Capital Research Center releases first video in series asking did BLM really help black Americans?

The conservative-leaning Capital Research Center is out with a video series that takes an inside look at the Black Lives Matter movement with a particular focus on whether it has indeed improved the lives of black Americans in Minneapolis and other communities across the country where riots have occurred. 

"They are not grateful to Black Lives Matter, and their black lives are not better, because of Black Lives Matter," center President Scott Walter said Friday on the "John Solomon Reports" podcast.

The first video in the multi-part series, sponsored by the center and filmed and produced by No Filters Media, focuses on Minneapolis one year after the protests that followed the May 2020 death of George Floyd and at the Black Lives Movement Global Network Foundation – the decentralized, loosely-knit collection of BLM chapters across the country founded seven years ago. 

"This is a multi-million-dollar operation," restaurateur Harold "Noonie" Ward says in the film, pointing to a small, makeshift BLM memorial in Minneapolis. "Who got some of that money?"

Solomon, early in his roughly 45-minute conversation with Walter, describes Capital Research Center as "America’s Think Tank."  

Walter responded: "We're not a think tank that does regression analyses on economic statistics and whatnot. We are a think tank that digs into what is really happening, especially on the left. 

“We use it as a mission statement of sorts that we investigate the left deeply and expose it widely because that story is just not being told by the mainstream media."

The first video includes the heartbreaking story of a black woman named Melodye McKinley, a hairstylist whose dreams of opening her own shop in the neighborhood where Floyd was killed gets shattered by the riots.

"She had a loan lined up to be able to do it," Walter said. "And then, of course, the riots happened and forget it."

Walter vows that the latter videos in the series will expose and unravel the elaborate, deep-pocketed financial network of the Black Lives Movement Global Network Foundation, from which only a select few have benefitted.

"That's the real theme of these movies," he tells Solomon. "On the one hand, are they sincere, crazy left-wing ideologues? Yep, probably. And at the same time, are they also just racketeers making fast, easy money off of other people's sufferings? Yeah, that's true, too."