If you’re a woke journalist, how would you frame allegations of financial misconduct against the main Black Lives Matter organization?
You could ignore the financial questions surrounding Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Or you could frame the allegations the way New York magazine has in a recent article: by absurdly quoting people saying that the organization’s corruption proves its leaders are capitalists.
For good measure, also suggest that Black Lives Matter founders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Melina Abdullah haven’t led the mayhem of the past few years, but instead inflated their role. It was a media fabrication. These women don’t represent a large, beautiful movement that fights for social justice.
This is Sean Campbell, an investigative reporter. threading this needleIn his article for New York magazine. Reports of malfeasance must not be ignored, even though The New York Times or The Washington Post try to do so.
California, of all places, has suspended the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation’s tax-exempt status, Politico Pro reports.
So apologists for the main Black Lives Matter organization may have to get out the facts on the alleged wrongdoing, but they ignore the founders’ exceedingly well-documented Marxist training and blame their covetousness on capitalism.
Campbell didn’t even show the slightest interest in telling the story. broken by the Washington Examiner’s enterprising reporter Andrew Kerr. Kerr’s scoop included a missing $60million, the absence of any foundation leader for almost a full year, and the fact it spent $8 million Canadian dollars on the purchase of the former Toronto headquarters of Canada’s Communist Party of Canada.
So much for honesty between journalists and thieves. First, however, let’s give credit where it is due: Campbell did several noble things. He is clear in reporting that Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation does not help victims of police action and that its finances are very opaque. This is the first time that I have ever seen a major publication admit to these facts.
Campbell quotes Tory Russell, an activist in Ferguson, Missouri, as saying: “The movement that has been catapulted into the limelight has forgotten about Ferguson and the freedom fighters [who] have literally given their lives to the struggle.”
Campbell also quotes others being open about “a deeply troubling lack of financial transparency” at the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, and himself writes: “BLMGNF has never been a model of fiscal clarity.”
Such courage does it take for a writer at a major publication on the left to write all these things that Campbell felt the need to explain that he is a black man raised by a single mother, “and police have pointed guns at me.”
Credit ends there. Campbell engages in revisionist historical thinking, leading the reader to believe Garza, Cullors and Tometi have merely stolen attention from Black Lives Matter.
For example, his New York magazine piece quotes a disgruntled former BLM activist, Ashley Yates, saying that at a 2015 conference at Cleveland State University to discuss the future of the movement, “organizers confronted Cullors, saying she and her co-founders needed to do more to correct media reports that their organization was orchestrating the movement.”
Campbell writes: “Yates says she later pressed Cullors, Garza, and Tometi on the matter privately. ‘They said, “It’s not really us; the media’s doing it, and we can’t help what they do.” I’m like, ‘Okay, but it came out of your mouth.’”
In this telling, Cullors, Garza, and Tometi’s key work in organizing socialist groups in Ferguson in 2014, after a police officer there fatally shot Michael Brown, was really accidental.
The three apparently surfaced in Ferguson, “branding their effort as Black Lives Matter,” writes Campbell, quoting Yates as saying: “No one really was clear on what they were there for. No one was really even clear on who they were.”
This 2014 article in a publication called In These Times—the communist magazine founded by Herbert Marcuse, Julian Bond, and Noam Chomsky—gives a pretty good account of Garza’s key role in using Brown’s killing to launch a nationwide and worldwide network that has made us less free today.
Yet, even the 2013 founding and operation of BLM seems questionable.
“As the story goes,” Campbell writes, “Garza was drinking bourbon when news broke that George Zimmerman had been acquitted of murder charges in the killing of Trayvon Martin, and she took to Facebook to express her grief. ‘Black people. I love you. We are my family. Our lives matter,’ she wrote. Her friend Cullors replied with a missive of her own, closing with #BLACKLIVESMATTER.”
“They have a really inflated sense of self-importance in terms of the movement,” Howard University law professor Justin Hansford is quoted as saying.
Campbell also quotes another disgruntled activist, Keyanna Celina, as saying: “I think it is important, concerning Black Lives Matter, that they more or less be identified as capitalists.”
The essay in New York magazine has nearly 4200 words. The deep Marxism of Garza and Cullors is not found anywhere. Nowhere will the reader find their training for years at centers set up by the likes of Eric Mann and Harmony Goldberg, the first a Maoist and Soviet apologist and the latter an expert on Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s strategy of effecting revolution by preceding it with ideological indoctrination.
Yet, it is Marxism which ties it all together.
People like me have written exactly what Campbell has stated for years: The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation creators are not interested in black lives or social justice. This is not just because Russell and others have said it.
BLM leaders are also unaware of the thousands of black lives lost to violence in the very same cities where BLM protested or rioted over something called “the Ferguson Effect.”
Social justice and racial equity are instead just a façade for a much larger project: to destroy capitalism and the American system, including representative democracy.
That’s why Garza tells people that “we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society,” or Cullors says that she and Garza are “trained Marxists,”Why Tometi? praises Venezuela’s “participatory democracy.”
That’s why socialist organizations sent Garza, Cullors, and Tometi to FergusonTo strategize with other socialists.
Since the beginning, the mainstream media have covered every aspect of the news. ForThe Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation is not covered. Campbell’s rendition of the BLM scandal is another example of this.
Journalists will eventually have to report financial misconduct by the foundation. But at least now we know how this could occur: It’s because its leaders are capitalists.
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