INTERVIEW

Black Lives Matter is "spewing hatred for America": A brief debate with Rudy Giuliani

Giuliani has alleged that Black Lives Matter wants to confiscate white people's houses. We asked him to explain

Published July 17, 2020 6:00AM (EDT)

President Donald Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani looks at his cellphone outside the White House on the South Lawn (NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images)
President Donald Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani looks at his cellphone outside the White House on the South Lawn (NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images)

Former Lifelock spokesperson Rudy Giuliani has in recent media appearances and self-produced videos fired off a number of incendiary accusations against the Black Lives Matter social justice movement, reducing the organization's multi-layered social-democratic policy platform to what amounts to a terrifying declaration of war against white people.

America's Mayor (retired) also characterizes Democrats in general as enablers, witting or not, who if not identified and stopped will lead us down a path to the ruination of white welfare and Western civilization.

The former federal prosecutor's gripes include what he appears to perceive as articulated threats to the property, freedom, money and personal safety of white Americans. Giuliani presents these theories in sweeping fashion, in a conspiratorial tone that seems calculated to inflame paranoid fantasies about the radical left and the Black left.

Giuliani's pseudo-academic approach will be familiar to anyone who indulged his "research" into Vice President Joe Biden's alleged malfeasance in Ukraine and China. (This led directly to the impeachment of Giuliani's client, the president of the United States.)

It's clear that Giuliani revels in the role of scholar-heretic, an archaeologist and interpreter of arcane documents wherein the truth lies hidden in plain sight, on the internet. He sets his homemade videos in his study, backed by leather-bound books. One can almost smell the rich mahogany.

That room of wealth and privilege strikes quite a contrast with his claims, which, though they come from the former mayor of New York, might seem better suited to a blacklit basement Discord video, strains of roommate-cranked death metal seeping through the ceiling. To wit:

This is not — please, understand this — this is not isolated. This is not spontaneous. This is planned. This is planned by Black Lives Matter, it's funded by [George] Soros to the tune of $30 to $40 million. And the plan is to change your government. To take it away from you. To take away from you a government based on free enterprise. To take away from you your Second Amendment right to bear arms. To take away from you, really, your right to have a religion. Soros is a notorious atheist. Proclaims the fact that he's an atheist. So are Marxists, by the way. It's one of the cores of Marxism, atheism. 

And one of the cores of Marxism is no private property. They want your property. They want the government to control it. But they do want one preferred class and that's the people who are — they're going to get, like, a lifetime salary. And that's going to be — Black people will get that. And they'll also get to choose property that they want, and that's the reparations for slavery. Except it'll include Black people that came from the Caribbean. And it's going to get paid by white people who never had anything to do with slavery.  

Salon, for whatever reason, decided on a lark to engage Giuliani on some of these claims. Here is how that brief text message conversation went.

(Some follow-up nudges have been cut, but the content is otherwise untouched.)

Always been curious about what you mean when you say "BLM wants to take your property."

In their literature easiest to find is "A Vision For Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power Freedom & Demands" under section on Economic Justice section 3. "A right to restored land ... and housing ... end to ... privatization of natural resources."

Amazing I have to inform you of the extreme Marxist agenda of BLM. It is fairly described as a Marxist violence promoting spewing hatred for America, it's history, it's founders, it's ideal of nuclear marriage, it's private ownership of property and an end to policing and the virtual end of the military.

I mean, I know their embrace of general Marxist theory, but you're twisting that to say that BLM "wants to take your property." The eradication of "privatization of land and resources" is not the same as, say, taking my house away.

The group certainly seems to hate a broad swath of ugly, murderous American history, but not America. The greatest thing about America is the idea baked in to our foundation that we are imperfect, that we must always change, become more perfect. The part of America they're talking about, and the types of change they advocate, is not anything for you or me or anyone to be afraid of. Are you afraid of these ideas?

They can claim property including homesteads presently owned by innocent people. Transform from apologist to reporter. I am finished with you as a lost cause. There have even been training — legal — on how to do it. Also they question importance of father in the family structure. There's so much more on their Marxist plan to overthrow our form of government but it begins with getting us to hate America ... it's founder, liberator, the author of our liberty. But when has become an apologist for a cause or organization no chance ... sorry

interesting, but how do you read what I'm saying as apologist? the manifesto is more academic and robust than you seem to put it, and it just seems a fair objective analysis that BLM doesn't mean broadly and literally that they "want to take your property." That part is a conceptual shift, and while some of what they advocate is retroactive, like reparations, that part is forward-looking. You might mean I'm an apologist for their beef with America, but I perceive them as attacking a rot in the country's foundation that we've all been trying to repair. Not sure if I hang with them on all of it, but you seem maybe to conflate them with Black Israelites, who are, yes, extreme in the extreme.

I mean, you say, "They'll also get to choose property that they want, and that's the reparations for slavery." That's not Marxist at all. You make one incendiary argument publicly and another more narrow argument to me here.

You are a pettifogger. Marxists are never consistent. The party people become wealthy. Here Blacks are the preferred class they get life time salary, no one else, and they can claim property. So let's call it bastardized Marxism as it always is.

Admit it your soft on BLM even though run by 3 white hating America hating admitted Marxist and assisted in its circuitous financing by a convicted terrorist who was part of Clinton's last minute corrupt pardons.

I'm still not sure where in that manifesto — which I had not read and thank you for showing me — you see any proposition to "choose property that they want." Or that they "can claim property." I don't know how you justify these sweeping statements you extrapolate. They're just not saying that. I don't feel threatened by them. Should I be? Do you?

Also: "pettifogger" A+

Also still interested in your reading on the nuclear family point.

I cited for you exactly where they can claim restored property that's all I can do. One of the main things Colours et al pontificate about is how fathers in families are overrated. If you can't find it, you're not looking for it. I've wasted more than enough time now write your pandering article about an anti-American, anti-Black organization that is funded in part by a convicted terrorist.

What do you mean by Colours?

Lifelock did not reply to Salon's request for comment.


By Roger Sollenberger

Roger Sollenberger was a staff writer at Salon (2020-21). Follow him on Twitter @SollenbergerRC.

MORE FROM Roger Sollenberger


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