J.D. Vance’s 2020 Black Lives Matter Lie Shows the Threat He Really Is

Following the 2020 George Floyd uprising, J.D. Vance peddled an unhinged conspiracy about Black Lives Matter: Amazon funded the protests to burn down its competition.

On Thursday, the Christian Science Monitor reported that in 2021, Vance attended a conference hosted by right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, where he claimed that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos funded Black Lives Matter to encourage private property destruction during the protests of summer 2020.

“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,” he declared .

Vance pushed a conspiracy about “woke capital” and called Bezos “one of the largest funders of the Black Lives Matter movement.”

“Woke capital is when companies and businesses are more invested in a movement like BLM than they are in traditional American principles,” said Vance, pushing the far-right’s favorite diversity, equity, and inclusion conspiracy. “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.”

Amazon did donate $10 million to a range of social justice organizations about two months after the murder of Floyd, but categorizing the megacompany as “one of the largest funders” of the racial justice movement is pure disinformation.

In the speech, Vance also categorized companies supporting abortion rights as corporations being “so desperate for cheap labor that they don’t want people to parent children.”

When asked for comment by the Christian Science Monitor , Vance didn’t back away from the conspiracy. “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,” a Vance spokesman wrote. “Woke billionaires like Bezos have taken over corporations across the country and turned them against the American people. Senator Vance is absolutely right to call them out and will continue to do so.”