He used to be one of the people helping organize Black Lives Matter marches. Now he’s calling the whole thing a “scam” and says his political worldview did a full 180 after what he describes as a long-overdue wake-up call.
Xaviaer DuRousseau, 29, who has since become a conservative media personality and contributor with PragerU, says his break from the left didn’t happen overnight—it came during the chaos of the 2020 pandemic era, the George Floyd protests, and an unexpected detour through reality television casting that forced him to re-examine everything he thought he believed.
According to DuRousseau, the turning point came when he began digging into conservative arguments while preparing for a role on Netflix’s “The Circle,” a social experiment-style competition where contestants are isolated and must strategize—sometimes using fake identities—to win a cash prize.
With lockdown time on his hands, he says he started researching “both sides” more seriously than he ever had before.
What he claims he found, at least in hindsight, shocked him out of his political comfort zone.
He now says he realized he had been approaching information with what he calls “confirmation bias,” only seeking material that reinforced what he already believed. Once he stopped doing that, he says his conclusions shifted dramatically.
DuRousseau has since publicly argued that he believes socialism has consistently failed in practice and has described Black Lives Matter as “a scam,” while also leveling broader criticism at progressive politics and what he sees as ideological indoctrination from a young age.
He also says he grew increasingly uncomfortable even during his activist years. While helping organize protests following George Floyd’s death in 2020, he claims he questioned where the massive fundraising dollars were going and whether victims’ families were actually receiving meaningful support.
When he raised those concerns, he says he was essentially told to fall in line or stay quiet—something he now frames as a red flag about the movement’s internal culture.
He has also criticized what he views as the movement’s blanket hostility toward police, noting that he personally had friends and family in law enforcement and didn’t feel comfortable with what he saw as sweeping condemnation of all officers. He says the riots and looting that accompanied some protests only deepened his doubts.
One of his sharper criticisms centers on what he calls the “performative” nature of the activism industry—particularly around high-profile cases like Breonna Taylor, where he claims families were not properly supported despite large sums of money being raised in their name.
His broader political shift, however, appears to have been accelerated by his early life experiences. DuRousseau has said he grew up facing racial hostility in a small Illinois town, which initially pushed him toward progressive activism. By high school and college, he was organizing initiatives around Black history education and pushing for ethnic studies requirements, eventually even supporting Bernie Sanders in 2016.
At the time, he says he genuinely believed he was “on the right side of history.” That certainty, he now argues, gradually cracked under scrutiny.
He also points to his experience with “The Circle” as a strange catalyst. According to reporting, producers reportedly wanted him to pose as a white woman and then later reveal his true identity as part of a social experiment twist. He says the preparation process forced him to engage deeply with arguments he previously dismissed—and that he struggled to rebut them.
Just before traveling to London for filming, he ultimately backed out, saying he no longer believed in the political messaging he would have been expected to portray.
Looking back now, DuRousseau frames his journey as one of disillusionment—arguing that he moved from what he saw as a narrow, emotionally driven worldview to a broader skepticism of activist institutions and progressive orthodoxy.
And in classic internet-era fashion, he’s now turned that personal ideological shift into a public-facing career on the conservative media circuit, presenting himself as someone who has seen both sides—and chose to walk away from one of them.
