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Black Lives Matter is a Marxist scam. As with all totalitarian ploys, BLM uses your natural fear of social rejection to force conformity and compliance with its goals. If we buy into it, we have a lot to lose, including all individual liberties—freedom of speech, of thought, and especially the right to a private life and private relationships.

The BLM goal should be obvious by now: conjure up enough blind conformity to create the illusion of unanimous support. Support for what? The uncontroversial slogan that black lives matter is just a tool to draw you in emotionally to its broader and more destructive agenda.

Read the BLM website and you’ll find lots of Marxist agendas like ending constitutional self-governance (under the guise of “sustainable transformation”) and taking over law enforcement to abolish the rule of law (“defund the police”). It’s anti-Christian and anti-free markets. It’s committed to “disrupting” the nuclear family and replacing it with collectivist forms of child-rearing. Its endgame is typical of Marxism: a power grab stoked by the illusion of mass approval through street theater.

When we get sucked in to the vortex of BLM’s mass delusions, whether out of a sense of guilt or ignorance, the results are predictable. Forced confessions. Struggle sessions. The suppression of speech. Stoking of resentments. Accusations of thought crimes. Toppling historical monuments. Civilizational breakdown. Meddling in private life, especially family.

So, what’s the secret of creating enough woke conformity to get to such an anti-thought point? How does a well-organized band of power-craving elitists get people to surrender the right to speak their own minds? To open the door to giving collectivist elites the raw power they crave?

I’ll use the terms socialism and Marxism somewhat interchangeably. Marxists tend to refer to themselves as socialists, even if some socialists claim they aren’t Marxists. All are collectivists, though, with the same patterns and tendencies and agendas, some harder than others, depending on their “state of evolution.”
Weaponizing the Fear of Loneliness

The threat of ostracism is a primal and universal human terror, and thus an extremely powerful weapon, especially when mobs enforce it. Tyrants have always been in the business of cultivating the terror of social rejection in order to control people and amass power. Sadly, most people are not consciously aware of these dynamics, and are therefore vulnerable to succumbing.

The terror of abandonment is built into our social DNA because human beings cannot survive in isolation. What we see today is a psychological operation that plays on that fear through identity politics, peer-modelling, and social contagion.

First, the propaganda media conjures up images of unanimity with a false BLM narrative. Then, anyone who doesn’t buy in is smeared as a racist, at great risk of losing his or her job, status, livelihood, and now even family. It’s designed to induce everyone to cave in to that primal fear of social isolation and submit to the power elites. Once society reaches a tipping point where everyone blindly succumbs, then the power grab begins, and game over.
Emotional Blackmail Is Common to Identity Politics

Emotional blackmail seems to be an inherent tactic of Marxist activists as well as today’s cult of wokeness. We can now see how BLM applies that tool to the daily lives of its “allies.”

The author of a recent New York Times op-ed writes that he fears for his life when he goes out because he’s black. He’s irritated with texts of sympathy he receives from white allies because he finds their support for BLM inadequate.

The essay, titled “I Don’t Need ‘Love’ Texts From My White Friends,” offers a prescription for proving their love: threaten to ostracize any loved ones who don’t get with the program. His exact words: “Text: to your relatives and loved ones telling them you will not be visiting them or answering phone calls until they take significant action in supporting black lives either through protest or financial contributions.”

Here’s a key Twitter thread on it:

this @nytimes oped instructs us to excommunicate "loved ones" until they've attended a protest, or paid cash to author-approved causes.
So grandparents need to risk COVID19 at a protest or pay up, or no grandkids
How did antiracism get so creepy & cultishhttps://t.co/ppJuOK69ue pic.twitter.com/Lbcj1mhD1A

— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) June 6, 2020

Repeat After Me… Repeat After Me…

Cult experts have a term for this practice of meddling in relationships: predatory alienation. It’s a form of relational aggression, straight out of Cults 101. BLM offers us other examples of mass compliance reminiscent of Jonestown.

A creepy Maoist-styled struggle session recently took place in the affluent suburb of Bethesda, Maryland where a large crowd theatrically recited a mass confession of collective white guilt. They also promised to proselytize (i.e., “educate”) others, leading likely to performing emotional blackmail when deemed necessary.

We’ve also seen spectacles of police officers, and even uniformed military personnel, “taking the knee” in obedience to mobs. Corporate America from Amazon to Zoom has also drunk the Kool-Aid in fear. Even supposed Republicans like Mitt Romney and George W. Bush publicly support BLM’s false claim that America is a “systemically” racist nation. Maybe you now have family and friends who harangue you, threatening—overtly or tacitly—to shun you if you don’t get with their program.

Americans should have enough sense to know that such shameful acts of submission to mobs are not about race, police brutality, or healing. They are about shifting power from the rule of law to a socialist elite who intend lawless dominion over everyone once in power. Their false narratives exploit George Floyd’s death as a trigger to stir up fear and loathing (in the name of love) in order to gain and consolidate power.
Socialism Weaponizes Loneliness to Control People

The emotional manipulation we’re seeing by Black Lives Matter reflects socialism’s long pattern of isolating individuals and controlling their relationships. We can see it in socialism’s history, in its policies, and especially in its tactics.

Abolishing family and religion are both old socialist rallying cries. A big part of socialism’s history is its war on those primary institutions through which our most intimate relationships and our unique identities are formed. We become isolated and weakened, and more easily controlled, when separated from them. That’s the idea.

Socialist dictators like Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedog, Pol Pot, and Adolf Hitler were dedicated to the destruction of all private life, insisting that loyalty belonged only to them. That’s why the death toll of socialist systems is more than 100 million.

Whatever else socialists say they promote—equality, justice, free stuff—they have one goal: placing too much power in the hands of too few people. To undermine the power of individuals, they undermine their private relationships. That’s exactly what just about every socialist policy has done, including no-fault divorce, welfare dependency, and abortion, which wreak havoc on the family.

The victims of this brokenness naturally feel alienated. Yet they still have a need to belong to something. Socialists feed that appetite with pseudo-communities, such as contrived collectives, mobs, and, yes, its wokeness cult.
Groupthink and Imposed Isolation Are a Vicious Cycle

The mob mindset is a trap, a form of mental solitary confinement, an ironic form of mind rape. Why? Because mobs of wokeness do not allow for anyone to express an original thought to another human being without the risk of being smeared and isolated.

As people invest in groupthink to remain in the herd, they end up spiraling even deeper into the mental isolation, cutting off normal conversation. They soon become “triggered” by other points of view. BLM activists have not only taken full advantage of the fear of loneliness already inherent in our culture. They also seem intent in perpetuating the fear by stoking more divisions within private relationships.

Political correctness and identity politics have long been used as tools of agitation designed to instill groupthink and stir up that threat of loneliness. Political correctness works by inducing self-censorship, cutting off conversation and the exchange of ideas, which might lead to friendship.

People with politically incorrect ideas often confide they feel completely alone. Identity politics works by forcing people to focus only on a collective identity and collective guilt while erasing each of us as unique individuals. Both are alienating. Both empower bad actors.

Most of us have never had a chance to learn the history of how blind conformity breeds terror, and vice versa. Abject conformity led to the hellscapes of Stalin’s reign of terror, of Hitler’s Germany. Those who submit to false confessions of “white guilt” can just as easily submit to such regimes because the psychological mechanism is the same: seeking the social approval they crave and avoiding the social rejection they fear.

In the end, weaponized loneliness is the fuel of socialism, as well as hardcore socialist organizations, including BLM. Recognizing and rejecting this scam is the only way to begin coming together as whole human beings.

Stella Morabito is a senior contributor to The Federalist.