What was the most demented moment of the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020? For me, it was when 1,200 public health officials declared that, although meeting other people was a health risk, especially if you were protesting the lockdowns, demonstrating in support of BLM was fine.
Few dared speak out against this obvious madness. Being the only sane person during a spasm of collective psychosis is dangerous, and it truly was a collective psychosis, triggered by months of confinement, with people poring over their screens instead of going out with friends.
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Almost every organization joined the bedlam. Congressional Democrats knelt in Ghanaian stoles for 8 minutes, 46 seconds, the amount of time Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck. The New York Stock Exchange observed an 8-minute silence.
McDonald’s changed its name on all social media platforms to “Amplifying Black Voices.” Apple replaced its music app radio stations with a single stream playing N.W.A’s “Fuck Tha Police” on repeat. Lego canceled advertising for its police-related toys. Woe betide you if you did not post a black square on June 2, 2020, to mark #BlackOutTuesday.
The delirium went global. From Latin America to continental Europe, people decided that a rogue police officer in Minneapolis symbolized racism in their countries. Canadians toppled statues and burned churches over a wholly fictitious account of mass graves in indigenous boarding schools. Australians held a referendum on giving Aboriginals extra parliamentary representation. New Zealand, which has enviable race relations by any standard, decided to reopen its founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi, in which (remarkably for its or any other time) the world’s most powerful empire was treated on equal terms with Stone Age tribes.
Britain went every bit as bonkers as the United States, from the Royal Family down. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, then leader of the Opposition, took the knee, as did every Premier League soccer player at the start of matches. Oxford University granted black students extra time on their exams. Bookshops replaced their usual stock with Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist. Even British children’s shelves were filled with nagging morality tales.
The BBC, like CNN, lost all self-awareness. Its presenters gabbled about “mainly peaceful protests” while viewers watched footage of burning buildings and injured police officers. People lost their jobs for saying “All Lives Matter,” which is about the most uncontroversial statement imaginable in normal times. One retired policeman actually went to prison for posting a tasteless joke about Floyd in a private WhatsApp group.
Ten billion dollars was poured into the coffers of BLM and BLM-adjacent outfits without anyone daring to ask what it would be used for. When JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon took the knee in front of an open bank vault, he personified the corporate world’s attitude. Shakedown artists took the hint. To this day, no one has much idea of where the $10 billion went or who has it now.
On the fifth anniversary of the height of the protests, those events had an unreal, phantasmagoric quality. The identitarian Left over-reached, seeking to bring the same bullying style to other matters on its agenda, such as transgender rights and supporting Palestinians. But the tide was no longer flowing their way. In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter, now X. In 2023, the world was disgusted by anti-Israel demonstrations on campuses in the aftermath of pogroms. In 2024, President Donald Trump was elected on an overtly anti-woke platform.
Official America got the memo. The corporate leaders who spent 2020 moralizing about white privilege sacked their diversity consultants faster than you could say “intersectionality.” Universities began adopting merit-based admissions policies. People started voicing opinions that would have canceled them in 2020.
But the needle never quite moved back to where it was. In fields adjacent to race, some of the more extreme rhetoric is now recognized for the nonsense it is. Few argue with the same self-righteous confidence that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that Hamas represents legitimate resistance against a settler-colonist state.
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But the racial narcissism that 2020 encouraged in every non-white population, what Eric Kaufmann called “asymmetric multiculturalism,” is not going away. The pressure for slavery reparations will continue to build. It will still be a cause of self-congratulation when black actors are cast in white roles, while the reverse remains unthinkable.
Leftists sometimes talk of a “long march through the institutions,” but in truth, it is a long Foxtrot with occasional backward steps. We are in one of those backward steps now. Don’t mistake it for a new direction.