A co-founder of the Black Lives Matter revolutionary group made several very extreme statements in the past, such as comparing her book to former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader and mass murderer Mao Zedong, celebrating the burning of the Confederate Flag, and saying the U.S. flag is “not a symbol I stand by.”
In a 2015 interview given to radio program Uprising with Sonali, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors said “it’s really amazing to be alive watching people burn” the Confederate Flag because she thinks it’s a “power symbol.”
Cullors continued by taking aim at the Star Spangled Banner along the same lines, “I want to question, too, are we saying then that the American flag is a symbol that we are standing by? It’s not a symbol I stand by.”
Cullors, a self-professed “trained Marxist” who nonetheless was found in April to have gone on a real estate shopping spree in affluent, primarily white neighborhoods, called for people she referred to as BLM’s “white allies” to take “more risks” by infiltrating white supremacist groups.
“That is a tactic that many anti-racist white people have done. They’ve infiltrated white supremacist groups as a way to be a detail, as a way to tell other members,” said Cullors.
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Cullors also has a history of spreading anti-police sentiment. In a speech at King’s College London as part of her Ferguson Solidarity Tour in 2015, Cullors tried to equate law enforcement to a “terrorist organization.”
“That’s what I wanted to do. I always knew I wanted to fight police. They were the single most, sort of, terrorist organization in my life, and I wanted to know how to fight them.”
Cullors said she started instigating anti-law enforcement sentiment as young as 17, running “campaigns that focused on trying to get them out of high schools.”
She also advocated for revolutionaries to use various insurgency tactics such as using a small group of people to cause chaos such as shutting down malls, freeways, and obstructing police departments.
“Five people can shut a freeway down. We did it in Los Angeles. 10 people can shut a Walmart down. We did it in Ferguson… In Los Angeles, for example, we occupied the LAPD Los Angeles Police headquarters for 18 days.”
In another video, Cullors was thrilled when her book was compared to Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, which was used as a doctrinal pretext by CCP zealots during the Cultural Revolution to justify the killing of anyone who didn’t show extreme fealty and loyalty to the Communist Party during the peak of its bloodlust.
“I was speaking to this young person from Arizona who’s trying to fight SB 1070, and he grabbed a book and he said, ‘It’s like Mao’s Red Book.’ And I was like man, that’s what I was thinking, and it was just really cool to hear him make that connection,” Cullors remarked.
Cullors’ pride seems misplaced, however. In a 1994 article by the Washington Post, the paper found Mao was likely to have surpassed the infamous company he can call his peers: Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin, in the mountain of dead bodies he created.
Washington Post said he and the CCP can be charged with between 40 and 80 million deaths “he was directly responsible for and deaths resulting from disastrous policies he refused to change.”
The article breaks down the figures, “One government document that has been internally circulated and seen by a former Communist Party official now at Princeton University says that 80 million died unnatural deaths — most of them in the famine following the Great Leap Forward.”
“This figure comes from the Tigaisuo, or the System Reform Institute, which was led by Zhao Ziyang, the deposed Communist Party chief, in the 1980s to study how to reform Chinese society.”
“In comparison, Hitler is blamed for 12 million concentration camp deaths and at least 30 million other deaths associated with World War II, while Stalin is believed responsible for between 30 million and 40 million ‘unnatural deaths,’ including millions from a famine he created,” says the article.
With reporting by Jonathan Walker
