BLM’s Problems Are Bigger Than the Grift

Organizations founded by leftist revolutionaries have profoundly transformed America already

Letter to The WSJ.

"Jason Riley is right that Black Lives Matter’s popularity has declined since its 2020 peak and that news “about the organization’s spending habits” will make things worse (“BLM’s Antipolice Racket is Coming Undone,” Upward Mobility, April 20). And there’s more. The IRS doesn’t know where millions raised in 2020 have gone. California and Washington, no bastions of conservatism, have suspended fundraising by the group’s flagship, the BLM Global Network Foundation, because it is delinquent on its 2020 financial reports.

But the foundation’s biggest problem has never been the grift. Nor has it been that its self-avowed Marxist founders have gone on a mansion-buying spree with money well-intentioned Americans and craven corporations donated.

The worst is that organizations founded by leftist revolutionaries have so profoundly transformed America already. In my book “BLM,” I detail how Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Melina Abdullah, BLM’s founders, are Marxists with an abiding hatred of the American way of life.

Ms. Cullors and Ms. Garza were trained by theoreticians steeped in cultural Marxism, or the idea that to dismantle society you must first infiltrate the culture and indoctrinate Americans. Ms. Tometi is a devotee of Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro, while Ms. Abdullah says, “In order to eliminate police violence, and the killings of our people at their hands, we must also target the economic systems that built it and rely on it.” It is because of them, and the havoc they’ve visited on America since 2013, that we’re having to fight culture wars in classrooms, offices, churches and army barracks.

Grifters will always be with us. What we never had was Marxist ideologues changing America.

Mike Gonzalez

The Heritage Foundation

Washington"