Lake County Gazette

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker gave $300,000 in federal COVID-19 "relief" funds to anti-family activist group Black Lives Matter of Lake County.

That's according to the Office of the Illinois Governor's Dec. 2021 report to the Legislative Budget Oversight Commission, released on Jan. 14. 

Black Lives Matter of Lake County was founded in 2019 by Clyde McLemore of Zion.

McLemore and his organization opened an office at 111 N. County Street across from the Lake County Courthouse in downtown Waukegan in Aug. 2020.

“We had to have brick and mortar,” McLemore told the Chicago Tribune.

But according to Lake County Court records, building manager Mon Ami Realty filed a commercial eviction notice with the court against McLemore and Black Lives Matter of Lake County on Jan. 3, 2022.

The money was granted to Black Lives Matter of Lake County as part of a series of grants intended to stop "the increased potential for violence in underserved and disproportionately impacted communities."

McLemore, 63, was arrested in Kenosha, Wisc. in Feb. 2021 and charged with felony battery to a police officer and disorderly conduct after he allegedly kicked a door at the Kenosha Courthouse and threatened to "break the fingers" of a Kenosha police officer. A hearing is scheduled on the charges for Feb. 28.

According to Lake County Court records, McLemore has pled guilty to criminal felony battery and criminal misdemeanor battery multiple times, as well as faced orders of protection over stalking, most recently in 2020 and 2019.

Leaders of New York-based Black Lives Matter, has cheered street riots and looting while calling for the elimination of police departments and laws discriminating against white Americans, has vowed to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure."

"We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and 'villages' that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable," the group's web site said.

Black Lives Matter says its goals are to "dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk," to "(free) ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual" and to establish in America a different family structure.

In total, Illinois received approximately $5.5 billion in Washington, D.C. "federal financial relief" in 2020 and 2021.