Black Lives Matter appears in these episodes not as an organization with a described structure, membership or founding, but as a narrative, a movement and a set of cultural events that guests on The Bob Zadek Show invoke in arguments about policing, rioting and race-conscious policy. No excerpt describes the group’s origins, leadership or formal aims; what the sources supply is how each guest characterized it and what they said followed from it.
Policing and the “Ferguson Effect”
In the May 2017 episode on Heather Mac Donald’s book The War on Cops, Bob Zadek framed the hour around two questions: whether there is a war on cops, and whether there is a war conducted by cops on the inner-city black community. He introduced Mac Donald as an author who had followed the issue since well before August 9, 2014, when, in his words, the events in Ferguson, Missouri occurred, and noted that her earlier book Are Cops Racist? was written in 2010 Is There a War on Cops? (2017).
Mac Donald answered that the war on cops is, in her characterization, overwhelmingly ideological and rhetorical, and that it is the product of the Black Lives Matter narrative. As she described that narrative, it holds that policing is lethally racist, that it is shot through with systemic bias, and that the country is living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of black males. She called the narrative both false and dangerous. She reported that it is leading to an almost unprecedented level of hostility that cops encounter in high-crime areas, and illustrated with a Chicago cop who told her last June that he had never experienced so much hatred in his 19 years on the job and that the job was now basically undoable. She described officers making a pedestrian stop at 1:00 AM on a known drug corner finding themselves surrounded by hostile, jeering crowds cursing at them and throwing things Is There a War on Cops? (2017).
The consequence Mac Donald drew was de-policing: cops backing off the discretionary law enforcement activities she considers important in lowering crime, not getting out of their cars to make discretionary stops, and not engaging in the low-level public order policing she says law-abiding residents of high-crime areas demand. As a result, she said, crime in inner-city areas has been spiking up Is There a War on Cops? (2017).
Rioting and Institutional Trust
The January 2021 episode with Nick Gillespie, editor-at-large of Reason magazine, treated Black Lives Matter chiefly through the summer’s rioting. Zadek, opening the show, described the week’s events at the Capitol as an organized riot planned in advance and out in the open, said President Trump incited and egged on the rioters, and criticized the Capitol Police as unable to rise to the task. He then asked Gillespie to put the rioting in context, dating it to the spring rioting he attributed to Black Lives Matter and to bad actions by police in Minneapolis The Capitol Riot in Context (2021).
Gillespie agreed on the need for a larger context while explicitly declining to suggest any moral or political or cultural equivalency between Black Lives Matter and the pro-Trump people he held responsible for five deaths in DC. His explanation was a long-lived, continuous erosion of trust and confidence in all aspects of government — the presidency, the Supreme Court, Congress, which he said had been in the single digits at various points in the past four years. He argued that absent the coronavirus lockdowns the riots in the wake of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of police in Minneapolis probably would not have occurred, and that absent the Black Lives Matter riots over the summer, the Capitol riot would not have occurred either. He called what happened at the Capitol indefensible and said Trump and those involved needed to be held to account, while insisting the underlying dynamic would not disappear with a change of administration The Capitol Riot in Context (2021).
Zadek devoted part of the hour to a Martin Luther King quotation he said had been drummed up during the summer’s rioting by public officials and spokespeople on the left: that a riot is the language of the unheard. He called the use of the quote misused and dangerous, argued King was saying in context that rioting is a symptom of something else, and contended that because public officials, especially on the left, did not appropriately renounce the rioting’s destructiveness, rioting quickly became an acceptable tool — if it is okay for the left, it is okay for the right The Capitol Riot in Context (2021).
Critical race theory, ethnic studies and the movement
Two episodes treat Black Lives Matter as an ally or outgrowth of critical race theory. In the October 2020 episode on California’s ethnic studies curriculum, Williamson M. Evers described reading the roughly 300- or 400-page model curriculum in July 2019 and finding it permeated and interwoven with critical race theory. Defining that theory, he said everything is about race and racial domination, that politics and history are all about whites trying to dominate blacks and other groups, and that individualism, constitutional liberties and protections, toleration and civil rights are, on this account, a smokescreen covering white domination of blacks. He added that on these premises a white person can never get out of being a racist, and that the only possible position is to be an ally of the critical race theory people or of the Black Lives Matter people — an ally who must support unquestioningly whatever they dictate. He said this is taught not only in K-12 and college but in government and corporate training sessions, and that President Trump had recently issued an executive order against racially divisive critical race theory training for federal employees California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum vs. Trump’s Patriotic Education (2020).
In the May 2022 episode on Jonathan Butcher’s Splintered, Zadek asked how critical race theory acquired any momentum at all, recalling a childhood pride in what he learned and asking what petri dish nourished the movement. Butcher traced deep roots in higher education — law schools developing Marxist ideas, Critical Legal Theory and Critical Theory — leading to institutions that became public policy, and cited the Obama administration’s school discipline ideas, including the legal theory of disparate impact, which he said predates critical race theory and holds that any policy producing different outcomes by skin color is inherently racist or prejudicial. He argued that different impacts do not prove intent, and that higher suspension and expulsion rates for black and Hispanic students have other explanations, including single-parent homes, poverty and dangerous neighborhoods. He said policies limiting suspension and expulsion in K-12 schools were in place during the Obama administration, and that cultural events of recent years around race — the murder of George Floyd, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement — were ready to capitalize on ideas seeded into the culture, noting critical race theory has been in colleges at least since 1989 Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022).
A client’s fear
Black Lives Matter surfaces once more, briefly, in the November 2020 episode on wealthy emigrants. Immigration adviser David Lesperance, describing why clients of all political persuasions consider leaving, recounted a very wealthy Black entrepreneur who told him he was not worried about taxes but about his grandchild coming around the corner and getting between a Proud Boy and a Black Lives Matter person and being killed — and who therefore wanted the ability to get his family out if things picked up in the future The Flight of the Golden Geese (2020).
Across episodes
The topic recurs in five episodes, and the treatment shifts with the guest rather than developing: Mac Donald in 2017 attacks the movement’s central claim about policing and attributes de-policing and rising crime to it; Gillespie in 2021 treats the summer’s riots as one episode in a decades-long collapse of institutional trust; Evers in 2020 and Butcher in 2022 fold the movement into a critique of critical race theory in schools and training; and Lesperance in 2020 mentions it only as a named pole in a client’s fear of civil conflict. No excerpt shows one guest responding to another’s argument, and the excerpts show no development of a shared position across the run.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe Black Lives Matter’s founding, founders, organizational structure, funding, chapters or stated platform, and no guest claims to speak for the organization. They do not give membership figures, polling or any measure of public support, and they do not report the movement’s own response to the criticisms leveled at it. The legal questions raised in passing — the scope of disparate impact, the content of Trump’s executive order, the status of any bill or case — are not resolved in the excerpts, which in several places break off mid-exchange.