Living in a box..

[Gob]

Patrisse Cullors, the movement's co-founder and until last year its executive director, was incensed by criticism she'd received from what she called a 'Right-wing-media machine just leveraging literally all its weight against me, against our movement, against BLM the organisation'.



She added: 'It's because we're powerful, because we are winning. It's because we are threatening the establishment, we're threatening white supremacy.'

She was mainly referring to a 2021 story in the New York Post that revealed how, since the BLM movement took off, she'd spent $3.2million (£2.5million) buying four homes, including three in LA and another in Atlanta, Georgia, with an aircraft hangar.

Cullors insisted she'd paid for the properties with money earned from public speaking and book sales.

It was hardly the first time BLM leaders had tried to dismiss any criticism as racist. 'I think they've attempted to cancel us, but they have not been successful,' chimed in Melina Abdullah, who co-founded BLM's LA 'chapter'.

'They've attempted to say — and I'm just gonna say it — 'She bought some damn houses. We gonna cancel her.' '

Alicia Garza — another co-founder of the BLM movement — had a message for their rich, white critics: 'Y'all don't know s**t about what it takes to live in a box here.'



A 'box'? Well that's one way to describe the house they were sitting in front of and which their organisation had just bought — a 6,500 sq ft, seven-bedroom, seven-bathroom mansion in LA's Studio City neighbourhood costing a cool $6million (£4.6million).



As well as a swimming pool, its palm tree-shaded grounds also boast a sound stage, music recording studio and two-bedroom guest house.

For an organisation dedicated to radical wealth distribution to help the disadvantaged, not to mention dismantling capitalism altogether, the deluxe property seems a curious choice. Which is surely why, according to an investigation by New York Magazine, the BLM leaders went to great pains to hide it.

The property was bought in cash in October 2020 with money donated to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the original BLM organisation and an umbrella group for the worldwide movement.

Only two weeks earlier, it had received $66.5million (£51.1million) from the financial body processing the donations following the death of Mr Floyd.

New York Magazine reported that the house was purchased by a property developer named Dyane Pascall, who is financial manager for a company run by Cullors and her wife.

Within a week, according to California property records, Pascall transferred ownership of the house to a company established in Delaware, the tiny state known as 'America's Switzerland' thanks to its notoriously opaque corporate-transparency rules.

According to New York Magazine: 'The manoeuvre ensured that the ultimate identity of the property's new owner was not disclosed to the public.'

Adding to the confusion, although the property had originally been bought for $3.1million, it was transferred to the Delaware company for $5.8million. The discrepancy between these two figures has yet to be explained.



Cullors claimed separately that the New York Magazine article had been 'racist and sexist' and 'filled with misinformation, innuendo and incendiary opinions'. She said she had 'never misappropriated funds' and added that the house was bought 'to be a safe space' for black people in the community. It hadn't been announced earlier as the building 'needed repairs and renovation', she claimed. New York Magazine said it stood by its story.

Cullors asked supporters to 'understand the enormous pressure and fear that comes with living under the constant threat of white supremacist terror and real threats on my life and those of people I love'.

New York Magazine claimed BLM bosses have been staying at the mansion when they feel 'unsafe' in their own homes. It also noted that the statement didn't address why, if it is a creative space, so little has been 'created' there since it was bought over a year ago.

Financial and legal experts, meanwhile, have expressed grave concerns that the mansion was purchased — and is being run — in such a way as to blur the boundaries between the Foundation, which is a charity, and private companies owned by some of its leaders.

Paul Cullors, Patrisse's brother, is 'head of security' at the house, while her mother was approved for a cleaning job there. Patrisse has even used the mansion's kitchen to film her own cookery programme. Charity experts say an official investigation may be justified to ensure donations are being spent properly.

Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza set up Black Lives Matter in 2013 with fellow activist Opal Tometi, in protest at the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood-watch volunteer who had shot dead Trayvon Martin, a black 17-year-old, in Florida. Zimmerman pleaded self-defence.

Cullors, who came up with the social media hashtag 'blacklivesmatter', grew up in a poor neighbourhood of California's San Fernando Valley, had a father who was in and out of prison and says she first experienced police racism as a nine-year-old when she watched officers harassing her brothers. As executive director of the BLM Global Network Foundation until last May, Cullors advocates abolishing the police, the Armed Forces and prisons (replacing the latter with a rehabilitation system for offenders).

She has compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler and has claimed that Communists such as Karl Marx, Lenin and China's Chairman Mao provide 'a new understanding around what our economies could look like'.

Garza, 41, like Cullors, is another hard-Left firebrand who believes that capitalism and 'imperialism' oppress ethnic minorities in the U.S. Their organisation states on its website that its founders are 'radical Black organisers' heading a decentralised 'global network of more than 40 chapters'.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Scum floats. Everywhere. Black, white, yellow, brown. It floats