“It’s time to admit it: Black Lives Matter hysteria made fools of us all,” declares a bold Telegraph headline published last week, captioning a 2020 photo of BLM protesters tipping Edward Colston’s statue into Bristol Harbour.

Actually, BLM hysteria made fools of some of us. During that unforgettable summer of love, I distinctly remember writing these words:

Understanding our history, rather than just raging against it, enables us to debate the good, the bad and the ugly of every era and learn from all of it… We may make all sorts of progress. But prejudice is a difficult weed to eradicate from the human heart—as the cancellers themselves remind us. Because of this, all of us desperately need the past. We need it, at the very least, to hold ourselves accountable.

The hysteria of those tempestuous days was suffocating, but it was not irresistible. We had many reasons then, as now, to defy the impulses of the so-called “antiracism” throng.

Not least among those reasons was their ugly contention that white people are uniquely and inherently racist. Please be sure you don’t miss the irony in that.

As the Telegraph piece notes, hard evidence that antiracism was largely a grift can now be found in abundance.

“Remember the Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol? The one where the mob tipped the statue into the harbour?” columnist Michael Deacon asks. “In court this week, one of its organisers admitted fraud, after £30,000 in donations from Black Lives Matter supporters went missing.”

Xahra Saleem, 23-year-old co-founder of the All Black Lives Bristol group was one of five activists to organise the infamous June 7, 2020 Bristol protest.

Days earlier, Saleem had launched a GoFundMe in the group’s name to raise a few hundred pounds to cover the costs of the demonstration, The Times reports. Saleem and her co-belligerents agreed before the event to give any leftover funds to Changing Your Mindset, a Bristol youth group “which planned to use it to fund a life-changing trip to Africa for young people in the deprived St Pauls area of the city”.

As summer turned to autumn, Changing Your Mindset chased Saleem and her group for the funds with no success, eventually deciding to call the police. An investigation found the donation money had disappeared. Saleem was eventually arrested, has since pled guilty to fraud, and will be sentenced on 31 October.

It is only the latest in a string of BLM-related scams.

In case you missed it, Boston University last month opened an inquiry into Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research. Among the many questions they have is where $55 million in funding has been spent since the center opened in 2020, why Kendi has been AWOL, and why half the centre’s staff were recently laid off.

This follows on from BLM’s financial scandal last year. The group’s co-founder Patrisse Kahn-Cullors abruptly quit after indulging in a real estate buying binge, leaving no one in charge of the remaining $60 million in the organisation’s coffers.