Mediaboss Marketing

When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed last month, right-wingers predictably placed the blame on wokenesstheir thinly veiled rhetorical stand-in for Black people. But it didnt take long before white conservatives, apparently unable to help themselves, openly admitted what they truly meant.

Wall Street Journal opinion columnist Andy Kesslereven after noting SVBs singular focus on venture capitalists and startups, overabundance of uninsured deposits, depreciated securities portfolio due to rising federal interest rates, and the tech sectors downturnstill somehow dumbly arrived at the conclusion that having 1 Black and 1 LGBTQ+ members on its board may have indicated SVBs fatal preoccupation with diversity.

Silicon Valley Bank donated more than $73 million to groups tied to Black Lives Matter, Fox Business Network host Maria Bartiromo pronounced. Silicon Valley Bank, Tucker Carlson dramatically stated during his nightly Fox white-power hour, spent more than $73 million on donations to BLM and related organizations. Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who now runs a white supremacist legal operation, groused about the bailout of a bank that has given millions of dollars in BLM initiatives.

Right-wingers being incensed about a single Black member of a 12-person boardwhich still makes SVB one of the countrys whitest major banksis totally in keeping with who they are. Nothing performative about the racism on display there; anti-Blackness is their brand. Its their contention of SVBs death-by-diversitymanifest in some multimillion-dollar cash giveaway to BLMwhere the faux outrage can be found.

Because not only did SVB fall short of giving $73 million to BLM, in reality, the bank never gave a single dollar to the organization.

The most telling evidence of the lie driving this racist hysteria is its origin point. The Claremont Institute may have once been the sort of conservative institution that dressed up its racism and bigotry in intellectual finery, but starting in the Trump era, it opted to change into something a bit less stuffy and more transparent for the white supremacist party.

Days after SVBs failure, Newsweek published an opinion piece from the organizations Center for the American Way of Life that was filled with half-truths, lies, and right-wing racist refrains.

Leaning into the conservative mantra that 2020s racial justice protests were overwhelmingly violent, the article labeled BLMs demands for anti-racism in workplaces a shakedown of corporate Americastopping just short of calling it an armed hold up. According to Claremont, American corporations, cowed and afraid, had pledged or contributed an astonishing $82.9 billion over the last three years. (They noted the figure is more than the GDP of 46 African countries, because why not drag a whole other continent of Black folks into this while youre at it, I guess.)

The authors linked to CAWs new BLM Funding Database, which purports to reveal how much individual companies across corporate America have given to the Black Lives Matter movement and related causes.

This is where the fine print becomes fraudulent. A general search of the database for SVBs donations to BLM Movement & Related Causes produces a figure of $70,650,000which would certainly be a staggering number, if only it were true. But getting slightly more specific in the search reveals the big lie at its core.

Claremont itself admits the the BLM Movement consists of a limited number of official organizations, including the BLM PAC, BLM Grassroots, BLM At School, and any official BLM chapters, among a few other entities. Search the database for SVB donations to any of those listed groups, and it shows that not a dime has been given.

The discrepancy, it seems, can be found under the link Explanatory Notes, where Claremont explains that it defines a BLM Related Cause as all organizations and initiatives that advance one or more aspects of BLMs agenda. That means any organization Claremont believes helps BLMs missionwhich, for the record, Claremont explicitly claims is to undermine capitalism, the nation state, and Western civilizationis tagged as a related cause. To call Claremonts related cause category a stretch is to redefine the word understatement.

For Claremont, providing mental wellness services to Black kids is a BLM related cause, which on its own shows how unscrupulous and dishonest the mission behind its database is.

As Popular Information notes, an example of what Claremont tries to pass off as a related cause is Access to Innovation, a fellowship program launched by SVB itself to aid Black, Latinx and women professionals looking to launch their careers in venture capital. SVB pledged to infuse the program with $50 million over the next five years back in 2021, but with the banks failure just two years later, theres no telling how much money was actually invested in the program.

Even so, if every pledged cent made its way into the fellowship, the program would still fail to meet Claremonts own definition of a BLM-aligned cause. To quote Popular Information, 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.

The database also points to another $20 million SVB supposedly gave to a BLM-related causes, but then indicates those dollars supported COVID-19 relief, a needs-based University Scholarship program to students at four universities, including two HBCUs and economic development; and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts through 2022.

Saranac Hale Spencer at Factcheck.org noticed Claremonts math didnt quite add up to the purported $20 million figure, and asked the institution to explain the discrepancy. Claremont responded with a boilerplate statement that neglected to answer her question.

So Spencer did some further digging and found SVBs charitable foundation donated to 10 organizations, including a group supporting wildlife affected by the wildfires in Australia, a hospice care project and various childrens organizations. Along with that, the foundation pledged $5 million for 25 full undergraduate scholarships at four universitiesArizona State University, Tulane University, Florida A&M University and Xavier University of Louisiana. Only the last two colleges are HBCUs, and all of the scholarships were open to anyone who met established financial and academic eligibility requirements.

To recap, theres not a single BLM related cause to be found, nor any group with a demonstrated commitment to torching capitalism, the nation state, and Western civilization.

We could do this all day, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo apparently did, only to find that Claremont pulled this misinformation stunt with nearly every company in its database. In the case of Bank of America, which Claremonts database links to $18 billionyes, billion, with a bin BLM and related cause donations. Marshall found that BOA earmarked $1.8 billion housing and business loans in minority communities, which is money that has to be paid back, likely with interest, to BOA, because thats how loans work. Marshall also noted a tiny fraction of that total (no specific numbers are cited) goes in grants to organizations like Asian Americans Advancing Justice, National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development and The Leadership Conference Education Fund.

I did a search under Kelloggyou know, the breakfast cereal companywhich Claremont claims gave BLM and related causes a whopping $91 million. Look through the paperwork, though, and youll find the company gave $1 million in planning funds to 10 groups, including a coalition that helps pastoralist women in Tanzania, and a U.S.-based effort that trains restaurants to desegregate their staff racially and raise wages for workers of color. Five of those groups were then selected to receive $80 million over the next eight years, including a collective working to help Indigenous South and Central Americans with land tilling and ownership; environmental legal groups in Kenya, Sierra Leone, and the U.S; an initiative to end End Youth Incarceration in Hawai'i; a group working to end racism in Brazilian schools; and Healing Through Justice, which addresses trauma and mental health issues in Black and brown kids from underserved communities in Chicago. Kellogg also gave $1 million to the NAACPthe oldest and, frankly, most establishmentarian racial equality group in the U.S.

For Claremont, providing mental wellness services to Black kids is a BLM related cause, which on its own shows how unscrupulous and dishonest the mission behind its database is.

You get the picture.

FactCheck.orgs Spencer calculates that, of the more than $82 billion Claremont claims corporations gave to BLM, actual donations to BLM groups account for about 2 percent of the total amount included in the database for all corporations.

Among the groups Claremont includes as BLM related: the ACLU, NAACP, Urban League, United Negro College Fund, the Jackie Robinson Foundation, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, The American Heart Association, YWCA, Amnesty International, YMCA, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Chinese for Affirmative Action, and the Equal Justice Instituteand I am only stopping here because otherwise we will all age into dust.

Maybe the most laughablebut still dangerousassertion Claremont makes in its Newsweek piece is that its database reveals that the radical Left has the meansand willingnessto realize its policy preferences in ways that bypass the democratic political process.

Whoo boy. Lets get into this.

Claremonts discussion of the lefts means conveniently ignores its own funding by Donors Trustknown as the dark money ATM of the right for the anonymity of most of its backers, which it has no legal obligation to divulge, although right-wing mega-donors including the DeVoses and Kochs are on-record for being among their numbers.

Donors Trust then distributes its dark money millions to the right-wing groups currently leading the charge against voting rights, trans rights, climate policy, and racial equality. It is aligned with groups like the Federalist Society, another Donors Trust grantee, whose leader, Leonard Leo, is responsible for Trumps selection of the triumvirate that completed the courts conservative supermajority, allowing Roe v. Wade to be overturned and a slew of other civil rights to now hang in the balance.

Federalist Society member John Eastman, the author of the coup memo that attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and reinstall Donald Trump, is a senior fellow at Claremont. In fact, Eastman authored Claremonts amicus friend of the court brief in Moore v. Harper, one of the most frightening cases before this Supreme Court, because if Claremont and its allies win, Republican state legislatures will be empowered to commit all kinds of partisan chicanery in elections, and state courts will be barred from doing anything about it. (Eastman, in fact, is the guy who got the independent state legislature theory from the extremist margins to SCOTUS in the first place.)

Claremont also filed an amicus brief in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which has led to gun control laws being challenged in multiple states. Claremont has been a paid booster of Pizzagates Jack Posobiec and anti-woke activist Christopher Rufo, who proudly boasts about creating misinformation-driven social panics around critical race theory and trans existence.

Claremonts president, Ryan Williams, promotes ideas steeped in 19th-century race science, and claims the Constitution is really only fit for a Christian people. As if thats not enough, after helping promote Trumps election denialism, Claremont is now all-in with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, helping him realize every fascistic idea he can come up with.

Thats what Claremont stands for. Their attacks on BLM are really about their disdain for what they see more broadly as ungrateful Black people disrupting the American status quo. SVB failed for many reasons, but BLM had zero to do with it. Its all a great, big racist distraction from the actual undermining of institutions and stability that Claremont is undertaking. And sadly, it sure seems to be working.

(The Claremont Institute did not respond to The Daily Beasts request for comment and clarification.)

See the original post:
Debunking the Right-Wing Lie That Black Lives Matter Got $82 Billion From Corporations - The Daily Beast

Legendary former NBA coach Phil Jackson says he stopped watching professional basketball in 2020 because he couldnt stand the protests by players for racial justice. In a podcast interview with Rick Rubin, Jackson claimed the NBA had done something wanky when it decided to paint Black Lives Matter on the courts at its quarantine bubble in Orlando and allow players to put social justice slogans on the backs of their jerseys. This was apparently too much for the man who led the Chicago Bulls to six championships in the 1990s, who claimed, People want to see sports as non-political. Politics stays out of the game; it doesn't need to be there. He said he couldnt watch it anymore after that, accusing the NBA of catering to a certain audience. As one can imagine, his remarks set off a firestorm of gifs on Twitter, with users using everything from Interstellar to The Sopranos to mock Jacksons reaction to seeing the league support black people. Other users pointed to a history of problematic remarks from Jackson, including calling LeBron James business partners his posse in 2016.

More here:
Phil Jackson Says He Can't Stand Basketball 'Catering' to Racial Justice Protests - The Daily Beast

As American cities burned in the summer of 2022 due to non-violent protests, in which billions of dollars of damage was inflicted on businesses and property, demonstrations began to take place all over the world. An unarmed black man, George Floyd, had been violently arrested in Minneapolis and had died; the police officer, Derek Chauvin, was later found guilty of murder. This sad and inexcusable event caused the explosion of violent demonstrations, accompanied by the slogan Black lives matter. In tandem with these displays, a new gesture was used to symbolize the slogan: taking the knee.

Adopted initially, perhaps, in a spirit of repentance for real or imagined wrongs against all black people, it quickly became the go-to virtue signal for the ignorant, the opportunist, and the cynical. A persons refusal to bend the knee invariably leads to condemnation by self-appointed guardians of new moral absolutes in the media. From this emerged a modern form of excommunication known as canceling. This is happening to those who now refuse to wear symbols celebrating aberrant sexual activity.

During the outbreak of this moral frenzy, I was speaking to a friend of mine, who had just begun a new job in a northern city in the United States. She is a young Nigerian doctor and a Catholic. It just so happened that, as BLM protests were spreading, she had heard that more Nigerian Christians had been killed at the hands of Islamist militants. Martyrdom in Nigeria is an event so frequent that it rarely makes the news. But perhaps that is not the real reason it is not reported on. My friend told me how shocked she was that there were no marches or protests about the mass slaughter of Nigerian Christians, a crisis that has been steadily growing in the last ten years. Do these black lives matter?she asked.

As a priest advocating for persecuted Christians, I relate the huge number of Nigerian martyrsmen, women, and childrenfrom the last few years alone in parishes in the United States and England. People are always horrified, shocked that they have never heard about this from the media or the Church. I always get asked what can we do?

On Good Friday of this year in Benue State, Fulani herdsmen attacked an IDP (internally displaced people) camp and killed 35 people, mainly women and children. The murders were mainly attributed to climate change. The Muslim Fulani herdsmen need to kill Christians, as they have been for many years, to find grazing land for their cattle. This necessary depopulation for the sake of climate change apparently involves, burning churches that are filled with worshippers, the destruction of villages, rape, kidnapping and, as on Pentecost Sunday last year, shooting more than 40 people attending Mass.

According to Fr. Remigius Ihyula from the diocese of Makurdi in Nigeriaone of the most affected areas, with more than two million IDPsthe claim that climate change is the cause of this violence is false. As he points out, climate change is affecting the whole world, and yet the violence in Nigeria is unique. Our interpretation, he said, is that there are terrorists who use these herdsmen to displace the local population. Yet many governments, including the UK, continue to deny the specifically religious character of the violence, and instead refer to climate change.

In a condolence note for the Pentecost massacre, the president of Ireland, Michael Higgins, referred to the contributory factor of climate change in the slaughter. I spoke to Bishop Jude of Ondo, the diocese where that massacre took place, about Higgins execrable claims; Bishop Judes fiery eyes and forceful words told a different story.

There is always a danger that the figures of martyred Christians might cause numbness, or compassion fatigue, if the MSM reported them with any frequency. Perhaps death lists do no good, but the world needs to acknowledge the intensity of the persecutionwhich many argue has developed into a genocide. According to a report by Intersociety, last year alone, at least 5,000 Christians were martyred in Nigeria, with more than 3,000 kidnapped. Intersocietys report included the claim that since 2009, more than 52,000 Nigerian Christians had been killed, and those figures may be too low.

With all this violence directed against one religious group, the Biden administrations November 2021 decision to remove Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern from its list of countries with religious freedom issues is incomprehensible. Apparently, the death of 52,000 people in just over ten years is no reason for concern, especially as the Cato Institute reported that since 2009 the U.S. has sold Nigeria $130 million worth of weapons, and $155 million worth of security assistance. Similarly, Great Britain, according to a Freedom of Information request by the Campaign Against Arms Trade, has licensed 43 million worth of armaments to Nigeria. Linked with the arms sales is the issue of trade; as a recent piece in The Washington Times noted, China is now out-trading the U.S. in Africa by 400%. As the religious freedom expert Nina Shea has noted, the issue of trade is one clear reason why the Biden administration is overlooking persecution in Nigeria.

It appears the time is now long past for a papal encyclical on the crisis of the worldwide persecution of Christians, addressing both the causes, theological issues, and the need for aid and advocacy. This was called for during the intense persecution of Christians in Syria and Iraq, a persecution which is ongoing, but to no avail. At a local and diocesan level, the Church must listen to Aid to the Church in Need and other religious freedom experts and organizations that are calling for the crisis in Nigeria and other parts of Africa to become a high priority. Once more, as in Iraq and Syria, many Christians feel forgotten by their brethren in the West, despite the good works of many Western Christians. While it seems important for the Western Church to highlight the climate crisis, for those dying for their faith in Nigeria, Burkina Faso, India, Syria, and so many other places, the appropriate use of air-conditioning tends to be lower down their list of priorities.

Is consistent prayer for the persecuted a feature of life in most parishes? Not a monthly mention in the intercessions, but a sustained program supported by bishops and clergy. If not, it must be. Pressure must be put on legislators by voters to address the issues of trade and aid and make them significant bargaining chips in relation to the government of Nigeria and others. It might be naive to imagine that governments will place the care of Nigerian Christians above national profit, but the appeal must be made. No one has taken the knee for the thousands of martyred Nigerian Christians killed in the last ten years, but prayer, aid, and advocacy will be a far more effective witness to the fact that those black lives really do matter.

Originally posted here:
Do These Black Lives Matter? The European Conservative - The European Conservative

Nick Robertson and The Hill

3 days ago

A counter-protestor is seen in a T-shirt reading "Black Lives Matter" during a protest by Trump supporters following the results of the 2020 election in November 2020. (Associated Press/David Goldman)

(The Hill) A Michigan man was sentenced to 10 months in prison Wednesday over his racist attempts to intimidate Black Lives Matter protesters.

Kenneth Pilon, 62, called nine Starbucks stores and told employees to threaten and racially demean employees supporting Black Lives Matter. He also threatened to kill Black people, according to court records.

Pilon had called the stores in the days after Starbucks announced it would provide T-shirts for employees who wanted to support Black Lives Matter in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis.

Pilon also left nooses and threatening notes at Starbucks parking lots and other establishments.

One note read, An accessory to be worn with your BLM t-shirt. Happy protesting! court records show.

Read the original:
Man sentenced for racist intimidation of BLM protesters - NewsNation Now

Legendary NBA coach Phil Jacksonswinning pedigree cant get him out of his latest controversy. Jackson appeared on record exec Rick Rubins podcast, Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin, where he spoke about why basketball is a significant part of his life story, but it hasnt been of much interest to him since the 2020 NBA season finished []

Team CASSIUS

19 hours ago

Jackson appeared on record exec Rick Rubins podcast, Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin, where he spoke about why basketball is a significant part of his life story, but it hasnt been of much interest to him since the 2020 NBA season finished up in the bubble.

But its got nothing to do with the odd, reclusive setup inside the Disney World campus and everything to do with the rise of social justice awareness around the league.

They had things on their back like Justice, and a funny thing happened like, Justice just went to the basket, and Equal Opportunity knocked him down, Jackson said. Some of my grandkids thought it was pretty funny to play up those names; I couldnt watch that.

Amid the protest of George Floyds killing, the NBA became more socially conscience and allowed players to wear progressive statements on the back of their jerseys in place of last names, like Black Lives Matter, I Cant Breathe, Vote Say Their Names, Anti-Racist, Justice, Power to the People, How Many More, Equality, Peace, Respect Us, and Stand Up.

While the NBA was applauded for standing with the oppressed and victims of police brutality, Jackson thinks it upset another demographic.

It was trying to cater to an audience or trying to bring a certain audience to the game and they didnt know it was turning other people off, he said. People want to see sports as non-political. Politics stays out of the game; it doesnt need to be there.

You can listen to the entire episode above and see how Twitters reacting to Jacksons comments below:

See the original post:
Phil Jackson Says He Stopped Watching NBA Games Because Of Black Lives Matter Politics, Twitter Roasts Him - The Rickey Smiley Morning Show