It’s all over MAGA social media: The alleged reason Silicon Valley Bank failed is that it was too busy being woke, and they point to a silly, misleading database from the wingnuttier Claremont Institute. You’ll never guess what they “found” — that SVB and their clients gave millions to Black Lives Matter. Nope. Via Talking Points Memo:
The claims come from a database posted earlier this week by the Center for the American Way of Life, a project of the Claremont Institute. As Claremont put it in a Newsweek article introducing the database, “Americans deserve to know who funded the BLM riots.”
Claremont has been around for many years — I actually spent a summer many years ago as a research assistant at another think tank very loosely associated with it — and it’s always been on the right. But it’s undergone a sort of hyper-right-wing rebranding in the Trump era and now presents itself as the group trying to provide an intellectual, let’s say PhD-based, underpinning to Trumpism, sometimes termed “national conservatism.”
Now back to the database. Even if it had nothing to do with SVB’s collapse, is it really possible that the bank contributed almost $74 million to the “BLM Movement & Related Causes?”
Well, no.
You’d think common sense would kick in at some point. A bank donating $74 million to Black Lives Matter? And no one heard about it? No press releases went out?
Let’s start with 3M.
Claremont lists 3M pledging a whopping $50 million to “BLM.” But the cited document, published in September 2020, appears to be mainly focused on supporting STEM learning in Black communities. It’s a pledge of $50 million over 5 years and lists $6 million in initial investments. That $6 million consisted of $5 million to the United Negro College Fund for work in St. Paul, Minnesota; another $1 million is slated for “annual investment to social justice partnerships, led by our employee resource network community champions and building on the initial investment from 3M Foundation in 2020.”
For Claremont, these are all “BLM.”
You’re not surprised, right? The America haters just love this stuff. It feeds what passes for their tattered souls.
The right wing insists that anything that’s Black-people adjacent is “Black Lives Matter,” pushing the narrative that these companies are pushing riots and civil disorder. These are clearly racist and sick, twisted people and institutions.
We already know why SVB collapsed. They bought politicians who voted to deregulate them. See how well that turned out?
