The Ouroboros: Black Lives Matter Shakes Down Toronto Pride

The Toronto Pride festival yesterday ground to a halt for half an hour for a Black Lives Matter protest. "The parade didn't re-start until after Pride Toronto executive director Mathieu Chantelois signed a document agreeing to the group's demands." Those demands are interesting to read:

Among the nine, three explicitly cite funding, while the rest (save #8) are implicit funding demands, either through hiring/staffing demands or expenditures (as for "community spaces", "community full control over hiring", "increase community stages/spaces", etc.). It is hard to see how this can possibly stick; Chantelois signed an agreement under duress, i.e. the Black Lives Matter leaders forced him to submit or else they would not allow the parade to continue. So if this gets to court, it's very hard to imagine how this would be enforceable. Moreover, kicking police out of Pride activities sends a terrible message: it really is Us vs. Them, with no dialogue possible.

Already, Pride has backed off the idea that the police ban will remain in force in future events, saying,

"Pride Toronto never agreed to exclude police services from the Pride parade... We have had, and will continue to have, discussions with the police about the nature of their involvement as parade participants," the organization said in a statement.

"Frankly, Black Lives Matter isn't going to tell us there's no more floats in the parade," Pride Toronto executive director Mathieu Chantelois told CP24 earlier in the day.

One wonders just how much longer they will adhere to the other, less visible but still significant terms inflicted on them. While the tantrum's outcome drew praise from many quarters, it appears from this vantage that it was nothing short of a commercial shakedown of the sort American race hucksters have engaged in for decades. Intersectionalism means there's always someone more privileged than you, if you just try hard enough; converting that to money and power is always the goal.