On the Thursday before the MLK weekend, police arrested 29 protestors who blocked traffic on I-93 both north and south of Boston.  Traffic was snarled for most of the morning, blocking commuters and an ambulance attempting to get to Mass General Hospital.

According to the protest organizer, six protestors in the southern blockade stuck their arms into holes in the sides of 55-gallon drums and had concrete poured over them.  Firefighters had to use power saws to cut open the drums, which weighed 1,200 pounds.  The Boston Globe reports: “When a Boston firefighter’s power saw generated sparks that flew onto the protester, he screamed in pain.”

The protestors wore diapers, anticipating a long wait.

These tactics speak to the radical nature of these people; we’re not talking about college kids waving “Stop Racism Now!” signs for half an hour between classes.

According to the Globe, the protest was an attempt “to call attention to racial oppression.”  Protest organizer Shannon Leary said, cluelessly, “I personally can’t understand why the act of killing a black child [in Ferguson] is not enough for people to stop.”

A statement issued by the protesters identifies them as “a diverse group of LGBTQA, white, pan-Asian and Latin@ people acting in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, both locally and nationally.”

The statement continues with explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-America rhetoric:

[I]t is necessary to disrupt a capitalist structure that has been built on the physical and economic exploitation of Black bodies since our country’s inception. We also recognize our unique position in the struggle for economic, political, gender and racial liberation…

We maintain that the U.S. is and has always been a state founded on the exploitation, enslavement and oppression of people of color worldwide. The political and economic system we struggle under today would not exist without the centuries of exploitation of Black and brown people. It is crucial to recognize that capitalism is a system that is upheld by white supremacy. We cannot end capitalism without ending white supremacy. There is no such thing as total liberation without ending the exploitation of Black and brown bodies.

Black Lives Matter (echoing the names of Democracy Matters and Media Matters for America) was created, according to their website, “in 2012 after Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman, was acquitted for his crime.”  Their blog has a “herstory” describing the organization’s founding by three “black Queer women,” and the bottom of the webpage lists other hashtags: BlackTransLivesMatter, BlackQueerLivesMatter, BlackLesbiansMatter, etc.

Gay activism is a dominant theme in their literature.  We read, for example:

How Black queer and trans folks bear a unique burden from a hetero-patriarchal society that disposes of us like garbage and simultaneously fetishizes us and profits off of us, and that is state violence.

Similarly, in Boston, the first group identified in their statement is LGBTQA.

The Boston statement additionally proclaims: “We stand behind the demands released by organizers in Ferguson, which can be found at http://fergusonaction.com/demands/.”  These demands are a boilerplate Marxism:

• We want the United States Government to recognize the full spectrum of our human rights and its obligations under international law.  [As opposed to its obligations to the U.S. Constitution.]
• Our communities have a human right to access quality housing.  [Free stuff.]
• We want all children to be able to access free, quality education. Including free or affordable public university.  [More free stuff.]
• Support for the passage of the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA) which in law would prohibit the use of profiling on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin or religion by law enforcement agencies.  [It begins with prohibiting the profiling of black men in Ferguson but encompasses 22-year-old male Arab Muslims from Saudi Arabia flying in from Yemen.]
• The development and enactment of a National Plan of Action for Racial Justice by the Obama Administration…The Plan would set concrete targets for achieving racial equality and reducing racial disparities and create new tools for holding government accountable to meeting targets.  [Or creating new government power for prosecuting violators of our conception of racial injustice.]

The Ferguson website was created by the Design Action Collective.  Their “Design by Issue” provides a list of issues: Economic Justice, Environmental Justice, Feminism and Queer Liberation, Grassroots Organizing, Internationalism, and Racial Justice.

The End Racial Profiling Act has been promoted by the Rights Working Group.  The Act was introduced in the Senate by Ben Cardin (D-MD) in May 2013 and in the House by John Conyers (D-MI) in July 2013.  The Rights Working Group lists a steering committee of 22 organizations, including a few big names like the ACLU, La Raza, and Human Rights Watch.  The list also includes five Muslim lobbying groups.

To choose one at random: on January 13, 2015, a week after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, attorneys from RWG affiliate Muslim Advocates and the Center for Constitutional Rights testified in an appellate court in Philadelphia against the NYPD’s “Suspicionless Spying Program.”  They argue:

We are pleased that the [U.S Department of Justice] Guidance [on racial profiling] expands the definition of profiling to now include religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity [but] inexplicably omits the Transportation Security Administration and CBP activities at the border.

What strange bedfellows: three of the five profiling prohibitions address sexual identity, but Muslim terrorists attempting to enter the United States are viciously homophobic.  Profiling Michael Brown for being black, profiling Mohammed Atta, profiling someone for his or her gender (?) – it’s all the same in the minds of people who put on diapers and stick their arms in concrete-filled barrels.

According to the Globe: “The Milton protesters didn’t belong to any particular organized group, but were united in their belief that race relations need to be improved. Leary said her protest group was not linked to the other protesters who blocked the highway north of the city.”

Let me get this straight – one group arrives at 7:20 AM, the other at 7:30, both with the intention of blocking traffic into Boston, and the groups are not linked?

It may be true that they didn’t “belong to any particular organized group.”  The radical left has literally thousands of organizations that combine in flexible coalitions.  These groups have similar anti-capitalist, anti-American goals, but they focus on the grievances of their particular victim constituency.  David Horowitz aptly named his website that describes the agendas of the political left Discover the Networks.  A network of small groups is much less of a recognizable target than a monolithic anti-capitalist organization.

Then again, the Washington Times reports that George Soros’s Open Society Foundation gave at least $33 million to Black Lives Matter and groups involved in the Ferguson protests.