A “glitch,” or a tacit recognition of the radical nature of the BLM agenda? Earlier today, Matt Walsh noticed something missing from the official Black Lives Matter website — their statement of principles and core demands:

BLM's "what we believe" page, calling for the destruction of the nuclear family among many other radical left wing agenda items, has been deleted pic.twitter.com/qCZxUFMZH4

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 21, 2020

Others noticed earlier changes, too, which at first appeared to be more of an edit:

With little fanfare, Black Lives Matter removed a section of text that had been under a section called “What We Believe” that sought to engender the destruction, or perhaps reimagining, of the nuclear family structure.

The section read: “We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered.

“We practice empathy. We engage comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts. We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work ‘double shifts’ so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work.

“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”

That was what the Post Millennial saw yesterday, anyway. By this morning, the whole page was gone, and with it any mention of BLM’s actual agenda.

Not that it’s gone forever. The original page was still up as late as Thursday evening, according to the Wayback Machine, along with the nuclear-family disruption text. Wayback’s next pass on the URL, early on Friday morning, turns up the 404. Nevertheless, all of the versions of their “what we believe” page are still accessible through Wayback, if one knows to look for it there. (I’ve archived it here too.)

Why delete it, especially without an immediate replacement? So far BLM hasn’t explained their move, but it likely has to do with its polling of late. It hardly seems a coincidence that this deletion came just a day or so after Pew published a poll showing that support for Black Lives Matter had dropped twelve points since June, and that the decline took place primarily with whites and Hispanics who had first supported the slogan without knowing much about the agenda. Critics spent the summer pounding on the BLM agenda, and especially on its Marxist roots — as proclaimed by the group’s own founders:

Just ask BLM leaders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal TometiIn a revealing 2015 interview, Cullors said, “Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.” That same year, Tometi was hobnobbing with Venezuela’s Marxist dictator Nicolás Maduro, of whose regime she wrote: “In these last 17 years, we have witnessed the Bolivarian Revolution champion participatory democracy and construct a fair, transparent election system recognized as among the best in the world.” …

A partner organization, the Movement for Black Lives, or M4BL, calls for abolishing all police and all prisons. It also calls for a “progressive restructuring of tax codes at the local, state and federal levels to ensure a radical and sustainable redistribution of wealth.”

Another M4BL demand is “the retroactive decriminalization, immediate release and record ­expungement of all drug-related offenses and prostitution and reparations for the devastating impact of the ‘war on drugs’ and criminalization of prostitution.”

While BLM operated mainly on the fringe, few paid attention to their agenda or aims. Now that they have seized the nation’s attention, more and more people are realizing what’s behind the slogan — and don’t like it. Memory-holing it won’t help either, and that kind of move betrays a desperation to push a genie back into a bottle. It’s far too late for that, but not too late to see the intellectual dishonesty of BLM’s radical activists.