Corporate donors are fleeing Confederacy-loving GOP senator in runoff

Corporations are lining up to demand a refund of their campaign contributions to Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) because of her racist comments and history of supporting the Confederacy.

Hyde-Smith, a white woman, is in a close Senate runoff race with Mike Espy, a black man seeking to become the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Mississippi since 1982.

Over the weekend, Major League Baseball demanded Hyde-Smith return a $5,000 contribution, following the lead of other corporations such as Walmart, AT&T, and Pfizer.

Accounting giant Ernst & Young also released a statement saying that Hyde-Smith’s recent comments “are in direct conflict with our longstanding core values of respect, diversity and inclusion,” and demanded a refund of its $5,000 contribution.

In all, nine corporations have demanded Hyde-Smith return campaign cash, according to the news site Popular Information.

Hyde-Smith ignited a firestorm when she laughingly told a supporter that she would gladly attend a public hanging with him.

The comment recalled Mississippi’s long, ugly history of racist lynchings, which were often treated like entertainment by the white mobs who gathered to watch vigilantes murder black people.

Mississippi voters will return to the polls on Tuesday for the runoff election between Hyde-Smith and Espy, who both received about 40 percent of the vote in the Nov. 6 general election.

Since the video of Hyde-Smith joking about lynchings surfaced, she has been plagued by yet more scandals.

Hyde-Smith was also caught on tape gleefully talking about voter suppression efforts targeted at liberal college students.

Then, photos surfaced of her wearing Confederate regalia and praising the Confederacy as “Mississippi history at it’s best!”

Hyde-Smith’s love of the Confederacy has a long and sordid history.

In 2007, Hyde-Smith, then a state senator, supported a resolution honoring and praising a Confederate soldier for “defend[ing] his homeland.”

Even more troubling, the Jackson Free-Press reported that Hyde-Smith attended a “segregation academy” in Mississippi.

Hyde-Smith “attended and graduated from a segregation academy that was set up so that white parents could avoid having to send their children to schools with black students,” the Free-Press writes.

Hyde-Smith sent her own daughter to the same school, where the mascot was a “Rebel” dressed like a Confederate soldier.

Of course, Hyde-Smith’s controversy is doing nothing to keep the openly racist Trump away, who planned two rallies in Mississippi to support Hyde-Smith before the runoff.

Given Hyde-Smith’s history of supporting both segregation and the Confederacy, her “joking” comments about lynching and voter suppression sound like something out of 1820, not 2018.

No wonder her corporate donors are running for the hills.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.