Capitalizing on the lucrative opportunities afforded to them as high-profile progressives, the three celebrity founders moved on, leaving the operation to wither in the hands of deputies who, sadly, turned on each other. A remarkable spate of legal trouble, brushes with law enforcement, and tangles with the Internal Revenue Service have all but spelled the death of the enterprise that you probably know best as Black Lives Matter.

The spectacular rise and fall of BLM has surprisingly little in common with earlier civil rights campaigns, other than, perhaps, good intentions. How BLM’s leaders exploited George Floyd’s murder to raise millions that they then put into their own pockets more closely resembles the stories of famous grifters like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos or Sam Bankman-Fried’s foray into “effective altruism.”