How a far-right think tank made everything "woke"

When Republicans use the word "woke," it's a deliberate bit of obfuscation, a way to signal bigotry to their fellow travelers while pretending it's something else to those who call them out for it. But it's also pretty hard to ignore the bullhorn levels of racism that are often embedded in complaints about "woke" culture. When Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., complains that it's "woke" to let Black women sing at the Super Bowl, for example, the only rational conclusion is that it's their skin color that offends her. 

After the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the Republican obsession with blaming everything on "woke" hit a ridiculous new level, as the biggest clowns in the party — who happen to be the agenda-setters for the GOP — rushed forward to say that it was because the bank was "woke." This was met with a cacophony of laughter. How on Earth is a bank "woke" and how would "wokeness" force them to, as happened with SVB, invest too much in bonds that created a liquidation crisis when interest rates rose?

Even the dunderheads who think Tucker Carlson is a moral authority struggle to buy that one. But rather than abandon this dumb-as-nails talking point, right-wing media has been working overtime trying to backfill the "woke banks" gambit with post hoc rationalizations.

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So far, the efforts to make "woke banks" make sense have been underwhelming. The first pass at it, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal and Donald Trump Jr. was to point to a small handful of bank executives who aren't white men as evidence of "woke." But even for the Fox News crowd, it's hard to pretend that "only white men can bank" isn't straight-up bigotry.

So pass number two to put some lipstick on this pig was to argue that SVB was "woke" because they supposedly gave money to "Black Lives Matter." Jesse Watters of Fox News breathlessly claimed that SVB "donated $74 million to Black Lives Matter." It was a lie that was immediately replicated throughout the right-wing media and by trolling Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. 

Obviously, to people outside of the Republican media bubble, this still is a wildly racist argument. But to the right-wing audience, trained by years of disinformation campaigns to believe "Black Lives Matter" is a well-financed group of professional rioters, this was good enough to satisfy their desire to be racist while also denying they're racist. 

It was also a total lie: The amount of money given to "Black Lives Matter" by SVB is zero dollars. 

That Watters and his compatriots are dishonest is self-evident to anyone not living in the Fox News Cinematic Universe. People who live in reality know both that the Black Lives Matter protests were overwhelmingly peaceful and the handful of people who did riot were not funded by any outside groups, much less corporate America.

But how Republican propagandists generated this lie is darkly interesting. Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall decided to dig around into where this number was coming from. Watters and other right-wing propaganda outlets pointed to the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank that's gone pure MAGA in the past few years. The group put together a database of corporate charities that they claim exposes "who funded the BLM riots." That dubious $74 million number comes from this supposed database. Marshall discovered, however, that in order to gin up this fake data, Claremont reclassified basically any charity you can think of as "BLM Movement & Related Causes."

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Charity groups that Claremont labeled "BLM Movement & Related Causes" include, The American Heart Association, the United Negro College Fund, a STEM program for kids at Saint Paul Public Schools, the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, the U.S. Vaccine Adoption Grants, Grameen America, which provides small business loans to female entrepreneurs, and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a group that helps expand child care and housing in underserved communities.

It goes on and on like this, but you get the picture. Claremont decided that any charity that has programs that might benefit Black people was "Black Lives Matter" and therefore also "rioters." As Marshall points out, this database was only put up earlier this week, suggesting it was thrown together in a haste to justify this asinine "woke banks" talking point.

So in their efforts to argue that the "woke banks" claim wasn't racist, Republicans ended up doing the opposite and stuffing even more racism into their argument. To use the Claremont data is to argue that any help whatsoever that goes to a Black person is "riots." Black girls learning to code, Black women starting businesses, Black people getting preventive heart care, Black moms getting child care: All of this, according to Claremont, is "riots." 

I'm old enough to remember when Republicans would argue that we don't need a robust social spending net, because charity would make up the difference. Well, here are major corporations investing heavily in charities that help people get housing, education and health care. And their reward for it is that Republicans are accusing them of funding "rioters." 

The whole thing also tells us a lot about how the Republican propaganda machine works. They throw together a talking point — "woke banks" — and then start to create "evidence" for it. That evidence doesn't have to be real, much less meaningful. They just construct something, such as this Claremont database, that sort of looks like "evidence," at least if you don't look too closely. It's a simulation of an argument, the illusion of evidence.

One can see from this how Fox News got itself sued by Dominion Voting Systems for defamation. As court filings show, Fox News "sources" include such colorful characters as a woman who claims she's a ghost who is telepathically connected to the wind. That seems nuts, but it's just how the GOP noise machine does business. What matters not is whether evidence is true or believable, but that they can point to something they can say is "evidence," no matter how silly.

This claim that SVB funded "Black Lives Matter" is no different. The "source" for the claim is honking nonsense. Fox news correctly figures their audience won't ask any hard questions about it, however, so they aren't too worried about it. Lucky for them, unlike Dominion Voting Systems, SVB will cease to exist soon, which means the bank won't be able to sue.