2022 has been a very revealing year for Black Lives Matter, and it is only April. Most recently, we found out that BLM just spent $6 million of donor money on a new mansion in Los Angeles.
But there is so much more.
To recap last year, co-founder Patrisse Cullors resigned in May of 2021 after intense blowback from BLM chapters and parents of killed black children for lack of financial transparency from the organization. Cullors purchases her fourth house before resigning, making a bad situation much worse. The former co-founder and the organization has a fixation on issues that are antithetical to the vast majority of the Black community like defunding the police, getting rid of charter schools, and the Middle East conflict and that fixation has outed them time and again as nothing else but professional grifters with an agenda different from their name. For more background, please see BLM Leaders Get Rich by Exploiting Black Community, Attacking Israel.
The only thing that has changed in 2022 is that BLM seems to be in an even deeper mess than before. On February 4th, the California Department of Justice has written a letter to BLM, giving the organization 60 days to disclose unaccounted for donations in the amount of $60 million. The letter adds “charitable assets cannot be used to pay these avoidable costs.” As the Black Enterprise article notes below:
The letter comes days after it was revealed the BLM organization has not had someone in charge of its finances since co-founder Patrisse Cullors left the organization last May. Additionally, it was revealed $6.3 million was transferred from the group to Cullors spouse, Janaya Khan and several Canadian activists to purchase a mansion in [2021].
Not only has BLM been secretive about their $60 million, but over $6 million was also transferred to Patrisse Cullors’ spouse and to the BLM Canada chapter to buy a mansion. This also comes on the heels of the $90 million raised in 2020 of which the organization has yet to give an account. Many investigators have speculated that money was going to Democrat politicians through a fundraising platform called Act Blue. Accusations that BLM was a front to launder money to Democrats were aggressively dismissed as fantasy and conspiracy theory. Those who brought up the Act Blue issue were derided and ridiculed. Articles were written, “debunking the myth of money laundering.” Social media fact-checkers plastered “false” on any posts that even suggested the Act Blue laundering “theory”. But here is an obvious problem with such an aggressive campaign to shut down such a theory: not one of the fact-checkers, social justice pundits, and BLM defenders have yet to tell us where the money is going.
Much energy has been spent trying to convince the public where the hundreds of millions of dollars were not going, but conveniently seemed to stop short of disclosing expense reports, or anything to make known how the money BLM has raised is actually helping Black communities. Not to mention the fact that only a few weeks ago, Black Lives Matter broke ties with Act Blue after being exposed for “still accepting donations on the Democratic platform despite claiming it had stopped amid questions about its finances.” If BLM is not laundering money to Act Blue, the people deserve to know what is going on. If there is no transparency, we can only conclude that the Act Blue laundering theory or something worse is true.
Aside from the hundreds of millions of dollars that have not been accounted for, we do know where at least some of the money has gone. As previously mentioned, a mansion was purchased for BLM in Canada, and $6 million was transferred to Patrisse Cullors’ spouse. The public has also discovered that BLM uses its donations to post bail for attempted murderers. On February 14th, a BLM activist named Quintez Brown was sent to jail after shooting at Louisville, Kentucky mayoral candidate, Craig Greenberg. Brown was being held in custody for attempting to shoot someone, and BLM pays $100,000 to bail him out of jail. Even if the argument is that he was innocent or mentally ill, which seems to be the prevailing argument at the moment, shelling out $100,000 to bail a dangerous person out of jail after buying a mansion, sending millions to an ex-leader, and still refusing to disclose where the rest is going, only adds to the mounting suspicious and dishonest doings of Black Lives Matter.
For those who maintain the notion that once upon a time, Black Lives Matter was a good and noble organization that fought for worthy causes that Black people all over America and the rest of the Black world could get behind, let me turn your attention to Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, just one year after BLM was formed. Born out of false pretenses, protests and riots are erupting from Mike Brown’s killing. Ferguson is being torn apart by riots, and mainly by people who were not from Ferguson. Darren Seals, a resident of Ferguson watches as these protests form in his city; he watches as out-of-town organizers come in, lead marches, make speeches, and accept donations from people who think they are helping Mike Brown’s family. Seals sees all of this early on, and begins to speak out against what he calls a hijacking.
An excerpt from a 2016 Washington Post article entitled Who killed Ferguson activist Darren Seals stated:
Seals was deeply skeptical of national organizations that he felt had co-opted the organic energy and power of the Ferguson protests, and he often accused other activists of getting rich while Ferguson was left behind. He publicly clashed with St. Louis natives like Templeton and Johnetta Elzie, prominent figures he insisted had sold out, and he harbored a special contempt for Deray Mckesson, a school administrator who traveled to Ferguson from his home in Minneapolis to join the protests and eventually became among the nation’s most prominent activists. Seals would often take to his social media accounts to level pointed attacks at McKesson and #BlackLivesMatter, an umbrella organization founded after the death of Trayvon Martin that the media quickly linked to the demonstrations in Ferguson.
Seals, unfortunately posthumously, have been vindicated. Of the many parents who have spoken up about BLM’s corruption, Mike Brown’s own father, Michael Brown Sr. is one of them. Upon learning of BLM raising $60 million in 2020, Brown Sr., in 2021, has demanded money from BLM, as the Brown family has seen none of it while BLM continues to raise funds in their deceased son’s name. The late Breona Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer has excoriated BLM Louisville as a ‘fraud.’ Palmer says further in a deleted Facebook post:
“…I’ve watched ya’ll raise money on behalf of Breonna’s family who has never done a damn thing for us … talk about fraud,” Palmer wrote. “I could walk into a room full of people who claim to be here for Breonna’s family who don’t even know who I am…”
That may be the aptest imagery to use for Black Lives Matter; they don’t even know we are. And they don’t know because they don’t want to know. At the top, from its very founding, the agenda has never been to actually better the lives they claim matter. I happen to have personally met some honest BLM activists on the ground who, though we disagree on a lot of issues, are genuine about helping our community. Unfortunately, that is not what BLM was designed to do. To reword what BLM activists tend to say about the American justice system, Black Lives Matter is not broken. It is doing what it was designed to do. The fact that there may be a few good people within the organization is irrelevant because the organization itself, at its very core, is contemptible. The only viable option is for it to be completely dismantled; and from the looks of it, we may see it soon.