We guess this is their attempt to make the halfwit “woke bank” lie more intellectual racist. Because to appeal to the kinds of people who vote for Republicans and consume rightwing media with the voraciousness of Ron DeSantis fingering a pudding cup, your talking points need to make sense jam at the white supremacist G-spots inside their bottoms.
We first heard it on Tucker on Wednesday night, so there’s a huge shock. In the middle of his fuckbonkers monologue, which was really nothing more than interactive bingo for those aforementioned G-spots, he said that “according to amazing new analysis from the Claremont Institute, Silicon Valley Bank — brace yourself — spent more than $73 million on donations to BLM and related organizations.”
LOL “Claremont Institute.” There’s your first clue this is some absolute full-of-shit nonsense. OK actually the first clue was Tucker’s mouth was moving and he was making those high-pitched yipyap sounds that always come out when he talks.
SEVENTY-THREE MILLION DONATIONS TO BLM! (And related organizations asterisk shhhhhhh.)
Friends, does it make sense that Silicon Valley Bank donated $73 MILLION TO BLACK LIVES MATTER (and related organizations asterisk shhhhh)?
That would be a very big sponsorship, if so!
Anyway, this wasn’t just something that was written on whatever Tucker had stuck up his butt that night. The entire rightwing media has latched on. Donald Trump Jr. pulled the $73 million number out of his pants and played with it on Twitter. On Fox News, Jesse Watters said Tuesday night that Wokey McBankFace gave $74 million to BLM. He’s also said $75 million. (The number is jumping around a bit, which is fine, because it’s all lies.) Ainsley Earhardt repeated it on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday morning. Larry Kudlow pegged it at $75 million. (Guess that was one of the WOKE ROMPINGS he’s been accusing the bank of this week.)
Everybody on Fox News said it.
Friends, would you like to know how much money Wokey McBankFace donated to Black Lives Matter?
Zero dollars. The answer is zero dollars.
Several sites have done extensive debunkings of how Claremont Institute put together its “amazing new analysis” that ended up manufacturing this fake lying amount of donations for lying rightwing fascist pundits to piss into their followers’ receptive gullets. Josh Marshall has a good one at Talking Points Memo. The link we posted above — and will post again right now — from Judd Legum and his pals at Popular Information is extensive and detailed.
The key to the damned fucking lie is that it’s including “pledges to groups that are associated with Black Lives Matter.” Wait, that’s not the key to the lie. Wokey McBankFace gave all those related orgs zero dollars.
The key to the damned fucking lie is that it includes “organizations and initiatives that advance one or more aspects of BLM’s agenda.” And what are some aspects of BLM’s agenda? Well, Claremont says it’s to — hold on to your funny bones for this one — “undermine capitalism, the nation state, and Western civilization.” These people are such fucking shut-in bigots, Jesus Christ.
But that’s not even how Claremont calculates it, as Legum explains. We’re just going to copy/paste you four paragraphs, because it’s not like we did the research:
In 2021, SVB made a pledge to spend $50 million over five years on an internal initiative called Access to Innovation. The program sought to connect women, Black people, and Latinos with startup funding, networking, and leadership development in the venture capitalist ecosystem. Integrating marginalized groups into the venture capitalist community seems like an odd way to “undermine capitalism,” the purpose of BLM, according to the Claremont Institute. And since the program was to last five years, most of the money has probably not been spent. Nevertheless, the $50 million represents more than two-thirds of SVB’s alleged support for BLM.
The other major contribution by SVB that the Claremont Institute says was BLM-related was a $20 million donation “to support additional COVID-19 relief” and establish a “full-ride, needs-based University Scholarship program to students at Arizona State University, Florida A&M University, Tulane University, and Xavier University.” (The $20 million represented the fees SVB collected for processing loans under the Paycheck Protection Program.) It is unclear what COVID-19 relief and college scholarships have to do with BLM.
The Claremont Institute database also says that SVB spent another $1.2 million on the Access to Innovation program and $1.6 million on “causes supporting gender parity in innovation” in 2020. According to the sources cited by the Claremont Institute, these expenditures actually occurred in 2019. They also have no apparent connection to the BLM movement.
Rounding out the Claremont Institute database is a 2020 “2:1 matching campaign for employees who donate their money or time to social justice organizations, which raised nearly $400,000.” The identity of these groups is not disclosed, but the Claremont Institute assumes they must be related to BLM. In addition, the database includes $250,000 of donations from the SVB Foundation in “corporate donations to the NAACP, ACLU, National Urban League and other organizations.” (These donations may overlap with the matching program.) The Claremont Institute considers the NAACP and the ACLU to be “BLM partners.” In reality they are two of the oldest and most respected civil rights and civil liberties organizations in the United States.
And that, friends, is how the rightwing white supremacist sausage party lie is made. If you’d rather read it in more bite-sized form, Legum made a Twitter thread.
Why do they get away with this? Because Claremont and every rightwing piece of shit repeating the lie know with 100 percent confidence that the idiots who get their news from them are too stupid and gullible to check the information for themselves, and too racist to notice the fact that THE LIE DOESN’T EVEN FUCKING MAKE SENSE. These morons have been buying “WOKE BANKS!11111!” this whole week, they’re the stupidest people in the entire world.
Remember how the Dominion texts are showing us how Fox News knowingly and intentionally lies to its viewers for fun and profit?
Yeah.
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