The Suppression Of Black Lives Matter Abuse At Meta/Facebook

 I've previously written about the obvious scam that is Black Lives Matter; as a basic matter, there is no national organization per se, and as a consequence, money donated to that cause merely awaits the right scammer to pick up the tab, particularly as much of it passes through the sticky and opaque fingers of ActBlue, a fundraising siphon where accountability goes to die.

Sean Campbell's extensive update to the story at New York magazine discovered that Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Melina Abdullah had purchased a home with

… more than 6,500 square feet, more than half a dozen bedrooms and bathrooms, several fireplaces, a soundstage, a pool and bungalow, and parking for more than 20 cars, according to real-estate listings. The California property was purchased for nearly $6 million in cash in October 2020 with money that had been donated to BLMGNF [Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation].

Of course, this meant that the BLMGNF immediately started playing defense, changing ownership of their clubhouse (known as "the campus") "to an LLC established in Delaware by the law firm Perkins Coie … [ensuring] that the ultimate identity of the property’s new owner was not disclosed to the public." It also meant 

…monitor[ing] social media for negative mentions of BLMGNF, with members using their influence with the platforms to have such remarks removed. It’s currently not possible to share the Post’s article on Cullors’s home purchases on Facebook because the site’s parent company, Meta, has labeled the content “abusive.” At other points, Bowers and his associates direct a private investigator to look into BLMGNF detractors and journalists, including me.

(Emboldening mine.) The ban appears to be over, thankfully, but it's pretty clear they fully expect the cooperation of social media companies to prevent unseemly details from leaking out. To their credit, as far as I can tell, Twitter never did play along with this game.

The Trouble With Labels And Facebook's Censorship

 The New York Post has a story about BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors buying four million-dollar-plus homes in the New York area, scoping out property in the Bahamas, and last month buying a $1.4M home in Malibu. This is in addition to homes in the Atlanta and Los Angeles areas.

 BLM, of course, is a label, which means anyone can use it. There really is no unified formal organization, which has led to grifters capitalizing on the brand's goodwill. BLM Global Network Foundation, Khan-Cullors' particular instance, is one among many:

Founded by Khan-Cullors and another activist, Kailee Scales, the nonprofit Oakland, Calif.-based BLM Global Network Foundation was incorporated in 2017 and claims to have chapters throughout the US, the UK and Canada, and a mission “to eradicate White supremacy and build power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities.” The group does not have a federal tax exemption and donations are filtered through ActBlue Charities and Thousand Currents, two nonprofits that manage the cash.

This, of course, sounds awfully familiar; the whole point of ActBlue is to hide the operations of political scam artists. What makes this worse is Facebook censoring attempts to share the story, something mainly reported by News Corp. outlets. (Twitter has not, so far, attempted to step on this.) What good can come from this? The fact that the BLM name is being openly used by grifters is bad enough; that Big Tech covers for them is appalling.

At Last, Something Approximating A Plan In Portland

I recently despaired at the problem of Black Lives Matters offering no policy directions to improve policing and diminish police abuse of blacks. It therefore came as welcome news when I found out about Reimagine Oregon's surprisingly meaty list of policy demands, particularly their section on police divestments. A great deal of this has already been accomplished in some form or another (banning the use of chokeholds, mandated duty to report/intervene in cases of violence, making officer disciplinary records visible to the public) with many other particulars still on the table. Some correspond to reforms I have already proposed, but many strike me as commonsense beyond those:

• Prevent contract arbitration from limiting disciplinary action.
• Demilitarize the police, including ending (a) tear gas use, (b) sound cannons, and (c) flashbang grenades. (a) will be extremely difficult to implement (crowd control is still a legitimate function of government), but the other two ((b) especially) are so overused as to be serious problems.
• Decriminalize public transportation fare evasion.
• Prohibit public transportation fare evasion as justification for search warrants.
• Remove sworn and armed officers from public university campuses. This is probably unlikely to happen, and in any case, how much of a problem does this realistically present? University campuses are hardly a hotbed of crime to begin with.
• Ban the receipt of militarized equipment (1033 transfers). This is well overdue.
• Reconsider personnel public records requests. Police disciplinary records need to be public. Despite a nearly 60-year-old Supreme Court case, Brady v. Maryland, that has frequently been read to imply that police disciplinary records germane to court proceedings must be made available to the defense, it is frequently flouted in practice.
• Consider the laws that allow expunction [expungement] without costs for people with no convictions in a certain number of years.
• End 48 hour rule that delays police officer questioning after a charge of excessive force is raised.
• Eliminate qualified immunity, duh.

There are other items aimed at the county and municipal levels, but this strikes me as a fine first crack at achievable line-items. The biggest single item missing, and the hardest one to implement, is ending police unions. The question in my mind is whether the Portland protesters have anything whatsoever to do with this group.

No Concrete, No Foundation, Or, "Awareness" Is Not Enough

About a month ago, I ran into Shaun King's widely-disseminated tweet about voting response to police brutality:

STOP generically telling us to VOTE in response to all of the police brutality we have right now.

Yes we should vote. But we have to be VERY specific.

Democrats, from top to bottom, are running the cities with the worst police brutality in America right now.

We voted for them.

— Shaun King (@shaunking) June 5, 2020

This was, I think, the first sign of a possible awakening (and no, I don't think the Republicans are a particularly good answer here). The fact that these things keep happening in Democratically-run cities and states is an indicator that the rot is substantially more difficult to excise, and that the affiliations in multiple dimensions will make this harder still.

Forcing politicians to implement reform in the face of entrenched interests will require sustained political agitation, and an agenda of reforms to agitate for. This brings me to the subject of this piece, Black Lives Matter, the formal organization. It surely has been front and center in many aspects of the current crisis. Formed in the wake of the George Zimmermann acquittal in 2013, the protests of the Michael Brown shooting in St. Louis the following year garnered the nascent organization national recognition. But in that time, they have not set up a national 501(c)4. There is accordingly no IRS 990 history to analyze. The PAC registered under that name raised a grand total of $500, and has since been dissolved. As donations to BLM itself all go through ActBlue (itself a 501(c)(3) charity with over $1M in assets according to its 2017 990), there is no visibility to that money beyond what ActBlue provides. (At the time of writing, I have a request into that organization for BLM's finances, but have received only a robot response.)

You will seek in vain for actual policy at BLM's website. Their "What We Believe" page is a litany of sophomoric college intersectional babble, full of nonsense like

• "We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege"
• "We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered."
• "We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure..."
• "We foster a queer‐affirming network."

This is not terribly surprising coming from people whose founders in fact include actual Marxists. But nowhere there will you find a proposal for dealing with police violence against black people. BLM, the organization, has lost sight of the main goal everyone assumes they are after: the end of disproportionate police violence against black people.

Contrast this void with CHAZ/CHOP's demand list. Yes, they're silly. Despite the repeated assurances this isn't what the phrase "defund the police" means, they "demand abolition. ... This means 100% of funding, including existing pensions for Seattle Police." But at least, they provide a set of specifics. You could also look at the NAACP, whose strategic plan is full of airy nothings ("A chance to live the American Dream for all", "A free, high-quality, public education for all", etc.), but at least they point in the direction of goals. You can't fix what you can't identify.

This is in some way ironic, because only five years ago, BLM had actually launched Campaign Zero, which offered tangible and plausible ideas to stop police violence (h/t Coyoteblog). But that seems to have since gone nowhere. Campaign Zero's parent organization, We The Protesters, has a 2017 990 (the last year I could find) detailing $484,588 of support in that year, with no distributions over the period 2015-2017. But where are they? Has anyone heard from them, at all, since the George Floyd protests started? They have been a cipher. "Activist" groups like Black Lives Matter, at least the formal entity, have invested much in protesting and public displays, but show almost no interest in why police violence against black people is so widespread, nor in concrete solutions to fix that problem.

Update: I forgot to add this Washington Free Beacon piece about Shaun King sending money from Real Justice PAC to his own company.  While this is not, by itself, proof of malfeasance, it sure looks fishy.

 

Update 2022-04-04: Stripped the formatting off the King tweet upthread that made the now-deleted tweet invisible. Sorry, Google.