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WASHINGTON, D.C. – Sen. Josh Hawley called Black Lives Matter’s major corporate sponsors “anti-American” for their silence on the activist group’s monthlong boycott against non-Black-owned businesses.
His comments come in response to Black Lives Matter’s “Black Xmas” campaign that urges consumers to only purchase Christmas and holiday goods from Black vendors. Amazon, Microsoft, Intel and Airbnb are among the major corporations that have announced donations to the Black Lives Matter movement.
“They are anti-American in so many ways,” the Missouri Republican told Fox News. “They treat American workers terribly, they treat American consumers terribly, they bad-mouth our culture and try to run it down.”
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The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the movement’s national arm, launched a campaign on Nov. 24 to exclusively shop at Black-owned businesses through the New Year. The campaign seeks 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.”
It also calls for people to “move your money from white corporate banks (that finance gentrification, prisons, and environmental degradation) to Black-owned ones.”
“This kind of nonsense is what you’ve chosen to make yourself a part of,” Hawley said of the supporting corporations, calling them “increasingly anti-American.”
BLM CORPORATE DONORS SILENT ON GROUP’S CALL TO BOYCOTT ‘WHITE COMPANIES’
Microsoft, Airbnb, Intel, and Amazon have all donated to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation in the past. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
“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 told Fox News. “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.
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Sen. Josh Hawley speaks with Fox News Digital Originals.
“[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,” the announcement launching the campaign read. “Let’s harness our economic power to disrupt white-supremacist-capitalism and build Black community.”
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BLM’s statement said: “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.”
“This is what you get,” said Hawley, referring to the corporate sponsors that contributed to Black Lives Matter.
Fox News requested comment from Airbnb, Amazon, Intel and Microsoft, as well as BLM, but did not immediately receive a response.
Timothy Nerozzi contributed to this report.