However racist you thought the “woke banks” talking point was, somehow it’s even worse
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.
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.
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.