Replies

Black Lives Matter Leader Stands Behind J6 Prisoners, Endorses Trump

BY TYLER DURDEN
SUNDAY, OCT 22, 2023 - 04:15 PM

Mark Fisher—who stepped down from his leadership position at BLM Rhode Island, which he co-founded, and is now founder and executive director of the Maryland-based BLM Incorporated—has stood in solidarity with leaders of the Proud Boys and led vigils of prayer for the people he believes to be political prisoners.

“They’re lambs led to slaughter to be sacrificed as an example for all who might want to dissent in the future,” Mr. Fisher told The Epoch Times. “This is what the government does to those who express independent thought and want to stand up for what they believe.”

What he sees in the vindictive treatment of the J6 prisoners are similarities to how black people have been treated, he said, and his aspiration in establishing that connection is to find common ground.

“One of the things I highlight when I speak to them is that they have a whole new understanding now of what black people have been going through with the over-policing, the police brutality, and the unfair treatment in the two-tiered justice system and how oppressive and overreaching it is,” Mr. Fisher said.

Media’s Distortion of Truth

Just as legacy media has distorted what happened at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by accusing Trump supporters of a violent insurrection, Mr. Fisher said BLM has been blamed for the 2020 summer riots, though there were outside parties like the far-left extremist group Antifa that were a source of chaos.

“Antifa had a lot to do with the riots of 2020, and there were a lot of anarchist groups who just wanted to take advantage of the moment and were out for destruction,” he said.

Black Lives Matter had been around years before George Floyd died while in police custody in Minneapolis in 2020, Mr. Fisher said. Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder in the case.

“That’s when it became a political movement and the national and global center of attention,” Mr. Fisher said. “The media made us its darling, which it loves to do, and it was able to make us its scapegoat when things started to go south.”

Mr. Fisher, a Christian who has a degree in theology with a background in being a pastor, expressed contempt for both the government and the media.

“I don’t trust the federal or state government as far as I can throw them, and the media is trying to stop us from uniting,” he said. “It’s the same media that caused the division between all of these marginalized groups in the first place to keep us at each other’s throats.”

What BLM Means

According to Mr. Fisher, people have misunderstood the original intent of BLM’s mission.

The name of the organization itself has led to anger.

“It’s not black lives are better,” he said. “It’s not black lives are greater or black lives matter more. It’s just simply black lives matter. That statement itself is so loaded that people have processed it differently through their own lens and experience.”

To not see the significance of the statement from the perspective of a black person is to fail to see it through a lens of compassion, he said.

Mr. Fisher denied the framing of BLM as a Marxist organization.

“Black people want the same thing that white people want,” he said. “We want life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We want to make money and have a family. Do those sound like Marxist principles? To me, those are fundamentally American, entrepreneurial, and capitalist principles. We want to acquire wealth and leave something—as the Bible teaches us—for our children.”

Mr. Fisher’s current organization, BLM Incorporated, focuses on entrepreneurship education and financial empowerment for black Americans.

The website also states that the organization is not aligned with any political party or position, “unless those politics are for the dismantling of a racist system and the eradication of the white supremacist ideology and state sanctioned police brutality against and killings of Blacks.”