We are unlikely to find more than one person out of a hundred, and this includes law enforcement professionals, who is OK with what Derek Chauvin (allegedly until proven guilty) did to George Floyd.  President Trump just issued an executive order to address the abuses highlighted by Floyd's death, and rightly so.  The House and Senate are both meanwhile considering legislation that goes beyond the executive order.  We do not, however, need to associate with a group like Black Lives Matter to achieve reforms with which everybody, including police, agrees.

BLM is right to denounce the tiny minority of police officers who abuse their authority in what's a righteous opposition to police misconduct.  They're the marquee group on this, and everyone knows it.  The problem is not what's at the top of the rock, but rather with what we find crawling around underneath it when we turn it over.

BLM has blood libeled Israel as an apartheid state that practices genocide.  If the Electronic Intifada is for BLM, that's another good reason to be against it, and "#BlackLivesMatter stands up for Palestine" is yet another.  BLM's current statement of principles says, "We see ourselves as part of the global Black family, and we are aware of the different ways we are impacted or privileged as Black people who exist in different parts of the world."  Caucasian racists view themselves similarly as part of a global white family as opposed to the American family whose members come in all colors.  "Make this Christmas a Black Xmas" — BLM argues that people should not buy from white-owned businesses between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day.  If that's not racist, I don't know what is.  BLM and/or people acting in its name have promoted hatred and contempt for all law enforcement professionals with slogans like "Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon."

Nancy Pelosi tried to virtue-signal to them by giving George Floyd's brother a folded flag that had flown over the U.S. Capitol, as if George Floyd had been an emergency responder or Armed Forces member instead of a convicted violent felon.  Floyd's rap sheet doesn't justify what happened to him, but what happened to him doesn't make him a hero or a "gentle giant," either.  We should keep in mind that BLM is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization that is not allowed to try to influence elections.  The instant the Democrats try to turn BLM events into campaign rallies, this can and should be used to defeat them in November.

The Right Way to Boycott and Cancel BLM

The problem with Colin Kaepernick wasn't that he protested unlawful use of force by police — but that he did it on his employer's time and during the National Anthem.  I and probably 99% of the country agree with him about this.  If you put a BLM sticker on your car or support BLM in social media as an individual, I might not agree with it, but I am not going to treat you as an enemy, either, especially because we agree on BLM's non-controversial goal of addressing police misconduct.

But it works both ways.  An employer or organization that fires or publicly shames somebody for criticizing BLM on his own time is failing to respect free speech of all people and should be called out, shunned, and boycotted.  Somebody who takes his support of BLM to his own workplace, or somebody else's, to try to get somebody fired or "canceled" should have his own career placed at risk by whatever lawful means are at hand, and probably using what he is doing to the other person as a model.  Sir Charles Napier's "You follow your customs and we will follow ours" is a word to the wise, as is the adage about glass houses and stones.  Facebook deserves credit for firing an employee who criticized another employee, in a work-related context, for not supporting Black Lives Matter.

Cornell University alumni and others should withdraw their support for Cornell's law school, and perhaps redirect prospective students to the far less expensive SUNY (State University of New York) system, because the law school's dean publicly criticized a professor for criticizing Black Lives Matter.  The university's "woke" leftists and social justice warriors (SJW) were apparently unhappy that the professor pointed out, and accurately, that Michael Brown did not have his hands up, and also that BLM's agenda (as pointed out earlier) seems to go far beyond advocacy for equal justice under the law to include some very unsavory and repulsive items.

If Cornell University is going to publicly shame its own faculty members for refusing to toe the party line, much as mainland China's "social credit" system denies good career opportunities to those who go against the party, then qualified faculty should consider careers at other institutions.  Students should question whether Cornell Law School is worth roughly twice SUNY Buffalo's tuition. You can by the way show proper respect for the law school's public denunciation of the professor in question by making a donation to Legal Insurrection, which I just did.

Starbucks, LEGO, and Washington DC

Starbucks should stick to serving coffee, and tell its baristas to express their political views on their own time and not Starbucks' time, if it values the good will of all its customers as opposed to just the "woke" left. It has lost mine until such time as it bans its employees from wearing BLM apparel when on the job, but I would not expect or advise Starbucks to allow employees to wear MAGA hats or display Trump 2020 signs either because these would alienate the "woke" leftists and SJWs.

LEGO has suspended marketing of police and firefighter figures (although not the figures themselves). If LEGO's executives are somehow embarrassed by our emergency responders, then if they ever find themselves in 100-story buildings that have been set on fire by al-Qaida terrorists, they should not call the police and firefighters who went into those buildings on Sept. 11 2001, 412 of whom never got out. They should instead call Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the people running the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, and wait for them to show up. I suspect that they will wait a very long time.

Washington D.C. should be boycotted for naming a street for Black Lives Matter. The city is expensive anyway, and this is yet another reason to not schedule conferences, trade shows, and similar events there. Don't boycott our national treasures that can be visited there, assuming the "woke" Left doesn't vandalize them first, but boycott the rest of the city.

Civis Americanus is the pen name of an American Thinker contributor who remembers the lessons of history, and wants to ensure that our country never needs to learn those lessons again the hard way.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons, public domain, with modification.