Back in February, Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King announced in a now-unavailable Facebook post that he was welcoming a "new member of the King family:" a mastiff named Marz.
Good news, right? Surely, you’d think that this would be a totally normal, uncontroversial thing for King to do!
Not quite. Marz isn’t just any old pooch — he’s an award-winning mastiff bred by the California-based Potrero Performance Dogs with a price tag of over $40,000. And guess what? It turns out that donors to the Black Lives Matter movement are footing the bill. No refunds, I guess!
Shaun King's Grassroots Law PAC invoiced Potrero twice in February and December for $30,650 and $10,000, respectively.
King - who's white, by the way - defended the purchase in an impassioned Instagram post, during which he detailed several alleged security threats from “white supremacists” that motivated the $40,000 expenditure. The “Defund the Police” activist also attacked New York City and New Jersey in his post for their restrictive gun laws.
“New York City won’t even allow me to have a gun,” King wrote. “New Jersey doesn’t have stand your ground laws and hardly allows you to even own guns.”
“So know this,” King emphasized at the end of his post, “when you see reports about the money it costs to keep me and my family safe, it’s nowhere near enough. Not at all. Not even close.”
Though King argues that the $40,000 price tag is “not even close” to what it would take to protect him and his family, it is stunningly close to the approximately $56,000 that King’s PAC has actually used for political donations in 2021, per the Washington Free Beacon.
Earlier this month, the breeder announced that King’s show dog had been returned to Potrero because "he's got a little too much energy to be a family dog."