He sips Erewhon smoothies, invites viewers to “walk with me” through Los Angeles, and records videos dissecting politics and culture for millions online. Xaviaer DuRousseau is a conservative content creator and on-air personality for PragerU.
DuRousseau was not always a conservative firebrand. He was once a progressive. In fact, he used to march in support of Black Lives Matter.
The 29-year-old host of “Respectfully, Xaviaer” spoke with Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview about how he went from BLM marches to becoming one of the biggest conservative influencers.
“Even to this day, every time I hear about my BLM protesting days, I still cringe. It was the most ghetto mess I ever participated in,” he said.
DuRousseau was born and raised in “the trenches” of Southside Chicago, in a progressive family, some that he said held “Marxist” views.
Then he went from the Southside to “the middle of nowhere” surrounded by cornfields in Illinois in a mostly White community, and was always told growing up that he was different, and needed to “view everything through the lens of race.”
Once he went to college, DuRousseau became even more progressive and became “even more conscious of racial issues and social justice issues.”
He became an activist, and joined Black Lives Matter protests.
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“I was posting a lot of racial things online talking about microaggressions and oppression and all these insane narratives long before the George Floyd Palooza even started.”
In 2020, a dare changed his trajectory.
DuRousseau applied to the Netflix show “The Circle,” a reality competition where isolated contestants communicate only through a social media platform, strategically rating and eliminating each other, sometimes while pretending to be someone else, and he was selected out of 25,000 people as a social justice activist.
To prepare for the show, DuRousseau was doing research and had a plan to go after conservative voices like Charlie Kirk and debunk PragerU videos; then he had a big awakening.
“I accidentally red-pilled myself,” he said.
Through the experience, DuRousseau realized he aligned more with the right.
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“I ended up realizing that I was wrong about many of these social issues,” he said. “I learned more about history than I’d ever seen before. And I realized that it was the first time I had ever researched without confirmation bias to the point where I finally backed out of filming the reality show in October of 2020. And a few months later, I decided I was going to start speaking about the new values and the new things that I had learned, and the rest was history.”
Rather than a red-pill moment, DuRousseau said he served himself a prescription bottle filled with red pills.
“If I had to pick one thing that was like the straw that broke the camel’s back, it was when I started looking into the funds of BLM.”
During his time as a BLM activist, he found himself asking where the funds were going and even noticed Breonna Taylor’s mother spoke out about the BLM funds.
“Every time I would ask those questions, people would tell me that, like, I had lost the plot or that I needed to mind my business and stay in my lane.”
DuRousseau said by tracing the money, one can see the priorities of an organization.
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“I started seeing that BLM was taking their money through ActBlue and putting it toward these progressive activists and these progressive causes and to politicians. And these politicians were doing absolutely nothing in the Black community.”
Federal prosecutors are investigating whether senior leaders of the Black Lives Matter organization defrauded donors who contributed tens of millions of dollars during the 2020 protests, two sources familiar with the probe told Fox News.
The Associated Press first reported that the Justice Department’s ongoing inquiry is focused on the foundation’s handling of donations collected in the wake of the George Floyd killing, when the group saw a surge of more than $90 million in contributions.
DuRousseau said, “It wasn’t going toward police reform or anything of the sort. So when I realized how fraudulent that was, it was like this domino effect of me realizing, ‘Oh, BLM, it’s not just a scam of a movement, it’s a scam as an organization and the left is 100% a part of it.'”
Now as a conservative content creator, DuRousseau wants people to think and not be afraid to think outside the box.
“My goal is simply to get people to critically think again because we are at this point where so many people are afraid to ask questions or afraid to be honest or afraid to have a thought that strays from the box that they were told that they had to think inside of.”
DuRousseau shared that this resulted in family strains.
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“Many people of my own family wanted absolutely nothing to do with me,” he said. “I didn’t speak to my own father for a couple of years. My eldest brother – it’s been five years – and he still thinks that I’m a Ku Klux Klan member, still trying to understand how being a White supremacist would benefit me. But, according to them, that’s what they think.”
He said over the years, some have come around.
“Over the years, I’ve had some family members start to realize I was right,” he said. “And I’ve more friends, you know, over years that, from the past, have come forward. And even if they don’t fully agree with me now, they at least apologize for how emotional they were in their response to everything that happened in 2020 and 2021 when I started speaking out.”
DuRousseau said about his popular “Walk With Me” videos: “Here’s a guy with his $25 smoothie going on the most unhinged rant you’ve ever seen on his way to the gym.”
He said the format is to get people’s attention from other avenues.
“It’s getting people that wouldn’t necessarily pay attention to politics and what’s going on in our world today to accidentally listen to real world issues.”
The most prominent Black Lives Matter nonprofit has disbursed only around a third of its recent cash hauls to other charitable nonprofits.
The BLM Global Network Foundation, the movement’s primary nonprofit, raised roughly $87 million in contributions between mid-2020 to mid-2022. However, a bulk of the cash came between July 1, 2020, and June 30, 2021, during the movement’s height and before the once-prominent organization saw a drastic collapse in donations.
Black Lives Matter did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Fox News’ Greg Wehner, David Spunt contributed to this report.
