‘Black Lives Matter Is Crooks!’

S outh Park’s Underpants Gnome theory of achievement proves endlessly adaptable, particularly when it comes to left-wing activism. It’s missing-link logic. When it comes to the Black Lives Matter movement, the thinking goes as follows:

1. Black people suffer race-related harms at the hands of the police, and in other ways.
2. Therefore, we should give money to groups who proclaim “Black lives matter.”
3. ???
4. Racism recedes.

The question, “Hey, I wonder what the heck is happening to all of that money pouring into any number of charities with Black Lives Matter in their names,” is one that most top reporters either aren’t asking or are afraid to ask. If there’s any clearer path to ostracization and charges of racism, it’s challenging anything linked to this era’s defining catchphrase. If you point out that BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors bought at least four houses totaling some $3.2 million, you might as well be saying Black Lives Don’t Matter. Khan-Cullors is a self-proclaimed Marxist, and who wants to be called a counterrevolutionary?

Sean Campbell, a black New York magazine writer, was (natch) denounced for racism when he published the exposé, “The BLM Mystery: Where Did the Money Go?” The piece actually raises more questions than it answers, suggesting that reporters will have much to untangle in the event that anyone decides to keep poking around.

He begins his piece by contrasting the efforts of a grassroots activist with Khan-Cullors fighting racism via an UGG boots–sponsored YouTube hootenanny that invited “everyone around the globe to move together, united by a groove and the freeing act of dancing.” Take that, racism!

Perhaps the best known of the many BLM charities, the Khan-Cullors-co-founded Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, rakes in enormous amounts of cash with very little accountability and hasn’t published a financial reckoning in nearly a year. Maine, Connecticut, New Mexico, New Jersey, Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia have all revoked BLMGNF’s charitable registration. Indiana’s attorney general calls it a “scam.” The group funneled $6 million to a nonprofit founded by Khan-Cullors’s wife, Janaya Khan, to buy a 10,000-square-foot party house in Toronto. (Sorry, Wildseed Center for Art & Activism. It just looks like a party house.) Amusingly, the mansion dedicated to “transfeminist, queer affirming space politically aligned with supporting Black liberation work across Canada” (as its website boasts) once served as the headquarters of the Communist Party of Canada, which was to suckers of an earlier era what BLM is today.

Khan-Cullors resigned as the group’s executive director shortly after the New York Post reported on her lavish lifestyle. In 2020, when ten BLM chapters were preparing to ask for greater transparency, each of them disappeared from the BLM website, and when asked about this, a spokesperson for the chapters declined to answer New York magazine’s reporter and said such questioning “does not move the movement forward and it also leads to more harassment and Internet chatter when Patrisse and the global network is the topic of discussion.” Translation: Don’t ask questions that might hurt The Cause.

Last year, BLM was criticized by two mothers of young men killed by police: “We don’t want or need y’all parading in the streets accumulating donations, platforms, movie deals, etc. off the death of our loved ones, while the families and communities are left clueless and broken,” wrote Lisa Simpson and Samaria Rice in a statement. “Don’t say our loved ones’ names period! That’s our truth!”

Black Lives Matter (originally a hashtag used by Khan-Cullors after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin) has sprouted so many soundalike groups (BLM Global Network, BLM Action Fund, BLM Grassroots, etc.) that even major corporations such as Google and Apple got mixed up and joined in an effort that wound up sending $4 million to the wrong group, BuzzFeed News reported.

A Khan-Cullors crony named Christman Bowers, the deputy executive director of BLMGNF, is the treasurer of a group called Reform L.A. Jails, which collected $1.4 million in 2020 and spent more than half of that on grants to four recipients: $270,000 to Bowers’s consulting company; $211,000 to Asha Bandele, who co-wrote Khan-Cullors’s memoir; $205,000 to a company that Khan-Cullors operates with her spouse, Janaya & Patrisse Consulting; and $86,000 to a company started by Damon Turner, who is the father of Khan-Cullors’s child.

Simpson, the mother of an 18-year-old man who was shot and killed by police in Watts, Calif., tells Campbell that a BLM activist with positions at BLM L.A. and BLM Grassroots stood next to her at a protest soliciting money for the slain man’s funeral. Simpson says she never got any funeral money from either outfit. She later appeared at a BLM L.A. rally where she shouted, “Black Lives Matter is crooks!” She calls the BLM groups a “false flag” and notes that, “They putting hashtags on our kids, and y’all not even helping us. We homeless, and we can’t get no type of help from this entity.” There’s a lot more to be learned about the finances of the Black Lives Matter charities.