Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza invoked the words of former Chinese Communist Chairman Mao Zedong during a speech outlining her organization’s effort to “transform democracy” and “take power” in the U.S., The National Pulse can reveal.
Speaking at the Personal Democracy Forum in 2016, Garza asserts early in her speech that “Black Lives Matter (BLM) is about transforming our economy and transforming our democracy” before alluding to BLM’s success in generating a “new political order.”
Her talk, entitled “How Black Power Aims to Transform Democracy,” outlined how BLM would bring about these drastic changes at the Facebook-sponsored event.
While doing so, Garza appeared to invoke a famous phrase from former Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao. Describing the “internal struggle” experienced by the BLM movement, Garza asserts:
“We, too, are navigating the tension between allowing 1,000 flowers to bloom while at the same time distinguish between what are flowers and what are in fact weeds that threaten to consume the entire ecosystem.”
The reference dates back to Mao’s Hundred Flowers Campaign, which he infamously announced with the following rationale:
“The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science.”
The 1950’s campaign invited criticism of the Chinese Communist Party from citizens and intellectuals, only to see Mao quickly reverse the policy and persecute, imprison, or execute those who voiced their opposition to the regime.
This revolutionary sentiment, however, appears throughout Garza’s overtly pro-Communist speech where she describes carrying out her activism “for the sake of collective liberation.”
“We are not scared of what it means to take power,” she emphasizes while adding that BLM pledges to “transform the way that power is distributed” and bring about “a new kind of power that is in collaboration rather than in competition.”
“We’re not satisfied with the crumbs that may fall from the table of power, and we are not satisfied with merely sitting at the tables of power. In fact, we aim to up overturn those tables in favor of a new system overall,” Garza adds. “You can’t be for social change and against disruption,” Garza reiterates before emphasizing that “disruption is the new world order; it is the way that those denied power assert power.”
In the speech, Garza also praises a month-long “occupation” of the Florida State Capitol:
“Were it not for the courage and tenacity of young people who occupied the state Capitol in Florida for 31 days and 30 nights demanding an end to stand your ground laws after George Zimmerman was acquitted, many of us would not have known that the laws that are designed to uproot structural racism would have been under continuous assault by the types of laws that give vigilantes the power to be judge, jury, and executioner.”
The unearthed remarks from the “trained Marxist” follow The National Pulse revealing fellow BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors relishing people comparing her work to Mao’s “Little Red Book” in a 2010 speech.
