Josh Marshall has a story that will make you want to throw something it’s so infuriating. You can read it here. He did a brief twitter threat with the basic outline:
Rarely do I stumble upon something quite so gross and stupid as this. So if you’ll indulge me for a brief thread, I’d appreciate it.
Over the last couple days there’s a claim making the rounds in right wing media that Silicon Valley Bank went under in part because it gave more than $73 million to “BLM”. So they were so focused on woke culture they forget to run the bank, etc.
Even if the claim about why the bank went under was silly I couldn’t believe that even a medium sized bank could have possibly given that sum of money. A little poking around quickly led me to newly published database put out by the Trumpist think tank Claremont Institute. It probably won’t surprise you that of course SVB didn’t donate $73 million to “BLM”. But that only scratches the surface of this hideous little bundle of racist garbage.
The database allows you to look up dozens of individuals corporations and how much they gave to the “BLM Movement & Related Causes,” funding which they explicitly say “funded the BLM riots.” But when you look at the database, not only are the total sums usually wrong, the great majority of the giving is to organizations like the United Negro College Fund, various historically Black colleges and universities, the National Urban League, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation and various other orgs funding housing, medical care & STEM education in Black communities.
Since BLM is a movement rather than a discrete organization, it might be fair at some level to list this or that left wing Black advocacy organization as part of “BLM & Related Causes”. But they’re actually pretty hard to find examples that are even argumably in that ballpark. Even then the overwhelming amount of the money claimed as going to “BLM” is actually going to organizations like the ones I listed above. The upshot of the database is the basic point that anything tied to Black people or even adjacent to Black people is “BLM” and tied to violence and public mayhem.
Postscript: I only touch on this in the post. But among the many truly inane things in this database it leasts Bank of America as contributing $18 Billiion, yes, billion to “BLM” but when you look up the cited document it’s almost entirely mortgages and small business loans in Black communities. So if you’re Black even your BoA home mortgage is a contribution to “BLM” and urban rioting.
Originally tweeted by Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) on March 15, 2023.
These are the most loathsome of all the MAGA warriors. They know that it’s all bullshit and they do it anyway because they love to manipulate the rubes and own the libs. They are nihilistic little jerks.