Black Soccer Pro Lyle Taylor Slams BLM, Calls it a “Marxist Group”

In an interview that is sure to ruffle some leftist feathers this week, Nottingham Forest soccer pro Lyle Taylor, a prominent black athlete, said he has no intention of taking a knee before his games. In remarks to LBC’s Nick Ferrari, Taylor said that while he agrees with some aspects of the racial justice movement, he didn’t intend to fall in line with a “Marxist group” like Black Lives Matter.

“I took the decision because I felt that enough was enough,” he said. “Not enough people have looked into the organization that has kind of brought this all to the fore. I said before that I agree with the message that black lives do matter and something needs to be done about that to actually teach the message that the racial inequality and the societal injustice needs to stop.

“But by the same token, we are hanging our hat on a Marxist group who are … looking to defund the police, they’re looking to use societal unrest and racial unrest to push their own political agenda, and that’s not what black people are, we’re not a token gesture or a thing to hang your movement on just because it’s what’s powerful and what’s going on at the moment,” Taylor continued.

This isn’t the first time that Taylor has pushed back on Black Lives Matter. The Sun reports that, in January, the English footballer said, “I do not support Black Lives Matter as an institution, as an organization. I’d request anyone who blindly supports Black Lives Matter to have a look to what that organization does and what it stands for — because it’s scandalous the fact that the whole world and the whole world’s media got behind Black Lives Matter.”

What will make it difficult for leftists to criticize Taylor is that he’s been outspoken on issues of racism in the past. This isn’t a conservative guy saying that racism doesn’t exist or that it’s being propped as something it isn’t. When he played for Charlton Athletic, he actually sat down for a lengthy interview on racism, during which he said it was up to the Football Association to do more to combat bigotry in the sport.

“There is only so much we can do as players because we’re not allowed to say this or that,” he said at the time. “There is only so much we can do before we get reprimanded from the governing body of our sport and it is difficult. There is so much we need to stay and we should have the power and ability to say it all calm, it’s also very difficult to explain to people who haven’t been racially abused how it feels white people have never been victims of oppression, so something almost as trivial as that is washed away, it’s water off a duck’s back.”

In other words, this is a guy who, by all rights, should be exactly aligned with the expressed purpose of BLM. That he recognizes them for their true selves says something. Perhaps if more people like Taylor speak the truth about this wretched organization, the world will see the light.