninformed and blissfully ignorant protesters far outweighs the number of revolutionaries, informed agitators, and fellow travelers.  Regardless, no doubt, our adversaries abroad must be enjoying the show and relishing the results of their handiwork.

The widespread admiration and even genuflection (literal and figural) by media, academia, large U.S. corporations, and politicians to BLM is stunning to witness.  Those groups are, generally speaking, better educated about BLM.  That's telling as to the declining state of our country — what Mark Steyn eloquently describes as the disconnection from the animating principles of the American idea.

While the list is long, probably no recent developments better exemplify the self-loathing madness than having streets in at least two of our major metropolises — cities attacked by other totalitarian forces less than 20 years ago — painted with the words Black Lives Matter to "commemorate" the movement.

"The streets of our city will now affirm the vital work activists have done to bring us forward," Mayor de Blasio said. "With a street in every borough painted with the words Black Lives Matter, we are recognizing where we have been and looking forward to where we will go."

As the Aim Center report states, "while justifying violence to achieve 'social justice,' the [BLM] movement's goal is to overthrow our society to replace it with a Marxist one."  There's nothing "forward" about that dreadful and discredited end, and, I have to believe, it is not where most Americans, no matter their race, want to go.

The 2016 report is a must-read for those wanting to better understand BLM and the American left.