Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), whose collapse last week has triggered a global banking crisis, donated over $70 million to a variety of left-wing causes — but found itself unable to pay depositors in a cash crunch.
A pedestrian speaks on a mobile telephone as he walks past Silicon Valley Banks headquarters in Santa Clara, California on March 10, 2023. – U.S. authorities swooped in and seized the assets of SVB, a key lender to US startups since the 1980s, after a run on deposits made it no longer tenable for the medium-sized bank to stay afloat on its own. (NOAH BERGER/AFP via Getty Images)
As Breitbart News reported last week, SVB’s donations were part of nearly $83 billion that left-wing groups received from corporate America, as documented by a Claremont Institute database:
“As a point of reference, $82.9 billion is more than the GDP of 46 African countries. In 2022, the Ford Motor Company’s profits were $23 billion,” they also noted. The sum of $82.9 million includes “more than $123 million to the BLM parent organizations directly,” as well as much more to other organizations supporting BLM’s agenda.
The list reveals that several popular corporations from a wide range of different industries supplied the movement with large sums of cash. Walmart, for example, which is based in Arkansas, gave a whopping $100 million in support of BLM and related causes focusing on “racial equity.”
Last year, Black Lives Matter suspended fundraising in several states after it failed to file required non-profit reports. It has also faced questions about it leaders’ lavish spending on real estate and other expenses.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Correction: This article has been corrected in two ways, since the Claremont Institute — whose database the article cited — corrected an error in the amount of the contributions, from $73 million to $70 million; and also because the Claremont Institute’s definition of “Black Lives Matter” included a far wider range of organizations. Left-wing writer Judd Legum appropriately flagged these issues — but then repeated the dubious claim that the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank was caused by a Trump-era rollback of Dodd-Frank regulations. He neglected to mention inflation, which is widely accepted as the most important cause.
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