Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley is calling out corporate sponsors of Black Lives Matter, labeling them “anti-American” after they have remained silent in the face of the group’s month-long boycott of non-black-owned businesses.
The conservative senator’s comments come in the form of backlash against BLM’s “Black Xmas” campaign, which is urging consumers to only buy Christmas and holiday items from black vendors.
Corporations have donated millions to the Black Lives Matter organization over the course of the past year alone when the group rose to prominence again following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis. They include Airbnb, Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, and dozens of others.
“They are anti-American in so many ways,” the junior Missouri senator told Fox News. “They treat American workers terribly, they treat American consumers terribly, they bad-mouth our culture and try to run it down.”
On Nov. 24, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, which is the national arm of the organization, launched a race-tinged campaign asking Americans to only shop at black-owned businesses through the New Year. One of the campaign’s aims is to “shake off the chains of consumerism and step fully into our own collective power, to build new traditions, and run an offense as well as a defense.”
“[A]t every turn, white-supremacist-capitalism is telling us to spend our money on things that we don’t need, to reap profits for corporations,” said the announcement launching the campaign. “Let’s harness our economic power to disrupt white-supremacist-capitalism and build Black community.”
Hawley responded: “This kind of nonsense is what you’ve chosen to make yourself a part of,” adding that they are becoming “increasingly anti-American.”
“What they wanted to do is contribute money to BLM [and] say, ‘We’re woke, you know, we get it, don’t come after us,'” he added. “They want to have this credential from this far-left extremist group.”
“And then they want to go right on ahead and keep doing stuff that actually hurts American workers, that actually drives up prices for American consumers, and it hurts the middle class,” Hawley continued.
He went on to respond as well to a statement BLM put out at the outset of the black-business-only campaign: “As BLMLA organizer, Jan Williams, reminds us, ‘Capitalism doesn’t love Black people.’ In fact, white-supremacist-capitalism invented policing, initially as chattel-slavery-era ‘paddy rollers,’ in order to protect its interests and put targets on the backs of Black people.”
“White-supremacist-capitalism uses policing to protect profits and steal Black life,” the global foundation wrote on Instagram. “Skip the Black Friday sales and buy exclusively from Black-owned businesses.”
“We’re dreaming of a #Blackxmas. That means no spending with white companies from 11/26/2021 – 01/01/2022,” the BlackXmas website blackxmas.org notes further.
“This is what you get,” Hawley said.
Jon has over 30 years' worth of reporting experience, as well as an author and U.S. Army veteran. He has a BA in political science from Ashford University and an MA in national security studies/intelligence analysis from American Military University.
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