Black Lives Matter has been around since 2013, a period of seven years, but has the radical, Marxist and anti-family movement been built on a false narrative? The answer is yes.

The movement formed a year before the controversial police shooting of Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old black male in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri. Brown was fatally shot by white police officer Darren Wilson and his death sparked several nights of riots and property destruction in the poverty-stricken suburb. Brown was unarmed at the time and it led Black Lives Matter rioters to erroneously claim that he put his hands up before being shot and killed, a false narrative was debunked by the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice civil rights investigation.

Contrary to the Black Lives Matter rhetoric, Brown was not an average-sized individual and stood over six feet tall and weighed almost three-hundred pounds, far from the media narrative. Wilson was also of similar height, but about eighty pounds lighter than Brown. The Department of Justice found that Brown attempted to seize Wilson’s sidearm and that Wilson did not fire at Brown when the latter ran away. Wilson opened fire at Brown because Brown turned around and approached him again, which Wilson said was an act of self-defense.

Although Wilson has since resigned from the Ferguson police department, he was not the corrupt and racist police officer that the Black Lives Matter movement made him out to be.

Since Brown’s death in 2014, Black Lives Matter has rioted in the streets of multiple cities across the country during election cycles, with one exception being the 2015 Baltimore, Md. riots after the death of Freddie Gray in city police custody.

In 2020, after officer-involved shootings in Minneapolis, Minn., Kenosha, Wisc., Portland, Ore., Seattle, Wash., Louisville, Ky., and Atlanta, Ga., Black Lives Matter took to the streets and destroyed entire neighborhoods and caused long-lasting economic damage in these communities. All these cities suffered nights of destructive riots, in which small businesses and properties were vandalized, burned, and destroyed.

Based on the data, Black Lives Matter has caused at least $569.8 million in property damages in 2020. Much of the destruction occurred in poorer, minority neighborhoods which will struggle to recover and rebuild.

Statistics exposed the falsity of Black Lives Matter’s primary narrative about police officers targeting black Americans and allegedly hunting them down in the streets.

The Washington Post has tried to validate this false narrative, but found that the majority of officer-involved shootings involve white males. Manhattan Institute policy analyst Heather MacDonald found that in 2019, “police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous.” She continued, “African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015.” In short, the Black Lives Matter movement continues to perpetuate a false narrative about police officers targeting black Americans.

The Black Lives Matter movement is not built on a peaceful protest movement, nor is it built on the facts surrounding Brown’s death. The movement claims that black Americans are being targeted for assassination by white police officers, but statistics also disprove this lie. It is a movement built on lies, seeking to divide, intimidate, and wreak havoc to tear apart the fabric of the American republic.