Black Lives Matter has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. The prize has been given to ridiculous honorees before, meaning that the pointless corporate stands and violent riots that marked last summer’s Black Lives Matter resurgence give it as good a chance of winning the award as anyone else.
Petter Eide, a socialist member of the Norwegian Parliament, made the nomination, saying that “it’s quite important that we spark this discussion.” While any national politician can make a nomination, it is a discussion that Black Lives Matter allies have been happy to push for the past year.
It’s a discussion that has focused on the woke corporate messaging of the Black Lives Matter movement. Athletes are praised for cookie-cutter statements about their support for the cause, while their teams and leagues give similar statements to appease sponsors. Hollywood celebrities gave cookie-cutter statements, talking about each other’s bravery on late-night talk shows.
While schools and syrup bottles were renamed, this corporate Black Lives Matter movement played pretend. NBA player LeBron James and other athletes maintain that Jacob Blake was the victim of police brutality, though he admitted to defying police orders while holding a knife. President Biden still buys in to the lie that started the Black Lives Matter movement, that Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson because of racism and not because he was assaulting a police officer.
All the while, this corporate side ignored what was actually happening in the streets. Portland, Oregon, suffered $23 million in damages from riots in the initial aftermath of the George Floyd shooting. Kenosha suffered over $50 million in damages that broke out after Blake was shot. Minnesota’s governor requested $500 million in aid to repair Minneapolis, while the destruction of businesses across the country led to over $1 billion in insurance claims.
While now-Vice President Kamala Harris joined several Hollywood celebrities to bail out the rioters wreaking havoc on minority communities, the actual reforms that were achieved were minuscule. The Democratic Party pitched itself as the ally of the Black Lives Matter movement, even though it has controlled the cities where these incidents happened for decades. At the national level, Senate Democrats torpedoed a police reform bill put forward by Republicans, deciding that nothing was better than something.
While athletes, celebrities, and politicians ignored or tacitly endorsed these riots, no major changes or reforms were achieved. Businesses were looted and destroyed, and people such as retired police Capt. David Dorn were killed by rioters. That is where this discussion, the one that Eide and others want, ends.
