Patrisse Cullors, the Black Lives Matter co-founder who cashed out and got millions of dollars in media contracts, says that the recent scrutiny of BLM’s “charitable” finances upsets her.
Black Lives Matter is embroiled in several scandals involving the $90 million they raised in 2020 to end police brutality and racism. The most recent eyebrow-raiser was the revelation that the group purchased a $6 million mansion in California that has rarely been used for the purposes they say.
There’s also the matter of the $60 million in funds that no one at BLM Global appears to be in charge of.
Related: Black Lives Matter Used Donations to Buy a $6 Million House
Cullors says she gets “triggered” when anyone mentions the IRS form 990 — the form charities must complete that reveals donors and sources of money.
“I actually did not know what 990s were before all of this happened,” Cullors said, an apparent reference to the Washington Examiner’s reporting in January about BLM’s lack of financial and leadership transparency that led multiple states, including California, to order the charity to cease raising funds until it discloses what it did with the $90 million it raised in 2020.
Cullors said activists suffer trauma and that their lives are put at risk when charities under their control are required to disclose publicly what they did with their tax-deductible donations.
“This doesn’t seem safe for us, this 990 structure — this nonprofit system structure,” Cullors said. “This is, like, deeply unsafe. This is being literally weaponized against us, against the people we work with.”
The system that was designed to prevent fraudsters like Cullors from fleecing people is “deeply unsafe”? Isn’t that sort of like a bank robber complaining that it’s too difficult to open the safe and questioning why the cash can’t just be laid out in the open so it can be easily grabbed?
“People’s morale in an organization is so important. But if their organization and the people in it are being attacked and scrutinized at everything they do, that leads to deep burnout. that leads to deep, like, resistance and trauma,” Cullors said.
Cullors, who left BLM without a leader after she resigned in May 2021 amid scrutiny of her personal real estate purchases, said media scrutiny of the charity is an “experiment,” that, if successful, will be used to take down other black-led activist groups.
“They know what they’re doing: how to create the infighting, how to create the distrust,” she said. “We have to stop it before they do it. We have to shut it down. We have to be showing up against it.”
“They”? Until someone shows me proof that BLM has been anything but widely praised and protected by the national media, and there’s a conspiracy afoot to destroy it, I’ll withhold judgment on this invisible conspiracy.
That “scrutiny” is a result of the law that says that if anyone asks, a charity must turn over its 990 forms. Being asked to play by the same rules that groups who oppose BLM operate under shouldn’t be controversial for anyone.
Unless you’ve got something to hide. And given the number of investigations underway, it won’t be too long before we learn what Cullors and her friends have been up to in spending that $90 million in cash.
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