Michael Brown's Dad Tells BLM to Put Up or Shut Up, Demands $20 Million
And the grift goes on.
Since re-emerging as a public relations powerhouse with the 2020 riots over the death of suspected counterfeiter George Floyd in Minneapolis, the Black Lives Matter organization has proven it’s almost as good at raising money as it is at raising a ruckus, collecting $90 million in donations as it wreaked destruction across the United States, according to The Associated Press.
Now, the father of the man whose shooting by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 was the catalyst for an earlier round of rioting wants his cut.
According to Fox News, Michael Brown Sr. and a group called the International Black Freedom Alliance are demanding $20 million from the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation on behalf, they say, of the protesters whose earlier activism helped push Black Lives Matter into the prominence it has now.
Today our co-founder, #Ferguson frontline organizer @VanguardTNT alongside #MikeBrown‘s father demands 20 million from #BlackLivesMatter in order to continue the work they and other have been doing since the uprising since 2014. pic.twitter.com/4rDA28ZKnB
— TheIBFA (@THEIBFA) March 2, 2021
“Today we hold Black Lives Matter accountable,” IBFA founder Tory Russell said in a video posted to Twitter, with Brown Sr. standing silently by his side.
“What kind of movement are we building where we’re saying, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ but the freedom fighters and the families are being left behind?”
In a news release issued Tuesday, the IBFA called the Black Lives Matter fundraising “jaw-dropping to the father of slain teen Micheal [sic] Brown Jr. who was shot and killed by Ferguson officer Darren Wilson in 2014.”
[firefly_poll]
It said Brown Sr. (with first name misspelled again) had some questions about BLM’s eight-figure fundraising: “Who are they giving it to and what are they doing with it?”; “Why hasn’t my family’s foundation received any assistance from the movement?”; and “How could you leave families who are helping the community without any funding?”
A shorter way of putting it might have been: “Where’s mine?”
The demand got plenty of attention on social media.
What is Black Lives Matter doing with all the money they’re accumulating if not helping their local chapters and Black-owned businesses to advance?
They seem to be fundraising for the sake of fundraising.
All talk, all woke. https://t.co/8KSKvJHoq3
— JD Rucker (@JDRucker) March 4, 2021
It is going to the democrats. It is fund raising. It isnt going to black communities or black families.
— Nancy (@lobo0506) March 4, 2021
The shooting of Michael Brown Jr. is probably best remembered for being the birth of the “hands up, don’t shoot” hoax, which anti-police activists used to fuel the propaganda that American law enforcement officers are unredeemable racists bent on killing unarmed black men.
One of the most influential lying slogans in American political history, it was based on a story that Brown was trying to surrender to Officer Darren Wilson at the time he was shot — a story that was thoroughly debunked by a Justice Department report issued in March 2015 that vindicated Wilson’s account that Brown was attacking him at the time of the shooting.
(To be fair, the report was not conclusive about the determination that Brown actually was attacking, but noted all evidence backed up Wilson’s story. And remember, this was a Justice Department under then-Attorney General Eric Holder and then-President Barack Obama. If any investigation was going to paint Brown as a victim and the officer as the villain, this would have been it. It didn’t. It was a vindication.)
But the Brown case also galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement, which had been founded a year earlier after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the Florida neighborhood watch captain who had been charged — ludicrously – with second-degree murder for shooting 17-year-old Trayvon Martin during a confrontation in Sanford, Florida, in 2012.
From there, Black Lives Matter has grown into a sprawling activist-industrial complex with close financial ties to an umbrella group headed by a board of directors that included such worthies as Susan Rosenberg, a former member of the Weather Underground terrorist group.
As the $90 million raised in 2020 shows, it’s also become the public face for liberals to try to assuage their guilt at being blessed to live in the greatest country the world has ever known. Whatever Black Lives Matter was in 2014, it’s a financial empire now, and the demand by Brown and the IBFA proves it.
The “trained Marxists” behind Black Lives Matter acknowledge Ferguson’s role in the movement upfront:
“The Black Lives Matter Global Network would not be recognized worldwide if it weren’t for the folks in St. Louis and Ferguson who put their bodies on the line day in and day out, and who continue to show up for Black lives,” the group’s history page states.
Still, the likelihood that Brown or his little-known group will see anything like $20 million from Black Lives Matter is approximately zero. A little go-away money? Maybe. Serious cash, like $20 million? No. (A Google search of the group shows it’s best known now for wanting $20 million from Black Lives Matter. Not exactly starting a negotiation from a point of strength)
Black Lives Matter is a brand now, a shorthand way for woke white liberals to signal their virtue to their woke white liberal friends. It’s a good bet that a fair portion of that $90 million Black Lives Matter raised came from the very suburban voters that Democrats targeted in the 2020 election that resulted in Joe Biden being installed as the nation’s 46th president.
It’s a grift for the givers — they get to sponge up credit for cheap compassion, though liberal policies have been a cancer to the African-American community for more than 50 years now, ever since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
(In 1965, the out-of-wedlock birth rate among African-Americans was about 24 percent, according to the liberal Brookings Institution. It was a staggering 77 percent in 2017, according to the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, which cited the federal National Center for Health Statistics. Destroying the nuclear family is destroying a community. And even Democrats have to know that by now.)
And it’s a grift for the recipients. All Black Lives Matter has to do is keep its name in the news and the guilt level high, and the donations — and taxpayer dollars — will keep rolling in.
And unlike most corporations, it can’t be targeted for a civil rights shakedown by “activists” who can convince largely white executives that their company’s stock value can be destroyed by accusations of racism.
What took so long for these communities to ask these questions. Guess what the money is gone! Sent mostly to white dem politicians. This money wasn’t for the communities.
— Scotty’s Terrible Takes (@Scottyterrible) March 4, 2021
However, there’s a long-shot chance that an action like this could represent a kind of crack in a dam that ends up washing a whole rotten structure away.
It’s true that Michael Brown Sr. has one of the best-known names of the long-running national nightmare that’s built on the unquestionably fraudulent idea that American police are gunning for blacks. After all, he and his family ended up with a $1.5 million settlement over his son’s death in 2017, as the AP reported.
But he’s far from the only one.
If this idea managed to take off, if Black Lives Matter started getting dinged for money by every two-bit activist who smashed a window, or yelled at a cop, or ended up getting arrested and bailed out by now-Vice President Kamala Harris, it could end up bankrupting the group.
Even if it never paid out a dime, the legal fees alone — not to mention the public relations damage — could be ruinous.
And to get really optimistic, there’s the small chance that all the attention to its finances would show the organization to be what it has really become — an international grift that’s using white guilt and liberal philosophies to amass a dangerous amount of financial and political capital.
As the AP reported, some local chapters of Black Lives Matter have demanded greater transparency from the overall organization.
According to the AP, a group of 10 chapters calling themselves #BLM10 wants more representation in “this thing that our names are attached to, that they are doing in our names,” said April Goggans, organizer of Black Lives Matter DC.
“We are BLM. We built this, each one of us,” she said.
The group includes BLM organizations in Hudson Valley, New York; Indianapolis; Oklahoma City; San Diego; and elsewhere, AP reported.
With that kind of discontent public, maybe even the mainstream media would stop accepting the Black Lives Matter movement at face value and give it the kind of attention that a group like, say, the National Rifle Association receives on a regular basis. (Isn’t it pretty to think so.)
That’s the kind of awakening that could end up destroying the “woke” movement.
That’s a long way off though, and it depends a good deal on the kind of media reaction Mr. Brown Sr. and his IBFA comrades draw in their effort to get a piece of the Black Lives Matter action.
One way or the other, though, the grift goes on.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
