New reporting from Christian Science Monitor this morning uncovered a 2021 speech from JD Vance to members of the Claremont Institute, an extreme right-wing organization with ties to Project 2025. In the speech, Vance attacked companies supporting abortion rights and described a vast conspiracy that vilified American companies like Amazon he claimed were “invested in destroying America.”
During his speech, Vance reportedly claimed, without evidence, that Jeff Bezos donated to organizations supporting Black Lives Matter to encourage riots that would destroy its competitors — the “small businesses on Main Street.” That is, of course, false.
In the same speech, Vance lashed out at American companies supporting abortion rights and claimed they wanted a pool of “cheap labor that they don’t want people to parent children.”
Learn more about JD Vance’s 2021 Claremont Institute speech:
- In 2021, J.D. Vance gave a speech to a conservative think tank on “woke capital” – and accused Amazon of funding Black Lives Matter in order to burn down the competition.
- “Who benefits most when small businesses on Main Street are destroyed? Who wants to see their competitors unable to deliver goods and services to people, so that you get it delivered in your brown Amazon box? Jeff Bezos,” Mr. Vance said, referencing the riots that broke out in the summer of 2020, amid a wave of racial justice protests. “The people who are invested in destroying America via our corporate class are also getting rich from it. This is an important piece of the puzzle to understand.”
- Mr. Vance has described big business as an enemy of conservative values, accusing many corporations of directly undermining America.
- But Mr. Vance doesn’t just think companies are cynically pandering to the marketplace. He’s taken his criticisms a step further, painting corporations’ motivations in a sinister, conspiratorial light.
- “If you peel back the onion, what you find is that the businesses that are most connected and most devoted to destroying our values are also benefiting financially from it,” he argued in the speech at a conference in suburban Washington, D.C., hosted by the Claremont Institute, a right-wing California think tank that has emerged as an ally of the MAGA movement.
- In the same 2021 speech, Mr. Vance argued that companies supporting abortion rights really just want a pool of “cheap labor,” with workers unburdened by the cost and time commitment of caring for children. Citing former Georgia Democratic House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams’ assertion that a Georgia abortion ban would be “bad for business,” he said: “She was right. When the big corporations come against you for passing abortion restrictions, when corporations are so desperate for cheap labor that they don’t want people to parent children, she’s right to say that abortion restrictions are bad for business.”
- Ms. Abrams had lamented in a 2019 Twitter thread that more business leaders weren’t speaking up against a bill prohibiting most abortions in Georgia. She says in a statement to the Monitor that his comments misrepresented her earlier remarks, while saying he and Mr. Trump “expressed contempt for women’s healthcare.”
- “A woman’s access to abortion directly affects her ability to secure an education, find a job and advance and make decisions about how and when to grow a family,” she says in an email. “Companies cannot effectively attract and retain talent when half of the available workforce is denied basic human rights to care and self-determination.”
- Thomas Frank, a left-leaning historian and author who has written extensively on American populism, says that Mr. Vance identified a phenomenon that has been going on for years – but took it to an extreme and unsupported conclusion.
- “This combination of liberalism and capitalism, this does exist, and it’s real,” says Mr. Frank. But instead of just accusing companies of virtue signaling, Mr. Vance makes a giant leap in framing their rhetoric and actions as part of a sinister plot. Jeff Bezos wanting Main Street to burn? “That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. I would love to see his evidence for that.”
- In July 2020, Amazon pledged $10 million in donations to a dozen social justice organizations, part of a wave of corporations signaling to consumers and their own employees that they shared their values. The company later offered a corporate match that led to $17 million more. Black Lives Matter’s national and local chapters received more than $2 million from Amazon and another $1 million from employee contributions.
- The Trump-Vance campaign did not provide any evidence supporting Mr. Vance’s claim that the organizations Amazon donated to had supported the riots that sporadically broke out alongside the widespread, largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
- But when asked for comment about his 2021 remarks to the Claremont Institute on abortion and Black Lives Matter, a spokesman for Mr. Vance doubled down. “Jeff Bezos’s companies promoted and donated to Black Lives Matter as BLM protestors destroyed countless brick and mortar businesses across the country – the very businesses that Amazon counts as direct competitors,” Vance spokesman William Martin says in an emailed statement.
Published: Aug 15, 2024 | Last Modified: Sep 2, 2024