Everything that touches the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation reeks of cynicism.
The group’s latest financial disclosure shows it ended the last tax year with a $9 million deficit — plus a new wrinkle: blatantly trying to buy off critics.
At least two big-ticket payments, per the outfit’s tax form 990 for tax year 2022, went to prominent detractors.
The Tamir Rice Foundation, named for a Cleveland boy killed by the police, got $400,000; its head, Samaria Rice, had blasted BLM’s Patrisse Cullors over her questionable ethics.
And the Michael O.D. Brown We Love Our Sons & Daughters Foundation, named after the teen whose death sparked the Ferguson riots, took in $89,303; Brown’s father had come out swinging against BLM for its opacity.
This follows such well-documented and dubious outlays as buying real estate for its founders, handing out juicy payments to the firms of board members and employees and paying for private jets — outrages that drove Cullors to step down (at least officially).
Ironically, she’s declared that the $90-odd million the group took in after the death of George Floyd is “white guilt money.”
Indeed, that flood of donations (mainly from large corporations) does now look cynical, since the donors plainly never considered what the BLM group was likely to do with the cash.
It was a PR move.
Perhaps it’s a blessing that BLM’s leaders spent the windfall on themselves and their cronies, rather than on the Marxist nonsense they profess.
Yet it’s still sad to see their critics seemingly take cash themselves in exchange for quieting down.
So: Some $90 million handed by corporate America, in a rush to prove its own wokeness, to radicals who prove to be grifters — and then proceed to pay some of it as hush money to their own critics.
At least the “foundation” is rapidly spending itself into oblivion, so we can soon hope to never hear a word more from or about Cullors & Co. ever again.
