On Monday, 24-year-old Black Lives Matter protester Marissa Janae Johnson told Elon James White and Imani Gandi of This Week in Blackness that she doesn’t “give a fuck” if her strident interruption of a Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle has hurt her cause in the eyes of white people.

Last Sunday, Johnson and fellow Black Lives Matter of Seattle protester Mara Jacqeline Willaford disrupted a rally in support of Medicaid expansion in Washington state as Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was getting up to speak. When the two women grabbed the microphone and screamingly insisted they were being reasonable by refusing to let the rally proceed, Sanders left the stage.
ADVERTISEMENT

The stunt has left many on the left at odds. Johnson and Willaford’s supporters claim that the two women are acting with the urgency required in a situation where black people’s lives and bodies are being destroyed by police on a daily basis.

Critics say that the interruption amounted to little more than a clownish tantrum that drove as many people away from the Black Lives Matter cause as it could have attracted.

Johnson says she doesn’t care, ultimately, whether the tactics are alienating.

Surprise! Surprise! Surprise

One of the Black Lives Matter activists who shut down the Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle is a self-identified “radical Christian” and former Sarah Palin supporter.

Marissa Jenae Johnson along with another protester, Mara Jacqueline, interrupted the planned Seattle rally for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Saturday afternoon, preventing the Vermont senator from addressing the massive crowd.

The rally at Westlake Park ended around 3 p.m. with Sanders choosing to leave after the belligerent protesters took the stage and stayed there, controlling the microphone, and hurling racist insults at the progressive crowd gathered to hear Sanders speak.

After disrupting the Sanders’ event and taking the microphone, a hostile and obnoxious Johnson accused the audience of “white supremacist liberalism” before telling the Seattle crowd:

I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is — with all of its progressives — but you’ve already done that for me. Thank you.