With all of the current pro-Hamas protesting and rioting going on these days, it can be easy to lose track of the similar activities that took place during 2020's summer of love. Those riots gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and all it entailed. Unlike today's anti-Israel forces that are only supported by a small minority of people, BLM caught fire. Celebrities were tripping over themselves to rush out and promote fundraising and donations for whoever was supposedly organizing BLM and the money quickly mounted into the millions. Much of that cash wound up being funneled through a leftist dark money organization called the Tides Foundation. But as the Free Beacon reports this week, there seems to be trouble in paradise once again. A group called Black Lives Matter Grassroots is suing the Tides Foundation because (once again) it seems that nearly nine million dollars intended to go to the movement has mysteriously disappeared.
The left-wing dark money giant Tides Foundation raised more than $33 million on behalf of the national Black Lives Matter group during the George Floyd riots in 2020. Now, Black Lives Matter is suing Tides over its refusal to hand the funds back. There’s just one problem—nearly $9 million of those funds have seemingly disappeared.
From 2020 through 2022, Tides transferred $8.7 million from the fund to Black Lives Matter Grassroots, an offshoot of the national Black Lives Matter group led by Melina Abdullah, a longtime activist and professor. But Black Lives Matter Grassroots reported to the IRS that it never received that money, and no one involved in the transactions will say what became of the funds. These discrepancies have left charity watchdogs mystified, while legal experts say they could lead to massive fines and penalties.
The original donors who were persuaded to finance all of this will almost certainly never see their money again, but it does appear that this particular transaction (or lack thereof) could lead to legal trouble for somebody. The question is who will wind up taking the fall? The Tides Foundation reported transferring nearly nine million dollars to BLM Grassroots over a three year period. If they have even one monitor on their staff who passed a basic accounting class at some point, surely they must have a record of those transactions.
The transfers had to have passed through a bank or other financial institution. You don't send someone in a pickup truck over to the BLM Grassroots offices with cartoonishly large bags stuffed full of hundred-dollar bills. BLM Grassroots is required to keep records of all the contributions they receive. And they too must have been doing business with a bank to handle the deposits and distribution of the money, so we should expect records to exist there as well. And yet BLM Grassroots claims that they never received any of it. Somebody is lying. And when you're talking about that amount of cash, somebody might be going to jail.
How does this keep happening to every "official" organization that grew out of the original street movement that became BLM? The first such organization, BLM Global Network Foundation, wound up taking in a haul of roughly $80 million. But rather than helping local groups, the Global Network Foundation purchased multiple mansions worth millions of dollars each. Another large tranche of cash seems to have wound up in the pockets of Patrisse Cullors.
In March of last year, outrage was renewed when a review of tax documents revealed that only one-third of the money pouring into BLM's non-profit wound up being passed on to other aid groups. The rest of the money was mostly accounted for, but it was being showered on people like Patrisse Cullors' father for "security services" and another BLM board member who pocketed more than two million dollars for "consulting." A rapper named Zuby was crowing, saying he felt vindicated because he had called BLM a "disingenuous scam" from the beginning.
BLM also famously promoted the stories of Black people who were believed to have been abused by the police and ran advertisements asking people to donate money "in their name." One of those was Breonna Taylor, who legitimately was killed by police officers. Last year her mother posted saying that BLM is "a fraud." One of the younger people who was shot by the police and subsequently used for fundraising was Tamir Rice. His mother later told the New York Post that, “they are benefiting off the blood of our loved ones, and they won’t even talk to us.”
Now we have BLM Grassroots painting a very similar picture. They were supposedly given millions and millions of dollars to "help the movement." But when you ask them where the money is today, they shrug their shoulders and try to point the finger at someone else. Perhaps they should have named this the Black Millionaires Matter movement. Or how about the Black Mansions movement? So many people seemed to have figured out that this was an outrageous racket, but the money kept flowing in, albeit more slowly over time. And where did most of that cash wind up going, allegedly intended to help disadvantaged residents of Black communities? Perhaps they should have called it the Black Hole Movement.
